THIS MODERN WORLD

More about the book here. (Warning to those of you at work: the video starts up automatically on that page. It’s loud.)

I mentioned the Safire Standard for accuracy in opinion columns a few posts below, which made me think of the now-retired pundit’s own wacky anitcs in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. To summarize (with some material lifted from the older post):

As you certainly remember, President Bush spent much of 9/11 in search of a safe place to hide—which elicited a critical response from William Safire in his September 12, 2001 column:

Did our national leadership respond well in the first hours of crisis, when nobody knew what would follow the devastation in New York and the attack in Washington?

Stopping air and rail transportation was necessary, and blocking access to national monuments and federal offices was prudent. New York’s governor and mayor did their duty by sticking to their posts and reassuring their fellow New Yorkers live on television, recalling King George VI during London’s blitz.

But the Secret Service took full charge of President Bush, who was in Florida, running him secretly around the country making a nervous tape. Even in the first horrified moments, this was never seen as a nuclear attack by a foreign power. Bush should have insisted on coming right back to the Washington area, broadcasting — live and calm — from some secure facility not far from the White House.

However, after this column appeared, someone from the White House (probably Dick Cheney) clearly took Safire out to the woodshed and gave him a dressing down, because the next day he quickly adopted the party line:

A threatening message received by the Secret Service was relayed to the agents with the president that “Air Force One is next.” According to the high official, American code words were used showing a knowledge of procedures that made the threat credible.

(I have a second, on-the-record source about that: Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, tells me: “When the president said ‘I don’t want some tinhorn terrorists keeping me out of Washington,’ the Secret Service informed him that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts. In light of the specific and credible threat, it was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort.”)

–snip–

“It would have been irresponsible of him to come back, pounding his chest,” says my source, “when hostile aircraft may have been headed our way. Any suggestion that he should have done so is ludicrous.”

Confession: I made just that suggestion in yesterday’s column, which stimulated two set-it-straight calls. Why didn’t the V.P. make an appearance during that long afternoon in Bush’s stead? The official reason is that Cheney was busy in the basement; the real reason, I think, is that he was unduly concerned it would appear presumptuous.

The most worrisome aspect of these revelations has to do with the credibility of the “Air Force One is next” message. It is described clearly as a threat, not a friendly warning — but if so, why would the terrorists send the message? More to the point, how did they get the code-word information and transponder know-how that established their mala fides?

That knowledge of code words and presidential whereabouts and possession of secret procedures indicates that the terrorists may have a mole in the White House — that, or informants in the Secret Service, F.B.I., F.A.A. or C.I.A. If so, the first thing our war on terror needs is an Angleton-type counterspy.

Now, it quickly became clear that there was no threat to Air Force One that day, no mole in the White House, no terrorists with knowledge of secret codes. So certainly William Safire wrote a third column, setting the record straight, right?

Of course he did not.

I keep trying to write about this anniversary, but I just don’t have anything. So instead, an unpleasant trip down memory lane:

Four days ago, my wife and I were in the park near our Brooklyn apartment, taking the dog for his morning run, when we heard a loud, sudden bang. It sounded like a transformer blowing somewhere, or a garbage truck hitting a particularly wicked pothole. We didn’t think much of it until we started walking home and noticed the ominous plume of smoke in the sky, which we initially took as evidence of a fire in the neighborhood somewhere–until two workmen standing out in front of an apartment building told us that two planes had just crashed into each of the twin towers. The bang we heard was the second plane hitting (I don’t know why we didn’t hear the first).

* * *
A man on the radio insisted that he had seen a military jet crash into the buildings, someone else was talking about reports of hijacked airliners with passengers aboard. We didn’t know what to believe.

And then…there was another loud noise and I looked up to see a round puff of smoke coming out of the south tower and there were people screaming and moaning on the rooftops around me and my brain couldn’t quite seem to process what we were witnessing: the first of the two towers had just collapsed.

* * *
An acrid smoke billowed up from the wreckage and soon enveloped our neighborhood. We went inside and closed the windows–not wanting to breath whatever was floating in the air — and then spent most of the rest of the day staring numbly at the television, like everyone else. We went up to the hospital a couple of times and tried to give blood, but were turned away both times because they had more volunteers than they had resources to deal with them. Now, it appears that little of that blood will be needed, because there just aren’t going to be very many survivors from this thing. A friend of ours is a doctor and volunteered at one of the emergency stations set up somewhere, and reports the eeriness of a cavernous room filled with empty , unneeded hospital beds.

* * *
We went to a candlelight vigil last night, in which hundreds of people gathered on the streets of our Brooklyn neighborhood while fighter jets circled overhead, as they did all day during the President’s visit to lower Manhattan. The crowd gathered to pay tribute to the twelve men from our local fire department lost in the tragedy, and it was both moving and disturbing. Some in the crowd sang “Give Peace a Chance,” while others chanted “U.S.A! U.S.A!” as if they were at a football rally.

I walked away feeling that this was the cusp, the moment at which the mood turns from grief to vengeance.

* * *
The Administration has wasted no time in using this event to consolidate their power and advance their goals. As Norman Solomon reports: On Friday, the Senate voted 98-0 for a war resolution. It says: “The president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” This resolution, written as a blank check, is payable with vast quantities of human corpses.

* * *
There is a surreal quality to life in Brooklyn right now. It rained yesterday, but apart from that, the days have been obscenely beautiful, as cool crisp fall weather finally overtakes the oppressive humidity of summer. There are frequently fighter jets in the air above us, and as the airports reopen, every airplane in the sky now inspires a jolt of adrenalin and dread. And weighing heavily over it all, the knowledge that across the river, rescue workers and construction crews are grappling with horrors which are certainly, as Mayor Giuliani put it, “more than we can bear.” And yet life goes on. Everyone I know seems a little shell shocked, but people still go about their daily lives. Work resumes, children play, the dog must be walked.

But I haven’t been to the park once since this thing happened without seeing someone being comforted by a friend or lover as they break down in tears.

…mostly, I hate these yearly looks back. I’ll go to great lengths to avoid watching the cable networks rebroadcasting their coverage of that day. I thought about not posting anything at all, but that didn’t seem right either. Five years is some kind of milestone. Five years of lies, war, chaos, and stupidity.

One more thought from the immediate aftermath:

As Jake Tapper writes in Salon: ‘The nation is heading into a war that Bush described in his Thursday address as possibly including “covert operations, secret even in success.” One military official told the Washington Post Monday that because “this is the most information-intensive war you can imagine …We’re going to lie about things.” ‘

Winston Churchill famously said that “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

We have been warned. And yet, I promise you that most of us will believe what we are told, unquestioningly, obediently, blindly.

The CBS Evening News gave Rush Limbaugh a little more.

Sean Hannity has said that he’ll be on one of these spots as well.

Will the media ever stop trying to cuddle up and make nice and just accept the fact that wingnuts hate them and always will?

I can’t believe it’s already been five years since that Tuesday. It’s one of those moments so burned in my brain that it seems like it was both a million years ago and a few days ago at the same time…if that makes any sense. Kind of a fucked-up time to have to relive every year (or as we’re supposed to call it now, Patriot Day). I’ll spare you the sight of me sinking back into the emotional muck of 9/11 (though it would be easy to do) and get right into discussing politics. Besides, I’m sure none of you need much of a reminder how horrible it was to watch the murders of thousands of people on live television.

All last week, there’s been a discussion on NPR and elsewhere on the question of “Why haven’t we been attacked again?”. My short answer would be that multiple attacks don’t fit into the “bleed until bankruptcy” strategy that al Qaeda seems to favor. Besides, that question is almost tailor-made to make our leaders look good. The real question in the aftermath of 9/11 isn’t when we’ll get hit again, but “Is the United States government able to keep its citizens safe?” Of course, that question was answered a year ago :

To me it’s impossible to separate 9/11 from Hurricane Katrina. For four years we’d been promised that the leadership of George Bush and the Republican party could keep us safe, yet the aftermath of a natural disaster showed us that the federal government can’t even protect us from a threat they have a week to prepare for. How could we expect them to respond to a dirty bomb attack, on electromagnetic pulse, a nuclear bomb smuggled in a shipping container, another anthrax attack, a few trucks filled with fertilizer explosives surrounding a sports arena, or more airliners hijacked with terrorists using ceramic or plastic blades and crashing them into chemical plants, the New York Stock Exchange, or the Capitol building during the State of the Union? These are the scenarios that keep me up at night and, al Qaeda’s motives aside, there are still plenty of crazy people out there who’d love to kill as many Americans as possible.

So, where does that leave us? Well, the presidential administration we’re stuck with for the next two years is a deadly combination of arrogance, stubbornness, and being-wrong-about-everything-ness. But it is an election year (which you may have guessed from the President’s suddenly sparked interest in Osama Bin Laden), so there’s still an opportunity to change course. Who’s holding the President’s feet to the fire to ensure that Russia’s missing nuclear weapons are tracked down? Or that shipping containers entering the United States are searched? Or that people entering this country aren’t here under falsified documents? Or that the FBI and CIA are sharing information? Or that our intelligence agencies have enough people to translate the mountain of data they’re receiving?

Right now the Legislative branch is controlled by people who have bent over backwards to protect the President, despite his string of failures. They excused his stonewalling of the 9/11 Commission, dragged their feet on investigating Iraq’s many scandals (torture, WMD’s, no-bid-contracts), ignored his extra-constitutional dalliances (imperial presidency, signing statements), and they’ve made the extraordinary choice of working to change the laws that the President has been willfully breaking rather than insist that he follow the laws like the rest of us. That’s your Republican party in action.

So on this fifth anniversary of the worst day of my life, I’m tired of watching the country be crippled by its grief and fear. We’re in danger, things aren’t getting better, and we need to keep asking the same goddamn questions until we get answers. Who’s keeping us safe? Well, I know who isn’t.