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Robert Scheer: 9/11 Unleashed American Barbarism
What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan, as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would then-Vice President Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?
As assaults on a society go, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war.
The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our own.
Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the Pentagon doesn’t compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of Hiroshima’s mayor two years ago: “That fateful summer, 8:15 a.m. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast — silence — hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted.”
We assumed that the Japanese people would readily forgive us, and having been raised in the spirit of total obedience to their emperor, they accommodated our occupation quite well, even injecting industrial-grade silicon into their women’s breasts to satisfy the erotic appetites of our soldiers.
Americans who blithely claim the moral high ground with every pledge of allegiance to a flag that, because it is American, is assumed to have never been sullied by imperial greed or moral contradiction expect no less than instant and full forgiveness for our “mistakes.” Only last month, four decades after he led the massacre of 500 villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, did former Army Lt. William Calley express “regret” for his crimes. He served no time in prison for the point-blank shooting of toddlers, thanks to the commutation of his sentence by President Richard Nixon, who might have been anticipating his own need for a presidential pardon.
In blind and wrathful retaliation for Sept. 11, we wreaked havoc on Iraq, a nation that our then-president knew had not attacked us, and we continue to slaughter peasants in Afghanistan who aren’t able to find Manhattan on a map.
We, a people whose nation has never suffered a long and widespread occupation, easily gave vent to our most barbaric impulses, assuming the absolute right to arrest and torture anyone anywhere in the world without revealing his identity, let alone respecting a single one of those God-given rights that we claim for ourselves alone. And even when we identify the few we hold responsible for the attacks on our soil, we refuse them public and fair trials even after years of torturing them.
But we do have a saving grace for our experiment in democracy — although unfortunately it did not exist in the Supreme Court or Congress as a barrier to an imperial vice presidency. It is the power of the lone whistle-blower of conscience, occasionally given voice in what remains of our free press and which can influence presidential elections, as happened quite dramatically this last time around.
There are those like Joe Wilson, who exposed presidential fraud masquerading as national security concern over bogus Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and more recently the truth-telling of Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI agent and lead interrogator of terrorists.
In Sunday’s New York Times, Soufan, who was involved in obtaining much reliable information from prisoners before they were tortured, observed that the recently released memos cited by Cheney to back his argument that torture was efficient actually “fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.”
So, Cheney is again proved wrong, but if there had been a larger attack on Sept. 11, I doubt whether many free souls would be around now to tell him so.
— TruthDig.com editor in chief Robert Scheer‘s new book is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. Click here for more information. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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» on 09.12.09 @ 07:10 AM
Why don’t you just put your tail back between your legs and get back in the closet.
» on 09.12.09 @ 09:21 AM
I’m glad for the fact that you have the freedoms to write this crap. I’ll keep my American Barbarism, what you don’t get is that the Islam Fascist’s have been at war with America since 1979 the problem is that we never fought back. If you want to have a conversation with them you can go over there and talk and when you don’t convert to Islam and they take the sword to you neck you will be rethinking your stance. Go back to you liberal hole. One more thing there were WMD’s in Iraq no matter how much you ignore it. Why else would Sadamm Kick out UN (Other wise known as United Nations of Stupid) inspectors.
Forget God Bless America, America needs to bless God
» on 09.12.09 @ 01:07 PM
This article erroneously refers to House of Representatives member Joe Wilson, and has a link to his website instead of Valerie Plame’s husband: former ambassador Joe Wilson.
[Noozhawk’s note: The error has been corrected. Thank you.]
» on 09.12.09 @ 04:24 PM
You sound like a pacifist masquerading as a communist.
» on 09.12.09 @ 06:07 PM
Mr. Scheer is of the enemy. He identifies with the enemy, he sympathizes with the enemy, and he supports the enemy. Mr. Scheer is a traitor. Mr. Scheer is un-American. Mr. Scheer is an extremist. Mr. Scheer is my enemy.
Mr. Scheer is of the mindset that allowed governments to murder upwards of 262,000,000 people in the 20th century.
One of the governments Mr. Scheer sympathizes with is Imperial Japan because of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Well, between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered about 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended that horror and saved the world; seems like a fair trade to me.
Yet, Mr. Scheer has never met a totalitarian atrocity he could not rationalize as morally superior to anything done by the United States of America.
The irony is that in any of the hell holes he defends, Mr. Scheer’s idiocy would make him a target and he would not last a New York second.
» on 09.12.09 @ 06:54 PM
You make me puke.
» on 09.12.09 @ 07:58 PM
My goodness. Robert Scheer is certainly angry and clearly disgusted with the United States. I suppose that Bob would consider us the intellectual and moral children of the Vandals and Visagoths sacking Roman cities. Oops, oh gosh, a lot of us actually are. Son of a gun.
And, Bobby it’s a good thing that we are. Utopian idiots seem to never “get” the fact that there are monsters out there. To have a civil society domestically, hard men need to do bad things to folks elsewhere that we don’t like, sometimes.
I am sorry that this offends your delicate sensibilities. But, that’s tough toenails, Bobby. You know, why don’t you move to Canada and whine about things? Or how about Islamabad? I mean, guy, you could demonstrate your moral superiority to the locals!
» on 09.12.09 @ 08:45 PM
My my, another self=loathing American. It must be heck waking up in the morning.
» on 09.12.09 @ 09:44 PM
i took a class from Scheer at USC and enjoyed it thoroughly. I am a very liberal person and am staunchly against the war in Iraq, but this is absolutely ridiculous. He certainly makes a living off of hating his own country. That’s not an overstatement. This is absolute “blind and wrathful” writing by a whack-job. Way over the line…. In fact, it’s downright offensive… By the way, the eye-melting thing was so, so touching Bobby. You have such a gift! A lot more innocent little girls would have died if the war wasn’t ended right then and there in 1945. And the silicon-injecting comment has tha flavor of a WWII-era propagandist. No wonder I didn’t get an A…
» on 09.12.09 @ 09:59 PM
Get the hook. The hook! This guy needs to dragged off the stage. If you hate America sooooo much, please I’ll buy you a ticket to the Middle East!
» on 09.13.09 @ 05:38 PM
My goodness. Robert Scheer is certainly angry and clearly disgusted with the United States. I suppose that Bob would consider us the intellectual and moral children of the Vandals and Visagoths sacking Roman cities. Oops, oh gosh, a lot of us actually are. Son of a gun.
And, Bobby it’s a good thing that we are. Utopian idiots seem to never “get” the fact that there are monsters out there. To have a civil society domestically, hard men need to do bad things to folks elsewhere that we don’t like, sometimes.
I am sorry that this offends your delicate sensibilities. But, that’s tough toenails, Bobby. You know, why don’t you move to Canada and whine about things? Or how about Islamabad? I mean, guy, you could demonstrate your moral superiority to the locals!
» on 09.16.09 @ 06:39 AM
For an accounting of events from “a front row seat in the Pentagon” after the third of four aircraft fatal accidents-by-design on 9/11/2001, highly recommend reading memoirs in office by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, USAF General Richard B. Myers, “Eyes on the Horizon ...” [Simon & Schuster, 2009). Ealirer today [Sept. 16th], I posted a review to the author’s page of this book at the <AMAZON.com> web site. Titled- ‘THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK ...’! See especially General Myers’ Part IV - last two prescriptive chapters! -30-
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