The Political Zone
11 Years After 9/11: The United States Has Changed a Lot Since the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks, and Not For the Better
By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, September 11, 2012
September 11, 2012 marks the 11th anniversary of the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Eleven years later, Americans are still feeling the effects of 9/11—and civil libertarians have many reasons to be worried about the direction the United States has been taking the last 11 years.
After 9/11, the neocon supporters of the George W. Bush Administration repeatedly said that the al-Qaeda terrorists who engineered the 9/11 attacks “hate us for our freedoms.” And ironically, the neocons who made that assertion gave al-Qaeda a major gift: they went about attacking American freedoms by promoting the Patriot Act and greatly expanding the powers of the federal government. Trends forecaster Gerald Celente has described the Patriot Act as “the Raping of the Constitution Act”; he is absolutely right.
If Islamo-terrorists hate Americans for their freedoms, the Patriot Act was an enormous victory for al-Qaeda. So was the use of torture and waterboarding, which neocons applauded. Torture, of course, is a notoriously unreliable interrogation method; the person being tortured is likely to say anything and offer bad information in the hope of making the torture stop. But then, neocons (who are really neo-fascists, not neo-conservatives) are obsessed with control—and facts certainly aren’t going to get in the way of their agenda.
When the No-Fly List was created by the George W. Bush Administration and U.S. citizens were wrongly placed on that list, it was an enormous victory for al-Qaeda. One of the most egregious examples of a false positive occurred when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy was placed on the No-Fly List; the Massachusetts Democrat spent three weeks appealing directly to Tom Ridge (head of the Department of Homeland Security at the time) in order to get his name removed from that list. Obviously, Kennedy enjoyed special privileges as a member of the U.S. Senate; other Americans who have the misfortune of being wrongly placed on that list don’t have those privileges.
Sadly, some of the worst George W. Bush-era abuses (including the Patriot Act and the No-Fly List) have continued during the Barack Obama era. TSA agents have become increasingly abusive at U.S. airports, and with the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act (which Obama signed into law on December 31, 2011), civil libertarians have even more to worry about. Celente, a vehement critic of NDAA, has described the law as a major attack on habeus corpus and said that under the NDAA, U.S. citizens who criticize the government can be declared “enemy combatants” and subject to indefinite detention. Celente has warned that under the NDAA, “the military could come into anyone’s home, anyone’s office, into anyone’s life and lock you up, take you away, torture you, blow your brains out—and there’s no recourse at all.”
A variety of people from across the political spectrum have been warning that post-9/11, the U.S. has been gradually turning into a police state. Liberal/progressive feminist Naomi Wolf, journalist Chris Hedges and members of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have made that assertion; so have Rep. Ron Paul, AntiWar.com publisher Justin Raimondo, Paul Craig Roberts, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson (who would like to see the Patriot Act overturned), talk show host Alex Jones and other right-of-center libertarian/paleoconservatives. Politics can make strange bedfellows, and Wolf is absolutely correct when she says that while liberals and libertarians can agree to disagree on economics, they need to join forces when it comes to opposing dangerous pieces of legislation like the Patriot Act and the NDAA. Indeed, Roberts spoke the truth when he said: “It is clear that the purpose of the police state is not to protect Americans from Muslim terrorists. The purpose of the police state is to terrorize US citizens.”
From corporate welfare and bailouts to a collapsing middle class to attacks on civil liberties, the United States is looking more and more like a banana republic. Eleven years ago, al-Qaeda brought down the Twin Towers—and if their goal was to bring down the U.S. Constitution as well, they appear to be succeeding.
Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, Skin Two, The Pasadena Weekly, JazzTimes, Cash Box and a long list of other well-known publications. He can be followed on Twitter @alexvhenderson.
