As the 9-11 anniversary nears it’s shocking if one considers the consequences of that event in terms of the choices the US government took after that horrific day. The costs in blood and treasure continue to be unsustainable. More on that later.
What’s most shocking however, or should be, is the fact that our government and ‘we the people’ never acknowledged what could have been done prior to 9-11 to undermine the motivations of Islamic extremists who butchered not only thousands of Americans, but the very fundamental tenant of their global religion. Peace.
Christianity’s history is pocked with similar butchery. Yet one fact remains globally indisputable. The fundamental ideal of every major religion is the Golden Rule. Not the corporate golden rule that profit is the only goal. Or the government golden rule that campaign financing can influence policy decisions. But the fundamental self-evident truth that all people are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. Rights that no government, no corporation, and no extremist group should be able to take away -- without prohibitive consequences.
Our US Constitution provided us with a second Amendment for irrevocable protection against any government diminishing our rights. Unfortunately, the engineering of our constitutional federation also had fundamental flaws. From the start (and even beyond the original sin of codifying slavery) our government’s blueprint was based on a delusional concept of 'independence'.
Our government is based on the codified independence between states, federal agencies, and even between nation states. And we never question the insanity of this idealized concept regardless of its monstrously bloody and budget breaking consequences.
Our Independence (or national sovereignty) didn’t protect us on Sept. 11, 2001. It actually prevented us from detecting the conspirators organizing within our own borders, states, and training schools.
Independent state tax regulations resulted in lower cigarette taxes in Virginia than in Maryland. The al Qaida’s operatives leveraged those price differences to buy in VA and sell in MD for a bloody profit. The hijackers used states with minimal regulations for acquiring driver’s license, enabling them to easily gain legal land and air transportation between all 50 states.
Federal legal walls between the FBI and the CIA prevented intelligence sharing that may have identified Saudi Arabia passport holders taking flying lessons (not for landings…. just take offs).
The international divisions between nation state’s various intelligence agencies added yet another barrier to exchanging insightful and vital cooperation that still largely exists today… and in some cases gotten worse where competing national interests arise.
Six months before 9-11 the third and final report from the bipartisan Presidential “US Commission on National Security in the 21st Century” was released. It proposed combining a few federal independent agencies into one, to more readily detect threats to Americans. In its final report release in March 2001 the 14 commissioners unanimously put “Terrorism” as the top threat to Americans. It warned that ‘Americans should prepare to die in large numbers on American soil’ from terrorism. The report was ignored. And it’s recommendations to combine independent agencies was rejected even after the attacks and after another commission suggested the same idea.
Finally, 14 months later Congress passed the Homeland Security Act which combined 22 independent federal agencies into one Department of Homeland Security”. And a full two years after the first Commission release of its final report -- DHS finally opened its doors to ensure “a more secure America that is better equipped to confront the range of threats we face”. But DHS remains an agency largely independent from the Department of Defense.
This is the same DoD that launched a ‘pre-emptive’ attack on Iraq just one year later. An attack that created more extremists and extremist groups than most Americans could even image. But some did. And they too were largely ignored.
Ignored by a President that was elected by a questionable Supreme Court ruling on a balloting problem in the ‘independent state of Florida. I’m not sure Al Gore would have responded any better than Bush did immediately after the horrors of 9-11, but I do believe he not have invaded Iraq and probably would have listened more to the findings of the 2001 Commission Report, and done more to ween the US from our addiction to foreign oil and our Saudi Arabia alliance, neither of which valued the protection of human rights.
Very few US citizens could tell you the three primary motivations that Osama Bin Ladin claimed was his reasons for masterminding the 9-11 attacks, or, his two specific goals to achieve with the attack.
His motivations?
1. US
support for Israel at the expense of Palestinians.
2. US military
presence in Saudi Arabia before and after the 1st Gulf war.
3. The deaths
of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, as a result of
the US sanctions on Iraq after the first Gulf War. Few Americans know that the US intentionally bombed
Iraqi water and sanitation facilities prior to kicking Saddam out of Kuwait, full
well knowing that this would lead to the deaths of innocent Iraqis, but hoping
that Iraqi suffering would result in the overthrow of Saddam. A brutal dictator, that was our friend and ally
before he turned on Kuwait. A brutal
dictator that we gave chemical and biological weapon precursors to, at US tax payers
expense, when he was our buddy, and willing to gas Iranians, our sworn enemies.
Note that almost immediately after
9-11, Bush did three things. He offered
a two state solution to Israeli/Palestinian ordeal, he withdrew US troops from Saudi
Arabia, and his administration started looking for new place to put US troops
in the region so we could guard our access to Middle East oil, a critical
element to our economy…thus our ‘national security’.
All as if middle east foreign
policy, human rights, environmental policy, and US energy policy were each
independent of one other.
The two things Osama Bin Ladin
wanted to accomplish was
1. To break the US economically. He believed his anti-Soviet efforts in Afghanistan
helped lead to the fall of the USSR.
2. To
divide us politically. He seemed to know
that our privacy was connected to our security, and that by attacking us on 9-11,
the fear it would generate would divide us between those who were willing to
give up their privacy (and ease of air travel) and those who would resist such
government controls.
Osama didn’t seem to understand that
we ultimately didn’t need any help devolving our own political climate on
either of these basic fronts.
Today, few Americans understand that our Constitution’s 4th Amendment that ‘prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures’ largely limits the detection of extremists (domestic or foreign) if it were fully enforced. Most are more than willing to sacrifice our privacy for a little more security, but in the process realize that our loss of privacy has led to an even greater loss in our increasingly cyber world of personal economic and physical security.
A recent Raytheon commercial touting its work on cyber security said “When everything is connected, security is everything”. Notice that it didn’t say, ‘When everything is interdependent, the golden rule is everything’. It should have.
Bio security (from pandemics, loss of antibiotic arsenal, bioterrorism, lack of access to affordable health care and healthy food) is a lot like cyber security. DNA or bits, everything is information, and information is power.
Here’s some information to consider if you would like to maximize your freedom and your security.
Security is an illusion. With the evolution of technology offensive capacity will always be more affordable and faster to deploy than defensive technologies. And our dependence on so many things (food, water, clean air, medicines, jobs, health care, energy, housing…) its virtually impossible to protect everything from all threats.
Independence is an illusion that is forcing is to sacrifice our freedom and our security.
Freedom is all we really have. We (and our nation) is free to do (or not do) whatever we want. But we will NEVER be free of the consequences.
At this point in history, the smartest, wisest, thing we could do is fund and achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This is the ONLY comprehensive global effort to address the fundamental drivers of most of the threats we face. We will never eliminate terrorism (a tactic used by those without aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, or unfathomable wealth) but we can ‘do unto others’ as we would like them to do to us…and greatly reduce those who want to do us harm. And make more friends in the process. Friend who will help us when we need it. Like warning us of extremists who acquire unprecedented low tech and even high tech killing capacity for which no effective and affordable defense systems are available…unless we chose to live in very unfree and insecure world.
I assert that it is our staunchly held belief that we are independent from one another, from the environment, from the quality of life of people in other nations, from their environmental destruction, and from the suffering even in our own cities, that is killing us at far greater numbers than terrorists (home grown or foreign). That could change when (not if) they acquire biological WMD, but for now, the opioids, suicides, homelessness, loneliness, premature deaths by heart disease, diabetes, cancer, hospital infections, and drunk/distracted driving, is a far great threat to ourselves and our loved ones.
If we and our government continue to react to crisis (like 9-11, Katrina, 2008 recession, climate change, mass shootings…) instead of addressing the systemic flaws that lead to them, we are committing a crime against future generations, both here and abroad.
As Thomas Paine said in “Common Sense” pamphlet in 1775, “The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which, their affections are interested. The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party censure…” … “Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz., freedom and security”.
Abrama Linclon, reaffirmed this sentiment when he wrote about our Declaration of Independence being our “Apple of Gold” and our Constitution being the “frame of Silver” around it.
‘All people’ are deserving of the inalianble rights according to the ‘self-evident’ truths inherent in the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”
Our founding fathers separated them-selves from tyrannical rule of the King. But our nation will never be independent from other global factors. If we can’t correct our Constitutional dysfunction in effectively dealing with the hyperglobalization of our modern world and it’s profoundnly powerful and affordable technologies… what happened on 9-11 will be forgotten in the coming chaos.
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