20 Years of Post-9/11 Amnesia

The constant demand that we “Never forget!,” the events of September 11, 2001 is rather laughable. Forgetting is difficult after enduring 20 years of war propaganda. News stories about that day are plentiful albeit useless, that is to say they add nothing to our understanding of why the U.S. was attacked and depend upon sentiment, jingoism, and tried and true claims of exceptionalism to maintain fear, hatred, and support for war.

[blackagendareport.com]

{The 9/11 event isn’t forgotten, but the near universal approval of the attack on Afghanistan is rarely mentioned now. The corrosive impact of that war on international and domestic law is also swept under the rug. In the past 20 years presidents have claimed the right to kill anyone they claim is a threat, deny the right to civilian trials, and gather and keep electronic information on everyone in the United States. These assaults on human rights have been largely forgotten, as the shock of the day turned otherwise intelligent people into supporters of aggression.}

{Thanks to the state’s collusion with corporate media, there was even an unwillingness to find out how the attacks were carried out and ascertain who in Bush’s administration should have known what was going to happen. During that summer of 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to fly on commercial airlines. He obviously knew there was a threat.}

{Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford was one of many eyewitnesses to strange activity on the day in question. He recounted meeting two men in Jersey City, New Jersey watching the towers burn. They claimed to be Polish but spoke Hebrew, had fake press passes, brand new cameras, and a joyful attitude about the unfolding tragedy. There were other reports about Israelis ostensibly working for a moving company who also watched the towers fall and celebrated as they did. These documented incidents inconvenience the official narrative and were given insufficient attention by the government and their friends in media.}

{Even when there was reporting on links between Osama bin Laden, the U.S. government, and the Saudi royal family, the stories cast suspicion everywhere except where it should have been directed. They rarely delved into bin Laden’s beginnings as an ally of the U.S. in the Afghanistan regime change effort, and his ties to the Saudi allies that would have embarrassed the Bush family and the entire foreign policy apparatus.}

{Remember that Secretary of State Colin Powell lied at the United Nations about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Remember that even our popular culture has been impacted, and that film makers are given access to classified documents if they agree to produce pro-torture propaganda. The New York Times wouldn’t even print the word torture if the U.S. was the perpetrator. “Harsh interrogation techniques” and other such euphemisms were substitutes for the truth.}

{Twenty years later the U.S. is a changed country and not for the better. Congress still gives presidents broad authority to bomb, change foreign governments at will, and sanction any country that becomes a target. Regime change is acceptable as long as U.S. troops aren’t directly involved in the dirty work. The media follow suit and citizens who object to wars of terror and a growing surveillance state are marginalized. Even politicians who call themselves progressive go along to get along and eagerly vote to support a defense budget that is now more than $750 billion.}

{Glen Ford put his strange experience in perspective. “In effect, Washington was claiming revenge as the motive for crimes that it had long been planning to commit. Precise causality for the specific events of 9/11 becomes near-irrelevant, submerged in the much larger aggression that was conceived long before the towers fell.”}

They gorge on culture they don't understand then evacuate their bowels on the rest of the world. They take and take until there's nothing left to take. Leaving behind a decimated society unable to managed a productive society in which they then blame on its government and people.