This week on the Leftorium, a look back at this day specifically, 17 years ago, and the months leading up to it. While we honor the memory of those lives lost, it is important that we never forgot those principally responsible for allowing it to happen.
George W. Bush, who is currently being celebrated as the most recent entrant into the cool neoliberals club, was President not just on 9/11 but for nearly a year before the day. In that time, his administration received and disregarded various detailed reports about an imminent attack on U.S. soil. Osama bin Laden was already on everyone’s radar at the time, bombing two embassies in Africa in 1998, urging followers in his al-Queda network to infiltrate the U.S. and replicate those bombings in major cities. Then CIA director George Tenet received multiple briefings that reportedly put him on edge but was unable to synthesize the same sense of urgency in Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney and Bush himself. Among the many daily briefings had been one literally titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” We point to Trump’s refusal to take daily briefings seriously as though it’s something new, holding it up against previous presidents who would never be so careless as to do such a thing. Here we have a tragedy that could arguably have been avoided had Bush 43 and his advisors done the bare minimum of what their jobs entailed.
So on this day more than any other day, it’s important to push back against any attempt to rehabilitate George W. Bush or anyone one from his administration, however it’s being done, by whoever is doing it. In the years since 9/11, we’ve been dragged into at least two unnecessary wars that are still ongoing, based primarily on this event. Outside of the actual people who plotted the attacks, no one in the Bush administration has been even remotely held responsible for their rank incompetence. No one has been held responsible for the lies told to get us into the Iraq War afterward. I haven’t read it myself but Ruck pointed me to an axiom put forward by the authors of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” that would go a long way toward explaining the general callousness in the months leading up to the attacks – public support for a transformational war in the Middle East would’ve been almost impossible “absent a catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Elsewhere on The Leftorium
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia S13E1, “The Gang Makes Paddy’s Great Again”
The Playlist
What’s new in your corner of hellworld?
{Quick aside… to the person coming here daily to downvote comments, I hope one day you find true happiness.)