America’s culpability in 9/11: military industrial complex

By Frosty Wooldridge

This reality pains me more than anyone can understand. I am the son of a career U.S. Marine.  My grandfather served and earned a Purple Heart in WWI.  My father served in WWII and Korea, and died in service. My brother served in the U.S. Army in Desert Storm. I served as a U.S. Army officer during Vietnam.

War is hell and it scrambles men’s and women’s minds.  From the Vietnam War alone, over 200,000 once healthy men committed suicide after coming back from Nam in 1975.  Hundreds of thousands more suffered broken marriages and descended into drugs and alcohol.  The expectations for suicides from Iraq and Afghanistan run into the 150,000 range.  Those suicides can be based on the lunacy of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon and now, George Bush and Barack Obama.

For the record, I personally know Peter Gadiel the father of a young boy who died in one of the twin towers on 9/11.  His pain continues today because he has battled the U.S. government to stop illegal immigration and secure our borders for 10 year, but they have not.  The incompetence or the “on purpose” path of supporting illegal immigration as well as relentless legal immigration shows a grand design to destroy the sovereignty  and culture of our country by some very powerful elites at the top of the power structure.

My heart goes out to every American and non-American that suffered in the 9/11 massacre.  This past 9/11 Sunday, America mourned.  I mourned.

I love America with every cell in my body. At the same time, I urge a reality check to Americans as to the open door for 9/11.  Nothing in this universe or in this world happens without a cause.  We live in a cause and effect world.  Something or some act causes a corresponding reaction.  

A bit of history from the United States of America

When the European settlers came to this country, they slaughtered the Native Americans with superior, mechanized violence. It proved deplorable yet humanity tends toward self-aggrandizement.  Conquering human tribes always write history in their own best interest.  They (our forefathers) grouped the Indians into detention camps called “reservations.”  Our forefathers took away their freedoms, cultures, customs, languages, religions and ways of life.  We introduced them booze and small pox.  We broke treaty after treaty with the Indians. We massacred men, women and children. Read Trail of Tears, Sand Creek Massacre and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee if you want to appreciate a really in-depth understanding of white men’s violence toward Native Americans. 

They have not recovered.  They live on welfare, on reservations, drink endless booze, live on hopelessness and suffer domestic violence as they attempt and fail to adjust to the white man’s world.  We also turned their pristine continent into a chemical, carbon, paved, polluted and littered trash pit.  Look them in the eyes and one can feel their emptiness.  How can we look in the mirror ourselves and feel nothing?

During Harry Truman’s administration, his advisors cooked up the idea that we should halt communism by fighting in Korea. We jumped in to thousands while suffering 33,000 deaths ourselves—in a conflict that we had no business entering over 10,000 miles away from our shores.   The Korean War killed countless tens of thousands of people and did absolutely nothing to move the world toward peace. North and South Korea today stand as ardent enemies with no solution.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower finished his two terms as president, he warned about the Military Industrial Complex. Quite simply, that is a group of men and organizations that feed on wars, and as we have seen, they create and engineer wars.  We American citizen did not heed Ike’s words.

Thus, the U.S. Military Industrial Complex created the Vietnam War.  It did not create it to make America safer; those elites created it to make more money and wield their power.  We waged it for 10 years because that’s how long those engineers could manipulate us.  It would still be going if not for the “reaction” of the college students screaming, “Hell no, we won’t go!” 

The architect of  Vietnam, Robert McNamara, before he died at 92 a year ago, wrote Fog of War.   He admitted that, “Vietnam was a mistake.”  His mistake killed over 2.1 million Vietnamese and poisoned their country with Agent Orange.  It still causes ecological mayhem and birth defects throughout Vietnam in 2011.  Since we don’t see or feel the consequences, we feel immune to our causing them. 

The Gulf of Tonkin fraud provided the pretense for the Vietnam War.  But that’s all it took for Johnson to start bombing and sending 53,267 men to their violent deaths with another 350,000 amputated or maimed emotionally.  The “Silent Majority” felt no culpability for the deaths of 2.1 million Vietnamese any more than it felt culpability for the massacres of Native Americans.  When might we understand that we are not the final “father figure” of the planet?

Then, in the early 1990s, we stuck our noses into Kuwait and Iraq. We killed a few thousand people with our firepower.  We lost just short of 400 kids.  At that time, Osama bin Laden warned us to leave Muslim lands.  Several other imams demanded that we leave Muslim lands or face jihad.   We didn’t believe them because we felt immune to the law of cause and effect.

In 1993, Muslims tried to bomb the World Trade Towers at the basement level.  They failed while bin Laden again warned us to leave Muslim lands.  We still didn’t listen in 1993.   We do not listen in 2011 at what costs to our young men and women?  Answer: 4,200 American soldier (kids) deaths and 42,000 maimed. 

On September 11, 2001, not Afghanistan and not Iraq, but 17 of the 19 men from Saudi Arabia hijacked our airplanes and flew them into the towers, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania cornfield.  Some very cogent proof shows that 9/11 was an inside job and that someone in high places concocted the entire terrorist act to get us into another war.  Building #7 collapsed because it was rigged with explosives. 

From there we have bombed and killed tens of thousands of “insurgents” in that goat herder country of Afghanistan that lacks a single fighter jet or helicopter.  Isn’t it amazing how the finest army in the world can’t conquer a bunch of illiterate goat herders and poppy seed growers?

Then, as usual, the Military Industrial Complex boiled up “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which allowed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to start bombing a country that did not have any weapons of mass destruction.  They used and made a fool out of General Colin Powell.  Subsequently, Bush/Cheney killed hundreds of thousands as they created 2.5 million refugees and contaminated Iraq’s soil and water with depleted uranium “shock and awe” bombs.   I charge George W. Bush and coward Dick “five draft deferments from Vietnam” Cheney with crimes against humanity.  Their total arrogance in the face of Muslim leaders’ warnings borders on Hitler’s megalomania.

In the meantime, Bush and Cheney stroll around their mansions with endless money while our precious, though naïve volunteer soldier/kids walk around with plastic arms, legs and other body parts.  Not only that, 100,000 combat soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan will commit suicide in the coming years as well as suffer horrible broken families and orphaned children.  Of special note, one young man this past week earned the Medal of Honor while millions more earned a PTSD diagnosis. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is another term for having your brains scrambled for life.)

We mourn that dreadful moment on 9/11, yet our own government’s actions and the Military Industrial Complex caused 9/11.   Today, we harbor over 572,000 military personnel on over 700 bases in over 100 countries around the world.  In effect, we foist our standing army into every corner of the Earth. We push our empire onto everybody else’s country without merit and without reason.

The results:  as a nation, we’re broke, in-debt and spiritually vacuous.  We suffer 14 million unemployed while spending $12 billion monthly for two wars of 10 years.  Our schools turn out illiterate kids and our country suffers from insidious malaise such as “flash mobs.” 

Our Congress features a 12 percent approval rating and our president suffers from a 46 percent approval rating, worst in the modern era.  He has failed on every pledge to get Americans back to work and bring peace to our country.  Obama’s Nobel Peace prize is a contradiction as he added to and lengthened the war in Afghanistan.  His floundering represents our floundering.  What could that $12 billion monthly war bill do for our citizens within our country?  Plenty!  We have spent over $1 trillion blowing up two ancient countries.

As you now appreciate, 9/11 didn’t occur out of the ether.  By our apathy and refusal to listen to Muslim demands to leave their countries, our government and the Military Industrial Complex caused 9/11.  We’re accountable because we supported Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and Iraq with our silence and apathy.  

Taking responsibility powers change for a more positive outcome.  Doing nothing as we citizens have done for 50 years—allows the Military Industrial Complex to continue without pause.

How do we stop our Congress, presidents and the Military Industrial Complex from creating and starting more wars?

1.     We need term limits to stop the good old boy network that allows men like Mark Udall, Orrin Hatch, John McCain and Charles Schumer to languish in office for decades, accomplishing little as politicians. 

2.     Invite fresh minds and statesmen (women) to move our country forward.

3.     We must elect presidents that honor the Constitution instead of emotions, hunches or other indolent manners of leadership that start wars.

4.     We citizens must cease supporting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with our apathetic complicity.

5.     We must abandon our ethnocentric arrogance for a 21^st century integrity that understands that all humans matter in their own countries—versus our long standing superior view of America’s power.

May this be America’s time to move toward authentic power with equitable, moral and spiritual actions—understanding that we are part of the human family.  To maintain our current imperialism will invite another 9/11.

##