"The world after 9/11: Naomi Klein prevails again"

Gerald Kaplan (The Globe and Mail-CA):

Osama bin Laden inflicted a terrible crime on the American people. America’s elites and their allies have done the rest. MORE...

Frank Rich: "Day’s End-The 9/11 decade is now over. The terrorists lost. But who won?"

Frank Rich (New York Magazine):

In retrospect, the most consequential event of the past ten years may not have been 9/11 or the Iraq War but the looting of the American economy by those in power in Washington and on Wall Street. This was happening in plain sight—or so we can now see from a distance. At the time, we were so caught up in Al ­Qaeda’s external threat to America that we didn’t pay proper attention to the more prosaic threats within.
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It was only a month after 9/11 that the Enron scandal erupted, kicking off a larger narrative that would persist for the rest of the decade. The Houston energy company was a corporate Ponzi scheme that anticipated the antics at financial institutions, mortgage mills, and credit-rating agencies during the subprime scam. Enron had also been the biggest patron of Bush’s political career, and so the president dutifully promised a crackdown, with a new “financial crimes SWAT team” and “tough new criminal penalties for corporate fraud.” But this propaganda campaign was no more reality-based than the one that would promote Saddam’s weapons of mass ­destruction. Once the Enron collapse became old news, federal regulatory agencies and law enforcement were encouraged to go fishing as the housing bubble inflated and banks manufactured toxic paper that would send America and the world into a ruinous dive rivaling bin Laden’s cruelest fantasies.

It is that America—the country where rampaging greed usurped the common good in wartime, the country that crashed just as Bush fled the White House—that we live in today. It has little or no resemblance to the generous and heroic America we glimpsed on 9/11 and the days that followed. Our economy and our politics are broken. We remain in hock to jihadist oil producers as well as to China. Our longest war stretches into an infinite horizon. After watching huge ­expenditures of American blood and ­treasure install an Iran-allied “democracy” in a still-fratricidal Iraq, Americans have understandably resumed their holiday from history where it left off, turning their backs on the Arab Spring.

Thanks to the killing of the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and the scattering of Al Qaeda, at least no one can say, ten years later, that the terrorists won. But if there’s anything certain about the new decade ahead, it’s that sooner or later we will have to address the question of exactly who did. MORE...

"The Way We Forget"

William Rivers Pitt:

This country of ours has a monstrous capacity to forget. We are able to forget - if we ever knew - what happened two hundred years ago, one hundred years ago, fifty years ago, ten years ago. Worse, we are able to forget what happened one year ago, last month, last week, and even yesterday. We forget, we ignore, we refuse to know, and in our deliberate ignorance are found the seeds of further destruction, widely sown and also to be forgotten.

It has been made far too clear that our national amnesia certainly extends over the last two years. After an era of Republican rule that saw vast economic collapse, the abrogation of basic rights, the trashing of Constitutional law, two decade-long wars that still have no end in sight, a catastrophic terrorist attack that could have been prevented, the virtual annihilation of a major American city that could have been prevented, and the theft and waste of trillions of dollars, every available poll appears to indicate that the American people have already forgotten all about it, and are perfectly ready to let the wolves back inside the fence. MORE...

The YoungTurks: "Ratigan Rant On 9/11 Attacks" (video)

The Young Turks, video (11:21).

The Day After: Maddow on "Exploiting 9/11 for fear and profit" (video)

MSNBC-Maddow, video (10:00).

Howie P.S.: Who is Newt's new friend?

Greenwald: "Amazingly prescient/smart 9/12/2001 column from Hunter Thompson"

Glenn Greenwald:

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.

Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them. MORE...