Saturday, May 07, 2011

Yahoo! News Story - The cost of bin Laden: $3 trillion over 15 years - Yahoo! News



The cost of bin Laden: $3 trillion over 15 years - Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_exclusive/20110506/pl_yblog_exclusive/the-cost-of-bin-laden-3-trillion-over-15-year  =======================================================


Every once in a while there is a story that requires suspension of disbelief, and here is one of those. Well not really, may be.

Think what you will about the 9/11, it happened the way the government says it did or it did not. Is Osama bin Laden dead or not, was he even real or not,  whatever the case you and I know that we have gone broke fighting terrorism and that is a fact.

Did 9/11 cause us to spend all this money, and if so was it even necessary?  Here we are ten years after 9/11 still talking about the terrorist and Osama, here are a few random thoughts on the subject first

Freedom may not be free, but being the international bully costs a lot more
On the school grounds or the factory floor, even in Basic Training, ones who perceive themselves stronger and meaner become the bullies.
 A million dollars for the hovel, no decent food, no armed guards, no surveillance system, no traps, no alarms, are you blowing smoke up my ass again?
A drone strike in Yemen, invading sovereign nations, bombing the son of Ghadaffi, siding with oppressors that we like, torturing "suspects" at whim, at what fucking point, "we are not at war with Islam", lose its meaning?
 If Osama Bin Laden could run a world wide terror network without a phone, the internet a fax machine or even a bank account, then at least we need not give an office expense deduction to the corporations, and no personal jets and blonde secretaries.
Should we forget that we trained Osama to fight our war against the Russians, or that we financed his terrorist network to begin with? Have we learnt anything from this experience? We are still supporting the rapists and muderers and the child molesters the world over, so all this fighting the terrorists rings hollow, the point here is that we want to control the world and its resources and that has a cost.

In my 2003 dissertation, A New World Order, 2003, I proposed that we pay fair prices for the commodities and for the labor that we use from the foreigners and supporting murderous regimes, that we have not yet changed so how are we complaining about the terrorism and pretend to eliminate it when we do not eliminate the biggest cause of its existence.

Are we so short sighted or just plain stupid to think that as the Arabs have risen against our patsies from West to the East, the revolt will stay limited to the Arab countries and the workers in Korea and Philippines and Brazil and Argentina and Mexico and elsewhere are to remain blind to their own misery?

Will we call them the terrorists?  We know that Osama was against the Saudi regime, and the Western culture and such, but can we say that if he was not a Muslim or was born in a different culture or religion he would not have risen against injustice? Or the thirst for freedom and a hankering for justice is only a problem for the Muslims?

Did we really need to invade Afghanistan? may be, Iraq? may be? Pakistan ? may be, then what, pretty soon we will have our hands putting out so many fires that we won't be able to cover our own ass.Did Osama think he was going to  make us broke that we will deny health care to the elderly or food and education for our children, was he a Republican you mean?Or was he telling George Bush to cut taxes in the middle of the wars and a security disaster, did he make Bush give medals of freedom to those on whose watch 9/11 happened.

It cost us three trillion dollars because we kept friends with those who brutalized and are still brutalizing their own populations. Mat be terrorism would not have ended if we had changed our  policy of keep our favorite thieves and rapists in power to do our bidding, it would have been worth a try.

It is a sad commentary on  our collective state of mind, and on our leadership that we do not wish to treat other peoples with respect and decency, that we wish to not make friends but scare the world with our military might, that we pay lip service to freedom and human rights and we keep people in cages and assassinate some for the fear that our deeds might be exposed for the world at large to see,


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