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Monday, September 11, 2023

On 9-11

For me, 9-11 always arrives in a fog of memories.  Like the tragedies of JFK's assassination, space shuttle Challenger exploding on ascent, or the triumph of Apollo 11's landing, I'll always remember where I was and details of the day it happened.  

I've long harbored a mixed bag of responses.  The first group of feels is "remember the fallen", "remember the first responders who ran into the buildings", "remember the dead and wounded servicemen, the ones who came back with missing limbs, or injuries that can't be seen" and "remember their families."  All of those feels are still there.  Next, though, came contempt for the politicians and beltway bandits that made money off those fallen servicemen.  The age-old bad guys that Eisenhower coined the term "Military Industrial Complex" for. Those feels are now joined by contempt for and disgust with the current military leadership. 

Everyone says 9-11 changed the world forever.  America of 2023 is so different from the America that I grew up in that it's barely recognizable.  Part of it was the PATRIOT act, which led to that NSA Data storage facility in Colorado (I ran some numbers on it in 2013, but that's pretty outdated) and so very much more.  Peter Grant, Bayou Renaissance Man, ran a piece today linking to a piece on the Last Refuge that presents the case that 9/11 led to the current mess our country is in.  

The problems we face now as a country are directly an outcome of two very distinct points that were merged by Barack Obama. (1) The post 9/11 monitoring of electronic communication of American citizens; and (2) Obama’s team creating a fine-tuning knob that it focused on the politics of the targets.  This is very important to understand as you dig deeper into this research outline.

The late 1990s and into 2001 was a seminal moment in technology; the population of people online and communicating electronically skyrocketed, the data began pouring in and was ripe for the picking.  It gave rise to what Sundance at the Last Refuge calls the Fourth Branch of Government or the Intelligence Branch.  The article on Last Refuge is long and detailed but worth going back to. 

While 9-11 led to Afghanistan and Iraq, Iraq was pretty much over with years ago, Afghanistan lingered on.  We're now two years since the disastrous ending in '21.  That was the year that we lost.  We weren't defeated, we formally demonstrated defeating ourselves to the whole world.  We lost in what might have been the most incompetent fustercluck in world history.  A team of Brownie Girl Scouts could have planned and executed that abandonment of Afghanistan better than the Bidenistas did.  For cryin' out loud, they abandoned hundreds of Americans and Afghans that worked for us behind Taliban lines.  Many of those left behind have been assassinated.  They even abandoned Biden's translator in Afghanistan.  By now, the stories have been talked about until everyone has heard them. 

Just to be clear, it's not that I think we should still be in Afghanistan, I'm closer to those who have said we should have gotten out long ago, only we should have done it competently.  We didn't leave from any position of strength, we left with our tails between our legs looking so weak as to be pitiful to the charitable observers and pathetic to the rest of the world.  I'm sure we're especially pathetic to the heirs of Bin Laden who declared us "a weak horse" easy to roll over.  I expect lots more actual attempts to emulate 9/11 while we're showing weakness. There have been reports that many people on the "terror watch list" came across the open border in the last few years.  Not just from the middle east, but from all over the world, joined by Chinese communists.  I'd be shocked to the point of falling over if there aren't Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army special forces teams in the country now.

America is weak now.  Unprecedentedly weak.  I hear numbers around that our non-nuclear weapons stockpiles are essentially gone; given to and used up in Ukraine.  That Ukraine uses more in one day than manufacturers make in a month.  Other adversaries have to be looking at us and thinking "now is the time" to do whatever they thought we'd respond to with force.  It's possible they've decided not to attack us because we're doing such an excellent job of destroying ourselves. 




11 comments:

  1. It's noteworthy that as soon as Trump left office, the Taliban and others all started to move in Afghanistan. Trump had plans for a forceful and defended pullback and pullout, including bombing the living dogsqueeze out of anyone even thinking of interfering with the withdrawal and the new Afghan government.

    I never will forget that day. And all the times the politicians, bureaucrats and government employees stabbed us in the back.

    And I'll never forget how the Clintons and Gore set the stage for 9/11.

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  2. America is weak because WE have allowed it. I say we, as in conservatives, RINOS, so called Patriots, and those who wave the Flag but do nothing when its burned and violated. WE as in my generation, the Baby Boomers. We as in Veterans, Boy Scouts, Constitutionalists, and Anti Communists. WE as in those who write about the collapse of our liberties but do nothing more. The Deep State has placed chains around our necks and reduced the nations electoral system into little more than its own personal pawn game. The 2nd Amendment is toilet paper as is the entire Constitution. It is so because we allowed it. Congress is owned by Wall Street, the Executive office owned by China, and the country controlled by the WEF and UN.

    So whats the answer ? How do we break the Communist chains we allowed around our necks ? The Colonies found a way to break the chains placed upon them by King George. Life without chains lasted a little over 200 years. It took a war to achieve such a magnificent achievement - A Constitutional Republic. Im afraid we are going to have to fight another war if we want to end the chains of tyranny that now binds us. Can the people do it ? Can the people once again break the chains that now bind us ? I am increasingly doubtful.

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  3. We should never have gone into Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of those countries. There is a Constitutional mechanism for what happened: A letter of Marque. The government could have issued a letter of Marque, listing the names of Bin Laden and the other leaders of Al Qaeda. $1 billion reward to deliver Bin Laden, dead or alive, to any US military installation. Lesser amounts for his lieutenants. How many of those Camel Jockeys would have done the job for us for a billion bucks?

    It would have been cheaper in both American lives and funds.

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  4. We were beyond screwed the minute the official response was to restrict the Constitutional rights of Americans, rather than completely obliterating our enemies.
    We had every right to go places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

    But we should have done it from 40,000', with B-52s, and left nothing but smoking ruins in our wake. We should have been making 2000# fuel-air munitions and cluster bombs 24/7/365, and expending them until those places were completely uninhabited deserts, without so much as one stone standing on top of another, such that people would use "Americans" as a substitute for Baba Yaga and the chupacabra to frighten their children into compliance with brushing their teeth and eating their vegetables for the next 1000 years.

    We should also have dropped most of the Congress on those places from 40,000' as well. Head first. They and we would both be better off had we done that.
    Forget 9/11. It was merely a pretext for a worse assault on America than everything perpetrated by all foreign enemies, combined, from 1776 to date, inclusive, and everyone who died that day and since was totally wasted effort.
    At least in 1812, the British only burned parts of D.C.
    In 2001, the Congress and the federal government burned down the republic, and everything that underpins it.

    Until we clean house in 50 state capitols and Mordor on the Potomac, in a way that makes Arlington Cemetery look like leftovers of a small fracas, that will remain inescapably true.

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    Replies
    1. "Smoking ruins?" You got something against turning them to Trinitite?

      The one problem that the Last Refuge piece had was very little mention of corruption. Even simple things like congress passing rules against inside trading and then dumping those rules when people stopped talking about it. It's a cliche that we see people go to congress as "working people" becoming millionaires on a salary well under that.

      How about a certain ex-bartender who's joining that club? Or that Vermont millionaire always ranting about punishing the rich? Being a moron isn't a crime. Taking money like they do should be.

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    2. Why f*** things up for the people downwind?

      Call it ecologically responsible vengeance.

      I'd be equally happy if we'd landed the entire Army there, and told them to go all Genghis Khan from horizon to horizon, leaving no one alive afterwards, nothing standing, poisoning all the wells, and salting the earth afterwards.

      Rome got more than a few things right in their day.

      Hanging the crooks in Washington (that would be all of them) could take place the following week.
      I'd like to see them fleeing on foot ahead of a wall of Abrams and Bradleys using just the chain guns and MGs.

      Leakers to be ground under the treads.

      It would have a salutary effect on future officeholders.

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  5. Brett Cavanaugh in bush younger admin helped write the patriot act

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