"Atleast our boys aren't chopping heads with samurai swords"

Manhattan night out.

I had a night to kill in NY and decided to call on my pal Chuck to crash at his pad. We agreed that we should dine at lovely local place on 2nd Ave called Subway. Delicious. (Alright, just ok). After a few hours pre-gaming the evening, we ended up going to a bar named Fiddlesticks in Greenwich Village. A friend of mine from highschool met us there with two of her friends. After a few more drinks, the friend left, but one of her accompaniment stayed behind with her boyfriend and began a conversation with me that somehow got to 9/11.

Being an outsider to the NY area, I am a little hesitant to expose some of my true feelings about our culpability in that terrorist attack to New Yorkers. They all seem to know of the real story behind everything and never seem willing to offer any unknowns. We will probably never know if 9/11 was a conspiracy involving US participants, but even in the face of my dedicated resistance to anything G.W.B., there is no f'n way that he was involved. I will agree on many names for Bush, but a traitor doesn't seem to fit the bill.

This girl said over and over that the US planned 9/11. I assured her that that was impossible and surely implausible. Sure, the US needed an event to jump start our collective global consciousness and strengthen the presidency, but to assume that this want would be enacted by a vile and murderous gouge to Americans to gain support is really not credible. The cover-up would be too great and the stakes way too high. Bush's fall from grace to noose would be a sky dive. The notion of an American planned 9/11 is rediculous.

We all understand the brutality of war either from daily CNN reports from Iraq, numerous special documenteries from the war-zone or by looking at the casualties report. Lots of people are dying. Abu Ghraib warned us of the terrible repercussions of dehumanizing "enemy combatants". If someone isn’t human, it’s a lot easier to treat that someone in an inhumane manner. This tactic has been tried since the beginning. Some good examples include Greeks-Persians (BC), English-Irish (Cromwell et al), Japanese-Chinese (1937-1945), Germans-Jews (c.1936-1945), Americans-Vietnamese (1965-72) and more recently with Bosnians-Serbs in Bosnia and Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda.

It doesn’t take a history lesson, however, to realize that even against my hopes and (lost?) faith in the American government, we continue to use this technique to get innocent and naive American men and women (sometimes mere boys and girls) to torture and kill those deemed less human than them. We have all heard the derogatory slang given to Arabs and those of Middle-Eastern descent. I can’t imagine the verbal abuse given to inhabitants on an every day basis from our GIs. I want to make this clear: It is not our GIs fault. They have been fed this dehumanizing message from our commanders since before the days we invaded. Preparing for invasion of Iraq, our military elites knew the best insurance for getting our troops to kill enemy troops. It was the time-tested measure of sub-human name-calling. It seems to work every time, despite it being a broken record.

I do not agree with our strategy of treating “terror” suspects as non-soldier combatants in their own lands. There is a precedent for treatment of partisans in previous wars, though in the case of America, I would not look that way for guidance. In truth, the only real strategy that would be a success for the American treatment of detainees in Iraq is either execution or withdrawal. There is no adequate strategy in Iraq (or Afghanistan) to deal with detained “enemy combatants”.

In essence, while we aren’t chopping heads (in reality not such an unpleasant way to die, the displeasing part is to know your head is going to be chopped off!) we are taking part in the cruelties of war. There is no doubt in my mind that there will be further cruelties taking place. At first, the question had to be asked if we were there as liberators or occupiers. As I see it now, it has to be asked if we are there to hold back the tides of civil war and mass genocide.

While I can never agree with liberal zealots who stress conspiracy over conspiracy with our blundering government, I do see how the positioned few can dictate policy to the masses using fear to manipulate on our darkest emotion. Like Spielburg using children to easily influence the audience’s sentiment on the big screen, powermongers use terrorism as a convenient tool to gain popular support in their xenophobic policies.

The night could not have ended more discreetly. The four of us, lumbered into a open and nameless bar near 2nd and 82nd, had a Smithwicks or Newcastle, I can’t remember which, and talked about the old country as if we were Irish shepherd’s returning to our flock.