Dear chiildren, relatives and friends,
Herewith sharing the best analysis I have read on the world situation after
9/11, terrible for its implications and a difficult challenge to overcome
by people longing for a better world.
Abrazos
Azril


http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/09/09/mantra-for-911/

Mantra for 9/11
[image: Sept119915]

Fourteen years later and do you even believe it? Did we actually live it?
Are we still living it? And how improbable is that?

Fourteen years of wars, interventions, assassinations, torture,
kidnappings, black sites, the growth of the American national security
state to monumental proportions, and the spread of Islamic extremism across
much of the Greater Middle East and Africa. Fourteen years of astronomical
expense, bombing campaigns galore, and a military-first foreign policy
of repeated
defeats
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175854/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_a_record_of_unparalleled_failure/>,
disappointments, and disasters. Fourteen years of a culture of fear
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175904/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_inside_the_american_terrordome>
in America, of endless alarms and warnings, as well as dire predictions of
terrorist attacks. Fourteen years of the burial of American democracy (or
rather its recreation as a billionaire’s playground and a source of
spectacle and entertainment but not governance). Fourteen years of the
spread of secrecy, the classification
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175570/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_the_national_security_complex_and_you/>
of every document in sight, the fierce prosecution
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175526/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,_joining_the_whistleblowers'_club/>
of
whistleblowers, and a faith-based
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175789/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_a_ripley's_believe_it_or_not_national_security_state>
urge to keep Americans “secure” by leaving them in the dark about what
their government is doing. Fourteen years of the demobilization
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175970/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_is_a_new_political_system_emerging_in_this_country/>
of the citizenry. Fourteen years of the rise of the warrior corporation
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175507/tom_engelhardt_remotely_piloted_war>,
the transformation of war and intelligence gathering into profit-making
activities, and the flocking of countless private contractors to the
Pentagon, the NSA
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/nsa-leak-contractors_n_3418876.html?1370919691>,
the CIA
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175780/tomgram%3A_pratap_chatterjee,_the_jason_bourne_strategy/>,
and too many other parts
<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/30/revealed-private-firms-at-heart-of-us-drone-warfare>
of the national security state to keep track of. Fourteen years of our wars
coming home in the form of PTSD
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/03/why-the-iraq-war-has-produced-more-ptsd-than-the-conflict-in-afghanistan/>,
the militarization
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175881/tomgram%3A_matthew_harwood,_one_nation_under_swat/>
of the police, and the spread of war-zone technology like drones
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/13/half-us-mexico-border-patrolled-drone>
and stingrays
<http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-stingray-cases-20150828-story.html>
to the “homeland.” Fourteen years of that un-American word “homeland.”
Fourteen years of the expansion of surveillance of every kind and of the
development of a global surveillance system
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175713/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_you_are_our_secret/>
whose reach — from foreign leaders
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/nsa-surveillance-world-leaders-calls>
to tribal groups in the backlands
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining>
of the planet — would have stunned those running the totalitarian states of
the twentieth century. Fourteen years of the financial starvation of
America’s infrastructure <http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/> and
still not a single mile
<http://www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/popular-elsewhere-high-speed-rail-remains-elusive-in-the-u-s/>
of high-speed rail built anywhere in the country. Fourteen years in which
to launch Afghan War 2.0, Iraq Wars 2.0 and 3.0, and Syria War 1.0.
Fourteen years, that is, of the improbable made probable.

Fourteen years later, thanks a heap, Osama bin Laden. With a small number
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1620971356/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> of
supporters, $400,000-$500,000
<http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.htm>, and 19 suicidal
hijackers, most of them Saudis, you pulled off a geopolitical magic trick
of the first order. Think of it as wizardry
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175388/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_osama_dead_and_alive/>
from the theater of darkness. In the process, you did “change everything”
or at least enough of everything to matter. Or rather, you goaded us into
doing what you had neither the resources nor the ability to do. So let’s
give credit where it’s due. Psychologically speaking, the 9/11 attacks
represented precision targeting of a kind American leaders would only dream
of in the years to follow. I have no idea how, but you clearly understood
us so much better than we understood you or, for that matter, ourselves.
You knew just which buttons of ours to push so that we would essentially
carry out the rest of your plan for you. While you sat back and waited in
Abbottabad, we followed the blueprints for your dreams and desires as if
you had planned it and, in the process, made the world a significantly
different (and significantly grimmer) place.

Fourteen years later, we don’t even grasp what we did.

Fourteen years later, the improbability of it all still staggers the
imagination, starting with those vast shards
<http://911anniversary.nydailynews.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape/rubble25.jpg>
of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, the real-world equivalent
of the Statue of Liberty
<http://www.originalprop.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/planet-of-the-apes-statue-of-liberty-blu-ray-disc-screencap-hd-1080p-05.jpg>
sticking out of the sand in the original *Planet of the Apes*.  With lower
Manhattan still burning and the air acrid with destruction, they seemed
like evidence of a culture that had undergone its own apocalyptic moment
and come out the other side unrecognizably transformed.  To believe the
coverage
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/118775/tom_engelhardt_9/11_in_a_movie-made_world>
of the time, Americans had experienced Pearl Harbor *and* Hiroshima
combined.  We were planet Earth’s ultimate victims and downtown New York
was “Ground Zero,” a phrase previously reserved for places where nuclear
explosions had occurred.  We were instantly the world’s greatest victim
*and* greatest survivor, and it was taken for granted that the world’s most
fulfilling sense of revenge would be ours.  9/11 came to be seen as an
assault on everything innocent and good and triumphant about us, the
ultimate they-hate-our-freedoms moment and, Osama, it worked. You spooked
this country into 14 years of giving any dumb or horrifying act or idea or
law or intrusion into our lives or curtailment of our rights a
get-out-of-jail-free pass. You loosed not just your dogs of war, but ours,
which was exactly what you needed to bring chaos to the Muslim world.
Fourteen years later, let me remind you of just how totally improbable 9/11
was and how ragingly clueless we all were on that day. George W. Bush (and
cohorts) couldn’t even take it in when, on August 6, 2001, the president
was given a daily intelligence briefing titled
<http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/> “Bin Laden
determined to strike in U.S.” The NSA
<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/the-al-qaeda-switchboard>,
the CIA
<http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/23/information-could-have-stopped-911-299148.html>,
and the FBI, which had many of the pieces of the bin Laden puzzle in their
hands, still couldn’t imagine it. And believe me, even when it was
happening, I could hardly grasp it.  I was doing exercises in my bedroom
with the TV going when I first heard the news of a plane hitting the World
Trade Center and saw the initial shots of a smoking tower. And I remember
my immediate thought: just like the B-25 that almost took out
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-25_Empire_State_Building_crash> the Empire
State Building back in 1945. Terrorists bringing down the World Trade
Center? Please. Al-Qaeda? You must be kidding. Later, when two planes had
struck in New York and another had taken out part of the Pentagon, and it
was obvious that it wasn’t an accident, I had an even more ludicrous
thought.  It occurred to me that the unexpected vulnerability of Americans
living in a land largely protected from the chaos so much of the world
experiences might open us up to the pain of others in a new way. Dream on.
All it opened us up to was bringing pain to others.

Fourteen years later, don’t you still find it improbable that George W.
Bush and company used those murderous acts and the nearly 3,000
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11_attacks>
resulting deaths as an excuse to try to make the world theirs?  It took
them no time at all to decide to launch a “Global War on Terror” in up to
60 countries <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1547561.stm>.  It took
them next to no time to begin dreaming of the establishment of a future *Pax
Americana* in the Middle East, followed by the sort of global imperium that
had previously been conjured up only by cackling bad guys in James Bond
films.  Don’t you find it strange, looking back, just how quickly 9/11 set
their brains aflame?  Don’t you find it curious that the Bush
administration’s top officials were quite so infatuated
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/101850/> by the U.S. military?  Doesn’t it
still strike you as odd that they had such blind faith in that military’s
supposedly limitless powers to do essentially anything and be “the greatest
force for human liberation
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/washington/w23policytext.html?pagewanted=all>
the world has ever known”? Don’t you still find it eerie that, amid the
wreckage of the Pentagon, the initial orders
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-9-11/> our
secretary of defense gave his aides were to come up with plans for striking
Iraq, even though he was already convinced that al-Qaeda had launched the
attack? (“‘Go massive,’ an aide’s notes quote him as saying. ‘Sweep it all
up. Things related and not.'”)  Don’t you think “and not” sums up the era
to come?  Don’t you find it curious that, in the rubble of those towers,
plans not just to pay Osama bin Laden back, but to turn Afghanistan, Iraq,
and possibly Iran <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/opinion/18KRUG.html> —
“Everyone wants to go to Baghdad.  Real men want to go to Tehran” — into
American protectorates were already being imagined?

Fourteen years later, how probable was it that the country then universally
considered the planet’s “sole superpower,” openly challenged only by tiny
numbers of jihadist extremists, with a military better funded than the next
10
<http://mic.com/articles/79673/america-spends-more-on-military-than-the-other-top-10-countries-combined>
to 13
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/everything-chuck-hagel-needs-to-know-about-the-defense-budget-in-charts/>
forces combined (most of whom were allies anyway), and whose technological
skills were, as they say, to die for would win no wars
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175854/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_a_record_of_unparalleled_failure/>,
defeat no enemies, and successfully complete no occupations?  What were the
odds?  If, on September 12, 2001, someone had given you half-reasonable
odds on a U.S. military winning streak in the Greater Middle East, don’t
tell me you wouldn’t have slapped some money on the table.

Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that the U.S. military
has been unable to extricate itself from Iraq and Afghanistan, its two
major wars of this century, despite having officially left
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/world/middleeast/last-convoy-of-american-troops-leaves-iraq.html>
one of those countries in 2011 (only to head back again
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/07/statement-president>
in the late summer of 2014) and having endlessly announced the conclusion
of its operations in the other (only to ratchet them up again
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/27/us-afghanistan-helmand-idUSKCN0QW1CO20150827>
)?

Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that Washington’s
post-9/11 policies in the Middle East helped
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175962/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_the_ten_commandments_for_a_better_american_world/>
lead to the establishment of the Islamic State’s “caliphate” in parts of
fractured Iraq and Syria and to a movement of almost unparalleled extremism
that has successfully “franchised
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/world/middleeast/islamic-state-sprouting-limbs-beyond-mideast.html>”
itself out from Libya
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/isis-rises-in-libya> to Nigeria
<http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/12/middleeast/isis-boko-haram/> to Afghanistan
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33322208>? If, on September 12, 2001,
you had predicted such a possibility, who wouldn’t have thought you mad?

Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that the U.S. has gone
into the business of robotic assassination big time; that (despite
Watergate-era legal prohibitions
<http://edition.cnn.com/2002/LAW/11/04/us.assassination.policy/> on such
acts), we are now the Terminators of Planet Earth, not its John Connors
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Connor>; that the president is openly
and proudly an assassin-in-chief
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175551/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_assassin-in-chief/>
with his own global “kill list
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html>”;
that we have endlessly targeted the backlands of the planet with our (Grim)
Reaper and Predator (thank you Hollywood
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100403/?ref_=nv_sr_3>!) drones armed with
Hellfire missiles; and that Washington has regularly knocked off women
<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147>
and children
<https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/11/more-than-160-children-killed-in-us-strikes/>
while searching for militant leaders and their generic followers
<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/the-case-against-drone-strikes-on-people-who-only-act-like-terrorists/278744/>?
And don’t you find it odd that all of this has been done in the name of
wiping out the terrorists and their movements, despite the fact that
wherever our drones strike, those movements seem to gain
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175936/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_the_national_security_state_%22works,%22_even_if_nothing_it_does_works/>
in strength and power?

Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that our “war on terror”
has so regularly devolved into a war of and for terror; that our methods,
including the targeted killings of numerous leaders
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176022/tomgram%3A_pratap_chatterjee,_no_lone_rangers_in_drone_warfare/>
and “lieutenants” of militant groups have visibly promoted
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175988/tomgram%3A_andrew_cockburn,_how_assassination_sold_drugs_and_promoted_terrorism/>,
not blunted, the spread of Islamic extremism; and that, despite this,
Washington has generally not recalibrated its actions in any meaningful way?

Fourteen years later, isn’t it possible to think of 9/11 as a mass grave
into which significant aspects of American life as we knew it have been
shoveled?  Of course, the changes that came, especially those reinforcing
the most oppressive aspects of state power, didn’t arrive out of the blue
like those hijacked planes.  Who, after all, could dismiss the size and
power of the national security state and the military-industrial complex
before those 19 men with box cutters arrived on the scene?  Who could deny
that, packed into the Patriot Act (passed largely unread
<https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2009/03/02/congress-had-no-time-to-read-the-usa-patriot-act/>
by Congress in October 2001) was a wish list
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/ten-years-later-look-three-scariest-provisions-usa-patriot-act>
of pre-9/11 law enforcement
<https://www.aclu.org/surveillance-under-usa-patriot-act> and right-wing
hobbyhorses?  Who could deny that the top officials of the Bush
administration and their neocon supporters had long been thinking
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175336/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_war_is_a_drug/>
about how to leverage “U.S. military supremacy” into a *Pax Americana*-style
new world order or that they had been dreaming of “a new Pearl Harbor”
which might speed up the process?  It was, however, only thanks to Osama
bin Laden, that they — and we — were shuttled into the most improbable of
all centuries, the twenty-first.

Fourteen years later, the 9/11 attacks and the thousands of innocents
killed represent international criminality and immorality of the first
order.  On that, Americans are clear, but — most improbable of all — no one
in Washington has yet taken the slightest responsibility for blowing a hole
through the Middle East, loosing mayhem across significant swathes of the
planet, or helping release the forces that would create the first true
terrorist state of modern history; nor has anyone in any official capacity
taken responsibility for creating the conditions that led to the
deaths of hundreds
of thousands <http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians>,
possibly a million or more
<http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30164-report-shows-us-invasion-occupation-of-iraq-left-1-million-dead>
people, turned many
<http://warincontext.org/2015/09/02/the-worlds-failure-in-syria/> in the
Greater Middle East into internal or external refugees
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174892/michael_schwartz_the_iraqi_brain_drain>,
destroyed nations, and brought unbelievable pain to countless human
beings.  In these years, no act — not of torture, nor murder, nor the
illegal offshore imprisonment of innocent people
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175630/tomgram:_peter_van_buren,_torture_superpower/>,
nor death delivered from the air or the ground, nor the slaughter of wedding
parties
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175787/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_washington's_wedding_album_from_hell/>,
nor the killing of children — has blunted the sense among Americans that we
live in an “exceptional
<http://eaglerising.com/15660/marco-rubio-liberals-may-not-believe-know-america-exceptional/>”
and “indispensable
<http://www.voanews.com/content/obama_tells_air_force_academy_us_is_one_indispensable_country_world_affairs/940158.html>”
country of staggering goodness and innocence.

Fourteen years later, how improbable is that?

*See Tom Engelhardt’s response here
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176041/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_exceptional_pain_dispensed_by_the_indispensable_nation/#more>.*

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