Tags
9-11, Al Qaeda, Blowback, Bush, Chris Hedges, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Iraq Invasion, Libya, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, Unfettered Capitalism, War for Profit
First off, I need to make it clear that I do not subscribe to the bizarre conspiracy theories about planned detonations of the twin towers. Did top government officials know something was afoot? Yes, there were ample detailed warnings concerning an impending attack. As the above news story from the NYT describes, intelligence officials were so convinced that an attack was imminent that they wanted to quit their jobs to avoid being blamed for what was coming. What ensued afterward is best described as taking advantage of a crisis or “not letting a good crisis go to waste.” Iraq’s oil resources were already on the minds of the neocons and the oil corporations; a spectacular terrorist attack on America would be the perfect event by which the Western elite could demonize all of the Middle East in order to make one last run on what was left of the world’s depleting hydrocarbons. When the lifeblood of your economy is running out, more extreme and radical options get thrown onto the table. And so the media whipped up the nationalist fervor of the country and false claims of Al Qaeda ties with Iraq and WMD’s were spun into the national consciousness. Much blood and treasure were spent; the coffers of the Arms Dealers swelled; a security and surveillance state blossomed to tamp down domestic social unrest; and a new enemy was born to take the place of disaster capitalism’s old nemesis of communism. The financial elite and the neocons, the American war machine, and Big Oil gloated over their Machiavellian maneuvers. But blowback is always the counterweight to the perceived success of such unscrupulous deeds. What’s in the news today:
Making the world safe for capitalism and empire definitely has its drawbacks, don’t you think? When you support oppressive tyrants, throwing them under the bus when their usefulness has expired, fund and arm radical Islamist rebels, and only give lip service to democracy, reality has a way of raising its ugly head in the end.
The following interview from yesterday dovetails with the above commentary on 9-11 and foresees the future. Eventually, unfettered capitalism consumes entire planets when left to its own devices:
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes, because it was an understanding that unfettered, unregulated, unchecked, unimpeded corporate capitalism knows only one word, and that’s “more.” They commodify everything. Human beings are commodities, the natural world is a commodity, that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we see that with the melting of the summer Arctic ice, 40 percent gone. What is the response of our corporate overlords? It’s to raid those waters for the last fish stocks, mineral, oil, natural gas. It makes Herman Melville’s Moby Dick the most prescient book in American literature. It’s utterly suicidal. These are all Ahabs. There’s a quote. I think Ahab says, you know, “My means and my methods are sane. My object is mad.” It’s utter insanity. And if we do not wrest power back from these corporate forces, if we do not reverse this corporate coup d’état, they will quite literally kill off the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life and force all of us in this downward race to the bottom, so that the conditions of workers in Immokalee, Florida, begin to replicate the conditions of workers everywhere.
We’re caught in capitalism’s feedback loop of self-destruction. The corporate state will make everything cower before the altar of “The Market”. Unfortunately, the ecosystems of the planet will have the final say on such demands.
HISTORY OF U.S.-LIBYA RELATIONS
U.S.-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya, Human Rights Watch
A new Human Rights Watch report includes interviews with 14 Libyans who had fled the country in the 1980s, most of them members of an anti-Qaddafi Islamist group. The Libyans interviewed said they were detained by the U.S., interrogated as terror suspects, and then sent back to Qaddafi’s Libya “at a time when Libya’s record on torture made clear they would face a serious risk of abuse.” One described being waterboarded by his American captors in Afghanistan.
Files Note Close C.I.A. Ties to Qaddafi Spy Unit, New York Times
Documents found in an abandoned office after Qaddafi’s fall documented what appeared to be regular communications between the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 and Libyan officials about terror suspects, and suggested that prisoners were rendered to Libya for questioning.
As U.S. Rebuilt Ties with Libya, Human Rights Concerns Took Back Seat, ProPublica
The U.S. began normalizing its relations with Libya in 2004, removing the country from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2006. Our explainer from last year covered how oil companies were among the proponents of more engagement with the regime. Evidence also continues to emerge that the U.S. and Qaddafi cooperated on some counterterror efforts, despite the Libyan government’s often inflammatory anti-Western public rhetoric.
Also…
Britain, Italy condemned for Libya ties – Los Angeles Times
Gadhafi’s military: Trained and armed by Uncle Sam
…as well as my post Iran and Its Threat to the U.S. Dollar Hegemony
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I love this site: so well done and thought out, and it parallels my own thinking.
But I was disappointed in your characterization of theories of planned detonations of the WTC as bizarre.
I’d admit they SEEM bizarre, about as bizarre as the following:
1. That my ancestors were monkeys, and lizards, and parameciums.
2. That I, because of driving around in my little Honda Civic, am causing the climate to change so drastically that much of life on earth will be obliterated in just a few generations.
Before you make up your mind on a complex topic, make sure you know all the facts. Almost 2000 architects and engineers have jeopardized their careers by standing up and being counted as those who KNOW the official story is a fantasy.
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I deal in facts here. My gut instinct was to discount out of hand the conspiracy theory of an orchestrated demolition of the WTC buildings. It’s been debunked by various experts over the years. With the devastating strike on the Pentagon by one of the planes, why on earth would there be a need for the towers to be purposefully detonated? At any rate, conspiracy theories abound about UFOs, David Icke’s lizard illuminati, and abiotic oil. This site only deals in hard reality.
I hope you keep reading, but let’s avoid conspiracy theories. If I have no hard evidence, then I avoid it.
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The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo
(Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)
THE LEADEN ECHO
How to keep–is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there’s none; no no no there’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.
THE GOLDEN ECHO
Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air.
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-lastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace–
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.–
Yonder.–What high as that! We follow, now we follow.–
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.
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