Recently in September 11 Category

While we are often told by our political leaders that it is bad form to look back, one of the great questions of the past decade is why and how Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001. Thankfully not everyone has refused to review the situation. As the New York Times' Scott Shane writes about a new Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Tora Bora:

"Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat," the committee's report concludes. "But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide."

The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military's Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden's escape into Pakistan are still being felt.

The report blames the lapse for "laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan."

This was one of the biggest errors of the Bush Administration's War on Terrorism. Why are we not supposed to hear from General Tommy Franks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld, and other leading Bush Administration officials about why they refused to send enough troops to ensure bin Laden's capture?

These are questions that should not be lost to the mists of time or our refusal to hold those in power to accountable for their mistakes.

Our friends the British have begun an investigation this week into their involvement into the Iraq War, one to which we should pay more close attention.

Glenn Greenwald, for example, reviews testimony yesterday that should remind us of how important the anthrax attacks which followed the September 11, 2001 attacks were to creating the climate of fear in the United States that fed into the Iraq invasion and so many other horrible policies. Yes, those same anthrax attacks so quickly deleted from our collective memory.

Yesterday, the former U.K. Ambassador to the U.S., Sir Christopher Meyer, testified as to the importance of the anthrax attacks, as Greenwald summarizes:

Meyer said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11. US senators and others were sent anthrax spores in the post, a crime that led to the death of five people, prompting policymakers to claim links to Saddam Hussein. . . .

On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in "no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation" . . . It seemed that Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, argued for retaliation to include Iraq, Meyer said. . . .

But the anthrax scare had "steamed up" policy makers in Bush's administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam, who the administration believed had been the last person to use anthrax. (emphasis by Greenwald)

As Greenwald then reminds us, the anthrax attacks remain "unresolved and uninvestigated." How the hell is that acceptable given how important they were? He reviews, with links, all of the sources that have serious questions for about the FBI's conclusion to this case.

I simply do not understand how we have left the anthrax attacks unresolved and wiped from our collective memory. They directly impacted more people than the September 11 attacks. They created more fear. (To this day, how many of us get training on the proper way to open mail?)

Some things deserve more of our attention. That's why I encourage you to go read Greenwald's post and restart your memory by clicking on his post's links.

Bruce Schneier has an outstanding post arguing for the need to move beyond security theater and engage our rational minds around the terrorism threat and what should be done to prevent it.

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at US airports in the months after 9/11 -- their guns had no bullets. The US colour-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.

This entire post is worth reading. And we need more discussion on these points.

We've accepted many things out of fear since 9/11/01. But we rarely question whether the measures we've accepted actually make us safer.

Now that the Republican National Committee has decided to police presidential vacations, I wonder if they would like to make a statement about whether President Bush should have stayed on vacation after his August 6, 2001, intelligence briefing?

I agree with Digby, and thank Richard Clarke for pointing out that the trauma of September 11, 2001, is no excuse for bad decisions made by government leaders. As Clarke writes:

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.

There should be no excusing this. Nor forgiving it. And as the evidence suggests, more investigations are in order.

We must come to terms with what happened if we hope to restore our national honor.

Think Progress catches Press Secretary Dana Perino using interesting spin to justify the past 2,551 days of failure to make good on President George W. Bush's promise to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."

It's been 2,550 days since President George W. Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."

Later, of course, President Bush later told us that he just didn't spend too much time on Osama.

That last statement, alas, has proven all too true. In a rational world, the president long ago would have been held to account for this failure.

During her introduction of the president last night, First Lady Laura Bush said:

And let's not forget President Bush has kept the American people safe.

Does she not realize that President Bush was the, um, president during the September 11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax attacks which followed?

That's keeping us safe?

In my post below about the anthrax attacks, I linked to a Think Progress video of John McCain's October 18, 2001 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman.

I was struck by McCain's first joke in this video to Letterman -- and wonder when people like McCain are going to be held accountable for the failure that joke represents.

“What is Osama bin Laden going to be for Halloween?” “Dead!”

Too bad Letterman didn't ask McCain for the year. McCain sure was proud of the joke, eh?

We are nearing the seventh Halloween since McCain's joke. Do we really think we should keep the same people in charge who have failed to capture bin Laden. Just to remind us all, it is now 2,512 days since President Bush vowed to get bin Laden "dead or alive".

2,512 days. And the clock continues to tick.

Juan Cole highlights a prime example of blowback: in 1987, a major right-wing Christian group advocated for "aid to anti-communist insurgents in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola and elsewhere..."

Those insurgents in Afghanistan would change their allegiances in the aftermath of the first Iraq War. Ultimately, they would attack the United States.

It's been 2,200 days since President George W. Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."

Later, of course, President Bush later told us that he just didn't spend too much time on Osama.

That last statement, alas, has proven all too true. In a rational world, the president long ago would have been held to account for this failure.

Rudy Guiliani campaign advisor Tony Carbonetti issued this odd (or self-serving?) response to concerns raised by victims' families and emergency responders about Guiliani's plans to participate in upcoming ceremonies marking the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks:

"If you know Rudy Giuliani, he'd be down there paying his respects whether he was invited or not," Carbonetti said in a statement. "To say he's politicizing it -- he never would do anything like that."

Oh, Giuliani would never politicize the September 11 attacks? Just what campaign is Carbonetti senior advising? This is all Giuliani has -- the self-proclaimed "hero" of September 11, the only man who knows how to attack the terrorists.

This seems as good a time as any to encourage people to read Wayne Barrett's important Village Voice article, "Rudy Giuliani's Five Big Lies About 9/11", an expose that debunks the claims Guiliani makes on the campaign trail while politicizing September 11.

It's been 2,175 days since President George W. Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."

Later, of course, President Bush later told us that he just didn't spend too much time on Osama.

That last statement, alas, has proven all too true. In a rational world, the president long ago would have been held to account for this failure.

Former Senator Gary Hart asks Republican presidential pretender Rudy Guiliani some important questions:

Since you have based your presidential campaign almost exclusively on your reaction to terrorist attacks on New York City, and since you have recently accused Democrats of being on the defense against terrorism and therefore guilty of inviting more casualties, I have one question for you: Where were you on terrorism between January 31, 2001, and September 11th?

The first date was when the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century issued its final report warning, as did its previous reports, of the danger of terrorist attacks on America. The George W. Bush administration did nothing about these warnings and we lost 3,000 American lives. What did you do during those critical eight months? Where were you? Were you on the defensive, or were you even paying attention?

"America's So-Called Mayor" has been living in a glass house on the terrorism issue. His record is fair game -- and it is about time the American people started seeing the media dig into just what Rudy did to protect the city he led.

I don't think he will like the answer.

In Altercation's correspondence corner, Ben Miller asks an important question: just what did Rudy Guiliani do to earn the title of "America's Mayor?"