- The press recently ran stories about Americans reliving
the horrors of 9/11 through released emergency-call transcripts that include
the last gasps of doomed souls. Am I the only one struck by the extremely
odd nature of this story?
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- Why would people expose themselves to material that might
well be regarded as pornographic when used for anything other than an official
investigation?
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- The normal human brain works to soften or blot out memories
of intensely disturbing events, otherwise no one could function in times
of crisis, and no one could survive imprisonment or torture. You grieve
for a while, and then you go on with the often hard business of living.
Occasionally, you grieve briefly again, but when you actually indulge a
taste for the grim past - and reading the desperate gasps of the dying
is about as grim as it gets - either you need professional help or you
are trying to exploit the dead to some purpose.
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- Why would a respectable newspaper print such material?
Well, I recall a service station in Massachusetts with gas pumps that blinked
out a message with multiple exclamation points never to forget 9/11, over
and over, as you filled your tank. What this had to do with selling gasoline
I don't know, but it reflected a frenzied, dangerous kind of thinking,
the thinking of those ready to subject themselves and others to some form
of control.
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- A recent poll shows that about 70% of Americans believe
that Iraq was involved in 9/11. That is to say, two years after the fact,
most Americans believe an absolute fantasy, not supported by any evidence.
Poor old Hussein had a hard enough time for years just holding things together
in Iraq - a feat the vast armies and resources of the United States appear
incapable of repeating - without running off and getting involved in terrorism.
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- All this should be abundantly clear to Americans by now.
They occupy Iraq. They have looked into its every nook and cranny. There
cannot be much there that American administrators do not now understand,
yet somehow the basic facts of the situation remain unknown to most Americans.
Instead they embrace fantasy.
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- Indeed, it should have all been clear long before invading
and occupying the place. With all the electromagnetic intercepts, spy satellites,
and daily over-flights of the last decade, Iraq probably qualified as the
CIA's most intensively-recorded country.
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- Bush unblinkingly calls Iraq the central front in the
war on terror, but that's what a skulking politician does as he asks for
another $87 billion to clean up a horrible mess he created. And what a
platter of tax-payer goodies to set before friends and supporters! There's
a mother load of public paranoia and misinformation out there to be mined,
and Bush isn't about to set to work clearing it away.
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- America's velvet-glove fascists, the neocons, have exploited
9/11 relentlessly. In some respects their activities do resemble the Nazis'
exploitation of the Reichstag fire. Then, the act of a mentally unstable
man from Holland was immediately seized upon to justify a quick and systematic
destruction of the hated Weimar Republic, whose Chancellor Hitler had only
just been appointed.
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- Bush's government was floundering before 9/11. He was
well along to earning full recognition of his vacuity - a notable achievement
considering the immense resources employed to "airbrush" a President's
every move. Fate in the form of nineteen mentally unstable men from the
Middle East intervened and dumped at his feet the gifts of excessive public
fear and credulity.
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- Two years after 9/11 the world is forced to accommodate
an unhealthy, delusional America, like adults fearful of confronting a
disturbed child who paces the schoolyard mumbling while carrying a loaded
gun taken from home. It is not an exaggeration to say that the situation
often involves less rationality and predictability than we knew from Leonid
Brezhnev's Soviet Union.
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