Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [51]
There has been a lot of talk about what Bush might have done to prevent September 11 in the month before it happened. But no one is talking about an action fourteen years before September 11 that almost certainly would have prevented the tragedy—at a cost of 50 cents more per airline ticket. In 1987, I went to work for a while in Ralph Nader’s office in Washington, D.C. What was one of the projects Nader’s Raiders were working on at that time? They were lobbying the government to make airline travel safer and pushing for all the airlines to install new cockpit doors that would be impenetrable. The airline industry objected loudly and refused to do a thing. Of course, had they listened to Nader then, would the nineteen hijackers have been able to get control of those planes? I can pretty much guarantee the 3,000 who died that September day would be alive today had Nader’s group prevailed fourteen years earlier.
When we are talking about terrorists, we need to accept and admit that most acts of terror are inside jobs and most terrorists are homegrown. We must stop thinking that it is the foreigner, the stranger, who is out to harm us. That is rarely the case. We’ve learned a lot about this in modern times. We now know that when a person is killed, the vast majority of time the victim knows the murderer. Children are molested usually not by the mythical stranger in a trench coat, but rather by a family member, neighbor, or friendly clergy. Arsonists are far too often former firefighters, burglars are many times people who have been in or worked on your home. With all the security set up at New York’s City Hall to protect it from some scary 9/11-style terrorists, it was a city councilman who walked his own killer around the metal detectors with the police’s acquiescence. And when it has come to people hijacking and crashing airplanes, the only two times this happened before September 11, it was insiders—the airlines’ own people—not madmen outsiders. Only airline employees had been responsible for such mass-murder hijacking until 9/11/01. (A disgruntled USAir employee did not have to walk through security and brought a gun on board in December 1987 and crashed a plane in California; and on November 16, 1999, an Egyptian airline employee took over the controls and crashed that plane into the Atlantic Ocean.)
It is crucial to stop thinking of the “terrorists” as masked, anonymous, and foreign. More likely, it’s someone you know. You’re having a drink with him right now.
I’ve always thought it was interesting that the mass murder of September 11 was allegedly committed by a multi-millionaire. We always say it was committed by a “terrorist” or by an “Islamic fundamentalist” or an “Arab,” but we never define Osama by his rightful title: multi-millionaire. Why have we never read a headline saying, “3,000 Killed by Multi-Millionaire”? It would be a correct headline, would it not? No part of it is untrue—Osama bin Laden has assets totaling at least $30 million; he is a multi-millionaire. So why isn’t that the way we see this person, as a rich fuck who kills people? Why didn’t that become the reason for profiling potential terrorists? Instead of rounding up suspicious Arabs, why don’t we say, “Oh my God, a multi-millionaire killed 3,000 people! Round up the multi-millionaires! Throw them all in jail! No charges! No trials! Deport the millionaires!!”
We need protection from our own multi-millionaire, corporate terrorists, the ones who rip off our old-age pensions, destroy the environment, deplete irreplaceable fossil fuels in the name of profit, deny us our right to universal health care, take peoples’ jobs away whenever the mood hits them. What do you call a 19 percent increase in the homeless and the hungry from 2001 to 2002? Are these not acts of terrorism? Do they not cost lives? Is it not all part of a calculated plan to inflict pain on the poor and the working poor, just so that a few rich men can get even richer?
We have our own “terrorists” to deal with, and we need our