Terrorism Starts at Home

This is a lovely little lump of lines about the lair of lions in which we have been lied to in order to lay in. Yes, we have been terrorized, and, like getting punked by Aston Kutcher, that means we’ve been played for a fool by somebody who is most famous for being an idiot on national TV.

Despite the carnage of 9/11, terrorism has been a small-scale American danger in the years since, worse than shark attacks, but not much else. Like a wizard, however, what Osama bin Laden and his suicide bombers did that day was create an instant sense of an enemy so big, so powerful, that Americans found “war” a reasonable response; big enough for those who wanted an international police action against Al Qaeda to be laughed out of the room; big enough to launch an invasion of revenge against Iraq, a country unrelated to Al Qaeda; big enough, in fact, to essentially declare war on the world. It took next to no time for top administration officials to begin talking about targeting 60 countries, and as journalist Ron Suskind has reported, within six days of the attack, the CIA had topped that figure, presenting President Bush with a “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” a plan that targeted terrorists in 80 countries.

What’s remarkable is how little the disjuncture between the scope and scale of the global war that was almost instantly launched and the actual enemy at hand was ever noted here. You could certainly make a reasonable argument that, in these years, Washington has largely fought no one—and lost. Everywhere it went, it created enemies who had, previously, hardly existed and the process is ongoing.

There are a few phrases in here that leave a bad taste on my ear’s tongue- any time anybody uses the term “shadow government,” I question if they really believe there can be such a thing as an illuminated government- but the basic facts are irrefutable. The article starts out with the obvious and then delves deep into the obliviousness of the oligarchy leading the country towards militaristic overreach.

Without 9/11 and the perpetual “wartime” that followed, along with the heavily promoted threat of terrorists ready to strike and potentially capable of wielding biological, chemical or even nuclear weapons, we would have no Department of Homeland Security nor the lucrative mini-homeland-security complex that surrounds it; the 17-outfit US Intelligence Community with its massive $75 billion official budget would have been far less impressive; our endless drone wars and the “drone lobby” that goes with them might never have developed; and the US military would not have an ever growing secret military, the Joint Special Operations Command, gestating inside it—effectively the president’s private army, air force and navy—and already conducting largely secret operations across much of the planet.

For all of this to happen, there had to be an enemy-industrial complex as well, a network of crucial figures and institutions ready to pump up the threat we faced and convince Americans that we were in a world so dangerous that rights, liberty and privacy were small things to sacrifice for American safety. In short, any number of interests from Bush administration figures eager to “sweep it all up” and do whatever they wanted in the world to weapons makers, lobbyists, surveillance outfits, think tanks, military intellectuals, assorted pundits… well, the whole national and homeland security racket and its various hangers-on had an interest in beefing up the enemy.

Give it a read, why don’cha, hey?