We Are Lost
“We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. Nothing could stop you except perhaps retaliation in kind.” – Osama Bin Laden, May 1998, ABC interview
Our nation is in one of its darkest times. Most Americans are aware of the controversy, but most do not realize the full extent of our corruption. We live in a time when our president blatantly lies to us, our media spreads false propaganda, our military destroys and occupies nations who did nothing to us, our government assumes we are traitors, and we don’t even think twice about it. Even the motives behind the attack on the Word Trade Center are a mystery to most Americans.
We Had It Coming
We are the aggressors in this war. We got involved in the Gulf War because we had alliances to maintain (which is something to cover in a future article). After the Gulf War, though, we kept about 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. From there, we enforced no-fly zones over Iraq and attacked them with cruise missiles and bombs. On top of all this, Saudi Arabia contains the most important sites in Islam, namely Mecca and Medina, and our presence alone, even ignoring our aggressive actions while there, was insulting to Muslims. We, as part of the UN, made Israel an independent nation, ripping the holy land from the hands of the Islamic Middle East, then we played the biggest military role in maintaining that independence, then we made such aggressive actions against Iraq, even during a “peacetime,” that there really is no other way to interpret us but as a threat to the entire Middle East. We clearly didn’t sympathize with the Muslims, and we clearly didn’t care. We had alliances and agendas to protect, all the while destroying everything they have.
Bin Laden made his grievances public, publishing fatwas in 1996 and 1998 urging Muslims to kill Americans, both military and civilian. The 1998 fatwa listed particularly clearly his grievances against the United States:
“First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
“If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
“Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
“So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
“Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.” – Osama Bin Laden, 1998 fatwa, translated by the FAS
Bin Laden also tried to clear up exactly why he thought it was appropriate to attack U.S. civilians instead of just military targets. It is too large to quote directly, but here is a summary of a small portion of Bin Laden’s Letter to America in 2002:
- The fact that Americans are free means that you are responsible for the actions of your government.
- American citizens fund the bombers, tanks, armies, and fleets because your government continues to provide funds for Israel using tax dollars.
- The American army, who is also fighting alongside the Jews, is part of the American people.
- The American people also fund the American forces.
- Therefore, the American people are guilty.
- Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
I’m not trying to say that we could have even accurately predicted an attack, at least not the exact time and nature of it. I’m also not trying to say that I would have done the same thing that Bin Laden did. I’m trying to say that we deserved it. At least, that is certainly what Bin Laden thinks.
For more Bin Laden quotes about the reasons for the attacks, check out this page.
Lies
I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that the Bush administration is lying to us.
“Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” – George Bush, September 20, 2001
To this day, the Bush administration supports this as fact. The terrorists just hate freedom. They hate freedom so badly that they would kill thousands of people just to hurt free people. The worst part is how many Americans believe this crap.
Just as bad as Bush is the mainstream media, especially televised media. Everything they report seems to be either a lie or an incomplete picture. They take their interpretations too far, and we end up getting something more like a national pep rally than news. Anybody who gets on the Internet and checks up on the facts from credible, first-hand sources can then decide for themselves what to make of the mainstream media’s interpretations, but, please, don’t depend on the mainstream, especially televised, media anymore.
Logical Problems with a War on Terrorism
There is something fundamentally wrong with declaring a war on terrorism.
“No group or nation should mistake America’s intentions. We will not rest until terrorist groups of global reach have been found, have been stopped, and have been defeated.” – George Bush, November 6, 2001
What are we doing in Iraq now? We certainly didn’t go after terrorism there. The WMDs that were reportedly there have not been found (as if mere possession should be cause for war), and all alleged cooperative ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda have been found to be false, even before we invaded Iraq. If Hussein and Bin Laden were cooperating and there had been any WMDs in Iraq, there would have been a lot more dead American citizens than the under 3,000 lives lost on 9/11. We are now making plans to attack Iran. They haven’t even done anything to us yet, just like Iraq. We have not and are not stopping terrorism by invading these countries, yet we still are doing it.
Why is this happening? It’s because you just can’t declare war on subnational groups. If a nation allows our military to enter and track people down, they have surrendered to us. No effort in this war will be without nation-level conflict. These nations do not deserve to be torn apart by war. Terrorism is criminal, not national. It might be a nation’s responsibility to suppress terrorists on their own soil, but they have no responsibility to us for the actions of terrorists on our soil.
Habeas Corpus
Habeas corpus is the right to challenge your own imprisonment in the court system. If there ever was an important restriction on government enforcement of laws, this is it. Habeas corpus has been revoked for non-citizens, and it has been hinted by Attorney General Gonzales that even citizens don’t have Constitutional guarantees to habeas corpus, implying that we could potentially lose the right in the future. The wording in the Constitution (found in Article I, Section 9) regarding habeas corpus says that it is permissible to suspend habeas corpus in times of rebellion or invasion, but neither of those circumstances have arisen. Some might claim that we could be invaded, but that simply hasn’t happened. Terrorist attacks are clearly not an invasion; it is definitely criminal and violent, but the word “invasion” simply can’t apply. It does not warrant a violation of the basic principles of government.
Even despite rulings by the Supreme Court within the last few years protecting habeas corpus, the government continues to keep prisoners in Guantanamo Bay under the claim that it’s acceptable because it’s not on American soil. Is nitpicking like this really the way a government should be allowed to run? There is always a loophole in legalese, but it should be the government’s responsibility to be faithful to the underlying purpose of a ruling. If we can’t even make our own government do that, even with the backing of the Supreme Court, there is something very broken about the way we are doing things.
The Bush administration would like us to believe that the suspension of habeas corpus is the only way to combat terrorism. This just shows that they would rather make things easy than ethical.
Where Does It End?
We have certainly set a lofty goal:
“[…] through the sustained effort to compress the scope and capability of terrorist organizations, isolate them regionally, and destroy them within state borders, the United States and its friends and allies will secure a world in which our children can live free from fear […].” – National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, page 12
How can our government seriously think they can rid our nation of fear? This is one of the surest signs of our government using fear as leverage to control its citizens. This administration is gaining power by convincing us that we are afraid.
Losing Freedom
The Patriot Act is the most clear infringement on our freedoms. It allows the government to monitor us without our knowledge and without justification, to seize our property arbitrarily, to arrest us without charges, to hold us indefinitely without trial, and to arrest us just for talking about it. This is a clear violation of our rights as specified by the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.
But it gets worse than that. The number of police officers needlessly attacking civilians is increasing rapidly. Protesters have been arrested for reading the Constitution in public (the First Amendment, at that). An ad titled “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” was officially denounced by both the Senate (72 to 25) and the House of Representatives (341 to 79) on the grounds that it was unpatriotic. In fact, most criticisms of the current administration are treated as treason. We don’t even actually own our own property, by current policy; the IRS does, and they will take it whenever they decide you aren’t contributing enough to the government on your own, despite the fact that there is no law or provision giving them the authority to audit you or even collect an income tax at all.
We Dropped the Ball
I urge my readers to very seriously look into these issues. You don’t have to take my word for any of this. Just read up on some historical context and keep an eye on the activities of Congress and the President. There is no excuse for allowing the nation to fall like this.
