9/11 After A Decade: Have We Learned Anything?

[Ben]

9/11 After A Decade: Have We Learned Anything?

by Paul Craig Roberts

August 25, 2011

In a few days, it will be the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. How well has the US government’s official account of the event held up over the decade?
Not very well. The chairman, vice chairman, and senior legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission wrote books partially disassociating themselves from the commission’s report. They said that the Bush administration put obstacles in their path, that information was withheld from them, that President Bush agreed to testify only if he was chaperoned by Vice President Cheney and neither were put under oath, that Pentagon and FAA officials lied to the commission, and that the commission considered referring the false testimony for investigation for obstruction of justice.


http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/kean-hamilton-300x209.jpg (http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/kean-hamilton.jpg)Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean

In their book, the chairman and vice chairman, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote that the 9/11 Commission was “set up to fail.” Senior counsel John Farmer, Jr., wrote that the US government made “a decision not to tell the truth about what happened,” and that the NORAD “tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public.” Kean said, “We to this day don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us, it was just so far from the truth.”
Most of the questions from the 9/11 families were not answered. Important witnesses were not called. The commission only heard from those who supported the government’s account. The commission was a controlled political operation, not an investigation of events and evidence. Its membership consisted of former politicians. No knowledgeable experts were appointed to the commission.
One member of the 9/11 Commission, former Senator Max Cleland, responded to the constraints placed on the commission by the White House: “If this decision stands, I, as a member of the commission, cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access. This investigation is now compromised.” Cleland resigned rather than have his integrity compromised.
To be clear, neither Cleland nor members of the commission suggested that 9/11 was an inside job to advance a war agenda. Nevertheless, neither Congress nor the media wondered, at least not out loud, why President Bush was unwilling to appear before the commission under oath or without Cheney, why Pentagon and FAA officials lied to the commission or, if the officials did not lie, why the commission believed they lied, or why the White House resisted for so long any kind of commission being formed, even one under its control.
One would think that if a handful of Arabs managed to outwit not merely the CIA and FBI but all 16 US intelligence agencies, all intelligence agencies of our allies, including Mossad, the National Security Council, the State Department, NORAD, airport security four times on one morning, air traffic control, etc., the President, Congress, and the media would be demanding to know how such an improbable event could occur. Instead, the White House put up a wall of resistance to finding out, and Congress and the media showed little interest.
During the decade that has passed, numerous 9/11 Truth organizations have formed.
There are Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, Remember Building 7.org (http://rememberbuilding7.org/), and a New York group which includes 9/11 families. These groups call for a real investigation.
David Ray Griffin has written 10 carefully researched books documenting problems in the government’s account. Scientists have pointed out that the government has no explanation for the molten steel. NIST has been forced to admit that WTC 7 was in free fall for part of its descent, and a scientific team led by a professor of nano-chemistry at the University of Copenhagen has reported finding nano-thermite in the dust from the buildings.
Larry Silverstein, who had the lease on the World Trade Center buildings, said in a PBS broadcast that the decision was made “to pull” Building 7 late in the afternoon of 9/11. Chief fire marshals have said that no forensic investigation was made of the buildings’ destruction and that the absence of investigation was a violation of law.
Some efforts have been made to explain away some of the evidence that is contrary to the official account, but most of the contrary evidence is simply ignored. The fact remains that the skepticism of a large number of knowledgeable experts has had no effect on the government’s position other than a member of the Obama administration suggesting that the government infiltrate the 9/11 truth organizations in order to discredit them.
The practice has been to brand experts not convinced by the government’s case “conspiracy theorists.” But of course the government’s own theory is a conspiracy theory, an even less likely one once a person realizes its full implication of intelligence and operational failures. The implied failures are extraordinarily large; yet, no one was ever held accountable.
Moreover, what do 1,500 architects and engineers have to gain from being ridiculed as conspiracy theorists? They certainly will never receive another government contract, and many surely lost business as a result of their “anti-American” stance. Their competitors must have made hay out of their “unpatriotic doubts.” Indeed, my reward for reporting on how matters stand a decade after the event will be mail telling me that as I hate America so much I should move to Cuba.
Scientists have even less incentive to express any doubts, which probably explains why there are not 1,500 Physicists for 9/11 Truth. Few physicists have careers independent of government grants or contracts. It was high school physics teacher David Chandler who forced NIST to abandon its account of Building 7’s demise. Physicist Stephen Jones, who first reported finding evidence of explosives, had his tenure bought out by BYU, which no doubt found itself under government pressure.
We can explain away contrary evidence as coincidences and mistakes and conclude that only the government got it all correct, the same government that got everything else wrong.
In fact, the government has not explained anything. The NIST report is merely a simulation of what might have caused the towers to fail if NIST’s assumptions programed into the computer model are correct. But NIST supplies no evidence that its assumptions are correct.
Building 7 was not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, and many Americans are still unaware that three buildings came down on 9/11.
Let me be clear about my point. I am not saying that some black op group in the neoconservative Bush administration blew up the buildings in order to advance the neoconservative agenda of war in the Middle East. If there is evidence of a coverup, it could be the government covering up its incompetence and not its complicity in the event. Even if there were definite proof of government complicity, it is uncertain that Americans could accept it. Architects, engineers, and scientists live in a fact-based community, but for most people facts are no match for emotions.
My point is how uninquisitive the executive branch, the security agencies, Congress, the media, and much of the population are about the defining event of our time.
There is no doubt that 9/11 is the determinant event. It has led to a decade of ever expanding wars, to the shredding of the Constitution, and to a police state. On August 22, Justin Raimondo reported that he and his website, Antiwar.com (http://antiwar.com/), are being monitored by the FBI’s Electronic Communication Analysis Unit to determine if it is “a threat to National Security” working “on behalf of a foreign power.”
Francis A. Boyle, an internationally known professor and attorney of international law, has reported that when he refused a joint FBI-CIA request to violate the attorney/client privilege and become an informant on his Arab-American clients, he was placed on the US government’s terrorist watch list.
Boyle has been critical of the US government’s approach to the Muslim world, but Raimondo has never raised, nor permitted any contributor to raise, any suspicion about US government complicity in 9/11. Raimondo merely opposes war, and that is enough for the FBI to conclude that he needs watching as a possible threat to national security.
The US government’s account of 9/11 is the foundation of the open-ended wars that are exhausting America’s resources and destroying its reputation, and it is the foundation of the domestic police state that ultimately will shut down all opposition to the wars. Americans are bound to the story of the 9/11 Muslim terrorist attack, because it is what justifies the slaughter of civilian populations in several Muslim countries, and it justifies a domestic police state as the only means of securing safety from terrorists, who already have morphed into “domestic extremists” such as environmentalists, animal rights groups, and antiwar activists.
Today Americans are unsafe, not because of terrorists and domestic extremists, but because they have lost their civil liberties and have no protection from unaccountable government power. One would think that how this came about would be worthy of public debate and congressional hearings.

The Honorable Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was appointed by President Reagan Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and confirmed by the US Senate. He was Associate Editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and he served on the personal staffs of Representative Jack Kemp and Senator Orrin Hatch. He was staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, staff associate of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and Chief Economist, Republican Staff, House Budget Committee. He wrote the Kemp-Roth tax rate reduction bill, and was a leader in the supply-side revolution. He was professor of economics in six universities, and is the author of numerous books and scholarly contributions. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

[Faldur]

Ya, how to spend $48 billion dollars a year for people to grope us at the airport.

[Ben]

George Carlin - We Like War - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaS2bRGS86c)

[Ben]

George Carlin comments on 9/11 Truth and the NWO - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pow5_UYKaJ8)

[Dino Velvet]

I learned that terrorists are jerks.

[hippifried]

We learned that the last attack isn't going to happen again, & that it's something different every time.

Oh wait a minute. I guess we haven't learned that. Never mind.

[Nicole Dupre]

http://mindprod.com/politics/bush911.html

[robertlouis]

http://mindprod.com/politics/bush911.html

Ummm. :confused:

What's your own take, Nicole?

[russtafa]

it's a fucking pain with everyone putting in their 2 cents worth .just tell these arseholes that if it happens again KABOOM their goes your miserable scrap of dust you call a country

[runningdownthatdream]

it's a fucking pain with everyone putting in their 2 cents worth .just tell these arseholes that if it happens again KABOOM their goes your miserable scrap of dust you call a country

The trite gibberish that comes out of you continues to be entertaining if not enlightening. Keep on being you.

[Stavros]

We have learned that the so-called 9/11 Truthers believe what they want to believe, as long as its not the truth. They insult the memory of the people who died and were injured.
http://www.debunking911.com/

[russtafa]

The trite gibberish that comes out of you continues to be entertaining if not enlightening. Keep on being you.
yeah same go's for you

[Prospero]

It is goes... The level of literacy on here is amusing

[Prospero]

One thing we learn from 9/11 is to expect the unexpected Another is, as someone else observed, that whatever happens next will not be the same. Generals never realize that and tend always to fight the last war. The best at least learn from history so as not to repeat it.

[Nicole Dupre]

Robert, I believe that there are enough plausible "kooky conspiracy theories" that, even if .5% of them are true, something is very wrong with the scenario that was painted in the official report. I've learned that there are far more questions than answers.

Stavros seems to want to have a pissing contest of websites tho'. lol He speaks of "insults", stating his "view" from a bluff-based moral high ground. But, clearly, he has no problem being offensive himself, as he pulls outdated Cliff Notes out of his ass to make points. His overview of tattooing proved that to me. He's a pseudo-intellectual geek.

[Prospero]

it's a fucking pain with everyone putting in their 2 cents worth .just tell these arseholes that if it happens again KABOOM their goes your miserable scrap of dust you call a country

I translate this somewhat incoherent remark to mean that if a coterie of terrorists from another country attack the US (or your home country or any nation with nuclear weapons) then we should retaliate against the entire population with nuclear weapons. That's a grown up and very civilised response. So that, for instance, the tiny minority who were behind the attacks in Bombay a year or so ago should have prompted an Indian nuclear response which would have killed hundreds of thousands and, eventually, millions after Pakistan's inevitable nuclear counter-response.

Justified anger is one thing. Idiocy of this sort quite another.

[Ben]

Robert, I believe that there are enough plausible "kooky conspiracy theories" that, even if .5% of them are true, something is very wrong with the scenario that was painted in the official report. I've learned that there are far more questions than answers.

Stavros seems to want to have a pissing contest of websites tho'. lol He speaks of "insults", stating his "view" from a bluff-based moral high ground. But, clearly, he has no problem being offensive himself, as he pulls outdated Cliff Notes out of his ass to make points. His overview of tattooing proved that to me. He's a pseudo-intellectual geek.

Paul Craig Roberts makes a very cogent point: "Let me be clear about my point. I am not saying that some black op group in the neoconservative Bush administration blew up the buildings in order to advance the neoconservative agenda of war in the Middle East. If there is evidence of a coverup, it could be the government covering up its incompetence and not its complicity in the event."
So, it's the government covering up its own incompetence. I mean, 9/11 was a complete failure of security....
And as Gore Vidal points out in the vid clip below: The law is that when a plane has been hijacked fighter jets are "scrambled" to investigate. I mean, where were they?
So, again, the so-called cover-up would be, I think, covering up the complete failure of security on 9/11, as pointed out, again, by Paul C. Roberts....

9/11 Truth: Gore Vidal recommends 'The New Pearl Harbor' - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fq4teGzhTo)

[jm813]

That air travel sucks

[russtafa]

I translate this somewhat incoherent remark to mean that if a coterie of terrorists from another country attack the US (or your home country or any nation with nuclear weapons) then we should retaliate against the entire population with nuclear weapons. That's a grown up and very civilised response. So that, for instance, the tiny minority who were behind the attacks in Bombay a year or so ago should have prompted an Indian nuclear response which would have killed hundreds of thousands and, eventually, millions after Pakistan's inevitable nuclear counter-response.

Justified anger is one thing. Idiocy of this sort quite another.

seems very reasonable to me .that's how i would do business

[Prospero]

Well then Russtafa you are either a total simpleton - or simply trying to wind people up.

[russtafa]

if people fuck with me or fuck with my family i would take care of him is family his friends his cat and dog ect

[muh_muh]

if people fuck with me or fuck with my family i would take care of him is family his friends his cat and dog ect

no you wouldnt

[NaughtyJane]

I think we've learned how to surrender our rights, our sense regarding our expectation of government spending on fool militarism, and invasive, ineffective 'so called security'.

Things as they are, failing dollar, totally corrupt political system - the terrorists won.

Nation of passive pussies letting our leaders and their corporate masters rob and burn the whole thing to the ground.

Like the totally submissive piss ant surrendering to dominatrix servitude, the sit on their ass public deserves every grain of maligned falsehood defining our futures.

I try not to care, but.... I do.

[russtafa]

yes i would

[runningdownthatdream]

I translate this somewhat incoherent remark to mean that if a coterie of terrorists from another country attack the US (or your home country or any nation with nuclear weapons) then we should retaliate against the entire population with nuclear weapons. That's a grown up and very civilised response. So that, for instance, the tiny minority who were behind the attacks in Bombay a year or so ago should have prompted an Indian nuclear response which would have killed hundreds of thousands and, eventually, millions after Pakistan's inevitable nuclear counter-response.

Justified anger is one thing. Idiocy of this sort quite another.

You are far too polite and rational for the guy from 'down unda' to understand. His statements are getting more idiotic and hateful as time goes on.

You are right of course: the worst people commit the worst acts to provoke extreme responses which create chaotic situations they can then exploit. Only rational thinking and restraint can keep them from succeeding.

[russtafa]

You are far too polite and rational for the guy from 'down unda' to understand. His statements are getting more idiotic and hateful as time goes on.

You are right of course: the worst people commit the worst acts to provoke extreme responses which create chaotic situations they can then exploit. Only rational thinking and restraint can keep them from succeeding.

i was brought up to look after the family,the family first,friends second and every one else a good third.the family honour was paramount.if someone fucks with the family you fuck with them good and proper

[robertlouis]

Robert, I believe that there are enough plausible "kooky conspiracy theories" that, even if .5% of them are true, something is very wrong with the scenario that was painted in the official report. I've learned that there are far more questions than answers.

Stavros seems to want to have a pissing contest of websites tho'. lol He speaks of "insults", stating his "view" from a bluff-based moral high ground. But, clearly, he has no problem being offensive himself, as he pulls outdated Cliff Notes out of his ass to make points. His overview of tattooing proved that to me. He's a pseudo-intellectual geek.

Thanks Nicole. I tend to agree pretty much entirely with the overall premise in your first paragraph, to the extent that the official report was in all probability a whitewash, and a cover-up to hide the shortcomings of security on the dread day and the abject failure of intelligence in the preceding months and years.

And whether you subscribe to the conspiracy theories or not, there's little doubt that, in the aftermath, the climate of fear that was engendered by the hawks in the Bush administration and the authoritarian approaches that followed, allowed them to seize control of all arms of the state in a way that their narrow and still questionable victory in November 2000 certainly didn't legitimize.

[Prospero]

"Their narrow and still questionable victory in November 2000 ...."

Well it was a victory for sure, but not by legitimate means.

[tsnajwa]

i was brought up to look after the family,the family first,friends second and every one else a good third.the family honour was paramount.if someone fucks with the family you fuck with them good and proper


What does this have to do with a topic of national security and terrorism?Right because I'm sure Bin Laden's number one priority was to get some guy in australias family..
You just have some prejudice against people from the middle east and cry foul for the actions of a few extremist.. Not all terrorism and violence is from muslims, what about the Bosnian genocide and ethnic cleansing? or the attrocities Israel continues to commit against palestine to this day?
x

[Nicole Dupre]

Russtafa's been talking racist bullshit for ages. I called him out on it a good 4 years ago. He's a lower/working class, simple-minded Australian dude. I think he's a skinhead. I put him on ignore weeks ago.

I'm really starting to lose all patience with this place. There's a core group of cool people, but it's loaded with scumbags.

[Stavros]

Stavros seems to want to have a pissing contest of websites tho'. lol He speaks of "insults", stating his "view" from a bluff-based moral high ground. But, clearly, he has no problem being offensive himself, as he pulls outdated Cliff Notes out of his ass to make points. His overview of tattooing proved that to me. He's a pseudo-intellectual geek.

Nicole, you posted a link to a 9/11 'truth' website, I posted an alternative -not a contest at all, just sharing information. Lots of people here use weblinks to make a point, as a reference, to give people some other point of view; its not a contest. I don't know what I have said that is genuinely offensive, though I know I am critical, which is not the same thing. I don't know what a Cliff note is, and my issue with tattoos comes from a different cultural perspective from yours, that is all. If you think I am pseudo-intellectual -that is your right, I don't know how I prove my 'credentials', we are all equals here. I am sometimes mystified by the hostility of your posts when you respond to me, I don't understand why you would attack me just because you don't agree with what I say.

Finally, do you not think that people who lost someone on 9/11 are indeed insulted when someone with no evidence claims it was their own government that did it?

[Nicole Dupre]

Stavros seems to want to have a pissing contest of websites tho'. lol He speaks of "insults", stating his "view" from a bluff-based moral high ground. But, clearly, he has no problem being offensive himself, as he pulls outdated Cliff Notes out of his ass to make points. His overview of tattooing proved that to me. He's a pseudo-intellectual geek.

Nicole, you posted a link to a 9/11 'truth' website, I posted an alternative -not a contest at all, just sharing information. Lots of people here use weblinks to make a point, as a reference, to give people some other point of view; its not a contest. I don't know what I have said that is genuinely offensive, though I know I am critical, which is not the same thing. I don't know what a Cliff note is, and my issue with tattoos comes from a different cultural perspective from yours, that is all. If you think I am pseudo-intellectual -that is your right, I don't know how I prove my 'credentials', we are all equals here. I am sometimes mystified by the hostility of your posts when you respond to me, I don't understand why you would attack me just because you don't agree with what I say.

Finally, do you not think that people who lost someone on 9/11 are indeed insulted when someone with no evidence claims it was their own government that did it?
And exactly what the fuck would you know about losing anyone on 9/11? Did you? Do you know anyone who did? Were you here?

Let's not even go there. You're the one doing the insulting so far.

[Nicole Dupre]

And you have no reason to be mystified. You're offensive.

[Nicole Dupre]

do you not think that people who lost someone on 9/11 are indeed insulted when someone with no evidence claims it was their own government that did it?And what the fuck is such a stretch about a body of government taking out it's own people for clandestine reasons? Did you just step off the Good Ship Lollipop?

Anyway, you can't even figure out how Google "Cliff Notes", let alone quote a post on this forum yet. You're not exactly the brightest bulb in the marquee.

[Nicole Dupre]

Monty Python Twit Race Sketch - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCyr1ugzxXM)

[Nicole Dupre]

Monty Python-The Meaning of Life-Death - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoBTsMJ4jNk)

[russtafa]

Russtafa's been talking racist bullshit for ages. I called him out on it a good 4 years ago. He's a lower/working class, simple-minded Australian dude. I think he's a skinhead. I put him on ignore weeks ago.

I'm really starting to lose all patience with this place. There's a core group of cool people, but it's loaded with scumbags.
This is coming from one of the biggest trouble makers on this site,Yes, I may be racist but we are all judgemental on one subject or another don't you think?

[trish]

But why be so fucking judgmental on something as insignificant and yet as hurtful as race? If you want to be judgmental about something insignificant try fashion or art. It's much less hurtful. To admit to being a unregretful racist, to take racism as a deliberate position, is willful maliciousness. Am I being judgmental or simply describing the very mindset you admit to having?

[onmyknees]

Interesting Question Ben....Yes I believe we have learned something, but in actuality, we already knew most of it. We know that no matter what significant event occurs here...from tornados to blizzards to assassinations, to attacks on the homeland, there will be a sliver of people like Oliver Stone and Gore Vidal who have vivid imaginations.....the same kinda people who have to sleep with a light on because they're afraid of the dark....you know the ones who 50 years later are still looking for the second shooter on the grassy knoll, or evidence that FDR knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor. They're small, insane, probably pathological, and vocal.
We also learned that the biggest threat to our republic, our way of life is not external, but internal. What do I mean? The attacks on lower Manhattan were meant to strike at the heart of American capitolism, American finance....it wasn't just a couple buildings. As horrific an act as it was in terms of loss of life, it had a greater symbolic meaning to our enemies. Now here's where I'm going to loose 3/4 of you with BDS, ( Bush Derangement Syndrome) but like it or not....the nation rebounded pretty quickly from that...and I'm obviously not talking about the bricks and mortar, I'm referring to the financial markets, the business of commerce, the confidence in the system. We were rocked, but regained our footing pretty quickly.
Afghanistan was under control inside of 2 months with an astounding military victory in terms of expelling and killing our enemies. The markets came back rather quickly in spite of the severity of the attack.
That's just a fact.
A far greater threat than all the combined events of 911, is the current fiscal calamity we're facing.It's a cancer that will destroy us over the next decade if not cauterize and corrected. When Statesmen like Erskin Boles, Alan Simpson, Judd Greg, Hillary Clinton ,Byron Dorgan, and countless others tell us it's the single greatest threat to our democracy we've ever faced....we'd better take notice.

[runningdownthatdream]

But why be so fucking judgmental on something as insignificant and yet as hurtful as race? If you want to be judgmental about something insignificant try fashion or art. It's much less hurtful. To admit to being a unregretful racist, to take racism as a deliberate position, is willful maliciousness. Am I being judgmental or simply describing the very mindset you admit to having?

Excellent point - the fact that he or anyone else chooses to deliberately espouse a racist philosophy has more to do with being hurtful to others than anything else. The 'more intelligent racists' (an oxymoron I know) try to disguise their mean and nasty character by presenting 'facts' that justify their hatred for others. The really dumb ones just say stupid shit like Russtafa does. He doesn't even try to sound intelligent.

[russtafa]

Excellent point - the fact that he or anyone else chooses to deliberately espouse a racist philosophy has more to do with being hurtful to others than anything else. The 'more intelligent racists' (an oxymoron I know) try to disguise their mean and nasty character by presenting 'facts' that justify their hatred for others. The really dumb ones just say stupid shit like Russtafa does. He doesn't even try to sound intelligent.

muslim is not race dickhead it's a religion and yes i don't like people pack raping girls in Australia because they are Aussie or walking into clubs in Bali and killing innocent people or flying planes into buildings or tube ways in London or Madrid .i i don't like people who make excuses for them,so grow some fucking ball's yah cat

[Stavros]

And exactly what the fuck would you know about losing anyone on 9/11? Did you? Do you know anyone who did? Were you here?
Let's not even go there. You're the one doing the insulting so far.

Nicole, 9/11 was a crime against humanity, as well as an attack on the USA. 67 of the victims were British; you cannot nationalise the topic. That's like saying only Jews can have an opinion on Auschwitz.

I have not insulted you or anybody else on this forum, and I don't think googling 'Cliff Notes' is a benchmark of intelligence; but I do know it is little importance in this discussion.

If you have evidence that your government was involved in the attacks on the USA on 9/11, I think you should provide it, that is one of the issues that this thread is about.

[Ben]

Noam Chomsky on 9/11 Conspiracy Theories (CONSPIRITOLOGY SERIES/ 9/11) - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-5FAzQoKYs)

[russtafa]

And exactly what the fuck would you know about losing anyone on 9/11? Did you? Do you know anyone who did? Were you here?
Let's not even go there. You're the one doing the insulting so far.

Nicole, 9/11 was a crime against humanity, as well as an attack on the USA. 67 of the victims were British; you cannot nationalise the topic. That's like saying only Jews can have an opinion on Auschwitz.

I have not insulted you or anybody else on this forum, and I don't think googling 'Cliff Notes' is a benchmark of intelligence; but I do know it is little importance in this discussion.

If you have evidence that your government was involved in the attacks on the USA on 9/11, I think you should provide it, that is one of the issues that this thread is about.Stavros and I don't usually agree but he is only debating the subject,he is not attacking other's on this forum personally.

[robertlouis]

muslim is not race dickhead it's a religion and yes i don't like people pack raping girls in Australia because they are Aussie or walking into clubs in Bali and killing innocent people or flying planes into buildings or tube ways in London or Madrid .i i don't like people who make excuses for them,so grow some fucking ball's yah cat

You are correct, but it's the constant demonisation by the media and rabble-rousers of Muslims as a group that has blurred the distinction between the race and the religion to the extent that a lot of westerners can't - or worse, don't want to - recognise the difference.

[tsnajwa]

muslim is not race dickhead it's a religion and yes i don't like people pack raping girls in Australia because they are Aussie or walking into clubs in Bali and killing innocent people or flying planes into buildings or tube ways in London or Madrid .i i don't like people who make excuses for them,so grow some fucking ball's yah cat

Nobody is making excuses for extremist but you are generalizing all people from the middle east and saying they should all be sterilized, and yet you refuse to see the violence and crime and terrorism committed by other groups from around the world who are not muslim or from the middle east..

[Nicole Dupre]

Nicole, 9/11 was a crime against humanity, as well as an attack on the USA. 67 of the victims were British; you cannot nationalise the topic. That's like saying only Jews can have an opinion on Auschwitz.

I have not insulted you or anybody else on this forum, and I don't think googling 'Cliff Notes' is a benchmark of intelligence; but I do know it is little importance in this discussion.

If you have evidence that your government was involved in the attacks on the USA on 9/11, I think you should provide it, that is one of the issues that this thread is about.

I didn't nationalize anything. Don't put words in my mouth. I localized and personalized it. I personally knew someone who died, and I watched it happen. I smelled it for days. I waited for people to get home safely. You caught it on the news.

The Bush family and their friends are not "my government". They're a military-industrial cabal, and they were fully capable of orchestrating 9/11 via someone who was on the CIA's payroll, like Osama bin Laden.

And I don't care about the selective plausibility your link provides, which I disagree with btw, because even if it happened exactly as it was laid out on that site, the motivation behind "Bin Laden's act of terrorism" could easily have been planned by other people. In fact, the more you try talking about how it happened, the further you get from WHY it happened.

Since you weren't there to observe the orchestration of the event, all you have is your supposed faith in humanity, which is laughable. Human beings take advantage of and manipulate one another all the time. You simply prefer one conspiracy theory over another. But Bush and friends had a clear motive and a sketchy history, including the way they got into the White House.

And your uninformed stab at why people get tattooed speaks volumes about you alone, as does your self-appointed title of HA music critic. And it was meant to be offensive, clearly, which it is. But maybe you've also struggled with concepts like why we all don't wear grey unisex uniforms, or what the validity of hairstyles are. Maybe you live under a rock, and drink toilet water. Personally, I really don't care about your limited perspective on pop culture, fashion, etc.

Anyway, Googling something in 2011 is a benchmark of common sense, not intelligence. And if you don't appear to have any of that, you most certainly come across as a pseudo-intellectual pompous ass. "I'm not socially retarded. I make purchases in shops on a regular basis"? Wtf was that supposed to mean?

You don't even seem to have an interest in shemale porn. In fact, you're about as likely to be a disinfo agent as anyone here.

So go piss up a rope.

[Nicole Dupre]

ween-fancy pants - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J6NWReYzWE)

[runningdownthatdream]

This is coming from one of the biggest trouble makers on this site,Yes, I may be racist but we are all judgemental on one subject or another don't you think?

I think you said it yourself - everyone saw it. Don't bother trying to back out now. Nicole made the right call on you: you're a low-level un-educated buffoon. Troglodyte is the word that comes to mind whenever I see your handle.

[runningdownthatdream]

.

And I don't care about the selective plausibility your link provides, which I disagree with btw, because even if it happened exactly as it was laid out on that site, the motivation behind "Bin Laden's act of terrorism" could easily have been planned by other people. In fact, the more you try talking about how it happened, the further you get from WHY it happened.

Since you weren't there to observe the orchestration of the event, all you have is your supposed faith in humanity, which is laughable. Human beings take advantage of and manipulate one another all the time. You simply prefer one conspiracy theory over another. But Bush and friends had a clear motive and a sketchy history, including the way they got into the White House.

I won't bash Stavro but that was a stunning and lucid observation........as if you needed anyone to tell you that :)

[russtafa]

I think you said it yourself - everyone saw it. Don't bother trying to back out now. Nicole made the right call on you: you're a low-level un-educated buffoon. Troglodyte is the word that comes to mind whenever I see your handle.you are a piece of work with your smart ass name calling and your better than a working class man like me .People like you are gutless wonders and that's why Australia,America,the UK are in the state they are in,over educated wimps that have never done a hard days work in their lives and sneer at people that do

[Stavros]

I personally knew someone who died, and I watched it happen. I smelled it for days. I waited for people to get home safely. You caught it on the news.

Yes, there was a specific dimension to New York city that outsiders cannot appreciate; but as a general principle, we are all humans, and all capable of walking by on the other side of the street, our hands in our pockets; and also capable of extending our sympathy and support to you and your friends -and I think you know that had you called upon anyone on this board on the 9th, 10th, 11th, or any September day, we would have extended our hands to you.

Since you weren't there to observe the orchestration of the event, all you have is your supposed faith in humanity, which is laughable. Human beings take advantage of and manipulate one another all the time.
This must be the saddest comment on this topic you have made -please for once acknowledge the heroism and bravery of New York's Finest, its policemen and fire brigades; of the unfamous heroes and heroines with no uniform who went out of their way on that day, and put their own lives in danger to help people bleeding to death, stumbling along the street covered in ash barely able to see or breathe: on 9/11 we witnessed the worst and the best that humanity has to offer. Your choice.

"I'm not socially retarded. I make purchases in shops on a regular basis"? Wtf was that supposed to mean?
Mea culpa -that's my sense of humour -an ironic joke that passed you by.

Nicole, we are not going to agree on the politics of 9/11, so I don't propose to extend this correspondence any further. I bear no malice to you as a person, I have never met you, but I sincerely hope that if you ever visit the UK and I can make it London or wherever you are, we can have lunch and discover what it is that we agree on; life is too short, and already too brutal for this unnecessary quarrel.

[Nicole Dupre]

Yes, there was a specific dimension to New York city that outsiders cannot appreciate; but as a general principle, we are all humans, and all capable of walking by on the other side of the street, our hands in our pockets; and also capable of extending our sympathy and support to you and your friends -and I think you know that had you called upon anyone on this board on the 9th, 10th, 11th, or any September day, we would have extended our hands to you.


This must be the saddest comment on this topic you have made -please for once acknowledge the heroism and bravery of New York's Finest, its policemen and fire brigades; of the unfamous heroes and heroines with no uniform who went out of their way on that day, and put their own lives in danger to help people bleeding to death, stumbling along the street covered in ash barely able to see or breathe: on 9/11 we witnessed the worst and the best that humanity has to offer. Your choice.

Mea culpa -that's my sense of humour -an ironic joke that passed you by.

Nicole, we are not going to agree on the politics of 9/11, so I don't propose to extend this correspondence any further. I bear no malice to you as a person, I have never met you, but I sincerely hope that if you ever visit the UK and I can make it London or wherever you are, we can have lunch and discover what it is that we agree on; life is too short, and already too brutal for this unnecessary quarrel.

You addressed none of my points.

And talk's cheap. What did you donate at the time for relief efforts? Let's see a receipt.

And what's "sad" is you'd even try to play the 'brave heroes' card. My uncle was the chief of the Port Authority Police during 9/11. My cousins and uncles are Jersey City police, across the water from Ground Zero. My other uncles and cousins are NJ State Troopers and Newark Police. I'll hold up about 7 PBA cards on cam with today's date if you need me to. I've heard first-hand accounts of the event that you probably didn't catch conveniently on the news. You're presumptuous bullshit knows no bounds.

And it's not a quarrel. You're offensive. If you need to put your tail back between your legs now, feel free, jerkoff. The only joke is your opinion. Just shut the fuck up, you offensive twit.

[russtafa]

You addressed none of my points.

And talk's cheap. What did you donate at the time for relief efforts? Let's see a receipt.

And what's sad is you'd even try to attempt playing the "brave heroes" card. My uncle was the chief of the Port Authority Police during 9/11. My cousins and uncles are Jersey City police, across the water from Ground Zero. My other uncles and cousins are NJ State Troopers and Newark Police. I'll hold up about 7 PBA cards on cam with today's date if you need me to. I've heard first accounts of the event that you probably didn't catch conveniently on the news. You're presumptuous bullshit knows no bounds.

And it's not a quarrel. You're offensive. If you need to put your tail back between your legs now, feel free, jerkoff. The only joke is your opinion. Just shut the fuck up, you offensive twit.

What a fucking baboon .Never seen one with tat's before. The circus or zoo would pay big money for the ugly thing.Should have a placard out side the cage"beware it throws shit"

[Ben]

9/11: Ten Years Later, Americans Still Stupid and Vulnerable

by Ted Rall (http://www.commondreams.org/ted-rall)

They say everything changed on 9/11. No one can dispute that. But we didn't learn anything.
Like other events that forced Americans to reassess their national priorities (the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Sputnik) the attacks on New York and Washington were a traumatic, teachable moment.
The collective attention of the nation was finally focused upon problems that had gone neglected for many years. 9/11 was a chance to get smart—but we blew it.
First and foremost the attacks gave the United States a rare opportunity to reset its international reputation. Even countries known for anti-Americanism offered their support. "We are all Americans," ran the headline of the French newspaper <em>Le Monde</em>.
The century of U.S. foreign policy that led to 9/11—supporting dictators, crushing democratic movements, spreading gangster capitalism at the point of a thousand nukes—should and could have been put on hold and reassessed in the wake of 9/11.
It wasn't time to act. It was time to think.
It was time to lick our wounds, pretend to act confused, and play the victim. It was time to hope the world forgot how we supplied lists of pro-democracy activists to a young Saddam Hussein so he could collect and kill them, and forget the "Made in USA" labels on missiles shot into the Gaza Strip from U.S.-made helicopter gunships sold to Israel.
It was time, for once, to take the high road. The Bush Administration ought to have treated 9/11 as a police investigation, demanding that Pakistan extradite Osama bin Laden and other individuals wanted in connection with the attacks for prosecution by an international court.
Instead of assuming a temperate, thoughtful posture, the Bush Administration exploited 9/11 as an excuse to start two wars, both against defenseless countries that had little or nothing to do with the attacks. Bush and company legalized torture and ramped up support for unpopular dictatorships in South and Central Asia and the Middle East, all announced with bombastic cowboy talk.
Smoke 'em out! Worst of the worst! Dead or alive!
By 2003 the world hated us more than ever. A BBC poll showed that people in Jordan and Indonesia—moderate Muslim countries where Al Qaeda had killed locals with bombs—considered the U.S. a bigger security threat than the terrorist group.
In fairness to Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld and Bush's other leading war criminals, everyone else went along with them. The media refused to question them. Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, cast votes in favor of Bush's wars. Democrats and leftist activists ought to have pushed for Bush's impeachment; they were silent or supportive.
9/11 was "blowback"—proof that the U.S. can't wage its wars overseas without suffering consequences at home. But we still haven't learned that lesson. Ten years later, a "Democratic" president is fighting Bush's wars as well as new ones against Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Now he's saber-rattling against Syria.
American officials correctly inferred from 9/11 that security, particularly at airports but also in ports where container ships arrive daily from around the world, had been lax. Rather than act proactively to close gaps in transportation security, however, bureaucrats for the new Department of Homeland Security created a gauntlet of police-state harassment so onerous that it has threatened the financial health of the aviation industry.
"Aviation security is a joke, and it's only a matter of time before terrorists destroy another airplane full of innocent passengers," wrote Barbara Hollingsworth of <em>The Washington Examiner</em> after the 2009 "underwear bomber" scare. As Hollingsworth pointed out, the much-vaunted federal air marshals have been removed from flights because the TSA is too cheap to pay their hotel bills. (This is illegal.) What's the point of taking off your shoes, she asked, when planes are still serviced overseas in unsecured facilities? No one has provided an answer.
Ten years after 9/11, there is still no real security check when you board a passenger train or bus. Perhaps the sheer quantity of goods arriving at American ports makes it impossible to screen them all, but we're not even talking about the fact that we've basically given up on port security.
While we're on the subject of post-9/11 security, what about air defenses? On 9/11 the airspace over the Lower 48 states was assigned to a dozen "weekend warrior" air national guard jets. Every last one of them was on the ground when the attacks began, allowing hijacked planes to tool around the skies for hours after they had been identified as dangerous.
Which could easily happen again. According to a 2009 report by the federal General Accounting Office on U.S. air defenses: "The Air Force has not implemented ASA [Air Sovereignty Alert] operations in accordance with DOD, NORAD, and Air Force directives and guidance, which instruct the Air Force to establish ASA as a steady-state (ongoing and indefinite) mission. The Air Force has not implemented the 140 actions it identified to establish ASA as a steady-state mission, which included integrating ASA operations into the Air Force's planning, programming, and funding cycle. The Air Force has instead been focused on other priorities, such as overseas military operations."
Maybe if it stopped spending so much time and money killing foreigners the American government could protect Americans.
On 9/11 hundreds of firefighters and policemen died because they couldn't communicate on antiquated, segregated bandwidth. "Only one month away from the 10th anniversary of 9/11," admits FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, "our first responders still don't have an interoperable mobile broadband network for public safety. Our 911 call centers still can't handle texts or pictures or video being sent by the phones that everyone has."
Because the corporate masters of the Democratic and Republican parties love the low wage/weak labor environment created by illegal immigration, American land borders are intentionally left unguarded.
A lot changed on 9/11, but not everything.
We're still governed by corrupt idiots. And we're still putting up with them.
What does that say about us?

© 2011 Ted Rall

[Helvis2012]

Doesn't seem like it.

[runningdownthatdream]

you are a piece of work with your smart ass name calling and your better than a working class man like me .People like you are gutless wonders and that's why Australia,America,the UK are in the state they are in,over educated wimps that have never done a hard days work in their lives and sneer at people that do

Oh how little you know. I come from the under-priviledged - it is why I can empathize. I did not attend a university - it is why I can think objectively (no offense meant to the university educated). I have done many a 'hard days' work' (I take it that you mean manual labour) - which is why I worked harder to get into jobs where I can use my brain more.

Some advice for you: you're probably a good guy over a beer but know you intellectual limits or do more to educate yourself otherwise you will continue to come across as a simpleton.

[russtafa]

Oh how little you know. I come from the under-priviledged - it is why I can empathize. I did not attend a university - it is why I can think objectively (no offense meant to the university educated). I have done many a 'hard days' work' (I take it that you mean manual labour) - which is why I worked harder to get into jobs where I can use my brain more.

Some advice for you: you're probably a good guy over a beer but know you intellectual limits or do more to educate yourself otherwise you will continue to come across as a simpleton.hey i have worked hard all my life and if i have different point of views it's one i will hold on to even if some try's to down grade me for that point of view

[Nicole Dupre]

Get back in your damn penal colony, penis.

[trish]

hey i have worked hard all my life and if i have different point of views it's one i will hold on to even if some try's to down grade me for that point of view

When you feel like you have to "hold on to" your point of view, you've already given it up. What remains is a choice: figure out what you really think or stick to your old story.

[Prospero]

I would say that a lot has been learnt. Ten years on we certainly know a lot more about the Muslim faith - the goodness of the bulk of its followers, but the horrendous acts that those pursuing a perversion of the faith are capable off. We have learnt that not even the safest seeming place in the world is really safe. We have glimpsed and been reminded again of the craven nature of some human beings and of the terrible things they are capable off. We have learnt that our freedoms need to be protected. We have been reminded of just what a complex place our planet is - and off the need to live together and find ways to resolve our disputes without recourse to violence. Who gained from 9/11? Nobody. Who gained from the invasion of Iraq? What value has there been in the trillions of dollars spent by the West in the wars in Afghanistan and iraq?

[runningdownthatdream]

I would say that a lot has been learnt. Ten years on we certainly know a lot more about the Muslim faith - the goodness of the bulk of its followers, but the horrendous acts that those pursuing a perversion of the faith are capable off. We have learnt that not even the safest seeming place in the world is really safe. We have glimpsed and been reminded again of the craven nature of some human beings and of the terrible things they are capable off. We have learnt that our freedoms need to be protected. We have been reminded of just what a complex place our planet is - and off the need to live together and find ways to resolve our disputes without recourse to violence. Who gained from 9/11? Nobody. Who gained from the invasion of Iraq? What value has there been in the trillions of dollars spent by the West in the wars in Afghanistan and iraq?

Clearly you see the positive in everything.......sadly that isn't enough and isn't any use to humanity as a whole. Fighting - whether between individuals/cities/states/cultures/religions - has been happening since our story has been recorded. It will never stop. The more we learn the less we feel and the more extreme our actions. More people probably died due to conflict in the 20th century than all the wars combined in the previous 500 years - what makes you think the 21st century will be better? If we learned anything from the 20th century it was how to become more effective at killing. There are new things to fight over now - space, Antarctica to name a few - and all the while the war machines keep getting more efficient. Sorry my friend, we cannot change destiny but we can try to enjoy the lives we lead now.

[trish]

I don’t know if WE learned anything because of 9/11. I’ve learned a few things and also had a few suspicions confirmed. I was in a food court with a crowd of people watching the horror unfold on a public television. At one point I turned to my neighbor and suggested we’ll be at war by the end of the week. I don’t quite know why I volunteered. It was as if I didn’t want it to be true and I was hoping people seated next to me would reassuringly disagree. Instead the reply was along the line, “Damn straight. We’re gonna kick some Muslim butt for sure.” My heart sank. I knew then I was right. We were going to war. Maybe not by the end of the week; but we were going to war.

I was ignorant about Islam and knew it. I knew more than Bush who had no hint of the depth of his ignorance. I knew the politics in the Middle East were tribally structured and I knew about the political and religious differences between the Sunni and the Shite. I had a number of Persian and Indian friends. But I felt the need to read. I read Naipaul’s Beyond Belief. I read Reza Aslan’s No god but God. I read Irshad Manji’s The Trouble with Islam. And of course I read the countless magazine and newspaper articles that were either intended to inform or incite. I think a lot of us have attempted to educate ourselves in the beliefs and ambitions of our Muslim neighbors. Unfortunately, a lot of us just rejoiced in our ignorance and deepened our hatred for anyone different.

Before 9/11 I would describe myself to people as apolitical. I didn’t give a shit who was in office and I didn’t think it made a difference. I was concerned with my own transition, my education and paying for the two. In every free moment I thought about mathematics, astrophysics and cosmology. Even though I was young and trying to make ends meet, life seemed pretty good. The Nation had a ten year budget surplus! The big argument in the election before 9/11 was what to do with that enormous amount of extra money we’ve got!!

I learned it does make a difference who’s in office, especially when a tragedy like this occurs. Had Gore been in office 9/11 may never have occurred. After all, the Clinton administration was already hip to the danger al Qaeda presented. Had Gore been in office the surplus might not have been given away to rich in tax cuts, and for what[?] Job growth was stagnant [] during W’s reign. Had Gore been in office we might not have been drawn into Iraq. Of course those are all “maybes”. But one thing is sure: it would have gone down differently and it['s] difficult to image how it could have gone down worse. So I’m a political animal now, thanks to George Bush and his mishandling of 9/11 and everything that followed.

I learned that Halliburton wasn’t just an oil company, but that it had subdivisions that specialized in military security. I was astounded to see how quickly Rumsfeld privatized various aspects of the military. No more KP duty, the military is now privately catered, and for a lot more money than it used to cost. No more armored vests either. If a soldier was lucky her family bought one for her and sent it in the mail. I saw mercenaries paid ten fold more than our own soldiers and I saw them committing crimes and not being held accountable. I watched the death count rise. I watched the causalities mount. I saw people protesting the war in Iraq and protested too. I saw something I never thought I see. I saw Americans torture other human beings. I watched America rendition people they weren’t willing to torture themselves. I saw a television series that popularized the very notion of torture. Now this later stuff really isn’t stuff I learned. Technically its stuff I witnessed and everyone else has witnessed too along with me. But being a witness is to be an evidence gatherer, and that’s the first step in learning. I have yet to digest everything that I’ve witnessed.

[runningdownthatdream]

I don’t know if WE learned anything because of 9/11. I’ve learned a few things and also had a few suspicions confirmed. I was in a food court with a crowd of people watching the horror unfold on a public television. At one point I turned to my neighbor and suggested we’ll be at war by the end of the week. I don’t quite know why I volunteered. It was as if I didn’t want it to be true and I was hoping people seated next to me would reassuringly disagree. Instead the reply was along the line, “Damn straight. We’re gonna kick some Muslim butt for sure.” My heart sank. I knew then I was right. We were going to war. Maybe not by the end of the week; but we were going to war.

I was ignorant about Islam and knew it. I knew more than Bush who had no hint of the depth of his ignorance. I knew the politics in the Middle East were tribally structured and I knew about the political and religious differences between the Sunni and the Shite. I had a number of Persian and Indian friends. But I felt the need to read. I read Naipaul’s Beyond Belief. I read Reza Aslan’s No god but God. I read Irshad Manji’s The Trouble with Islam. And of course I read the countless magazine and newspaper articles that were either intended to inform or incite. I think a lot of us have attempted to educate ourselves in the beliefs and ambitions of our Muslim neighbors. Unfortunately, a lot of us just rejoiced in our ignorance and deepened our hatred for anyone different.

Before 9/11 I would describe myself to people as apolitical. I didn’t give a shit who was in office and I didn’t think it made a difference. I was concerned with my own transition, my education and paying for the two. In every free moment I thought about mathematics, astrophysics and cosmology. Even though I was young and trying to make ends meet, life seemed pretty good. The Nation had a ten year budget surplus! The big argument in the election before 9/11 was what to do with that enormous amount of extra money we’ve got!!

I learned it does make a difference who’s in office, especially when a tragedy like this occurs. Had Gore been in office 9/11 may never have occurred. After all, the Clinton administration was already hip to the danger al Qaeda presented. Had Gore been in office the surplus might not have been given away to rich in tax cuts, and for what. Job growth was stagnant in during W’s reign. Had Gore been in office we might not have been drawn into Iraq. Of course those are all “maybes”. But one thing is sure: it would have gone down differently and it difficult to image how it could have gone down worse. So I’m a political animal now, thanks to George Bush and his mishandling of 9/11 and everything that followed.

I learned that Halliburton wasn’t just an oil company, but that it had subdivisions that specialized in military security. I was astounded to see how quickly Rumsfeld privatized various aspects of the military. No more KP duty, the military is now privately catered, and for a lot more money than it used to cost. No more armored vests either. If a soldier was lucky her family bought one for her and sent it in the mail. I saw mercenaries paid ten fold more than our own soldiers and I saw them committing crimes and not being held accountable. I watched the death count rise. I watched the causalities mount. I saw people protesting the war in Iraq and protested too. I saw something I never thought I see. I saw Americans torture other human beings. I watched America rendition people they weren’t willing to torture themselves. I saw a television series that popularized the very notion of torture. Now this later stuff really isn’t stuff I learned. Technically its stuff I witnessed and everyone else has witnessed too along with me. But being a witness is to be an evidence gatherer, and that’s the first step in learning. I have yet to digest everything that I’ve witnessed.

Now pick 9 other people you know and ask yourself how many did as much as you did to try and understand what happened and how we got to 911. Of those who did the research, how many have the same opinion about the reason for what happened or the same opinion about who is to blame? I doubt you'll find more than 4 people out of the 9 did as much research as you. And of those 4 maybe 2 may share similar opinions. All of which points to a very very divided human population incapable of uniting for something as ethereal as 'the good of mankind'.

[Stavros]

Trish, thank you for a thoughtful response that has returned us to the original, if flawed proposition -perhaps the thread should ask What have YOU learned in the last decade.

Runningdownthedream: in your reply to Prospero, you say, and I quote:
Clearly you see the positive in everything.......sadly that isn't enough and isn't any use to humanity as a whole. Fighting - whether between individuals/cities/states/cultures/religions - has been happening since our story has been recorded. It will never stop

The point about the 'humanitarian alternative' is that it has always been there; a balanced view of history counterposes acts of war to acts of peace; that you emphasize one rather than the other is your choice.

Not long after the worst atrocities had been committted against the Armenians -I think it was the early 1920s, an Orphanage was set up by a Protestant community at Nyon, in Switzerland, where today there is also a refuge for seekers of Political Asylum. The Melkonian Brothers set up numerous schools and orphanages for displaced children. Neither the Swiss nor the Melkonian brothers had to lift a finger to help anyone; but they did: they made a choice, and they acted on it.

Throughout the Third Reich, an underground Protestant group in the Ruhr gave safe housing to Jews, moving them in secret from one location to another. The Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler put himself at risk by helping Jewish musicians flee the country; James Joyce performed a similar act for Hermann Broch and other Jews in Germany and Austria. Again: none of these people had to put themselves at risk to help a few Jews; but they did.

I don't recall Martin Luther King inciting people to violence; his message of peace and reconciliation was not debased by the Vietnam War, but enhanced by it. I was inspired by King and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and don't regret it.

Nelson Mandela, released from Prison, did not seek the violent overthrow of the Apartheid government; from the day of his release he held an open hand of friendship for all -because his priority was the future, not the past. The same model of positive thinking has shaped the release from house arrest, of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma.

Sean Penn doesn't have to spend his time or money in Haiti, but he has chosen to do so, and whatever you think of his project, it is making a difference to people's lives.

We all have choices, sometimes we are not in a position to help; I am one of those people who believe that doing good is not impossible, and that it is better than hurling insults and abuse at people; better than ridicule and violence; or turning away from a situation, from whatever feeling. Helping others will not solve the world's problems; but the alternative is a darkness in which nobody can see where they are going.

[hippifried]

Clearly you see the positive in everything.......sadly that isn't enough and isn't any use to humanity as a whole. Fighting - whether between individuals/cities/states/cultures/religions - has been happening since our story has been recorded. It will never stop. The more we learn the less we feel and the more extreme our actions. More people probably died due to conflict in the 20th century than all the wars combined in the previous 500 years - what makes you think the 21st century will be better? If we learned anything from the 20th century it was how to become more effective at killing. There are new things to fight over now - space, Antarctica to name a few - and all the while the war machines keep getting more efficient. Sorry my friend, we cannot change destiny but we can try to enjoy the lives we lead now.

Now pick 9 other people you know and ask yourself how many did as much as you did to try and understand what happened and how we got to 911. Of those who did the research, how many have the same opinion about the reason for what happened or the same opinion about who is to blame? I doubt you'll find more than 4 people out of the 9 did as much research as you. And of those 4 maybe 2 may share similar opinions. All of which points to a very very divided human population incapable of uniting for something as ethereal as 'the good of mankind'.
Wow! Do you have one of those dark clouds hanging over your head like in the cartoons? That's some kind of world class pessimism you got going there. I don't think most people are even capable of that much negativity.

[runningdownthatdream]

Wow! Do you have one of those dark clouds hanging over your head like in the cartoons? That's some kind of world class pessimism you got going there. I don't think most people are even capable of that much negativity.

I haven't bothered to look so I don't know. I do know the historical record of our actions though and that's all you need to come to the conclusion that we are incapable of living in harmony.

[runningdownthatdream]

We all have choices, sometimes we are not in a position to help; I am one of those people who believe that doing good is not impossible, and that it is better than hurling insults and abuse at people; better than ridicule and violence; or turning away from a situation, from whatever feeling. Helping others will not solve the world's problems; but the alternative is a darkness in which nobody can see where they are going.

No doubt it is better to do good than do harm. But small isolated acts of kindness have little impact on the big picture. The thing is that we have not found enough points of unity as human beings on which we can agree. Look at the issue of capital punishment for example: if killing is wrong then killing is wrong regardless of who perpetrates it. Yet, there's a huge segment of the population for it. We make laws but then find ways - legal and illegal - to subvert those laws to benefit individuals or special interest groups.

Fundamentally, nothing ever really changes.

[russtafa]

We know that America and the UK ,Australia are the biggest push overs

[Prospero]

I don't think that my post especially made me seem to look unerringly at the "positive in everything." Rather I suggested 9/11 was a reminder of the darkness and cruelty that those possessed of big ideas are capable off - be it radical and fundamentalist Islam, Nazism and fascism, Stalinism, zealous Christianity (the crusades and the behaviour of the Conquistadores to mention but two examples) and many more.

But balanced with that is the need to also believe in the possibility of human good otherwise we are forced into the view that mankind is simply a cruel but clever animal animated by bloodlust and little more. I refuse to accept that.

With special reference to 9/11 i was working with people at Windows On The World (the restaurant on top of the WTC) just a few days before 9/11. When the planes hit I remembered these nice and good and ordinary people. I remembered their faces and their names and know that many died that day because of the breakfast meeting there. This was an evil act - one of numberless evil acts before and since (Beslan, the Bombay hotel killings, the disco attack in Thailand, the recent Norwegian massacres etc etc).

But in memory of those good people I refuse to accept that we are just all flawed and that our venture is a futile one.

Most people in most places pursue the good.

[hippifried]

I agree, Prospero. Add 9/11 to the other 3 incidents you mentioned & we're still not up to 50 perpetrators. Out of what, 6+ billion people on the planet? The 2 reactionary wars caused a lot more damage to innocents than all the terrorist acts in the last half century worldwide. I'll bet there aren't more that a few thousand actual potential terrorists on the planet, from all the different nutbar ideologies. That's what, less than 1% of 1% of 1% of 1 %? That's exponentially miniscule. (Is there another word for going backwards using roots?) What are the odds of getting hit by a terrorist attack, compared to getting killed in a home accident or car crash?

I can't bring myslf to even entertain the idea that mass violence is indicative of the human race. Most people live by the universal moral code. That's what allows us to live in close proximity to each other, & form societies to pool our resources. If we were that fucked up, we wouldn't have this population explosion that's been going on for the last several thousand years. In the 21st century, even war is becoming passe, along with bloodline aristocracy. War has always been the exception & not the rule anyway. Each generation is less violent as a whole, even in just my lifetime. It'd be nice to live long enough to see the changes brought about by my grandchildren's & great grandchildren's generations. Compared to just a century ago, we're doing pretty damn good.

[runningdownthatdream]

I agree, Prospero. Add 9/11 to the other 3 incidents you mentioned & we're still not up to 50 perpetrators. Out of what, 6+ billion people on the planet? The 2 reactionary wars caused a lot more damage to innocents than all the terrorist acts in the last half century worldwide. I'll bet there aren't more that a few thousand actual potential terrorists on the planet, from all the different nutbar ideologies. That's what, less than 1% of 1% of 1% of 1 %? That's exponentially miniscule. (Is there another word for going backwards using roots?) What are the odds of getting hit by a terrorist attack, compared to getting killed in a home accident or car crash?

I can't bring myslf to even entertain the idea that mass violence is indicative of the human race. Most people live by the universal moral code. That's what allows us to live in close proximity to each other, & form societies to pool our resources. If we were that fucked up, we wouldn't have this population explosion that's been going on for the last several thousand years. In the 21st century, even war is becoming passe, along with bloodline aristocracy. War has always been the exception & not the rule anyway. Each generation is less violent as a whole, even in just my lifetime. It'd be nice to live long enough to see the changes brought about by my grandchildren's & great grandchildren's generations. Compared to just a century ago, we're doing pretty damn good.

Don't take this the wrong way but........you're not in touch with reality and obviously haven't done any research on (take your pick - they're in chronological order and off the top of my head):

- the Russo-Japanese War
- WW1
- the Communist Russian Revolution
- the post Russian Revolution purge
- WW2
- the Communist Chinese Revolution
- Korean War
- the post Chinese Revolution Cultural Revolution
- Vietnam War
- Ugandan Genocide
- Russian Invasion of Afghanistan
- Nicaraguan revolution
- First Gulf War
- Balkan War (3rd of the 20th century)
- Rwandan Genocide
- Chechnyan Revolt

Those are some of the major conflicts within the 20th century. The Russian and Chinese purges alone accounted for about 40 million people. Rwanda another million and on and on. Your claim that 'war is becoming passe' is ridiculous and no doubt inspired by the fact that you live in the bubble known as North America where memories are short and things that happen outside North America don't count because most of us who live here are consumed by the banality of shopping malls, shiny cars, Hollywood movies, and the endless quest to become wealthy and where the major man-made calamities inflicted (since the destruction of the Native tribes in the last century) have been limited to relatively small and isolated acts of terrorism (Oklahoma City and 9/11). We can't see past our noses.

Come back and talk about how it's 'less than 1% of 1% of 1% of 1 %' of the population that is responsible once you educate yourself. Oh just to humour you: who do you think killed millions upon millions? Hitler and a sub-machine gun? Mao and a grenade? Stalin and a pistol?

[hippifried]

Your list verifies my point.

There used to be wars going on all the time. What's left now is basically mop up more than anything else. WWII brought an end to European colonialism. It brought an end to European wars among themselves for the most part too. Think they'll be starting up again any time soon? Of course they won't, because they're not ruled by kings anymore. That's going on all over the world. That's what the Arab spring is. Once the kings, dictators, & foreign occupation forces are gone, they're not coming back. The thought process that revolves around one man rule is going away. War is becoming passe. It's the exception & not the rule. Always has been really. We just talk about it more. Probably because it's more exciting to rehash old conflicts than to report on nice uneventful days.

[Helvis2012]

Don't take this the wrong way but........you're not in touch with reality and obviously haven't done any research on (take your pick - they're in chronological order and off the top of my head):

- the Russo-Japanese War
- WW1
- the Communist Russian Revolution
- the post Russian Revolution purge
- WW2
- the Communist Chinese Revolution
- Korean War
- the post Chinese Revolution Cultural Revolution
- Vietnam War
- Ugandan Genocide
- Russian Invasion of Afghanistan
- Nicaraguan revolution
- First Gulf War
- Balkan War (3rd of the 20th century)
- Rwandan Genocide
- Chechnyan Revolt

Those are some of the major conflicts within the 20th century. The Russian and Chinese purges alone accounted for about 40 million people. Rwanda another million and on and on. Your claim that 'war is becoming passe' is ridiculous and no doubt inspired by the fact that you live in the bubble known as North America where memories are short and things that happen outside North America don't count because most of us who live here are consumed by the banality of shopping malls, shiny cars, Hollywood movies, and the endless quest to become wealthy and where the major man-made calamities inflicted (since the destruction of the Native tribes in the last century) have been limited to relatively small and isolated acts of terrorism (Oklahoma City and 9/11). We can't see past our noses.

Come back and talk about how it's 'less than 1% of 1% of 1% of 1 %' of the population that is responsible once you educate yourself. Oh just to humour you: who do you think killed millions upon millions? Hitler and a sub-machine gun? Mao and a grenade? Stalin and a pistol?


F

Instead of pure hyperbole and insult, garnished a few historical references, why don't you try to explain why you disagree with the comment you responded? You never said anything to support your position.

[russtafa]

Europole regards the UK as a grave concern for islamic terrorist activity

[Stavros]

Don't take this the wrong way but........you're not in touch with reality and obviously haven't done any research on (take your pick - they're in chronological order and off the top of my head):
- the Russo-Japanese War
- WW1
- the Communist Russian Revolution
- the post Russian Revolution purge
- WW2
- the Communist Chinese Revolution
- Korean War
- the post Chinese Revolution Cultural Revolution
- Vietnam War
- Ugandan Genocide
- Russian Invasion of Afghanistan
- Nicaraguan revolution
- First Gulf War
- Balkan War (3rd of the 20th century)
- Rwandan Genocide
- Chechnyan Revolt

Those are some of the major conflicts within the 20th century. The Russian and Chinese purges alone accounted for about 40 million people. Rwanda another million and on and on. Your claim that 'war is becoming passe' is ridiculous and no doubt inspired by the fact that you live in the bubble known as North America where memories are short and things that happen outside North America don't count because most of us who live here are consumed by the banality of shopping malls, shiny cars, Hollywood movies, and the endless quest to become wealthy and where the major man-made calamities inflicted (since the destruction of the Native tribes in the last century) have been limited to relatively small and isolated acts of terrorism (Oklahoma City and 9/11). We can't see past our noses.
Come back and talk about how it's 'less than 1% of 1% of 1% of 1 %' of the population that is responsible once you educate yourself. Oh just to humour you: who do you think killed millions upon millions? Hitler and a sub-machine gun? Mao and a grenade? Stalin and a pistol?

Prospero can answer for himself, I am sure, and as far as I know he lives in London, not a bubble in North America.
runningdownthedream: your post suffers from a confused understanding of war, where there is a clear difference between conventional wars fought by professional armed forces under the direction of a trained soldier acting under political orders from a Monarch, President or whatever; and unconventional wars fought by non-state actors such as 'liberation armies' or ideological guerillas such as al-Qaeda.

Your examples throw in conventional wars with people who have died from causes other than war: we still do not know how many people lost their lives in China during the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958-61 depending on your chronology), and as they died from famine it doesn't qualify as war, even if, as in the Ukraine in the 1930s it was artificially induced. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were undoubtedly responsible for the deaths of millions in the 20th century; but the tabulation of known conventional wars shows a distinct decline following the Napoelonic Wars, which ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. There are various reasons for this: first, the number of states with armies was higher than it is today; and second, the duration of wars could extend, as it did in Europe, for 30 Years or 100 Years which puts even the Second World War into a different perspective.
You are right to indicate how the technology of violence has changed, and there is no doubt that the capacity for mass murder has increased beyond calculation, if you accept that the widespread use of nuclear weapons has the potential to wipe out most of the world's population and make the planet uninhabitable for centuries to come.

On the other side of the argument, more people have been living in peace throughout the world for the last 100 years than was true before that: if you discount the border dispute between Ecuador and Peru there have only been three inter-state wars in South America since the end of Spanish rule in the 19thc, the last one being the Chaco war of 1932-35, and none of these wars were as bad as the European wars, with the exception perhaps of Paraguay's war against Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina between 1864-70 which was bad for Paraguay.

Conventional wars in Africa, north and south of the Sahara have been rare in the last 100 years where before, as in Europe, there were wars between what today we would consider minor Kingdoms, but which are calculated as wars between states in history. The Ashanti in Ghana, the Zulu in South Africa were wealthy and militarily dominant in their day.

Deaths have taken place as a consequence of secession, civil war and other forms of insurgency; the most serious, because it has been taking place since independence in 1960, has been in the Congo/Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo; serious as in the scale of loss of life, and political inability to solve the root causes.

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may be more important for the impact it has had on the wider Middle East and international relations, than it has been on the victims (on both sides) which is not to belittle that dreadful experience.

I could go on, but the point is that you mistake the headlines for the story -not millions, but billions of people around the world are not engaged in warfare or anywhere near a war. The same is true of 'terrorism'; in fact, the majority of the world's population face the greatest risk to life by crossing the road; by drinking and smoking to excess; by malaria and other communicable and contagious diseases; and by poverty.

But peace and conflict have co-existed for millenia, I don't see how you can separate one from the other and claim it is dominant; you are not the only person on this thread to deny that humans have a capacity for peaceful coexistence as a sort of occasional accident rather than by design.

[Ben]

9/11 and the Imperial Mentality


Looking Back on 9/11 a Decade Later

by Noam Chomsky (http://www.commondreams.org/noam-chomsky)
We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1st, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.
A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. "He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them," Eric Margolis writes. "'Bleeding the U.S.,' in his words." The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap... Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction... may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States” -- particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.
That Washington was bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s fervent wishes was evident at once. As discussed in my book 9-11, written shortly after those attacks occurred, anyone with knowledge of the region could recognize “that a massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and his associates, and would lead the U.S. and its allies into a ‘diabolical trap,’ as the French foreign minister put it.”
The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that “bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world,” and largely succeeded: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.

The First 9/11
Was there an alternative? There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11. The “crime against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered.
In 9-11, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the “horrendous crime” of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty,” an accurate judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists -- call them “the Kandahar boys” -- who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.
Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment. It happened. The only inaccuracy in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the U.S. succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s brutal regime in office. The goal, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us” to take over their own resources and in other ways to pursue an intolerable policy of independent development. In the background was the conclusion of the National Security Council that, if the US could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.”
The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” as Henry Kissinger assured his boss a few days later.
These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. The first 9/11 was just one act in a drama which began in 1962, when John F. Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense” -- an anachronistic holdover from World War II -- to “internal security,” a concept with a chilling interpretation in U.S.-dominated Latin American circles.
In the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that from that time to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites,” including many religious martyrs and mass slaughter as well, always supported or initiated in Washington. The last major violent act was the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The perpetrators were an elite Salvadorean battalion, which had already left a shocking trail of blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of Special Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the U.S. client state.
The consequences of this hemispheric plague still, of course, reverberate.
From Kidnapping and Torture to Assassination
All of this, and much more like it, is dismissed as of little consequence, and forgotten. Those whose mission is to rule the world enjoy a more comforting picture, articulated well enough in the current issue of the prestigious (and valuable) journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. The lead article discusses “the visionary international order” of the “second half of the twentieth century” marked by “the universalization of an American vision of commercial prosperity.” There is something to that account, but it does not quite convey the perception of those at the wrong end of the guns.
The same is true of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which brings to an end at least a phase in the “war on terror” re-declared by President George W. Bush on the second 9/11. Let us turn to a few thoughts on that event and its significance.
On May 1, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in his virtually unprotected compound by a raiding mission of 79 Navy SEALs, who entered Pakistan by helicopter. After many lurid stories were provided by the government and withdrawn, official reports made it increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law, beginning with the invasion itself.
There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 79 commandos facing no opposition -- except, they report, from his wife, also unarmed, whom they shot in self-defense when she “lunged” at them, according to the White House.
A plausible reconstruction of the events is provided by veteran Middle East correspondent Yochi Dreazen and colleagues in the Atlantic. Dreazen, formerly the military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is senior correspondent for the National Journal Group covering military affairs and national security. According to their investigation, White House planning appears not to have considered the option of capturing bin Laden alive: “The administration had made clear to the military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.”
The authors add: “For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency who had spent nearly a decade hunting bin Laden, killing the militant was a necessary and justified act of vengeance.” Furthermore, “capturing bin Laden alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome legal and political challenges.” Better, then, to assassinate him, dumping his body into the sea without the autopsy considered essential after a killing -- an act that predictably provoked both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.
As the Atlantic inquiry observes, “The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration's counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.” That is one significant difference between Bush and Obama. The authors quote former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who “told German TV that the U.S. raid was ‘quite clearly a violation of international law’ and that bin Laden should have been detained and put on trial,” contrasting Schmidt with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who “defended the decision to kill bin Laden although he didn't pose an immediate threat to the Navy SEALs, telling a House panel... that the assault had been ‘lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way.’"
The disposal of the body without autopsy was also criticized by allies. The highly regarded British barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who supported the intervention and opposed the execution largely on pragmatic grounds, nevertheless described Obama’s claim that “justice was done” as an “absurdity” that should have been obvious to a former professor of constitutional law. Pakistan law “requires a colonial inquest on violent death, and international human rights law insists that the ‘right to life’ mandates an inquiry whenever violent death occurs from government or police action. The U.S. is therefore under a duty to hold an inquiry that will satisfy the world as to the true circumstances of this killing.”
Robertson usefully reminds us that “t was not always thus. When the time came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness than Osama bin Laden -- the Nazi leadership -- the British government wanted them hanged within six hours of capture. President Truman demurred, citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson that summary execution ‘would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride... the only course is to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing as dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that will leave our reasons and motives clear.’”
Eric Margolis comments that “Washington has never made public the evidence of its claim that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks,” presumably one reason why “polls show that fully a third of American respondents believe that the U.S. government and/or Israel were behind 9/11,” while in the Muslim world skepticism is much higher. “An open trial in the U.S. or at the Hague would have exposed these claims to the light of day,” he continues, a practical reason why Washington should have followed the law.
In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In June 2002, FBI head Robert Mueller, in what the [I]Washington Post described as “among his most detailed public comments on the origins of the attacks,” could say only that “investigators believe the idea of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, the actual plotting was done in Germany, and the financing came through the United Arab Emirates from sources in Afghanistan.”
What the FBI believed and thought in June 2002 they didn’t know eight months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know) to permit a trial of bin Laden if they were presented with evidence. Thus, it is not true, as President Obama claimed in his White House statement after bin Laden’s death, that “[w]e quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda.”
There has never been any reason to doubt what the FBI believed in mid-2002, but that leaves us far from the proof of guilt required in civilized societies -- and whatever the evidence might be, it does not warrant murdering a suspect who could, it seems, have been easily apprehended and brought to trial. Much the same is true of evidence provided since. Thus, the 9/11 Commission provided extensive circumstantial evidence of bin Laden’s role in 9/11, based primarily on what it had been told about confessions by prisoners in Guantanamo. It is doubtful that much of that would hold up in an independent court, considering the ways confessions were elicited. But in any event, the conclusions of a congressionally authorized investigation, however convincing one finds them, plainly fall short of a sentence by a credible court, which is what shifts the category of the accused from suspect to convicted.
There is much talk of bin Laden's “confession,” but that was a boast, not a confession, with as much credibility as my “confession” that I won the Boston marathon. The boast tells us a lot about his character, but nothing about his responsibility for what he regarded as a great achievement, for which he wanted to take credit.
Again, all of this is, transparently, quite independent of one’s judgments about his responsibility, which seemed clear immediately, even before the FBI inquiry, and still does.
Crimes of Aggression
It is worth adding that bin Laden’s responsibility was recognized in much of the Muslim world, and condemned. One significant example is the distinguished Lebanese cleric Sheikh Fadlallah, greatly respected by Hizbollah and Shia groups generally, outside Lebanon as well. He had some experience with assassinations. He had been targeted for assassination: by a truck bomb outside a mosque, in a CIA-organized operation in 1985. He escaped, but 80 others were killed, mostly women and girls as they left the mosque -- one of those innumerable crimes that do not enter the annals of terror because of the fallacy of “wrong agency.” Sheikh Fadlallah sharply condemned the 9/11 attacks.
One of the leading specialists on the Jihadi movement, Fawaz Gerges, suggests that the movement might have been split at that time had the U.S. exploited the opportunity instead of mobilizing the movement, particularly by the attack on Iraq, a great boon to bin Laden, which led to a sharp increase in terror, as intelligence agencies had anticipated. At the Chilcot hearings investigating the background to the invasion of Iraq, for example, the former head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 testified that both British and U.S. intelligence were aware that Saddam posed no serious threat, that the invasion was likely to increase terror, and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had radicalized parts of a generation of Muslims who saw the military actions as an “attack on Islam.” As is often the case, security was not a high priority for state action.
It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos had landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial rites, of course). Uncontroversially, he was not a “suspect” but the “decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq -- that is, to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country and its national heritage, and the murderous sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything attributed to bin Laden.
To say that all of this is uncontroversial, as it is, is not to imply that it is not denied. The existence of flat earthers does not change the fact that, uncontroversially, the earth is not flat. Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for horrendous crimes, though loyalists deny it. All of this should, again, be too obvious for comment, and would be, except in an atmosphere of hysteria so extreme that it blocks rational thought.
Similarly, it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the “supreme international crime” -- the crime of aggression. That crime was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg. An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “[i]nvasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State ….” No one, even the most extreme supporter of the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.
We might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg on the principle of universality: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
It is also clear that announced intentions are irrelevant, even if they are truly believed. Internal records reveal that Japanese fascists apparently did believe that, by ravaging China, they were laboring to turn it into an “earthly paradise.” And although it may be difficult to imagine, it is conceivable that Bush and company believed they were protecting the world from destruction by Saddam’s nuclear weapons. All irrelevant, though ardent loyalists on all sides may try to convince themselves otherwise.
We are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty of the “supreme international crime” including all the evils that follow, or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were a farce and the allies were guilty of judicial murder.
The Imperial Mentality and 9/11
A few days before the bin Laden assassination, Orlando Bosch died peacefully in Florida, where he resided along with his accomplice Luis Posada Carriles and many other associates in international terrorism. After he was accused of dozens of terrorist crimes by the FBI, Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by Bush I over the objections of the Justice Department, which found the conclusion “inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch.” The coincidence of these deaths at once calls to mind the Bush II doctrine -- “already… a de facto rule of international relations,” according to the noted Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison -- which revokes “the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists.”
Allison refers to the pronouncement of Bush II, directed at the Taliban, that “those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves.” Such states, therefore, have lost their sovereignty and are fit targets for bombing and terror -- for example, the state that harbored Bosch and his associate. When Bush issued this new “de facto rule of international relations,” no one seemed to notice that he was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and the murder of its criminal presidents.
None of this is problematic, of course, if we reject Justice Jackson’s principle of universality, and adopt instead the principle that the U.S. is self-immunized against international law and conventions -- as, in fact, the government has frequently made very clear.
It is also worth thinking about the name given to the bin Laden operation: Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound that few seem able to perceive that the White House is glorifying bin Laden by calling him “Geronimo” -- the Apache Indian chief who led the courageous resistance to the invaders of Apache lands.
The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk… We might react differently if the Luftwaffe had called its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”
The examples mentioned would fall under the category of “American exceptionalism,” were it not for the fact that easy suppression of one’s own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are not defeated and forced to acknowledge reality.
Perhaps the assassination was perceived by the administration as an “act of vengeance,” as Robertson concludes. And perhaps the rejection of the legal option of a trial reflects a difference between the moral culture of 1945 and today, as he suggests. Whatever the motive was, it could hardly have been security. As in the case of the “supreme international crime” in Iraq, the bin Laden assassination is another illustration of the important fact that security is often not a high priority for state action, contrary to received doctrine.
© 2011 Noam Chomsky
https://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imagecache/author_photo/chomsky_0.jpg (http://www.commondreams.org/noam-chomsky)
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements.

[yodajazz]

I watched a long video, with a very interesting explanation of how the Twin Towers may have been destroyed. This was based entirely on scientific evidence, and did not approach why it may have happen this way.

Her basic theory was that there was some kind of weapon, which was a cross between a laser and microwave, also known as "directed free energy". Her basic lesson was that if the towers had collapsed from 'conventional' methods, there would have been apx thirty stories of debris. But in this case the towers virtual turned to dust, (or 'vaporized') in mid-air. A characteristic of the type 'beam rays' she spoke of, is that it would cause certain types of materials such as concrete and steel to lose cohesiveness at a very small particle size. That would explain concrete and steel virtually turning into dust,in mid air. Included in her evidence were cars that were partially destroyed, up to a mile away from the site. Some these cars had sections destroyed by fire, while other parts of the same vehicle had much less damage, including papers still on the seats.

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=gUjyvQSGb4c

I dont recall her (the scientist/author,) saying this; but what came to my mind was that in a microwave, food will be piping hot, while little is done to a paper towel, in the oven, at the same time. She states, there no file cabinets found, in the debris, yet there were loads of paper everywhere.

Her interview, regarding her book, is an very interesting theory, that makes a lot of sense.

[Stavros]

Ben, Noam Chomsky, whose reputation rests on his work in the philosophy of linguistics, was an important dissident during the Vietnam War, but has long since passed his sell-by date. The article you pasted is sadly typical of the perennial themes of 'Imperial America' and 'the state-within-a-state' paranoia that has kept thousands of printers in work for so many years.

The two valid points he makes are 1) whether or not bin Laden should have been captured alive, and sent to trial. The problem for any prosecution is finding hard evidence that he was involved, not just in 9/11 but also in the East African carnage, the USS Cole and so on; immediate execution was more efficient, and also cheaper as a result. No 2) sort of anyway, is that the 'Allied' intervention in Iraq in 2003 emboldened a weakened al-Qaeda, although I wonder how far Musab al-Zarqawi was allied to bin Laden -it didn't get very far anyway, even if it did slaughter thousands of Muslims.

The aim behind bin Laden's strategy of drawing the US into an expensive war it could not win, was based on bin Laden's mistaken belief that the Mujahideen had done exactly that to the USSR in Afghanistan and beaten them, whereas the USSR never made a serious military commitment to Afghanistan and it was the cumulative costs of defence in general, plus decades of economic mismanagement that derailed the Communist system; and when Gorbacheve withdrew Soviet troops he was still of the view the system could be reformed, not dismantled.

Bin Laden also believed this 'victory' paved the way for the Taliban as a purist 'Islamic' government, even though it took them years to gain control after the Soviet withdrawal and there were some pockets of the country that were never under Taliban rule.

What bin Laden wanted, was the overthrow of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the re-creation of an Islamic caliphate to replace the (imperfect) Ottoman Caliphate that was formally wound up in 1923. Having seen what happen to the Saudi radicals who seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, bin Laden adopted a quasi-Maoist strategy: where Mao had from the countryside to the city -basing communists in villages and building support in the countryside before attacking the major cities' bin Laden had, if you like from the periphery to the centre. The presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia -and then Iraq- was the key: bankrupt the USA, force its troops out, and the prize -Mecca and Medina- is available.

However, bin Laden's own outfit al-Qaeda split after 9/11, and the harassment of NATO bombings in 2001-2002 severely undermined his operational abilities; indeed, bin Laden's little band never really recovered from 9/11. Moreover, the kind of purist Islam that he advocates has been discredited, not just by 9/11, but by the Taliban and the extremist groups in Pakistan, most of which make the Muslim Brotherhood look like the English Conservative Party.

Chomsky wants to find smoking guns inside the USA, yet there are plenty outside, pointing in. It is a pity he uses his intellect, or whats left of it, to undermine flawed and in any case second-rate politicians, when he could be exposing the heartless core and violent obsessions of the political radicals in whose orbit he circulates; but under whose rule he himself would not last long.

[runningdownthatdream]

Don't take this the wrong way but........you're not in touch with reality and obviously haven't done any research on (take your pick - they're in chronological order and off the top of my head):
- the Russo-Japanese War
- WW1
- the Communist Russian Revolution
- the post Russian Revolution purge
- WW2
- the Communist Chinese Revolution
- Korean War
- the post Chinese Revolution Cultural Revolution
- Vietnam War
- Ugandan Genocide
- Russian Invasion of Afghanistan
- Nicaraguan revolution
- First Gulf War
- Balkan War (3rd of the 20th century)
- Rwandan Genocide
- Chechnyan Revolt

Those are some of the major conflicts within the 20th century. The Russian and Chinese purges alone accounted for about 40 million people. Rwanda another million and on and on. Your claim that 'war is becoming passe' is ridiculous and no doubt inspired by the fact that you live in the bubble known as North America where memories are short and things that happen outside North America don't count because most of us who live here are consumed by the banality of shopping malls, shiny cars, Hollywood movies, and the endless quest to become wealthy and where the major man-made calamities inflicted (since the destruction of the Native tribes in the last century) have been limited to relatively small and isolated acts of terrorism (Oklahoma City and 9/11). We can't see past our noses.
Come back and talk about how it's 'less than 1% of 1% of 1% of 1 %' of the population that is responsible once you educate yourself. Oh just to humour you: who do you think killed millions upon millions? Hitler and a sub-machine gun? Mao and a grenade? Stalin and a pistol?

Prospero can answer for himself, I am sure, and as far as I know he lives in London, not a bubble in North America.
runningdownthedream: your post suffers from a confused understanding of war, where there is a clear difference between conventional wars fought by professional armed forces under the direction of a trained soldier acting under political orders from a Monarch, President or whatever; and unconventional wars fought by non-state actors such as 'liberation armies' or ideological guerillas such as al-Qaeda.

Your examples throw in conventional wars with people who have died from causes other than war: we still do not know how many people lost their lives in China during the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958-61 depending on your chronology), and as they died from famine it doesn't qualify as war, even if, as in the Ukraine in the 1930s it was artificially induced. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were undoubtedly responsible for the deaths of millions in the 20th century; but the tabulation of known conventional wars shows a distinct decline following the Napoelonic Wars, which ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. There are various reasons for this: first, the number of states with armies was higher than it is today; and second, the duration of wars could extend, as it did in Europe, for 30 Years or 100 Years which puts even the Second World War into a different perspective.
You are right to indicate how the technology of violence has changed, and there is no doubt that the capacity for mass murder has increased beyond calculation, if you accept that the widespread use of nuclear weapons has the potential to wipe out most of the world's population and make the planet uninhabitable for centuries to come.

On the other side of the argument, more people have been living in peace throughout the world for the last 100 years than was true before that: if you discount the border dispute between Ecuador and Peru there have only been three inter-state wars in South America since the end of Spanish rule in the 19thc, the last one being the Chaco war of 1932-35, and none of these wars were as bad as the European wars, with the exception perhaps of Paraguay's war against Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina between 1864-70 which was bad for Paraguay.

Conventional wars in Africa, north and south of the Sahara have been rare in the last 100 years where before, as in Europe, there were wars between what today we would consider minor Kingdoms, but which are calculated as wars between states in history. The Ashanti in Ghana, the Zulu in South Africa were wealthy and militarily dominant in their day.

Deaths have taken place as a consequence of secession, civil war and other forms of insurgency; the most serious, because it has been taking place since independence in 1960, has been in the Congo/Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo; serious as in the scale of loss of life, and political inability to solve the root causes.

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may be more important for the impact it has had on the wider Middle East and international relations, than it has been on the victims (on both sides) which is not to belittle that dreadful experience.

I could go on, but the point is that you mistake the headlines for the story -not millions, but billions of people around the world are not engaged in warfare or anywhere near a war. The same is true of 'terrorism'; in fact, the majority of the world's population face the greatest risk to life by crossing the road; by drinking and smoking to excess; by malaria and other communicable and contagious diseases; and by poverty.

But peace and conflict have co-existed for millenia, I don't see how you can separate one from the other and claim it is dominant; you are not the only person on this thread to deny that humans have a capacity for peaceful coexistence as a sort of occasional accident rather than by design.

You completely missed my point and go caught up in over-analysis which you seem prone to doing. The point wasn't about wars - it was about the capacity of humans to inflict carnage on each other and to refute Hippifrieds' assertion about how few people are actively engaged in perpetrating atrocities upon other people. We do not live in a world full of compassionate others who are striving for the betterment of mankind - people seem to be too busy and lack the resources to care about anything outside their immediate circle, are extremely prone to whatever propaganda ther're subjected to in their respective country (whether that's about hating someone in another country, hating someone from another political party, or the urge to buy buy buy), or simply not interested in anything other than day-to-day survival.

Unless we all come to the same conclusions at the same time or work towards The Singularity (which in itself will bring other problems) the human race will never be able to live peacefully.

I wanted to address one of your direct assertions above about the many wars in Africa from past centuries. I am well aware of African history. hundreds of tribes, languages, cultures, religions, etc resulted in constant warfare yes. And although all these various tribes are not warring with each other today less conflict does not equate to less people dying. As I'm sure you know, until the latter half of the 20th century most native africans did not have access to modern weaponry or transportation. Since then, conflicts have resulted in far higher casualties than were even possible in the past.

We may have become more structured in our approach to violence against each other but I don't agree that we perpetrate less violence against each other.

[Stavros]

You completely missed my point and go caught up in over-analysis which you seem prone to doing. The point wasn't about wars - it was about the capacity of humans to inflict carnage on each other and to refute Hippifrieds' assertion about how few people are actively engaged in perpetrating atrocities upon other people.

I accept your criticism of my verbosity, I like writing and sometimes get a bit carried away. However, war is also conflict, and I am assuming you do not include events like one person mugging another for a wallet, mobile phone and so on. If so, I also cannot accept your position: there are 5 billion+ people on the planet, my guess is less than 10 million are actively engaged in conflict with others, and that is probably an overestimate. Headlines are not necessarily the story; yes, violence and murder are part of the human condition, on balance I believe the evidence shows humans are less rather than more likely to commit acts of violence in daily life.

ps, what is The Singularity?

[runningdownthatdream]

You completely missed my point and go caught up in over-analysis which you seem prone to doing. The point wasn't about wars - it was about the capacity of humans to inflict carnage on each other and to refute Hippifrieds' assertion about how few people are actively engaged in perpetrating atrocities upon other people.

I accept your criticism of my verbosity, I like writing and sometimes get a bit carried away. However, war is also conflict, and I am assuming you do not include events like one person mugging another for a wallet, mobile phone and so on. If so, I also cannot accept your position: there are 5 billion+ people on the planet, my guess is less than 10 million are actively engaged in conflict with others, and that is probably an overestimate. Headlines are not necessarily the story; yes, violence and murder are part of the human condition, on balance I believe the evidence shows humans are less rather than more likely to commit acts of violence in daily life.

ps, what is The Singularity?

Your verbosity can be deliciously entertaining at times!

No, I don't include the normal criminal acts inherent in society. We likely will never agree on this point but I think people are complicit in atrocities even without being directly involved. Let's leave aside the fact that there are about 100 000 000 people at any given time on the planet quite prepared to kill given the order (i.e.: the standing and reserve armies of various countries), how many others simply do nothing to help their fellow men and women? How many of us are truly willing to sacrifice our comfortable lives to help others? If we were truly noble why would so many people need to turn to religion to provide a moral compass?

On to more interesting things..............The Singularity is the term used to describe a movement that aims to provide humans with machine enhanced intelligence. Some even want to i

mplant such technology into our brains which of course leads me to think we may really become the Borg some day. This site tells much about the movement:

http://singinst.org/

[Ben]

How private firms have cashed in on the climate of fear since 9/11

The past ten years have seen the growth of a national security industrial complex that melds government and business



Paul Harris (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/paulharris) in New York
guardian.co.uk (http://www.guardian.co.uk/), Monday 5 September 2011 20.05 BST
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/9/5/1315249423189/In-this-handout-image-pro-007.jpg A US homeland security helicopter patrol over New York in 2003. Photograph: US Coast Guard/AFP/Getty Images

Charles Smith always enjoyed visiting US troops aboard. Though a civilian, he had worked for the army for decades, helping to run logistical operations from the Rock Island arsenal near Davenport, Iowa.
He helped keep troops supplied, and on trips to Iraq (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/iraq) made a point of sitting down with soldiers in mess halls. "I would always ask them: what are we doing for you?" Smith told the Guardian.
Smith eventually got oversight of a multibillion-dollar contract the military had struck with private firm KBR, then part of the Halliburton empire, to supply US soldiers in Iraq. But, by 2004, he noticed problems: KBR could not account for a staggering $1bn (£620m) of spending.
So Smith took a stand. He made sure a letter was hand-delivered to KBR officials, telling them that some future payments would be blocked. According to Smith, one KBR official reacted by saying: "This is going to get turned around."
A few days later, Smith was abruptly transferred. The payments he suspended were resumed. "The emphasis had shifted. It was not about the troops. It was all about taking care of KBR," he said. Eventually, Smith left the army. When he told his story to the New York Times, the paper ran an editorial. "In the annals of Iraq war profiteering, put Charles Smith down as one of the casualties," it wrote.
What Smith had blundered into is one of the most disturbing developments of the post-9/11 world: the growth of a national security industrial complex that melds together government and big business and is fuelled by an unstoppable flow of money. It takes many forms. In the military, it has seen the explosive growth of the contracting industry with firms such as Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, or DynCorp increasingly doing the jobs of professional soldiers. In the world of intelligence, private contractors are hired to do the jobs of America's spies. A shadowy world of domestic security has grown up, milking billions from the government and establishing a presence in every state. From border fences that don't work to dubious airport scanners, spending has been lavished on security projects as lobbyists cash in on behalf of corporate clients.
Meanwhile, generals, government officials and intelligence chiefs flock to private industry and embark on new careers selling services back to government.
"The creation of this whole industry is a disaster. But no one is talking about it," said John Mueller, a professor at Ohio State University and author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe Them.
Contractors form huge parts of the lines of supply for American troops. But they also fly planes, provide security and take on big infrastructure projects. Next year, as US combat troops draw down from Iraq, an estimated 5,000 private contractors will provide security on behalf of the US state department. That's a deployment roughly the size of an army brigade.
Worldwide, the ratio of contractors to US soldiers in uniform is about one-to-one. During Vietnam it was one-to-eight. It has speeded up since 9/11. "In the last 10 years, spending at the Pentagon has shifted enormously to contractors," said Pratap Chatterjee, a fellow at the Centre for American Progress and industry expert.
That shift has a cost. Incidents of malpractice and fraud by contracting firms – whom critics call modern-day mercenaries – are legion. One of the most infamous was the Baghdad battle involving Blackwater that saw 17 Iraqi civilians killed in 2007. But that was just one event. An AP investigation in 2010 looked at incidents involving more than 200 contractors worldwide that ranged from drinking to sexual misconduct to a gunfight outside a nightclub in Haiti.
Oversight of contracting is weak or opaque – and is often contracted out, too. One recent investigation found $4.5bn of contracts awarded to firms with a history of problems or which had violated laws. A federal audit found an oil firm had overcharged the Pentagon by $204m for fuel in Iraq.
A similar process has hit the intelligence world. An industry has sprung up of recruitment firms that service the intelligence community. A search on website IntelligenceCareers.com – headed by former army intelligence officer William Golden – found highly paid jobs in Iraq and Japan as well as all over the US. Many required "top secret" security clearance. Of those private firms with a top secret clearance, more than a quarter came into being since 9/11.
The benefits are obvious to employees. Pay is higher and some companies have offered sign-on bonuses or free cars. It is estimated that contractors from more than 100 firms make up a third of the CIA.
And as the rest of America suffers recession, this is an economic boom. The US intelligence budget last year was $80bn, more than twice 2001 levels.
When CIA agent Raymond Davis was arrested in Pakistan after shooting dead two men in Lahore it caused a huge diplomatic spat. But what went mostly unrealised was that Davis, engaged to work in one of the world's most dangerous places, was a contractor.
Those cashing in on the international "war on terror" pale beside the security boom that is taking place in the US itself. Across America, new organisations sprang up in the wake of 9/11 as the flow of money was turned on. Nine days after the tragedy, Congress committed $40bn to fortify America's domestic anti-terror defences. In 2002, the figure was a further $36.5bn. In 2003 it was $44bn. More than 260 new government organisations have been created since 2001. The biggest of all is the Department of Homeland Security, whose workforce is 230,000-strong and awaiting new headquarters in Washington, which will be the biggest new federal building since the Pentagon. It is rising up on the grounds of a former asylum.
Since 2003, the DHS has distributed more than $30bn to state and local governments to spend on security and counter-terrorism. The Washington Post last year produced an exhaustive survey called Top Secret America. It revealed there are now 1,271 government organisations and 1,931 private firms related to counter-terrorism, intelligence or homeland security in some 10,000 locations around the US. In the Washington DC area, they have built enough new office space to add up to three Pentagons. A startling 854,000 Americans now hold top secret security clearances, around 250,000 of them in the private sector.
Among the things created are Fusion Centres. There are around 70 of them across the US, set up to allow local law enforcement to collect data on "suspicious activity". Critics claim there is little for them to do, and point to mistakes. The North Texas Fusion Centre, for example, once issued a warning of a "significant" threat posed by a harmless local Muslim civil rights group. Civil rights activists have also complained they threaten data privacy laws and bring in military and corporate interests into policing civilians. "It is odd to create a whole intelligence apparatus in a decade. One that exists only because of bureaucratic inefficiency and not national security needs," said David Rittgers of the Cato Institute. What security impact does he think they have had? "None. We could abolish Fusion Centres tomorrow. Any intelligent analysis would show we don't need these things."
Airport scanners are another big business that has sprung up since 9/11. Tech firm L-3 has won nearly $900m in business from the Transportation Security Administration. L-3's full-body scanners, which cost around $200,000 each, are being rolled out across the US, boosted by the unsuccessful terror attack in 2009 by a would-be plane bomber who put a device in his underwear. Yet a report by the Government Accountability Office found that it was "unclear" if scanners could have detected the bomb. "They have vastly overbuilt the airport security complex," said Chris Calabrese, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
There is precedent though. Prior to the body scanners, so-called "puffers" were tried. They used a gust of air to detect particles on clothing. After spending $20m, the TSA abandoned the scheme in 2007. Though that pales in comparison with the $1bn given to Boeing to build a hi-tech wall on the border with Mexico.
That scheme, created in part out of a fear of terrorists crossing over, was scrapped with just 53 miles of it built.
One of the main reasons for the ongoing gold rush in national security lies on "K Street" in Washington, the busy downtown thoroughfare is where many lobbying firms have their headquarters, clustered around the fountain of national security funding like bees around a hive. "Wherever there is government money in that amount, there is going to be a swarm of lobbyists. They are very active players," said Michael Beckel, a researcher at the Centre for Responsive Politics watchdog.
Spending on lobbying by the scanning industry has doubled in the past five years. Lobbyists for the industry pull out all the stops, too: they once rolled scanners into the Capitol in a bid to persuade lawmakers of their usefulness.
But more important than the millions spent by businesses involved in national security is who is doing the lobbying. The border between lobbying firms and the government departments they seduce is called simply the "revolving door". A startling eight out of 10 lobbyists for the scanner industry come from a previous career in government or congress.
Among firms specialising in intelligence work, the picture is the same. Booz Allen once hired James Woolsey, a former head of the CIA. Northrop Grumman hired former NSA director William Studeman. CACI hired Barbara McNamara, an NSA deputy director. It is the same in the military, where defence firms snap up retiring generals as advisers and lobbyists. Between 2004 and 2008, a startling 80% of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work in the private sector.
All of this could perhaps be understood on grounds of cost. After all, much of the original justification for contracting and bringing the private sector into national security was that it was cheaper. But this is not true. A 2008 survey of the DHS found that contractors made up 29% of staff, but some 49% of the budget. "By all means spend money on national security, but spend it wisely," said Mueller.

[Stavros]

We likely will never agree on this point but I think people are complicit in atrocities even without being directly involved. Let's leave aside the fact that there are about 100 000 000 people at any given time on the planet quite prepared to kill given the order

runningdownthatdream -no we can't agree, not least because there are no reliable figures for what you want to express.

As for The Singularity, some years ago (around 2006-07 and probably before) someone devised a microchip with the personal details of a relative who was in the early stages of alzheimers -in addition to implanting this into the body, there was a barcode tattooed on the skin which could be zapped and read and reveal the details of the person, in case they got lost or injured in an accident.

The US government, along with the Russian and the Chinese, were experimenting with mind control technology in the 1950s -in the US it was called Project MKULTRA and you can read about it in the link at the end of this free message. Since those days, the potential for electronic implants must have advanced, but how effective it is I don't know; but I know I don't like it or The Singularity... Unpredictability, like the English weather, is something we should live with and adapt to...
Project MKULTRA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:DeclassifiedMKULTRA.jpg" class="image"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4f/DeclassifiedMKULTRA.jpg/220px-DeclassifiedMKULTRA.jpg"@@AMEPARAM@@en/thumb/4/4f/DeclassifiedMKULTRA.jpg/220px-DeclassifiedMKULTRA.jpg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA)

[runningdownthatdream]

We likely will never agree on this point but I think people are complicit in atrocities even without being directly involved. Let's leave aside the fact that there are about 100 000 000 people at any given time on the planet quite prepared to kill given the order

runningdownthatdream -no we can't agree, not least because there are no reliable figures for what you want to express.

As for The Singularity, some years ago (around 2006-07 and probably before) someone devised a microchip with the personal details of a relative who was in the early stages of alzheimers -in addition to implanting this into the body, there was a barcode tattooed on the skin which could be zapped and read and reveal the details of the person, in case they got lost or injured in an accident.

The US government, along with the Russian and the Chinese, were experimenting with mind control technology in the 1950s -in the US it was called Project MKULTRA and you can read about it in the link at the end of this free message. Since those days, the potential for electronic implants must have advanced, but how effective it is I don't know; but I know I don't like it or The Singularity... Unpredictability, like the English weather, is something we should live with and adapt to...
Project MKULTRA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA)

Ostensibly enhanced intelligence will be used for 'good'....in the same way atomic energy was used for good.......

I'm familiar with the MKUltra program.......and the implanted microchips. Eventually these things will become common-place 'for our own good'. I've worked around electronic payments for many years and have seen the direction identity control in the name of security is going. Trust that it won't be many years before all government issued ID will be on microchip affixed to a single card which can be tracked by GPS. The technology exists today and is deployed.

[hippifried]

In 1992, H Ross Perot was holding Singapore up as a shining example of how a society should be run. He especially touted their system of everybody having an ID card with a trackable chip.

There were prototypes in the '70s, & chipping your pets became a fad in the '80s. There was even a short lived argument over the ethics of chipping your children. There was already a huge push to fingerprint & register them, just in case of abduction. Pictures of kids on the milk cartons. "Have you seen me?" (Last seen with Mom or Dad, & they're missing too.) It's always something. & of course security needs to be tightened. we need more surveilance & more power to enforce the law. I can trace it back to the '60s & '70s, when no-knock warrents were legitimized. Now nobody ever knocks. Personally, I'm getting real tired of the paranoia boosters & my own government trying to terrorize me. I refuse to be scared.

[Stavros]

Its one of those topics, it goes back a long way. I liked the story of a man who was supposed to wear an electronic tag so the court/police could track his movement as he was under curfew. He had the tag applied to his wooden leg, then took off the leg, and, as it were, took off...even convicted criminals with tags have evaded the law because they were too stupid to use the technology to trace his movements. Murderers have been convicted because of the proximity of their mobile phone to a mast that was yards away from where the crime was committed -but I am not afraid, I think the systems will work sometimes, and probably fail a lot of times.

[russtafa]

In 1992, H Ross Perot was holding Singapore up as a shining example of how a society should be run. He especially touted their system of everybody having an ID card with a trackable chip.

There were prototypes in the '70s, & chipping your pets became a fad in the '80s. There was even a short lived argument over the ethics of chipping your children. There was already a huge push to fingerprint & register them, just in case of abduction. Pictures of kids on the milk cartons. "Have you seen me?" (Last seen with Mom or Dad, & they're missing too.) It's always something. & of course security needs to be tightened. we need more surveilance & more power to enforce the law. I can trace it back to the '60s & '70s, when no-knock warrents were legitimized. Now nobody ever knocks. Personally, I'm getting real tired of the paranoia boosters & my own government trying to terrorize me. I refuse to be scared.Singapore is a great country to live virtually no crime very clean and well ordered no graffitti but very expensive to live there

[hippifried]

Singapore is a great country to live virtually no crime very clean and well ordered no graffitti but very expensive to live there
That's almost word for word what's been said about the Arab states for decades too. Gee, I wonder why those folks are so discontent.

[russtafa]

That's almost word for word what's been said about the Arab states for decades too. Gee, I wonder why those folks are so discontent.no crime need some action?

[Ben]

Singapore is a great country to live virtually no crime very clean and well ordered no graffitti but very expensive to live there

You forgot: prostitution -- :)

Prostitution thrives in Singapore - 23 Nov 08 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5N7tMa2phQ)

Street Prostitution groups in Geylang ( Singapore ) - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utr7xuvkeVA)

Outside Orchard Towers in Singapore - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds-J-uu_qhs)

[Ben]

A very good but disheartening book -- about the way the whirling and weary world is:

[Ben]

You Can't Shoot All These People! You have To Understand What's Behind Islamic Rage! Richard Clarke - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h1_Xg0Wa5Q)

[yosi]

Have we learned anything?

if we hear on television : "we will have an interview with a mother of 1 of the 9/11 victims...........after the commercials break" , we've learned nothing.

if the 9/11 was an excuse to spend billions on the "Big Brother" idea , we've learned nothing.

if we still support the Syrian president who support muslim terrorists and who slauthers 100's if not 1000's of his poeple , we've learned nothing.

[Ben]

9/11 10th Anniversary: Conspiracy Theories & Questions We Have - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivGbd_ASYgE)

[Ben]

9/11 10th Anniversary: Professor Sut Jhally on 9/11 Conspiracies - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKWItbJPWLc)