By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com
September 11, 2001. It’s 22 years since that horrendous day. Still too soon to tell you what I really think.
Except for this: the 343 firefighters, including Great Neck’s own Jon Ielpi, were true heroes of the highest magnitude. The 40 passengers and crew aboard Flight 43 who made a decision to bring down the plane in a field in Pennsylvania in order to protect the likely target of the Capitol, were bona fide heroes.
The 3,000 who died in the Twin Towers and at the Pentagon were not heroes. They were victims. No different than the 3,000 people murdered EACH and EVERY month by America’s senseless gun violence. No doubt there are true heroes among them, who do their best to bring down the perpetrator but most were just living when their lives were snuffed out.
Within days of 9/11, Congress passed the Patriot Act, giving the government the right to monitor anyone deemed suspicious, like checking what library books you consulted without the librarian being able to let you know you are being investigated.
Within days of 9/11, anybody traveling on an airplane had to take off their shoes; as soon as they had the machines, people were x-rayed to their underwear, patted down because one wannabe terrorist had a match in his shoe and another wore an explosive in his underpants. (But masks to protect others from a deadly virus, is an intolerable violation of your freedom.)
Since September 11, 2001, over 800,000 – 800,000! – have been killed with guns, the equivalent of a 9/11 each and every month – compared to the 15,000 American soldiers and contractors who died in the 20 years of Afghanistan and Iraq wars to avenge 9/11. Gun violence has become the number one killer of children taking the lives of 12 each day. The United States is the only country in the world where this happens and the only country in the world where guns outnumber people (120 to 100).
Tree of Life Synagogue. Topps Supermarket, Pulse Nightclub, A Las Vegas concert. A July 4th parade. Walmart. McDonalds. Charleston church. Movie theater. Shopping mall.
Does the government react as it did after September 11 to protect Americans from this domestic, home-grown, daily threat of terrorism? To the contrary, the radical rightwingers on the Supreme Court has actually weakened the ability of states to protect their residents from gun violence; other maniacal courts have declared unconstitutional Red Flag laws to bar abusers and those in mental distress from possessing a gun. Congress created a “no-fly” list, but terrorists on the list can still freely purchase a gun.
Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Parkland, Columbine.
September 11 follows soon after the first days of school. Now our children have to go through the trauma of “active shooter” drills, and hundreds of thousands of children have lived through the real thing, some even multiple times.
Students exposed to shootings at their schools are more likely to have mental health issues, stay home from school, get held back or drop out, are less likely to graduate high school, go to college or graduate college, and they are less likely to be employed and have lower earnings in their mid-20s. (See: Surviving a school shooting: Impacts on the mental health, education, and earnings of American youth.
Schools now spend $2.7 billion on security EACH YEAR, turning buildings into prisons instead of centers for learning.
Maybe instead of once again spending hours at the September 11 Memorial reciting each and every one of the 3,000-plus names murdered 22 years ago (hundreds more from illnesses contracted), we should recite the 48,000 names of people died by guns just this past year. Or maybe we should just recite the names of the children murdered in their classrooms. We don’t because just as the Sept. 11th memorials intended to engender support for policies, they might inspire actual efforts to prevent gun violence.
And maybe in 22 more years, I will feel free enough to tell you what I really think of why we have turned September 11 into a sainted day, and the site of the Twin Towers hallowed ground.
But it has to do with the fact that 9/11 was the greatest failure of government in history – far greater than Pearl Harbor given the intelligence gathering they had in 2001. No one could have imagined commercial planes being used as bombs? The G7 had already been relocated because of that precise threat; the Millennial terror attack using commercial aircraft had already been foiled. After the dust of 9/11 had settled, they found the NSA had intercepted a trove of messages from Sept 8-10 detailing plans for the attack that were untranslated. (I’ve suspected it was because of the backlog created when Bush fired gay translators.)
And what if the September 11 attacks were not the “Who could have imagined?” surprise the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield neocon administration made it out to be. Is it possible our administration was that inept?
Four planes flew around for two hours without being intercepted or challenged. Passengers had enough time to call their loved ones, give updates and reports. But no response from the Air Force.
One might understand the first plane – a tragic accident. The second plane – no longer an accident. So how do you allow two more planes that have been identified as hijacked to just fly around?
It’s only after the fourth plane crashes that all planes are grounded (except for the planes carrying bin Laden’s relatives and wealthy Saudis out of the USA; notably, several bin Laden relatives were investors in Carlyle Group with ex-POTUS George Bush).
On the other hand, September 11 proved convenient to the “Project for the New American Century” neocon plan which sought a Pearl Harbor-like tragedy to unite support and quash dissent or questioning – evident by the implausible 80% “approval” ratings for George W. Bush after he put himself on top of a fire truck at Groundzero and bellowed with a bullhorn, “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." Instead, Bush launched an invasion of Iraq,
Bush used 9/11 – the collective victimization and mass desire for vengeance - as an excuse to invade Iraq, actually diverting resources from Afghanistan, the HQ for the 9/11 attack, using the lie that Saddam Hussein had aided the attack (not Saudi Arabia, where Osama bin Ladin and 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers came from). It was another stunning example of useful ineptitude that fit into the objective of taking over a major oil supplier and providing the US a base to control the Middle East, while shutting down any domestic opposition as unpatriotic. And it achieved the objective: Bush, now a wartime president, was reelected, this time, with a majority of the popular vote.
500,000 Iraqis were killed during the Iraq War between 2003-11, according to studies by four universities including Washington University. If there were actual justice, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld would be tried as war criminals instead of a two-term administration.
And 9/11 has made millionaires, powerbrokers and celebrities out of people like Rudy Giuliani and Erik Prince.
A study by the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies calculates that in the 20 year period since September 11, 2001 through 2021, the United States has spent $21 trillion on ‘militarization, surveillance, and repression.”
“Twenty years after 9/11, the war on terror has remade the U.S. into a far more militarized actor, both around the world and at home. The human costs of this evolution are many — including mass incarceration, widespread surveillance, the violent repression of immigrant communities, and hundreds of thousands of lives lost to war and violence.”
The $21 trillion spent on the security state “have shown us that the U.S. has the capacity and political will to invest in our biggest priorities. But the COVID-19 pandemic, the January 6 Capitol insurrection, wildfires raging in the West, and even the fall of Afghanistan have shown us that these investments cannot buy us safety. The next 20 years present an opportunity to reconsider where we need to reinvest for a better future.”
With $21 trillion to build and maintain the security state, there is no real incentive to solve problems that are too profitable not to solve.
And yet, Republicans fought against giving New York Citydisaster aid after 9/11, then blocked ongoing health care, when some 400,000 people are estimated to have been subjected to cancer-causing impacts; the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act only passed in 2010, with a Democratic Congress and White House.
But you aren’t allowed to question or say anything because it might offend or arouse pain for survivors to consider that September 11 never should have happened at all. And that is why we still recite the names of 3,000 people every September 11th.
__________________________
© 2023 News & Photo Features Syndicate, a division of Workstyles, Inc. All rights reserved. For editorial feature and photo information, go to www.news-photos-features.com, email editor@news-photos-features.com. Blogging at www.dailykos.com/blogs/NewsPhotosFeatures. ‘Like’ us on facebook.com/KarenBRubin, Tweet @KarenBRubin