The ‘Costs of War’ project

The ‘Costs of War’ project, which involved more than 20 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists, provides new estimates of the total war cost as well as other direct and indirect human and economic costs of the U.S. military response to the 9/11 attacks. The project is the first comprehensive analysis of all U.S., coalition, and civilian casualties, including U.S. contractors. It also assesses many of the wars’ hidden costs, such as interest on war-related debt and veterans’ benefits.

Estimates by the ‘Costs of War’ project provide a comprehensive analysis of the total human, economic, social, and political cost of the U.S. War on Terror. Among the group’s main findings:

1. The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan will cost between $3.2 and $4 trillion, including medical care and disability for current and future war veterans. This figure does not include substantial probable future interest on war-related debt.
2. More than 31,000 people in uniform and military contractors have died, including the Iraqi and Afghan security forces and other military forces allied with the United States.
3. By a very conservative estimate, 137,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by all parties to these conflicts.
4. The wars have created more than 7.8 million refugees among Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis.
5. Pentagon bills account for half of the budgetary costs incurred and are a fraction of the full economic cost of the wars.
6. Because the war has been financed almost entirely by borrowing, $185 billion in interest has already been paid on war spending, and another $1 trillion could accrue in interest alone through 2020.
7. Federal obligations to care for past and future veterans of these wars will likely total between $600-$950 billion. This number is not included in most analyses of the costs of war and will not peak until mid-century. …more

Protest like nobody’s watching
Posted by Guest – Fri, Sep 9, 2011

War is SO over
by Sharon Miller, CODEPINK San Francisco intern

One of the things that I’ve been thinking, as we near the 10th anniversary of 9/11, is that it wasn’t long after the attacks that many Americans embraced the security state, perhaps under the impression that constant surveillance was the only thing standing between the United States and the terrorists. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, advertisements like this one began showing up on public transit. We have been encouraged, by the government and by the media, to police each other according to our own definitions of “normal” and “suspicious.”

One effect of the level of community surveillance that became commonplace after 9/11 is a culture in which we police ourselves to avoid arousing suspicion. Self-policing affects how much of ourselves and our thoughts we choose to reveal to others. For several years, I worried that being too vocal about my opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would get the attention of those who would brand me as suspicious and place me under surveillance. Some would respond that if I had nothing to hide, the constant threat of surveillance shouldn’t bother me. However, there have been reports of unsuspecting civilians being caught in the security/surveillance dragnet, who actually had “nothing to hide”—that is, nothing that could reasonably be interpreted as a threat to public safety.

For example, I recently found this chilling report about Minnesota’s Mall of America from NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting. The biggest mall in the country has established its own counterterrorism program, which gives a sinister, dystopian meaning to the term “mall security.” Journalists obtained 1,000 pages of “suspicious activity reports” on various shoppers stopped and questioned by security guards at the Mall of America dating back to 2005. Guards at the Mall of America interrogate an average of 1,200 people annually, ostensibly based on suspicions that they may be plotting terrorist attacks there. If a mall’s security force is included in the Orwellian-sounding Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, it begs the question: who else is watching us, and where?

At the same time, I just can’t remain silent. I refuse to let my fear be used to justify war after endless war. On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I refuse to give in to my fear of being “discovered.” I will be joining CODEPINK and other activists and members of the community in a public local action for peace and justice. What will you do? …source

Let’s Cancel 9/11
Bury the War State’s Blank Check at Sea
By Tom Engelhardt – September 8, 2011. – Tom Dispatch

Let’s bag it.

I’m talking about the tenth anniversary ceremonies for 9/11, and everything that goes with them: the solemn reading of the names of the dead, the tolling of bells, the honoring of first responders, the gathering of presidents, the dedication of the new memorial, the moments of silence. The works.

Let’s just can it all. Shut down Ground Zero. Lock out the tourists. Close “Reflecting Absence,” the memorial built in the “footprints” of the former towers with its grove of trees, giant pools, and multiple waterfalls before it can be unveiled this Sunday. Discontinue work on the underground National September 11 Museum due to open in 2012. Tear down the Freedom Tower (redubbed 1 World Trade Center after our “freedom” wars went awry), 102 stories of “the most expensive skyscraper ever constructed in the United States.” (Estimated price tag: $3.3 billion.) Eliminate that still-being-constructed, hubris-filled 1,776 feet of building, planned in the heyday of George W. Bush and soaring into the Manhattan sky like a nyaah-nyaah invitation to future terrorists. Dismantle the other three office towers being built there as part of an $11 billion government-sponsored construction program. Let’s get rid of it all. If we had wanted a memorial to 9/11, it would have been more appropriate to leave one of the giant shards of broken tower there untouched.

Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven’t we had enough of ourselves? If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn’t it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness? No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror. No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money. No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific acts. And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious remembrance. This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 — who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used — as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we’ve visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands.

Isn’t it finally time to go cold turkey? To let go of the dead? Why keep repeating our 9/11 mantra as if it were some kind of old-time religion, when we’ve proven that we, as a nation, can’t handle it — and worse yet, that we don’t deserve it?

We would have been better off consigning our memories of 9/11 to oblivion, forgetting it all if only we could. We can’t, of course. But we could stop the anniversary remembrances. We could stop invoking 9/11 in every imaginable way so many years later. We could stop using it to make ourselves feel like a far better country than we are. We could, in short, leave the dead in peace and take a good, hard look at ourselves, the living, in the nearest mirror.

Ceremonies of Hubris

Within 24 hours of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the first newspaper had already labeled the site in New York as “Ground Zero.” If anyone needed a sign that we were about to run off the rails, as a misassessment of what had actually occurred that should have been enough. Previously, the phrase “ground zero” had only one meaning: it was the spot where a nuclear explosion had occurred.

The facts of 9/11 are, in this sense, simple enough. It was not a nuclear attack. It was not apocalyptic. The cloud of smoke where the towers stood was no mushroom cloud. It was not potentially civilization ending. It did not endanger the existence of our country — or even of New York City. Spectacular as it looked and staggering as the casualty figures were, the operation was hardly more technologically advanced than the failed attack on a single tower of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Islamists using a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives.

A second irreality went with the first. Almost immediately, key Republicans like Senator John McCain, followed by George W. Bush, top figures in his administration, and soon after, in a drumbeat of agreement, the mainstream media declared that we were “at war.” This was, Bush would say only three days after the attacks, “the first war of the twenty-first century.” Only problem: it wasn’t. Despite the screaming headlines, Ground Zero wasn’t Pearl Harbor. Al-Qaeda wasn’t Japan, nor was it Nazi Germany. It wasn’t the Soviet Union. It had no army, nor finances to speak of, and possessed no state (though it had the minimalist protection of a hapless government in Afghanistan, one of the most backward, poverty-stricken lands on the planet).

And yet — another sign of where we were heading — anyone who suggested that this wasn’t war, that it was a criminal act and some sort of international police action was in order, was simply laughed (or derided or insulted) out of the American room. And so the empire prepared to strike back (just as Osama bin Laden hoped it would) in an apocalyptic, planet-wide “war” for domination that masqueraded as a war for survival.
[Read more →]