Musings on 9/11/01 and 11/22/63

Some time ago I worked for a webzine, and the Managing Editor asked several of the staffers to contribute a reflective piece on the events of 9/11 to mark its first anniversary. In the piece I wrote then, a year and a half ago, I made a comparison to the assassination of John Kennedy, largely based on the personal significance of the events as relative to the generations that lived through them.

Specifically, I noted that I had always groaned when my mother would start in on the story of where she was (in the classroom in Junior High) when the news was read over the loudspeaker. She claimed she remembered exactly what she was wearing, who said what, who cried, how they dismissed school, and so on. I noted that I had always been sure that her mind was coloring the experience for her, filling in the little details that memory couldn't possibly still be supplying. At least that's what I had thought until 9/11, which I can now remember with the same almost photographic clarity.

In any case, that's where my comparison had halted at the time. At the time. Since then I've been thinking a lot about those events and how they reshaped the world in their wake, and I see a lot more that the two events have in common.

Both of them precipitated a war - in JFK's instance, the heightened involvement in Vietnam, while 9/11 had the far more direct result of the invasion of Afghanistan, the War on Terror, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq.

Looking at the bare facts of each case leads to the conclusion that there was a fundamental failure on the side of government agencies to provide the most basic precepts of security and protection. In Dallas, security details were lax, failing to follow basic procedures like sealing open windows along the parade route and allowing a 120 degree turn that violated established Secret Service protocols. In NYC and DC, planes were allowed without interference into restricted airspace - in NYC there was even a second plane, and fighters were either not scrambled or scrambled too late.

Elementary evidence has been ignored, whitewashed, or simply never brought up in both instances. The files on the Kennedy assassination have been purloined, destroyed, and sealed for 75 years. The black boxes from the Pentagon and WTC planes were never recovered.

Most alarmingly, however, I think the thing that both events have in common most strongly is that both ushered in a period of grief-stricken complacency for the American people that allowed silent government to seize more power. In the wake of Kennedy's killing, nobody questioned the heightening of our involvement in Southeast Asia - at least not at first. And in the wake of 9/11, very few voices were heard to protest the incremental relinquishing of civil liberties in the name of tightening security.

I'm very much afraid that later generations may look back at us and wonder how we could have let ourselves be fooled, much the way I look back at the generation that received that news from Dallas.

When i first came to the realization of what 911 exactly was I was horrified. I spent many sleepless nights researching and studying everything I could get my hands on.
It was during this research that I came to the conclusion that the early '60s was the turning point in american history.
In 1961 You have the military-industrial complex speech by President Eisenhower, in which he warns all americans, "We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, aetheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method"
In 1962 You have this 'hostile ideology' offering up operation northwoods to then President JFK
In 1963 You have this 'hostile ideology' eliminating JFK for not being a team player.
Once he was dead, who would stand against them?
Surely no congressman, no senator would dare say no to them if they can kill the president.
Initially i was angry at my parents and others for letting the white-wash with JFK go uncontested.
If only they had stood up, spoke out.
Surely they had to see something was wrong with the official story. Surely something could have been done at that time that would have kept us from the situation we find ourselfs in today.
But alas, I see now the very problem that confronted all those that have come before me.
The complacent masses. The sheeple, the herd, the flock, whatever you call them.
We have even more evidence of high level complicity in 911 than we did with JFK, and yet it continues to elude the mass media.
Yes, i wondered how my parents could be fooled.
I look about me in wonder today as people that I have known for many years are fooled, even after I show them evidence.

Both of your posts are insightful, emotional and clarifying. I often wonder when it was exactly that America lost its soul. The outrageous lies we were
expected to swallow by the bucketful from the Warren Commission left a foul taste lingering throughout the land.

In the 40 years since 1963, I never met or talked to a single person who ever believed that load of horse hockey that the WC published.

The current investigation into the causes of 911 will be fruitless as well. More voters will be disinfranchized because of the growing distrust of elected officials and their legions of bureaucrats who follow in the politicians wakes, testifying to nothing.

I want to know who the sheeple really are. In the 60's the phrase was coined, turn on, tune in and drop out.
Are the ones who give up and don't vote, sheeple? Are the blind, follow the party line robots, the sheeple?

You see, I want someone to blame for what is wrong with this country, for why I am losing all of my civil rights and liberties. And I want those 4 men who died in Fallujah yesterday honored by our countrymen. I want answers to why with all of our slick technology, we cannot catch and kill a raggedy bunch of murdering anachists. I want the dadgum safeties taken off of all of the American made weapons in Iraq and the Marienes to go into that town and kick a whole lot of Iraqi terrorist butts. When is that going to happen?

It won't because this war isn't about winning anymore than Vietnam was. Its simply about making the most amount of money for weapon makers, the Humvee makers, corporate America and our glorious Military-Industrial bloodsuckers.

If we are going to pull out of Iraq, we should atleast have the curtesy of doing what we set out to do...rid that country and our world of the menace that resides in it.

Sorry if I've gone off on a rant. '11-22 and 9-11 make me sick to the bottom of my soul. It is the depths of evil that we are sinking to that alarms us all.

I couldn't agree more with your sentiments, radstar. The ones I feel for the most acutely are the ones in uniform who do what they do out of a genuine sense of patriotism and stand a good chance of being left out to dry by shifting political agendas and nebulous war aims.

Unlike many folks, I don't necessarily have a problem with the United States functioning as the world's police force - but I have a beef with the way that this duty is called up only when it suits the interests of big money. This thread began with some thoughts about Kennedy and his assassination. One of the more famous quotes from JFK was "What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana, forced on the world by American weapons of war..." Well, I don't have a problem, on a gut level, with a Pax Americana. But let's apply it evenly, and not only in those areas where oil interests can benefit.