Where were you on 9/11/2001?

Hi Katalusis friends, I first published this piece in 2007. On today's anniversary of September 11, 2001, I’m sure many of us will once again be reminded of where we were when terrorists struck the Twin Towers in NYC. 

Two Men and a Truck, assisted by my son, helped me move into my new apartment that Labor Day weekend.

A few days later, rushing around to get ready for work, I paused at my second floor east window to watch the breaking of a bright new day in suburban St. Paul.

On the way to my car, I heard the ominous sound of propellers overhead and looked up to see helicopters circling the area. I pulled out of our parking lot and within minutes, I was stuck in a massive traffic jam ― a big tanker had overturned on the nearby interstate.
It took forever to get to work and by the time I parked and walked to my cube in the Communication team’s office, the place was eerily deserted. My co-workers were across the hall staring at a conference room TV. I caught up with them just in time to see the plane slam into the second tower on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. 

Life as we knew it, both locally and globally, changed instantly. Formerly reasonable and presumably peace-loving acquaintances became angry and defiant. Still numb with shock, I stood in the corridor as a regional vice-president strode toward me and said, “We’ve got to hunt these people down and kill them.” 

Hunt them down and kill them. 

I heard that phrase often in the days that followed. The media echoed the refrain and soon the drumbeat began for an all out war on terror that called first for bombing to smithereens already shell-shocked Afghanistan, still struggling to recover from a previous war.

Barely pausing for breath and with unlimited hubris, the Administration geared up to send the people of Iraq into “shock and awe” with a targeted, high tech, pre-emptive strike against their country.
It’s rumored that he who appeared in a video recently with beard trimmed and dyed black is still hanging out somewhere along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the meantime, the insurgency, once referred to by Donald Rumsfeld as a few dead-enders, demonstrated decisively that an I.E.D. concealed in a strategically placed goat cart on a back street in Baghdad, could effectively checkmate the world’s greatest superpower with all of its technological superiority.

Six years later, it bears repeating until we’re blue in the face: Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

There were in the beginning occasional voices of dissent. The late Susan Sontag published an essay in the New Yorker shortly after 9/11 guaranteed to provoke the wrath of a good number of liberals, conservatives, and those in between. Six years later, her remarks would seem prophetic to any semi-conscious American. Here are a few excerpts:

“The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing…

“A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration, apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush…

“A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere – about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense…

‘"Our country is strong," we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be.”

Those days I found refuge and sanity at my church where we gathered, not so much to rail at our “enemies,” but to get centered again in the midst of a national mood combining a volatile mix of nationalism, hyped up patriotism, and evangelical fervor rapidly approaching hysteria.

Ignoring the hype, members of our congregation stood fast and for whatever it was worth, a majority of us signed a resolution opposing the invasion of Iraq.

When it was too late to matter, the NY Times, the daily paper that sets the news agenda in the United States, published a front-page apology for its inadequate investigative reporting in the run-up to that ill-fated invasion, including the farce about weapons of mass destruction.

Let it be noted here that from day one, my son insisted: “The war with Iraq is about oil, Mom.”
But even at our most cynical, small incidents occur that nurture our spirituality and keep us going. I was browsing in the local Barnes and Noble one evening, when another customer hesitantly asked my help. Identifying himself as Muslim, he said he was looking for a book on comparative religion; he wanted to learn more about other faith traditions.

As we scanned the shelves in B & N’s skimpy section on religion, another gentleman joined us. Turned out he graduated from a Catholic seminary in my home state of Ohio. He referred our Muslim seeker to a nearby used bookstore that he often frequented.

It occurred to me later that our theologically diverse threesome, representing Unitarian-Universalism, Roman Catholicism, and Islam, had bonded immediately in a common quest. And I found myself wondering just how a Muslim in search of greater religious understanding happened to run into not one, but two seminary graduates at a neighborhood bookstore.

In the spirit of process theology that advocates bridges instead of barriers, religious leaders as disparate as Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh and evangelical Christian Jim Wallis, editor of “Sojourners Magazine,” began pleading for sanity and calling for peace.

In his book, Calming the Fearful Mind: a Zen Response to Terrorism, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote: “Many of us claim to be disciples of the Buddha, of Jesus Christ, of Mohammed, but we don’t listen to their teachings. Hatred cannot overcome hatred. Violence cannot overcome violence. The bible, the Koran, the Torah, and the Sutras teach us that. But we don’t always believe in our spiritual path. We must think that our spiritual teachings are not realistic, because we have put so much faith in military and financial power. We think that money and weapons can make us strong. But our country has a lot of weapons and a lot of money and we are still very afraid and insecure.” 

The next time I spoke to my son about the prospects for peace, he looked me steadily in the eye and said: “It’s about oil, Mom.”
 
Jim Wallis reports in "God's Politics," which offers a challenge to both the Left and the Right, that President Bush, who once publicly named Jesus his favorite philosopher, refused to meet with a delegation of U.S. church leaders before leading the nation to war. However, on Feb. 18, 2003, the U.S group was joined by international church leaders in a fifty-minute meeting with Tony Blair. Wallis said they testified in moving personal statements to their conviction that war was not the answer to the real threats posed by Saddam Hussein.

Wallis adds, “We told the prime minister that the answer to a brutal, threatening dictator must not be the bombing of Baghdad’s children.”

Today, the nearly 3,800 American troops who have died in Iraq since the invasion exceeds the number of Americans who died in the attacks on the Twin Towers.

And a recent poll in the Los Angeles Times estimates the death toll of Iraqi civilians at 1.2 million.
As for the children, large numbers of those who have survived the war so far are orphaned, homeless, and malnourished. 

UNICEF reports: “Many children are separated from their families or on the streets, where they are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Most children have experienced trauma but few receive the care and support they need to help them cope with so much chaos, anxiety and loss.”
9/11, we remember, dawned golden bright. Six years later, the skies over Ground Zero were gray, as raindrops mingled with the tears of survivors gathered nearby.

I wasn’t the only one reminded of where I was and what I was doing on 9/11: Roger Cohen wrote in the NY Times:

“My daughter’s fourth birthday was that morning, and we looked at the billowing smoke from the water’s edge in Brooklyn Heights and she cried. I took the subway to work, one of the last to run, and a woman beside me was sobbing. When, that night, I emerged into Times Square, nobody. I walked for miles through a ghost city.” 

Cohen recalls:

“The United States was not previously a homeland, it was just our land, and that unhappy neologism with its Orwellian echoes, its sense of exclusion rather than inclusion, its faint fatherland-like echoes, seems to capture the closing and the menace and the terror-terror refrain with which we have all learned to live.”

Prompted by that refrain, we continue to ask the question that Sen. John Warner asked Gen. David Petraeus in last week’s hearings on Capitol Hill: “Are we safer now?”

And if you were watching, you saw the general, with his chest full of medals, struggle mightily before finally acknowledging, “I actually don’t know.”

Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker offered only a glimmer of optimism in their recommendations for further military engagement in war-torn Iraq based on small signs of success, overshadowed lately by several credible reports of numerous failed benchmarks.

Instead of listening to our president’s speech this Thursday night, I went out to dinner at Culver’s with my son, who had also been following the week’s developments. Pausing between bites of his butter burger, he said, “Mom, it’s about oil.”
The Petraeus report, appended by Bush’s speech, was best described by one commentator as a calculated attempt to kick the can down the road another six months.

According to the transcripts, Bush boasted, “Our troops in Iraq are performing brilliantly. Along with Iraqi forces, they have captured or killed an average of more than 1,500 enemy fighters per month since January.”
And so we continue as we began, determined to hunt down and kill every last one of those whom we fear and label as our enemies.

A brief digression here: In his just released 531-page memoir, Alan Greenspan, a widely respected conservative Republican and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, writes without elaboration:

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

I knew that.

In words compatible with process theology, Thich Nhat Hanh says:

“We have looked for strength and security in military might. “We have attempted to defend ourselves with weapons of war. We have brought great suffering and destruction upon ourselves and others. Our way of dealing with terrorism is taking us down a dangerous path of distrust and fear. It is time to stop. Let us pause. It is time to seek true strength and true security. We cannot escape our interdependence with other people, with other nations of the world. Let us take this moment to look deeply and find a path of liberation. It is possible to look at each other again with the eyes of trust, camaraderie, and love.” 

May it be so.

Note to readers: Today's post is an edited, condensed version of the presentation I gave yesterday at my church fellowship. As always, your comments are welcome.

Virginia

The deterioration of the United States since 9/11

Posting hours after bin Laden’s death was announced on May 2, I suggested the notorious one may have won the battle he led against the Western world. Bob Burnett, Berkely writer and retired Silicon Valley executive would agree. Burnett writes:

The death of Osama bin Laden is an opportunity to reflect upon the deterioration of the United States since the attacks on September 11, 2001. We've entered into an endless state of war and our economy teeters on the brink of collapse. And, as a people, we've developed a distinctive derangement.

America's craziness developed in four stages over an eleven-month period: First, on November 7, 2000, there was a controversial presidential election. On December 9th the US Supreme Court intervened, and, as a result, George W. Bush became president. Bush had had an undistinguished business and political career and was the least qualified presidential candidate in eighty years.

Read more:

And It Came to Pass in the Age of Obama

cross-posted at the Widdershins

In the months following 9/11, George W. Bush squandered soaring personal popularity as president both at home and abroad by pursuing policies in the name of national security that compromised the constitutional rights of Americans and alienated international allies.

Candidate Barack Obama accused John McCain of representing a third Bush term. Since Obama’s inauguration as president, however, his Bushian decisions have continually dismayed his devout supporters, while the rest of us can only shake our heads as we watch a rerun of a popular president leading the country down the same disastrous road.

The fact that Obama, a non-tenured track lecturer, padded his thin resume by claiming to have been a constitutional law professor ought to have alerted the electorate. But those were the days of Obama-luv when even the more staid types spoke in hallowed terms of “the age of Obama,” as if we were anointing a pharaoh or king instead of electing a president.

Martin Garbus, trial lawyer and author of six books on constitutional law, summarizes at Huffpo what has come to pass in the age of the faux professor:

Denying the public information, rejecting the public's free speech "right to know" has become a pattern of this administration. Obama has become radical in his commitment to secrecy, not totally unlike the Bush administration.

Late Friday, June 26, 2009:

1. Obama announced a plan to draft laws to detain terror suspects indefinitely.
2. Obama announced it would be done by exec order so as to bypass Congress. The Washington Post article which caught the events was entitled "Executive order of detainees would sidestep Congress."
3. Obama's Attorney General told a federal judge that the suit by the families of the four detainees who committed suicide at the Guantanamo Bay prison should be dismissed because the issue is "fraught with political and military concerns" and Cheney, the government lawyers and the others have immunity from prosecution.
4. Obama's Attorney General again delayed release of a 2004 CIA report which paved the way for detainee waterboarding, sleep deprivation and physical abuse. An extraordinary article by Luke Mitchell in this month's Harper's Magazine shows we are continuing that torture.
5. Obama's Attorney General delayed, again, turning over 35 Bush Era defense documents to Judge William K. Hellerstein, a New York federal judge on a suit filed by the ACLU.

Garbus concludes:

Hasn't he learned.

We see the similarities between the two administrations; similarities Obama promised us we would never see.

The First Amendment requires the government to be transparent. It requires the people be told exactly what the government is doing in their name. That is what democracy is about.

Obama's attempt at secrecy, continued torture and repression of speech must be stopped.

This reader’s comment following Garbus’ post would be funny it were not so pathetically tragic:

Lochmon

For the first few months, I thought Obama was playing third-dimensional chess, or stalling for time, or something....

Now I no longer believe he means what he says regarding transparency. His stated preference to "look forward, not back" regarding the constitutional abuses of the Cheney/Bush years was bad enough, but his administration's refusal to launch investigations (and criminal prosecutions where appropriate) has mutated into an actual protection of the previous admin... going so far as to, with a straight face, offer ridicule by late-night comics as a rationale for concealment. Obama has become an accomplice to the Bush years, not that that will buy him any "bipartisan" friends.

Even when I believe he's telling the truth about what he intends--preferring a public option for health care, for example, or wanting stronger regulation of the economy--it looks like he's too willing to roll over and trade it all away for the sake of compromising with people who prefer to destroy everything we elected Obama for.

I'm done with supporting this guy, unless and until he grows a backbone and gets serious about the promises he made. "Politics as usual" isn't going to cut it.

Gen. Petraeus: U.S. Violated Geneva Conventions

Gen. David Petraeus

Despite Obama’s “We’re too busy to deal with it” excuse for not investigating the possibility of war crimes committed by the previous administration, the torture issue is not going to go away.

John Stolz, a co-founder of VoteVets.org who served as a captain in Iraqi Freedom is calling attention to a recent statement by Gen. Petraeus in which he admits the U.S. has violated the Geneva Conventions.

Stolz quotes Petraeus from his recent appearance on Fox News:

Question: So is sending this signal that we're not going to use these kind of techniques anymore, what kind of impact does this have on people who do us harm in the field that you operate in?

Gen. Petraeus: Well, actually what I would ask is, "Does that not take away from our enemies a tool which again have beaten us around the head and shoulders in the court of public opinion?" When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions we rightly have been criticized, so as we move forward I think it's important to again live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international justice arena and to practice those.

To read more and watch a video by Jay Bagwell of VoteVets.org on the use of torture go here.

Obama to Recycle Bush Administration’s “Cash for Trash” Financial Policy?

During the campaign, Obama reminded voters that continuously repeating the same act while expecting a different outcome is a good definition of insanity. He also warned us that electing John McCain would mean four more years of the Bush Administration.

So now hear this: Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman despairs this morning that the Obama Administration’s “new” plan to save the banks is nothing more than a recycling of the “cash for trash” plan abandoned six months ago by Bush’s Treasury secretary Henry Paulson.

Krugman writes:

This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.

After all, we’ve just been through the firestorm over the A.I.G. bonuses, during which administration officials claimed that they knew nothing, couldn’t do anything, and anyway it was someone else’s fault. Meanwhile, the administration has failed to quell the public’s doubts about what banks are doing with taxpayer money.

And now Mr. Obama has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they’re doing.

It’s as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street. And by the time Mr. Obama realizes that he needs to change course, his political capital may be gone.

Let’s talk for a moment about the economics of the situation.

Right now, our economy is being dragged down by our dysfunctional financial system, which has been crippled by huge losses on mortgage-backed securities and other assets.

As economic historians can tell you, this is an old story, not that different from dozens of similar crises over the centuries. And there’s a time-honored procedure for dealing with the aftermath of widespread financial failure. It goes like this: the government secures confidence in the system by guaranteeing many (though not necessarily all) bank debts. At the same time, it takes temporary control of truly insolvent banks, in order to clean up their books.

That’s what Sweden did in the early 1990s. It’s also what we ourselves did after the savings and loan debacle of the Reagan years. And there’s no reason we can’t do the same thing now.

But the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, apparently wants an easier way out. The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks’ books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn’t be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there’s something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they’re doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.

You might say, why not try the plan and see what happens? One answer is that time is wasting: every month that we fail to come to grips with the economic crisis another 600,000 jobs are lost.

Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.

All is not lost: the public wants Mr. Obama to succeed, which means that he can still rescue his bank rescue plan. But time is running out.

The Nation’s Leadership Crisis in Government, Business, and the Media

David Gergen, posting at AC360 (CNN), is calling our attention today to more than a financial crisis; he writes:

“Yesterday’s stunning rejection by the House of Representatives of the financial rescue plan represents one of the clearest signs yet of the deepening leadership problem we are facing as a people.

“The pleas of a President, Congressional leadership, the business community, the press — all were ignored and defied by a majority of Members in the House. The opposition was especially intense among House Republicans, even though the most urgent pleas came from fellow Republicans in the executive branch. Those who voting against a rescue, in my judgment, should be held accountable by voters at the polls this November if the country now endures greater hardships.

“But we should recognize as well that the reason so many voted against the package was that the public has been against it — and in turn, the public has not been persuaded because it has lost trust in our national leadership. And THAT is a serious problem for a democracy — one that deserves more extensive debate about why the breakdown in trust and what can be done about it.”

Gergen goes on to cite recent thought-provoking survey results that point to leadership failures not just in government but in other national institutions as well:

“At Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership, which I have the privilege of directing, we have taken public surveys in each of the past three years measuring confidence in our nation’s leadership. Our surveys have been done in partnership with U.S. News & World Report as well as Yankelovich.

“The results haven’t been pretty. In the fall of 2005, some 65% said we have a leadership crisis in the country. By 2006, the number had risen to 69%. And last fall, no less than 77% declared there was a crisis of leadership. Moreover, 79% said the United States would decline unless we get better leaders.

“Please note that this survey did not reflect just an unhappiness with President George W. Bush. It was widespread across 12 different institutions and leadership groupings. Only the military and the medical profession were given relatively high marks this past fall. Strikingly for purposes of understanding these past few days, the institutions and groups with the lowest levels of confidence were smack in the middle of this financial meltdown. Four of the five lowest rated groups in the index were business, Congress, the executive branch, and the press. No wonder the “leaders” of these institutions had so much trouble persuading the general public about the seriousness of our financial mess.

“What we see today then is a leadership vacuum. And in particular, we are experiencing an interregnum in Washington, a moment when the highest office in the land seems vacant and we are awaiting a new national leader.

“But we cannot assume that a new president, whether Barack Obama or John McCain, can magically wave a wand and solve our problems. It is clear that we need to rebuild leadership in institutions and groups across the board. And unless we do so, America’s greatness as a nation will be severely challenged.

“How should we renew and rebuild our national leadership? That, I hope, will be a conversation in which we can all engage in the days ahead. Your views would be welcome right now. Thank you.”

Hmm, maybe the leadership issue is why I continue to feel uninspired by both the Democratic and Republican tickets in the 2008 presidential race.

No Lincolnesque Moments in Springfield from the Obama-Biden Team

photo credits: artfiles.art.com

The two men onstage in Springfield, Ill., raised their voices today in praise of each other’s roots, values, and accomplishments while promising that together they would undo the damage done by eight years of Bush and McCain. In sum, the Obama-Biden team promised the electorate they would go forth and mend terribly broken Washington and not only change the direction of America, but the rest of the world as well.

The Obama team, masters of stagecraft from Berlin to Springfield, Ill., chose for obvious reasons the Land of Lincoln for the One to announce his candidacy 19 months ago. The campaign then cunningly scheduled today’s event at the same site for Obama to introduce Joe Biden as his folksy, given to colloquialisms, running mate.

Biden went so far as to begin and close his talk with mention of Lincoln.

You may have missed it during the primary, but when anyone dared to raise the issue of Obama’s lack of experience, his backers often compared his background to that of Abraham Lincoln. In other words, we were asked to accept on faith that as our next president, Obama would rise to the stature of the nation’s 16th president.

The other illogical argument in defense of Obama’s lack of qualifications for the top job in the country was to point out that many experienced people in the Bush Administration hadn’t done so well. As if to say that because some experienced people hadn’t lived up to expectations, an inexperienced person could be counted on to excel.

No one has been turned off by eight years of the Bush Administration more than I, and I tuned in to today’s event sincerely wanting to be inspired and filled with hope for change I could believe in. When the two speeches were over and the wives had joined their men onstage, I listened to the CNN crew’s mindless chatter for a few minutes before hitting the off button on my remote.

After all the calculated suspense for Obama’s long-awaited VP announcement, the big event in Springfield amounted to a couple of boring guys exchanging expressions of adulation for one another. If the spirit of Abraham Lincoln was on that stage, I missed it.

By the way, the Obama team has actually received kudos from the media for once again demonstrating its ability to stay on message and withhold information from the public. As they say, it’s a well oiled, tightly run political machine. Kind of reminds me of the early years of the Bush Administration.

The GOP: The Party of Shriveled Hearts

In today’s Washington Post, staff writer Peter Baker reviews Michael Gerson’s book, “Heroic Conservatism.”

The insider glimpses of the Bush Administration offered by the president's former senior advisor no longer have the power to shock. They’ve become as “discouragingly familiar” to the rest of us as they have to Gerson:

A proposal to help the poor or sick would be presented at a White House meeting, but Vice President Cheney's office or the budget team or some other skeptical officials would shoot it down. Too expensive. Wrong priority.

It’s no wonder victims of Katrina waited in vain; Cheney was calling the shots:

Gerson writes that he urged Bush to fire Rumsfeld after the 2004 election, but that Cheney opposed the move. He recounts meetings in which Cheney's office tried to kill proposals to increase training of death-row defense lawyers, transition assistance for prisoners and aid for Hurricane Katrina victims.

And finally we’re allowed to see something that might even make the nation's self-righteous values voters wince:

"The storm had also revealed a political and moral chasm in the Republican Party," he writes. "The president and I saw Katrina as an opportunity to open a debate on race and poverty. Anti-government Republicans saw Katrina as an opportunity to cut off medicine to old people. It confirmed the worst image of Republicans as the party of shriveled hearts."

The party of shriveled hearts: how’s that for a campaign slogan in 2008?