Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
Plutarch
Tag: 9/11
We’re stupider now. We seem to care less. We embrace “austerity”—budget cuts for anything that suggests we owe a collective obligation to one another. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, that fire station we marched past so solemnly on Friday, September 14, is scheduled to close down due to budget cuts. The Bush-era tax cuts still survive. Military actions overseas, many of them secret, are like a squeezed balloon, expanding every time they contract somewhere else. September 11, it seems, delivered us unto permanent war. But solidarity is on strike for the duration.
Rick Perlstein (via azspot)
I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.
George W. Bush, speaking on March 13, 2002, whose policies are precisely why it took 10 years to track bin Laden down.
That Obama noted making this Job One for the CIA was no coincidence. He presumably mentioned this request so specifically because this was job 4,234,450 the day before he took office; Bush said as much. To Bush/Cheney, 9/11 was never anything other than a chance to pull some particularly exciting binders down off of Cheney’s darkside shelf.
That Obama noted making this Job One for the CIA was no coincidence. He presumably mentioned this request so specifically because this was job 4,234,450 the day before he took office; Bush said as much. To Bush/Cheney, 9/11 was never anything other than a chance to pull some particularly exciting binders down off of Cheney’s darkside shelf.
We can only hope that their shortsighted and foolish “bogeyman approach” to bin Laden now nucleates into a national desire to put an end to everything that was rolled out in his name. Then, and only then, will this be a “victory” of any kind for America.
Otherwise you’re just changing the name and picture at the top of Our Forever-War Commemorative Playing Card Set.
We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive: to be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day.
John Mueller and Mark Stewart report back after analyzing Homeland Security spending. Word.
Curveball II
I’d say this paragraph pretty well sums up American “terrorist policy” from 9/12/2001 on:
…whatever the truth about the detainee’s role before his capture in 2002, it is receding into the past. So, presumably, is the value of whatever information he possesses. Still, his jailers have continued to press him for answers. His assessment of January 2008 — six years after he arrived in Cuba — contended that it was worthwhile to continue to interrogate him, in part because he might know about Mullah Omar’s “possible whereabouts.”
A Waste of Money and Time
Bruce Schneier gives a cogent opinion:
Exactly two things have made airplane travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we’re done. Take all the rest of the money and spend it on investigation and intelligence.
This is exactly right, though it clearly elides the cesspool that our investigation and intelligence apparatus currently is, a critical problem that the government shows zero interest in taking on.
The 9/11 Commission pointed it out and the reaction has been to add another layer or two of middle managers and most definitely not to drain the swamp and rebuild a reactive and reasonably transparent national intelligence apparatus. Easier just to scan our junk, I guess. Kick all other cans down the road and then roundly blame the other party when the next big (but plainly avoidable) intelligence failure happens.
In which Ron Paul and I Agree
Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries.
The American Traveler Dignity Act. Good on you, Ron.
But: more to the point, it would be nice to see the conversation moved from being specifically about the scanners to a more general “the scanners are an entirely pointless invasion of deeply personal rights” realm. These scanners are a multi-million dollar boondoggle entirely aimed at stopping the underpants bomber of last year. They will do nothing whatever to stop the cecum bomber of 2011 or the vagina explosions of 2013. That we refuse to have this conversation, ever, is precisely why the next attack will succeed. Better to mark such a memo “classified” and hope nobody goes looking for it. Same with the memo on how these porno-scans are in fact saved and will inevitably get out; I’m surprised we don’t already have an airport scan of some celebrity. Likewise classify any health-related studies. And classify anything about the impact on pilots forced to go through this entirely needless screen daily for the rest of their careers. In the next fabulous version, your junk will be super-imposed on a stick figure! Won’t that be better for everyone? Left unasked, of course, is is this thing likely to stop any attack ever mounted, planned or attempted, past or present? Because it’s not clear it would have detected the very attack they point to when demanding the scans occur. It certainly wouldn’t have prevented 9/11; that fact is absolutely clear. I’m quite sure that any systematic testing of the assertion that these scanners offer no measurable improvement, if it’s been tested at all, is classified. File next to “what we deem as incredibly dangerous liquids in volumes greater than 3oz shall be stored in trash barrels directly adjacent to large concentration of passengers waiting in line.”
Listening to the tone of the recent hearings, I was unsurprised and yet still deeply troubled to hear that, mostly, the top concern was that this approach (apart from any particular utility or drawback) at least makes observant Muslims uncomfortable. I especially loved the back-slappy interchange between TSA chief John Pistole and John Ensign (R-Nev) who apparently agree that the most important part of any security technology or invasion of privacy is that it irritate Muslims. Does extending this underlying theory mean that if I agree to shave while in line I can thus skip the porno-scans?
Just as troubling, though, was the easy acceptance of the entirely false equivalency of “screened” airplane (using millimeter wave) and “unscreened” airplane (not using) and the relative preference a theoretical passenger would assert. Yes, we know a lot about everyone’s junk as they get on that “screened” plane, but it’s not actually any safer. And so far as I can tell from the transcripts I’ve found, not one Senator raised the issue of actual security improvement through this technology. In fact, they’ve only added a particularly demeaning bit of security theater to the already frothy mix of half-assed fixes to yesterday’s problems. And I guess that’s all we’re after anymore: The terrorists are coming; look busy!
It’s facile but still telling to point out that around 400,000 people have died in car accidents since 9/10/2001. About 3500 have died in domestic terror attacks since 9/10/2001. Feel free to compare and contrast national auto safety policy to national airline security policy.
Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?
In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
David Foster Wallace (via southpol)
Mind: Blown
among those who have an unfavorable view of Islam, an overwhelming 87 percent say the [not at Ground Zero, not a mosque] project shouldn’t be built, with 74 percent strongly opposed. [Fifty-five percent of those who have favorable views of Islam say it should be built.]
This ranks right up there with the most shocking things ever. No one could have expected that the non-mosque project opposition was, in fact, deeply rooted in anti-Islamic muckraking on the part of FOXnews, Drudge, Rush, Beck, and the GOP at large and is not some Grand Effort to preserve the Sanctity of Ground Zero and the victims of 9/11/01.
But, by all means media, keep reporting as if that list is entirely made up of sober and serious information sources. After all, the sooner Tashtego drowns the sooner that flag will get fixed. Tap tap tap.
We can count on Glenn [Beck] to make the night interesting and inspiring, and I can think of no better way to commemorate 9/11 than to gather with patriots who will ‘never forget.’ [Visa and MasterCard accepted.]
Sarah Palin, summarizes both her own racket and that of Glenn Beck in just 38 words. We should pay more attention to her.
Lemkin 