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The view from Oakland Printable Version PRINTABLE VERSION
by clarita zarate, United States May 14, 2007
Peace & Conflict   Opinions
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It's all coming apart for the Bush Administration these days. Finally. After the Democrats won a slight majority in the House and Senate last November, they are at last starting to exercise a little LONG overdue oversight… and hopefully we will be seeing some, if not all, of the incredible scandals and corruption that have been perpetrated by this administration fully exposed and explained to the public. And even more hopefully, those responsible will be not just held accountable, but punished!

Lying about WMD's to start the Iraq war. Halliburton no-bid contracts and overcharging. Election fraud in Ohio. Tom Delay. Jack Abramoff. Duke Cunningham. Hurricane Katrina relief money (not to mention billions of Iraq war dollars) going straight into the pockets of private contractors like Blackwater USA. The elimination of habeas corpus. Torture. The U.S. attorney scandal. The list goes on and on, and that is just the tip of the proverbial political iceberg!

I only hope that the public is paying attention. Because it has been obvious to me and just about everyone I know from the very beginning that these people are as crooked as a barrel of snakes! Just look at the way they took power - I won't say "got elected" because the way they "won" the crucial Florida election in 2000 was to have the Supreme Court block a full recount that, if carried out, would have proven that the other guy won!

I mean, how democratic is that? How American?

And it has only gone downhill from there. Compassionate conservatism, my ass. Let's see through the smokescreen of right-wing rhetoric and propaganda to one simple truth. The people in power at present are dedicated and committed to one thing: wholesale redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and power in favor of the powerful.

In America right now, a shocking statistic: the top 1% of households have more money than the bottom 90% combined! And you know what? They want more! They will not be satisfied with 99%! Or 99.9%! They want it all! There is no end to the greed of these people!

If we look at that and understand it as their main motivation, their raison d'etre, everything that has happened during the last six years starts to make a lot of sense, albeit in a very sinister and heartless way.

Recently I was watching the Oliver Stone movie "JFK" and was struck by a part of the monologue by Donald Sutherland's character "X" - he played an informant who had worked for the CIA "black operations" covert activities department, secretly handling assassinations, overthrowing governments, etc. - and he asked three questions that he said would lead the investigator, New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, to the truth about the Kennedy assassination: Why did it happen? Who profited from it? Who had the power to cover it up?

9/11 was the single most significant traumatic event in our country's history since the Kennedy assassination. We would do well to ask ourselves those same three questions about that fateful day, especially in the light of what has happened since.

First, Why did it happen? Well, obviously there are quite a few people in the world who are not exactly big fans of America… particularly the way we have thrown our weight around in the world for the last 50 years or so. We preach democracy but we feel free to meddle all over the world… to overthrow democratically elected governments and support kingdoms and regimes with no trace of democracy… if it suits our national interests. We're the big superpower and we can do what we like! Because we stand for Freedom! I can see how that kind of attitude could piss a few people off, don't you?

I am by no means saying that what those 19 people armed with box cutters and bent on mass murder and suicide did that day was justified. It was a horrible CRIME. One of the worst in history. But it was not a WAR! No. A WAR is what WE started. Afterwards.

Now, I have seen a lot of information on the Internet about various inconsistencies in the story of 9/11; the way the building seemed to come down as a controlled demolition, the fact that jet fuel burns at 1000 degrees cooler than the temperature required to melt the steel girders in the building's structure, the unexplained collapse of Building #7 - which, incredibly, was reported by a BBC reporter 20 minutes before it happened, and you can see the building still standing in the background over her shoulder as she was making the report (I saw the footage) - and all of these could possibly point to something which has been universally dismissed in the media as "conspiracy theory".

There have also been better-publicized indications that the government had prior knowledge that it was going to happen, but did nothing to stop it. In Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11? it was reported that a bunch of Osama bin Laden's relatives were flown back from Washington to Saudi Arabia right after the attack - during the total ban on U.S. air travel! I think any objective person would have to say this does raise a few questions!





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