from Intifada-Palestine Website
The attacks on September 11, 2001 have been a defining moment for America.
Although the losses were not great in terms of
urban slaughter during WWII, the political and psychological impact on
Americans of a concerted and visible attack in America were enormous -
indeed, it is an interesting “coincidence” that the attacks occurred on the
one day of the year whose mention reinforces a public sense here of
danger and emergency: 9-1-1.
A similar if less enthusiastic drama is
unfolding today, as many of the same parties who brought us 9/11,
Afghanistan and Iraq are edging America into confrontation and war with
Iran.
I am also conscious of a remark by a French colleague some years ago to the effect that Europeans saw conspiracies everywhere, but Americans never saw them anywhere, and both were wrong. I am even less enthusiastic about presumed coincidences with global consequences driving policy, or superficial explanations of physical catastrophes that fly in the face of both logic and physical realities.
With one war waning today, another getting hotter and a third “in the oven,” it is high time to look hard at what brought us to this place.
Eisenhower could compel Israel to withdraw from
the Sinai, but the last US President who forcefully opposed Israeli regional
and nuclear ambitions was John F. Kennedy. His assassination brought Lyndon
Johnson into the White House, so much a friend of Israel that he disregarded
the deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 war, in
which over 200 US sailors and Marines were killed or wounded.
That happened in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush, and a contemporary writer summarized the tip of the neo-conservative iceberg in his first Administration this way:
The presence of so many people from PNAC in key positions definitely sent a signal that US Middle East policy would henceforth be that of Israel, something that brought no joy to any other countries in the region, much less the long-suffering Palestinians.
Mutterings about a supposed “Road Map” to some
type of peace arrangement in such circumstances were utterly meaningless,
and almost everyone except the American public understood this fact of life.
What this meant, PNAC opined in 2000, was that,
9/11 Reconsidered
Most people are familiar with the basic details of that day - two commercial aircrafts crashing into the two tallest buildings in New York City’s World Trade Center (WTC), a third striking the Pentagon, and a fourth ending up in a Pennsylvania field. Few people will forget the images of the burning buildings, their collapse, the casualties, and the sense of shock and tragedy that ensued.
Few should forget the passage of emergency
legislation (the misnamed “Patriot
Act”), the rush to attack Afghanistan for harboring the source of
the attackers, or the later rush to attack Iraq to forestall “mushroom
clouds” from its apocryphal “weapons of mass destruction.”
Many others who utterly distrust the 9/11
Commission report, dismiss the US Government’s explanation of it, and point
to both an official cover-up and an “inside job,” include veteran fighter
pilots, EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) (EMT
interview), air defense experts, experienced commercial pilots,
demolition experts, architects and civil engineers - none of them
professions that inherently attract and retain the gullible and credulous.
Among the more catastrophic is the collapse of a third WTC building (the 47-story WTC7) which was not hit by a plane, and fell in what appears to be a controlled demolition, but has essentially been sidestepped by the mainstream media (MSM).
And this video interview (above video) with a demolitions expert overseas explains clearly and succinctly what happened to WTC7, with the shock and chaos accompanying the impact of the aircraft serving to distract attention and conceal what happened overall.
The overlay of the World Trade Center below shows the layout of the affected buildings:
Even more unbelievable is the “coincidental” salvage of an intact passport presumably belonging to one of the hijackers inside the plane that hit WTC2 - and this was how the official 9/11 Commission report described it:
Reflections
The depiction of the media management in America in 2002 is especially informative, and has not changed significantly since then: Today we are getting the same line on Iran, from the same type of people - Obama himself tries to be more independent, but most of the key staff and national security people in his Administration do not differ greatly on Israel and the Middle East from those of his predecessor.
And the Congress has shown itself to be even more of AIPAC’s lap-dog than the preceding Congress, an exercise in self-serving cowardice that admittedly has taken some doing.
This is not a simple anti-Jewish canard or mindless prejudice, both of which are juvenile and self-defeating sentiments.
They are a factual depiction of specific people
in specific positions advocating specific policies and stonewalling specific
attempts to elicit specific information about specific lies,
misrepresentations and deceit.
The human cost to America to date is some 60,000 people, military and civilian, killed or wounded on 9/11 and in Iraq and Afghanistan together, with more to come once we go to war with Iran (or get dragged into it following an Israeli attack on Iran).
Much of the deliberately misdirected rage that followed 9/11 has given way to endurance and grief, captured all too well in the following picture of a military funeral here: But grief is a close cousin to rage, and an enraged America is not pretty, as anyone familiar with our history can appreciate.
Americans are often deceptive without meaning to be. To much of
the world, they often come across as naive, bumbling innocents in the world
of global politics. And on a day-to-day basis, there is much truth to that.
The goal was to crush, and restraint was not a word
used much at all.
They may well leave Israel looking like Carthage after the Romans finished with it.
It will be Israel’s own great fault.
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