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  • Bruce H. McIntosh
    scotsman@afn.org
    Visit my work homepage
    Last revised Jan 04, 2021

    This space intentionally left blank

    Writings of various natures on various topics

    My Recollection of 9-11-2001


    Tuesday,September 11,2001: Several of us from the office were at InterOp in Atlanta. I was in a session and came out for a stretch break. A bunch of people were gathered around an information kiosk in the convention center lobby that had a TV showing the news. I wandered over and asked what was up. A woman standing there watching the tube told me, "There's been a terrible accident. Some airliner just hit the World Trade Center!" I thought about where the WTC was, where the airports were in and around NYC, and looked at the smoke pouring from the building and it just clicked in my head. I turned to her and said, "That was no accident, no way was that an accident" Just then the second plane hit.

    That evening,we went out to dinner, if memory serves at Max Lager's in downtown Atlanta. Sitting on the back patio in the city with the world's busiest airport, there were only two airplanes in the air - a pair of USAF F-16 flying circles over downtown, low enough that we could see the live missles on the rails.

    InterOp was cancelled and we headed home, up one person who couldn't fly back to Gainesville. It was weird over the next few days seeing no contrails, no blinking lights in the sky at night, just an occasional glimpse of a fighter.

    The events themselves were not, as I've mentioned on Facebook, a tragedy. They were rather an ATROCITY, a carefully planned series of attacks calculated to cause maximum damage and generate the greatest possible number of fatalities. The tragedy is that so much of the world today lies thrall to the political, social and religious monster that provided the impetus for the events of September 11,2001. As long as there is Islam, there will be no shortage of repeat appearances.

    The other, much less-remarked-upon, atrocity came in the afermath, as a dumbstruck, greiving, infuriated nation came to grips with the attacks and tried to plot a course forward, to shape a response. That great champion of liberty, GW Bush, waved the bloody shirt of 9/11 in front of an all too compliant Congress and proceeded to bend the tattered remnants of the US Constitution over his Oval Office desk and savaged it every bit as badly as the New Deal or the first Sedition Acts, while the House and Senate held it down. The USAPATRIOT Act and the FISA extensions were greased into law lubricated by the blood of the 9/11 victims. In a supreme act of "destroying the republic in order to save it" that would've made the most gung-ho groundpounder torching a village full of Viet Cong sympathizers blush, Dubya and Congress laid the fundamental legal and philosophical foundations for the gradual construction of a magnificently Orwellian surveillance state to make the UK or China blush.

    And, not content to rest on those gruesome laurels, the Bush administration and subsequent administrations have repeatedly grasped at the thinnest of windblown straws to justify ever increasing levels of military intervention in the political, social, religious, and economic snakepit of the Middle East, destabilizing and overthrowing governments and tearing nations apart, spending American blood and treasure with bewildering profligacy for little to no benefit to American interests, all while very carefully avoiding anything that could be construed as even a glancing blow at the towering edifice of blood and petroleum that birthed Bin Laden and arguably bankrolled much of the setup for the 9/11 attacks. After all, mustn't piss off the ibn Sauds and risk the steady flow of black gold westward (and, of course, yellow gold eastward).

    Previously posted to my livejournal and various other online fora. Recently edited to include the USAPATRIOT/FISA remarks.

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