Another year, another opportunity for the GOP to use 9/11 to pump fear into our populace while “honoring our dead.”

As a New Yorker, while that day and weeks and months that followed will always be with me, I’d long grown numb from the Bush administration’s and Republicans Party’s branding of 9/11 for their own despotic aims: an America in which democracy has been gagged, waterboarded and renditioned to a dank faraway cell for its own protection, while our “heroic” protectors of freedom fight against an adjective — terror — and something that’s been around since the dawn of time — terrorists.