I remember shaking my head in frustration when, back in 2001, President George Bush the Lesser asked the title question above and then answered it himself, disingenuously promoting the ridiculous  idea that the alleged perpetrators of 9/11 were jealous of our freedoms and therefore wanted to destroy us. The question was appropriate. Bush’s answer was absurd.
I recall deciding that the shadowy figures that did Dubya’s thinking for him at the time were dictating to him what he was to say in public. Certainly Bush wasn’t in charge of his administration’s policy-making. The group in charge was most likely Dick Cheney and his neo-con/PNAC pals that included Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
Cunning pathological liars that the members of that group soon proved themselves to be, I was certain that they were trying to distract the public’s attention from the 9/11 Keystone Kops false flag operation that made scores of mistakes that should have resulted in Cheney et al. being subpoenaed and charged with treason and mass murder and the promise of long jail time for the guilty parties.
Bush’s little Q&A that day was followed by a steady stream of White House-generated disinformation (dutifully regurgitated by the fawning mainstream media and believed as truth by gullible media consumers) that successfully over-shadowed the realities that should have been obvious to every clear-headed observer: that jet planes, brief fireballs, and the transient, rapidly self-extinguishing office fires that followed had nothing whatever to do with the multiple explosions in all three towers, the cutter charges that severed the massive steel beams into easily transportable chunks, the pulverization of the two towers into fine pyroclastic dust, or the collapses, at free-fall speed, of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11/01.
The documented finding of military-grade nanothermite all over the Manhattan dust should have clinched the argument that Osama bin Laden did not have anything to do with the controlled demolitions that brought down the towers. That part of the events of 9/11 had to involve insiders.
Applying Cheney’s own 1% Rule on acting on intelligence (there is probably a 50/50 chance of his guilt), he should have been subpoenaed under oath before you could say “mission accomplished”!
Regarding the above comments, it is essential to note that it is a scientific impossibility for planes and/or fires to bring down modern steel-reinforced skyscrapers. The only thing that can demolish modern over-engineered, fire-proofed buildings (that are made of non-flammable steel, non-flammable concrete, and non-flammable glass) is controlled demolition using pre-planted high-tech explosives that can sever steel beams.
Bringing down skyscrapers takes weeks or months of planning, ready access to the doomed buildings, careful planting of the explosive charges, and sequencing, by computer, of the explosive charges. World-class experience is essential to reliably bring down tall buildings into their own footprints. Only a handful of such experienced demolition companies exist in the world today. None of them were subpoenaed to appear before the stacked 9/11 Commission.
Knowing that there was something fishy going on and not trusting the nefarious, pro-war, oil-greedy characters that had just stolen the 2000 election (with the help of the five conservatives on the Supreme Court), I knew there was another explanation for 9/11. Dubya had once famously mangled the old truism, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” That group had already tried to fool me more times than I could count. So, accepting the veracity of that saying, I immediately and forever after disbelieved everything that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld ever said again.

Drone warfare has
escalated since Obama
succeeded Bush as the
“Current Occupant”

Yesterday and the days preceding that were days just like so many others in the several U.S.-invaded and illegally occupied foreign nations where we have American troops, CIA agents, contractors, and mercenary soldiers. Drones are being deployed in sovereign nations where the U.S. has no ethical right to be. These death-dealing drones are committing extrajudicial assassinations in the name of us American citizens, and we may wind up being the eventual targets of retaliation, even though we had nothing to do with unleashing those airborne dogs of war.
The appropriately named—and very grim—“Reaper” drones that fire “Hellcat” missiles have terrorized, maimed, and killed many innocent and unarmed civilians, including women and children, who live in remote villages in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. You can be certain that those acts of criminality will not be forgotten anytime soon.

Other than U.S.
assassination squads,
why do they hate us?
Let us count the ways

The rest of the non-“Christian” world is nervously expecting the fickle finger of fate to point at them next. Drone-making corporations are trying to expand their lucrative markets domestically, so, as Pogo might have said, the next enemy targeted might be us. All of these potential victims are justifiably fearful that they may be the next luckless target of some post-adolescent X-Box gamer who knows how to work a joystick. There is an inexhaustible supply of young armchair warriors used to killing by remote control, firing missiles at computer screen targets—guiltlessly obeying orders to kill that come down the chain of command.
As far as I know, the commandant of Auschwitz, SS Lt. Col. Rudolf Hoess, never personally killed anyone at Auschwitz. Just like Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, and Eichmann, Hoess never experienced the psychologically and spiritually devastating reality of having literal blood from a dying human smear all over his hands. The Nazi leaders did, however, have figurative blood all the way up to their armpits because they ordered grunt soldiers to do their dirty work for them. The joystick drone boys and their commanding officers are not guiltless.
Thomas Merton, in his powerful prose poem “Chant to be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces,” has Rudolf Hoess point his fingers at his accusers as he was about to be hung on the gallows overlooking Auschwitz:
“Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”



The message on the
Statue of Liberty has
been rendered obsolete

America was once regarded as the land of the free and the home of the brave. No longer. The most racist, militaristic, and xenophobic of America’s current crop of leaders have transformed our nation into the number-one manufacturer, seller, and possessor of the most lethal collection of weapons in the history of the world. The American military spends more money on inedible weapons of mass destruction than the rest of world’s industrialized nations combined, even though it represents only five percent of the world’s population. We are understandably one of the most feared and hated nations in the entire universe.
These mis-leaders have made a mockery of the once-proud Statue of Liberty, the symbol of hope for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse, the homeless, and tempest-tossed. To many observers around the world, America has degenerated into the paranoid scourge of mankind. Our once-proud nation has been taken over by the greedy One Percent, the corporate exploiters, the ruling elite, Wall Street’s fancy financiers, the militarists, and the corrupt crony capitalists. America is not being hated for its freedoms, but for the way it has turned against freedom, shredding its own constitution in the process.
Most of America’s current pro-war leaders have figurative blood on their hands. Many of them meet the definition of a chickenhawk, which is a pro-war, hawkish individual who enjoys wars and loves to start wars as long as he doesn’t have to fight in one.
Most of those foreign victims are yellow, brown, or black-skinned folks of non-Christian faiths, and they are being fingered as suspected enemies deserving of death without a jury trial. Oftentimes their only “offense” is that they happen to be living on top of oil, precious metals, minerals, water, or other valuable resources that greedy transnational exploiters covet and therefore need to acquire by hook or by crook. There is plenty to fear and loathe in that group.
Imperialist nations that murder innocent women and children in poor villages overseas deserve their assigned title of “Great Satan” or “Evil Empire.” One should expect that the American Empire will be treated as one of the evil ones.

Viewing the Stars
and Stripes but
seeing Swastika

When oppressed, exploited, and therefore angry foreigners view the Stars and Stripes fluttering over U.S. embassies or the hundreds of U.S. military bases scattered everywhere around the globe (built on land taken against the will of the people who had previously owned the property), who can blame them if they see Swastika?
Certainly the tortured prisoners at Guantanamo (most of them are innocent and have never even been charged with a crime), who have been cleared for release from their hell-hole but are still incarcerated, see Swastika instead of the U.S. flag flying over the Cuban concentration camp. Unjust imprisonment, punishment, and torture are powerful ways to generate undying hatred for the abusers who are keeping the captives from their freedom.
What the brutal, obedient soldiers of the hated Nazis did to the Poles, the Norwegians, the Belgians, the French, the Czechs, the Austrians, the Russians, the Jews, and the anti-fascist resisters all over Europe felt no different to the victims than what the brutal, obedient soldiers from “democratic” nations like America have been similarly doing all over the world. The fascist and racist “Lebensraum” policy of Germany was not much different from America’s policy of “manifest destiny,” which resulted in the genocide that targeted every native American tribe.

What part of “Yankee
Go Home” can’t
we comprehend?

And the pleas of “Yankee Go Home” from the terrorized civilian victims of our endless global wars have fallen on deaf ears. Those in positions of power refuse to listen to the wisdom in the pleas to “Support the troops by bringing them home out of harm’s way.” There must be too much money to be made in the insane “blow it up/build it up” mentality of the ruling classes, who have invested heavily in the weapons and construction industries.

Since 9/11/01 the Pentagon has been spending around two billion dollars per day on its war-preparation and war-making activities (2 billion times 365 = $730 billion per year, which is actually a little less than the actual annual Pentagon and war-making budget). Some say most of it is going down the Pentagon toilet. More tens of billions are spent on the Department of Energy, which deals with the military’s nuclear weapons.
We shouldn’t have to wonder why most of the rest of the world hates and wants to kill off all empires and colonizers, and we can’t expect that our particular brand of empire and colonization would be treated any differently.
Brutality and injustice breeds hatred for the perpetrators and a powerful desire for justice for the abused and retribution against the oppressor.  
What should worry most of us is that the guilty ones who got us into this mess may not be the ones who pay for their crimes against humanity. We innocents may wind up being the ones who pay.