Tag Archives: war on terrorism

Covid, 9/11 & Forever War, by Kit Knightly

Posted on September 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

For our rulers, the only thing better than a perpetual war on a tactic—terrorism—will be a perpetual war on germs. If will give them even more power born of fear and panic. From Kit Knightly at off-guardian.org:

From the war on terror to the “pandemic”, the elite are constructing fake threats to start wars that never have to end.

The war was not meant to be won. It was meant to be continuous.
George Orwell, 1984

Our 9/11 coverage this year, the 20th anniversary, has been focused on viewing the attacks of 2001 through the lens of the Covid “pandemic” rollout.

The point is not that both Covid19 and 9/11 are necessarily part of the same grand plan, were carried out by the same people, or were in any way directly connected. Rather, they are thematically connected, on the meta-level.

They spring from the same collective urge all rulers and governments harbour, and are employed to the same end.

They are different tools designed to achieve the same end. Different approaches to the same problem. Different evolutionary stages of the same animal: The decades-long change in the core aims of warfare and even the very meaning of “war” itself.

War has always been vital to the preservation of the state. Wars make rulers rich, and people scared. They unite nations behind leaders, and distract from domestic political issues.

But, as nations become more powerful, weapon technology more advanced, and global power centralises in giant corporations rather than nations, war – in the traditional sense – becomes more expensive, more dangerous, and largely meaningless.

Essentially the old-fashioned motivations for warfare no longer apply, but the ancillary domestic benefits of war-like policy remain. While the state, and their corporate backers, no longer need to take part in pitched battles over the best farmland, they do still need their subjects to believe they are under attack.

In short, by necessity, “war” has gradually shifted from genuine inter-state conflicts over control of resources, into a top-down tool of psychological manipulation.

And the first stage of that evolution was 9/11.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Governments, Law, Media, Medicine, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Science, Tyranny, War

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Back to the Future at the Pentagon, by William Astore

Posted on April 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

US military leaders are more comfortable gearing up for more conventional wars against China and Russia than they were with the Global War on Terror. However, that doesn’t mean that the US should fight such wars or that it could win them. From William Astore at tomdispatch.com:

Why 2021 Looks So Much Like 1981 — And Why That Should Scare Us

The future isn’t what it used to be. As a teenager in the 1970s, I watched a lot of TV science fiction shows, notably Space: 1999 and UFO, that imagined a near future of major moon bases and alien attacks on Earth. Movies of that era like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey envisioned colossal spaceships and space stations featuring international crews on mind-blowing missions to Jupiter and beyond. Who’d have thought that, 20 years after Kubrick’s alternate reality of 2001, we humans would effectively be marooned on a warming “sixth extinction” planet with no moon bases and, to the best of my knowledge, no alien attacks either.

Sure, there’s been progress of a sort in the heavens. Elon Musk’s Space X may keep going down in flames, but the Chinese now have their very own moon rocks. As the old-timey, unmanned Voyager probe continues to glide beyond our solar system, Mars is a subject for research by new probes hailing from the United Arab Emirates, China, and the U.S. Meanwhile, the International Space Station continues conducting research in low-earth orbit.

As with space exploration, so, too, with America’s military. What amazes me most in 2021 is how much of its structure and strategy resembles what held sway in 1981 when I joined the Air Force as a college student in ROTC. Instead of futuristic starship troopers flying around with jetpacks and firing lasers, the U.S. military is still essentially building the same kinds of weaponry we were then. They’re newer, of course, glitzier, if often less effective, but this country still has a Navy built around aircraft carriers, an Air Force centered on fighter jets and stealth bombers, and an Army based on tanks, helicopters, and heavy brigades. Admittedly, that Army may soon spend $20 billion on “augmented reality goggles” for the troops. (Perhaps those goggles will be programmed so that “reality” always looks like we win.)

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Terrorist Crackdowns Won’t Keep Us Safe, by James Bovard

Posted on March 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

A pretty good argument can be made that the US government’s war on terrorism has created more terrorism. From James Bovard at theamericanconservative.com:

The Bush administration’s post-9/11 domestic crusade is a cautionary tale for post-1/6 America.

A scene from the Capitol riot. (By Alex Gakos/Shutterstock)

President Biden, congressional Democrats, and much of the media are clamoring for a new law against domestic terrorism. Before enacting a new law, Americans should recognize how “terrorism” has spurred deluges of political and prosecutorial malarkey for almost 20 years. Any new crackdown on terrorism will turn into a numbers game in which justice and fair play don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.

In the six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the feds rounded up 1,200 people as suspected terrorists or terrorist supporters in the United States. All that was necessary for an Arab illegal immigrant to be considered a suspected terrorist was to encounter FBI agents in New York or New Jersey. Some FBI agents were instructed to look in phone books to find names of Arabs or Muslims who could be targeted. Federal judges repeatedly condemned the secret arrests and none of the detainees proved to have links to the attacks. But even after the Justice Department released or deported most of those detainees, President Bush continued to describe all of them as “terrorists” and “murderers.”

President Biden has often claimed that, during his time on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he wrote the draft bill that later became the Patriot Act. That law, passed immediately after the 9/11 attacks, expanded the definition of terrorism to include activities involving “acts dangerous to human life” that, among other things, may “appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” It can take only a few scuffles at a rally to transform a protest group into a terrorist entity. Even if the violence at a rally is initiated by a government agent provocateur, the feds can treat all of a group’s members as terrorists.

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9/11 Eighteen Years Later, by Donald Jeffries

Posted on September 12, 2019 | Leave a comment

9/11 remains the pivotal event of the still-young 21st century. From Donald Jeffries at lewrockwell.com:

Eighteen years ago today, nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives when both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were attacked by terrorists. The official narrative is that the terrorists were a group of nineteen Arabs armed with box cutters and plastic knives. The prevailing view in the anti- establishment world is that the terrorists were associated with the U.S. government.

While our leaders did absolutely nothing on the day in question, in response to hijacked planes being crashed into buildings, for some hour and a half, after it was over they reacted quite aggressively. The consensus was that 9/11 had “changed the world forever,” and that we were now battling an unclear, unidentifiable enemy, referred to conveniently as the “war on terror.”

According to the ACLU, some 762 “suspects” were arrested in the wake of 9/11, and none of them were found to have any ties to “terrorism.” Anyone named Mohammad became suspect in the public’s eye. An Arabic fellow I worked with at the time was absolutely terrified, and seriously considered changing his name to something that sounded less “terrorist.”

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Geopolitics, Government, Intelligence, Investigations

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Tulsi Gabbard’s Chance to Make the Race About the Wars, by Scott Horton

Posted on July 30, 2019 | 1 comment

The big flaw in Tulsi Gabbard’s antiwar stance is that she still believes in something called the war on terrorism. From Scott Horton at antiwar.com:

Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. Representative from Hawaii, is running for president. She’s one of the only Democrats in the race who says anything meaningful or interesting about foreign policy. Unlike the rest of them, she’s decided to make it the center of her campaign.

Gabbard was for Iraq War II before she was against it, serving two tours overseas during the war, one at Balad air base north of Baghdad and another in Kuwait. But she has done the very best thing she could do with that experience, and that is to use it to cover her right flank from hawks’ criticism about “weakness” while demanding retrenchment in the name of her colleagues in the Hawaii National Guard, where she is still an active duty major, and other U.S. military personnel.

The idiots on cable news are terrified of her. The U.S. population now regrets the terror wars by super-majorities. Veterans of the wars themselves agree – and the wars are not even over yet! Then here comes an attractive, credentialed candidate for high office saying exactly what is not supposed to be said – it doesn’t have to be this way – and right where the American people can hear it.

If and when she gets a chance at her Ron Paul moment, like what happened when Paul tangled with Rudy Guiliani about the motives of the September 11th hijackers back in 2007, it could change everything for the campaign and finally give the American people another chance to argue about what is really going on here.

That is why Gabbard needs to step it up right now. She needs to draw a line in the sand on her antiwar position and demand the others pick their side of it. How will the world know that war and peace is up for a vote this time around if she doesn’t take the initiative and make sure that it is? It’s true that she talks about it in her appearances all the time, and she did a pretty good job of beating up on that reflexive hawk, Tim Ryan, over Afghanistan in the last debate.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, History, Military, Politics, War

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What I Don’t Like About Life in Post-9/11 America, by John W. Whitehead

Posted on September 11, 2018 | Leave a comment

The list is long. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”―Edward Abbey, American author

Life in a post-9/11 America increasingly feels like an endless free fall down a rabbit hole into a terrifying, dystopian alternative reality in which the citizenry has no rights, the government is no friend to freedom, and everything we ever knew and loved about the values and principles that once made this country great has been turned on its head.

We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties.

We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade the citizenry to march in lockstep with a police state. Continue reading →

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Law, Media, Politics, Surveillance, Taxes, War

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The ‘War On Terror’ Has Cost American Taxpayers $250 Million A Day For 16 Years, by Darius Shahtahmasebi

Posted on November 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

Perhaps the most horrifying thing about that estimate is that it’s probably on the low side. From Darius Shahtahmasebi at theantimedia.org:

The U.S. government has spent a staggering $1.46 trillion on wars abroad since September 11, 2001, according to the Department of Defense’s (DoD) periodical “Cost of War” report. As International Business Times reports, this amounts to $250 million a day for 16 years consecutively.

The newly released version, published by the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News blog, spans war-related activity from the September 11th terrorist attacks through mid-2017.

According to the report, despite the fact that the war on terror is still ongoing rapidly to this day, Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011) and Operation Enduring Freedom (2001-2014) account for the vast majority of the cost, amounting to more than $1.3 trillion collectively.

It must be noted that this analysis only covers direct war-related expenses and is certainly on the lower side of such estimates of the cost of American wars to date. For example, in 2014, a report from Congress’ nonpartisan research arm found that the government had already shelled out over $1.6 trillion for the war on terror. That estimate would amount to approximately $337 million per day every single day for that 13-year period.

Last year, a report released by Dr. Neta Crawford, professor of political science at Brown University, found that spending by the United States Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Veteran Affairs since 9/11 was even higher, reaching almost $5 trillion.

That being said, the DoD’s recent report mainly covers the costs of military operational costs, support for deployed troops, and transportation of personnel and equipment. It does not include the expense of veterans’ benefits for troops who served in these wars. The cost of veterans’ benefits alone is projected to be somewhere between $600 billion and $1 trillion. The total also notably does not include “non-DoD classified programs” such as those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, which, as we know, has a significant budget of its own.

To continue reading: The ‘War On Terror’ Has Cost American Taxpayers $250 Million A Day For 16 Years

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Doing Bin Laden’s Bidding, by Tom Engelhardt

Posted on November 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

Some day Osama bin Laden will be recognized as a genius. Look at how al Qaeda, despite the occasional setback, has blossomed since 9/11, and it’s sworn enemy, the United States, has deteriorated. From Tom Engelhardt at tomdispatch.com:

Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald Trump recently offered aides and former campaign officials for their legal troubles in the Russia investigation (on which he’s unlikely to deliver) — a mere $400,000 to $500,000 — bin Laden managed to launch the American war on terror. He did so with little but a clever game plan, a few fanatical followers, and a remarkably intuitive sense of how this country works.

He had those 19 mostly Saudi hijackers, a scattering of supporters elsewhere in the world, and the “training camps” in Afghanistan, but his was a ragged and understaffed movement.  And keep in mind that his sworn enemy was the country that then prided itself on being the last superpower, the final winner of the imperial sweepstakes that had gone on for five centuries until, in 1991, the Soviet Union imploded.

The question was: With such limited resources, what kind of self-destructive behavior could he goad a triumphalist Washington into? The key would be what might be called apocalyptic humiliation.

Looking back, 16 years later, it’s extraordinary how September 11, 2001, would set the pattern for everything that followed. Each further goading act, from Afghanistan to Libya, San Bernardino to Orlando, Iraq to Niger, each further humiliation would trigger yet more of the same behavior in Washington. After all, so many people and institutions — above all, the U.S. military and the rest of the national security state — came to have a vested interest in Osama bin Laden’s version of our world.

To continue reading: Doing Bin Laden’s Bidding

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In Yemen’s secret prisons, UAE tortures and US interrogates, by Maggie Michael

Posted on June 23, 2017 | Leave a comment

Out of respect for the AP’s stringent conditions governing its intellectual property rights, SLL will only provide the link to the AP article. However, the title is self-explanatory, the journalism top-notch, and the story chilling. From Maggie Michael at apnews.com:

To read the article: In Yemen’s secret prisons, UAE tortures and US interrogates

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Are We Fighting Terrorism, Or Creating More Terrorism? by Ron Paul

Posted on May 29, 2017 | Leave a comment

The question is rhetorical and the answer obvious. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.com:

When we think about terrorism we most often think about the horrors of a Manchester-like attack, where a radicalized suicide bomber went into a concert hall and killed dozens of innocent civilians. It was an inexcusable act of savagery and it certainly did terrorize the population.

What is less considered are attacks that leave far more civilians dead, happen nearly daily instead of rarely, and produce a constant feeling of terror and dread. These are the civilians on the receiving end of US and allied bombs in places like Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.

Last week alone, US and “coalition” attacks on Syria left more than 200 civilians dead and many hundreds more injured. In fact, even though US intervention in Syria was supposed to protect the population from government attacks, US-led air strikes have killed more civilians over the past month than air strikes of the Assad government. That is like a doctor killing his patient to save him.

Do we really believe we are fighting terrorism by terrorizing innocent civilians overseas? How long until we accept that “collateral damage” is just another word for “murder”?

The one so-called success of the recent G7 summit in Sicily was a general agreement to join together to “fight terrorism.” Have we not been in a “war on terrorism” for the past 16 years? What this really means is more surveillance of innocent civilians, a crackdown on free speech and the Internet, and many more bombs dropped overseas. Will doing more of what we have been doing do the trick? Hardly! After 16 years fighting terrorism, it is even worse than before we started. This can hardly be considered success.

They claim that more government surveillance will keep us safe. But the UK is already the most intrusive surveillance state in the western world. The Manchester bomber was surely on the radar screen. According to press reports, he was known to the British intelligence services, he had traveled and possibly trained in bomb-making in Libya and Syria, his family members warned the authorities that he was dangerous, and he even flew terrorist flags over his house. What more did he need to do to signal that he may be a problem? Yet somehow even in Orwellian UK, the authorities missed all the clues.

To continue reading: Are We Fighting Terrorism, Or Creating More Terrorism?

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