(Originally Posted December 11, 2001)
"You monster. You beast.
You unspeakable bastard."
Everyone has an opinion about September 11, 2001. Everyone is pitching their two cents worth. So why not me? Not that I am any great statesman or spokesman or a "mover and shaker." However, it has all reached a boil now, and I thought I might as well spell out a few things from my point of view.
Let me begin with that morning and how it appeared to me. My alarm had gone off just shortly before six in the morning (Pacific coast time). OOMA [object of my affection], who had been up since 5:30, said that the World Trade Center was on fire. She went back to drying her hair.
Sure, thought I. I sat up in bed, looked at the TV, and sure enough, one of the towers is blazing away.
The "expert" guest commentator on the Fox News Channel was a dodo. He prattled on, saying we can't assume this was deliberate action, that there's a great deal of air traffic in the area, that the sun was low, could be blinding, pilot could have gotten lost, might be an accident, could be--
Blam! Huge fireball rises up into the screen. Cameraman pulls back from the tight shot he had been holding on the burning tower. Debris exploding out from the second tower, obviously a huge explosion, someone exclaiming that a second plane has hit the second tower. Quickly surf to CNN. Their camera had much the same angle/shot, but had been holding back, less zoom, more building. They replayed what had happened just moments before, showing a jetliner zooming in from the right, disappearing behind the burning tower, huge explosion showing where it ended up.
Accident, my ass.
In the hour that followed, I listened to the radio. A third airliner hit the Pentagon. A fourth had gone somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. All civilian aircraft grounded. The towers fell....
I'm sorry, but as I looked at those two buildings burning I thought, "What genius, what audacity." As horrific as it was (is!), what happened was a natural extension of terrorist actions throughout the world. Suicide bombers are now commonplace. It wasn't a huge leap to imagine suicide pilots. Tom Clancey built the climax of a novel (Debt of Honor) around the notion. The sheer brilliance of the execution was something to behold. Objectively, I couldn't help but admire what had been done, in much the same way as historians admire how well the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor went.
Subjective evaluation is another animal. Leonard Pitts, Jr., writing in the Miami Herald for September 12, 2001, said it short and sweet: "You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard."
Pitts also gave a foretaste of what was coming.
It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that's the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don't know my people. You don't know what we're capable of. You don't know what you just started.
But you're about to learn.
Now it's December 2001, some three months later. We have bombed Afghanistan up and out of the stone age, and toppled one of the most repressive regimes on earth. A coalition of interests from within Afghanistan has come to an agreement regarding a replacement, interim government. Osama bin Laden, the man we hold responsible for WTC 9/11/01 as well as other acts of terrorism, remains on the run, his al-Qaida terrorist network falling apart. The only cloud on the horizon sits over Israel, where Palestinian terrorists have triggered a series of suicide attacks that will in all likelihood do little more than toss Yasir Arafat from power, if not into a grave.
Yet as I drive to work this morning, I hear an NPR commentator saying that the large-scale bombing of Afghanistan will accomplish nothing, that we must bring the accused to stand before the world court, to espouse the rule of law, to settle the Palestinian issue, etc.
In short, she apparently doesn't realize that our actions in Afghanistan are working. We're winning. Certainly, this is just a first, tiny step. But it's amazing the number of people who can't recognize success. Or, more accurately, will never accept Bush as president, or that anything he does is proper and correct.
People are literally dancing in the street in Afghanistan. More and more information reveals that a large percentage, perhaps the majority, of the Taliban were from foreign nations. In effect, foreigners took over Afghanistan, declared their notion of Islam as the one, true way, and supported a world terrorist who felt likewise. Indeed, there is evidence that shows Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network was so intertwined with the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan as to be indistinguishable and inseparable. It was inevitable that an assault of al-Qaida would topple the Taliban, to the joy of the citizens of Afghanistan.
We did not attack Afghanistan; we went after a terrorist network. We did so in response to September 11, 2001, but it's about time!
Now, let me tell you what worries me. There is this great, crushing rush to erase a basic freedom we accept as normal and natural in the United States. That freedom? The freedom of movement, of being able to go where you will, whenever you want. When I attended the police academy, I was taught of a landmark Supreme Court case that came out of San Diego. There was this black gentleman of the dreadlocks persuasion who had a habit of late night walks. And he took them wherever he wanted, including the upper class neighborhoods of San Diego. Surprise, the police confronted him, demanded his identification, and pretty much tried to shake him down.
He refused to show any ID, stating (correctly) that he hadn't done anything wrong, wasn't doing anything wrong, and that the police had no right to confront him so. He was arrested on the spot. To no one's great surprise, the case ended up before the United States Supreme Court, who overthrew the man's conviction, and ruled that police cannot just randomly stop people, demand ID, and insist that the person explain themselves. There has to be this tiny little thing known as "probable cause."
Yet here we are, years later, perfectly willing to accept just this sort of police conduct.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Larry Ellison, president and CEO of Oracle, says it's time for a national ID card. No, sorry, he didn't say that, he said he believes that there should be a national standard for identification cards. That was his corrective statement after a television interview showed him saying, "We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedding in the ID card." In response to privacy objections, he added, "[T]his privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy." Not to be outdone, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, piped in with the comment, "You already have zero privacy. Get over it."
Nice, when two leaders in the technology industry, a predominantly liberal area of the economy, call for such a repressive measure.
I am not willing to surrender one iota of my liberty, and am not about to call on someone else to give up a trace of theirs. Please, let us face up to a basic, real fact: You are never safe! Just as crime is a function of society, risk is a function of an open society. The more open, the more free, a country and society, the more open to attack it is. Only by altering the fundamental nature of our country can this be changed.
And surprise, the creatures who staged the attacks of September 11, 2001, are the ones who want to alter the fundamental nature of our country! They don't like us just for being the way we are. Excepting our total conversion to a Taliban-like flavor of Islam (or whatever belief system--secular or otherwise--that they adhere to), there is nothing we are going to do that will change that. We could withdraw completely from the Middle East, taking Israel with us, and they'd still hate us, attack us, want to see us dead and buried. We are declared again and again as the Great Satan of the planet. There is no way, if that is the true belief, that they can stand to see us survive.
We have Federalized airport security personnel for ghu knows what reason. Please, explain this to me. On September 11, 2001, four airliners were hijacked. There is nothing to show that a single hijacker smuggled an illegal weapon on board. To the contrary, we are told again and again that their weapons were small and legal, pockets knives and box cutters. On that day, and until very recently, it was perfectly legal for passengers to carry such items onto the aircraft. Airport security personnel did their job, they did not fail.
On the other hand, a number of the identified hijackers were on the terrorist watch list. Immigration personnel who checked their passports as they came into this country let them pass. Aren't immigration personnel Federal employees?
So, if I understand this correctly we want to fire the people who did their job and did nothing wrong, while we "look into" how these terrorists got into the country in the first place. Ah, of course.
P. J. O'Rourke, in an article for the November 2001 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, remarks on how in Israel ordinary life has conquered terrorism. (When last checked, you could find the article here, but you may have to search the site in case it moves.) Anything O'Rourke writes is entertaining, and this is no exception. The closing paragraphs are priceless.
"This country is hopeless," Dave said, pouring a Palestinian Taybeh beer to complement a number of Israeli Maccabee beers we'd had earlier in West Jerusalem. "And as hopeless placed go, it's not bad." We discussed another Israel question. Why are Israeli girls so fetching in their army uniforms, whereas the women in the U.S. military are less so? It may have something to do with carrying guns all the time. But Freud was a lukewarm Zionist, and let's not think about it.
After the first Zionist Congress, in 1897, the rabbis of Vienna sent a delegation to Palestine on a fact-finding mission. The delegation cabled Vienna saying, "The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man." However, the twentieth century, with all its Freudianism, was about to dawn, and we know what having the beautiful bride married to another man means in a modern story line. No fair using amnesia as a device for tidy plot resolution.
"Do we have to choose sides?" Dave said. But it's like dating sisters. Better to make a decision and head for the Global Village limits. And speaking of sisters, I opened the Jerusalem Post on Easter morning and discovered that my sister's neighborhood in Cincinnati was under curfew, overrun with race riots.
O'Rourke made his trip to Israel earlier in the year, and he wrote the article before September 11. The events of September 11, 2001, require an American response, which is now in progress, and will be on-going for years to come. It is, in a sense, a new holy war, and if we remain focused it will spread a message of freedom, rather than an oppressive religious dogma.
As we demonstrate to the world that a free people are a terrible thing when aroused in anger, we must not forget our own lesson of freedom. We should not merrily surrender our liberties for an illusion of safety, no matter how tempting that may be. And for that, I give you the words of the fictitious Henry Drummond, as delivered by Spencer Tracy:
I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy, you can only punish. And I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches, its upholders as well as its defiers. Can't you understand that if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools. And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try and foist your own religion on the mind of man. If you can do one you can do the other, because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy and needs feeding. And soon, your honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we'll be marching backward, backward through the glorious ages of that 16th century when bigots burned a man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind.
Bear this in mind any time someone says changing an existing law or adding a new law is "for your own good, your safety."
2006 Update:
Most of the above I still agree with. However, over the last five years a few things have changed, mostly my knowledge and experience. I've a few years of law school under my belt and understand that much more of the US legal system. For instance, in late 2001 I would have said that The USA Patriot Act was a horror. Today I understand that 90+% of the Act simply allows Federal law enforcement to use against terrorists the same tools they've already been using against organized crime and drug dealers. Further, those restrictions aren't Constitutionally based. They come, rather, from the Legislature reacting in horror at the abuses of the Nixon administration. That is, they are the result of a power grab, the Legislative taking from the Executive.
While Drummond's words should be stamped on the hallways of every law school in the country, a quiet review of the dire warnings made by the loyal opposition in 2001 reveal...they aren't very good at making dire warnings.
There is also a continued failure to recognize the enemy for what he is, an ideology bent on the destruction of personal freedom. No, I'm not talking about Bush, and if that was your first thought then yes, I'm talking to you, and you need to get a clue. Osama and his ilk don't want to make nice, they want to convert you at gunpoint or kill you. They don't have a preference.
I opt for Door #3, which is to convert them, either to change their ways or end their ways. And between those two choices, I don't have a preference.
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