punditman says...9-11. It is unlikely that this blog, and thousands like it, would even exist if not for that fateful day 8 years ago. Eight years ago, everyone was discussing what the Bush administration was going to do in the wake of the attacks on New York's Twin Towers. Anyone with a driblet of political instinct knew there would be war in Afghanistan. So how is that working out? If someone went to sleep eight years ago and woke up today, they may have trouble believing that the Afghan War is escalating as I write this.
Eight years ago, some of us predicted there would be an assualt on liberty and a crackdown on dissent. And excuses and lies for more war too, in Iraq, or anywhere deemed necessary to go after those "with global reach." 9-11 offered little Hitlers everywhere international carte blanche to forego civil rights in the name of security. It gave us a permanent warfare state that shows no signs of abating. It gave us torture without accountability. 9-11 dumbed us down so that those who never ask the right questions and always avoid the real issues were alloted permanent prime time coverage, while anyone with a lick of common sense went scrambling off to the blogosphere attempting to make sense of planet weird. 9-11 was the perfect gift to the forces of stupidity and reaction. Too perfect, almost.
by Robert Scheer
What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?
As assaults on a society go, the 9/11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our own.
Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the Pentagon doesn’t compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of Hiroshima’s mayor two years ago: “That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast—silence—hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted.”
