MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES...

It is September, 11th 2007 and a day of reflection and remembrance for our nation and the world. I grieve for those directly affected as well as for the long term results of that tragic event on our nation's future. We, of all schools of thought, need to concentrate on taking our country back and rebuilding the vision that has sustained our growth and reputation in the global community.
There will be plenty said by pundints throughout the blogosphere and on TV screens everywhere supporting all schools of thought so I do not plan to mount my soapbox and rattle forth with my own view of events as I see them. I will, however, include some excerpts and tidbits of valuable insight that should give away my inner leanings for those who do not already know my views.

Starting with an excerpt from a book called "Blowback" by Chalmers Johnson which I will transcribe the old fashioned way. ( and if you know my typing skills, or lack thereof, you will consider it amazing. )

THE NATURE OF POLITICAL TERRORISM
Chalmers Johnson - Blowback (Introduction)
Copywrite 2000 w/ Intro copywrite 2004
Published by Owl Books, Henry Holt & Co.
http://www.henryholt.com
bold(ed) passages by Me

The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not "attack America," as political leaders and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy.
Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders, whose innocence is, of course, no different from that of the civilians killed by American bombs in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It was probably the most striking instance in the history of international relations of the use of political terrorism to influence events.

Political terrorism is usually defined by it's strategic objectives. Its first goal is normally to turn those domestic or international conditions terrorists perceive to be unjust into into unstable revolutionary situations. To a wavering population, terrorist acts are intended to demonstrate that the monopoly of force exercised by encumbent authorities can be broken. The essential idea is to disorient that population "by demonstrating through apparently indiscriminate violence that the exisiting regime cannot protect the people nominally under it's authority.
The effect on the individual is supposedly not only anxiety, but withdrawl from the relationships making up the established order of society."

Of course, such a strategy rarely works as intended: it usually has the opposite effect of encouraging people to support any strong reassertion of authority. That was indeed what happened within the United States following the attacks of September 11th, but not necessarily throughout the Islamic world, where the terrorists' objective of displaying America's vulnerabilities and destabilizing the world of the advanced capitalist nations was all too effective.

A second strategic objective of revolutionary terrorism is to provoke ruling elites into a disastrous overreaction, thereby creating widespread resentment against them.
This is a classic startegy, and when it works, the impact can be devastating. As explained by Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerrilla leader whose writings influenced political terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s, is a government can be provoked into a purely military response to terrorism, it's overreaction will alienate the masses, causing them to "revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things."
The second Palestinian Intifada of 2000-03 illustrates the dynamic: terrorist attacks elicited powerful and disproportionate Israeli military reactions that led to an escalating cycle of more attacks and more retaliation, completely militarizing relations between the two peoples.

In our globalizing world, the masses alienated by such overreactions may be anything but domestic. The bombing of Afghanistan that the United States launched on October 7, 2001, inflicted gret misery on many innocent civilians, a pattern repeated in Iraq, where the death toll of civilians as of August 2003 stood at well over 3,000 , a figure that informed observers think may go as high as 10,000 as more evidence is collected.
(transciber's note: We know that this number is much, much higher now. )
Altogether, instead of acting to resolve the post 9/11 crisis, the United States exacerbated it with massive military assaults on Afghanistan an Iraq, two ill-advised and unnecessary wars that inflamed passions throughout the Islamic world and repelled huge majorities in every democratic country on earth.

- END EXCERPT

The above section has been summed up and dumbed down by our presiding authority into a soundbite that explains, in depth, what really caused the events of 9/11 and everything that occurred since: "They hate us for our freedom !"

I will now include a couple of video insertions in the unlikely event that anyone reading has not seen them already.

and finally, the great fake news journalist, Jon Stewart's take on same:

If you have made it this far, I thank you. I do not have proper permissions to reproduce any of the above borrowed elements for this post so, until such a time when my readership grows beyond the dozen, or someone reports my usage of same, please support the original contributors of materials above. ( except Cheney, of course. )

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