Memory

Good information, or at least as good information as people like us will get, on this operation can be found from Jeremy Scahill, here.

I'm not dancing the streets and howling because Usama bin Laden has been ‘got.’ What it’s doing is bringing back vividly what he wrought upon our lives, from one moment to the next. Our lives in every way as we had been living them – economically, culturally, politically – were destroyed the moment those planes hit the Towers. We’ve had to re-invent everything from scratch. The only thing that stayed the same was our apartment’s address.

Thus it may be understandable what my attitude is toward the people howling U.S.A. in the streets, drunk, wrapped in flags. Neither 9/11 nor the execution of Usama bin Laden are manufactured teevee reality competitions. So many people -- even beyond the immediate victims in the Towers and the planes -- have suffered and died because of this, had their lives forever destroyed. The consequences have been ugly and destructive to this nation as a whole, to its civil liberties, its cultural and intellectual capacities. What has been manufactured, is the use of these events to accelerate the most enormous economic pilferage of the public sector, the greatest transfer of all wealth from everyone else to the smallest, most wealthy class. It has been used to destroy what was good about this nation. A national chant of U.S.A will not change this terrible reality.