Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Hold Onto Your Underwear
This Is Not a National Emergency

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI.  In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire.  More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported.  In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died.  In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226.  Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006.  And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York’s Hudson River when disaster might have ensued.  In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport.  (No one was killed.)    

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"It is nowhere written that the American empire goes on forever."
--Eugene Jarecki
Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life? Jarecki's shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative answer to each of these questions.

He may have been the ultimate icon of 1950s conformity and postwar complacency, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was an iconoclast, visionary, and the Cassandra of the New World Order. Upon departing his presidency, Eisenhower issued a stern, cogent warning about the burgeoning "military industrial complex," foretelling with ominous clarity the state of the world in 2004 with its incestuous entanglement of political, corporate, and Defense Department interests.

"Why We Fight"
99 minutes

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After months of deliberations, President Barack Obama finally outlined his revised strategy for the Afghanistan war in a nationally televised address Tuesday night. The commander-in-chief repeatedly invoked 9/11, attempting to justify his plan to escalate the eight-year-old war, which calls for the rapid deployment of 30,000 additional US troops to the region by next summer.

Obama's decision to step-up the war effort in Afghanistan comes two weeks before he heads to Oslo, Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaking at the US Military Academy at West Point to thousands of uniformed cadets, many of whom will likely be shipped off to Afghanistan when they graduate, Obama appeared somewhat subdued when he began his speech by saying that it is "important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place.

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On September 11, 2001, my office building, the World Trade Center, was attacked by al Qaeda, a murder cult of Saudi Arabians, funded by Saudi Arabians. And so, in response to the Saudis’ attack, America invaded … Afghanistan.

And here we go again. The New York Times (print edition) headline last Friday was: “Pakistani Army, In Its Campaign In Taliban Stronghold, Finds A Hint Of 9/11.”

Google it and you’ll find the Times report repeated and amplified 5,785 times more.

Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

Your eyelids are getting heavy. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

It’s the latest hit from the same crew that brought you Saddam = 9/11 and its twin chant, Saddam = WMD, Dick Cheney’s chimerical tropes which the New York Times’ Judith Miller happily channeled to the paper’s front page.

And they’re at it again.

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Part 3 of Real News Network Paul Jay's interview of former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley about the leadup investigations to the September 11, 2001 WTC attacks.


Part 2 of the interview is here.
Part 1 of the interview is here.

Part 2 of Real News Network Paul Jay's interview of former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley about the leadup investigations to the September 11, 2001 WTC attacks.


Part 1 of the interview is here.

Real News Networks Paul Jay interviews former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley about the leadup investigations to the September 11, 2001 WTC attacks.


Part 2 of the interview is here.

Released September 8th: This documentary presents the many-faceted events that led up to, and then scrutinizes, the 9/11 Commission hearings. Massive injustices and mis-representations are brought to light and "exposed" by respected members of the mainstream American media, and from the families themselves in the narrative of events that shaped most greatly our world today; "9/11: Press for Truth"

The families present their 2 1/2 year struggle to create an investigation and inquiry into the events of 9/11 -- which was at first heavily resisted and even explicitly prohibited by the President and Vice-President. For an example of contrast in funding; the internal disruption of a Clinton-Lewinski "sex scandal" the event was awarded a budget of 100 million dollars in total. Initially the 9/11 Commission was only allotted 3 million dollars and their time-limit was severely cut beyond the expectations of those who brought it into existence.

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Originally published at Asia Times

It's September 11 all over again - eight years on. The George W Bush administration is out. The "global war on terror" is still on, renamed "overseas contingency operations" by the Barack Obama administration. Obama's "new strategy" - a war escalation - is in play in AfPak. Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. "Al-Qaeda" remains a catch-all ghost entity. September 11 - the neo-cons' "new Pearl Harbor" - remains the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century.

It's useless to expect US corporate media and the ruling elites' political operatives to call for a true, in-depth investigation into the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Whitewash has been the norm. But even establishment highlight Dr Zbig "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, has admitted to the US Senate that the post-9/11 "war on terror" is a "mythical historical narrative".

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(Cross-posted from The Paragraph.) While President Reagan has many highways, buildings and the Washington National Airport named after him, President George W. Bush has so far had only a try at naming a sewage plant after him — to symbolize cleaning up the mess he left.⁴⁰ Yet many of the catastrophes of Bush flowed from the policies and tactics of Reagan:

• Just before 9-11, Bush ignored warnings of a coming Osama bin Laden terror attack, but it was Reagan who, as part of his campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, boosted fanatical jihadists and gave bin Laden his start.⁴¹⁴²⁴³
• Bush, on his first week in office, planned for carving up the oil fields after an Iraq invasion, but it was Reagan who took the solar panels off the White House and returned the nation to its oil-guzzling ways.⁴⁴⁴⁵
• To muster support for invading Iraq, Bush published phony intelligence reports, like those claiming that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda.⁴⁶ In that he followed the lead of Reagan, who, to gain support for aid to brutal regimes in Latin America, set up “The Office of Public Diplomacy” to use CIA propaganda techniques against the American people, and who, to gain support for his military build up, edited radio transcripts to give the false picture that the Soviets willfully shot down civilian flight KAL-007.⁴⁷⁴⁸

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