9/11 Day: How American Higher Education Never Forgets

As America gears up for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 — what will surely be a pornographic and predictable display of political theater — the tired echoes of “9/11 Remembrance” have never been more meaningless or comically absurd. What are we supposed to be remembering?

9/11 has been (and continues to be) the pretext for senseless wars and astronomical military spending (“the U.S. defense budget is now about the same as military spending in all other countries combined” and “since 2001, military and security expenditures have soared by 119 percent”).

Under the nauseating guise of “preventing another 9/11,” the United States has become increasingly disinterested in respecting civil liberties (the ACLU recently warned: “there is a very real danger that the Obama administration will enshrine permanently within the law policies and practices that were widely considered extreme and unlawful during the Bush administration”), and the post-9/11 practice of indefinite detention and rendition remains undisturbed, and in some cases, enhanced.

And even though hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children have died from our own acts of aggression (aggression that is “justified” by 9/11, of course) — and even though Osama bin Laden is now (allegedly) at the bottom of the ocean somewhere — September 11, 2011 will not be a day to take stock and reflect upon what we’ve done (to ourselves, and the world) over the last ten years.

With unusual candor, the Washington Post recently observed, “A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Americans live in an era of endless war.” And yet, the expectation is that Americans will “remember” 9/11 without asking why — or how — 9/11 continues to excuse our “era of endless war.” Ten years later, it seems that “9/11 Remembrance” is actually more about Forgetting than Remembering. Glenn Greenwald laments:

We are now enduring a parade of wistful, contemplative, self-regarding pundit-meditations on The Meaning of 9/11 Ten Years Later (if I could impose one media rule, it would be that following every column or TV segment featuring American political commentators dramatically unloading their Where-I-Was-on-9/11-and-how-I-felt tales, there would be similar recollections offered from parents in the Muslim world talking about how their children died from the pre-9/11 acts of the U.S. and its client states or from post-9/11 American bombs, drones, checkpoint shootings and night raids: just for the sake of “balance,” which media outlets claim to crave). Notwithstanding this somber, collective 9/11 anniversary ritual descending upon us, the reality is that the nation’s political and media elite learned no lessons from that attack.

It’s not just our politicians and television pundits who will be “dramatically unloading their Where-I-Was-on-9/11-and-how-I-felt tales,” though. America’s fabled liberal arts colleges display the same symptoms of Selective Remembrance.

At my alma mater, 9/11 will be commemorated with a “9/11 Service of Remembrance” called “Out of the Ashes: Building Community out of Tragedy,” a “nonsectarian service honoring the lives of those lost and of those who serve their communities.” In attendance will be Cindy McGinty, whose husband died in the 9/11 attacks. McGinty is also “the co-founder of My Good Deed (the original inspiration for the 9/11 National Day of Service and Remembrance).” What’s the purpose of the 9/11 National Day of Service and Remembrance (“9/11 Day”), and what does it tell us about how we “remember” 9/11? According to its website (“About 9/11 Day”):

Our hopeful mission, by annually organizing the 9/11 Day of Service and Remembrance (“9/11 Day”), is to provide a positive and forward-looking way for Americans and others to forever honor and remember the 9/11 victims, survivors, and the many that rose in service in response to the 9/11 tragedy, including first responders, recovery workers, volunteers, public safety officers and members of our military.

9/11 Day is made possible by generous corporate sponsors: JPMorgan Chase is listed as a “national contributor.”

It’s a bit odd that JPMorgan Chase is a major sponsor of “9/11 Day” — a day for “forever honoring members of our military” — especially since JPMorgan Chase repossed a soldier’s home on the same day that the soldier returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. In another shining example of “forever honoring the members of our military,” JPMorgan Chase disclosed in February that it had “improperly foreclosed on the homes of 18 military families.” Illegally foreclosing on members of the military (while they’re serving overseas!) — that’s certainly one way of honoring them.

And let’s not forget that JPMorgan Chase was selected to manage billions of dollars in Iraq — billions of dollars that magically vanished.

9/11 Day is also sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline — a British pharmaceutical giant that was recently investigated by the Serious Fraud Office for allegedly bribing members of Saddam Hussein’s regime in order to secure lucrative contracts, in breach of Iraq’s 1996 to 2003 oil-for-food program.

Andrew Witty, the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, holds an unelected position in the British government (“Lead Non-Executive Board Member at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills”). In August, GlaxoSmithKline “signed a deal to start manufacturing drugs in Iraq for the first time.”

9/11 Day is also made possible by a generous financial contribution from Best Buy. Best Buy sells DVDs and stuff. (Do you really need Best Buy to help you Remember?)

Wheaton’s “9/11 Service of Remembrance” is organized by the college’s office of Service, Spirituality, and Social Responsibility (SSSR). According to the SSSR website, “Social Responsibility is Wheaton shorthand for civic engagement, specifically informed political activism.”

When Wheaton talks about “honoring the lives of those lost and of those who serve their communities” — what does this mean? How does a socially responsible person in 2011 honor those who died on 9/11?

And, using language on the “JPMorgan Chase-9/11 Day” website: What is a “forward-looking” way to honor those who died on 9/11? What is a “forward-looking” way to honor those who are currently serving in our military? Heck, what is a “forward-looking” way of remembering 9/11?

Here’s how Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, “remembers” 9/11:

9/11 is the foundation of the open-ended wars that are exhausting America’s resources and destroying its reputation, and it is the foundation of the domestic police state that ultimately will shut down all opposition to the wars. Americans are bound to the story of the 9/11 Muslim terrorist attack, because it is what justifies the slaughter of civilian populations in several Muslim countries, and it justifies a domestic police state as the only means of securing safety from terrorists, who already have morphed into “domestic extremists” such as environmentalists, animal rights groups, and antiwar activists.

There’s nothing wrong with helping out at your local food pantry. But if that’s how you “remember” 9/11 — seriously, if you really think that signing up for Barack Obama’s “volunteer at the dog shelter on 9/11″ feel-good baloney is the most “socially responsible” thing you can do on 9/11 … how exactly is that “informed political activism”?

Remember Only What Barack Obama Wants You To Remember

Returning for a moment to Wheaton’s press release about Remembering to Stand United during 9/11 or whatever: “In 2009, President Barack Obama established the National Day of Service and Remembrance to honor the victims of the terrorist attacks, as well as the first responders.”

It’s nice that Barack Obama wants to help you remember 9/11 — it’s just a pity that he also wants you to forget about your civil liberties:

The ACLU decided to use the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack to comprehensively survey the severe erosion of civil liberties justified in the name of that event, an erosion that — as it documents — continues unabated, indeed often in accelerated form, under the Obama administration. The group today is issuing a report entitled A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11; that title is intended to underscore the irony that political leaders who prance around as courageous warriors against Terrorism in fact rely on one primary weapon — fear-mongering: the absence of courage — to vest the government with ever-more power and the citizenry with ever-fewer rights. Domestically, the “War on Terror” has been, and continues to be, a war on basic political liberties more than it is anything else.

Also, Barack Obama definitely doesn’t want you to remember this:

In many crucial areas, [Obama] has done more to subvert and weaken the left’s political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party’s leader endorses – even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.

This dynamic has repeatedly emerged in numerous contexts. Obama has continued Bush/Cheney terrorism policies – once viciously denounced by Democrats – of indefinite detention, renditions, secret prisons by proxy, and sweeping secrecy doctrines.

He has gone further than his predecessor by waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seizing the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process far from any battlefield, massively escalating drone attacks in multiple nations, and asserting the authority to unilaterally prosecute a war (in Libya) even in defiance of a Congressional vote against authorising the war.

This is from June, and please don’t remember it either:

Not only has Obama not closed Guantanamo, he has also vastly expanded a similar prison in Afghanistan

President Obama has presided over a threefold increase in the number of detainees being held at the controversial military detention center at Bagram Air Base, the Afghan cousin of the notorious prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. It’s the latest piece of news that almost certainly would be getting more attention — especially from Democrats — if George W. Bush were still president.

There are currently more than 1,700 detainees at Bagram, up from over 600 at the end of the Bush administration.

And if you remember this, from August, you’re probably a jerk:

Two Senators have been warning for months that the government has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to an entirely different law — one that gives the feds massive domestic surveillance powers, and keeps the rest of us in the dark about the snooping.

“There is a significant discrepancy between what most Americans – including many members of Congress – think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and how government officials interpret that same law,” wrote the Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. “We believe that most members of the American public would be very surprised to learn how federal surveillance law is being interpreted in secret.”

Oh well. What are some of the other things we’re not supposed to remember/care at all about? Oh, just some wars and stuff.

Forget About Iraq

4,474 members of U.S. military have been killed in Iraq since _______________ . (A: March 20, 2003 … why did you Forget?)

Contrary to what Barack Obama told you, the war in Iraq is still “going on.” TIME Magazine (Wheaton’s favorite!) reported last year that “the last U.S. brigade combat team has left Iraq.” Ha-ha, wrong! U.S. forces are still fighting in Iraq. In June, the New York Times reported that “President Obama declared the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq, yet members of the Army Special Forces and the Navy Seals are still on raids with their Iraqi counterparts almost every night.” There are still 50,000 troops in Iraq, and June was the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers stationed there since 2008.

Here’s a fun example of “the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq”: a recent night raid conducted by “Iraqi and American forces” in Tikrit “left the tribal Sheik and two others dead, and several wounded, including two young girls”:

“We will follow them to America and file cases there against them,” one of the villagers said. “There were more than 30 people here that saw what happened and all are ready to be witnesses.”

One tribal sheik, Youseff Ahmad, spoke about the debate about the future role of United States forces here that has dominated Iraqi public life of late. “We want them to leave, even before the end of this year,” Mr. Ahmad said. “They’ve destroyed us. They’ve only brought killing and disaster.”

There are 102,416 documented civilian deaths from violence in Iraq. The real human cost of this war has been left largely undocumented, or in many cases, hidden. More than 12,000 previously unknown deaths are contained in the ‘Civilian’ category of the Iraq War Logs — information that was never intended for public scrutiny. In the most recent WikiLeaks document dump, a diplomatic cable from 2006 details a “house raid” in Iraq, wherein U.S. soldiers summarily executed one man, four women, two children and three infants.

Furthermore, a study published in 2006 in the British medical journal the Lancet found that “655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.” The study was conducted by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.

This all sounds pretty bad, but it’s not nearly as bad as 9/11! Never forget!

Forget About Afghanistan

1,760 U.S. soldiers have died in Afghanistan since ______________. (C’mon … October 7, 2001! Never forget?!)

Afghanistan is the longest war in our nation’s history, made all the more embarrassing by the fact that the Taliban offered to hand bin Laden over to the United States immediately after 9/11 — an offer we refused, obviously, for Freedom.

Obama’s plan to “withdraw” from Afghanistan by 2014 is a total farce. The New York Times reported in June:

If Mr. Obama has decided to withdraw troops but leave as much of the combat force as possible in place, then among the first several thousand troops sent home could be support and service personnel. Among them would be logisticians and engineers, whose job is done after building barracks, runways and dining halls for the surge forces.

Even after all 30,000 troops are withdrawn, roughly 68,000 troops will remain in Afghanistan, twice the number who were there when Mr. Obama assumed office.

More recently, the Telegraph reported that U.S. troops might stay in Afghanistan until 2024.

We already know that Wheaton’s boyfriend Richard Stengel fabricated his entire “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan” sack of baloney. But is Richard Stengel still barfing about how we need to stay in Afghanistan forever, unless of course you want every woman on earth to be raped by space lizards? You bet your Ugg Boots he is! Via Truthout, July 9, 2011:

With Osama bin Laden dead, can the United States finally bring an end to the Afghan War, its longest-lasting foreign military conflict? It’s an obvious question, since the invasion of Afghanistan was largely portrayed as an effort to catch the leader of the group that carried out the September 11 attacks.

Corporate media did sometimes address this issue.
…
On NBC (5/8/11), the New York Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller cited Pentagon sources: “Right now what they’re saying is that just getting Osama bin Laden does not change the calculus completely here. The Taliban are still a threat.” Time’s Richard Stengel echoed her: “Well, the big picture is the military folks are telling Obama, ‘Look, our biggest fear is we’ve actually made advances over there,’ right?… ‘And I don’t want you to pull back now.’”

Funny Richard Stengel. Funny because of this:

The number of Afghan civilians killed in war-related violence rose 15 percent in the first half of [2011], according to a U.N. report released Thursday that offered grim statistics about the human toll of increased fighting.

But you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet or something? Let’s inspect some more “facts” and “data.” Via Reuters:

Virtually every major project includes a healthy cut for the insurgents. Call it protection money, call it extortion, or, as the Taliban themselves prefer to term it, “spoils of war,” the fact remains that international donors, primarily the United States, are to a large extent financing their own enemy.

“Everyone knows this is going on,” said one U.S. Embassy official, speaking privately.

And here’s a recent example of “the spoils of war”:

A year-long military-led investigation has concluded that U.S. taxpayer money has been indirectly funneled to the Taliban under a $2.16 billion transportation contract that the United States has funded in part to promote Afghan businesses.

Here’s something else, via The Independent, published December 13, 2010:

The most extraordinary failure of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan is that the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars has had so little impact on the misery in which 30 million Afghans live. As President Barack Obama prepares this week to present a review of America’s strategy in Afghanistan which is likely to focus on military progress, US officials, Afghan administrators, businessmen and aid workers insist that corruption is the greatest threat to the country’s future.

In a series of interviews, they paint a picture of a country where $52bn (£33bn) in US aid since 2001 has made almost no impression on devastating poverty made worse by spreading violence and an economy dislocated by war. That enormous aid budget, two-thirds for security and one-third for economic, social and political development, has made little impact on 9 million living in absolute poverty, and another 5 million trying to survive on $43 (£27) a month. The remainder of the population often barely scrapes a living, having to choose between buying wood to keep warm and buying food.

Afghans see a racketeering élite as the main beneficiaries of international support and few of them are optimistic about anything changing. “Things look all right to foreigners but in fact people are dying of starvation in Kabul,” says Abdul Qudus, a man in his forties with a deeply lined face, who sells second-hand clothes and shoes on a street corner in the capital. They are little more than rags, lying on display on the half-frozen mud.

The Brookings Institute’s Afghanistan Index offers some of the most recent data on the situation in Afghanistan:

The Brookings Institute also notes: “The United Nations documented 368 conflict-related civilian fatalities in May 2011, making if the deadliest month since they have been tracking. Estimates of civilian fatalities in Afghanistan vary widely.”

But forget Afghanistan. Forget it.

Never remember what The Nation’s national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill told Congress:

Despite the perception that we know what is happening in Afghanistan, what is rarely discussed in any depth in Congress or the media is the vast number of innocent Afghan civilians that are being killed on a regular basis in US night raids and the heavy bombing that has been reinstated by General David Petraeus. I saw the impact of these civilian deaths first-hand and I can say that in some cases our own actions are helping to increase the strength and expand the size of the Taliban and the broader insurgency in Afghanistan.

As the war rages on in Afghanistan and–despite spin to the contrary–in Iraq as well, US Special Operations Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency are engaged in parallel, covert, shadow wars that are waged in near total darkness and largely away from effective or meaningful Congressional oversight or journalistic scrutiny. The actions and consequences of these wars is seldom discussed in public or investigated by the Congress.

The current US strategy can be summed up as follows: We are trying to kill our way to peace. And the killing fields are growing in number.

….

As I just returned from Afghanistan, I would like to share with this committee part of my investigation into deadly US night raids in Afghanistan where innocent civilians were killed. These operations, carried out by the same Special Ops teams that operate in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, are part of what is effectively a shadow war within the more publicly visible war in Afghanistan. In one incident in February of this year, US Special Operations Forces raided a civilian compound in the Gardez District of Paktia province. They killed two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two men. US forces tried to cover up their responsibility for the killings and blamed the Taliban and said the women were killed in an honor killing. That was a blatant lie and eventually the US was forced to take responsibility, admitting the raid was conducted by operators from the Joint Special Operations Command.

Please don’t remember what General Stanley McChrystal, former Commander, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) said:

In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”

The comments came during a virtual town hall with troops in Afghanistan after one asked McChrystal to comment on the “escalation of force” problem. The general responded that, in the nine months he had been in charge, none of the cases in which “we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it.”

In many cases, he added, families were in the vehicles that were fired on.

Remember 9/11 and honor “it” or whatever, but please forget about this:

This time, the American invader forces that have no other mission rather than killing and massacre of our innocent compatriots through bombardment and blind firings, turned Takhar province, north of Afghanistan, into slaughter ground. On May 27, 2011, around 11 o’clock in the night, four helicopters landed in Gomali Village of Taliqan, capital city of Takhar, and started house search. They took every residents of the village out, tightened their hands and eyes and kept them there until the dawn. The American forces attacked one of the villagers named Mullah Khayat, killed four family members including him and left the area after committing all of these crimes at 4 o’clock in the morning. According to locals, the killed people, two women included, had no connection with Taliban and Al-Qaeda and were the normal natives of the village.

“Support” The Troops, But Forget About Sending Them Home!

Forget this immediately:

More U.S. soldiers and veterans have died from suicide than from combat wounds over the past two years. The latest research indicates that suicide recently has surpassed combat death as a cause of mortality in the military.

This should also be forgotten as soon as possible:

A soldier’s widow says his fellow Army Rangers wouldn’t do anything to help him before he took his own life – after eight deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army found Staff Sgt. Jared Hagemann’s body at a training area of Joint Base Lewis McChord a few weeks ago.

A spokesman for the base tells KOMO News that the nature of the death is still undetermined. But Staff Sgt. Hagemann’s widow says her husband took his own life – and it didn’t need to happen.

“It was just horrible. And he would just cry,” says Ashley Hagemann.

Ashley says her husband Jared tried to come to grips with what he’d seen and done on his eight deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“And there’s no way that any God would forgive him – that he was going to hell,” says Ashley. “He couldn’t live with that any more.”

Forgetting Everything

What are we told to Remember, and what are we supposed to Forget? According to the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, the cost of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan are estimated at 225,000 lives (“an extremely conservative estimate,” according to the researchers) and up to $4 trillion in U.S. spending.

225,000 lives — that’s 75 9/11s. (But again, that’s an “extremely conservative estimate.”)

Let’s return to Wheaton College.

The office of Service, Spirituality, and Social Responsibility supports “programming that encourages students to reflect upon their actions, values and beliefs and on the ways these impact their own intellectual development, the people around them and the communities of which they are a part.”

Is this really true? How does collecting canned goods pass as a “socially responsible” way of “remembering” 9/11? How is that “politically informed activism”?

“Remembering 9/11″ has nothing to do with community service — especially not community service that is promoted by Barack Obama. If you really want to remember 9/11, start asking the tough questions, and start taking responsibility for what your country has done to the world — and itself — over the last ten years.

I noticed that there is another 9/11-related event on the Wheaton Calendar. This sounds more promising:

Reflecting Absence: A Discussion of 9/11. 2011 marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Join the Wheaton College League of Historical Studies in a discussion about the personal, historical and societal significance of that day.

Hopefully the discussion will have real substance, instead of “let’s all sign up for Barack Obama’s Service.gov thing.”

There are alternatives to the corporate banality of 9/11 Day. Peaceful Tomorrows is one example:

Peaceful Tomorro­ws is an organization founded by family members of those killed on September 11th who have united to turn our grief into action for peace. By developing and advocating nonviolent options and actions in the pursuit of justice, we hope to break the cycles of violence engendered by war and terrorism. Acknowledging our common experience with all people affected by violence throughout the world, we work to create a safer and more peaceful world for everyone.

Here is a recent press release from them:

As we consider the killing of Osama Bin Laden, our thoughts turn not only to our family members who were killed on September 11th, but to all of the innocent people around the world who have died, and continue to die, as a result of the events of September 11th, 2001.

It is our hope that the rule of law, underpinned by our Constitution that was so terribly strained in the name of September 11th will again become the guiding light of our policies at home and abroad. One person may have played a central role in the September 11th attacks, but all of us have a role to play in returning our world to a place of peace, hope and new possibilities. We hope that process will begin today.

But for the time being, American Higher Education will stick with 9/11 Day. It has a better endowment, or something.

Tags: 9/11, 9/11 Day, 9/11 Day is dumb, afghanistan, iraq, never forget, norton massachusetts, pakistan, Service Spirituality and Social Responsibility, wheaton college