9/11: America Can’t Let the War Lies Go Down the Memory Hole Again

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1:009-11. America can't let the war lies go down that memory hole again. The article opens with an epigraph. It's our daily song, first verse. 25 years and the smoke still rises in photographs and names and empty chairs. We remember the more we remember the falling, but who remembers what they told us after that? Don't let the lies die. Say their names, remember why for every empty chair for every mother who still cries. 25 years and this much remains. A country that forgets the lies can be lied into war again. Today is the 25th anniversary of 9-11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to steal Iraq's oil, following their illegal invasion of Afghanistan for pure politics just to a bit more than a year earlier. Yet the media today so far anyway is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney's lies, given the cost of both those wars and Netanyahu and Trump using October 7th in a similar fashion

2:05to justify this insane war with Iran. It's an important moment to discuss our history of wars, both the illegal and unnecessary, and those that are arguably essential to the survival of democracy in the world. To be clear, I support U.S. involvement and even an expanded U.S. involvement in the defense of the Ukrainian democracy against Putin's Hitler grabs Poland-like attack and mass slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. At the world mobilized to stop Hitler when he invaded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938, there almost certainly wouldn't have been either the Holocaust or World War II, which is why Europe is so united in this effort. If Putin succeeds in taking Ukraine, his administration has already suggested that both Poland and Moldova are next, with the Baltic states Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, also on the menu. That would almost certainly lead to another war in Europe. And China is watching. A Putin victory in Ukraine will encourage Xi to try to take Taiwan. Between the two, war in both Europe and the Pacific, we could find ourselves in the middle

3:06of World War III if Putin isn't stopped now. That said, essentially defensive military involvement like with Ukraine or in World War II have been the exception rather than the rule in American history. We've been far more likely to have presidents lie us into wars for their own personal and political gain than to defend ourselves or other democracies. For example, after 9-11 in 2001 the Taliban that then ran Afghanistan offered to arrest bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a wartime president to have a successful presidency. The Washington Post headline weeks after 9-11 put it succinctly, Bush rejects Taliban offer on bin Laden. With that decision not to arrest and try bin Laden for his crime, but instead to go to war, George W. Bush set the U.S. and Afghanistan on a direct path to disaster, but simultaneously set himself up for re-election in 2004 as a wartime president. To further complicate things for Bush and Cheenie, the 9-11 attacks were not planned,

4:09hatch, developed, practiced, expanded, worked out, or otherwise devised in Afghanistan, or by even one single citizen of Afghanistan. That country and its leadership in 2001 in fact had nothing whatsoever to do with 9-11. The actual planning and management of the operation was done out of Pakistan and Germany, mostly by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Taliban were bad guys, trashing the rights of women and running a tinpot dictatorship, but they represented no threat whatsoever to America or our allies. Almost two decades later though, then President Trump and Mike Pompeo gave the Taliban everything they wanted. Power, legitimacy, shutting down 9-10 U.S. air bases in the country to screw incoming President Joe Biden, and allowed the release of 5,000 of Afghanistan's worst Taliban war criminals all over the strong objections of the democratically elected Afghan government in 2019. Trump did this so he could falsely claim heading into the 2020 election that he'd quote

5:09negotiated peace in Afghanistan. When in fact he'd set up the debacle that happened around President Biden's withdrawal from that country. The relationship I have with the Mullah is very good Trump proclaimed after ordering the Mullah who had then named himself President of Afghanistan freed from prison over the furious objection of Afghanistan's government which Trump had cut out of the negotiations. Following that betrayal of both Afghanistan and America, Trump and the GOP scrubbed the record of their embrace of the Taliban from their websites. And the conservative Boris Johnson administration in the UK then came right out and said that Trump's rushed deal with the Taliban without involving involvement of the Afghan government or the international community set up the difficulties that Biden faced. The die was cast, Defense Minister Ben Wallace told the BBC when the deal was done by Donald Trump if you want my observation. So Republican George W. Bush lied us into both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and then Donald Trump tried to lie us out of at least one of them.

6:11But this is far from the first time a President has lied us into war. Vietnam wasn't the first time an American President has buddies immediate in the media lied us into a war. When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara falsely claimed that an American warship had come under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and LBJ went along with the lie. Neither was President William McKinley lying us into the Spanish-American War in 1898 by falsely claiming that the USS Maine had been blown up in Havana Harbor. It had caught fire all by itself. The first time we were lied into a major war by a President was probably the Mexican-American War of 1846 when President James Polk lied that we'd been invaded by Mexico. Even Abraham Lincoln, then a Congressman from Illinois, called him out on that lie. You could also argue that when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian removal act in 1830 leading to the Trail of Tears, Swatter and forced relocation of the Cherokee under President Buchanan among other atrocities, it was all based on a series of lies. Bush's lies that took us into Afghanistan a bit over a year later into Iraq are particularly

7:15egregious, however, given his and Chinese reason for those lies. In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for President of the 2000 election, his family hired Mickey Herscowitz to write the first draft of Bush's autobiography at charge to keep. Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam War and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he'd concluded from watching his father's little three-day war with Iraq, that being a wartime President was the most consistently sure fire way to get reelected if you did it right and have a two-term presidency. I'll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999, Herscowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004. One of the things Bush said to me, Herscowitz says, is, quote, one of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed though I want to get passed, and I'm going to have

8:17a successful presidency. The attack on 9-11 gave Bush's first chance to be seen as commander in chief when our guy, Osama bin Laden, who the Reagan Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan, engineered an attack on New York and D.C. The crime was planned in Germany and Florida, and on 9-11 bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan, quote, CBS evening news has been told that the night before the 9-11 terrorist attack Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan, he was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military, the days later pledged its black backing for the US war on terror in Afghanistan, end quote. When the Obama administration finally caught and killed bin Laden, he was back in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban. The attack in our ally Pakistan in 2001 would have been impossible for Bush, and besides, nearby Afghanistan was an easier target, being at that time the second poorest country in the world, with an average annual per capita income of $700 a year.

9:19bin Laden had run terrorist training camps there, unrelated to 9-11, but they made a fine excuse for Bush's first chance to be seen as a commander in chief and get some leadership credit. Any meanwhile was in a world of trouble because a huge bet he'd made as CEO of Haliburton in 1998. Dresser Industries was big in at Asbestos, and about to fall into bankruptcy because of asbestos lawsuits that the company was fighting through the court system. Cheney Betdresser would ultimately win the suits and had Haliburton buy the company on the cheap, but a year later, in 1999, Dresser got turned down by the courts, and Haliburton stock went into free fall, crashing 68% no matter a month. Bush had asked Cheney who worked in his father's White House as Secretary of Defense to help him find a suitable candidate for VP. Cheney as his company was collapsing recommended himself for the job. In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the trouble company, and the year after that is VP, Haliburton subsidiary KBR received one of the first no bid, no ceiling,

10:22no accountability, no limit on how much they could receive, multi-billion dollar military contracts. Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001. Bush was seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father's court appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v. Gore law suit that made him president, a war that gave him legitimacy in the aura of leadership. Cheney's company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan, the Stan War, no bid contracts helped turn around Haliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world's largest defense contractors today. Even Trump had to get into the Let's Lie about Afghanistan game, in his case, to have bragging rights that he'd ended the war in Afghanistan. In 2019, Trump went around the Afghan government to their outrage. He invited even invited the Taliban to camp David and a move that disgusted the world. To cut a so-called peace deal that sent thousands of newly empowered Taliban fighters back

11:25into the field, and then drew down our troops to the point where today's ongoing chaos in that country was absolutely predictable. Trump's deal was the signal to the 300,000-plus Afghan army recruits we'd put together and paid that America no longer had their back, and if the Taliban showed up, they should just run away. Which of course is what happened on Trump's watch. As Susanna George of the Washington Post noted, quote, the Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the Trump February 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group in the United States, calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they soon would no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support, and grew receptive to the Taliban's approaches. John Perr's article on Daily Coase did a great summary with the title, Trump put 5,000 Taliban fighters back in battle and tied Biden's hands in Afghanistan. Trump's scheme and lied to help his own 2020 reelection efforts and the people who worked with our military and the US-backed Afghan government paid a terrible price for it.

12:30And now Trump's trying to deport them from America, compounding that disgusting betrayal. As President Biden told America, quote, when I came into office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor, which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9-11 2019. The left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1st 2021 deadline on US forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew US forces down to a bare minimum of 2500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice, followed through on the deal with a brief extension to get our forces and our allied forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country's civil conflict. I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan, two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not and will not pass this war onto a fifth. America has been lied into too many wars. It's cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies and tell our children about them so that memory isn't lost.

13:33When President Ford withdraws US forces from Vietnam, I remember a well. There was barely a mention of McNamara's and LBJ's lies that got us into that war. Similarly, today's reporting on the chaos in Afghanistan and the ongoing conflict around the Iraqi oil fields almost never mentions Bush and Chinese lies and ulterior motives in getting us into those wars in the first place. George Santiana famously noted those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We can't afford to let these lies go down the memory hole like we have the other wars we relied into that I mentioned earlier. Sadly, it's clear now that neither Bush nor Cheney will be held accountable for their lies or for the American Afghan and Iraqi blood and treasure that they cost. But both should be subject to a clear and public airing of the crimes they committed in office and Bush should be required at the very least to apologize to the thousands of American families destroyed by the loss of their soldier, children, parents, and spouses in those unnecessary wars as well as to the people of both Afghanistan and Iraq. If the media refuses to mention the

14:36Bush-Cheney lies on the anniversary of 9-11, it's all the more important that the rest of us use this opportunity to do so. Pass it along. And photographs and names and empty chairs. We remember them all. We remember the fall. But who remembers what they told us after that? They wrapped up the lies in the flag we loved. Sent sons and daughters off to war. So never came home. So came home broken. Still nobody answered what it all was for.

15:38Don't let the lies down. Don't let the truth disappear. Don't let 25 years wash away what happened here. We remember the fall and remember the cost. Remember the wars and everything we lost. If we bury the truth, we'll live through the lies again. They told us be afraid and we follow. They promised us the truth and gave us war. Blood and Afghanistan blood across Iraq and families still ask him what the children died for.

16:41History gets quiet and powerful men grow. But silence doesn't make a lake alive. The truth. So remember. Tell your children. Pass it on. Never let the truth go down the memory hole.