The tragedy of terrorism: From Afghanistan to Iraq
Posted in LFA Flashback by R Lee Wrights on July 30th, 2010 by R. Lee Wrights
What a difference a year makes. It’s amazing what drastic changes can transpire over such a relatively short span of time. It is astounding how quickly a basically peaceable people can be led down the road to War.
It is saddening, indeed sickening, to see how easily Americans, swept up in the emotional tidal wave of patriotism, can be persuaded to endorse and advocate the use of the mightiest military force on the face of the earth against people who have never done them any harm. In less than one year a desire for revenge has transformed peace-loving Americans into a nation of warriors who march in lockstep behind a my-way-or-the-highway leader. How many atrocities throughout history have been wrought in exactly the same fashion?
And to think, it all began in a little impoverished country that has been a bloody battlefield for decades already called Afghanistan. How convenient.
In the aftermath of the horrible terrorist attack in New York City on September 11, 2001, American justice acted swiftly. On little evidence, or none at all as far as we know, the government determined that a group of religious zealots, based in Afghanistan, were responsible for the tragedy that shocked the world. Specifically, President Bush claimed to have proof, which he could not share with the people he works for, that a man named Osama bin Laden had ordered the mass murder of thousands of Americans. Within a month of the World Trade Center crumbling to the ground before our very eyes, America was preparing to make war in a country that not one of the hijacking terrorists called home. Americans cheered and bought more flags as bombs began to fall on innocent people in a nation that had not attacked us nor even threatened to do so. And some of us wept.
When the politicians violate the Bill of Rights with the Patriot Act or some other guaranteed-to-bring-peace-and-security-to-the-world scheme, they always reassure us by saying:
The War in Afghanistan has dragged on for almost nine years. 
Some of you know that I used to work in the news media. Maybe it’s that insider viewpoint that makes it especially disgusting to me when I see the state of journalism-and I use the term loosely-today.
“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? … See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
This is something written for Praxis for the People, briefly a neat Green zine from Asheville NC, five years ago this month:
I. I was born free. No government can sanction my freedom, or take it away.
Plunging government revenues may have the unintended consequence - so far as tax-and-spend (and spend some more) public officials are concerned - of reminding people that we are ultimately responsible for our own safety.
Last week, I wrote about a federal agency that most people think is indispensable. In reality, I said, the FDA regulates us to death, literally, by forbidding even dying Americans who can’t be helped by established medical treatments from trying innovative therapies.
