Written by Diane V. McLoughlin   

One of the messages coming from New York is that New Yorkers are suffering from 9/11 fatigue. For ten years it's been an ongoing, daily thing. I cannot imagine being forced to remain in mourning forever; to wear my widow's weeds or black armband, or what have you, and be reminded of my loss, every,
single, day.

If that were me, I would think, for the love of god, pour me a drink and put on some music. Or, tell me a joke, and make me laugh. I want to delight in the joy of life with people. Yes? Life is for the living. So I, for one, would like the
families to be able to get on, without having the emotional wound torn open all the time. Enough. Plus, the constant reminders are not for their benefit,
anyway. What's behind the curtain using 9/11 as a prop doesn't give a damn about them.

On CNN last night, Piers Morgan was talking to a survivor. I liked him and felt bad for him. He lost hundreds of friends and colleagues. All of them were at their desks at work when the tower was hit. His brother was up there, too.
Just like every 9/11 story, it tears your heart out. He found renewed purpose resurrecting his business in order to help the families. A good man.

In another segment, we learn that some 9/11 family members have developed an educational package to facilitate discussion about terrorism in classrooms. Kids are encouraged to open up and share what they believe a terrorist looks
like. Then, the class would learn about white guys like Timothy McVeigh (homegrown American terrorist) or that blond, blue-eyed Norwegian lunatic who murdered dozens of innocent young people, recently. Their point: people who turn to violence to achieve political objectives surface in all different
religions, cultures and regions of the world.

The 9/11 families who started the educational project do not want the legacy of those they lost, to be more hate spreading in the world. I love these guys.

When it happened, I was at home watching television in the morning and, like the rest of the world, I just couldn't believe my eyes. I'm standing in my socks in the middle of the living room yelling, yelling, oh my god oh my god. Then...
they're going to need help. What do they need, and I spent hours on the phone, and eventually I got through to a way station down there, got some info, and tried to relay back here what kinds of things could help the rescuers.

I have blood relatives down there. Not close. But they are still part of my extended family. They could have been in there, and I couldn't do anything for
them - or anybody else. That was the worst part of it.

Tied for worst was what I knew the Bush administration would try to pull off next. I mean, I knew.

It was absolutely vital that all the questions were explored, both by the country's political leadership, and the mainstream press. A crime was committed. The evidence needed to be laid out, as it would be in any criminal investigation. Evidence is tweezed, first, with questions.

It became immediately clear that the question 'why?' was MIA; a cover-up. It's scary how much of America's elite went along.

If I come across a badly injured person, bleeding, clothes torn, weak and in distress, the first human response is, 'Oh my god! What happened to you, are you ok? Do you need help?'

Next person comes along as you're calling 911, you ask: 'Do you know what happened? Did you see anything?'

At some point after that, somebody will be asking the victim himself, 'Do you have any enemies? Why did this happen? Why would somebody want to do this to you?'

But in the case of 9/11 'why?' was absent. It was absent in the press, and it was absent from the White House. And I will tell you that anyone who posted comments pointing out the obvious after newspaper propaganda pieces, was
immediately censored, including me.

Bush's, 'They hate us for our freedoms - now, if you love your country - go shopping' - was amazing, in its horror. This was not just a little white lie. This was a whopper, out of which a nightmare - war based on lies; the fostering of racist hate - would be fanned into a raging inferno, When so much
carnage had been committed already, do they not see what they've done?

A shadow cabinet embedded within the highest echelons of U.S. power had for several years leading up to 9/11 discussed what future they dreamed of for America. And their dream was that the U.S. should become a world empire; seizing the whole thing, one Middle East country at a time, beginning with
Iraq. One individual is on record wistfully noting that a Pearl Harbor would be a gift. A crisis would get the people to rally around anything.

And so the imbroglio to occupy Iraq was soon enough launched, even though Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9/11 whatsoever.

Also, if I recall correctly, the civil liberties-shredding 'Patriot Act' just happened, miraculously, to be ready for Congressional perusal within days of 9/11 - a bound book of proposed changes to federal law roughly the size of a
fifty-pound turkey. Michael Moore made hay over the fact that no Congressman did his due diligence to even read the constitution-bending Patriot Act before voting in favor of the entire thing.

The fact of the matter is that it wasn't Iraq that was any kind of real threat, it was the U.S. government itself that had turned into the enemy domestic.

Conspiracy theories are unnecessary to make the case that the inner sanctum of government was as guilty as if they had flown those planes into the twin towers themselves. Although, I will say that it is a very strange thing that three
skyscrapers miraculously dropped into their footprints, straight down, within seconds. It is my understanding that hundreds of architects and engineers have gone on record to say that this is an absolute impossibility outside of controlled and preplanned demolitions. Building Seven wasn't hit by anything
at all, of course, and yet it fell straight down exactly the same way.

What is odd to me is that not one of the three buildings ended up falling over to the side on their way down. Structurally, that, to me, would have made more sense. Possible explanation? For the sake of limiting massive damage to
neighboring structures and to save lives otherwise, an executive order may have been issued to discharge pre-placed demolition devices. For this to happen the devices may have had to have been built in; a strange thing to do.
So maybe the buildings just defied all the odds and dropped. But I see the point of so-called conspiracy theorists on the question, so far as how the buildings actually fell.

343 New York City firefighters died on 9/11 trying to save people, in part because police and fire did not have the communications equipment they needed. It is a travesty, if true, that ten years later this situation has still not
been rectified.

What the government of the
United States did to provoke the 9/11 attack:

For ten years before 9/11 the U.S. and a few coalition partners held Iraq under military siege and committed genocide. In a desert nation they deliberately bombed out all electrical plants, water treatment facilities, and sewage
treatment plants. Then, John Bolton, U.S. representative at the United Nations, argued that along with everything else on the list, childhood vaccines should be barred from import.

Get it? When a private American citizen, Bert Sacks, tried to do whatever he could to save even a few Iraqi children from dying from preventable, U.S.- caused disease by arranging to import vaccines himself, the U.S. government fined him $10,000 for his egregious offense.

500,000 Iraqi children died.

We broke the law. There was no justification for putting Iraq in a lock-down in the first place.

One reason why we destroyed Iraq is Israel. Israel has held Palestinians captive under brutal military occupation since 1948 - gradually, slowly, ethnically cleansing the native Palestinians from their homes. It's illegal,
immoral, and the rest of the world doesn't like it, including the Arab world.

Rockets were fired from Iraq into Israel, causing panic. Sadaam Hussein held tremendous sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people. The Israeli occupation had been permitted to fester for too long.

In reaction to growing Middle Eastern restiveness, Western diplomacy could have gone the other way. The issues could have been brought forward, and a peace deal hammered out. Resolution to the Israel-Palestine unrest could have
been brought to bear. But that didn't happen, because too many people in the U.S. are blind to the situation. So, rather than do the right thing, perhaps partly out of the natural sympathy the West feels over the Holocaust, the U.S. utterly
destroyed Iraq, instead.

Iraq and Palestine aren't the only issues that Osama bin Laden raised in his 'Letter to America'. But they are at the top of the list.

The attack on the World Trade Center was a clear-cut act of terror. But the evil empire is still up and running, still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan; still bombing Pakistan and Yemen; still thinking about attacking Iran; having words
with China, and encircling Russia, while continuing to prop up the apartheid regime of Israel.

Americans are wonderful people. I believe most of the world is willing to cut the average American some slack. At the same time, the government has been trying to overrun the world, drunk on its own power, deluded with a belief in
its own invincibility with hundreds - hundreds! - of military bases, including some thirty alone in Muslim countries.

The only way world history will change course is if Americans vote in a party that will pull back from foreign entanglements and stop the madness. Otherwise, horrifying as it was, I fear that 9/11 was a cakewalk compared to what we can expect sooner or later down the road.

It is high time for Americans to begin to think about the fact that they wouldn't put up with it for one second if the shoe were on the other foot and America were occupied by a foreign power. If the country wants to survive as a
democratic state free from fear, it will have to take on the military and order that the soldiers be brought back home. When President John F. Kennedy, and his brother Robert after him, looked like they might try to do just that, they
were both assassinated, one after the other. War is big business.

Cassandra - a cursed mythical figure who could see the future but was unable to get anyone to listen to what she had to say. She knew what would happen. She just could not do anything about it.

Diane V. McLoughlin, mcloughlinpost.com