Was There a “War on Terror” or a War on the American People?

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In response to 9/11, Republican Attorney General John Ashcroft told an obedient Congress on a Wednesday to have a sweeping expansion of executive power and dramatic curtailment of American’s civil rights ready in bill form by the end of the week. As Matt Taibbi reminds us,

“Congress quickly delivered with ‘roving’ wiretaps, warrantless searches, ‘trap and trace’ searches, law enforcement and intelligence access to grand jury information, use of FISA monitoring for non-foreign situations, reduction or elimination of predicate requirements for FBI investigations, and elimination of judicial review for most of these activities, among many other things in the USA PATRIOT Act. It all passed on October 26th.” See this.

These measures had nothing whatsoever to do with fighting Muslim terror. To the contrary, these measures gave the government the power to terrorize Americans. 

Try to name Muslim terror attacks on America other than, if you believe the official narrative, 9/11. You can’t, because there aren’t any. 

Terror attacks on America were so non-existent that the FBI had to search for confused people and groups, convince them, enhanced with monetary bribes, to adopt a FBI prepared terror attack, and then arrest them before the attack could be attempted.  The FBI always explained that “the public was never in danger” as control of the operation was in FBI’s hands.

But the public is very much in danger from the police state measures that Taibbi lists. “Muslim terror” was so conspicuous by its absence that Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano announced that Homeland Security was being refocused on domestic American “extremists,” which has come to mean Trump supporters against whom the US government is deploying the police state measures.

The first part of the “war on terror” was against Americans’ civil liberties.

The second part of the war was on Israel’s opponents in the Middle East. 

In the case of Iraq and Libya entire countries were destroyed, millions killed and maimed, and displaced to Europe and the US with the strange result of importing Muslims who were said to be terrorists into the Homeland.

Ask yourself how Americans managed to fall for the propaganda that the US was under widespread attack from Muslims.

The “Muslim threat” was played to such an extent that the Attorney General said, “we need every tool available to us,” by which he meant getting rid of the US Constitution. The foundation of the American police state was established on the basis of only one attack, 9/11, falsely attributed to Muslims.

If the Muslims were really capable of outwitting the entirety of the US national security apparatus, why did they stop with the WTC? With such glorious success, why did they not continue? 

Why instead did the FBI have to create fake terror events in order to keep the public believing we were under attack?

Notice how we are always “under attack.” If it is not Muslims, it is Covid, or Donald Trump.

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.


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Articles by: Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

About the author:

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous university appointments. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Dr. Roberts can be reached at http://paulcraigroberts.org

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