Every year on September 11, I find myself cringing—for more than one reason.
Voices from across the political spectrum mourn a national tragedy and the thousands of lives lost, usually overlooking the millions more who died as a result of ignorant policy responses. September 11 should be a day to remember the victims of Washington’s bipartisan wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, but rarely are they remembered.
September 11 could also be a day to mourn the loss of civil liberties in America. Starting with the hasty and knee-jerk passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, and blossoming with Obama’s bipartisan entrenchment of the national security state under his Democratic administration, America has been transformed in the generation since the twin towers fell in Lower Manhattan.
Despite a commitment to the rights of individuals written into the Constitution, Washington erected a mass surveillance apparatus from the Internet and phone system to your local police department, supported by leaders of both of the corporate political parties in Washington. Meanwhile, across the country, communities starved for public resources funneled federal dollars through the tax system to the military, fueling a corrupt cycle of developing new weapons—and a series of agencies seemingly dedicated to finding excuses to use them, most recently from Russia to China.
September 11 has long offered an opportunity to oberserve and mourn the machinations of the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency engineered a coup in Chile on September 11, 1973 that installed a murderous dictator who killed tens of thousands of pro-democracy dissidents. Having never been held accountable for training despots or destabilizing democracies, the national security complex is back at it again today.
Several figures responsible for a recent coup in Niger were trained by the Pentagon. Despite repeated (and more or less characteristic) lies by government officials, Washington also played a key role in this year’s constitutional coup in Pakistan by urging military officials there to organize their political supporters to depose democratically elected leader (and former national sports hero) Imran Khan.
Nor are coups the limit of the Agency’s crimes against humanity. The CIA is led today by Gina Haspel, a figure who previously destroyed evidence of torture in order to protect criminal Agency officials at the cost of human rights principles for which our nation once fought—and won—the Second World War.
Language limits my capacity to convey just how much I loathe and detest the centralization of power in the executive branch over the last generation. Many observers watch events through too short a time span to notice how profoundly that shift has altered America. As an immigrant advocate for the vision of America that enticed my parents to come here from abroad, that shift has not been lost on me.
Last year, I wrote a post titled “Never Forget the horrors that 9/11 unleashed.” It aimed, among other things, to empower readers to push back on celebrations of today’s anniversary that ignore events to construct a false narrative. Today, I’m releasing that post as a podcast.
Never forget...what?