Other things to remember

Honor the victims of 9/11, but also spare a thought for Barbara Lee

As I drove the thirty-something miles from my then home in Conway, Arkansas to work in Little Rock on September 11, 2001, I didn’t listen to NPR as was my habit at the time. Though I consider the public radio broadcaster one of the worst mainstream propaganda outlets now, I thought differently at the time. I was a standard conservative then, but I prided myself that I was broadminded enough to listen to more left-wing voices and appreciate what their media had to offer.

But this morning, the day after what would have been my grandfather’s 80th birthday had he not passed away almost four years earlier, it was so beautiful, cool, and clear that I broke the routine — just listened to music and enjoyed the drive. Maybe subconsciously I sensed something was different about this day. That the end of a more innocent era was at hand.

When I arrived at work, someone on the elevator told me a small plane had stricken one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York City. My memory is not clear due to the shock of the coverage I was about to watch, but I thought he also said the plane had knocked another one into the other building. Humans are notorious for spreading inaccurate, sketchy information in the initial aftermath of a big event, but thinking back on it this description is so ridiculous and nonsensical that I feel like I must be recalling what he said inaccurately, as if remembering a dream in which I retain only images and snippets of conversation, all distorted. Like everything that day.

We went up to the top floor of the four-story building and watched Peter Jennings’ coverage on ABC for what seemed like hours. The replays of the second plane crashing into the south tower looked like a CGI animation to me. My brain couldn’t process that what it was seeing was real. There were vague references to people falling from the buildings, but thankfully it wasn’t particularly evident. Some time later (I don’t know what time I started watching that day) the south tower collapsed. Again, my mind wouldn’t process what I was seeing at first. Jennings didn’t notice on his monitor at first, either, and when it dawned on me what was going on, I wondered how long it would take him to notice.

Then word of the Pentagon crash, another hijacked plane over Pennsylvania, inaccurate reports of a car bomb at the State Department or the Capitol, the north tower collapse, and a nationwide shutdown of US airspace. My head was spinning. Everyone gathered in front of the plasma screens on the fourth floor was numb with shock. Like everyone, I wanted to know who did this, and I wanted revenge. But I was mostly sad. Sad for days. In anguish for the victims and their families. For all of us who had been traumatized by what we had seen in the immediate aftermath and in the days after, as more footage of horrible things emerged.

The armchair warriors in the Bush Administration wasted no time. Seeking Congressional support for a war in Afghanistan to cleanse the country of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, they championed a joint resolution called the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The AUMF would authorize the use of the US armed forces to take down those responsible for the 9/11 attacks against the United States, using all “necessary and appropriate force”. It became law a week after the attacks, receiving almost unanimous support. Almost.

The one holdout who dared vote against the AUMF was Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California. Her voice breaking, she stood before the House and expressed her sorrow for the lives lost and her conviction, despite agonizing over it, that passing the resolution so hastily would be a mistake. She called for restraint and for thinking through the possible results of our actions, so that “this does not spiral out of control.” She ended her two-minute allotted time recalling the words of a clergyman spoken at a memorial service just that morning: “As we act let us not become the evil that we deplore.”

Lee was concerned that the AUMF was worded so broadly that it could be abused by the Administration, used as a blank check for war-making anywhere in the world at a time when everyone just wanted to lash out. She acknowledged the president’s power to protect the country from further attack, but she believed the resolution being put forward would be an abdication of Congress’s responsibility to keep tight control over the objectives and conduct of any war they authorized. For this incredibly brave act of restraint, she was denounced and received a torrent of death threats.

But history has proven her right. While the US was mostly successful in driving al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan (into Pakistan in many cases) and beating down the Taliban, the AUMF would remain in place indefinitely and be used as a justification for endless military expansion and action throughout the Middle East and beyond, for conflicts that in most cases had no connection whatsoever to the events of 9/11. Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Yemen. A 2016 report by the Congressional Research Service found that at the time the AUMF had been cited 37 times in connection with actions in 14 countries and on the high seas. The AUMF is still in effect today, still ostensibly providing legal justification for American military occupation and occasional bombing all over the globe.

It was used to justify a program that picked up suspected terrorists and shuttled them blindfolded around the world to jurisdictions where torture could be carried out with a minimum of legal hurdles. It was used to set up an American gulag-style prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba where many of these same people could be locked away without trial, sometimes for decades.

It was used to justify an illegal regime-change war in Iraq, destroying that country of 30 million people and shattering an untold number of Iraqi and American lives. It was used to justify an illegal regime-change war in Syria that continues today, in which the US and its allies leveraged Saudi and UAE-funded jihadi terrorists, with the dark irony that some of them were and are allied with what used to be known as al-Nusra, otherwise known as al-Qaeda in Syria, to try and overthrow a legitimate government that we, Israel, and our Gulf State-allies don’t like (the Assad government). It was used to justify a regime-change bombing campaign in Libya, spearheaded by none other than Hillary Clinton at the State Department, which overthrew Gaddafi and turned a relatively stable country into a war-torn, jihadi-infested hellhole of a failed state.

It was used to justify an assassination-by-drone program begun during the Bush Administration but greatly ramped up during Obama’s tenure. As part of that program, run entirely by the president with virtually no oversight, young military men sat in front of screens in darkened rooms and used their joysticks to target state-of-the-art firepower at targets thousands of miles away. These were individuals that American intelligence had told them to hit based in most cases on nothing more than the detection of a mobile phone SIM card that was connected to someone they believed was a terrorist. When the missiles were launched in these so-called “signature strikes”, often killing men, women, and children in the vicinity, all military-age males killed within the strike zone were automatically classified as enemy combatants by the United States. Undoubtedly this program killed a lot of bad people. It also killed a lot of innocent people, some of whom were attending weddings or convalescing in makeshift hospitals.

The recent collapse of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan and return of the country’s government to the Taliban slapped us in the face with the truth: decades of war have gotten us and the world nothing. Military men and women all died in vain. Trillions of dollars were wasted and nearly a million lives lost. All supposedly to avenge the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11, an event that evidence shows could easily could have been prevented and whose details are still largely being covered up by our own government. The one accomplishment from all of this is that military contractors made billions and billions of dollars off of it for decades. Raytheon, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Blackwater, and hundreds of others made a fortune off of death and destruction. Families will never get their children back, but these companies will keep their profits.

I love my country and its people. But it’s way past time that Americans began to distinguish their country from their government. While the former are, for the most part, a noble society with altruistic motives, the latter has proved itself one of the most corrupt forces for evil in the world today and for at least the last 20 years. Ostensibly a democracy, it’s actually an oligarchy, mesmerizing its people with mind-numbing images on screens to subtly convince them that evil foreigners are out to get them because they hate their freedom, and that the only way to stop them is by high-tech instruments of death being unleashed on these populations to “protect our freedom”.

What’s often lost on them is that the acts of terror used to justify these campaigns were often the unintended negative blowback from previous acts of American intervention and occupation. Osama bin-Laden was considered a “freedom fighter” by western media when he and the rest of the mujahideen were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, likely with American money and weapons. For a long time bin-Laden denied involvement in the 9/11 attacks while also praising them. But in a 2002 “letter to America” purportedly from him he said the motive behind the attacks was “because you attacked us and continue to attack us” and that “the oppressed have a right to return the aggression”, referring to a decade of American military intervention in the Middle East.

If these statements can be taken at face value, they don’t justify anything that was done on 9/11 that resulted in the tragic loss of nearly 3,000 innocent lives. But if they can be believed they do explain why those lives were lost — the motives behind the act. When he ran for president in 2008, Ron Paul pointed this out at a Republican presidential debate, only to be booed when Rudy Giuliani whipped up the crowd by implying that Paul agreed with bin-Laden’s sentiments when in reality he was trying to show terrorism’s motives. It wasn’t that they hated us because we were free, Paul said. They hated us because we’d been over there, invading, occupying, killing. All things we would never have tolerated a foreign force doing on our own soil.

It’s unclear whether our collapse in Afghanistan will teach us anything about this as a country. My guess is we’ll still be inclined to believe the empty suits we call leaders when they advocate for the next campaign to protect global democracy with precision missiles and depleted uranium rounds. Theres’s always some new atrocity that may or may not be real that can be used to manipulate the public into supporting, or at least acquiescing to, a new round of death delivered with a pretty, democratic face. And just like before, whatever the scale of that initial atrocity, the death and destruction that results from it will pale in comparison to that wrought by our overbearing, lethal response to it. But the right people will make money from it, and that will be enough.

One thing is for certain, though: on this 9/11 anniversary, it’s important and right that we remember the innocent American lives lost in those horrible acts of murder 20 years ago. But it’s also vitally important that we remember what terrible things those attacks were cynically used to justify in the ensuing two decades, and are still being used to justify in places like eastern Syria and across the Middle East and North Africa. As politicians with blood on their hands speak empty words and wipe away crocodile tears, I’ll have no time for them. I couldn’t disagree more with Barbara Lee on a whole host of policies, but today, I’ll be thinking of her and her wish that we do not become the evil we deplore. In addition to those lost, I’ll be honoring her, her courage, her foresight, her humanity, her example.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.