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Afghanistan,
"Terrorism" and Blowback: A Chronology
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 September 11, 2001 September 14, 2001 Congress with only one dissenting vote gives the unelected resident of the White House a blank check to "use all necessary and appropriate force against nations, organizations, or persons he (emphasis added) determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons." Barbara Lee, Democrat of Oakland, California, voted "Nay," saying, "However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint.... Let us... think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control." September 24, 2001 Blowback on the Freedom to Know: This is the day when the study of the uncounted Florida ballots was scheduled to be released. [The study had been commissioned by a consortium of newspapers--- New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Palm Beach Post and others---- to the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). The first indication that there would be no release came when NORC eliminated its Florida ballot survey web pages. Most of the media involved, when commenting, attributed the joint decision to a "matter of resources," i.e., the need for personnel to concentrate on reporting the aftermath of the 9-11 disaster. Richard Berke of the New York Times was a bit more disingenuous: AUntil September 11th, the capital was riding a historically partisan period, with leading Democrats still portraying their president as 'appointed' by the Supreme Court. In a move that might have stoked the partisan tensions, but now seems utterly irrelevant, a consortium of news organizations, including The New York Times, had been scheduled this week to release the results of its ambitious undertaking to recount the Florida presidential ballots.... New York Times, September 23, 2001; Paul Lukasiak, Online Journal, October 6, 2001. However, many Americans do NOT consider this suppression to be irrelevant. See The Media Cover-Up of the Gore Victory, http://makethemaccountable.com/coverup/index.html ] September 26, 2001 White House press Secretary Ari Fleischer denounces comments made by Bill Maher on his ABC-TV program "Politically Incorrect." [Maher had disagreed with George W. Bush's calling the 9-11 hijackers "cowards." He said, "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly." Fleischer warns all Americans that they must "watch what they say and watch what they do." Time to dust off that old copy of 1984?] September 30, 2001 Supreme Court Justice Sandra O'Connor in a speech to the NYU School of Law predicts that there will be unprecedented restrictions of democratic rights as a result of the September 11 attacks. "We're likely to experience more restrictions on our personal freedom than has ever been the case in this country. ... [The attacks] will cause us to reexamine some of our laws pertaining to criminal surveillance, wiretapping, immigration and so on." [This open statement of an opinion broke the unwritten rule that Supreme Court justices do not make public comments on issues that are likely to come to the Court. It perhaps gave a signal to the Bush administration that authoritarian measures would be OK. The Court, it must be remembered, has not always been a firm guardian of the Bill of Rights. In the 1925 Gitlow v. New York the court upheld the imprisoning of socialists and anarchists for their political views and in the 1945 Korematsu v. United States, the internment of Japanese-Americans for their ethnicity. O'Connor was one of the five justices who selected the current resident of the White House in the Bush v. Gore decision of December 12, 2000.] |
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© Janette Rainwater 1997-2004 All rights reserved.
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