The toxic legacy of 9/11

Absent an authentic national reckoning, a wound that never heals

Amid heavy criticism from normally compliant media organs charged with amplifying official regime propaganda, the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 was cursorily honored by President Joe Biden this afternoon during a two hour fueling stopover in Alaska on his return to Washington, DC from a G-20 summit in Vietnam.

Whatever one’s opinion of Mr. Biden’s tone deaf, deceptively somnolent presidency and his clichéd remarks in Anchorage today, every American should feel profound empathy for the families of the people who were killed on 9/11, from innocent office workers to bystanders to heroic first responders.

Yet it is impossible not to acknowledge as well a continued gnawing sense of the enormous damage done by the profoundly flawed decisions of US leaders in the wake of the horrific events of that infamous day.

Last year, in an article titled “Susan Sontag was Right,” I noted:

After more than 20 years of the War on Terror, culminating in a disgraceful and bloody retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, Brown University calculates the cost of this monumental folly at $8 trillion and nearly 1 million deaths. The enormous geopolitical costs, on the other hand, are incalculable.

In her September 16, 2001, remarks in the New Yorker responding to the 9/11 attacks, Sontag noted:

Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.

“Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.

Behind George W. Bush’s titular role as Puppet-in-Chief, the cabal of then Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Principal Deputy Foreign Policy Adviser to VP Cheney, Victoria Nuland, seized on the tragedy of 9/11 to save Bush’s failing presidency by falsifying a Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) narrative designed to transform him into a “wartime president.”

Within a month of 9/11, Bush declared a never ending war on the ill-defined noun “terror.” His war message was amplified uncritically by sycophantic media, which gushed that he had risen to the occasion during a time of national mourning to become a figure of Churchillian stature.

A year long, historic spike in his approval ratings followed, jumping from 50% and declining to a peak of 90% within weeks, giving him political carte blanche that ended with large swaths of the Middle East destabilized and engulfed in the flames of permanent war.

It is worth noting that Nuland has served in high level foreign policy positions in every administration except Trump’s since 9/11, including under Obama and Biden. She currently serves as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and chief architect of Biden’s response to the Ukraine war against nuclear armed Russia.

In his nightly System Update show, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald recently devoted an entire hour and 20 minute episode to “Unmasking the Destructive Career of Neocon-Monster Victoria Nuland.”

When will there be a national reckoning for the imposition under intentionally false pretenses of the 9/11 surveillance and warfare state that has now become a permanent, cancerous guiding principle of both foreign and domestic policy in the USA?

South reflecting pool, 9/11 Memorial, Creative Commons image courtesy of Wikipedia

In Bush’s day, the transnational script, dressed in patriotic finery, came from the Project for a New American Century and their call for a US-led New World Order.

With the installation of Biden, the fearmongering vehicles for transition from citizen-driven democracy to a long coveted elite-driven transnational order are a WEF/UN/IMF pandemic campaign for a “Great Reset,” a relentlessly propagandized $200 trillion “climate crisis,” and nuclear brinksmanship with Russia via $150 billion in US-led aid for a proxy war in Ukraine, a war characterized by Biden himself as having precipitated the highest risk of nuclear Armageddon since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Writing in 1960, at the height of the Cold War, poet Kenneth Rexroth observed:

“So many people are blind partisans, struggling through life and with each other with no imaginable end in view, victims of momentary slogans and ancient prejudices. Behind them are men with clear ideas and well-defined aims.”

Today, it is “men and women” with clear ideas and well-defined aims still trying to take humanity on a dead end trip to autocracy, permanent war and existential enslavement.

It is long past time for this nation’s beleaguered citizens to emphatically reject the rotting kettle of fish being perpetually served as the latest global crisis du jour, and to demand justice and an authentic reckoning for the criminals who have brought us to this impasse.

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