david
| Tue, Sep 11, 2012
9:36 AM EST
I still find it unsettling when the weather on a September 11 morning is the same as it was 11 years ago – clear and crisp. Like it is today.
In a welcome move, both the Obama and the Romney campaigns have pulled their advertising for today.
Take a moment to remember.
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9 Comments . Leave a comment below.I was glued to the television and afraid to move. My children were at school and I made the decision to let them stay there, in the strong brick buildings as opposed to our ancient wood and nails house. My mind was spinning in disbelief. I could not function in any meaningful way.
Rest in peace to the people who lost their lives that day. The horror they faced, those in the buildings and on the planes, is beyond comprehension.
Everybody should read today’s op-ed in the NY Times about how ‘W’ missed ther MULTITUDE of warnings about 9/11: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=1&ref=global If you do read the op-ed, also click on its internal link to Condoleeza Rice’s testimoney before the 9/11 Commission.
It’s pretty clear what his foreign policy advisors wanted out of him from the beginning.
One, they always seem to start in spring 2001, thus conveniently skipping the time when there was another administration. Two, it is unlikely that “something is going to happen somewhere” warnings were going to be particularly useful in prevention then, when there were no robust counter-terrorism policies in place. Three, even preparing for hijackings would not necessarily have prevented the attacks that took place, which were different from airline hijackings that had happened up until then. Finally, until the unnamed sources engaged in ass-covering deign to be named, I will not put much credence in their ass-covering anecdotes.
In other words, Bush was “responsible” for the counter-terrorism policy throughout the spring and summer of 2001 in about the same way that Obama was “responsbile” for economic policy in the spring and summer of 2009.
In short, sometimes stuff happens. This strikes me as another purely political “Something Bad Happened, the Other party did it” nonsense.
And I find this link, in this thread, to be obnoxious in the extreme.
…it is unlikely that “something is going to happen somewhere” warnings were going to be particularly useful in prevention then, when there were no robust counter-terrorism policies in place.
But there were anti-terrorist policies in place. They were not implemented, by either the Bush Administration or Massport. Hence, this:
If Massport had taken the warnings seriously, either on their own or as a result of Federal prompting, it’s not unreasonable to think that the Logan-based part of the plot might have been thwarted.
The bombing of the USS Cole happened in December of 2000 – I remember it vividly, my stepson was in the Navy at the time and could easily have been one of those killed or wounded. The outgoing Clinton administration warned the incoming Bush administration that terrorism should be a high priority, and they left a response to the Cole attack up to them. Bush did nothing about the Cole, which emboldened Bib Laden to plan a larger attack. That’s why these warnings came up in the spring of 2001.
Really hard to put into words. I was so very fortunate — the 2 people I knew working In the WTC were both about to go into the building when it happened. The person I know who worked in the part of the Pentagon that was hit was on vacation that day. But so many people I know lost loved ones. My friend from high school who spent the weeks after going from one funeral to another, because she used to work at one of the firms on the top floors. The woman who babysat my sister when I was born lost a nephew. The cars that sat at the train station near my parents’ house, day after day, when it dawned on everyone after a couple of days that their owners were never coming back.
The shock and fear and disbelief that morning. The quiet in the skies that afternoon, with all air traffic halted. The memories are permanently seared, even for those of us not personally affected by loss. I just can’t imagine what it’s like for those who are.
That has only spawned repeated tragedy day after day. To put
our horrid war in Afghanistan in perspective my 8th grade classmate is
now being deployed, my girlfriends little sister, who was 8 at the time and a senior in high school now has friends being deployed when they graduate. At some point Romneys gaffe “Why waste billions of dollars pursuing one man?” (not to mention the thousands of lives he callously forgot to mention) rungs true. Our drone strikes are creating more terrorists than they destroy. Fortress America has seen a reality where the Patriot Act, Presidential War Powers, torture, indefinite detention and pre-emotive wars are commonplace realities enshrined by bipartisan consensus and a docile media. At some point we were promised a peace dividend both in terms of ending the money pit wars AND restoring pre-9/11 civil liberties and I am 100% positive we will see neither.
The worst abuses of WWII were justified by Congress and the Courts as war time abrogations of civil liberties during a worse threat to our nation than Al Qaeda ever was or will be. The same court with nearly the same composition reprimanded and reversed itself on internment towards the end of the war. Republicans lead the way in shrinking our army after the war lead. I don’t see that happening today a generation has been raised to fear terrorism and view our garrison state as normality. Much like “Munich” was used to scare my grandpas generation of policy makers into terrible policies 9/11 will have the same effect on my generation. I hope someday we can return to normal but the lesson of that day was that the war came home and we will never feel that level of normal again. They could never destroy America but they could bury its innocence in the rubble of the World Trade Center and drown it in a water boarding tub. It is for this reason that we can never claim lasting victory only permanent vigilance and a country sleeping with one eye open.
And I hope we do all the things required to never let it happen again.
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