Monday, September 23, 2002

One Terrible Pilot I accumulated and created the 9/11 Timeline because it started to become obvious to me that there are some unanswered questions about what happened and why on September 11, 2001. Worse, the mainstream press is not even approaching the task of asking those questions, so the probability that they will get answered is pretty slim. Fortunately, I'm not the only one trying to compile a timeline. For example, Ekstra Bladet at Visualjournalism.com has drawn up a graphic timeline of Bush's day on 9/11. He probably ran into similar difficulties as I did, namely that there are some discrepancies between different accounts. But we agree to within five minutes of everything we both recorded. Most importantly, we both have Bush learning of the second plane hitting the second tower at 9:05 and a statement not being made until well over twenty minutes later. There is a video available of Bush's morning spent at the school, and some good souls are mirroring it at various sites to insure it does not get scrubbed. Because it is a pretty good candidate for being disappeared. Bush gets the news and just sits there for seven minutes. Bush's handlers want us to think of Bush as authoritative and engaged, but as is always the case, their words cannot deceive our eyes. The lies Bush tells about this morning's events are telling. According to the official White House web page, Bush said "I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident." The first plane striking the WTC was not broadcast that morning. Amatuer footage was found later, but there is no way, at 9:00am 9/11 that Bush could have "[seen] an airplane hit the tower." And a horrible accident? Bush had to spend his July trip to a Genoan summmit on an American aircraft carrier because of threats of hijacked planes being used as missiles. And his August 6 security briefing specifically mentioned hijackings. And he thought it was a "terrible pilot"? Give me a break. He simply revised history to make himself look better. Surely everyone knows where they were and what they were doing when they learned of the terrorist attacks. There can be no doubt that Bush knew at one time how things happened that morning. (I believe he is fully capable of replacing inconvenient facts in his head and ultimately deceiving himself that they are true.) But why deceive us about inconsequential details that can be checked and refuted? And if he would lie about this, might he not also lie about consequential facts? 9:48:10 PM    comment []

Evil Is As Evil Does Michael Kinsley has written an essay in Slate that I really like. His thesis is that "[o]f all the explanations for Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent alleged war on terrorism, the least illuminating is that it's all about evil." According to our leaders, everything changed: our naive American eyes were open to the existence of real evil, and Bush changed our relativistic dialogue to once again include discussions of right and wrong, good and evil. Kinsley rightly cuts right through this crap, and also observes "that there has never in our entire history been a proposition from which fewer Americans dissent than 'Osama Bin Laden is evil.' Calling terrorists 'evil' requires no courage and justifies no self-congratulatory puffing." So there. But this blustering serves another purpose. "If the great essential truth about terrorism is that some people just hate the United States, the obvious next question is, Why? But that is precisely the question that offends the All-About-Evil crowd, because it leads in two unacceptable directions." The first direction is finding the psychological "root causes" which is only mildly less offensive to conservatives than the second direction, which is asking "is it something we did?" otherwise known as "blaming America first." I have little patience for people who are afraid to even ask questions. It means they are afraid of the answers and it is indicative of small minds. Kinsley says it hinders the war on terrorism. I would go farther: understanding our enemy's motivations is crucial strategic information. Failing to obtain this information because our leaders won't ask the necessary questions because it might, just might, lead to "excusing the terrorists" is unethical. How many tactical advantages are we squandering because we would prefer to be ignorant? 9/11 was supposed to have changed everything. I don't think so. 9:08:31 PM    comment []

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