A 9/11 Accounting
So come on Ron, Come on Ron
Let me hear you tell em, tell em how I
Tell em how I, Tell em how I feel
I was high up in the Sierras at some friends’ place on 9/11/01. I had an internet connection, no TV. I woke up, checked my email. I had received some cryptic message from Miss J about being right. This made me check the news and there was the news.
This was pre-video internet and I waited until around 6pm to bike into town and have a beer at the local establishment to see how the news was covering the news. I sat there for an hour and watched those planes smash into those towers again and again and again. All I could think, “Christ, this has been on a loop across America for twelve hours now,” and I knew well my fellow Americans. Not good. Not good.
I sent a :to all email the next morning saying while the crime was atrocious, it had changed nothing. Change would come with the US' response. Well, here we are.
The Good Dr. Thompson summed it up the next day, “The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now – with somebody – and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.”
Brown University released an accounting a couple years ago, Costs of War. After 3000 died with the towers falling,
“An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died “indirectly,” as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.”
Phew, that makes Israeli level retribution look restrained, leaving aside the fact there was one Egyptian, one Lebanese, two United Arab Emirates, and fifteen Saudis on those planes, not one Iraqi, Afghani, Syrian, Yemeni, or Pakistani.
To top it all, no one in twenty-five years has stood trial for the “greatest crime in American history.” Obama took out Osama, but unlike the 1998 blowing up of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Al Qaeda never claimed credit for 9/11. And remember, Osama said those embassy bombings were in response to US troops being stationed in Saudi.
US troops were put in Saudi in the second decade of what history will know as the American Oil Wars. The wars began when the US supported Saddam’s 1980 Iraqi invasion of Iran, a war that went on for nine years with 200,000 – 600,000 Iranian deaths. Boy, that's the type of specificity you associate with oil numbers.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, and forty-six years after the start of the Oil Wars, the one thing we can conclude is American energy, military, and global policies have been complete and abject failures – trillions upon trillions of dollars washed through an eminently corrupt military industrial complex, the bodies pile ever higher, and oil prices rise.
In the final accounting, Americans en masse have paid little attention to or take any responsibility for any of this, but that doesn’t mean they can skirt paying the costs. Victims again.
I noticed a couple weeks ago the amount of mentions across our media in the last month about the 9/11 anniversary dwarfed all previous talk of the republic’s 250th founding. Google Trends said it's 10-1 and that says everything.