MY ANNUAL 9/11 DIATRIBE

Knock! Knock! Who's there?
9/11
9/11 who?
I thought you said you'd never forget!

I'm glad I need a new cable box so that I don't have to see the non-stop 9/11 footage that we love to wallow in. Oh sure, it was a grisly attack which I saw with my own eyes down 6th Avenue and we have every right to mourn those that were lost. But here's a few things I'll bet the propaganda--I mean TV coverage--of 9/11 won't be focusing on.

George W. Bush and Condo-loser Rice ignored warnings that terrorists were to strike the WTC using planes. So they let it happen. Perhaps because they were inefficient. Perhaps they wanted the tragedy of 9/11 to occur so they could retaliate. I don't really need to entertain 9/11 conspiracy theories because the facts are damning enough.

There won't be much mention of the fact that the CIA trained Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11.

Bush used the tragedy of 9/11 to convince the country to attack Iraq--a country which had nothing to do with 9/11 and had no weapons of mass destruction. But America was in blood-thirsty GET REVENGE mode, so we didn't care which muslim country we attacked. We had no reason to attack Iraq, but the scum in Congress including Hillary Clinton voted to go to war against a non-enemy.

Attacking Iraq for no reason and then re-electing the man who began this attack is an indelible stain on the American psyche. If the couple thousand deaths from 9/11 were so awful, why did we go on to kill around 100,000 innocent Iraqis and displace millions more? Why did we cheer as we fished Saddam Hussein out of a hole and murder him--if he had never attacked us or had a hand in 9/11? It's not just that we're an ignorant and mean people--we were carefully manipulated into thinking we had to attack by all the anthrax mailings, yellowcake uranium tall tales, stories about the possible effects of sarin gas released by terrorists in our subways, and color-coded alert levels. And a media which regurgitated whatever the government wanted it to as actual news. After the Iraq war was widely acknowledged to be a mistake, CNN and the NY Times both apologized for not asking harder questions of the Bush administration as to why we were declaring war. In other words, your news isn't news. It's propaganda that spews what the government wants it to whether it's true or not. But the media apologized after the fact. When it was too late. After we've already begun a war and this proud, ethical country would never "cut and run"--despite the fact that we should never have "cut" in the first place.

The Iraq war should have taught us that the government should never be trusted. That our news should never be trusted. To his credit, Obama won over Hillary partially because he was one of the few senators to vote against the Iraq war which by then was seen as a mistake. Now the Nobel Peace Prize-winner is back at war with Iraq--and other than a beheading or a few stories about ISIS, ISIL or whatever they are calling it today--most of us have no idea why we are going to war again. We know the new cast of The View and who won Drag Race, but not about the questionable mission that we're sending young men and women to die for. First we were dropping humanitarian aid packages, then aid with bombs, but not sending troops. Gradually, we are sending more and more troops. No one knows why. We have different policies towards ISIS in Iraq and in Syria. Obama is siding with hawkish Republicans who always want war and don't need a reason. Spineless Democrats aren't saying much because to denounce Obama is to denounce their own party. The war may even be illegal. Hey, maybe that's why Obama never investigated Bush for war crimes--he knew that he'd be committing his own. But at least the NY Times is trying to ask harder questions this time around. This is from today's edition:

"But as President Obama prepares to send the United States on what could be a yearslong military campaign against the militant group, American intelligence agencies have concluded that it poses no immediate threat to the United States. Some officials and terrorism experts believe that the actual danger posed by ISIS has been distorted in hours of television punditry and alarmist statements by politicians, and that there has been little substantive public debate about the unintended consequences of expanding American military action in the Middle East."

Did you know that Obama, who said no boots on the ground in Iraq a month or two ago was preparing for "what could be a yearlong military campaign?" Here we go again. We've learned nothing from 9/11. As you mourn the victims, please also mourn your government's honesty and your news media's credibility.

There won't be much mention today of how George W. Bush's war in Iraq destroyed the country and helped lead to the chaotic conditions in which ISIS could grow. And there won't be much mention of how the "American interests" which Obama claims are so important to go in and protect are not Iraqi christians trapped on a mountaintop or beheaded journalists. Those "interests" are the oil produced in that region and the desire to establish US military bases everywhere. The desire to keep weapons manufacturers paid with the perpetual waging of war. Soldiers will lay down their lives not to protect the USA, but to protect oil companies and military contractors who have bought almost every politician from Obama on down. And there won't be much mention of the fact that US foreign policy screwing muslims around to secure oil has made this country so despised that there will be terrorist attacks on the US in retaliation for as long as we're alive. If the death and destruction of 9/11 was so horrible--and it was--then why is the US responsible for so much equally horrible unnecessary death and destruction? Why don't we care more about death and destruction that our tax dollars are paying for?  Because we're murdering innocent people who have a different skin color and religion? The government of the USA is the terrorist group responsible for the wreaking the most havoc on the world. The tragedy of 9/11 is nothing compared to what we have done to Iraq. And now we're going back in!

We re-elected Obama over Romney because Obama represented a drawing down from war. Romney, like most Republicans, represented picking new fights abroad. Funny how Obama won and now HE'S picking new fights. As America's schools, infrastructure, care for veterans and benefits for the poor continue to crumble. Those issues at home that affect how average Americans live we can't afford to fix. But we've always got tons of money to finance wars with countries which pose no threat to us.