9-11 Fairy Tale Excuse for Endless War

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By Victor Thorn

After suffering through eight years of the Bush-Cheney war machine, Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was supposed to usher in a new era of tranquility. To great acclaim, this recently elected “peace president” promised hope, change and an end to the imperialistic aims of his neo-conservative predecessor.

Yet two years later, the United States is now entangled in its third official war as the situation in Libya continues to escalate. Further, to the dismay of his most loyal supporters, Obama’s policies are becoming a mirror image of the man he derided for years.

The similarities between Bush’s Iraq war and Obama’s Libyan campaign are particularly troublesome. Both men sought United Nations approval prior to their attacks, while each justified their preemptive attacks on “humanitarian” grounds.

Even eerier, Bush and Obama based these wars on what “could potentially happen”—i.e., weapons of mass destruction purportedly hidden by Saddam Hussein, and a potential slaughter in a Libyan city. In addition, Iraq and Libya both hold vast oil reserves, each of their leaders was staunchly anti-Israel and neither U.S. president provided clear-cut exit strategies.

If that’s not enough, Obama has continued the abhorrent Bush-Cheney practice of “extraordinary rendition,” whereby captured “terrorists” are drugged and then secretly sent to foreign countries to be tortured. He has kept the prison at Guantanamo Bay open. He has escalated drone predator attacks in Pakistan and has increased troop levels in Afghanistan.

Obama even has his own “war criminal” scandal. Whereas Bush and Rumsfeld were scandalized by the Abu Ghraib nightmare, the current president now has to answer for even more inhumane “kill team” photos that occurred on his watch.

This story was detailed in AFP’s April 11 edition on page 4, which includes graphic photos of U.S. soldiers taking trophy shots with murdered Afghans. As Daniel Bates and Mark Duell wrote for the Daily Mail on March 29: “In one horrific episode in the latest scandal, troops allegedly threw a grenade at an innocent Afghan boy before chopping off his finger and using it as a gambling chip.”

Democrats and Republicans alike are incensed by the fact that whereas Bush at least received congressional approval prior to his war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama failed to even make that simple gesture.

As AFP recently noted, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has gone so far as to label the president’s Libyan attack an “impeachable offense.”

After promising not to place any American combat boots on the ground in Libya, on March 30 Obama signed a secret presidential finding to green-light covert operations by the CIA and other “intel” agencies.

Prior to this move, activist Ralph Nader declared that if George W. Bush was guilty of “war crimes,” then so is Obama. Time magazine’s Mark Halperin quipped that Obama is more “hawkish” than the man he replaced.

Likewise, filmmaker Michael Moore demanded that Obama return his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. All of the international meddling and war-making of the Bush and Obama administrations is based on the massive fiction that on Sept. 11, 2001, some terrorists hijacked Boeing 767s, took over the complicated controls and crashed them into buildings built to withstand any such shock, after which the buildings crashed to the ground.

All honest engineers who have analyzed this fairy tale have branded it a ridiculous lie. Meanwhile, Larry Silverstein, the owner of one of the buildings, wants billions of dollars from insurance companies that accept the official line. This fable is even beyond what one can find in the wildest children’s storybook.