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It's what you consider to be terrorism!

As yet another anniversary of 9/11 approaches, a timely, and sobering, piece on CommonDreams reflecting on what terror really is, and who the perpetrators are.   The author cites 5 areas which might be regarded as terrorism - and perhaps not ones you might have thought of.

"Every clear-thinking American knows that education and jobs are needed more than armed guards in poor neighbourhoods. But average Americans are led to believe in a terrorist threat that may or may not exist, and that in any case is greatly exaggerated, while the corporate/military/political complex creates new forms of terror to safeguard the assets of the rich.

1. War Terror

It started with our leaders comparing notes on Iraq:

Cheney 08/26/02: There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

Cheney 09/14/03: We never had evidence that he had acquired a nuclear weapon.

Powell 02/05/03: Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agents.

Powell 09/13/04: I think it's unlikely that we will find any stockpiles.

Bush 05/29/03: We found the weapons of mass destruction.

Bush 10/08/04: I wasn't happy when we found out there wasn't weapons.

In the first Iraqi war, two air missions per minute were conducted over 43 days, with the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs dropped on a largely defenseless country. Much of the slaughter was caused by "dumb bombs" that fell on civilian areas. U.S. troops attacked retreating Iraqi soldiers with cluster bombs and napalm as American pilots, adopting metaphors such as 'turkey shoot' and 'fish in a barrel,' conducted target practice from above. Some Iraqis were buried alive by bulldozers that spread tons of sand over them.

In the end, at least 190,000 Iraqi lives were destroyed in a war that cost over $2.2 trillion. A Johns Hopkins study puts the tally much higher, with an estimate of 650,000 Iraqi deaths."

Continue reading here.

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