The $1.2 Trillion Trap: What America Gave Up For 10 Years Of War Since 9/11. By Zaid Jilani on September 11, 2011 at 8:00 am "The $1.2 Trillion Trap: What America Gave Up For 10 Years Of War Since 9/11" Today is September 11th, the tenth anniversary of the horrific and inhumane Al Qaeda-led terrorist attacks that killed approximately 3,000 innocents. As Americans pause and reflect on how these attacks changed our country and the world, we should reflect upon one of deceased terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden’s primary goals: bankrupting America.
In an audio tape from 2004, Bin Laden explained that Al Qaeda had adopted a “policy” of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” through provoking it into engaging in perpetual warfare in the Middle East and South Asia. Nearly ten years after the United States sent our military forces into Afghanistan, our country has spent $1.2 trillion engaging in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the National Priorities Project (NPP). These numbers reflect only the monetary costs of the wars. Interview with Former FBI Agent Ali Soufan: 'We Did Exactly What Al-Qaida Wanted Us to Do' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. On Panetta and Defeating al-Qaeda. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said on his arrival in Kabul that the US could be on the verge of defeating al-Qaeda, and could do so in the wake of the killing of Usama Bin Laden by keeping the pressure on in Afghanistan, northwest Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
According to the Department of Defense, Panetta ‘…explained his reasoning saying there are between 10 to 20 key al-Qaida leaders in areas like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa and tracking them down would mean the defeat of the terror organization. “We have undermined their ability to conduct 9-11-type attacks,” he said. “We have them on the run. Panetta’s way of thinking about al-Qaeda is welcome in the sense that he is depicting it as a small network with only a few capable leaders (10 to 20). But thinking about al-Qaeda as an organization to which entrepreneurial leadership is key is itself problematic.
So here is how you really defeat al-Qaeda: 1. 2. 3. 4. The way to defeat al-Qaeda is not to kill 20 leaders. The quaint and obsolete Nuremberg principles - Osama Bin Laden. NYPD eyed US citizens in intel effort - US news - Security. Noam Chomsky, The Imperial Mentality and 9/11. This is, of course, the week before the tenth anniversary of the day that “changed everything.” And enough was indeed changed that it’s easy to forget what that lost world was like. Here’s a little reminder of that moment just before September 11, 2001: That’s a taste of the lost world of September 6-10, 2001 -- a moment when the news was dominated by nothing more catastrophic than shark attacks off the Florida and North Carolina coasts -- in a passage from a piece (“Shark-Bit World”) I wrote back in 2005 when that world was already beyond recovery.
A few days later, we would enter a very American hell, one from which we’ve never emerged, with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney leading the way. Almost a decade later, Osama bin Laden may be dead, but his American legacy lives on fiercely in Washington policy when it comes to surveillance, secrecy, war, and the national security state (as well as economic meltdown at home). The First 9/11Was there an alternative? Professor Paul Wilkinson. UK's secret policy on torture revealed | Politics. A top-secret document revealing how MI6 and MI5 officers were allowed to extract information from prisoners being illegally tortured overseas has been seen by the Guardian. The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK's role in torture and rendition – instructed senior intelligence officers to weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer.
It was operated by the British government for almost a decade. A copy of the secret policy showed senior intelligence officers and ministers feared the British public could be at greater risk of a terrorist attack if Islamists became aware of its existence. "For instance, it is possible that in some circumstances such a revelation could result in further radicalisation, leading to an increase in the threat from terrorism. " It also:
"War on terror" curators... Torture...