9/11: The Real Victim

It’s September 11 … a day when American politicians blanket the airwaves with doleful rhetoric and American citizens blanket their social media pages with the latest “We Remember” iconography.

Why? Because twelve years ago nineteen terrorists affiliated with the al-Qaeda network hijacked four commercial airliners – flying two of them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, a third into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and a fourth into a field in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania (this fourth flight intended to strike the U.S. Capitol, but was disrupted by a passenger revolt).

The attacks killed 3,000 people – most of them in New York City – and injured another 6,000. They also launched a decade-long “War on Terror,” which has resulted in nearly 6,800 U.S. military fatalities and will wind up costing taxpayers at least $3.7 trillion (according to an assessment conducted by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies).

But the thousands who died on September 11 aren’t the real victims of these terrorist attacks. Nor are the thousands of soldiers who perished in the ensuing global conflicts. Nor are current and future generations of American taxpayers, who have been deprived of resources they could not afford to sacrifice.

The real victim of September 11? American liberty …

Post-9/11 American has become a truly frightening place – the very embodiment of the Big Brother spy state we were taught to loathe during the Cold War. Like it or not, in the span of a few short years America has become everything it supposedly stood against – an Evil Empire reserving the right to violate any liberty at any time in the name of “national security.”

Your Constitution? Bill of Rights? Those documents may still reside in the National Archives, but in reality they are about as intact as the charred confetti raining down on Lower Manhattan as the twin towers burned.

This year’s revelations of widespread domestic spying – and the use of the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Department of Justice to suppress and intimidate those who might dissent – have exposed the extent to which each and every American is under the thumb of its government. Speaking of … that thumbprint identification on your new iPhone? It may prevent some unwanted intrusion, but it won’t stop Uncle Sam from monitoring everything you do on your device.

And saving and storing it for future use.

Oh, and flat out lying to you about it.

Anyway, in addition to an anniversary of the death of liberty 9/11 also marks the one-year anniversary of the ongoing failure of America’s interventionist foreign policy – notably the terrorist attack against a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.

So … how is America choosing to celebrate this most sacred of days?

Glad you asked. We’re providing arms to rebels in Syria who are affiliated with al-Qaeda (and who are chopping off the heads of Christians). Not only that, Obama and his warmonger allies – most notably U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham – have spent the last few weeks trying to convince the American people that we need to launch a direct military strike against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Which of course would invite precisely the sort of terrorist response we saw on September 11, 2001 …

Talk about things coming full circle.

In years past this website used to mark the occasion of the September 11 attacks by posting the words to Martin Luther’s famous hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A mighty fortress is our God”) beneath images of the still-standing World Trade Center towers.

“Our goal was to promote the United States as a ‘bulwark never failing …’ to rewind the clock to a time when America still exuded strength and exceptionalism like Cowboy sweat dripping from muscles that made stuff,” we wrote last September 11.

Well our eyes are open now … and yours should be, too.

It was said often in the wake of the September 11 attacks that it wasn’t just our symbols or our people that came under attack – but something larger, more elemental.

“Our way of life, our very freedom came under attack,” former U.S. President George W. Bush said on the evening of the attacks from the Oval Office.

He was right. It just wasn’t the terrorists doing the attacking …

The real victim of 9/11? Your lost freedom. And the real villain? The government whose leaders vowed on that day to defend it. Oh, and each day our government ignores this unavoidable reality – by suppressing liberties at home and needlessly warmongering abroad – the more likely it is to face another attack.