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Monday, June 25, 2012

TPP -- America Going (Gone?) 100% Fascist






June 25, 2012 at 10:55:47

TPP -- America Going (Gone?) 100% Fascist

By (about the author)




Obama - Deliverer of the New World Order by Occupy Los Angeles


When George H.W. Bush, an oilman who was so bad as President he only served one term, talked of a New World Order" what did he mean? A new era, when oil companies did not have to deal with pesky EPA laws and rules? When the US could attack two countries at once with drones and an all-volunteer army? When the US Constitution was entirely suspended, and corporate rights would always trump individual rights?

A Huffington Post Article titled, "Obama Trade Document Leaked, Revealing New Corporate Powers And Broken Campaign Promises" was posted June 13 and updated June 14, 2012. A few articles, blogs and discussion thread groups are criticizing Obama for closed door negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership, which gives both US Citizens rights and US Law (all branches of all US courts) over to jurisdiction of corporate tribunals. The corporate Tribunals consist of three lawyers.

The full, leaked TPP document is here: http://olivebiodiesel.com/tppinvestment.pdf

There are two things that most or all of the blogs and articles describing the TPP and Obama don't seem to mention: 1) That Obama, himself is a lawyer, and 2) That Obama is a cool as a cucumber lawyer. Not only is Obama a lawyer, he is a former US Constitutional Scholar. Who would know best, how to thwart, unwind, disassemble and circumvent the US Constitution but a Constitutional Scholar? Obama can quite literally order the deaths of an entire family right before going to wolf down a cheeseburger, no loss of appetite, and no guilt.

Taking the rights of an entire class of people in America is even easier to him. This is a man fascinated by Royals, by the upper crust of the world. He no more gives a damn for the eaters of America or anywhere else, they are just eaters, ants using up resources. He does not let this slip when campaigning, but it is how he has governed, how he will always govern. Obama plans on being powerful and in the loop of the rich and powerful his entire lifetime. Reps. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT), Rep. Donna Edwards(D- MD), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) might defy Obama briefly" ultimately they will be squashed like bugs" there's $20.5 trillion dollars per year in play with TPP.

The Tribunal of three lawyers mentioned in the TPP" Obama is going to be out of work in the next 1-5 years, he's planning ahead, planning to be one of the three lawyers on the Tribunal that replaces the US Courts and US Law, citizens rights replaced by three cool as cucumber lawyers. Obama, the cool as a cucumber lawyer, seems to have ice in his veins and ice in his heart every time he orders an entire family wiped off of the map by a drone strike. The man never gets angry, grins like a Cheshire Cat after wiping out an entire family by sucking the air out of their lungs with a hellfire-missile drone-strike.

Under current US law, if you take a bad heart drug and suffer physical damage, you can sue the drug company. Under the TPP, if you filed a lawsuit, a Tribunal of three lawyers, possibly Obama himself being one of the three attorneys, would find that you had interfered with free trade with your frivolous lawsuit. You'd have no recourse in the US Courts; the Tribunal would order you to pay the drug company damages after their bad drug injured you.

When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA on December 8, 1993, he signed away the rights of numerous small businesses and corporation to compete on a level playing field. American truckers must follow strict laws governing everything from the status of the brake system on their trucks to how many hours they drive before they have a set number of hours of sleep or rest. Mexican truck drivers coming into the US delivering Mexican goods are not subject to the same rules, the same standards because their Mexicans driving on US roads under NAFTA. Anyone they have a traffic accident with has fewer rights than they would think suing the Mexican trucking company, because they are dealing with both US and Mexican courts. The rights of the consumer were not the intent of NAFTA; profits for companies like Wal-Mart were the intent of NAFTA. The jobs created under NAFTA were and are largely Wal-Mart-type-pseudo-jobs.

TPP goes way further than NAFTA. Under TPP, hypothetically a Chinese Trucking company comes into the US, does not follow DOT rules, does not have safety inspections or rest periods for the driver. The Chinese driver replaces two union drivers, and pulls 14-15 hour shifts daily. The over-worked underpaid truck driver falls asleep, kills your family and you survive with no legs. You file suit via US and Chinese courts. The three-lawyer Tribunal fines you $500,000 for filing a nuisance suit against the Chinese trucking company.

Meanwhile, companies like Wal-Mart fire all their drivers and contract-out truck driving to a TPP Chinese-owned company with drivers who earn half the pay of current Wal-Mart truck drivers. The TPP is designed to make even more of a slave-class out of the dwindling middle class. The TPP is designed to go way, way past Tort Reform and make victims out of victims. If a TPP member-country corporation harms, injures or kills you or a family member, your legal recourse is an unsympathetic, corporate-controlled three-lawyer tribunal.

The Trans Pacific Partnership is not just more NAFTA" Ice-cold-heart lawyer Obama and corporate lawyers from around the globe drafted it behind closed doors. Not only was it drafted in secret, but only two of its 26 chapters have been leaked, there are another 24 chapters of TPP that are still being negotiated behind locked doors by Obama and the corporate lawyers from the member countries.  Right now, the U.S., Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, and Brunei Darussalam are all participating in the talks and expected to sign the treaty. Mexico, Canada and China are all interested and will probably end up as signatories as well. This will mean more US jobs going to Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, and Brunei Darussalam, Mexico, Canada and China.

The lawyers themselves are setting themselves and their families to be a ruling class, to have a serf class serving them goods and services, serving them cash flow. TPP is 658 million people spending much of their shrinking net worth, that's worth a staggering $20.5 trillion annually" The corporations and their lawyers, including their Lawyer Tribunal, rake in $20.5 trillion annually. They will spend a mere pittance of the $20.5 trillion annual on buying Senators, Congressman and Presidents, who are no longer powerful people, they are merely corporate pawns.

George Bush screwed the American public setting up the banks and energy companies and the defense contractors to rape the American economy. Obama is simply setting up the world's large multinational companies to decimate the last of the US Constitution that the Patriot Act and NDAA had not already decimated. Ultimately, he'll be like George Bush" In the future, there will be a long line of male and female Presidents with Bush and Obama last names.

Even though Americans are accustomed to voting box electronic machines and thinking of us as a democracy because we vote, both Bush and Obama have set themselves and their families up to be a long line of Kings and Queens, who rule over their serfs.

People judge Presidents in the US by their smiles, their jokes, by the price of gas and by how stable their job is. But if you look solely at their records, the laws they favored and signed" If you look at what the Congresses did under each President, from about 1979 until today, they drove nails into the coffin of democracy and promoted fascism. Fascism itself is when an individual or a group owns the government. Megalithic multinational corporations own the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court, all three branches of government.

Bush, Gore, Romney or Obama" no matter how you cast your vote, you are electing a corporate-sponsored minion, who will make you yourself more of a micro-minuscule-minion. Romney or Obama, either way you are just exchanging one deck chair for another deck chair on the good ship Titanic. Isn't that what our democracy has become, from the late 1970's until today, the US Titanic, a leaking, broken wide open democracy that Occupy protests cannot even begin to bail out? Our own police forces themselves are like panicked passengers, their urges to keep law and order reminiscent of a panicked person in the water climbing up high on your back so you both drown together. Law and order, profits for the Kings and Queens, no justice, no true democracy" just paperless ballots run by unintelligible computer algorithms.

Some of the biggest nails in the coffin of democracy were/are NAFTA, the Patriot Act, National Defense Act of America and Trans-Pacific Partnership. All of these had bankers, drug companies, oil companies, insurers of all kinds, and defense contractor's hands in them. None of these benevolent or harmless sounding laws was in the public interest. In each case, the public was flat out lied to, particularly by the 6 large TV stations. TPP fascism will be signed into law, the two-three Senators and Congressman who make a stink about TPP will be redistricted so that they lose the next election cycle. Americans themselves, mostly, will vote and console themselves that their new seat on the US Titanic is comfy, that they made a good choice.

Trade agreements like NAFTA and the TPP, couple with the Patriot Act and the National Defense Act of America (NDAA) are treasonous. These laws are the selling out of the American people, the selling out of the US Constitution to a group of lawyers and corporations. Those committing the treason justify their actions with lies and lawyer gobbledy-gook. Their denial of their treason does not make it less treacherous, less abominable. Covering it up with lies in the news media does not mean they did not sell out a democracy and turn the old democracy of America into their dystopian vision of fascism. America has pretty well been reduced to a fascist state by NDAA" TPP just drags America further down that fascist dark hole. All the flag-waving and nationalist rhetoric in the world does not a democracy make.

The fact that both Romney and Obama are anxious to sign the TPP agreement means that both Obama and Romney are the captains of the Titanic, willing to peg the throttle wide open. Regardless of their rank or their intentions, the country is about to strike an iceberg and sink. American Democracy, true working democracy, is down to a couple of blogs on the Internet. A couple of blogs, a couple of web sites are trying to warn the whole country about impending disaster. The rest of the country is watching CNN and Fox News, and will never even hear about TPP, even after its signed into law.

The US Constitution is an obstacle to the wealth interests of the global elite. Obama and the Royals he so worships need the entire, pesky old Constitution out of the way of their business plans. The Bush's, Obama's, Romney's of this world are setting up their New World Order, and it does not include any rights whatsoever of the individual. Obama is a DINO, a Democrat In Name Only. George H.W. Bush during a speech once glowingly said I see a thousand points of light for the homeless man. Homeless men want a meal, some new shoes, to see a doctor and to have a roof over their head again.

Each President, all the way from Ronald Reagan up to Obama, has worked to create a New World Order where the order is more homeless, more medically uninsured, and more hunger" all the while with the largest corporations raking in record profits, obscene amounts of vast fortune. Obama's secretive TPP agreement bodes much more evil coming to the common man. The ranks of the homeless are about to swell even bigger.

Obama's glowing gushing speeches are as hollow and empty as George Bush Sr.'s thousand points of light for homeless people. Ultimately, America will have fewer jobs and more hungry, with the disappearing cash going to foreign multi-national corporations. People will be feeding themselves with credit cards, temporarily. TPP may even, probably will usher in the return of debtor prisons.

Nobody outside of the TPP insiders has read all of the TPP chapters; there may possibly be provisions that do away with minimum wage, certainly livable wages" TPP may also do away with child labor laws, 8 hour days, etc. If these are deemed an interference to free trade with member nations, it will be up to a three-lawyer tribunal how our old laws get interpreted.

The fact that most of the pages are still a closely guarded secret tells you this is going to hurt the public very badly. Many people debate the New World Order, debate whether or not there is a conspracy, taking sides, yeah or nay. Both sides of these debators miss the entire point: the New World Order is ultimate greed, ultimate betrayal, ultimate self-centered self-importance. The players in the New World Order give new, deep meaning to terms like bullying, sociopsychopath and narcissist. Society has yet to invent a word for the players, the so-called leaders who have enslaved all of us. Lawyers are subordinating basically all of our rights to business, to corporatocracy.


Technologist and Horticulturist by trade. Very alarmed at the erosion of civil rights and the national need for unending warfare. Love America but despise our current corporate-owned government. 
 
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

TPP is Treason. WAKE UP! Globalization Goes For Check- Mate.



June 24, 2012 at 04:04:17

TPP is Treason. WAKE UP! Globalization Goes For Check- Mate.


 

George Orwell cried last night. Had not he warned them. Hadn't they read his books, once taught in high schools across America. He was so clear. Yet, so few listened. Now, the plot was almost over. They, the Pigs, were about to win. Unless......

"We have to stop them before it gets to Congress", warned Brooke Harper, referring to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP), the proposed pan-pacific treaty likely the most insidious piece of corporate global legislation ever to be secretly slipped through the halls of Congress. It was a secret until two weeks ago. Now, opposition must rise quickly. The consequences for American, and world, society are, indeed, terminal.

Ms. Harper, who represents Global Trade Watch, an organization based in Wash. DC, has just arrived in San Diego to rally the Southern California area activists in preparation for the upcoming TPP, eight day, negotiations to be held at the Hilton/ San Diego Bayfront in San Diego, July 2-10, 2012. This is round thirteen.
  A crowd of about forty, representing activist groups from the San Diego area, listened as Harper explained the depth of the threat posed by TPP. They had gathered at Canvass for a Cause, a community hall in the City Heights area. What they heard was chilling and went far beyond the fringes of what our current broken American democracy has become.

 

Pres. Barack Obama is traitor. This underhanded legislation/ treaty secretly sells- out the American people's legal rights in favor of his corporate puppet masters. The concept, inception, and mechanism of the TPP treaty comes, solely, from the Obama administration. In doing so, our one time constitutional scholar president attempts to create a new, world- wide, corporate dynasty. TPP gives up legal sovereignty and jurisdiction of the United States, and its laws, to a foreign power. This is the very definition of treason.

If Americans don't stop TPP corporations will, literally, be able to circumvent the existing laws of the EPA, FDA, unions, collective bargaining agreements, patent protections and access, banking regulations and many other American regulations and rights. All will be negated solely by the arbitrary diktats of corporations being currently, and secretly, included in the language of the TPP treaty. Should state, local, or federal governmental agencies attempt to enforce American laws in favor of their citizens a separate corporate court will have supreme jurisdiction over that American governmental agency. This "Tribunal" has the power to override existing American regulation.   Federal agencies, State Gov'ts, City authority, citizen's property, and competing American corporate interests will be considered as the Defendant before the court.   These defendants will have been charged, by the plaintiff corporation, with the new crime of a "Technical Barrier to Trade."

Should the defendant chose not to comply with the Tribunal's diktat, or refuse to pay Tribunal ordered financial compensation, the judgment will be enforced by our federal gov't against American interests.

Making matters even worse American based corporations will not have access to the authoritarian controls and manipulations of the TPP treaty. These luxuries are only available to the big multi-national corporations. Smaller American corporations will be subservient to the whims of TPP.
 

So, your state decides to place a health tax on cigarettes of one dollar a pack, as compensation for increased healthcare costs of smokers to the state. (California's Prop 29 attempted to do this in the last primary election.) The voters approve it. Seems pretty fair so far. Au contraire.

R.J. Reynolds doesn't like this portion of democracy, considering it bad for business and profits. Healthcare and designed addiction be damned, big corporations, at least the ones with real power, don't worry about the trifles of mere democracy. They just turn to the "Investor/State Dispute Resolution Tribunal." Not to a state court, not the federal court, nor the Supreme Court of the United States. A Corporation run court. For this TPP has adopted the more ominous description of, "Tribunal."

This corporate sponsored, congressional, science fiction continues with the makeup of the Tribunal and its members. Composed of just three corporate lawyers (remember what Shakespeare said?) the three will be divided into; one with experience with the defendant's issues, one for the plaintiff corporation, and a third who is, somehow, neutral. The Tribunal will meet in closed session away from cameras and reporters when adjudicating disputes between sovereign American federal, state, and local laws and the wishes of the corporations whose countries' governments have, maliciously, ratified the TPP treaty.
With the likelihood of your state prevailing being nil, the tribunal rules against the cigarette tax. The tax is ordered to be repealed and, as punishment to the state for the crime of state-sponsored health interests, is next assessed a corporate monetary penalty due to the tax being a, "technical barrier to trade". This term is the mantra of TPP and translates directly into, "your (healthcare) law is restricting our profits."

The tribunal then issues an order for compensation of, hypothetically, one hundred million dollars due to the loss of profits to R.J. Reynolds tobacco sales. Your state's attorney general says, "over my dead body", and heads for the Appeals court, perhaps the Supreme Court. Au contraire.

Here lies the treason of the TPP. It grants, once congress ratifies it, the complete nullification of the jurisdiction of all US courts regarding matters before the tribunal. So your state loses. Automatically.

Well, now your state treasurer says, "we'll never pay." That won't work either. Thanks to TPP, and a majority of treasonous Congressman, the federal government, which has authority over the states, must enforce the monetary judgment. Your states treasurer wakes up one morning to a call from the bank. It's something about a $100 million withdrawal. Uncle Sam just stole your states $100 million and gave it to R.J. Reynolds. And there wasn't a damn thing your state could do to stop it.

This is not fantasy. Nor hyperbole. Already Australia is under a similar legal attack by Phillip Morris, Ltd, one of the world's largest cigarette manufacturers. Because of a similar existing, Hong Kong/ Australia, trade treaty Morris is currently seeking tens of millions of dollars in monetary damages from the Australian Gov't. Recently, the Aussies decided to mandate plain paper packaging of all cigarettes and, that this packaging contain a health warning and some very ghastly images of diseased lungs, stomas, etc., designed to discourage smoking. Thanks to the treaty; au contraire.

The Obama administration's treason in propagating the TPP is shown in many other likely future edicts via TPP. Using the broad brush of, "Technical Barrier to Trade", pro-American interests will soon be banned, literally. "Buy American" provisions, designed to create jobs, on Gov't Purchases will not be banned.
Green Energy, an Obama campaign promise regarding creating new jobs, will not be a reality as these would compete with the stronger oil industry. Heath care for employees?   Also gone due to the cost to employers. Patent terms would be lengthened to as much as fifty years so as to restrict the production of cheaper generic drugs of same quality, thereby maintaining higher prices and restricting access to medication in impoverished counties. How many millions of people world- wide will die will never be known. Banking regulation, already minimal, will be gone. The few remaining small farmers will be forced from their land by multi- national agri-business. Fracking?   Whether you like it, or not. These are just the obvious examples.

 

Substitute into this scenario any governmental agency, fit in any restriction to corporate profit, and add the name of any multinational corporation, and the story plays out the same. These requirements are actually currently written into the first two, leaked to the public, chapters of the TPP treaty. There are drafts for twenty --six additional chapters, most of which have nothing to do with trade, but rather impose limits on domestic food safety, health, environmental, and other policies.   The first two are bad enough and the reason that these draft copies were released to Global Trade Watch two weeks ago. The governments involved, including the US, won't release the texts to the public. But 600 U.S. corporate "trade advisors" have full access.


What was initially met with a collective gasp by most media was quickly dampened to a mumble after a one-day news cycle. It is now missing from the pages of our nations' corporate controlled media, much as the recent NDAA ( National Defense Authorization Act) subterfuge. Media scoundrels are doing their job efficiently. During a the recent Dallas negotiations, despite the presence of over 400 area protesters, there was only one media crew, from Japan, present to cover the event.

These forty dedicated Occupiers and activist leaders are determined to make the week of July 2 -10 a call to action, and the attention, of their American and world brethren of the pending horror of TPP.

After a 90 minute presentation by Brooke Harper, on the nuances of TPP, the gathering spent another hour and a half discussing plans for each day of the week during the TPP negotiations, since negotiations are held during the day. A coordinated effort from across Southern California is expected to make a strong presence daily. Twenty members of the group have been given passes to enter the assembly daily as, "Stakeholders", (implying that they actually have a say in negotiations) and can meet and discuss issues with the official trade representatives of the countries present. Harper warns these stakeholders to be prepared for the self-serving arguments of the negotiators, since the invitation is designed to be the foil for the negotiators to challenge these protesters in public and legitimize the TPP process.

 

The countries who are party to this attempt at corporate world domination, i.e. globalization, are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam . All these countries are champions of the new corporate Democratic model.

These democracies elect their representatives, and these officials, then, maliciously ignore the interests of these voters until the advent of the next election cycle. In the interim these sham democracies serve, with all expediency, the corporate interest. This is becoming the global democratic model and the goal of globalization, and its castrating scissors; the TPP. Of course this has, since NAFTA, been the goal of American corporations all along. The TPP is American made. Obama's administration is the author.

The TPP negotiators refer to the treaty as a "Docking Agreement" meaning it is an opportunity for other countries to join. Already Mexico, a country representing, only, its upper 1%, and Canada, a country that just authored its own authoritarian response to the student protests in Montreal, will soon be added

Just two-and a- half years ago Americas' one-time constitutional scholar president, continued to bolster his assault of Americans' best interests,   by commencing the drafting of the TPP treaty, and to invite countries to participate in the negotiations. These have been continuing routinely, in secret, with the recent twelfth stopover in Dallas, Texas this past May. All the twenty US trade negotiators and the US trade representative, Ron Kirk, will be present at the TPP conference. All were selected by Obama.

 

Obama's treason deliberately conceals its intentions as the release of secret two chapters reveals. By design the treaty will remain secret. US Congressmen and Senators will not be able to see them until a final draft is submitted to them for consideration, and presumably, automatic passage.   This pre-authored treaty, like so many pieces of legislation already authored by A.L.E.C., will have no need to be read by these congressmen, who are already in the bag, and pleased to do the bidding of their corporate sponsors. The likely punch-line to this treasonous joke will be Obama using his "fast-track authority", via current US trade authority, to get this through Congress without possibility of formal congressional review, or the public suddenly paying attention in time. Like the secret provisions of this past New Year's sinister NDAA passage, this treasonous president, and his congressional co-conspirators, will put a final death nail in American democracy. Unless".

The time line for passage of the treaty through the congress and Parliaments of these member nations is intended to be by late summer this year.
Two congresswomen are taking an interest in protection American sovereignty and its citizen from TPP. Reps. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT) and Rep. Donna Edwards(D- MD) are the current leaders in exposing and challenging TPP. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), chairman of the Trade Committee in the Senate which has jurisdiction   overtrade agreements, has been denied any access to information despite persistent requests. Already a US senator lacks standing, or jurisdiction, within TPP regarding American interests. No elected official, other than Pres. Obama, is involved in the negotiations.
.
Times were dire before the sudden, shocking, news of the TPP. Corporations seek supreme authority over sovereign nations. Desperate, and ever greedy, the minions of authoritarian democracy wish to give their corporate masters the keys to the base of the financial pyramid. From Citizens United to the BP oil disaster cover-up; Obama's sham Heath Care bill to the NDAA's new gutting of civil rights, we now have TPP, designed to finish the job. It must be stopped. Efforts in San Diego and across the nation must commence. Congressmen must be contacted. Phones must ring. The call to national action must go out. Or the last vestiges of freedom will.

George Orwell cried last night.

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
STOP TPP

The author spent his formative years growing up in Australia, Ghana, the Bahamas and Alaska.He also traveled extensively through out the developing world in the era before globalization.His experiences have shaped him into a World Citizen who sees (more...)
 
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.


Wednesday, June 13, 2012

What Might Cause Another 9/11?


CommonDreams.org


It is supporters of Obama's aggression, not its opponents, who are likely to provoke another Terrorist attack

 
 
Tuesday’s defense of President Obama from Andrew Sullivan is devoted to refuting Conor Friedersdorf’s criticism of Obama’s drone program. Says Sullivan:


(Credit: Reuters/Pete Souza/The White House)
What frustrates me about Conor’s position – and Greenwald’s as well – is that it kind of assumes 9/11 didn’t happen or couldn’t happen again, and dismisses far too glibly the president’s actual responsibility as commander-in-chief to counter these acts of mass terror.
This is exactly backward. I absolutely believe that another 9/11 is possible. And the reason I believe it’s so possible is that people like Andrew Sullivan — and George Packer — have spent the last decade publicly cheering for American violence brought to the Muslim world, and they continue to do so (now more than ever under Obama). Far from believing that another 9/11 can’t happen, I’m amazed that it hasn’t already, and am quite confident that at some point it will. How could any rational person expect their government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the violence?

Just consider what one single, isolated attack on American soil more than a decade ago did to Sullivan, Packer and company: the desire for violence which that one attack 11 years ago unleashed is seemingly boundless by time or intensity. Given the ongoing American quest for violence from that one-day attack, just imagine the impact which continuous attacks over the course of a full decade must have on those whom we’ve been invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting.
How could any rational person expect their government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the violence?

One of the many reasons I oppose Obama’s ongoing aggression is precisely that I believe the policies Sullivan and Packer cheer will cause another 9/11 (the other reasons include the lawlessness of it, the imperial mindset driving it, the large-scale civilian deaths it causes, the extreme and unaccountable secrecy with which it’s done, the erosion of civil liberties that inevitably accompanies it, the patently criminal applications of these weapons, the precedent it sets, etc.). I realize that screaming “9/11″ has been the trite tactic of choice for those seeking to justify the U.S. Government’s militarism over the last decade, but invoking that event strongly militates against the policies it’s invoked to justify, precisely because those policies are the principal cause of such attacks, for obvious reasons.

In fact, one need not “imagine” anything. One can simply look at the explanations given by virtually every captured individual accused of attempting serious Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The Times Square bomber, the Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, said this:
As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to U.S. policy in the Muslim world, officials said.
“One of the first things he said was, ‘How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan’,” said one law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the interrogation reports are not public. “In the first two hours, he was talking about his desire to strike a blow against the United States for the cause.”
When the federal judge who sentenced Shahzad asked with disgust how he could try to detonate bombs knowing that innocent children would die, he replied: “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody.” Those statements are consistent with a decade’s worth of emails and other private communications from Shahzad, as he railed with increasing fury against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone attacks in Pakistan, Israeli violence against Palestinians and Muslims generally, Guantanamo and torture, and asked: “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?”

Najibullah Zazi, one of the first Afghans ever to be accused of Terrorism on U.S. soil when he plotted to detonate bombs in the New York subway system, was radicalized by the U.S. occupation of his country (“This is the payback for the atrocities that you do,” he said). Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) expressly said that the Christmas Day bomb attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was in retaliation for the Obama cluster-bomb airstrike in Yemen that killed dozens of women and children along with U.S. support for the Yemeni dictator. The Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was motivated by “the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Anwar Awlaki was once such a moderate that he vehemently denounced the 9/11 attacks, got invited to the Pentagon to speak, and hosted a column in The Washington Post on Islam — but then became radicalized by the constant post-9/11 killing of Muslims by his country (the U.S.). David Rodhe, the former New York Times reporter who was held hostage by the Taliban for nine months, said after he was released that Taliban “commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged.”

Even The Washington Post just two weeks ago pointed out that the primary source of strength for AQAP — the Terror group which the U.S. Government insists is the greatest threat to the U.S. — are repeated U.S. drone strikes in Yemen; said The Post: “An escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.” In late 2009 — almost three years ago – The New York Times pointed out exactly the same thing when quoting a Yemeni official after Obama’s civilian-killing cluster bomb attack (“The problem is that the involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda“). Even Sullivan acknowledges: “there does seem a danger, especially in Yemen, that drones may be focusing the Islamists’ attention away from their own government and onto ours.”
In other words, the very policies that Sullivan and Packer adore are exactly the ones that make another 9/11 so likely. Running around screaming “9/11″ at Obama critics to justify his ongoing American violence in the Muslim world is like running around screaming “lung cancer” to justify heavy cigarette smoking. It isn’t those of us who oppose American aggression in the Muslim world who need manipulative, exploitative reminders about 9/11; it’s those who cheer for these policies who are making a follow-up attack ever more likely.
Read the full article with updates at Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. His just-released book is titled "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful." He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.