9/11 Anniversary Thoughts

In retrospect, I should have had my musings the September 11, 2001 attacks on Tuesday, but I didn't think that I had anything to contribute. However, I have reconsidered even if we should also commemorate Augusto Pinochet's bloody, and US supported, coup, which also happened on September 11, but in 1973. 

When I first heard about them, I thought the first collision was a pure accident like when that B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945.  However, the clear weather of that day and the second plane hit the other World Trade Center tower made horrifically clear that this was no accident.

When that revelation sank in, I had only thought, "Please, let these attacker be another Timothy McVeigh." That is, I was hoping that a native white American militia organization was responsible for this horror like they were in the Oklahoma City Bombing, because if it isn't, then President George W. Bush would able be exploit this for anything he wants to do. Unfortunately, it turns out that Osama Bin Laden was responsible, and Bush and his cronies got to pursue anything they wanted.

I was actually hoping that this incident could have led to Bush and company reexamining US foreign policy to realize what provoked this.  Yes that was a naive hope, but it was all I had to cling to.  Instead, we were subjected to deceptive blandishments like "They hate our freedom" and stupid appeals to shop

That has led to among other things, the glorified gulag of the Guantanamo detention camp, making a volume of lies and exaggerations for the 2003 Iraq invasion and the draining chaos that followed including the sickening abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. You know, there was a time when the US was famous for their comfy POW camps that were better quarters for many enemy soldiers than their own side's barracks. Furthermore, that policy paid off in World War II with encouraging surrenders, minimizing inmate trouble and getting them to blab any secrets they had. It's just like Bush and company ignore American history and simple common sense from that to do something right in a war.

Finally, whatever the other causes of our economy's turmoil, the trillion dollar public expense has got to have been a contributing factor to our biggest trading partner's troubles.

After all, only a ideological idiot like Bush and his gang would cut taxes during a war; however, I would just love to see what they could have done if they had the chutzpah to do a war bond drive like they did in World War II like this cartoon.  This may be violating Godwin's Law but a big reason why Nazi Germany never went for war bonds was that they didn't wanted the German public to have a safe means of criticizing their policies by boycotting them.  Regardless, Bush and co. were in no mood to listen to basic sanity anyway.

So, that's at least part of the legacy of 9/11, an attack we are all still paying for in all the miserable ways.