NO ONE LEFT BEHIND (SIC)

Bomb-sniffing Dogs 'Left Behind' by US in Afghanistan Suffer Without Food & in Heat, Find New Home


In this picture taken on September 12, 2021, a dog, which was left behind during last month's chaotic evacuations from Afghanistan, rests inside a pet cage in a makeshift training center at the airport in Kabul. (AFP)

While it is unclear who the dogs belonged to, many were found in the section of the airport that was used by American forces.

AFP

KABUL
SEPTEMBER 13, 2021

In a makeshift training centre at Kabul airport, dozens of dogs that were left behind during last month’s chaotic evacuations from Afghanistan have found a new home — and new handlers.

While it is unclear who the dogs belonged to, many were found in the section of the airport that was used by American forces, and some were trained to sniff out explosives, their new handlers say.

They are among the remnants of the two-decade American intervention which ended with the hurried airlift of more than 120,000 people from Kabul as the Taliban returned to power.

Handler Hewad Azizi, who works for a company handling security at the airport, said he went out looking for abandoned dogs as soon as the last US soldier left.

“When I saw (the soldiers leaving) I went to save the dogs," he told AFP at the training centre, which faces hangars that were used for US planes and military equipment.

He found 30 — half of them in the area that was controlled by US forces. More were found in zones that belonged to former Afghan police.

The dogs are now being fed, cared for and trained by Azizi and his colleagues at the security company’s training centre, housed in two converted shipping containers separated by a weed-strewn strip of earth.

The United States pulled its final troops out of Afghanistan on August 30, ending America’s longest war just ahead of the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks that prompted the US-led invasion.

‘Bomb dogs’

Hours after the last soldier left, animal rights group PETA said in a statement that 60 bomb-sniffing dogs and 60 other “working dogs" were left behind by the US forces.

The group appealed to President Joe Biden “to take immediate action", warning that the dogs were “suffering in the heat without adequate access to food or water".

The Pentagon quickly denied that US military personnel abandoned some of their dogs at the airport.

“To correct erroneous reports, the US military did not leave any dogs in cages at Hamid Karzai International Airport, including the reported military working dogs," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby tweeted.

Azizi and his colleagues are not sure about the identity of the previous owners. All they are focusing on now is how to put them back to work when the airport returns to normal.

“We have done training with them to find out what they are used for exactly," he explained, adding that they have realised “they are bomb dogs".

Azizi’s favourite dog, Rex, a dark brown Malinois, is one of the recent discoveries.

Every day, he takes Rex for a walk in a small deserted area a few metres away from three old Afghan Air Force planes.

In a small stretch of land littered with bullet cases and empty bags of US military meal rations, he hides a box that smells like explosives and sends Rex to find it.

Seconds later, Rex returns with the box and is given a ball to play with as a reward.

“We train them to see how we can use them," explained Mohamad Mourid, a supervisor at the centre which operates under the umbrella of GAAC, the UAE-based company handling ground and security operations at the airport since last year.

“We feed them, give them water, and clean them."

Soon the dogs will be put to work as the airport, which shut for repairs after the evacuations, gradually reopens.

Cuban scientists reject 'Havana Syndrome' claims

SO DO CANADIAN SCIENTISTS

Cuban scientists said Monday there was no evidence for claims of US diplomats coming down with so-called "Havana Syndrome" on the island.

Agence France-Presse
September 13, 2021

Cuba (cubanismovineyards.com)


The mysterious affliction is said to cause headaches, nausea and possible brain damage, and is speculated to be caused by electronic weapons possibly wielded by a US rival such as Russia.

Several suspected cases have been reported among US officials and intelligence officers since 2016, first in Cuba, then in China, Germany, Australia, Taiwan and in Washington itself.

But a panel convened by the government of Communist Cuba -- 16 experts in a variety of fields and affiliated to the Cuban Academy of Sciences -- said the claims were not "scientifically acceptable," and there was "no scientific evidence of attacks" of this nature on Cuban soil.

"We conclude that the narrative of the 'mysterious syndrome' is not scientifically acceptable in any of its components," the panel said in a report published on Cubadebate, an official news site of the one-party state.

In July, the New Yorker magazine reported there had been dozens of new "Havana Syndrome" cases among US officials in Vienna, Austria since the beginning of 2021.

Last month, US Vice President Kamala Harris delayed a trip to Vietnam after the US embassy in Hanoi reported a possible case, raising concerns she could be a target.

- 'No novel syndrome' -

The Cuban expert report said some have accepted "as an axiom that attacks occurred in Havana."

"However, after four years, no evidence of attacks has appeared," and "neither the Cuban police, nor the FBI, nor the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have discovered evidence of 'attacks' on diplomats in Havana despite intense investigations."

The alleged incidents remain little understood and have sparked theories they were caused by a weapon that uses focused microwaves, ultrasound, poison or even a reaction to crickets.

The Cuban experts said, "No known form of energy can selectively cause brain damage (with laser-like spatial accuracy) under the conditions described for the alleged incidents in Havana."

They added most of the symptoms reported could be explained by disease, concluding: "There is no novel syndrome."

The panel said it would review any new evidence.

The syndrome has almost uniformly affected US officials, but in 2017, Canadian diplomats and their families in Havana reported several cases.

Some people have reported hearing focused, high-pitched or sharp sounds that left them nauseated.


Sometimes the afflicted had bloody noses, headaches or other symptoms resembling a concussion.

The administration of former president Donald Trump pulled US staff out of Havana and expelled Cuban diplomats from Washington, hinting that either the Cuban or Russian government was behind the alleged attacks.

Last year, a National Academy of Sciences study said one possible explanation could be pulsed, directed microwaves.


The CIA has created a task force to study the problem.

© 2021 AFP

Havana syndrome - Wikipedia

Pesticides or infectious agents

A 2019 study commissioned by Global Affairs Canada of 23 exposed Canadian diplomats, completed in May 2019, found "clinical, imaging, and biochemical evidence consistent with the hypothesis" that over-exposure to cholinesterase inhibitors (a class of neurotoxic pesticide) such as pyrethroids and organophosphates (OPs) as a cause of brain injury; the embassies and other places in Cuba had been sprayed frequently as an anti-Zika virus mosquito control measure.^[57][58][64] The study concluded that other possible causes could not be ruled out.^[57]

The 2020 National Academies study found that it was unlikely that "acute high-level exposure to OPs and/or pyrethroids contributed" to the illnesses, due to a lack of evidence of exposures to those pesticides or clinical histories consistent with such exposure.^[4]:23 However, the National Academies study committee "could not rule out the possibility, although slight, that exposure to insecticides, particularly OPs, increased susceptibility to the triggering factor(s) that caused the Embassy personnel cases."^[4]:23 The National Academies study committee also found it "highly unlikely" that an infectious disease (such as Zika virus, which was an epidemic in Cuba in 2016–17) caused the illnesses.^[4]:23–24

Long-secret FBI report reveals new connections between 9/11 hijackers and Saudi religious officials in the US

Pro Publica
September 13, 2021

NYFD Firefighter at Twi Towers site after 9/11 attacks (Photo: pixabay.com)

A long-suppressed FBI report on Saudi Arabia's connections to the 9/11 plot has revealed that Saudi religious officials stationed in the United States had more significant connections to two of the hijackers than has been previously known.

The 2016 report was released late Saturday night under an executive order from President Joe Biden, who promised to make it public no later than the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that killed 2,977 people and injured more than 6,000 others. The 16-page document was a final inventory of circumstantial evidence and leads from the FBI's investigation of Saudi ties to the plot; it was heavily redacted.

Nonetheless, lawyers for families of the 9/11 victims, who are suing the Saudi kingdom in federal court, said the document provided important support to their theory that a handful of Saudis connected to their government worked in concert to assist the first two Qaida hijackers sent to the United States in January 2000.

“This validates what we have been saying," said James Kreindler, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs. “The FBI agents working this case detailed a Saudi government support network that was working in 1999, 2000 and 2001 to provide the hijackers with everything they needed to mount the attacks — apartments, money, English lessons, flight school."

The Saudi government has always denied any role in the attacks, noting that al-Qaida and its former leader, Osama bin Laden, were sworn enemies of the royal family. But the 2016 report shows that FBI agents found evidence that several Saudi religious officials working in the United States had connections not only to people who assisted the hijackers but also to other Qaida operatives and suspected extremists. At the time, there were many Saudis in the country who had diplomatic credentials but were mainly involved in religious activity. The FBI later investigated many of them for extremism.

The FBI agents investigating possible Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks were part of a largely secret second phase of the bureau's examination of the plot, called Operation Encore. The story of that inquiry, and the obstacles it faced, was first revealed last year by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine.

The report released on Saturday was written by a senior analyst on the Encore team, John Nicholson, after the leader of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, Carlos Fernandez, decided with federal prosecutors to reassign Nicholson and the rest of his New York team, effectively shutting down their work.

Although the FBI stopped investigating the case, officials said, it kept the Encore file nominally open until earlier this year. The Justice Department repeatedly cited the continuing inquiry as a primary reason why it could not disclose Encore files to families of the 9/11 victims. But relatives of the victims say the U.S. government has maintained a shield of secrecy to protect the Saudi kingdom from embarrassing revelations.

“There is no reason this shouldn't be brought to light," said Christopher Ganci, a battalion chief in the New York Fire Department, whose father, Peter, was the highest-ranking fire official to die in the attacks. “The American people deserve to know this information. The ground troops, the FBI agents on the street, have been chomping at the bit to have this come out. It's been so frustrating for them and for us."

Among the pieces of new evidence cited in the 2016 report are telephone records showing that a Saudi graduate student who helped the two first hijackers to settle in San Diego was in contact with a Saudi religious official stationed in the United States, who in turn had connections to other Qaida operatives and later became a target of a new investigation.

The Saudi student, Omar al-Bayoumi, was a middle-aged man who rarely attended classes and was being paid surreptitiously by the Saudi Defense Ministry, where he had previously worked. Starting in 1998, the FBI had investigated him for suspected extremist activity, but that inquiry was inconclusive.

An FBI official who was a case agent for the bureau's initial investigation of the attacks, Jacqueline Maguire, testified to the bipartisan 9/11 Commission in 2004 that “by all indications" Bayoumi's first meeting with the hijackers “was a random encounter." Maguire and other FBI officials have described Bayoumi as an unwitting accomplice.

But the Encore team came to believe that Bayoumi not only gave extensive help to the two Qaida operatives, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, but later lied about his dealings with them and others.

Although Mihdhar and Hazmi were seasoned Qaida operatives, they spoke virtually no English, could not read street signs and were unable to navigate around the United States without considerable help, people who knew them told investigators. The Encore team believed that a support network of Saudi officials and other extremists in Southern California mobilized before their arrival in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000.

Witness testimony in the 2016 report provides the strongest evidence yet that on Feb. 1, 2000, Bayoumi went directly from a meeting at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles to a nearby cafe, where he waited for Hazmi and Mihdhar, approached them when they arrived and then spent about half an hour speaking with them.

Another witness, who appears to be a former Yemeni student in Los Angeles, told the FBI that a friend of his was tasked with helping the hijackers by a Saudi imam assigned to the Saudi Consulate, Fahad al-Thumairy. The FBI report quotes the witness as saying his friend, an Eritrean worshipper at Thumairy's mosque named Mohammed Johar, was instructed to take the two hijackers to the cafe where they met Bayoumi.

In interviews through his lawyer with ProPublica and in his statements to the FBI, Johar denied having been asked by Thumairy to assist the hijackers as well as allegations that he provided lodging for them at Thumairy's direction. According to the 2016 report, he said that a few days after the lunch meeting, he took Hazmi and Mihdhar to a Greyhound station to catch a bus to San Diego. They were met there by Bayoumi, who found them an apartment in his building, loaned them money to rent it, helped them arrange English classes and flying lessons, and introduced them to a circle of other Muslims, including the future Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

FBI officials had previously described Bayoumi as having been in close telephone contact with Thumairy, the Saudi imam and consular official in Los Angeles. The 2016 report reveals that Thumairy was also in telephone contact with the family home in Saudi Arabia of two Qaida militants, Suleyman and Abd al Aziz Al-Khalidi, who were later captured in Afghanistan and sent to the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The detainees' older brother, Issa, was killed by Saudi forces during the 2004 kidnapping of an American worker in Saudi Arabia, Paul Johnson, who was beheaded by his captors.

According to the 2016 report, Thumairy also had telephone contacts with some alleged Muslim extremists in Los Angeles who were suspected of helping Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was captured by U.S. border agents as he tried to cross from Canada on his way to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in late 1999. It is not clear if the FBI determined the extent of those suspected connections.

The FBI investigated Thumairy after the attacks, and the State Department withdrew his diplomatic visa on the suspicion that he led a radical Islamist faction at the King Fahad Mosque in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City. He was deported to Saudi Arabia when he tried to return to Los Angeles in 2003; he has denied knowing the hijackers or supporting militant causes. Investigators for the 9/11 Commission concluded that he was not a credible witness.

That 2016 report also cites an intriguing but briefly described report from a source that Thumairy received a telephone call from an unidentified person in Malaysia shortly before Hazmi and Mihdhar flew into Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 15, 2000.

It has long been known that the CIA had the hijackers under surveillance in Malaysia as they met there with other Qaida operatives early that January, days before leaving for the United States. The CIA then lost the hijackers' trail and neglected for more than 16 months to alert the FBI, even after learning that at least one of them had entered the United States.

The 2016 report also reveals a new layer to Bayoumi's efforts, noting telephone records that show he was in touch with another Saudi religious official, Mutaeb al-Sudairy, who was then assigned to the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Significantly, “Bayoumi called Sudairy five times" during the crucial period when the hijackers met Bayoumi in Los Angeles and he helped them move to San Diego, the report says.

Sudairy, the son of a prominent Saudi family, traveled extensively in the United States as a Muslim missionary for the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, according to documents and interviews. During this period, the Encore report states that he also spent four months as the roommate of Ziyad Khaleel, a Palestinian-American extremist who was living in Missouri. The FBI investigated Khaleel for terrorism-related activities, including the procurement of a satellite phone for bin Laden, according to court documents and interviews. (Khaleel has since died.)

After the Sept. 11 attacks, an American who knew Sudairy in Missouri reported him to the FBI as a possible extremist. But the Saudi religious official had left the country, and the result of the report is not known.

In 2010, Sudairy caught the FBI's attention again. While examining old phone activity of Bayoumi, an analyst on the Encore team discovered links to Sudairy. Soon afterward, the analyst learned that Sudairy and another official in the religious ministry had recently applied for new U.S. visas to study English at the University of Oklahoma. This was strange because the two Saudis were educated, wealthy officials who had lived and worked in the United States years earlier. Because of their suspected extremist links, agents believed that the plan to study in Oklahoma might be a cover for something more nefarious.

In contrast to other leads developed by the Encore team, FBI leaders took the matter seriously. They authorized an operation to put the two Saudis under full-time surveillance after they landed in the United States, former officials have told ProPublica.

But the episode ended when CIA officers in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, objected strongly to the FBI plan, one former official said. For reasons that remain unclear, the two Saudis canceled the visit at the last minute. Former investigators felt they lost an important opportunity to learn more about the suspected role of Saudi officials in the support network of the Sept. 11 hijackers. The new information about Sudairy raises even more questions about why U.S. authorities were not able to pursue the lead more aggressively in 2010.

A SPECTRE HAUNTS THE WEST
Al Qaeda leader, thought to be dead, surfaces in video on 9/11 anniversary

FEATURED WIB LAND

September 13, 2021

Staff Writer 0
Meenakshi Ray
Hindustan Times, New Delhi

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, rumoured to be dead, was seen in a new video on released on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the United States. US-based SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks the online activity of jihadist groups, reported that al-Zawahiri spoke on a number of issues, including a raid on a Russian military base, in the new hour-long video released by al Qaeda. Rita Katz, SITE’s director, noted that al-Zawahiri made no mention of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Katz pointed out al-Zawahiri was shown in the video even though reports last November claimed he had died. He last appeared in a video message for the group on the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

In June this year, a United Nations report said that a significant part of the al Qaeda leadership resides in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region, including al-Zawahiri, who is “probably alive but too frail to be featured in propaganda”. “One member state reports that he is probably alive but too frail to be featured in propaganda,” the UN report said, without identifying the country.

“Amid rumors of his death, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri shown in new 60-minute video, this time offering some evidence that he is not dead—particularly, reference to events after December, when rumors of death surfaced. (A speech from March offered no such proof),” Katz said in a series of tweets. “Event Zawahiri referenced was a raid on a Russian military base by the al-Qaeda-aligned Hurras al-Deen in Syria, which it claimed on Jan 1 (after rumors/reporting of his death surfaced in Nov). Also introduces Zawahiri with “May Allah Protect Him”,” she added.

DID YA ALL MISS ME

 

OF COURSE YOU DID,

THAT'S WHY I AM HERE

Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian who succeeded Osama Bin Laden as the chief of the group behind the 9/11 attacks, also talked about last month’s US withdrawal from Afghanistan in the new video. “However, Zawahiri doesn’t mention Taliban’s Afghanistan victory, and his talk of US “making its exit from Afghanistan” could have been said early as Feb 2020 upon Doha Agreement. Thus, he could still be dead, though if so, would have been at some point in or after Jan 2021,” Katz pointed out. “Nonetheless, intelligence agencies have, as of yet, offered no proof or solid assessments that Zawahiri is dead, leaving the question of his current status in the air.”

Al-Zawahiri has faded in prominence in recent years and experts have said that he is believed to be in poor health. Al Qaeda, however, has not issued any confirmation of the purported death of al-Zawahiri through its usual media channels. The New York Times reported in November 2020 that al Qaeda’s deputy leader Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah, also known as Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was secretly killed in Tehran in August by two Israeli operatives at Washington’s behest.

Bin Laden’s son, Hamza, who became a leading figure inside al Qaeda, was later killed. Following the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda gained prominence and the terror group gathered affiliates across the Middle East. The Islamic State was such a group, whose filmed beheadings and takeover of large parts of Iraq and Syria shocked the world.

___

(c)2021 the Hindustan Times (New Delhi)

Visit the Hindustan Times (New Delhi) at www.hindustantimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

9/11 and the birth of Trump's Big Lie

Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
September 11, 2021

President Bush flashes a "thumbs-up" after declaring the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, in this May 1, 2003 file photo. Six months after he spoke on an aircraft carrier deck under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," President Bush disavowed any connection with the war message. Later, the White House changed its story and said there was a link.


What drove this country crazy after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11? Was it how vulnerable we had been shown to be, that a group of 19 men armed with nothing more than box-cutters could bring the entire country to a halt? Was it that the attack was aimed primarily against innocent civilians, with nearly 3,000 killed at the Twin Towers alone? Was it that with the 19 hijackers dead in the suicidal attacks, we didn't seem to have anyone to retaliate against? Was it that we had no grasp whatsoever on understanding why our country, the freest and most democratic ever, was hated so much that they would attack us?

I remember how disconnected things felt for days, even weeks, after the attacks. Travelers outside the country didn't have a way to get home because flights had been canceled. People stranded in cities they were visiting within the country couldn't find cars to rent, there were so many trying to get home. Everyone seemed to feel a need to gather with families and friends and hunker down, as if another attack could come at any moment.

The country's leadership was frozen, stunned. Remember the photos of George W. Bush as an aide leaned over his shoulder and whispered the news into his ear? He was the president of the United States, and he looked scared to death. In fact, he was rushed from the school he was visiting in Florida to Air Force One, and his plane took off on what amounted to a flight to nowhere as his administration tried to pull itself together and decide how they would respond. It wasn't until hours later that Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and Bush hurriedly addressed the press in a windowless conference room, vowing to "hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts." Three days would pass before the president was flown to New York to appear atop the rubble of the World Trade Center at what became known as Ground Zero to take a bullhorn and make the pledge that would launch the country on a trajectory that has yet to change: "I can hear you!" he shouted to the workers at the site, "The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

A collective madness ensued. A great scrambling began to protect us against … well, against what? Box-cutters first and foremost, it seemed, as a new regime of inspections began at airports everywhere. The initial panic over the hijacked flights would lead to the establishment of the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, a kind of domestic department of defense which proceeded to put us on what amounted to a wartime footing within our own country that persists even today. How many times have you had to throw a set of fingernail clippers into a bin at airport security because a TSA agent was defending us from terrorism? How about removing your shoes because a lone lunatic made an unsuccessful attempt to blow up an airplane with a "shoe bomb"?


The entire paranoid regimen under which we still live 20 years later grew out of a supposed "war on terror" begun after 9/11 that has never ended. It took a decade to find and kill the actual terrorist who ordered the attacks on 9/11, but in the meantime two shooting wars were launched, only one of which had even the slightest connection to the terrorists who attacked us. There was an elemental problem: The war on terror wasn't against an enemy, it was against an idea, and ideas don't die when you hit them with bombs and bullets.

And so, without a readily definable enemy who could be seen and shot and killed and defeated, which is what wars are usually for, lies were substituted. We were buried with lies, and not just any lies. They had to justify the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops and the expenditure of trillions of dollars in treasure and the loss of thousands more American lives than died on 9/11 and countless more lives — enemies, civilians and, my goodness gracious, even a few real flesh and blood terrorists.

Sept. 11, 2001, was when the Big Lie was born. Or should we say, Big Lies, because they came fast and furious. By now they are known to be so completely without any basis in reality, so wholly bogus, that they hardly bear recounting. Weapons of mass destruction? Connections between Iraq and its government and leaders and the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11? Ha!

And then came new Big Lies to support the earlier Big Lies: that we were "winning" the war on terror. How many times were we reassured that all those lives and all those dollars were not being pissed away for nothing? How many times were we reassured that we were rebuilding the countries that hadn't needed rebuilding until we attacked them? How many times were we told of the miraculous training of the Iraqi and Afghan armies? They even invented a new word that I never learned in the classes I took in military history at West Point, a word to describe the magic bullet that was going to win both wars: the surge. If only we sent 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 or 50,000 more troops, we could win the mythical war on terror.

"Shock and awe" was a lie. "Taking Baghdad was a lie. The army of Iraq just went away. The "surge," each and every one of them, was a lie. "Winning" was a lie, every single time the word was used. Every. Single. Time. The Afghan army was a lie. It didn't even bother surrendering to the Taliban. It just went … poof. The Afghan "government" was a lie. It too went poof. The Iraqi government is a lie. Everything we have done to win the war on terror for two decades, 20 long years, has been a lie. We wasted trillions of dollars that could have been spent to, I don't know, feed hungry children in Arkansas? Pay for health care for poor families? Send kids to college? Reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and save our planet?

We wasted all those lives, American and Afghan and Iraqi and German and Australian and Polish and every other soldier from every other NATO country who died fighting "terror." And we killed hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi people for nothing.

For nothing.

The biggest Big Lie of them all was that it had meaning, that we accomplished something, that we somehow won the war on terror. Terror hasn't gone away. Hell, we're growing it ourselves now, right here at home.

I'll tell you another war we lost, maybe even a bigger and more important war than the war on terror. We lost the war on truth. And we were warned. Oh yes, we were warned. Take Donald Trump's first Big Lie right after 9/11 as just one example. He claimed — I hope you're sitting down for this — that he could see from his office window in Trump Tower crowds of Muslims across the Hudson River, several miles away, on the roofs of buildings in Jersey City, cheering as the World Trade Center fell.

Remember that one? It was such a patently outrageous lie that it zoomed right past without anyone noticing as the rest of the Big Lies hit one after another.

But Trump got away with it, and he learned from it. Oh, yes. He learned how the Big Lie worked. He learned from watching Bush get away with lying about WMDs, and he learned from the Big Lies that we were winning in Iraq and Afghanistan. So he started trying out other Big Lies of his own, like the one about how Barack Obama wasn't a citizen of the United States, that he had a fake birth certificate, that he was a "secret Muslim." Remember when Trump was all over the TV for days and days claiming that he had sent detectives to Hawaii? All we had to do was wait and he was going to reveal the "truth" about Obama.

He got away with his "birther" Big Lie, and he learned something that he has used ever since, something that helped him drive us into the ditch of the pandemic he lied about for a year, something that has helped him transform an entire political party, the Republican Party, from one of two normal political parties in this country into an authoritarian cult.

He learned that if he told Big Lies that were big enough, and if he repeated them enough times, that he could get away with it, just like Bush got away with lying about WMDs to get us into Iraq. And his party, the Republican Party, learned right along with him. Look at what they are doing right this minute about the insurrection he incited against the Congress of the United States in his naked attempt to overturn the election he lost. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are on a campaign to deny that it happened. They are trying to make a case that it wasn't Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, it was somebody else, and those who were arrested are political prisoners facing false charges … and on and on and on.

The legacy 9/11 has left us is that there is no common set of facts we can agree on about anything: Not about the COVID pandemic and masks and vaccines; not about the climate change that has killed hundreds and left town after town burned to the ground or under water and destroyed by tornadoes and hurricanes. We cannot agree that votes counted amount to elections won or lost. We cannot even agree on the common good of vaccines that will save us, that science is worth studying, that learned experts are worth listening to.

The lies that followed 9/11 have torn us apart as a nation and put our democracy in peril. That's our legacy: Lies are now considered by an entire political party to be legitimate political currency. A man who has told so many lies we have lost count of them is now a legitimate political figure supported for the highest office of the land by one of our two political parties.

Lies began tearing us apart after the attacks on 9/11, and we have not regained our footing as a nation. The question hanging over us now is whether we ever will.

US Spent $21 Trillion on War and Militarization Since 9/11

A young Iraqi boy stands in front of burning vehicles in Baghdad, 

Iraq, Sunday, April 13, 2003.

MICHAEL MACOR / THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE VIA GETTY IMAGES
BY Lindsay Koshgarian,

OtherWords

PUBLISHED September 11, 2021

Twenty years have now passed since 9/11.

The 20 years since those terrible attacks have been marked by endless wars, harsh immigration crackdowns, and expanded federal law enforcement powers that have cost us our privacy and targeted entire communities based on nothing more than race, religion, or ethnicity.

Those policies have also come at a tremendous monetary cost — and a dangerous neglect of domestic investment.

In a new report I co-authored with my colleagues at the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, we found that the federal government has spent $21 trillion on war and militarization both inside the U.S. and around the world over the past 20 years. That’s roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy.

Even while politicians have written blank checks for militarism year after year, they’ve said we can’t afford to address our most urgent issues. No wonder these past 20 years have been rough on U.S. families and communities.

After strong growth from 1970 to 2000, household incomes have stagnated for 20 years as Americans struggled through two recessions in the years leading up to the pandemic. As pandemic eviction moratoriums end, millions are at risk of homelessness.

Our public health systems have also been chronically underfunded, leaving the U.S. helpless to enact the testing, tracing, and quarantining that helped other countries limit the pandemic’s damage. Over 650,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 — the equivalent of a 9/11 every day for over seven months. The opioid epidemic claims another 50,000 lives a year.

Meanwhile extreme weather events like wildfires, hurricanes, and floods have grown in frequency over the past 20 years. The U.S. hasn’t invested nearly enough in either renewable energy or climate resiliency to deal with the increasing effects climate change has on our communities.

In the face of all this suffering, it’s clear that $21 trillion in spending hasn’t made us any safer.

Instead, the human costs have been staggering. Around the world, the forever wars have cost 900,000 lives and left 38 million homeless — and as the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan has shown us, they were a massive failure.

Our militarized spending has helped deport 5 million people over the past 20 years, often taking parents from their children. The majority of those deported hadn’t committed any crime except for being here.

And it has paid for the government to listen in on our phone calls and target communities for harassment and surveillance without any evidence of crime or wrongdoing, eroding the civil liberties of all Americans.

Fortunately, there’s a silver lining: We’ve found that for just a fraction of what we’ve spent on militarization these last 20 years, we could start to make life much better.

For $4.5 trillion, we could build a renewable, upgraded energy grid for the whole country. For $2.3 trillion, we could create 5 million $15-an-hour jobs with benefits — for 10 years. For just $25 billion, we could vaccinate low-income countries against COVID-19, saving lives and stopping the march of new and more threatening virus variants.

We could do all that and more for less than half of what we’ve spent on wars and militarization in the last 20 years. With communities across the country in dire need of investment, the case for avoiding more pointless, deadly wars couldn’t be clearer.

The best time for those investments would have been during the past 20 years. The next best time is now.


Lindsay Koshgarian  is program director of the National Priorities Project, working for a federal budget that prioritizes peace, shared prosperity and economic opportunity for all.

George W. Bush Didn’t Keep Us Safe

Paul Blumenthal
Sat, September 11, 2021

LONG READ

WAR CRIMINAL

(Photo: Illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis via Getty Images)

Twenty years ago today, I woke up in my basement apartment in Manhattan’s East Village to the sobs of my roommate down the hall. When I went to check on her, she sat on her bed holding a cordless phone to her ear while facing her 10-inch box television set. She pointed to the screen. I looked and saw what we would all come to learn was United Flight 175 crash into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

She was on the phone trying to reach her family. Her father had been in Boston for a business trip and was scheduled to fly out of Logan International Airport, where the hijacked jetliners originated. She didn’t know what day or which flight. He wasn’t on either of those hijacked that day. Others weren’t so lucky. I woke my other roommate, and we walked outside into that eerily beautiful September day, the perfect blue sky scarred by the plume lifting from where the World Trade Center once stood.

Two days later, the winds shifted, bringing the toxic smell of burning industrial destruction and death across the city. The world would never be the same.


We had no warning. U.S. leaders knew for months that an attack could be coming; cable news focused instead on shark attacks and salacious politics. President George W. Bush didn’t keep us safe. And as a result, nearly 3,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks that day. Hundreds of thousands more died in wars fought in their wake, and more still were displaced as refugees. In the 20 years since, Bush’s failures led to an immense and metastasizing conflict both outside of our borders and, increasingly, within ― setting the stage for the regeneration of the far-right in the form of the wealthy reality TV show star Donald Trump. It’s been two decades, but the scars left by 9/11 and worsened by American leaders’ failures have not healed.

Bush, the unpopularly elected 43rd president, installed into the position by the five members of his political party serving lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court ― including one put there by his father ― and his administration ignored warnings that began in January 2001 about the imminent threat from Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda group.

Smoke billows from the scene of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. (Photo: Larry Busacca via Getty Images)

Bush and his foreign policy principals were first warned that January by CIA Director George Tenet and counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke that they needed to take immediate action to counter the terrorist groups. Both Tenet and Clarke, holdovers from the Bill Clinton administration, felt that their warnings were not being taken seriously. Clarke sent national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a memo on Jan. 25 requesting an urgent National Security Council meeting on tackling the al Qaeda threat with an outline of a plan to do so.

But when such a meeting finally happened in April 2001, the nature of the threat was dismissed by Bush’s national security team. Instead, they suggested the focus should be on “Iraqi terrorism,” according to Clarke’s 2004 book, “Against All Enemies.”

In May, the CIA began to warn of an al Qaeda group inside the United States plotting attacks. On May 1, the CIA Daily Brief warned of a potential attack from “a group presently in the United States.” Another warning of an “imminent” attack came on June 22.

Senior administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dismissed these as a possible disinformation trick by al Qaeda, a Muslim militant group. The CIA continued to send warnings, including a June 29 memo and then another in the Daily Brief on June 30 titled “UBL [Usama Bin Laden] Threats Are Real.” Bush replied to this briefing with the infamous line, “All right. You’ve covered your ass.”

That line is often erroneously stated as Bush’s reaction to the more famous Aug. 6 President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” This memo outlined historic intelligence on al Qaeda’s activities, including the thwarted millennium bomb plot and bin Laden’s alleged consideration of crashing hijacked planes into buildings before stating:

FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

This was the 36th time the CIA had warned Bush about imminent threats from bin Laden and al Qaeda, according to journalist Barton Gellman’s “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.”

Near the end of August, Tenet received a report titled “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” Around this time, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen later alleged to be the 20th 9/11 hijacker, was arrested for overstaying his visa in Minnesota after his flight instructor became suspicious of his desire to learn to pilot large commuter jets before gaining any other flying skills. One week later, the CIA warned embassies in Paris and London of “subjects involved in suspicious 747 flight training,” referring to Moussaoui as a potential “suicide bomber.” Aside from Moussaoui, another potential hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi citizen, was denied entry to the U.S. on Aug. 3.

Far more warnings came from the CIA, the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies throughout that summer of an imminent attack or suspicious activity potentially related to a terrorist plot. Eventually, around the end of the summer and beginning of September, the Bush administration came around to discussing and elevating some of Clarke’s and Tenet’s concerns. But if they’d taken them seriously sooner, could the attacks have been prevented?

WAR CRIMINALS

President George W. Bush, right, and his foreign policy team of national security adviser Steve Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice failed to respond to warnings about terrorist attacks months before Sept. 11, 2001. (Photo: MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images)

It’s hard to prove a counterfactual. But history suggests something more could’ve been done, even if it’s impossible to say the attack could have been prevented. Journalist Peter Beinart examined whether the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented in 2016, after Trump blamed George W. Bush for failing to protect the United States on 9/11. Beinart raised Clarke’s argument that when he warned the Clinton administration of imminent al Qaeda attacks in December 1999, Clinton ordered “daily meetings with the attorney-general, the CIA, FBI,” which filtered down to the “field offices to find out everything they can find.” Clarke credits this process and the urgency taken by Clinton on it for foiling the Jan. 1, 2000, millennium plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport and other international targets.

The Bush administration did not begin such a process. The 9/11 Commission revealed a lot about information-sharing policies in federal bureaucracies that hindered investigations into the plot. Ultimately, the buck stops with the president.

Bush must, too, bear responsibility for his decisions after the attacks. The 9/11 attacks unleashed the American id from its vegetative state induced by the end of the Cold War. Pundits announced it was time to put childish things away, like those concerns about shark attacks and congressmen’s affairs with younger women.

It was time to get serious. And serious meant violent. The immediate and ongoing reaction was one of bloodlust.

Shock jock Howard Stern was on air recounting his failure to “bang Pam Anderson” as the hijacked airliners smashed into the World Trade Center towers, according to the book “Management of Savagery.” After briefly handing over his airwaves to a live CBS report on the 9/11 attacks, Stern returned to declare: “We’ve got to bomb everything over there. … We’ve got to drop an atomic bomb. … a devastating war, where people die. Burn their eyes out!”

“Now is the time to not even ask questions,” Stern added. “To drop a few atomic bombs. Do a few chemical warfare hits! Let their people suffer until they understand!”

Four days later, a 42-year-old Boeing aircraft mechanic in Mesa, Arizona, told his friends he was “going to go out and shoot some towel-heads” and then murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American, because he had a beard and wore a turban. A wave of anti-Muslim violence spread across the U.S.

Visitors paid tribute at a memorial for Balbir Singh Sodhi at the Arizona gas station where he was murdered on Sept. 15, 2001. Sodhi was popular in the neighborhood and often gave candy to children.

 (Photo: Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The day after Sodhi’s murder, Cheney appeared on “Meet the Press” to tell Tim Russert of the Bush administration’s coming approach to its open-ended “war on terror”:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

Harvard- and Yale-educated lawyers in the Justice Department began crafting legal justifications to create an illegal torture regime and an illegal surveillance state. The law would be bent to allow the U.S. to enter the “dark side.” Innocents would be swept up in these “methods” to be tortured, crucified, water-boarded, psychologically assaulted, sodomized, raped and beaten to death. Others, including wedding parties, small children and at least four U.S. citizens, would die by distantly piloted drones as Bush and his successors sought to cross names off their “Kill List.”

The invasion of Afghanistan in October seemed to be a swift success, but the Bush administration’s decision to use a light force and rely on local militias to go after bin Laden at Tora Bora allowed the mastermind to escape.

Looking back now, it was this moment that made last month’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and all the chaos that came with it inevitable. With bin Laden on the loose after he fled to his caretakers in Pakistan, the war’s aim shifted to an imperial project of nation-building. The war turned away from revenge of the actual perpetrator of the attack; Afghanistan didn’t fill the hole left in downtown Manhattan, the west side of the Pentagon or the field in central Pennsylvania.

So Bush and his allies determined that something bigger would be needed. Or, as Clarke recounted Rumsfeld telling him after 9/11, “there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq.”

Fires rage on the west bank of the Tigris River on March 21, 2003, in Baghdad during the U.S. Invasion

This new Iraq War, encouraged by leaders of both political parties and intellectuals both liberal and conservative and religious and atheist, could fulfill this bloodlust. Lies about weapons of mass destruction fueled the push for war, but it was the reliance on the classic American myth of regeneration through violence embedded in our psyches through our literary, political and cinematic history that propelled us forward.

The U.S. would take on the “Axis of Evil” of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, none of which had anything to do with 9/11, and remake the world. Libya, Sudan and Syria would follow. The violence committed against us would be repaid with our own violence, but our violence would be regenerative.

Or to put it more crudely, New York Times columnist and Iraq War evangelist Thomas Friedman told PBS’s Charlie Rose that the purpose of the war was to tell the Muslim world to: “Suck. On. This. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We coulda hit Saudi Arabia…. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”

This was, unfortunately, an abjectly American response to the tragedy of 9/11.

“The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience,” American studies professor Richard Slotkin wrote in his book “Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860.”

That myth has given meaning to American foreign policy from the wars of Indian extermination through the imperial wars of conquest fought against Mexico and Spain, the war in Vietnam and today with our global war on terrorism. The frontier, as envisioned by the progressive historian Frederick Turner, the first to fully examine the American frontier myth, provided a “safety valve” for American society to release its internal tensions. Material wealth earned through expansion and, of course, the violence against those in the way, prevented internal conflict in a society long divided by politics, religion, class and race. Martin Luther King Jr. thought of the safety valve differently, calling the Vietnam War “some demonic, destructive suction tube.”

An unidentified detainee is forced to stand on a box with a bag over his head and wires attached to him in late 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. 

(Photo: Associated Press)

But the need to fulfill our myth of regeneration through violence could not be met by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars ultimately failed because they served no real purpose for the American public other than the need to exact immediate revenge. And our leaders, starting with Bush but including Barack Obama and Trump, repeatedly lied about them, as revealed by the Afghanistan Papers.

These failures weren’t just a loss for Americans yearning for some sort of resolution to the 9/11 attacks. They were enormously deadly. They left behind not only tens of thousands of dead and wounded Americans but also hundreds of thousands of dead Afghans and Iraqis, whose lives are worth no more or less than ours. That includes the lives of the last 13 U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan, some of whom were babies on 9/11, on Aug. 26, and the lives of the 10 people, including seven children, killed by a U.S. drone strike three days later in response to those soldiers’ deaths. Even more people died from the wars’ repercussions after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s military, disbanded by the imperial U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority, joined forces with al Qaeda in Iraq and then mutated into the Islamic State, wreaking havoc across the Middle East and creating a mass migration of millions of refugees fleeing for their lives.

The ultimate effect of all this violence, as many authors are now cataloging in books such as “Reign of Terror,” “Management of Savagery” and “The End of the Myth,” among others, has been what King described as that “demonic, destructive suction tube” blowing in reverse. Just as our Cold War foreign policy led to the U.S. funding bin Laden, ultimately blowing back on 9/11, our post-9/11 turn to violence blew back, too. Within the U.S., it created a regenerated, anti-democratic far-right led by the reality TV fabulist Trump and the Republican Party he has come to dominate.

A mural depicting a U.S. drone says,

The often delusional thought of the regenerated right-wing under Trump is too easily blamed on the rise of former president himself. But it should be traced to Bush’s failure before 9/11 and decisions afterward.

As they lied their way to war in Iraq, a senior Bush administration aide (often rumored to be, but never confirmed, as political adviser Karl Rove) was quoted in a 2004 New York Times magazine article as saying that journalists and political pundits live in “what we call the reality-based community” but “that’s not the way the world really works anymore. … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality ― judiciously, as you will ― we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

If nations are formed by imagined communities, empires create imagined realities. It’s no wonder Trump, someone so capable of imagining new realities, would emerge under the conditions his predecessors created for him.

When we woke up on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, we had no warning about what was to come ― not the attack, the wars, their failure and their political threat to democracy at home.

The Bush administration had every chance to act beforehand, but we can’t know what would have happened had they done so. We do know what their decisions, and the decisions of the Obama and Trump administrations, resulted in afterward, and it isn’t pretty.

The plume of smoke that scarred the Manhattan skyline on 9/11 may have dissipated, but the scar our country’s actions have left on our souls remains deep. Twenty years later, it’s time to create a different reality.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to the Biden administration instead of the Bush administration in one instance.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
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For many Americans of color, including my friends, Sept. 11 only inflamed divisions


Raj Tawney
Sat, September 11, 2021

Sept. 11, 2001, was the first time I’d seen color used so evidently as a means to generalize and divide. I was only 14 years old, entering my first week of high school in the suburbs of Long Island, less than an hour outside of New York City, on the day my worldview changed.

The majority of my classmates were mostly white and I’d always stuck out like a sore thumb as a multiracial American – born to a Puerto Rican and Italian-American mother and an Indian immigrant father in 1987. My olive skin tone, bushy eyebrows, dark brown curly hair, and funny-sounding name made me an easy target for kids already searching for any physical differences to pick on. Even the few pockets of various Asian and Hispanic American students tended to stick closely with one another, socializing only with their own kind, minus a few misfits with whom I became close.

Though it hurt feeling like an outsider, I was used to feeling uniquely alone. Growing up in three vastly different cultures meant I never fit in, not even with cousins or elders. I was too light-skinned among the members of my father’s Desi community, too ethnic for the Italian side who’d ascended into white middle-class status, and too suburban for my inner-city Puerto Rican relatives living in the Bronx.

This Sept. 11, 2001, file photo shows the south tower of the World Trade Center, collapsing after the terrorist attack in New York.

In my mind, I’d always lived somewhere in the gray area of society. At home, my parents never treated me any differently or forced me to identify with any one side over another. They knew they were rebels in their own right, having broken traditions to marry outside of their cultures.

However, when they moved the family from Queens to Suffolk County, an invisible line of segregation existed among townships, and residents on our side were just beginning to get comfortable with diversity.

On the morning of Sept. 11, I was in second period Earth Science when my principal interrupted all classes to inform us that the World Trade Center had been attacked, allowing all teachers to turn on their TV sets to watch the news. Gasps and nervous murmurs floated around the room as we tried to make sense of the two buildings ablaze on our screen. As the bell rang and we flooded into the halls, panic quickly set in. Students swapped theories as to why our beloved towers were being targeted.

Raj Tawney at the age of 14.

I heard one kid scream that Muslims had committed the attacks.

My teachers and classmates witnessed the destruction of our city, with our eyes, staring at television sets in our classrooms. In real time, we collectively viewed horrific images of planes exploding into the Twin Towers and civilians covered in soot. Within hours, images of Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban were on the television screen as the suspected architects of the attack. Footage of dangerous, brown-skinned men covered our screens, adding to the fury and fervor brewing in many Americans that day.

As I watched the uproar in my school, I was reminded of the division I had experienced my entire life.

I saw fellow Indian and Pakistani students singled out due to their skin tone and “foreign” sounding names. A few of my brown-skinned friends got punched, shoved and name-called. Students were lashing out at people who looked anything like someone of Middle Eastern descent.

One Sikh friend, who wore a turban as part of his religion, faced ridicule from ignorant students teasing him about his likeness to bin Laden.

I didn’t face the same mockery as my other brown classmates, and I felt guilty for it. I was incensed by how superficial we could become, unable to see beyond surface labels.

Following that fateful day, FBI data now shows that hate crimes jumped to 481 incidents before dropping by more than half in the ensuing years.

Twenty years later, I’d like to believe we’ve come a long way, but with Islamophobia once again on the rise and increases in discrimination against Indian Americans, I'm reminded again of how Sept. 11 brought division for so many Americans. And I wonder if we’ll ever be able to get beyond it.

Raj Tawney writes about race, culture, food and the human experience from his multi-racial American experience. He recently completed a proposal for a memoir centered around his identity. Find him at rajtawney.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: For many Americans of color, Sept. 11 only inflamed division