The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse.

[elleng]

by Richard A. Clarke


Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense. . .

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/29/AR2009052901560.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

[patrice]

1. Ignored warnings from many other countries too . . .

http://www.historycommons.org/essay.jsp?article=essaytheytriedtowarnus

snip

So many countries warned the US: Afghanistan, Argentina, Britain, Cayman Islands, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, and Russia. Yet the two countries in the best position to know about the 9/11 plot—Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—apparently didn’t give any warning at all.

snip

[NYC_SKP]

2. The "trauma defense" has been my perception over the last few weeks...

"but we had just been attacked, we felt we had to take every possible step to protect America"....bullshit.

Seriously, they knew better then, they know better now.

[RandomThoughts]

3. Laws are created in times of peace to protect us from ourselves.

When things are relativity ok, and peaceful, people come together and decide what they are allowed to do, and what is bad and wrong. Those things are called laws and are seen in things like the Geneva convention.

If we are in the better ways, happy and not worried, we do not violate those laws because we know they are wrong. And we make the world better by holding those that do those violent wrong things to account.

But under the suppression of fear or anger, many times people lose the ability to know what is right or wrong, because of the darkness they use to guide them. In their hate and anger, they many times pick bad paths.

But that's when the laws are needed, they are there to protect us from our own failings. When tempted to turn to torture, Bush and Cheney had the protection of law, the law would have stopped them from torturing and kept America more safe, and them from being criminals by torturing.

But they discarded and ignored the law and lost their protection by discarding them.

This is another reason laws need to be made real by consequences, because they can protect us from ourselves, and help us from making bad choices.

[KG]

4. 9/11 wasn't trauma, it was an excuse to put into motion well laid plans.

[elleng]

5. May Be,

but it would be foolish to argue that it was not traumatic.

[KG]

6. it wasn't traumatic to the cheney administration, it was welcome.

the american people may have been traumatized, but trauma was just the public face the adminstration used to get the rest of the country to get behind the criminal acts the neo-cons had in store.