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5th Anniversary of 9/11
Time to Demand Answers |
This fall, we will observe the 5th anniversary of 2,819 people killed on September 11, 2001 in the worst terrorist attack on American soil.
We will hear speeches from our political leaders about how we need to be ever vigilant in protecting our democracy against the forces of evil that hate our way of life. The calls to remember those who died on 9/11 will be combined with pleas to support those who continue to die daily in Iraq and elsewhere in furtherance of our country's war on terror.
What we won't hear from our elected officials is an honest assessment of whether the US has taken the right road in response to 9/11. Peace activists, starting with the War Resisters League and the Green Party on the day of 9/11, called for the attacks to be treated as a crime, not a declaration of war. Peace activists called for the US to use the sympathy generated by the attacks to seek a global common agenda focused more of raising up the standard of living and security for all, rather than pursuing an America-first agenda through Free Trade / World Trade Organization economic domination and use of military force. President Bush and Congress chose instead the "war on terror".
President Bush will undoubtedly tell us that his "war on terror" has been a success – since there has not been a major terrorist attack in the US since then. He will probably forget to mention that the number of terrorist attacks worldwide against the US and our allies have increased since 9/11 – and that every day of course terrorists attempt to kill Americans in Iraq. And we will gloss over the fact that he is not managed to capture bin Laden.
Some of the media may remind us that the major impact of the new Homeland Security Committee was to emasculate FEMA to the point that it stood by watching as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was devastated. And that it created a nifty color-coding scheme to enable terrorists to quickly identify the security level of American forces.
Our "war on terror" has isolated the US politically in the world; has fueled a massive increase in an already bloated military budget, leading to massive war profiteering, an increased federal budget deficit and a cutback in many domestic programs; led us to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, miring us in a civil war which is much worse than most Americans realize; led to the curtailment of civil liberties at home, including the increased harassments of Muslims and others of Middle East descent; and expanded the specter of Big Brother with a significant increase in domestic spying and surveillance.
Terrorism is of course a tactic, not an ideology, nor is it confined to one organization or country. For football fans, declaring a war on terrorism is equivalent to declaring a war on the onside kick. One rational approach to confront terrorism would be try to figure out what policies and practices of the American government or corporations motivates individuals to employ terrorist tactics against us, and determine whether such polices are in fact in the best interest of the American people. One can condemn terrorism while still trying to figure out if there are legitimate grievances. Such an approach however is dismissed out of hand by the media and the major parties as caving in to terrorists. And the Middle East, starting with Israel, is the third rail of American politics, where no public debate is tolerated.
On 9/11/2006, we will not hear our political leaders call for an independent, comprehensive investigation into who is responsible for 9/11. Yet as detailed below, a majority of Americans want such an investigation.
Most Americans, but not the media, realize that the official 9/11 Commission was an exercise in damage control. Congress only reluctantly agreed to the Commission after the emotional pleas of the families of the 9/11 victims were strong enough to overcome the strong-armed resistance of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Bush and Congress agreed to a narrow scope of investigation and appointed prominent members of the existing national security and foreign policy establishment to ensure the investigation stayed within those narrow confines.
The media or politicians won't remind us that not one person who provided assistance to those who hijacked the airplanes in the US has been identified or prosecuted.
We probably won't be reminded that the official commission was unable to identify who actually financed the 9/11 attacks, ultimately dismissing it as unimportant – though they did note that largely the ruling Saudi Arabian families and oil money funded Al-Qaeda.
We may be reminded that almost all of the identified hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. We probably won't be reminded that the one captured terrorist that provided most of the information that the Commission utilized in its report on the hijackers also identified three Saudi leaders as having been closely involved with the plot – nor will we be told that these three individuals all died shortly afterwards.
Other than a few NYC politicians, the major parties will also ignore the significant environmental and public health problems that plagued many of the residents in the WTC area and those who assisted in the rescue and clean-up. They did not criticize Bush, Whitman or the EPA for covering up the public health risks after the attack.
Why is it the Congress and the media were able to ensure that Bill Clinton's sexual dalliances were thoroughly and publicly investigated but that the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil needs no such investigation? Is there one news outlet or media service in America that has assigned an investigative team to 9/11?
The media overwhelming dismisses those who raise questions about 9/11 as kooks. Yet a recent national poll by Zogby International found that "42% believe there has indeed been a cover up" (with 10% unsure) and 45% think "Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success" (with 8% unsure). " An August 2004 Zogby poll of New Yorkers showed nearly half believe certain U.S. officials 'consciously' allowed the attacks to happen and 66% want a fresh investigation. Such polls dutifully go unreported by the media and ignored by elected officials of both major parties.
We do know that the neoconservatives in the Bush administration – led by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney – publicly wrote in their Project for a New American Century policy documents that America needed another Pearl Harbor to provide an excuse to launch various military invasions, starting with going to Iraq to seize the oil fields. There lacks a serious debate that the Bush administration utilized the 9/11 attacks to implement such actions.
In a real democracy, such information would normally be sufficient to bring down the government. But with a bipartisan consensus among the Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy and most economic issues, there is no powerful opposition party in the US to hold the government accountable for such misdeeds.
In a normal democracy, the opposition party would pursue standard questions about who assisted the hijacker in their attacks, both with finances and logistics. And if the money trail leads to allies such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, especially its Intelligence Service, one would question why such countries continue to be viewed as allies.
A democratic country – particularly one with a free press – would normally probe related questions such as the role of prior administrations in promoting terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan as part of the Carter-Reagan effort to draw the Soviet Union into its own Vietnam. The US assisted destabilization of Afghanistan led to the rise to power of the Taliban, apparently providing an operating base for al Qaeda. A democracy would also normally explore the apparent role of Pakistan and the CIA in enabling the Taliban to come into power, and the Taliban's relationship to the American government since coming to power.
None of these questions have been raised by the Democrats as the opposition party – or by the mainstream media.
There are three overarching questions about 9/11, each with its own implications for corrective action:
1. Was the failure of the American intelligence community and military defense to prevent 9/11 due to its incompetence, starting with the traditional turf fighting among the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and Department of State?
2. Did the Bush administration know that Al Qaeda was planning some terrorist attack and decide to allow it to proceed to provide another Pearl Harbor, seriously underestimating in the process how devastating the attack would be?; or,
3. Did the neoCons in the Bush administration actively assist in carrying out the 9/11 attacks?
It is the latter question that the media routinely cite in defense of its ignoring of the 9/11 truth movement. Variations on this theme include: were the WTC towers and building 7 wired for implosion; did a missile rather than a hijacked plane hit the Pentagon; and were the "hijackers" merely low-level dupes who thought they were hired by the American government to be character actors in the major war games that the US government organized for 9/11? For instance, it is alleged that the Venice Florida airport that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta trained at was routinely used for CIA operations, such as to run the Iran Contra-gate drug-arms smuggling operation.
I routinely dismiss government conspiracy theories because they require a level of competence that I have not seen in my thirty-plus years of working with government agencies and officials. Others respond however that governments and leaders throughout history have created fake attacks in order to inflame the passion of citizens to demand retribution against foreign countries or targets. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was manipulated to justify the American intervention in the Vietnam War.
It is well documented that the Bush administration misled the American people and the world about the reasons for invading Iraq, starting with the existence of weapons of mass destruction. More recently, the release of audio tapes from the Norad command center prompted the revelation that the Pentagon and others had lied to the 9/11 Commission to the extent that criminal charges are still being considered. Early on in the investigation, the FBI was forced to admit to family members of the victims that they had not been truthful in their statements about the hijackers and other details. The EPA misled the public about the environmental dangers after 9/11.
So the question is not whether the government has lied about 9/11 but only how pervasive the lies are.
The American political establishment has used 9/11 to justify war, huge increases in the military budget and federal budget deficit, and curtailment of civil liberties. The American people should use the 5th anniversary as an opportunity to debate whether the choices made by Bush and Congress after 9/11 were the right one. And to demand that a real investigation be conducted of what led to so many Americans being killed on 9/11. |
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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