Lessons from 9/11

AMonger

Veteran Expediter
Ralph Nader gives 10 lessons we must learn from 9/11. If Ralph Nader is right, does the world end? I don't think it's ever happened before. But he's right on every one today.

I was going to paste the text, but it's only 2-3 words wide on my phone, so it'd be even worse than normal to read. Here's the link.

m.usatoday.com/article/news/50192636
 

mcavoy33

Seasoned Expediter
Ralph Nader gives 10 lessons we must learn from 9/11. If Ralph Nader is right, does the world end? I don't think it's ever happened before. But he's right on every one today.

I was going to paste the text, but it's only 2-3 words wide on my phone, so it'd be even worse than normal to read. Here's the link.

m.usatoday.com/article/news/50192636

Were you referring to his final line?

"All empires eventually eat away at their own and devour themselves."


What is your opinion on his 10 points?
 

chefdennis

Veteran Expediter
He has intertwined so many things here with in each "lesson", that you can agree with one sentense and disagreecwith the next..it is all convoluted..but here are the "10 Lessons" with a link that works.


Wednesday, August 31. 2011
Posted by nimda in Special Features
10 painful lessons of 9/11 - The Nader Page

10 painful lessons of 9/11

The commemorative ceremonies that are planned for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 massacre are those of pathos for the victims and their families, of praise for both the pursuit of the supporters of the attackers and the performance of first responders and our soldiers abroad.

Flags and martial music will punctuate the combined atmosphere of sorrow and aggressive defiance to those terrorists who would threaten us. These events will be moments of respectful silence and some expressions of rage and ferocity.

But many Americans might also want to pause to recognize - or unlearn - those reactions and overreactions to 9/11 that have harmed our country. How, in this forward-looking manner, can we respect the day of 9/11?

Here are some suggestions:

1. Do not exaggerate our adversaries' strength in order to produce a climate of hysteria that results in repression of civil liberties, embodied in the overwrought USA Patriot Act, and immense long-term damage to our economy. Consider the massive diversion of trillions of dollars from domestic civilian needs because of the huge expansion and misspending in military and security budgets.

2. Do not allow our leaders to lie and exaggerate as when they told us there were funded, suicidal and hateful al-Qaeda cells all over our country. They were never here. Actually, the wholesale invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan became recruiting grounds for more al-Qaeda branches there and in other countries - a fact acknowledged by both then-Army Chief of Staff George Casey and then-CIA Director Porter Goss.

3. Do not create a climate of fear or monopolize a partisan definition of patriotism in order to silence dissent from other political parties, the citizenry or the unfairly arrested or harassed.

4. Do not tolerate presidents who violate our Constitution and start wars without congressional deliberation and a declaration of war (article 1, section 8, clause 11). Do not let them disobey federal statutes and international treaties in pursuing unlawful, misdirected quicksand wars, as in Iraq, that produce deaths, destruction and debts that undermine our country's national interests.

5. Do not have Congress write a blank check, outside the normal Appropriations Committee hearing process, for the huge budgetary demands from the executive branch for funding of the Iraq, Afghan-Pakistan and other undeclared wars.

6. Do not allow the executive branch to engage in unconstitutional and illegal recurrent practices such as wiretapping and other methods of surveillance of Americans without judicial approval, in addition to arrests without charges, indefinite imprisonment, torture and denial of habeas corpus and other due process rights established by our Founding Fathers. Congress has passed no reforms to check the continuing exercise of unchecked dictatorial presidential power.

7. Do not let the government hide the horrors of war from the people by prohibiting photographs of U.S. casualties; operating cruel, secret prisons; harassing reporters; and refusing to count civilian casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is too much intimidation of returning soldiers - so many harmed for life - from telling the people what they experienced and think about these wars and their heavy outsourcing to profiteering corporations.

8. Do not allow leaders to violate American principles with torture or other war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. Nor should top military brass or members of the executive branch be above our laws and escape accountability.

9. Do not allow your Congress to abdicate or transfer its own constitutional authorities to the president. We the people have not exercised our civic duties enough to make our representatives in Congress fulfill their obligations under the Constitution to decide whether we go to war and act as a watchdog of the president's conduct. The Libyan war was decided and funded by President Obama without congressional approval.

10. Call out those in the news media who become a mouthpiece of the president and his departments involved in these hostilities. What more is the military really doing in Libya, Somali and Yemen as compared with the official line? Under what legal authority?

In addition, demand that news media outlets seek the inconvenient facts, wherever they might lead, unlike the pre-Iraq invasion period.

The celebrated American theologian-philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr aptly wrote decades ago that "to the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible."

All empires eventually eat away at their own and devour themselves.
 

greg334

Veteran Expediter
Well the only point that I have to sort of disagree with is number eight but overall he seems to be more right than wrong.

The problem is we forgot what 9/11 was really about and out victim mentality has forced us to create the hate that we are fighting against in lands that we really don't need to be there fighting. We are doing the job for others and not gaining a thing out of it.

I don't look forwarded to the 9/11 events that are up and coming because we became a nation of whiners and have displaced morals. We didn't rebuild the WTC but rather made what abomination is now in its place a symbol of the mess the country has become.

We tend to overestimate our knowledge about who wants to kill us, thinking they are goat herders who are living in tents in the desert when it is highly intellegent people who will not give up.

Today I listened to some of the 9/11 commission people speak about their report and the one thing that came out of that interview is we haven't even approached the basics that was the intent of the report - sharing info for the good of the country, not the good of the agency.

After that, I listened to something about a retiring general and the praise they have had for him. The bad thing is the comments about us gaining a foot hold against those who are trying to kill us is more or less sickening because they are just giving us propaganda and nothing they can do will root out and destroy them.
 

AMonger

Veteran Expediter
Well the only point that I have to sort of disagree with is number eight but overall he seems to be more right than wrong.
Which sentence in #8? I disagree that any of #8 is wrong, but at least I can understand a disagreement on the first sentence. A disagreement on the second sentence would be plain evil.

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Only Ron Paul can save us from yet another "Predator election," one in which whoever wins, we lose.
 

greg334

Veteran Expediter
It's the first part, the second part needs to have something added to it - no military or congressional person should replace diplomats and their job.
 
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