http://www.opednews.com/articles/Who-Will-Rescue-Us-From-Po-by-Curt-Day-120517-134.html

Who Will Rescue Us From Post 9-11 Thinking?

By Curt Day (about the author)

opednews.com

What is Post 9-11 thinking? What preceded it? Do inquiring minds really want to know?

Well, in case they do, we will start with pre 9-11 thinking. With pre 9-11 thinking, we treated terrorism like crime in that we didn't react to it until it occurred. And because we didn't pre-emptively act against terrorism, we didn't act against American citizens with today's surveillance. Thus, pre 9-11 thinking granted American citizens a few more rights and privacy than post 9-11 thinking did. However, pure pre 9-11 thinking really didn't exist. For example, our government had acted pre-emptively to stop "millenium" terrorist attacks in 1999. Regardless of how the would-be attacks were discovered, the Clinton Administration acted pre-emptively.

Then, tragically, the 9-11 atrocities occurred and we were asked to think in a new way, which was not really new to some in the Bush Administration or the rest of the country. The "new" way of thinking included more than just pre-emption, it meant that America could assume this dominating position over the rest of the world so that no rival would emerge. And a side benefit was that we would have more access to important resources and our products would have more access to markets around the world.

This new 9-11 thinking was based on then President Bush's analysis of the attacks. He claimed we were attacked because those who want our destruction were jealous of our freedoms thus implying that future attacks were a fixed cost. But Chalmers Johnson and others pointed out that our foreign policies, including our history of covert actions, gave more than adequate motivation to many groups, let alone Al-Qaida, for attacking us. In addition, interviews with Bin Laden pointed to policies like the Iraq sanctions, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, along with our unbalanced support for Israel in its brutal occupation and taking of Palestinian land as reasons for the attack.