The Decennial of 9-11 has come and gone, and the nationalist narrative of victimhood continues to be cynically employed by political elites to justify the incoherent and expanding Global War On Terror, originally a radical neocon enterprise that has been continued and defended and rendered into bipartisan consensus by a thoroughly corrupt Imperial Figurehead, who absurdly but dutifully declares that the past decade of war and war crimes and surveillance and detentions and economic crises have “made America stronger.”

Another way to describe this state of strength is as a state of exception of political leaders from established domestic and international law in pursuit of domestic and international wars of aggression — wars that have already spilled more innocent blood than could ever have been hoped for by the most misanthropic nihilist among the leadership of al-Qaeda.

Still, establishment liberals are given room in the New York Times to lament how “memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned” because of how it was used by “fake heroes” like George Bush et. al. “to cash in on the horror” and “justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.”

Such sentiments are nonetheless attacked even by mouthpieces of the left for politicizing such a somber occasion, as if “9-11 Day” wasn’t thoroughly politicized already.

The war criminals themselves, safe from all but editorial ire, call such sentiments “repugnant” while they tout the value of repugnant acts of torture on “news” networks.

The current administration defends the prior administration’s torture regime from legal accountability, according to its Orwellian “look forward, not backward” position — a position that only applies to political and economic elites, it should go without saying.

Mike Davis, author of the indispensable L.A. history City of Quartz, asks a question that answers itself:

Indeed, from the perspective of the future, which will be deemed the greater crime: to have created the Guantanamo nightmare in the first place, or to have preserved it in contempt of global popular opinion and one’s own campaign promises?

And not only is the torture regime of the prior administration defended, but torture itself, despite the Nobel Peace Laureate’s prohibition, continues to be outsourced to Afghan militias or Somali Black Sites, etc.