Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
September 12, 2021
Hello All – Yesterday's memorial events for the victims of the 9/11 attacks stuck carefully to the events of that day alone. We mourned the deaths of those who died at the hands of the terrorists, and those first-responders who were killed attempting to save them. But because 9/11 follows so closely on the heels of the collapse of the US project in Afghanistan, which was joined at the hip to the attacks on 9/11, we averted our eyes from the transition of the victim into the aggressor, and the waste of hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars that ensued. What are the lessons, the legacies, of 9/11 and 20 years of war? Who will frame this narrative?
In addition to the tragedy and terror of 20 years of war, looking back we can see that "9/11" did enormous, perhaps irreparable, damage to our country. In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg wrote: "The attacks, and our response to them, catalyzed a period of decline that helped turn the United States into the debased, half-crazed fading power we are today." Yet in the discourse of our political and media elites over the last week, there is little indication that any "lessons" have been learned, that new targets and more victims of war will not be found. For Concerned Families of Westchester, which marks its 20th anniversary today, there is no reason to think that the end of the war in Afghanistan will also end the need for desperate efforts on behalf of peace and justice.
In early 2002, CFOW began a collaboration with September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a newly formed organization composed of people who had lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks and rejected the use of these deaths as a justification for war. "Not in Our Name!" was their cry. Early members were Westchester's Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez, whose son was killed in the World Trade Center. One of our first speakers at Dobbs' South Presbyterian Church was Peaceful Tomorrow's member Rita Lasar, (shown here with Westchester's Masuda Sultan, who lost 19 family members during the early days of the US bombing of Afghanistan.) Rita's brother Abe was killed in the South Tower because his best friend was in a wheelchair, and they waited together to be rescued. When President Bush used the "selfless example" of her brother Abe to justify revenge, Rita's letter protesting this – Not in his name! – was published in the New York Times; and she later joined a delegation of similarly bereaved people to Afghanistan, where they met and consoled people there who had lost loved ones to US bombs. The courageous people who came together in February 2002 to form September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows illuminated a path in those dark days that remains with us still, invoking Martin Luther King's injunction that "wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."
Some useful reading about September 11, 2001
I Lost My Father on 9/11, but I Never Wanted to Be a "Victim"
By Leila Murphy, The Nation [September 9, 2021]
(Video) "Turning Point": Legacy of the U.S. Response to 9/11 Is Terror, Domestic Surveillance & Drones – From Democracy Now! [September 9, 2021]
9/11 and the Saudi Connection
By Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, The Intercept [September 11, 2021]
The Accumulated Evil of the Whole: Bush and Co. made the September 11 Attacks a Pretext for War on Iraq
(Video) "9/11's Unsettled Dust": Bush's EPA Hid Health Risks from Toxic Dust at Ground Zero & Thousands Died – From Democracy Now! [September 7, 2021]
News Notes
An extraordinary 10-minute video accompanies this shattering investigation by the New York Times into the drone assassination of an Afghan NGO worker and nine members of his family (mostly children) in the last days of the US occupation: "In U.S. Drone Strike, Evidence Suggests No ISIS Bomb." As happens so often with US precision, surgical strikes via drone, their target turned out to be a civilian. [LInk].
In the wake of the US collapse in Afghanistan, commentary by Noam Chomsky is in high demand. Among this week's interviews are "The US-Led "War on Terror" Has Devastated Much of the World" from Truthout; and two videos: "American Empire After 20 Years in Afghanistan"] from Jacobin Magazine, and "Noam Chomsky weighs in on Afghanistan" from Gulf News. All are interesting, imo.
Finally, the stalwarts at the UK's Extinction Rebellion have just published "Global Newsletter #55 - Power to the People! Rebellion Returns!" Needless to say, it's full of action and plans for more action. Read it here.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil takes place every Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
Most weeks, the Newsletter's "Rewards!" are a change-of-pace, some music or item of interest that is off-topic, diverting, hopefully enjoyable. That doesn't seem right this week. Here instead is Estonian composer Arvo Part's "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten," a short piece that, for me, captures the mourning, loss, tragedy, and waste of 9/11 and the 20 Years War that followed.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
The only way to effectively counter terror is to end war
By September 10, 2021
---- The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following the 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of "counter-terrorism," the United States now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists. … We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the United States helped create. Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars. … We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today. Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree: To counter terror, abolish war. [Read More]
The $8 Trillion Cost of Failure
By Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch [September 8, 2021]
---- They weren't kidding when they called Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires." Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn't pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 years of preparation, a burial never is. In fact, the shock and awe(fulness) in Kabul and Washington over these last weeks shouldn't have been surprising, given our history. … This is a land that's crumbling before our eyes, being (un)built month by month, year by year. Its political system is on the verge of dissolving into who knows what amid a raft of voter suppression laws, wild claims about the most recent presidential election, an assault on the Capitol itself, and conspiracy theories galore. Its political parties seem ever more hostile, disturbed, and disparate. Its economy is a gem of inequality, its infrastructure crumbling, its society seemingly coming apart at the seams. And on a planet that could be turning into a genuine graveyard of empires (and of so much else), keep in mind that, if you're losing your war with climate change, you can't withdraw from it. You can't declare defeat and go home. You're already home in the increasingly dysfunctional, increasingly (un)built US of A. [Read More]
September 11 and the Debacle of 'Nation-Building' in Iraq and Afghanistan
[FB – Walden Bello frames the US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq within the experiences of previous colonial efforts in The Philippines, Japan, and Vietnam.]
---- Like all other imperial powers, the US could not just wreck a society and engage in a purely military occupation of Afghanistan. Like all of them, it had to reconstruct a society, if only to reduce the costs of military occupation and give its venture a patina of legitimacy among both Afghans and Americans. And, like all, it could not help but attempt to reconstruct a society in its own image, even if the result was in reality a disfigured or distorted copy of itself. In the case of the United States, reconstructing Afghanistan and later Iraq in its own image meant trying to create an avatar of American liberal democracy. The term for this process given by American policy makers was "nation-building." However, a more accurate term to describe the American way of politically managing conquered societies is "liberal democratic reconstruction." …The ideology of liberal democratic reconstruction had been merely shelved, not buried. It received a new lease on life in the early 2000s, after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. There were a number of factors that went into the invasions of both countries, including vengeance for 9/11, but both countries were essentially seen as providing Washington opportunities to reshape the global political environment after the Cold War. [Read More]
Also of interest re: Afghanistan – Two informative videos: from Code Pink, "Afghanistan – What Next?" with Sonali Kolhatkar and Phyllis Bennis [Link]; and from Democracy Now! – "Taliban's New Acting Government Filled with Hard-Liners, No Women Is "Disappointing" as Protests Grow," with Danish Afghan journalist Nagieb Khaja [Link]. Also informative is "The Other Afghan Women" bSeptember 6, 2021] – about rural women - [Link].
The Climate Crisis
Imagine If We Had Spent the Last 20 Years Fighting Climate Change Instead of the War on Terror
By Sarah Lazare, In These Times [September 7, 2021]
---- Twenty years into a nebulous "War on Terror," the United States is in the grips of a full-fledged climate crisis. Hurricane Ida, whose severity is a direct result of human-made climate change, flooded cities, cut off power to hundreds of thousands, killed at least 60 people, and left elderly people dying in their homes and in squalid evacuation facilities. This followed a summer of heat waves, wildfires and droughts — all forms of extreme weather that the Global South has borne the brunt of, but are now, undeniably, the new "normal" in the United States. The U.S. government has turned the whole globe into a potential battlefield, chasing some ill-defined danger "out there," when, in reality, the danger is right here — and is partially of the U.S. government's own creation. Plotting out the connections between this open-ended war and the climate crisis is a grim exercise, but an important one. It's critical to examine how the War on Terror not only took up all of the oxygen when we should have been engaged in all-out effort to curb emissions, but also made the climate crisis far worse, by foreclosing on other potential frameworks under which the United States could relate with the rest of the world. Such bitter lessons are not academic: There is still time to stave off the worst climate scenarios, a goal that, if attained, would likely save hundreds of millions of lives, and prevent entire countries from being swallowed into the sea. [Read More]
Also useful/interesting on the climate crisis – "Indigenous Resistance Instrumental in Stopping High-Profile Fossil Fuel Projects, Says Report," bNick Cunningham, DeSmog Blog [September 8, 2021] [Link]; and "A Climate Disaster Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes—And Politicians Still Refuse to Take Action" by Sonali Kolhatkar, Naked Capitalism [September 8, 2021] [Link].
Civil Liberties
Muslim man spent 15 years in prison after post-9/11 crackdown
From Aljazeera [September 11, 2021]
---- For Yassin M Aref, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is a sad reminder of 15 lost years spent in American prisons. Aref, 51, a Kurdish man and former mosque leader at the Masjid As-Salam in Albany, was arrested in 2004 on a conspiracy charge brought by the FBI in a "sting operation". He was accused of aiding "terrorism" based on "secret" evidence. … Aref was deported to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq in 2019 after his release. Aref and his wife, Zuhur, live together while their four children, two boys and two girls, are studying in the US. On July 2 he published his memories in Kurdish. The book is more than 1,000 pages and includes details of his arrest and his life in prison. Son of Mountains is his English version of the memoir that was published in the US in 2008. [Read More]
For more on police surveillance/trickery – "Cameras, Drones and X-Ray Vans: How 9/11 Transformed the N.Y.P.D. Forever," b[Link]; and "9/11 militarized law enforcement and made every American a suspect" by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Responsible Statecraft [September 6, 2021] [Link].
Our History
The 19th Century's 9/11
By Marc Steiner, The Nation [September 10, 2021]
---- Long before the 9/11 of 20 years ago, another episode of violence took place on that day in 1851. That September 11 is long forgotten, despite its being one of the country's most seminal events. Most Americans called it the Christiana Riot. To Quakers and others who opposed slavery, it was known as the Christiana Resistance. In the early 1850s, America was already at war with itself, over slavery and its expansion into new territories. Abolitionists, while representing a political minority, were highly organized, and 100,000 members of the population had become fugitives from slavery. In response, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a federal crime to assist those seeking freedom. The act also ordered the US Marshals to pursue runaway slaves, monetarily incentivizing slave catchers and creating an industry of hunting down Black Americans, whether free or enslaved. The Christiana Resistance represented the first challenge to the Fugitive Slave Act, culminating in a violent confrontation between fugitive slaves and enslavers. [Read More]
