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9/11, Iraq, I_____
Sep. 7th, 2003 07:00 pmAfter Divine Liturgy this noon ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
davemac called my attention to his post of this morning, in which he links to this story in The Guardian.
There seems no doubt that someone in Washington gave specific orders disabling our normal air traffic control and defense system on September 11 to permit the hijacked aircraft to get to their targets. I suspect that person was told something like the following: "We need to do something drastic to shake this country up, so there's going to be a series of fake hijackings Tuesday morning. For this to work, you can't respond according to standing orders. These are unofficially suspended in the interest of national security."
As to where this came from, unlike Gore Vidal, I prefer to think it was not from Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld, who, I like to think, have some kind of vestigial loyalty to the United States, by which I mean the constitutional republic celebrated on national holidays, not the Chakravartin of the New American Century or the Lord High Executioner of the Mikado of Likud.
And if the orders came from agents of the one foreign power to profit from the disaster, we must remember how blinded people are by their racism. No doubt it was felt that Arabs might provoke America to a necessary war, but not have the brains and character to do any real damage. At any rate, that was the received opinion about the Japanese up to Pearl Harbor.
And who knew the Towers would fall, who remembered that the Nixon administration, in banning asbestos, caused them to be built, not according to plan, but essentially without fire protection? This was noted thirty years ago, and bin Laden is said to be a good enough engineer to be aware of these things, but evidently he was as astonished as the rest of the world. And the Israelis who were observed high fiving each other in Liberty State Park as the Towers burned probably had no real conception of the loss of life that would result. Nobody could.
This is what history is all about: humans stupidly doing things they have no idea of the consequences of...
It is enough to draw tears from a face of stone.
davemac called my attention to his post of this morning, in which he links to this story in The Guardian.There seems no doubt that someone in Washington gave specific orders disabling our normal air traffic control and defense system on September 11 to permit the hijacked aircraft to get to their targets. I suspect that person was told something like the following: "We need to do something drastic to shake this country up, so there's going to be a series of fake hijackings Tuesday morning. For this to work, you can't respond according to standing orders. These are unofficially suspended in the interest of national security."
As to where this came from, unlike Gore Vidal, I prefer to think it was not from Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld, who, I like to think, have some kind of vestigial loyalty to the United States, by which I mean the constitutional republic celebrated on national holidays, not the Chakravartin of the New American Century or the Lord High Executioner of the Mikado of Likud.
And if the orders came from agents of the one foreign power to profit from the disaster, we must remember how blinded people are by their racism. No doubt it was felt that Arabs might provoke America to a necessary war, but not have the brains and character to do any real damage. At any rate, that was the received opinion about the Japanese up to Pearl Harbor.
And who knew the Towers would fall, who remembered that the Nixon administration, in banning asbestos, caused them to be built, not according to plan, but essentially without fire protection? This was noted thirty years ago, and bin Laden is said to be a good enough engineer to be aware of these things, but evidently he was as astonished as the rest of the world. And the Israelis who were observed high fiving each other in Liberty State Park as the Towers burned probably had no real conception of the loss of life that would result. Nobody could.
This is what history is all about: humans stupidly doing things they have no idea of the consequences of...
It is enough to draw tears from a face of stone.