Several Relections on 9/11

Al-Qa'ida has proved so elusive and difficult to eliminate mainly because it has never existed in the form that governments and intelligence agencies pretend. Its membership, even before 2001, was always small and it had to hire local Afghan tribesmen by the day to make propaganda videos. But scarcely a month passes without the CIA announcing that its drones have killed operational planners of al-Qa'ida, as if the group were the mirror image of the Pentagon. Self-declared experts on "terrorism" appear as "talking heads" on television, declaring that the elimination of some al-Qa'ida figure is a body blow to the organization, but, such is its resilience, that the threat to us all remains undiminished.
~ from Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism by Patrick Cockburn ~

As it turned out, homeland insecurity was the perfect foil for the hegemony of Homeland Security. Now the architects of Total Information Awareness can legally be in our phone calls, our emails, our bank accounts, our library cards, our internet browsers, our peace groups, our medical records, our gonads, our heads, and our hearts. We’ve been hornswoggled, hoodwinked, and hijacked into accepting pervasive incursions into every vestige of individual liberty and political democracy -- all done quite ingeniously in the name of protecting liberty and preserving democracy.

The mathematics are Machiavellian and their logic is inescapable. For the mere price of 3000 souls, the return on investment has been exponential: tens of thousands tortured, hundreds of thousands killed, millions relentlessly survived, billions frightened lest they be next. It is the dream of real numbers, the holy grail of realpolitik, a down payment on the permanent war economy, a blank check for purchasing the dreams of future generations. It is, in short, the emperor’s handcrafted new clothes in full regalia.
~ from Millennial Math: 9+11=1984 by Randall Amster ~

I grew up during the Cold War, and my elementary school teachers told me that the difference between us and the Communists was that they thought the end justifies the means, but we didn't. It wasn't true then, of course – American armed forces in Vietnam bombed villages, slaughtered civilians, and threw people out of helicopters. But at least our leaders had to pretend that they had some moral superiority to their enemies.

Now we have seen torture and assassination institutionalized and justified at the highest levels. New crimes are continually uncovered: Documents recently captured by Libyan rebels indicate that Washington was sending prisoners to Gadaffi's government for interrogation, i.e. torture.

So that is one of the casualties of 9-11, in addition to the 3000 people brutally murdered on that fateful day in 2001: a moral degeneration among our political leaders who, it must be acknowledged, were already at a low level when it came to respect for human life in the rest of the world.
~ from Endless War, Lies and Terror: The Decade Since 9/11 by Mark Weisbrot ~

We don't have to sympathize with bin Laden or even to understand his messianic thinking to know how wrong-headed and misleading our public recounting of 9/11 has become. Lost in the purity of America's martyrdom are basic political realities: that bin Laden was a wealthy and well-connected Saudi Arabian, a former CIA asset, and America's stalwart, only somewhat covert ally in the anti-communist jihad that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in the 1980s; that bin Laden felt betrayed when the Saudi monarchy allowed American troops - in his view, infidel agents of the devil - to use its sacred soil as a staging ground, in 1990-91, to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait; that bin Laden, already a very violent terrorist suspect, was somehow never apprehended in the 1990s - not even for questioning - because of the Saudi regime's double game of protecting extremists while pretending to co-operate with Americans in the guise of "moderate Arab ally."
~ from The Sad Legacy of Sept. 11 by John R. MacArthur ~