60 Words And A War Without End: The Untold Story Of The Most Dangerous Sentence In U.S. History

[xchrom]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-without-end-the-untold-story-of-the-most



Sunrise was still nearly an hour off when Nazih al-Ruqai climbed into his black Hyundai SUV outside a mosque in northern Tripoli and turned the key. The lanky 49-year-old had left the house barely 30 minutes earlier for a quick trip to the mosque on a Saturday. It was Oct. 5, 2013, and after more than two decades in exile, he had settled into a predictable existence of prayer and worship.

The homecoming hadn’t always been so smooth. Ruqai, who is better known in the jihadi world as Abu Anas al-Libi, was still feeling the effects of the hepatitis C he had contracted years earlier during a stint in an underground prison in Iran. Following overtures from Muammar al-Qaddafi’s government, his wife and children had returned to Libya in 2010. But Libi stayed away, wary of the man he had once plotted to kill. Only when the Libyan uprisings started in early 2011 did he follow his family back to Libya. But by then it was already too late. His oldest son, Abd al-Rahman, the only one of his five children who had been born in Libya, was dead, shot while fighting for the capital.

After that, things moved in fits and starts. Qaddafi was killed weeks later in October 2011, and Libi eventually settled in Nufalayn, a leafy middle-class neighborhood in northeast Tripoli, alongside several members of his extended family. Life after Qaddafi was chaotic and messy — nothing really worked as the new government struggled to reboot after 42 years of dictatorship, often finding itself at the mercy of the heavily armed militias and tribes that had contributed to Qaddafi’s downfall.

Libi knew he was a wanted man. He had been on the FBI’s most wanted list for more than a decade, following an indictment in 2000 for his alleged role in al-Qaeda’s attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania two years earlier. Along with Libi the indictment named 20 other individuals, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, as defendants.

[RC]

1. And what of the sovereignty and sanctity of other countries?

What of International Law? What gives us the right over any other country to conduct our own brand of terrorism against other nations, organizations or persons, because we say so?

The words in the graphic, are a fancy way of authorizing the President to use terrorism against any nation, organizations or persons, with impunity, on his say-so that they they had something to do with 9/11. An attack that was known to be in the works and coming, at the time it happened. Those words have since been proven to be wrong on so many levels.

Why did we decide to go it alone? Why did we reject the help of other nations for a common sense solution of a police action? Instead we attacked a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, had no terrorists and turned it into a terrorist's paradise? The causalities are still piling up over 12 years later. For what? To create more terrorists, to fuel our fight against terrorism?