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There are no bombs. The whole thing is fucking pointless. George Carlin, You Are All Diseased HBO 1999 audio
Operation Northwoods: In 1962 the joint chiefs of staff drew up and approved what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the US government. In the name of anti-communism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba. Counter-Intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations s1e3: The Strategy of Tension, 2013
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. Edward R Murrow
There was an immediate assumption on the part of the administration that there had to be a surrender of certain of our rights. John Conyers, Congress Michigan
The House just passed President Bush’s Bill to redefine the treatment of detainees and the Senate is expected to do the same thing tomorrow. Buried deep inside this legislation is a provision that will pardon President Bush and all the members of his administration of any possible crimes connected with the torture and mistreatment of detainees dated all the way back to September 11th 2001. CNN News Report
Despite being a US citizen, Jose Padilla has been held indefinitely in a Naval brig in North Carolina. He has never been charged. And hasn’t seen a lawyer. CNN News
[Jose] Padilla alleged that he was subjected to prolonged isolation; deprivation of light; exposure to prolonged periods of light and darkness, including being ‘periodically subjected to absolute light or darkness for periods in excess of twenty-four hours’; extreme variations in temperature; sleep adjustment; threats of severe physical abuse; death threats; administration of psychotropic drugs; shackling and manacling for hours at a time; use of ‘stress’ positions; noxious fumes that caused pain to eyes and nose; loud noises; withholding of any mattress, pillow, sheet, or blanket; forced grooming; suspensions of showers; removal of religious items; constant surveillance; incommunicado detention, including denial of all contact with family and legal counsel for a 21-month period; interference with religious observance; and denial of medical care for ‘serious and potentially life-threatening ailments, including chest pain and difficulty breathing, as well as for treatment of the chronic, extreme pain caused by being forced to endure stress positions’. United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, May 2012
There is no civil right. Not even the precious right of citizenship that this administration will not abuse to secure ever greater control over American life. Jack Balkin, Yale University
To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty my message is this: your tactics only aide terrorists. John Ashcroft
At the last count more than thirty of the Guantanamo Bay detainees had attempted suicide. Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties, 2004
To protect the nation from terror the Blair government passed a series of laws that also undermined our basic liberties. Taking Liberties, 2007
cf.
If God forbid any terrorist act happens in the country, believe you me people are not going to be asking whether this legislation is too draconian. Whether it’s too great an incursion into people’s civil liberties. No-one’s going to be saying that to me. They’re going to be saying, 'Are you sure it’s tough enough?' Tony Blair, 11th March 2005
The fundamental dilemma is this: how do we reconcile liberty with security in this new world ... Let liberty at last stand up for the law-abiding citizen in this country. Tony Blair
We will confront the tyrannys and dictatorships and terrorists who put our way of life at risk. Tony Blair
There was bafflement and anger about the nature of Tony Blair’s relationship [with George Bush]. Neil Kinnock
The core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt. One constantly hears US government defenders referring to ‘terrorists’ when what they actually mean is: those accused by the government of terrorism. Glenn Greenwald
It’s almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns ‘privately with the administration’. Glenn Greenwald
If the events of September 11, 2001 have proven anything it’s that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American – our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No. Only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that. John Stewart
The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell’s 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface.
Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars. Paul Joseph Watson
However welcome the scenes of people playing music and shaving off their beards, this so-called Northern Alliance are no bringers of freedom. They are the same people welcomed by similar scenes of jubilation in 1992, who then killed an estimated 50,000 in four years of internecine feuding.
The new heroes so far have tortured and executed at least 100 prisoners of war, and countless others, as well as looted food supplies and re-established their monopoly on the heroin trade.
This week, Amnesty International made an unusually blunt statement that was buried in the news. It ought to be emblazoned across every front page and television screen. ‘By failing to appreciate the gravity of the human rights concerns in relation to Northern Alliance leaders’, said Amnesty, ‘UK ministers at best perpetuate a culture of impunity for past crimes; at worst they risk being complicit in human rights abuse’.
The truth is that the latest crop of criminals to ‘liberate’ Kabul have been given a second chance by the most powerful country on earth pounding into dust one of the poorest, where people’s life expectancy is just over 40.
And for what?
Not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has yet to be caught or killed.
Osama bin Laden and his network have almost certainly slipped into the tribal areas of the North-West Frontier of Pakistan. Will Pakistan now be bombed? And Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, where Islamic extremism and its military network took root? Of course not.
The Saudi sheikhs, many of them as extreme as the Taliban, control America's greatest source of oil. The Egyptian regime, bribed with billions of US dollars, is an important American proxy. No daisy cutters for them.
There was, and still is, no ‘war on terrorism’. Instead, we have watched a variation of the great imperial game of swapping ‘bad’ terrorists for ‘good’ terrorists, while untold numbers of innocent people have paid with their lives: most of one village, whole families, a hospital, as well as teenage conscripts suitably dehumanised by the word ‘Taliban’.
It is perfectly understandable that those in the West who supported this latest American tenor from the air, or hedged their bets, should now seek to cover the blood on their reputations with absurd claims that ‘bombing works’. Tell that to grieving parents at fresh graves in impoverished places of whom the sofa bomb-aimers know nothing.