Was There a “War on Terror” or a War on the American People?
Paul Craig Roberts | Sep 12 2023
In response to 9/11, Republican Attorney General John Ashcroft told an obedient Congress on a Wednesday to have a sweeping expansion of executive power and dramatic curtailment of American’s civil rights ready in bill form by the end of the week. As Matt Taibbi reminds us,
“Congress quickly delivered with ‘roving’ wiretaps, warrantless searches, ‘trap and trace’ searches, law enforcement and intelligence access to grand jury information, use of FISA monitoring for non-foreign situations, reduction or elimination of predicate requirements for FBI investigations, and elimination of judicial review for most of these activities, among many other things in the USA PATRIOT Act. It all passed on October 26th.” See this.
These measures had nothing whatsoever to do with fighting Muslim terror. To the contrary, these measures gave the government the power to terrorize Americans.
Try to name Muslim terror attacks on America other than, if you believe the official narrative, 9/11. You can’t, because there aren’t any.
Terror attacks on America were so non-existent that the FBI had to search for confused people and groups, convince them, enhanced with monetary bribes, to adopt a FBI prepared terror attack, and then arrest them before the attack could be attempted. The FBI always explained that “the public was never in danger” as control of the operation was in FBI’s hands.
But the public is very much in danger from the police state measures that Taibbi lists. “Muslim terror” was so conspicuous by its absence that Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano announced that Homeland Security was being refocused on domestic American “extremists,” which has come to mean Trump supporters against whom the US government is deploying the police state measures.
The first part of the “war on terror” was against Americans’ civil liberties.
The second part of the war was on Israel’s opponents in the Middle East.
In the case of Iraq and Libya entire countries were destroyed, millions killed and maimed, and displaced to Europe and the US with the strange result of importing Muslims who were said to be terrorists into the Homeland.
Ask yourself how Americans managed to fall for the propaganda that the US was under widespread attack from Muslims.
The “Muslim threat” was played to such an extent that the Attorney General said, “we need every tool available to us,” by which he meant getting rid of the US Constitution. The foundation of the American police state was established on the basis of only one attack, 9/11, falsely attributed to Muslims.
If the Muslims were really capable of outwitting the entirety of the US national security apparatus, why did they stop with the WTC? With such glorious success, why did they not continue?
Why instead did the FBI have to create fake terror events in order to keep the public believing we were under attack?
Notice how we are always “under attack.” If it is not Muslims, it is Covid, or Donald Trump.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. Visit his website.
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Permanent Warfare and the “War On Terror”
By Mark Taliano | Mar 19 2021
The “War on Terror” is a fraud. Washington supports the very same terrorists that it claims to be fighting. Washington’s wars are anti-humanitarian and anti-democratic, and they are all based on criminal war lies and public deceptions. This needs to end.
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard described the war on Syria in these words:
“There are two things you need to address in Syria. One is a regime change war that was first launched by the United States in 2011, covertly led by the CIA. That is a regime change war that has continued over the years, that has increased the suffering of the Syrian people and strengthened terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS because the CIA was using American taxpayer dollars to provide arms and training equipment to these terrorist groups to get them to overthrow the government.
So that is a regime change war that we should not have been waging.” (1)
More recently, Congresswoman Gabbard denounced not only the criminal war against Syria, but also the unilateral, criminal economic embargo imposed on Syrians:
“I am glad to hear that some of my former colleagues in Congress are speaking out against the recent unconstitutional airstrikes in Syria, but they’re ignoring the bigger issue, the regime change war the United States continues to wage in Syria, using al-Qaida, al-Nusra terrorists as our proxy ground force and who now occupy and control the city of Idlib, imposing Sharia law and cleansing the area of most Christians and religious minorities. The Biden administration continues to use our military to illegally occupy northeastern Syria to, quote, take the oil as Trump so crassly but honestly put it, violating international law.
A modern day siege of draconian embargo and sanctions similar to what the Saudi U.S. alliance employed in Yemen is causing death and suffering for millions of innocent Syrians, depriving them of things like food, medicine, clean water, energy, warm and making it impossible for the Syrian people to try to begin to rebuild their war torn country.” (2)
Not only does the aforementioned economic embargo collectively punish all Syrians, but it also serves to empower ISIS, al Qaeda, and SDF proxies.
In a recent interview with Richard Medhurst, investigative reporter Vanessa Beeley explains that whereas Washington is imposing sanctions on the Syrian people, it is NOT imposing sanctions on al Qaeda, ISIS and SDF (all Washington proxies) inside Syria. Furthermore, all Western “humanitarian” aid (sic), she says, goes to al Qaeda. (3)
Western-supported terrorist-controlled areas in Syria have always been anti-democratic. It is not a secret. It is openly proclaimed.
As Western leaders demonize Russia and China, and promise more permanent warfare, they are extracting vast sums of tax dollars from their own people, who are being increasingly impoverished and oppressed themselves.
The money being spent to support terrorism, and to destroy countries and peoples, should be spent on pro-Life agendas, not pro-war, pro-Death agendas.
Notes
(1) Kudos to Tulsi Gabbard for Telling The Truth. Lest We Forget … – Mark Taliano
(3) Washington Supports al Qaeda and ISIS / Richard Medhurst Interviews Vanessa Beeley – Mark Taliano
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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit his website.
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Also see: A short and dirty history of US imperialism
