In today's Guardian Seumas Milne writes:
"Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world."
Full article link below:
[urlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,551036,00.html [/url]
This is one outspoken Board member's comments:
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DoctorSpin - 03:17pm Sep 13, 2001
Awful loss of life, but nothing noteworthy compared to 500,000+ starved Iraqi children, deliberate creation of dictators and wars, trained & funded 'freedom fighters', trained & funded death squads, random missile strikes to get the President's sex life off the evening news, random missile strikes to mark the President's coming into office, Operation Desert The Kurds, blocking medical supplies unless they're exchanged for oil, etc. etc. etc.
AIUI, even Taliban / Bin Laden himself got the training/equipment push via the good ol' CIA. All to further US interests - if the people affected don't like it, well they can go and complain to a brick wall.
USA continually sides with Israel no matter what they get up to - whom I note took advantage of the media distraction to send more tanks in to expand its lebensraum. The US is also the world's largest arms dealer. (I wonder if they'll determine the knives' origin?)
And that's not even touching upon what happens off-camera, nor the cumulative effects of US-manipulated events elsewhere, e.g. Yugoslavia, US-backed IRA. And then there's the economic arena...
Those planes were like chickens, coming home to roost. Tasteless I know, but true.
In an ideal world, government/military would pause and ask themselves *why* they are despised and referred to as 'the great satan' by almost a third of the planet. Why children danced in the streets when this happened.
No prizes for predicting what will probably happen though. Operation TowelHead - The Video Game, fat military checks, flag-waving with near-lynching of any American who doesn't join in, half-cock job to 'preserve US interests in the region', making martyrs to the cause by addressing only the surface symptoms, some more civil liberties stamped on in the name of freedom [racial profiling, encryption backdoors, anyone?]. All that will happen will be the situation gets exacerbated. If they play their cards right, this might even start WWIII - that should help the Dow.
And we all know how much they would be concerned if this had happened in some distant unimportant country [e.g. Guyana, Angola, Britian] rather than NYC.
Saddam Hussein hit the nail on the head: 'The USA is reaping the thorns of its foreign policy'. He should know - the CIA put him where he is today.
http://www.counterpunch.org/ p.s. flamers etc. please note that this is in no way aimed toward the victims of this tradegy, nor is it justifying the attacks. It is Whitehouse policy and attitude that has caused this. On a governmental level, USA is not the shining-city-on-a-hill full of big-hearted boy scouts fighting 'EEEEEEVIIIIILLLL' that it claims to be. It has stirred shit for decades and it's just been splashed.
http://talk.guardian.co.uk/
