A Little 9/11 Truth

I don't remember ever linking to a book review before, but this one, from Jacob Heilbrunn at the New York Times, is such a great summary of facts that I urgently recommend it to you. As so often, I was led to it via Atrios. It concerns the truth about the Bush Administration's catastrophic response to the 9/11 attacks:

"Preoccupied with building a costly missile defense system to counter a spurious menace from Russia and with maintaining “full spectrum dominance” over the rest of the globe, most Bush administration officials blithely ignored the danger emanating from the caves of Afghanistan, where Osama Bin Laden and his acolytes plotted against America. Confronted by a small group of mostly Saudi nationals armed with box cutters, the central nervous system of the country’s defense agencies went into a state of cataleptic shock...

...efforts to reconstruct the tragedy itself were, at best, resented and, at worst, impeded by the sprawling defense bureaucracy and the Bush administration, both of which had much to hide.

Perhaps nothing perturbs Farmer more than the contention that high-ranking officials responded quickly and effectively to the revelation that Qaeda attacks were taking place. Nothing, Farmer indicates, could be further from the truth...

...both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military’s readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington.

Farmer scrutinizes F.A.A. and Norad rec­ords to provide irrefragable evidence that a day after a Sept. 17 White House briefing, both agencies suddenly altered their chronologies to produce a coherent timeline and story that “fit together nicely with the account provided publicly by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney.”

Go read it all. It's well worth it, and I suspect the book is too. It is vital that we see that the truth of this sorry chapter in our history, brought to you by the Republican party, is not forgotten, and that we do not allow conservatives to overwrite the truth of their despicable performance the way they did with the Vietnam war, or the criminal and treasonous behavior of their great Saint Ronald Reagan. We have paid a terrible price for the unwillingness of Democrats to stand up to Republican abuse and state the simple truth about our recent history. I, for one, am not willing to let it happen again.

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