When I think of the aftermath of 9/11/2001, I think of all that we willingly threw away. We threw away our right to morally object to another nation's war of aggression when the Bush Administration invaded Iraq. We threw away many of our civil liberties with the abysmally-named "USA Patriot Act". That piece of excreable lesiglation, among many other things, authorized "sneak-and-peek" searches, where the cops could legally sneak into your home and look for things that might justify a formal search. Over 99% of the "sneak-and-peek" searches had nothing to do with terrorism.
We had the FBI doing what they do best: Ginning up terroism cases based solely on egging on someone with a loud mouth and few brain cells. The FBI concentrated on locking up Achmed the Blowhard while refusing to look into the neo-Nazis and their ilk who were actually killing people. But to be fair, the FBI and the DHS (a Soviet-style security apparatus if there ever was one) were hampered in looking into far-Right terrorism because the GOP, even pre-Trump, recognized them as being part of their base.
We commemmorate a day when the intelligence agencies failed without acknowledging that they had all the tools and information that they needed before the attacks without giving them more power to further harass us. We commemmorate a day which happened after then then-sitting president was more interested in getting back to his golf game than being briefed on the therat that was posed. We commemmorate a day which was used as an excuse to launch a war of aggression that destabilized a region and which we are still dealing with. We commemorate a day which resulted using torture to prove a crime.
We criticize other nations for overreacting to a terrorist attack without ever having done a single thing to hold those who overreacted here to account for their actions. History may not judge the Bush Admininstration for having a discussion in the White House about using torture, but it's clear that we won't.
As I see it, there is little today that is worth commemmorating. Mourning would be more appropriate.
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2 comments:
As a former firefighter this hits me hard. As an American who mourns the loss of liberty it hits even harder.
I wasn't sure I wasn't a single parent for a few hours that morning, my wife was at a meeting in the Pentagon.
I spent the next 6 months+ on the telephone, email and fax responses for the FAA and writing the Administrator's morning report. In addition to fixing some real operational stuff we did a lot of scaping people off the overhead, talking them down and doing counseling for which a bunch of engineers, program analysts and pilots are not trained for at all. I couldn't do telephone for more than a couple hours at a go, so I did emails mostly. The morning report involved getting in early and pulling things together to have a summary on his desk when he got in. Going in the room with air traffic, technical operations, airports, security, the national connections for the Domestic Events Network and a person in the back by the red phone to scramble NORTHCOM is sobering. Not again, please.
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