"Statists love to say that 9/11 changed the world. Actually, it didn’t change anything insofar as the federal government is concerned. It continued doing the same things it was doing prior to 9/11 and even expanded them. 9/11 did change our country though, especially with respect to the degradation of liberty and conscience".-Jacob Hornberger
"Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor safety"-Benjamin Franklin
"The U.S. government has learned absolutely nothing since 9/11. Instead of the occasion being a time to reassess a century of bad foreign policy, it was used as an excuse to start two wars against countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 and accelerate the destruction of American freedoms. And now, ten years later, the anniversary of 9/11 will be used to lionize the police state, the warfare state, and the national security state while justifying even more wars."-Laurence M. Vance
It has been a decade since that tragic day when 19 Saudi terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center and one airliner into the Pentagon. It is estimated that around 3000 Americans lost their lives in that attack. The country was rightfully angry and wanted to avenge those who died. But even to this day, not a whole lot of people contemplate the consequences of the actions the U.S. government took after the 9/11 attacks, or even ask themselves if things could have been done differently.
No, Americans continue to blindly believe that 9/11 changed everything. Many Americans seem convinced that the policies that the U.S. government pursued in the aftermath of 9/11 were somehow necessary and just. Americans seem willing to give up liberty for security, but in the end, we have neither liberty or safety. What should rightfully be called tyranny, has been sold to the American people as "liberty" in an effort the cloak the bad and unjust deeds of the U.S. government.
Why did they attack us?
While this question seems redundant and unnecessary, we must ask ourselves this question in order to find out the motivation for carrying out the destructive attacks on 9/11. Unfortunately, from the very beginning, Americans have been sold a lie in regards to this question: that the attack somehow came about because the terrorist "hate our freedoms" or "hate our way of life". Americans have also been convinced that 9/11 resulted from too few entangling alliances and too few military interventions.
In an article entitled "All the Wrong 9/11Lessons", Michelle Malkin laments those who believe that 9/11 was caused by the aggressive and intervention foreign policy of the U.S. government:
A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Blame America-ism still permeates classrooms and the culture. A special 9/11 curriculum distributed in New Jersey schools advises teachers to "avoid graphic details or dramatizing the destruction" wrought by the 9/11 hijackers, and instead focus elementary school students' attention on broadly defined "intolerance" and "hurtful words."
But Michelle Malkin, and her fellow conservatives (and some liberals) are the ones who are drawing all the wrong lessons.
She is assuming that those (like myself and Ron Paul) who take the correct position that 9/11 came about because of our foreign policy of having troops in the Middle East, unconditional support for the State of Israel, and the continual bombing of Iraq are somehow "blaming America". First of all, we are not "blaming America"; we are placing the blame on the U.S. government's foreign policy of perpetual war and empire. Second, rarely does the U.S. government represent the American people. In fact, it has been determined to steal the liberties of the American people since 9/11 while euphemistically calling it "freedom".
So what motivated those terrible men to commit such a destructive act?
Said Osama Bin Laden:
It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. All of this and the world watch and hear, and not only didn’t respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its’ allies and under the cover of the iniquitous United Nations, the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves.
And in 1997 he said:
We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal, whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of the Prophet’s Night Travel Land.
Since there are more lengthy statements like this, I will give only one more, from Anwar al-Awlaki:
We are not against Americans for just being Americans. We are against evil and America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil. What we see from America is the invasion of [inaudible] countries, we see Abu Ghraib, Baghram and Guantanamo Bay, we see cruise missiles and cluster bombs and we have just seen in Yemen the death of 23 children and 17 women. We cannot stand idly in the face of such aggression and we will fight back and incite others to do the same. I for one was born in the U.S.; I lived in the U.S. for 21 years. America was my home. I was a preacher of Islam involved in non-violent Islamic activism. However, with the American invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. aggression against Muslims I could not reconcile between living in the U.S. and being a Muslim.
As James L. Payne has researched, when reading Bin Laden's published statements the "topic of imposing fundamentalist Muslim beliefs and practices on the West is essentially absent." Payne continues:
Bin Laden may be rigid and subjective in his perceptions, but his point of view is not without substance. Great Britain was the colonial master of many Muslim lands, including Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and especially Palestine, which, with the approval of the United States, the British turned over to the Jews for the state of Israel in 1948. U.S. military aid and military advisors have blanketed the Middle East for generations. The U.S. military has bases in Djibouti, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. It sent troops to Lebanon twice, in 1958 and 1983, and to Somalia in 1992. The U.S. Sixth Fleet, with forty ships and twenty-one thousand servicemen and women, patrols the eastern Mediterranean, and the Fifth Fleet, with fifteen thousand personnel, patrols the Persian Gulf. Its Carrier Strike Group and Expeditionary Strike Group are poised to deliver military might anywhere throughout the region. This great show of military power may have achieved little in the way of domination, but to a local Muslim it can certainly look vicious and threatening. Furthermore, American leaders have proclaimed the goal of spreading the American conception of democracy to the world. The neoconservatives have frankly urged the U.S. government to use military force to carry out this goal (see, for example, Kristol and Kagan 1996; Frum and Perle 2003, 278). Some might say this talk about spreading democracy by force is empty rhetoric for the most part, but to the man on the street in the Middle East it can certainly look like an aggressive program to impose American social and cultural values on Muslim lands. Shortly after 9/11, Bush described his war on terrorism as a “crusade,” a point that bin Laden didn’t miss: “The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouth [that America is waging a crusade against Muslim lands]”
But many Americans do not want to admit this truth: that our foreign policy is a huge motivating factor for terrorism and terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. This is not to say that the events of 9/11 were justified. What happened on that tragic day was terrible and those who commit such acts of violence must be punished, but by the full force of the law, not by war and military domination.
Aggressive War and Empire
Jacob Hornberger gives us a quick summary of the imperial escapades that took place after 9/11:
First, it invaded Afghanistan and effected regime change there by ousting the Afghan government and installing a crooked, corrupt, fraudulent, brutal dictatorial regime that would do the bidding of the U.S. Empire.
Second, it invaded Iraq for the purpose of effecting the regime change there that the 11 years of deadly sanctions had failed to accomplish.
Third, it instituted a program of torture, assassination, indefinite detention, abuse, and humiliation of people from the Middle East.
Fourth, it embarked on a spending and borrowing spree that now threatens the government with bankruptcy. What changed was the nature of freedom in America. The U.S. government used the attacks to assume the same types of emergency powers that U.S.-supported dictators in the Middle East had been exercising for decades against their own people.
After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Congress passed the unconstitutional “Authorization for Use of Military Force” resolution for Afghanistan. By doing this, Congress illegally transferred its war powers to the President. According to Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the power to “declare war”. But Congress did not declare war on Afghanistan, and would be unable to. The terrorists who committed the 9/11 attacks were not soldiers or agents from another nation-state. They were a stateless enemy. The best option for responding to the 9/11 attacks would have been to grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, which would allow bounty hunters to go hunt down and capture Bin Laden and his lieutenants. This would have saved us billions and billions of dollars, not to mention hundreds if not thousands of American soldiers’ lives. But instead, President Bush unconstitutionally invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. While U.S. and Northern Alliance forces quickly toppled the Taliban government, Osama Bin Laden escaped U.S. troops for the next 10 years.
The Taliban government did not attack the United States on 9/11. In fact, the U.S. government was sending millions of dollars to the Afghan government before 9/11. Now of course, we have showered countless amounts of money on our newfound subjects in Afghanistan.
Then there was Iraq. It wasn’t bad enough that our government was continually bombing that country for over 10 years while enforcing crippling economic sanctions that killed at least a half a million Iraqi children. Soon after 9/11, officials in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney soon began to beat the war drums and demand that the U.S. invade Iraq. In fact, there had been a desire to see the invasion of that country even before 9/11. The attacks only gave an excuse to see this desire implemented, and on March 19, 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq. Once again an “Authorization for Use of Military Force” resolution was passed. So once again, the President circumvented the Constitution and unconstitutionally invaded another country.
Now the United States is engaged in 5 wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen) with 2 more wars on the way (Syria, Iran).
The Costs of War
Anthony Gregory gives a quick summary of the costs of the wars the United States has been engaged in since 9/11:
Winslow Wheeler, Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Director of the Straus Military Reform Project, stresses the need to look at everything: the post-9/11 military operations, the aid to governments like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, the increased financial burden of domestic security, and the interest on deficit defense spending that financed these wars. He finds that "the federal costs already incurred would be from $3.2 to $3.9 trillion" -- even if the wars ended abruptly tomorrow. The scholars at the Eisenhower Study Group arrive at similar estimates.
We can also simply look at the effect on the defense budget over the last decade. Exorbitant Pentagon spending has always been touted as necessary to protect the country, yet ten years ago it was suddenly decided that this huge price tag was not nearly enough. Apparently all that defense and intelligence spending before 9/11, which failed to prevent the attack, was for something other than defense. In 2001, adjusted for inflation to today's dollars, the defense budget was just over $400 billion. After 9/11 the budget began rising at about eight percent a year. The latest funding request was for $707 billion. This doesn't include the ballooning security-related expenses in the Department of Homeland Security, State Department, or Department of Energy's nuclear weapon operations.
What was the full opportunity cost of all these wars? Few economists ask this question. What if these resources had been available for private savings and investment? What if the Americans and foreigners fighting had instead been working in the commercial sector, producing wealth? Perhaps the financial situation would look considerably better. The government is notorious for diverting money and energy from productive uses toward wasteful ones. Nothing is as destructive as war. Even the most just war imaginable is a disaster for the economy, as the great economist Ludwig von Mises explained.
Assaulting the Constitution and Liberty
Another consequence of the policies implemented by the U.S. government since 9/11 has been the loss of liberty here at home and the further burying of the American Republic.
Jacob Hornberger gives us a quick summary of the consequences of trading liberty for security since 9/11:
The military power to seize Americans and incarcerate, torture, and detain them indefinitely as “enemy combatants” in the war on terrorism. The power to spy on and monitor people’s email and telephone calls. The power to search people’s homes and financial institutions in secret. The power to grope people’s private parts at airports, including those of children. The Patriot Act. Guantanamo Bay. Kangaroo tribunals. Denial of due process.
Anthony Gregory asks whether or not our freedoms are actually being defended:
It doesn’t appear to be the First Amendment’s freedoms of speech and association. Otherwise it would be hard to explain the National Security Letters that forbid their recipients from telling anyone, even a lawyer or spouse, that the FBI is monitoring them. It would be difficult to understand the Bush administration’s “free speech zones” that kept war protesters far from presidential appearances, or U.S. spying on peace activists under both administrations. It would be perplexing that Obama would detain Bradley Manning for the crime of releasing incriminating information about the U.S. warfare state, or that his administration’s officials would hint that WikiLeaks’s project of exposing government wrongdoing should be shut down.
Maybe the government has mostly been protecting Americans’ right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Then again, it would be confusing that both Bush and Obama would stand by the USA PATRIOT Act, which has eroded the Fourth Amendment, forced businesses to spy on their customers and hand information over to the Justice Department, loosened restrictions for wiretapping, and empowered agents to conduct special searches without alerting Americans right away that their property had been searched. It would also be a mystery why both Bush and Obama have stood by the National Security Administation’s power to spy on American telecommunications without a warrant. Then there is the whole question of the Transportation Security Administration, which summarily searches American airline passengers, their luggage, and their persons, forcing them to go through invasive pat-downs and potentially dangerous irradiating “porno-scanners.”
Perhaps the freedom being defended is the long-celebrated right to due process and habeas corpus for those detained by the government. That would be hard to reconcile, however, with the Bush administration’s roundup of hundreds of innocent aliens right after 9/11, the “material witness” doctrine that allowed for indefinite detention without charge, or the “enemy combatant” designation that, when pinned on someone by the president, even on a U.S. citizen, means there will be a total disregard for traditional due process. It would certainly make a puzzle out of Guantanamo, where some detainees have been determined innocent of all wrongdoing but are nevertheless kept detained; and it would be hard to make sense of the military commissions that deprive subjects of both the standard protections of criminal suspects or those of prisoners of war. The secret evidence used in many cases in the last ten years certainly seems to be in tension with the right to confront one’s accuser and the evidence laid against one. And Obama’s very concept of “prolonged detention” and his administration’s fighting the courts on numerous habeas corpus cases are a little bit of an enigma if indeed the right to due process is what our leaders have in mind when they’re waging these wars for our freedoms.
Maybe it’s the right not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment that Bush and Obama have been defending! Although that would seem to be in conflict with the mistreatment of whisteblower Bradley Manning, the abuse that continues at Guantanamo, the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the psychological and sexual abuse that became a regular interrogation practice throughout Iraq and other U.S.-controlled areas at the height of the war on terror.
Other freedoms that haven’t seemed to be enhanced, much less defended by the war on terrorism, include the right to travel, financial freedom, the right to bear arms, and the right to a fair civil proceeding against government agents who have violated one’s liberties. Economic freedom hasn’t exactly blossomed since 9/11. Come to think of it, most of the freedoms that have been held as sacred for so long in this country aren’t exactly easy targets for terrorists to undermine in the first place; free speech, due process, privacy, and other such civil liberties are much easier for governments to compromise than for terrorists to take away.
Conclusion
We as Americans need to ask ourselves these questions as we reflect on 9/11: should we ever trade liberty for security? Should the Federal government disobey the Constitution, even in times of war? Should the U.S. be engaged in perpetual war for perpetual peace? What if our foreign policy of the past century has been deeply flawed and has not served to defend this country? What if we finally realize that terrorism is a predictable and unfortunate consequence of a foreign policy of empire and interventionism and has nothing to do with us being free and prosperous?
We need to ask ourselves these questions and contemplate changing the policies that the Federal government has enacted since 9/11. Failure to do so will mean the end of peace, liberty, the Constitution and the American Republic.
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