A Nine-Eleven State of Mind (lessness)

The official mantra being intoned ad infinitum throughout the world today is "Never forget."

But notwithstanding the surface appearance of soul-searching with all the maudlin remembrances by the mainstream media in the wake of the "official" end to the Afghanistan War, there's still quite a bit of selective memory at work to help keep the mythology of "we were attacked for no reason other than they hate us for our freedoms" alive. The common 20th anniversary critique still hinges mainly on the overreaction to the attack by our leaders, and not what caused the attacks in the first place: the abandonment by the CIA of its Al Qaeda creation and its valuable asset in the proxy war against the then-USSR - a disgruntled Saudi ex-royal named Osama bin Laden.

As you probably heard, the CIA has embarked on a marketing campaign to display its softer side through the magic of Woke-Washing. As long as they hire more women and ethnic groups to prove their diversity cred while not actually diverging from their core mission of relentless regime changes, dirty wars and other rogue activities, then it's all good.

The New York Times's Maureen Dowd, therefore, dutifully bashed the "toxic masculinity" and machismo of the Bush and Trump administrations as the root cause for post-9/11 insanity and war, while also owning that such female hawks as Condi Rice and Hillary Clinton were enablers of same. But Hillary was mentioned only insofar that as a senator, she had voted with the Bushies to invade Iraq. Left unmentioned by Dowd was her later outsize role, as Obama's secretary of state, in the war of aggression against Libya and its oil.

Dowd actually characterized the media-hyped nutritious sandwich filling that was Barack Obama a "respite" from GOP male supremacy.

My response to the Times:

The "respite" that was the Obama presidency is a matter of style rather than substance. Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations revealed in 2016 that his administration had dropped an average of 72 bombs a day, for a grand total of 26,171 in just that one year alone. Obama also vastly improved upon Bush's deadly record by expanding the secretive Special Ops campaigns to more than 70 percent of the entire globe, or 138 separate countries. So is it righteous to give Obama a pass for a "respite" just because he was the model of adult discretion and didn't wear his macho bellicosity on his sleeve like the oafish Bush and Trump? I think not, but telling the truth might destroy the carefully marketed mythology. Maureen Dowd does have a point about women leaders not being more peace-loving and kind than men. Who can ever forget Madeline Albright enthusing that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children during Clinton-era sanctions were "worth it?" And then there was Hillary Clinton laughingly bragging that "we came, we saw, he died" upon receiving news that Libyan president Gaddafi had just been sodomized to death with a bayonet. Libya, by the way, has become a modern slavery marketplace since Clinton played a major role in the "humanitarian intervention." The official "forever war" in Afghanistan may be over as far as US boots on the ground are concerned. Try telling that to the seven Afghan children killed by a US Reaper drone strike just the other week.

9/11/21:The Usual Suspects Perform

It could have been worse. George W. could have shown up and shared another piece of candy with Michelle while Bruce Springsteen crooned and strummed to the crowd in an act of anesthetized and sanitized remembrance.

Blasphemy In the Church of Nine-Eleven

Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi

The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must be done with reverence. The President shouldn’t use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack.

4:20 AM - 13 Apr 2019

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1. 1. Nancy Pelosi‏Verified account @SpeakerPelosi Apr 13
      

      As we visit our troops in Stuttgart to thank them and be briefed by them, we honor our first responsibility as leaders to protect and defend the American people. It is wrong for the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to fan the flames to make anyone less safe.

The target of much criticism from the left for her bland scolding of Donald Trump over his own incendiary Tweet against Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Pelosi has since announced she will ask for another security review by the FBI and Capitol Police to determine how Omar, her family and her staff can be best protected from a sitting president of the United States. She has also belatedly suggested that his original offensive tweet, with a photo of Omar interposed with a graphic of the flaming World Trade Center, "be taken down."

Omar's remarks about Islamophobia at a conference last month were recently ripped out of context by a right-wing agitator, then enhanced by Rupert Murdoch's tabloid New York Post, and finally grotesquely inflamed by Provocateur-in-Chief Donald Trump. What Trump actually presides over is not so much the government as it is the xenophobia and racism which has always been an integral, albeit usually verbally suppressed, part of the American ruling class agenda.

 And that very much includes the United States military, whose Civil War army was reconstituted and professionalized for the express purpose of enforcing the mass expulsions and exterminations of native American populations. To this day, military weapons and other hardware, such as the Apache helicopter, are named after Indian tribes. Osama bin Laden was code-named Geronimo prior to his extrajudicial sneak execution as Barack Obama began preparations for his re-election campaign.

 So Trump just happens to be the most vocal and vicious (and for the more discreet ruling elite, the most embarrassing) spokesman for this dark part of the American psyche, not arriving on the scene until some some 300 years after the Puritans first erected their own model shining City on the Hill off a foundation of corpses of the native populations of New England, whom they exterminated both through their diseases and their wars.

So the cowardly and tepid response of Pelosi and Democratic Party leadership to Trump's not-so-veiled incitements to racist violence against Omar in particular and Muslims in general, should thus be put into historical context.

Pelosi in her Tweet avoided directly addressing his threats against Ilhan Omar by diverting the issue into a bizarre sermon whose theme is that any discussion  of the Sept. 11th attacks should be akin to prayer - a "sacred memory" - to be chanted only with the approved words and contained within the walls of the established cathedral. This deflection is nothing new. The horrific act of mass murder began its transformation into a cult, founded and led by the political-media complex, almost from the day it happened. The attacks had to be fetishized in order to avoid discussions of its root cause, which was blowback by former CIA asset Osama bin Laden, revenge against the US militaristic/capitalistic meddling and plunder in the entire Middle Eastern world and the militarization of Israel by its US partner, funder and enabler.

 The physical site of the lower Manhattan attack has been transformed into a national shrine and museum. The 2,753 victims have been canonized as martyrs.

The attacks became the impetus for even more US meddling, with the ensuing full scale military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and still-ongoing bombings of at least seven other majority-Muslim countries, including Ilhan Omar's native Somalia. More than a million people have died, been maimed or displaced by this overkill. The 9/11 attacks also became the perfect excuse to criminalize dissent and whittle away the civil rights of both US and global populations. They spawned a whole new Department of Homeland Security and transformed the  country into what journalist Todd Miller aptly calls Border Patrol Nation. This year, the United States Congress has allocated more money to the permanent war machine than it did during the bloodiest year of the Iraq War.

Long before the September day in 2001 "when everything changed," of course, Islam was being demonized by Western leaders, and their corporate news media and Hollywood propagandists. Islam has regularly been equated with fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism for decades. As the late Palestinian author Edward Said explained in the introduction of the 1997 edition of his book "Covering Islam," Muslims became especially convenient scapegoats after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the wake of the bombing by Libyan terrorists of the Pan Am flight above Lockerbie, Scotland, and the first bombing of the World Trade Center and other attacks, the simple utterance of the word "Islam" in the West became a means of attacking Islam. 

This, in turn, has "provoked more hostility between self-appointed Muslim and Western spokespersons. 'Islam' defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and of course an infinite number of different experiences."

This is exactly what Ilhan Omar was talking about in her speech last month,  correctly observing that the actions of "some people" on 9/11 paved the way for the perpetual criminalization of an entire religion as practiced in myriad ways by over a billion people worldwide.

As for Donald Trump, inveterate entertainment consumer and purveyor that he is, his own personal xenophobia did not sprout full-fledged from the murky depths of his personality disorder. He probably, for example, saw the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster, True Lies. Its star villains, notes author Zachary Karabell, are stereotypical Arabs "complete with glinty eyes and a passionate desire to kill Americans" who must, in turn, be killed by the sexy intrepid American hero, played by future GOP California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

As Edward Said observed, "Covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what 'we' do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are."

Ilhan Omar was initially celebrated by the Democratic Party because she so perfectly fit its identity politics agenda as a cosmetic antithesis of Trump: she is a woman, she is Black, she is an immigrant, and she is a Muslim. If only she could have stayed in her appointed place as an exotic statue instead of criticizing the right-wing government of Israel - on top of having the effrontery to be one of the most progressive members of Congress. As such, she puts lie to the propaganda that Muslims live in a medieval, anti-feminist world. The corporate wing of the party, led by Pelosi, is not progressive and it fully supports the right-wing government of Israel. While pretending to be all-inclusive and anti-bigotry, this corporate wing has fully colluded in waging the forever wars on Muslim-majority countries. Pelosi never blinked an eye at Barack Obama's drone assassination program, which specifically targeted Muslim civilians as incipient terrorists simply by virtue of who they are and where they live (unprotected "tribal areas").

Pelosi therefore must have found it easier to castigate Trump for blaspheming  the "sacred memory" of 9/11 than to castigate him for implicitly threatening Ilhan Omar's life. It took her three whole days to even factor Omar's well-being into her narrative. Her main gripe was that Trump abused the sacred memory by making it all about himself and his political future. 

Although she didn't spell it out, Pelosi also implied in her April 13th tweet that the carefully unmentioned Omar had also abused the sacred memory by juxtaposing her own religion next to the US Imperium's virtual state religion and holy day of obligation, which became the very basis for attacking Omar's religion and its various adherents, the vast majority of whom are peace-loving people.

The Church of Nine-Eleven was constructed by the war-mongering capitalist elites for the sole propaganda purpose of ramping up war and plunder, cynically repurposing the victims and first responders into patriotic martyrs and human shields, even as some of these same first responders went to war to die for the sole profit of corporations. And, even as sections of the 9/11 Commission report implicating the Saudi government were kept secret for many years. The volunteer troops fighting the oligarchs' wars were then used by the Obamas and other politicians to shame the economically struggling population at home into "sharing the sacrifice" as jobs were lost and punishing austerity was imposed after the 2008 financial collapse. 

 Pelosi's tepid tweet sends the hysterical message that it is reckless, rank heresy for Trump to openly and verbally admit that he hates Muslims, Mexicans and all dark-skinned people.

Her sub-Tweet, gushing about her own visit to a US military base in Germany,  which is still semi-occupied 75 years after the end of World War II, says it all. When she writes that the military protection of "the American people" is her first priority, keep in mind that the de facto definition of "the people" and their national security is the corporate state, which armed forces must protect around the clock and around the globe if their plunder is to proceed apace.

As Edward Said wrote:

"The tendency to consider the whole world as one country's imperium is very much in the ascendancy in today's United States, the last remaining superpower.... Such an idea of rightful Western dominance is in reality an uncritical idolization of Western power. "

Keep in mind that Said penned those words in 1997, before 9/11 "changed everything." The ascendancy has already reached its peak and it has nowhere else to go but down.

Thus, for Pelosi and for her fellow imperialists, it is likewise heresy for a progressive elected representative like Ilhan Omar to bring too much attention to herself, to her maligned religion and her war-torn native country, to her fellow immigrants and refugees, and to bipartisan hypocrisy. The ruling class does not want the American public to get the idea that the United States kills and expels and robs people for any reason other than humanitarianism, or that other countries hate us not for our "freedoms", but for our crimes.

Pelosi might be getting this year's Profiles in Courage award from the Kennedy dynasty, but it's really Omar who deserves an award for her serene courage under immense, unrelenting pressure. In the days since Trump's incendiary tweet, she has received even more death threats, and Trump himself has escalated his Twitter attacks on her.

Even so, her mind is on the plight of others:

Ilhan Omar‏Verified account @IlhanMN

This country was founded on the ideas of justice, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness. But these core beliefs are under threat. Each and every day. We are under threat by an administration that would rather cage children than pass comprehensive immigration reform.

11:18 AM - 13 Apr 2019

Forgetting Our Great National Obsession

Man, do I ever feel faux-guilty. I was so busy watching and worrying over Hurricane Irma (when I wasn't shallowly and obsessively writing about Hillary and Ivanka, that is) that I completely, utterly forgot that yesterday was the anniversary of 9/11. I didn't realize the importance of the date until I switched on the local news last night. Usually they lead off with a gory highway pileup, or the latest grievous assault on (or theft of) a religious statue in the Bronx. But the minute I heard that solemn tolling bell soundtrack, I knew exactly what I had missed.

It was like the recurring nightmare I used to have as a struggling single mother: I'd either forgotten about Halloween, and my kids were the only ones in the school without costumes, or even worse, the kids woke up to a bare Christmas tree because Mom had forgotten to play Santa. Maybe a psychologist out there can interpret these anxiety dreams for me. Because truth be told, I still sometimes have them. even though my children have been adults for years.

I wasn't always so remiss about 9/11 on this blog. Without going through the archives, I'm pretty sure I've posted something inappropriate about it on all the requisite dates. Since I am a day late and a dollar short, I'll just offer up the following 9/11 anecdote before following up with a reprise of one of my older posts.

You might have read that our esteemed governor, Andrew Cuomo, has faced some criticism for yanking hundreds of New York State police troopers away from their normal patrols in order for them to stand around at the airports and train stations as actors in National Security Terror Theater. (The media has had to file Freedom of Information requests to get the specifics on this public relations gimmick, such as the $26 million cost overrun in the state police budget.)

A state trooper I know was one of those assigned to Grand Central recently. Before going to their assigned posts, however, his detail's first order of business was a special guided tour of the 9/11 memorial and museum at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. He told me that the objective was to get the troopers in the right emotional and patriotic frames of mind as they sussed out potential terrorists waiting in line for a train to Albany or a flight to Boise. Oh, and it was for Cuomo to look Oval Office-ready and for passengers to feel either safe or intimidated, as the case may be. The trooper told me he'd personally found the whole experience very weird, particularly the required museum tour. His main function turned out to be posing for selfies with out-of-state tourists.

On that note, here's a piece I wrote three years ago, to mark the opening of the 9/11 museum in 2014:

Atrocity Exhibition in the Gilded Age

It could always be worse, I suppose. At least they're not selling the "Twisted Metal" series of X-rated video games in the September 11 Memorial Museum gift shop. Not yet, anyway.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a 9/11 souvenir shop. It will open its doors next week, to coincide with the grand opening of our Great National Shrine to Terror, appropriately located just blocks away from that other terror enclave known as Wall Street in lower Manhattan.

A dedication gala reserved for a class-spanning cavalcade of potentates, politicians, CEOs, corporate sponsors, emergency personnel and survivors was being held today.

But back to shopping. Among the mementos on sale are adorable search and rescue dog plushies. They're euphemistally being  labeled "rescue" animals for Disneyfication-of-atrocity purposes, due to their rapid redeployment as cadaver dogs after the tower collapses. 

And since the 9/11 gift shop is an equal opportunity purveyor, the puppies are available in both black Lab and yellow Lab. 

  The selection doesn't end with toys. For fashionistas anxious to show off their somberness for all the folks back home, the "Darkness" clothing label is offering a special line of tee-shirts and hoodies. This couture is not recommended for wearing upon dark skin, especially in Florida* and wherever the NYPD is on patrol.

And for those hopelessly romantic death-denialists out there, there's a wide variety of "Survivor Tree" jewelry, named after the oak tree damaged in the attacks and nursed back to health by some volunteer horticulturists.

  Finally,don't forget your WTC Map & Memorial Tote Bag. For only $20, you'll have a sturdy place to stash your 9/11 plushies, earrings, mug, cap, cell phone cover, mousepad, magnets, keychains and a wide variety of 9/11 Christmas ornaments.

Are you worried that the commercialization of one of the most horrific crimes in history might be too intense for the sensitive shopper?  Well, you can ease yourselves. Because all proceeds will be used for the outrageously expensive upkeep of the 9/11 Museum itself. You see, the multimillion-dollar tax deductible predatory loans investments from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and virtually all of corporate America apparently are not enough to keep Terror alive, year after year, for all eternity.

 And heaven forbid that any proceeds are used to give away tickets to those New Yorkers who can't afford the $24 price of admission. The indigent population in the Wealth Disparity Capital of the World will get nothing. The ailing, poisoned first responders of 9/11 will not be seeing any additional proceeds either, despite the fact that their badges and insignia are being honored as religious artifacts and sold at high markups in the gift shop.

To be totally fair, though, Museum directors are not charging admission to children. They also don't recommend attendance by children under the age of 10. The exhibits are that disturbing.

If you can't or won't visit the glorified crime scene, you can still order 9/11 stuff from the gift shop website. And should your merchandise arrive in a mangled condition, there's a 45-day window for returns or refunds. Your complete satisfaction is their goal.

But, I digress from the sanctity of this surreal occasion.

In the 9/11 museum itself, the thrills will be muted, and open displays of  enjoyment will not be tolerated. Taking a cue from peep show culture, long-suppressed graphic video and audio of human beings in the act of death will be only available for discreet viewing in private rooms. Similarly, the unidentified human remains newly arrived from the city morgue for museum interment will be hidden from rubber-neckers who cannot prove that they are immediate family. Fetishists will have to be satisfied using their limited imaginations as they ponder the grotesque tableaux of mangled fire trucks, orphaned shoes, melted girders, and other relics and artifacts of mass murder. The mausoleum within the museum is off-limits to mere gawkers.

And J.G. Ballard must be rolling in his grave.

The late novelist actually presaged the 9/11 museum and the dystopian decadence of the 21st century Gilded Age in his fiction. His novel "The Atrocity Exhibition" included a controversial short story called "Crash". The plot, such as it is, takes place amidst a museum display of horrendous car crash memorabilia.

"All over the world," Ballard wrote, "major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized in its most digestible form."

Unlike the glitzy 9/11 shrine, we never do find out whether Ballard's atrocity exhibition of gruesome relics is real, or whether it's simply a figment of the protagonist's psychotic imagination.  First published in Great Britain in 1970, the book was considered so disgusting that copies were soon yanked from store shelves and destroyed. The pre-9/11 world apparently was not yet ready for science fiction pornography.

The late Christopher Hitchens described Ballard as a "catastrophist" who specialized in "dark materials," (as in the 9/11 Boutique "Darkness" clothing line) his inspiration flowing in a straight line from Jonathan Swift. In his review of Ballard's short story collection, Hitchens wrote:

Another early story (though not represented here: the claim of this volume to be “complete” is somewhat deceptive) in something of the same style, “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” ignited a ridiculous fuss in the very news rags whose ghoulish coverage of her life Ballard was intending to satirize. Randolph Churchill led the charge, demanding punishment for the tiny magazine that printed it. This “modest proposal” furnishes one of many clues to a spring of Ballard’s inspiration, which is fairly obviously the work of Jonathan Swift. In 1964 he even wrote an ultra-macabre story, “The Drowned Giant,” which tells of what happens when the corpse of a beautiful but gigantic man washes ashore on a beach “five miles to the north-west of the city.” The local Lilliputians find cheap but inventive ways of desecrating and disfiguring the body before cutting it up for souvenirs and finally rendering it down in big vats. One might characterize this as the microcosmically ideal Ballard fantasy, in that it partakes of the surreal—the “Gulliver” being represented as a huge flesh statue based on the work of Praxiteles—as well as of the Freudian: “as if the mutilation of this motionless colossus had released a sudden flood of repressed spite.” In the pattern of many other stories, the narrator adopts the tone of a pathologist dictating a detached report of gross anatomy. A single phrase, colossal wreck, is a borrowing from Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which may be the closest that Ballard ever came to a concession to the Romantic school.

 Another and nearer literary source is provided by the name—Traven—of the solitary character in “The Terminal Beach.” This is one of two tales—the other being “One Afternoon at Utah Beach”—in which Ballard makes an imaginarium out of the ruined scapes of World War II. Like his modern but vacant cities full of ghostly tower blocks (he is obsessed with towers of all sorts) and abandoned swimming pools, the Pacific and Atlantic beaches, still covered by concrete blocks and bunkers, furnish the ideal setting for a Ballardian wasteland. The beach in the first story has the additional advantage of having been the site of an annihilating nuclear test. The revenant shapes of long-dead Japanese and Germans are allowed a pitiless flicker before their extinction.

 It was such an innocent time, that Pre-9/11 Era. And then Everything Changed (TM). We were speed-read the Shock Doctrine. The NSA revved up into high gear. The Bill of Rights crashed and burned and became a relic practically overnight. (all except the Second Amendment, which immediately began consuming the other nine, course by voracious course.)

Disaster Capitalism ran wild.

 “Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us. Nothing can change who we are as Americans.” -- Barack Obama, 9/11 Museum dedication.

 “The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on its shroud." -- J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.
_____________________________________

* This was a reference to the murder of Trayvon Martin in the "stand your ground" Sunshine State. He was shot to death by neighborhood watch vigilante George Zimmerman because he was wearing a hoodie while walking while black.

Deplorables of the Deep State

While the nation ostensibly mourns the thousands of victims of the 9/11 attacks today, thousands of elite pathocrats and plutocrats are cackling, silently yet maniacally. September 11th is the permanent catastrophe that keeps right on giving to them. It's always Christmas for the Deep Security State, a behemoth so big and so unaccountable and so flush with cash that even the president himself cannot be aware of all its myriad moving parts. 

As reported by Dana Priest and William Arkin, 9/11 has spawned a virtual Fourth Branch of government which grows secretly and exponentially with every passing anniversary of the attacks:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

Therefore, all the president can do to try and control the permanent War on Terror is to renew America's State of Emergency for a 16th straight year, and continue issuing proclamations and uttering platitudes about the Nine Eleven Generation. These are the young people who have never known a day when their nation has not been at war.  Although the marketing campaigns are creepily similar, they are not to be confused with the Pepsi Generation. That might be way too crass.

Crass, my ass: Coke, in true capitalistic competitive spirit, marked our great national day of hegemony and death by constructing a Twin Towers replica made entirely out of soda cans. To add insult to injury, they built it in a Florida Walmart. The marketing geniuses apparently didn't realize the display was in bad taste until thousands of shoppers told them so, and the exhibit was duly removed by $8-an-hour associates with no company health insurance benefits.

Meanwhile, 9/11 continues to be very, very good for neoliberal capitalism. As Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee writes in his Diary of a Bad Year, 

The bogeyman Osama bin Laden has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Armed with nothing but Kalashnikovs and plastic explosives, he and his followers have terrorized and demoralized the West, driving nations into wholesale panic. To the bullying, authoritarian, militaristic strand in Western political life, Osama has been a gift from the gods.

No matter that U.S. special forces executed a cowering Osama in 2012 in the run-up to Barack Obama's re-election campaign. The patriotic spirit of terror lives on, with or without him.

The September 11 attacks were the pretext to invade Iraq a year and half later.  Nearly 7,000 U.S. service people and at least a quarter of a million civilians have died since the start of the war, which continues with the deployment of at least a thousand new Gen-9/11 troops to fight Isis. Obama's drones have murdered at least hundreds of innocent women and children in areas with whom this country is not even officially at war.

Bill Quigley writes:

Since 9/11 US spending on our military cost well over $3 trillion. Direct combat and reconstruction costs for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11 have officially cost US taxpayers $1.6 trillion dollars according to the Congressional Research Service.   Additional trillions have been spent on growing the Pentagon budget and for present and future increased health and disability benefits for veterans.
The US military captures 55 percent of our national discretionary spending and spending on veterans benefits is another 6 percent. Since 9/11 military spending has increased by 50 percent while spending on other discretionary domestic spending increased by 13 percent according to the National Priorities Project.

War profiteers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have raked in billions of dollars in profits in the 15 years since 9/11. Although Saudi Arabia has been at least indirectly implicated in the attacks, the United States continues to sell that repressive regime billions of dollars worth of arms for the slaughter of Yemeni civilians. President Obama is expected to veto a bill which would allow 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia for monetary damages.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton rails against the millions of Donald Trump supporters who have been carefully and incessantly taught to be Islamophobes by the leaders and corporate media of America. The "deplorables" of Flyover Country simply didn't wake up one morning and start railing against Muslims based upon any direct knowledge or experience. They simply turned on CNN and Fox and MSNBC and watched the sycophantic mass media cozily embed themselves with the American invaders. They learned to think of Muslims as bad guys whose pictures were on decks of cards. "Clash of civilizations" propaganda has been polluting our airwaves with a vengeance for going on two decades.

It seems that Clinton forgot to notice all the rotten eggs of the Military-Industrial complex in her own Basket of Deplorables. Despite an overpowering reek, they're nesting there comfortably in their abundant money grass. Not only have they never been convicted of torture and war crimes, graft and corruption, they are getting pride of place at the gourmet table. And because they're encased in solid gold, there's no danger of them ever getting devoured themselves. People are too weary to develop a taste for rebellion against the forever wars being waged in all our names.

So we turn away in apathy or disgust. And then we hold our noses, and we choose a commander in chief using the parts of our brains which process fear rather than exercising those which enable rational thought.

Eleventh Nine Eleven

What with all the hoopla of the campaigns and party conventions, September 11th kind of snuck up on me. I am ashamed to admit that before President Obama reminded me about the looming celebration of mass murder, glorious Americana style, it had totally slipped my mind. After all, didn't the event reach its orgiastic zenith last year in the wake of the bin Laden assassination? Some irrational part of me just assumed that from then on out, it would just sort of tastefully lurk beneath the surface of our collective super-ego.

No such luck. Obama dusted off his earnest Keeping Fear Alive and Loving It screed again today. Forget about his fiscal scold of an acceptance speech the other night, when he insisted we elected him to tell us the unvarnished truth instead of what we want to hear.  Because it's that time of year again, when politicians let their cynical patriotic fervor go hog wild. It's the time of year when any sense of shame or adherence to the truth goes right out the window. It's the time of year when I really, really cringe in embarrassment. Anyway, here is the transcript of Barry's latest Very Special Sept.11th Retrospective. (he has promised to shut up on the day itself, even though he and the Mittster plan to be there for the usual solemn, touchy feely let's all get along for one day, photo op.)

This week, we mark the eleventh anniversary of the September 11th attacks. It’s a time to remember the nearly 3,000 innocent men, women and children we lost, and the families they left behind. It’s a chance to honor the courage of the first responders who risked their lives – on that day, and every day since. And it’s an opportunity to give thanks for our men and women in uniform who have served and sacrificed, sometimes far from home, to keep our country safe.

This anniversary is about them. It’s also a time to reflect on just how far we’ve come as a nation these past eleven years.

On that clear September morning, as America watched the towers fall, and the Pentagon burn, and the wreckage smoldering in a Pennsylvania field, we were filled with questions. Where had the attacks come from, and how would America respond? Would they fundamentally weaken the country we love? Would they change who we are?

(The very first question that entered my mind when the first plane hit the tower was "Wow, someone must sure hate the Americans in general and our predacious capitalist system in particular. What outrage could we have perpetrated that could have brought them to this extremity?" Also, where is the president's outrage that so many of our first responders have been laid off due to government austerity, and have been unable to access medical care thanks to no universal health insurance?)

The last decade has been a difficult one, but together, we have answered those questions and come back stronger as a nation.

(We started two wars costing over a trillion dollars and at least 50  times more lives than were lost in the 9/11 attacks -- and we're still counting. We will be in Afghanistan for at least another decade. This last decade has been a very profitable one for Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex.)

We took the fight to al Qaeda, decimated their leadership, and put them on a path to defeat. And thanks to the courage and skill of our intelligence personnel and armed forces, Osama bin Laden will never threaten America again.

(We put them on a path of blowback against the United States that is exponentially increasing with every secret Drone attack that kills innocent people in countries with which we are not even at war. America is in more peril than ever before. With every bombing that kills somebody's innocent mother, father, brother or sister, we create future generations of countless bin Ladens. Our moral standing in the world has taken a huge hit since 9/11. The initial good will and sympathy expressed by the international community has been plummeting ever since. Our very own Nobel Laureate president is no longer viewed favorably by much of the world. )

Instead of pulling back from the world, we’ve strengthened our alliances while improving our security here at home. As Americans, we refuse to live in fear. Today, a new tower rises above the New York skyline. And our country is stronger, safer and more respected in the world.

We are fighting terrorism with terrorism. Far from strengthening our alliances, American bellicosity is creating more enemies. As Americans, we live in a state of manufactured fear every single day. We are patted down and x-rayed at airports. People protesting economic inequality in Occupy encampments and at closed partisan conventions are arrested and put on Terror watch lists. The president has declared that he can extra-judicially arrest or kill anyone, anywhere in the world. The National Security agency is building a brand new repository in the Utah desert in which to store the email and Google searches and data trails and  cell phone conversations of every man, woman and child on the planet. Never before have our civil rights been more jeopardized and trampled upon.)

Instead of turning on each other, we’ve resisted the temptation to give in to mistrust and suspicion. I have always said that America is at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates – and we will never be at war with Islam or any other religion. We are the United States of America. Our freedom and diversity make us unique, and they will always be central to who we are as a nation.

(The United States is attacking and killing Muslims abroad and spying on them here at home. Obama's national security advisor has gone out of his way to praise the New York City police department's illegal anti-Muslim surveillance. The Obama administration has deported more undocumented immigrants than any previous regime and has prosecuted a record number of whistleblowers exposing government waste and corruption. The Department of Homeland Security had turned a blind eye to the growing right wing terror threat in these United States out of a sense of not wanting to offend right wing politicians. This country has not been this deeply divided against itself since the Civil War. Just take a look at the theatrical presidential sweepstakes: mistrust and suspicion are the rule, vicious money-fueled attack ads are poisoning the discourse.) 

Instead of changing who we are, the attacks have brought out the best in the American people. More than 5 million members of the 9/11 Generation have worn America’s uniform over the past decade, and we’ve seen an outpouring of goodwill towards our military, veterans, and their families. Together, they’ve done everything we’ve asked of them. We’ve ended the war in Iraq and brought our troops home. We brought an end to the Taliban regime. We’ve trained Afghan Security Forces, and forged a partnership with a new Afghan Government. And by the end 2014, the transition in Afghanistan will be complete and our war there will be over.

This entire paragraph is a bald-faced lie. The reaction to the attacks bankrupted this country and eviscerated the Bill of Rights. Since only one percent of our population has joined the all-volunteer armed forces, the vast majority of us have no real clue about the horrors the government is subjecting them to: endless deployments, drugging them to keep them awake and alert, irreversible brain damage and mental illness and an increase in suicides, an epidemic of sexual assaults against female troops that is going unaddressed and unpunished. The Afghan Security Forces are turning against us and killing our troops in the field. The transition in Afghanistan will not be anywhere near complete by 2014. The United States has promised a presence there at least through the next decade. Americans are trying retain indefinite control of the military prison on Afghan soil. We will continue to launch drone attacks from our bases in Afghanistan.)

And finally, instead of turning inward with grief, we’ve honored the memory of those we lost by giving back to our communities, serving those in need, and reaffirming the values at the heart of who we are as a people. That’s why we mark September 11th as a National Day of Service and Remembrance. Because we are one American family. And we look out for each other – not just on the difficult days, but every day.

(Instead of turning inward with grief, we have neglected the people here at home and directed our voracious military machine ever outward, with close to 1000 bases worldwide. We have expanded our power and machinery in new narco-wars in Africa and Latin America. We look out for our defense contractors and war profiteers every single day, because we are now in a permanent state of war. There will be no more normal days.) 

Eleven years later, that’s the legacy of 9/11 – the ability to say with confidence that no adversary and no act of terrorism can change who we are. We are Americans, and we will protect and preserve this country we love. On this solemn anniversary, let’s remember those we lost, let us reaffirm the values they stood for, and let us keep moving forward as one nation and one people.

(Oh, would he please just shut the hell up.)