It’s impossible to document, or even acknowledge all of the grievous crimes by the U.S. and its allies over the last 25 years in the name of revenge for the attack on 9/11. The people who run this country want us to think history started with 9/11, that they were just driven to develop new ways to respond to save “democracy.”
But of course none of their playbook was really new. They had just demolished civilian infrastructure in Iraq only 10 years earlier, applying sanctions on the population which brought about the deaths of as many as 500,000 children. Remember Madeleine Albright’s (Secretary of State under Democrat Bill Clinton) later comment that those deaths had been “worth it”? Waterboarding used on “war on terror” prisoners in 2002 was adopted from the so-called “Spanish-American” war, when it was used against Filipinos by the U.S. military 1898-1901 when they took the Philippines from Spain.
The mass internment of prisoners at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was not new either but the snatching of men across the globe and then stashing them in “black” sites was a development that foreboded the expansive repression against immigrants we face now. In his report on the Global Vigils to Close Guantanamo, Andy Worthington does a concise update on how 779 men were imprisoned there beginning 9000 days ago. Update: A federal court has just found ― again ― that the “confessions” attained through torture cannot be used as evidence in long-postponed trials of some of the 15 men remaining at Guantanamo.
The attack on the World Trade Center with the thousands of civilian deaths there and on the crashed planes aiming for Washington DC was never going to bring justice for people suffering under imperialism. As a 9/14/01 statement, “The Horrors That Come from this Horrible System,” said:
As the dust clears from our eyes, the people in the most powerful country in the world find ourselves held hostage to the inevitable repercussions of the actions of this U.S. power structure and their bloody military machine. Now, besides the horrors that they have perpetuated against the people around the world — horrors that multiply the tears shed in NY and Washington a thousand times — these cold-hearted imperialists have called forth the same kind of devastation in the belly of their own beast. And now they call on the people to support their retribution. They speak of war and justice. No….
One of the ways people put their arms around each other in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in Manhattan was the OUR GRIEF IS NOT A CRY FOR WAR project, put together by artists at a time when public gatherings were still suspect. We found this account online from the artist Dread Scott:
“Our Grief Is Not A Cry For War” is a performance conceived of by a grouping of artists drawn together by the events of September 11th, 2001. I was part of this gathering of artists and came up with the text and helped shape the performance. It was first performed September 22, 2001 at Union Square in New York and twice in the following weeks at Times Square. More than 100 artists stood silently and motionless for an hour at each performance. Some “audience” members joined us during the piece.
We went on to mount the largest anti-war protests in U.S. history against the U.S. global war on terror. We did not stop those wars nor the murder and displacement of millions of people. But what would become of humanity if we hadn’t tried?
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