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A fter witnessing the first jetliner crash into the Twin Towers
on that Sept. 11 morning, a friend of mine's wife and
seven-year-old daughter fled to their nearby Manhattan
loft and ran to the roof to look around. From there, they
saw the second plane explode in a rolling ball of flaming fuel
across the rooftops. It felt like the heat of a fiery furnace.
Not iong after, the girl was struck with blindness. She rarely
left her room. Her parents worked with therapists for months,
trying various techniques including touch and visualization,
before the young girl finally recovered her sight.
"The interesting new development," my friend reports, "is
that she no longer remembers very much, which she told me
when I asked her if she would be willing to speak with you."
That's what happened to America itself 10 years ago this
Sunday on 9/11, though it might be charged that many of us
were blinded by privilege and hubris long before.
But 9/11 produced a spasm of blind rage arising from a
pre-existing blindness as to the way much of the world sees
us. That in turn led to the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq,
Afghanistan again, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia—in all, a
dozen "shadow wars," according to The New York Times. In Bob
Woodward's crucial book, Obama’s Wars, there were already
secret and lethal counterterrorism operations active in more
than 60 countries as of 2009.
From Pentagon think tanks came a new military doctrine of
the "Long War," a counterinsurgency vision arising from the
failed Phoenix program of the Vietnam era, projecting U.S.
open combat and secret wars over a span of 50 to 80 years, or
20 future presidential terms. The taxpayer costs of this Long
War, also shadowy, would be in the many trillions of dollars
and paid for not from current budgets, but by generations born
after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. The deficit spending
on the Long War would invisibly force the budgetary crisis now
squeezing our states, cities and most Americans.
Besides the future being mortgaged in this way, civil lib
erties were thought to require a shrinking proper to a state
of permanent and secretive war, and so the Patriot Act was
promulgated. All this happened after 9/11 through democratic
default and denial. Who knows what future might have fol
lowed if Al Gore, with a half-million popular-vote margin over
George Bush, had prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court instead
of losing by the vote of a single justice?
In any event, only a single member of Congress, Barbara
Lee of Berkeley-Oakland, voted against the war authorization,
and only a single senator, Russ Feingold, voted against the
Patriot Act.
Were we not blinded by what happened on 9/11? Are we
still? Let's look at the numbers we almost never see.
Fog of War
As to American casualties, the figure now is beyond twice
those who died in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington,
D.C., on 9/11. The casualties are rarely totaled, but they
are broken down into three categories by the Pentagon and
Congressional Research Service.
There is Operation Enduring Freedom, which includes
Afghanistan and Pakistan but, in keeping with the Long War
definition, also covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Second, there is
Operation Iraqi Freedom and its successor, Operation New
Dawn, the name adopted after September 2010 for the 47,000
U.S. advisers, trainers and counterterrorism units still in Iraq.
The scope of these latter operations includes Bahrain, Jordan,
Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab
Emirates.
These territories include not only Muslim majorities but
also, according to former Centcom Commander Tommy Franks,
68 percent of the world's proven oil reserves and the passage
way for 43 percent of petroleum exports, another American
geo-interest that was heavily denied in official explanations.
(See Michael Klare's Blood and Oil and Antonia Juhasz's The
Bush Agenda for more on this.)
A combined 6,197 Americans were killed in these wars as
of Aug. 16, 2011, in the name of avenging 9/11, a day when
2,996 Americans died. The total American wounded has been
45,338, and rising at a rapid rate. The total number rushed by
Medivac out of these violent zones was 56,432. That's a total
of 107,996 Americans. And the active-duty military-suicide rate
for the decade is at a record high of 2,276, not counting vet
erans or those who have tried unsuccessfully to take their own
lives. In fact, the suicide rate for last year was greater than
the American death toll in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has long played a numbers game with these
body counts. Accurate information has always been painfully
difficult to obtain, and there was a time when the Pentagon
refused to count as Iraq war casualties any soldier who died
from his or her wounds outside of Iraq's airspace. Similar con
troversies have surrounded examples such as soldiers killed in
non-combat accidents.
The fog around Iraqi and Afghan civilian casualties will
be seen in the future as one of the great scandals of the era.
Briefly, the United States and its allies in Baghdad and Kabul
have relied on eyewitness, media or hospital numbers instead of
the more common cluster-sampling interview techniques used
in conflict zones like the first Gulf War, Kosovo or the Congo.
The United Nations has a conflict of interest as a party
to the military conflict, and acknowledged in a July 2009
UN human-rights report footnote that "there is a significant
possibility that the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan is underreporting civilian casualties." In August,
even the mainstream media derided a claim by the White House
counterterrorism adviser that there hasn't been a single "col
lateral," or innocent, death during an entire year of CIA drone
strikes in Pakistan, a period in which 600 people were killed,
all of them alleged "militants."
As a specific explanation for the blindness, the Los'Angeles
Times reported on Apr. 9 that "Special Forces account for a
disproportionate share of civilian casualties caused by western
troops, military officials and human rights groups say, though
there are no precise figures because many of their missions are
deemed secret."
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