Tag: 9/11

Biden extends 9/11 emergency

US President Joe Biden has renewed the national emergency declared by former president George W. Bush in the days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 for another year.

The “terrorist threat” behind the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people “continues,” Biden wrote in a Thursday memo published in the Federal Register, adding that the “powers and authorities adopted to deal with” the attacks “must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2022.” 

The 9/11 emergency declaration is just one of several Biden has extended this week alone. Also on Thursday, the president prolonged a national emergency he had declared the previous year regarding sectarian violence and human rights abuses in Ethiopia, while on Tuesday he announced the renewal of an emergency declared by his predecessor Donald Trump in 2018 regarding the threat of “foreign interference in or undermining public confidence in” US elections. 

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NYC Mayor Breathes Life into Saudi-9/11 Connection

You could be forgiven for missing it, but in the depths of the dog days of August, with most everyone’s attention on the long Labor Day weekend, New York City Mayor Eric Adams dropped what can be interpreted as tacit acknowledgement that the government of Saudi Arabia — or at least, agents of the government — may have participated in the planning and execution of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

On Thursday, August 30, Adams met at New York City Hall with members of three advocacy groups representing 9/11 survivors and victims’ families. Alarmed by an October stop of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour at the Trump Organization-owned Golf Links at Ferry Point in the Bronx — and convinced by recently declassified information that Saudi Arabian intelligence officials assisted al-Qaeda — the groups asked Adams to block the tournament. 

Adams, who was a NYPD lieutenant in 2001 and worked a security detail at the World Trade Center wreckage that night, said he legally could not do anything. The Trump golf course is Trump’s; Trump can welcome anyone there he likes. 

But then, instead of dismissing the 9/11 families’ specific concerns, Adams platformed them.

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First Came 9/11, Then COVID-19, What’s The Next Crisis To Lockdown The Nation?

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

– H.L. Mencken

First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.

In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.

It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.

Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what the nature of the next national emergency might be (terrorism, civil unrest, economic collapse, a health scare, or the environment) as long as it allows the government to lockdown the nation and justify all manner of tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

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