Understanding 9/11

Here's a bit from a good essay on AlterNet.org about how September 11th is misused by the media and misunderstood by the American people:

What happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was extraordinary and horrible by any measure. And certainly a crime against humanity. At the same time, it was a grisly addition to a history of human experience that has often included many thousands killed, en masse, by inhuman human choice.

It is simply and complexly a factual matter that the U.S. government has participated in outright mass murders directly -- in, for example, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq -- and less directly, through aid to armies terrorizing civilians in Nicaragua, Angola, East Timor and many other countries.

The news media claim to be providing context. But whose? Overall, the context of Uncle Sam in the more perverse and narcissistic aspects of his policy personality. The hypocrisies of claims about moral precepts and universal principles go beyond the mere insistence that some others "do as we say, not as we do." What gets said, repeated and forgotten sets up kaleidoscope patterns that can be adjusted to serve the self-centered mega-institutions reliably fixated on maintaining their own dominance.

- Six Years of 9/11 as a License to Kill