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Who did this?
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Who did this?By Claire Wolfe 09.11.01Exclusive to Sierra Times
Stunned and reeling. This is a day when the world changes. A day like Pearl Harbor of the assassination of JFK, when every one of us will remember forever where we were when we heard the news. It's now the afternoon of the inconceivable, indiscriminate, savagely well-planned attack on innocents in New York, Pennsylvania, and D.C. (yes, there are surely some innocents even there). An attack that combined the maximum carnage with a maximum display of bravado. This is what fighting cocks would do, if they had brains -- showing off their bloody, macho power to intimidate opponents. It is at once an act of brilliantly evil human mindwork and limbic-level stupidity. Hours ago my betters -- people like L. Neil Smith and John Silveira, senior editor of Backwoods Home Magazine, launched their warnings into cyberspace about what will happen next. There's not much I can say about that that they haven't. We all know, in a way, what will happen next: Greater loss of liberty in the name of security. False security. One more stomp of the boot on the road to the police state. But unlike my clearer-headed compatriots, I'm still paralyzed. I'm writing this with trembling fingers, not steady head. I'm neither a pundit nor a prophet. I have no clear vision. Not today, of all days. Instead, I keep thinking two contradictory things. I may be wrong, but I think this was a true act of war (not mere terrorism) from some organization outside the country. No American "extremist group" has either the resources or the will to pull this off. And professional paranoid and "government hater" though I sometimes am, I find it impossible to believe that even the most ruthless power-cravers within the U.S. government would (or could) engineer the hijacking of four suicide flights all in one surreal morning. Oh yes, "our" guys -- that is, those who wish to rule us -- would gladly blow up a plane or a building in search of more funding or legislation to give their iron fist a greater reach. They'd do it before breakfast and never turn a hair on their designer-coifed heads if they thought it would gain them what they crave. But this? No, they couldn't find enough suicidal agents, even if they brainwashed them. And they, frankly, don't have imaginations quite this evil. They'd have stopped at one.BUT . Not long ago, Aaron Zelman of Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States pointed me toward the report of a bipartisan commission (always duck when you hear those words) headed by former Sens. Warren Rudman and Gary Hart. In January, these men and their cohorts issued a report recommending that -- to combat terrorism -- the U.S. create a draconian, cabinet-level "homeland defense agency" that would control everything from domestic policing to international computer security. Nobody's talking about this report. Why not? The moment I read it, with chills running like spiders up my spine, I thought, "They're going to come up with something horrible to justify doing what they propose. A horror is going to descend upon us." And if what happened on the infamous day of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 isn't horror, then the word has no meaning. But how to resolve the contradictions? "They" -- Rudman, Hart, Gingrich, FEMA, the military, and all the creepy corporations who sell them their spy cameras, their bio-war supplies, their retina scanners, their metal detectors, and the other gear of the crushing Big Brother state -- have been waiting for something like this to happen since January. (Since much longer, really.) "They" -- those powerful people who like us little folks cowed and submissive -- need this to convince us rebellious little Americans that we need them and their "protective" power. Now it's happened. And despite the fact that I'm not quite paranoid enough to believe they engineered it, the famous old rhetorical question, "Qui bono?" keeps ringing through the chaos in my media-muddled slaughter-saturated brain. Qui bono? Who benefits? Answer that question and you'll probably know who's responsible. Who did this? I don't know. That's one thing that makes it worse, in its way, than Pearl Harbor: nobody to strike back at --yet. Who benefits? That you already do know: those who, through our fear and rage, can manipulate us into placidly -- or with wild enthusiasm -- doing their bidding. It really doesn't matter in the end whether it was Osama bin Laden or some evil gnome at Langley. May there be a true hell for those who engineered this, and may they suffer through an eternity for each and every victim who was so much as scratched today. May they feel every broken bone, every torn limb, every screaming pain of every burn, every desperate smoke-filled breath, every spike of panic -- and every wail of grief within everyone who loves the wounded or dead. May they feel every drop of sweat, every ache of exhaustion, every bit of wrenching nausea felt by every rescue worker. Forever. Then may they suffer another eternity of hell for every victim who, in the name of "protection" from sadistic, senseless monsters, loses the rights that make life worth living. In the end, those victims will far outnumber the dead. http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/sep/11/edCW091101.htm
Stunned and reeling. This is a day when the world changes. A day like Pearl Harbor of the assassination of JFK, when every one of us will remember forever where we were when we heard the news. It's now the afternoon of the inconceivable, indiscriminate, savagely well-planned attack on innocents in New York, Pennsylvania, and D.C. (yes, there are surely some innocents even there). An attack that combined the maximum carnage with a maximum display of bravado. This is what fighting cocks would do, if they had brains -- showing off their bloody, macho power to intimidate opponents. It is at once an act of brilliantly evil human mindwork and limbic-level stupidity. Hours ago my betters -- people like L. Neil Smith and John Silveira, senior editor of Backwoods Home Magazine, launched their warnings into cyberspace about what will happen next. There's not much I can say about that that they haven't. We all know, in a way, what will happen next: Greater loss of liberty in the name of security. False security. One more stomp of the boot on the road to the police state. But unlike my clearer-headed compatriots, I'm still paralyzed. I'm writing this with trembling fingers, not steady head. I'm neither a pundit nor a prophet. I have no clear vision. Not today, of all days. Instead, I keep thinking two contradictory things. I may be wrong, but I think this was a true act of war (not mere terrorism) from some organization outside the country. No American "extremist group" has either the resources or the will to pull this off. And professional paranoid and "government hater" though I sometimes am, I find it impossible to believe that even the most ruthless power-cravers within the U.S. government would (or could) engineer the hijacking of four suicide flights all in one surreal morning. Oh yes, "our" guys -- that is, those who wish to rule us -- would gladly blow up a plane or a building in search of more funding or legislation to give their iron fist a greater reach. They'd do it before breakfast and never turn a hair on their designer-coifed heads if they thought it would gain them what they crave. But this? No, they couldn't find enough suicidal agents, even if they brainwashed them. And they, frankly, don't have imaginations quite this evil. They'd have stopped at one.BUT . Not long ago, Aaron Zelman of Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States pointed me toward the report of a bipartisan commission (always duck when you hear those words) headed by former Sens. Warren Rudman and Gary Hart. In January, these men and their cohorts issued a report recommending that -- to combat terrorism -- the U.S. create a draconian, cabinet-level "homeland defense agency" that would control everything from domestic policing to international computer security. Nobody's talking about this report. Why not? The moment I read it, with chills running like spiders up my spine, I thought, "They're going to come up with something horrible to justify doing what they propose. A horror is going to descend upon us." And if what happened on the infamous day of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 isn't horror, then the word has no meaning. But how to resolve the contradictions? "They" -- Rudman, Hart, Gingrich, FEMA, the military, and all the creepy corporations who sell them their spy cameras, their bio-war supplies, their retina scanners, their metal detectors, and the other gear of the crushing Big Brother state -- have been waiting for something like this to happen since January. (Since much longer, really.) "They" -- those powerful people who like us little folks cowed and submissive -- need this to convince us rebellious little Americans that we need them and their "protective" power. Now it's happened. And despite the fact that I'm not quite paranoid enough to believe they engineered it, the famous old rhetorical question, "Qui bono?" keeps ringing through the chaos in my media-muddled slaughter-saturated brain. Qui bono? Who benefits? Answer that question and you'll probably know who's responsible. Who did this? I don't know. That's one thing that makes it worse, in its way, than Pearl Harbor: nobody to strike back at --yet. Who benefits? That you already do know: those who, through our fear and rage, can manipulate us into placidly -- or with wild enthusiasm -- doing their bidding. It really doesn't matter in the end whether it was Osama bin Laden or some evil gnome at Langley. May there be a true hell for those who engineered this, and may they suffer through an eternity for each and every victim who was so much as scratched today. May they feel every broken bone, every torn limb, every screaming pain of every burn, every desperate smoke-filled breath, every spike of panic -- and every wail of grief within everyone who loves the wounded or dead. May they feel every drop of sweat, every ache of exhaustion, every bit of wrenching nausea felt by every rescue worker. Forever. Then may they suffer another eternity of hell for every victim who, in the name of "protection" from sadistic, senseless monsters, loses the rights that make life worth living. In the end, those victims will far outnumber the dead. http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/sep/11/edCW091101.htm
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