• Some 9/11 footage — 9/11 was used as a pretext for invasion of Iraq
  • 1st plane; 2nd plane; North tower; South tower
• President Bush’s speech on 9/11
• 2002: the ‘Mushroom cloud‘ (5:20) talking point
• State of the Union speech
• Colin Powell’s UN speech
• Bush’s invasion speech
• Mission accomplished (landing, speech)
• Donald Rumsfeld dissembles
• Bush’s admission
• Larger contexts
  • US, oil, and Iraq
  • Vice President Cheney (in 1994, tragically prophetic)
• Rare critical press coverage
  • Media ‘analysts’ reinforcing the government’s position, asking hard questions of . . . their colleagues
  • Lara Logan discusses US weapons left behind (for ISIL)
• Obama’s speech after bin Laden’s assassination

Media coverage

• • Tortured language and waterboarding
  • Iraq / Iran: Fox News uses same tactics, years later (parody)
  • Managing commercial media
  • Part of the team
  • More sports metaphors
  • Terror alerts and media distraction
  • Justifying the first Persian Gulf War (ending with the retreat of Iraq’s army from Kuwait)

Some context

• Osama bin Laden, from Saudi Arabia, was part of a rebel insurgency, trained and armed in part by the US government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1980.
• bin Laden was upset with the government of Saudi Arabia, when it allowed US military forces to set up military bases in its country in 1990 in preparation for a military operation to repel Iraqi troops from Kuwait in the first ‘Gulf War.’ He declared a fatwah against the United States for its occupation of Holy Lands. Later he was instrumental in the formation of the terrorist group al Qaida, which claimed responsibility for the attacks of September 11, 2001. There is some controversy, though, about the strength or even the organization of al Qaida before 9/11.
• Mohammed Mosaddeq was the Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, when he accused the British Government of seeking too much control over Iran’s natural resources. He attempted to nationalize Iran’s natural resources (that is, to have them owned and administered by the state) and declared the United Kingdom an ‘enemy.’ The British sought the help of the US Government, President Eisenhower labeled Mosaddeq a communist, and he was shortly deposed. The Shah of Iran at the time, who shared power in the Iranian monarchy, was exiled, but returned and installed by the US through a covert CIA operation.
• The Shah used repressive measures, including a secret police force, to control the citizenry and maintain an unpopular alliance with Western governments. In 1979, an Islamic revolution, a direct response to the Shah’s rule and the US support for his government, overthrew the government (but not before the US had shared uranium enrichment technology with Iran, in an effort to develop nuclear power capacity). The CIA refers to this sort thing as blowback.
• In late 1979, Iran overran the US Embassy and took 53 US Embassy employees hostage for over a year. Iran was also engaged with Iraq in a bloody war, and when Iraq, controlled by former army officer Saddam Hussein appeared to be losing the war, the US stepped in to help with arms (including biochemical weapons) and intelligence. Donald Rumsfeld met with Hussein personally in 1983.
• Fast forward–Saddam Hussein was no longer the US friend after he invaded Kuwait–whose government he had accused of ‘slant drilling‘ for oil into Iraq’s oil fields–and the US may have feared he would continue to Saudi Arabia (which has the largest known oil reserves in the world). Certain factions within the US have been trying to find a way to remove him from power since, chief among them individuals who were part of the Project for a New American Century (‘neoconservatives’ mostly, with close ties to the defense industry).
• After the first Gulf War, in which Saddam Hussein and his troops retreated from Kuwait, the US and other countries imposed economic sanctions on Iraq to try to marginalize him and erode his power base in the Middle East.
• In the mid 1990s, Osama bin Laden declared a ‘fatwah’ against the US, primarily because they had used Saudi Arabian soil as part of their military operations to wage the first Gulf War (see above). He was very upset at the Saudi Government for allowing the US Military to deploy on what the Moslem world considers its Holy Land. It is probably no coincidence that 15 of the 19 hijackers who perpetrated the attacks on the US on 9/11 were Saudis. The Saudi Government, to maintain control, has no doubt had to compromise with those more fundamentalist elements of the Islamic faith unhappy with their relationship with the US, and part of that probably had to do with not pursuing al Qaida and other terrorist groups operating in the country (in other words, it may have been a ‘safe haven’ in some ways).
• Epilogue? bin Laden is assassinated by US troops on May 1, 2011. Pentagon releases video.
• Is it over? Ever? ISIS (so-called) and fear but not much light
• Narrative from Chalmers Johnson, former CIA agent.

From Mark Twain’s ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court‘:

The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly American ear. They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody else’s without remembering him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him gratis, and be ready to come at a moment’s notice, leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatened storm; they had to let him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation to themselves when his heedless fruit-gatherers trampled the grain around the trees; they had to smother their anger when his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying waste the result of their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves, and when the swarms from my lord’s dovecote settled on their crops they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then came the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it: first the Church carted off its fat tenth, then the king’s commissioner took his twentieth, then my lord’s people made a mighty inroad upon the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty to bestow the remnant in his barn, in case it was worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes again, and yet other taxes — upon this free and independent pauper, but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church; if the baron would sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit up all night after his day’s work and whip the ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman’s daughter — but no, that last infamy of monarchical government is unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his tortures, found his life unendurable under such conditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake through his back, and his master the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.

And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on their lord the bishop’s road three days each — gratis; every head of a family, and every son of a family, three days each, gratis, and a day or so added for their servants. Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood — one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror — that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.