Written by Don Washington   

The truth about 9/11 is that we will never know what actually happened because not only did we not secure and record the sites we removed the evidence without doing a forensic analysis of it. We will never know what happened because of the alarming paucity of electronic evidence. We are missing everything from black box flight recorders to FAA tapes and video footage of crash sites not at Ground Zero. What we don't know will always outweigh what we do know.

It's all speculation and more's the pity because such a thing creates an evil atmosphere of fear and distrust between a terrified populace and a government that needs to appear to be in control when it obviously isn’t. If it were then 9/11 would not have happened. That it happened demonstrates that on that day either the government wasn’t in control or was in total control. Either way the distrust that such uncertainty breeds is palpable.

After 9/11 the basic social contract between the government and the governed became different. That’s all I am sure of, that as the government’s coercive powers grew the trust between it and the people decreased in direct proportion to its strength. Maybe that’s because the people in charge of the government hated it so much they only knew how to destroy with it? You remember, the wars, the occupations the attacks on civil liberties the fumblingly inept governmental agencies and the fact that they lied about everything that followed from the attack to how safe it was to go back to work and work at the site to weapons of mass destruction. What I know is that 9/11 killed what trust that existed between thinking Americans and their government and the Obama Administration has done precious little to win that trust back.

I have been reading, hearing and seeing a lot about the ten year memorials of 9/11. Everyone has a reflection, a story and of course oracular poetry and prose to give such a horrible day some sense of meaning. I didn’t really want to write anything about 9/11. I wrote something a long time ago about how after 9/11 cab drivers who used to race past me started to pick me up and ask me, a black man, how to deal with not being trusted and being attacked at random and being afraid for their wives and children whom they could not be with all the time. How did I, as someone who as a black, and must know about random violence, being distrusted and hated for simply existing, copes with it all. It was a moving piece and just the right scale for what was happening then. A single event, a terrible tragedy I had a scale for what was happening then. I have no scale for what is happening now... no one does... it’s beyond Biblical.

In 2001, a decade ago I had a frame to understand 9/11 but that was before the PATRIOT ACT and Afghanistan. It was before Iraq and the creation of a surveillance state that would have made the old Soviet Union envious. That was before privatized mercenaries, over $60 billion dollars in missing money lost by war profiteers, private intelligence agencies that the CIA and DIA report to came into existence. That was before the creation and proliferation of secret prisons and official torture. That was before spying on private citizens and the hollowing out of the state. That was before soldiers served eight or nine tours and continue to come back broken, despondent, angry, transformed and/or jittery because their contact with the reality of 9/11 demonstrates how little any of us understand what 9/11 actually means. That was before what is turning out to be a lot more than a nightmare. You can wake up from that.

That was before enemy combatants and the new broader definition of terrorism that is so wide that literally vegan protestors are on the domestic terrorist watch list. That was before the Constitution was set on fire and virtual cavity searches at the airport. That was before government secrecy became so pervasive that you cannot know if what you do makes you a terrorist and everything you write or say electronically is recorded and stored... often by private companies. That was before an uncountable number of human beings who were never terrorists were murdered in my name and yours. What’s happening now is beyond any scale. There is nothing big enough to encompass the disasters that have been heaped upon the ordinary citizens of the world by the wealthy and powerful; that are making unimaginable profits off the very real blood and actual bones of those ordinary people and the deaths of their public sectors. Yes, when Iraq and Afghanistan got and continue to be blown to hell it’s our tax dollars and private developers fixing them or more likely building them shoddily and defrauding both us and the people of those benighted countries.

This is happening all over the world; in our names and under the cover of a war on terror made possible by whatever happened on 9/11. So when I try to reflect on something too large for anyone human to completely comprehend I find I can’t. What I know is that the simple fact that we’re not all feeling something similar tells us that we do not concur on what happened on 9/11 or what it means. It clearly wasn’t another Pearl Harbor, like the people who are presently growing richer and fatter from the resulting and on-going slaughters wanted us to believe. It’s not an example of how far those rich, fat, evil prick-rat-bastards are because if it were people would be in the streets dragging them into the sunlight to drive stakes through their hearts. I don’t know what 9/11 means. What I do know is that it will be a long, long time before Americans trust their government ever again. I also know that everything that has flowed from 9/11 has been a complete rejection of the values this country used to at least try to live up to and that we, as ordinary citizens have to fight to make real every day in the face of real evil.

Don Washington is an AP-Award winning writer, political expediter and problem-solver, proprietor of the agitational, informational, interactive website and show the Mayoraltutorial.com. You can follow him as drobsidian on Twitter and he is the keeper of two large and mischievous cats.