Happy Patriot Day.

Rep. McDermott signs on to impeachment resolution
Published: Tuesday September 9, 2008
Congressman Jim McDermott, representing Washington’s 7th district, stood up on the House floor to give his official support to efforts to impeach President Bush.Of course this is way to late and means nothing, but I post it for it’s novelty,if not it’s historical value. Truth be told, our children will wear Saudi dog collars, howling in Mandarin at those gates of hell, quoting the only one allowed book, the King James Bible.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 12 2008 0:27 utc | 4

This Post by Billmon on the Fifth Anniversary of 9/11 was a classic and warrants posting in full – thankfully it has been preserved at Webarchive.org

here
My hat is off to you Bill for a great piece of writing.
Go there for the full effect, to get the various hot links. Probably my most fwd post to friends overseas, to assure them that not all Americans were insane. It had the hoped for effect,
The Sixteen Acre Ditch
Five years after 9/11, this is what Ground Zero looks like (or will, once the NYFD removes the jerry-rigged memorial “pool” it created for Shrub’s photo op):
Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, ground zero remains a 16-acre, 70-foot-deep hole in the heart of Lower Manhattan. High above it, a scaffolded bank building, contaminated during the attack, hulks like a metal skeleton, waiting endlessly to be razed . . .”The problem,” as John C. Whitehead, 84, the former chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said baldly in an interview last spring, “is the 16-acre ditch.”
If you had told me, five years ago, that on the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in history Ground Zero would still be nothing but an enormous hole in the ground, I wouldn’t have believed you — just as I wouldn’t have believed that a major American city could be thoroughly trashed by a Category 4 hurricane and then left to moulder in the mud for a year while various federal, state and local bureaucrats and hack politicians tried to make up their minds what to do.
I would have said that while those kinds of things can and do happen in Third World kleptocracies or decaying Stalinist police states, they’re simply not possible in the richest and most powerful nation in history. Even if the voters could somehow be bamboozled into accepting such incompetence, the wealthy elites and corporate technocrats who own and operate the world’s only remaining superpower would never stand for it.
You can learn a lot about a country in five years.
What I’ve learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration’s insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media — plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of “reality management”) is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at an amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.
The physical symptoms — a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot — aren’t nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn’t know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn’t find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don’t even pretend to cover the news unless there’s a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We’ve got think tanks that can’t think, security agencies that can’t secure and accounting firms that can’t count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People’s Bank of China, and we still can’t push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.
I could happily go on, but I imagine you get my point. It’s hard to think of a major American institution, tradition or cultural value that has not, at some point over the past five years, been shown to be a.) totally out of touch, b.) criminally negligent, c.) hopelessly corrupt, d.) insanely hypocritical or e.) all of the above.
It’s getting hard to see how these trends can be reversed. Maybe they can’t (which would explain why all empires, at least so far, have eventually declined and fallen.) In the past I’ve used the economic concept of market failure to describe the process whereby dissident voices and uncomfortable views are gradually weeded out of the “marketplace of ideas,” allowing errors to go uncorrected, lies to go unchallenged (or ignored) and ideological orthodoxy to calcify into self-delusion:
Watching the punditocracy spin its ideological wheels these days, it’s hard not to be reminded of the later years of the Soviet Union — a nation dedicated to proposition that the marketplace of ideas should never be allowed to clear. As the system declined into senility it, too, became increasingly detached from reality. Soviet pundits and academic ideologues churned out reams of bad ideas and stupid policies. Soviet Krauthammers advised the Politburo to invade Afghanistan. (“It will be a cakewalk.”) Soviet [James] Glassmans told it to crank up the central planning. (“Traditional capitalist measures of valuation mean nothing.”)
When the public discourse on Edward R. Murrow’s old network consists of Katie Couric introducing Rush Limbaugh’s buffoonish views, you know the intellectual and ideological rot is well advanced — maybe not quite as far as the Soviet Union in the ’80s, but getting there. One of my favorite books about the Soviet collapse was titled “The Age of Delirium” which I think perfectly captured the progressive insanity of a system that could no longer even understand, much less believe, its own lies. I think of that book practically every time George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld open their mouths in public.
Some time ago, back when I still had comments on this blog, a jihadi sympathizer left a note on one of my posts bragging about his movement’s success in taking down the Soviets — just as the armies of the Prophet succeeded in taking down the Persian Empire. The new Rome (that is, us) would be next, he boasted.
At the time I thought it was daft — exactly the kind of thing a crazed religious fanatic would say. But these days I’m not so sure. The jihadis in Afghanistan didn’t really take down the Soviet empire — they just delivered a very hard punch to a giant that was already falling. Looking at the state of America five years after 9/11, it no longer seems completely implausible that the same thing might one day be said of us.
This is not, I know, the most inspiring way to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the event that essentially kicked off the new American century — which at this point seems unlikely to last even a decade. If you want the standard patriotic rhetoric (hallowed ground, blessings of democracy, forward strategy for freedom, etc.) you’ll have no trouble finding it elsewhere. There’s no shortage of the stuff today (whitehouse.gov is a good place to start). But I personally don’t think the record of the past half decade (or the current condition of Ground Zero) really justifies that kind of self-serving, self-justifying pablum.
Do you?
Posted by billmon at September 11, 2006 04:25 PM

Posted by: erichwwk | Sep 12 2008 2:33 utc | 6

@fool – @1 – And it seems plausible since Baluchistan is also in a low level insurgency believed to be aided by Americans.
I wrote about that in April 2005(!) Free Baluchistan

A small tribal guerrilla war, supported by a few secret special forces and some Dollars could easily escalate and lead into an independence movement in Baluchistan which would be hard to overcome by military means.
…
I now expect a “Free Baluchistan Act” to be on next years congressional agenda.

Haven’t seen that act yet, but I have no doubt that the U.S. is operating in that direction.

Posted by: b | Sep 12 2008 4:48 utc | 8

aumana – 9/11 could just as easily have been “divine retribution” for:
September 11, 1921 – Nahalal, the first moshav of Israel, is settled in Palestine, signaling the end of 2000 years of freedom for the not-yet-named-as Palestinians;
September 11, 1940 – George Stibitz pioneers the first remote operation of a computer, (or a computer-controlled commercial airliner, perhaps;)
September 11, 1941 – Ground is broken for the construction of The Pentagon, which has become our $T a year black-hole-of-death shibboleth devouring the Whole Earth;
September 11, 1948 – Death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, or some powerful Saud or Egyptian sheikh the West knows little about;
September 11, 1965 – Birthday of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, or some powerful Saud or Egyptian sheikh the West knows little about;
September 11, 1978 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel meet at Camp David and sign Peace Accords, nullifying the Six Day War and Israeli Occupation in which 21,000 Muslims were killed, 45,000 wounded, and 6,000 imprisoned, a harbinger of things to come;
September 11, 1982 – International forces that were guaranteeing the safety of Palestinian refugees following Israel’s 1982 Invasion of Lebanon leave Beirut. Thousands of Palestinians were massacred in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
The US says and does nothing, even though their CIA ME ops knew what had happened;
Know’m sayin?
WTC 7 was already scheduled for controlled-demolition as part of lease improvement negotiations with Federal agencies which occupied the building, along with their computer records of IRS and SEC violations by Wall Street brokers and investment houses discovered relating to the dot.con fraud. Those were all destroyed, saving Wall Street and NYC potentially a fatal death blow, since at that time NYC was on its fifth refinancing of refinancing of refinancing of refinancing of refinancing of its many times juniored and over-leveraged muni GOB’s. It also saved Silverstein $10Ms in asbestos removal, controlled-demolition and street closure out-of-pockets.
The mandatory Y2K 100% daily computer file backup archives supposedly kept in a New Jersey data center were never found, so all enforcement actions came to an end.
In the same way, the section of the Pentagon hit had just been reinforced against “terrorist attack”, (but obviously not cruise missile attack), then all records moved into the reinforced section, including those of the missing $2TRILLION that Rumsfeld revealed the day before (as code signal to remind his Bilderberg handlers the evidence was about to be destroyed?)… was destroyed.
Again, mandatory Y2K computer file 100% daily backup archives supposedly kept in a Langley, Virginia data center were never found, so any possibility of enforcement actions and tax monies recovery came to an abrupt end.
“Suppose you had a milkshake, and I had a straw that reached all the way to here?” $12T had just been sucked up from the American Dream by September 10th, 2001. Most people aren’t willing to admit just how much of their life savings they gambled.
It only took a single bright fall morning in New York to destroy all the evidence.
Everyone that I’ve convinced by exhaustive argument and narrative comes away at the end with a shoulder shrug, and a hmm, and advice, “We’d better grab as much of the remaining loot as we can before the Saudis and the Chinese get here in their limos!”
Know’m sayin?
As a rich Israeli shouted to a Palestinian in front of her new condo just built on his seized and occupied land, “We won, you lost. Now get the hell off my property.”
Or as Palin might add, “Jesus is Coming Back, and Man, is He Pissed!!”

Posted by: Bill de Berg | Sep 12 2008 6:17 utc | 10

“I do not want another one.’
You’ll have another one anytime the GOP decides.

Posted by: waldo | Sep 12 2008 8:49 utc | 12

@Buckaroo
“Odd that worked out, is it not?” No, not in the slightest. “Israel” (purely as pure knee-jerk terminology) is the excuse for the entire Middle East mess, bar none. Even if Israel doesn’t project pre-emptive strikes as a strategy it is attributed to Israel as an excuse of the Empire to move in the direction they deem of greatest advantage to themselves. “Israel” is just another term for military adventurism.

Posted by: Spyware | Sep 12 2008 10:18 utc | 14

There is something about “The Day That Changed Everything” that has long puzzled me — and that is that it is always said that “almost three thousand who died that day…”
I don’t know if I can phrase this, but it’s as if there were some sort of sick Death Eater Disappointment that the number of bodies incinerated, smashed to road kill on the pavement to escape the flames was not the three thousand plus first promised the media beast in those first few hours of what we can now see was the beginning of a mass psychosis and outright communual insanity.

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Sep 12 2008 13:59 utc | 16

David McGowan
August 2000
Note to readers: A few recent visitors to this web site have e-mailed me asking if perhaps this article (previously posted elsewhere on this site) shouldn’t be taken down or rewritten in light of the events of September 11, 2001. Having forgotten what the article actually said, I decided to review it for myself. After doing so, I decided that it shouldn’t be taken down or rewritten, and is in fact more relevant today than the day it was written. Notice that all of the reactionary ‘security’ measures now being openly called for by all avenues of the U.S. political and media apparatus were already being quietly called for long before any ‘terrorist’ attack took place. Of course, a year ago these measures would have met with stiff resistance from the American people. That is decidedly not the case now. It is left to the reader to decide if this represents the prescient wisdom of our fearless leaders, or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
September 19, 2001
The National Commission on Terrorism, a ten-member panel assembled by the U.S. Congress to deal with supposedly rising levels of international terrorism, released a sixty-four page report this June in which a variety of measures designed to hasten the rise of the overt police state were recommended. According to the panel, these recommendations were based on a conclusion reached after conducting a six-month world-wide investigation.
This investigation led the bipartisan commission to the rather remarkable conclusion that “a well-financed, fanatical and global terrorist network poses exceedingly difficult problems for U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” Commission chairman L. Paul Bremer III, a former State Department ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism (which is to say, a spook) summed up the problem thusly: “the threat is changing, and it’s becoming more deadly.” (1)
An adviser to the commission – who also boasts of being a senior adviser to the president of the Rand Corporation, a long-time intelligence front – described the report as “a passionate document determined to bring about a fundamental change in mind-set.” He praised the commission for recognizing that “while progress has been made in combating terrorism, the terrorist threat has evolved … Large scale indiscriminate violence has become the reality of today’s terrorism, raising concerns that tomorrow’s terrorists will move beyond truck bombs to employ chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons.” (2)
Fanatical bands of global terrorists toting nuclear weapons and launching them indiscriminately? That’s pretty scary stuff. The thing that really sucks is that it comes at a time when we thought we had finally made the world safe by eliminating the menace of “international communism.” And now this.
It’s really a bitch being the world’s only superpower. Never a moment’s rest. Of course, being that we are – as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has stated – “the indispensable nation,” we will do the right thing and make sacrifices at home and abroad to deal with this new global threat. Luckily, the commission has given us a blueprint for what we need to do.
First, the good news: the aforementioned commission chairman was quick to clarify that the report is “not recommending martial law.” (3) Whew! That sure is a relief (of course, it would be even more of a relief if the good chairman had not even felt the need to bring up the subject of martial law). There are a few changes we’re going to have to make though.
For starters, we need “more wiretaps on Americans.” That will show those fanatical bastards that we are getting serious about fighting a war on terrorism. We also need to start “using the Army to replace civilian law enforcement” (though how you tell the difference anymore between ‘civilian’ law enforcement and military personnel is beyond me). And even more importantly, we need to start “stigmatizing foreign students who switch their majors to science,” (4) lest they scurry back to the terrorist-harboring rogue state that they call home and start building nuclear warheads.
It’s also high time that we begin “loosening restrictions on the Central Intelligence Agency.” (1) Enough with the incredible restraint the agency has shown for the last fifty-three years – let’s put some real teeth into the CIA. For one thing, let’s “drop the guidelines that restrict the recruitment of unsavory informants who have committed human right abuses.” (2)
This is, of course, an age-old problem for the agency. In the past, guidelines have been so restrictive that mass murderers like Klaus Barbie were barely able to slip in the door. Rumor has it that Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson had to lie on his application to get on the payroll. It’s really rather foolish to think that an intelligence agency can function effectively without a few Nazis, Mafioso, drug lords and assassins on the roster. We’re trying to fight a war here.

[snip] follows graph:

The first thing that should be immediately apparent is that terrorist attacks – or at least what the U.S. government considers terrorist attacks, which obviously does not include the acts committed by America or its various surrogates around the world – have shown an overall decline since reaching a peak in 1987. In fact, the years 1996-1998 showed the lowest levels of terrorist activity since the U.S. government started keeping records of such things. While there was a slight increase in the past year, the truth is that this increase was not by any means due to what any rational-minded person would consider ‘terrorist’ activity.
As the report acknowledges, the increase was due to three factors: “In Europe individuals mounted dozens of attacks to protest the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia and the Turkish authorities’ capture of Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) terrorist leader Abdullah Ocalan” and “radical youth gangs in Nigeria abducted and held for ransom more than three dozen foreign oil workers. The gangs held most of the hostages for a few days before releasing them unharmed.” In other words, in some parts of the world there was active resistance to flagrantly illegal acts committed by the United States, which included: the destruction of the infrastructure of a sovereign nation and the deliberate infliction of massive environmental damage on that same nation, all in violation of any number of international laws; the direct complicity in the kidnapping of the leader of a resistance movement leading a struggle against a corrupt U.S.-backed government whose ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Turkish and Iraqi Kurds has already claimed tens of thousands of lives, by the State Department’s own figures; and the century-long exploitation of the planet by U.S. oil interests. The next two charts illustrate the gravity of the risk that we here in America face from terrorist attacks.

link

Posted by: plushtown | Sep 12 2008 14:29 utc | 18

b #8, thanks for your link. i wasn’t paying as much attention to pakistan back then. the comment section is worth the ride especially for the cast of characters and commentary who show up later on (if they are indeed who they claim to be, Gul Agha??) plus an old cia map link showing a decent portion of baluchistan in afghan territory.
for a US centric view i recommend this 06 report from carnegie Pakistan: The Resurgence of Baluch Nationalism
check out pg 11 ‘exploiting islam’.
an old cia map linked from the comment section places a decent portion of baluchistan in afghan territory.
what was the reason to invade Afghanistan again?”
3 rules of real estate. location location location.
ring around the ruskie,
pocket full of nukie
ashes ashes we all fall

Posted by: annie | Sep 12 2008 15:38 utc | 20

The invasion of Afgh. was planned well before 9/11, as a specific enterprise, different from the long-standing tussle with Saddam, Iraq.
It was given the nod by the international community, well before. Everyone knew the US would take over after the Russkie withdrawal. It was considered minor, normal, good or bad, who knew: UN resolutions were vague, but the support of the Int’l community was there. there was UNOCAL, the Caspian sea oil, pipelines, the *dregs of the Cold War*, amongst many other things, etc. etc. Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panshir, was assasinated just before 9/11 – just one event that forms part of the whole picture, it is complex…
Rummy saying go for it and invade Afgh. and the Bush negotiations for the Taliban to give up Binny were pure theater for the American public, and their own way of falsely assuming the top of the heap position and exploiting 9/11 hysteria (getting more soldiers was a top priority) and blustering about with a show of US power, shock and awe bombing, after Yugoslavia, which was a success, it all seemed a steal. 9/11 was, in this affair, at best a PR boost.
I’m sorry I can’t link to the hundreds of articles before 9/11 or some good summary…google…I have no great summary link at hand..
For Iraq, a similar picture emerges.
The sanctions, long lasting and devastating, the oil-for-food program, and the outcome of Gulf War I, etc. spelled Saddam’s and thus Iraq’s doom…many, many years before 9/11.
9/11 did not change the fundamental geo-political landscape, it only provided an oppo to stir up the locals, a sense or urgency, which Bush and his minders went for with shark teeth and rousing fascistic nationalist discourse, as we all know. Fear and enemy branding..
They exploited happenings partly, perhaps largely, outside their control (say.) They got on the bandwagon, made the best of events, exploited them clumsily (Iraq was responsible for 9/11, Atta met an Islamist in Prague, etc.)
There can be no genuine grieving for 9/11 victims in the US.
Many Americans understand or suspect that the US itself – some internal forces, factions – was somehow responsible or complicit, or purposely negligent, that no investigation was done, that no culprits have been arrested, that no explanations have been given, reparations don’t exist (footnotes about hush money skipped), and victims are ignored. (See ground zero workers, the Family truthers, odd ceremonies, including at Arlington, etc.)
Nothing is known about the terrorists, their finances, their infiltration of airports, etc., about the collapses, about NORAD stand-down, etc. It is all, *move on*, nothing to see here, Islamic terrorists are responsible.
This post is too long …. Americans (most, etc.) don’t care about Iraqi displaced or killed, now up to 6 million (…) and they also don’t care about 3,000 of their own being killed by some unknown forces in their own country…or at least not to the point where they demand some investigation, some answers.
9/11 is a topic that is dangerous to post about, once one leaves the terrain of ‘allowed’ 9/11 truth movement agit prop.
No, I am not hinting at ‘Zionist’ or ‘Mossad’ participation, though they knew about it in advance, like many others.

Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 12 2008 17:51 utc | 22