printWhat was/is a greater danger to the republic of blessed memory: the (now-dead) Osama bin Laden, or the state apparatus installed in his honor? You tell me.
In July of 2010, the Congressional Research Service estimated that “the United States had spent more than $1 trillion on wars since the September 11, 2001.” That was in 2010.
For all the din being made over the opportunity to cut back on so-called counter-terrorism efforts now that bin Laden is dead—you and I know that’s never going to happen.
Since 9/11, our overlords who art in DC have doubled the defense budget, adding a Department of Homeland Security that took us from passing through a metal detector in our travels to genital manipulation and irradiation.
The police state perfected under the now fully rehabilitated “W,” and perpetuated under Obama his successor, is considered a co-equal branch of government. Your Fourth Amendment rights come with multiplying exclusionary clauses, not least that an agent of the state has the right to treat those who still travel (I try not to) like meat in a meatpacking factory.
The budget allotted to the repugnant TSA agents comes to $6.3 billion annually. According to Randall Holcombe of the Independent Institute, “The damage al Qaeda’s attack caused when it destroyed the World Trade Center was about $10 billion.”
In her familiar smarmy style, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow waxed nostalgic about the pre-9/11 era. She managed some valid points: “Ten years ago, before 9/11, the U.S. defense budget was half the size that it is now.
Ten years ago, before 9/11, there was no Department of Homeland Security. Had someone suggested that there ought to be one, you probably would have teased them for using a weird word like homeland.
Ten years ago before 9/11, you walked through a metal detector to get through an airplane, sure, but this was the kind of thing you‘d only do maybe on a third date. Sometimes on your flight, even the pilots would keep the cockpit door open and you could see them work and you could see the world fly by through their windshield if you peered down the aisle.
… Before 9/11, the U.S. legal history of torture was of our government prosecuting people for that. Wartime was no excuse. [Really?]
Before 9/11, the National Security Agency having access to everybody‘s emails and phone calls and texts and bank records and everything would have been a scandal.
Before 9/11, we did not have a new militarized intelligence bureaucracy that ‘The Washington Post’ described as an additional 1,271 government organizations, 1,931 private companies and an estimated 854,000 people holding top secret security clearances.
Before 9/11, no one in politics and private life talked about Article III Courts. Courted called for under the Constitution because those were just what courts were. We didn‘t have anything but Article III courts. Why would we?
Before 9/11, we didn‘t drop bombs using flying robots.
Before 9/11, we had not lost 3,000 people in Lower Manhattan and at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Before 9/11, we did not have 2.2 million Americans who are Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and we did not have the national promise to do right by them as a country in respecting their service.
Before 9/11, we had not lost more than 6,000 of those veterans in our post-9/11 wars before U.S. forces finally founder and killed Osama bin Laden.
If you were a kid when 9/11 happened, it may be hard to imagine our country without all of these things in place.
If you were an adult when 9/11 happened, you probably never could have believed this is how we would have chosen to spend the decade after.”
I have a question. Obama comes from a background that I’d call pacifist in nature. I recall he wrote an article in college against nuclear proliferation. My point being, he comes from a perspective that is very college undergrad, youthful Kumbaya, non-interventionist. Later he made his mark against Hillary Clinton as being against “dumb” wars; and he threw a bone to middle American voters by saying he wasn’t “against all wars”.
Why does he feel the need to continue so much of WBush’s foreign policy approach (including enhanced interrogation, GITMO, a prolonged staged withdrawal, drone attacks, etc). It’s against what I suspect his ideology is, so whom is he pandering to? Is it a simple matter of trying to please moderate, centrist, pro-war voters? The guy slammed Obamacare down everyone’s throat even as he realized how unpopular it was. The guy won a Nobel Peace Prize. Not even Krauthammer and his ilk could be too surprised if Obama withdrew troops from Afghanistan, closed down Gitmo, and adopted a Ron Paul approach to foreign policy. I think more Americans support Paul’s foreign policy ideas than Obamacare.
It is odd that some phantom who in the last 20 years was only seen by trusted fiends Zawahari, Puxatawney Phil, Ahab the Arab, and Ali Baba and produced occasional tapes to Al Jazeera and then gets murdered and disposed at by Secret Seals Groucho Harpo Chico and Zeppo can inspire so much blather.
Not only has this country changed, it has changed for the worse. We are more in danger from ourselves – both our lives and liberties from the bankrupt police state we are turning into.
Sunny, I doubt that the media manipulated mobs who show up waving USA USA whenever we assassinate an Osama or bomb Khadaffi’s granddaughter or tear down Saddam’s statue cares much for the foreign policy of Ron Paul, Ilana Mercer, Myron Pauli, Dennis Kuchinch and other “hate America pacifists”. The German people were gleefully Seig Heiling a psychotic mass murderer and only grew skeptical when Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s boys were raping their way from Minsk to Berlin and when Hap Arnold was dropping bombs over Hamburg and Dresden.
Remember how the “protest the TSA movement” fizzled out last November?? As Judge Napolitano put it, we are a nation of sheep. Bahhhhhh.
After you wrote the above comments, Ilana, similar to previous versions of this list of the crimes of totalitarianism, it seems strange to me that you usually deny the idea of conspiracies. Could it be that the New World Order totalitarian conspiracy is slowly accomplishing everthing that it intends, that many religious and political and military aspects of recent history has been an intentional act of destruction of EVERYTHING on all sides of the political and religious spectrum that opposes the New World Order totalitarian conspiracy, whether the destruction of American Christian Democracy or Islamic totalitarianism?
Is it not obvious that among the primary objectives of this charade is to condition the public to accept that notion that the extrajudicial murder by the government is morally and legally permissible?
I think the follow-up is the key part here. If Obama seizes this moment & uses it as a reason to draw down American foreign commitments & slash our ridiculously corrupt and unsustainable military-industrial complex then he deserves praise. If not, then scorn.