This is terrorism of the most worst kind. Brought on you by our own government ... Are We the People still in charge of this nation? Stan Jones, Montana Senate Debate
9/11: A chance to implement the agenda that their Neo-Conservative allies had been working on for decades. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States X: Bush & Obama: Age of Terror, Showtime 2012
The United States was embarking on a global war. ibid.
The Bush administration branded detainees as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’. ibid.
Afghanistan was a distraction to Bush; his attention was focused on toppling his father’s old adversary Saddam Hussein. ibid.
The US would act unilaterally and pre-emptively to overthrow any government deemed a threat to US security. ibid.
Millions of protesters hit the streets around the world. ibid.
The New York Times Sunday magazine cover for January 5 2003: The American Empire (Get Used to It). ibid.
The eight-year war became the debacle critics predicted. ibid.
Was 9/11 contrived to create the War on Terror? Oil, Smoke & Mirrors
And as the weeks turned into months and into years, and one death became a dozen deaths and a hundred deaths and a thousand deaths then we began to realise, you know what, maybe we’re causing more trouble over there than the whole effort has been worth. David Letterman
The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It’s a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world’s energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror. Noam Chomsky
There’s very lively debate about whether the Bush administration downgraded the so-called War on Terror in favour of its ambitions in Iraq. This was based on revelations by recent Bush administration officials, which I’m sure you’ve seen ... They consciously increased the threat of terror in order to achieve their goals in Iraq. Noam Chomsky, Imperial Grand Strategy
Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’. These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked (‘retaliation’, ‘protective reaction’ etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that US power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence – wholesale as opposed to retail terror – during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not ‘terror’ ... ‘security forces’ only retaliate and engage in ‘police action’.
These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as ‘reactive’ and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of ‘terrorism’ ... Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror. Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection & Third World Fascism
US Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture. Noam Chomsky
A drone strike is a terror weapon, we don’t talk about it that way. It is; just imagine you are walking down the street and you don’t know whether in five minutes there is going to be an explosion across the street from some place up in the sky that you can’t see. Somebody will be killed, and whoever is around will be killed, maybe you’ll be injured if you’re there. That is a terror weapon. It terrorizes villages, regions, huge areas. It’s the most massive terror campaign going on by a long shot. Noam Chomsky
The war on terrorism was not declared on September 11th rather it was redeclared using the same rhetoric as the first declaration twenty years earlier; the Reagan administration as you know came into office announcing that a war on terrorism would be the core of US foreign policy. Noam Chomsky, lecture New York 2002, ‘The History and Hypocrisy of the War on Terror’
We continue to send military aid to Latin-style fascists no matter how many are murdered because there are higher priorities than human rights. ibid.
Freedom fighters organised and armed by the CIA and associates trained by the same special forces who are now searching for them in caves in Afghanistan and they were a component of the first war on terror. ibid.
Terrorism just means the terrorism that they carry out against us. ibid.
2001: The United States radically intervened in the election and warned Nicaragua that the Untied States would not accept the wrong outcome … all of this passes without comment. ibid.
The war on terror was not declared by George W Bush on 9/11 but by the Reagan administration 20 years earlier … ‘the evil scourge of terrorism, a plague spread by depraved opponents of civilisation’. Noam Chomsky, Amnesty International lecture Dublin 2006, ‘The War on Terror’
The war was declared and implemented by pretty much the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism. ibid.
It was in 1982 that Reagan removed Iraq from the list of states supporting terror. ibid.
The United States is far in the lead of security council vetoes. ibid.
According to the The New York Times there are 7-8 million people in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation. Noam Chomsky, lecture MIT October 2001, ‘The War on Terror’, Youtube 1.17.13
The United States expelled or mostly exterminated the indigenous population, many millions of people, conquered half of Mexico, carried out degradations all over the region – Central America, sometimes beyond – conquered Hawaii and the Philippines killing several hundred thousand Filipinos … It was always killing someone else, fighting somewhere else. ibid.
Terrorism works. It doesn’t fail; it works. Violence usually works … Primarily a weapon of the strong. ibid.
The United States had total control of their [Nicaraguan] airspace; they were overflying it, and using that to pass instructions to the terrorist army to enable them to attack soft targets … But the idea that Nicaragua should be permitted to defend its airspace against a superpower attack that is directing terrorist forces to attack undefended civilian targets – that was considered in the United States outrageous and uniformly so. ibid.
Obama is running a global terror programme of a kind that has never been envisioned before. Noam Chomsky: The Empire’s Election Extravaganza, interview Abby Martin & The Empire Files, Youtube 2015
It cannot be a war on terror … We are all total hypocrites on any issue relating to terrorism. Noam Chomsky, lecture Harvard University 2002, ‘Distorted Reality: A War on Terrorism?’, Youtube 55.13
Reagan 1984: His administration had immediately declared that the war on terrorism would be the focus of US foreign policy … ‘by depraved opponents of civilisation.’ ibid.
State terror is far worse than individual terror for the obvious reason that states have means of violence that individuals don’t have or groups. ibid.
The United States hires terrorist states. ibid.
On September 20 2001 California Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D) cast the only dissenting vote in the entire US Congress opposing S J Resolution 23 giving President Bush a free hand to attack terrorists anywhere in the world as he saw fit. Mike Ruppert, The Truth & Lies of 9/11
It is a sequential war to control the last remaining oil reserves on the planet. Mike Ruppert, lecturer & author & former CIA agent
The more we’re afraid, the more you ask us to give – Patriot Act II, enhancements to the Patriot Act; now the budget’s started to be bankrupted – billions flowing out of this country into a War on Terror. Scott Ritter
This War on Terror is a War of Terror. Ken O’Keefe
This war on terrorism is bogus: the 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination. Michael Meacher, Guardian online article 6th September 2003
To pursue a drastic unlimited militarisation of foreign policy on a massive and unprecedented scale required by long-standing elite planning, while crushing domestic dissent and criminalizing legitimate protest. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom: Causes & Consequences of 9/11, Institute for Policy Research & Development
Al Qaeda is an instrument of co-operation rather than an enemy of the West. There is no War on Terror. This is the crux of the issue. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
The bulk of my research in my book The War on Truth concerns the role of al Qaeda as an instrument of Western covert operations. And this really does for me fundamentally undermine the entire concept of the War on Terror. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed