Slashdot Mirror
Marking 10 Years Since 9/11/2001
10 years ago today, coordinated terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. killed nearly 3,000 people. It wasn't the first terrorist attack directed against the U.S., or even on U.S. soil, but it was the deadliest, and came at a time of relative peace. Probably most people reading this remember where and how they heard the news. We've often discussed the consequences of the attack: security cordons, ID checks and metal detectors where none existed before, a reexamination of how U.S. policy affects international perception and attitudes, and the encroachment of surveillance policies and technology, to name a few. Today, we don’t want to inundate you with links to tributes and retrospectives, so we’ll offer the only thing we can: a look back at how the day unfolded here. Our thoughts are with everyone who lost friends and family members.
9/11 every day in Iraq
Isn't that 3000 ppl died, that happens also in car accidents every few months.
It's that USA went from being a respected member of the world community to a nation hated even among its allies. A nation that things it owns the whole world, can torture other country's ppls, can force them to act in ways it wants, and that is in everyone else's face.
It was the day that marked the beginning of the end for the USA.
The US way to write dates is stupid, indeed. Not that European is that much better either. Everyone should just use time format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS, for example 2011-09-11 15:30. It makes the most sense, and drops the stupid am/pm stuff too.
Actually I was reading /. when I heard about it.
My thoughts are with everyone who lost friends and family members in the attack.
Fuck religion! This is what happens, over and over.
what you propose is big-endian which is good because lexicographical sort works in the expected way. Little-endian (European style) is OK too. Middle endian is just silly.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They got us good. They caused the equivalent of a cytokine storm, a massive autoimmune response. We lost important freedoms, likely for good, and bankrupted ourselves financially and otherwise. The world hates us, our economy is in the toilet, the government is hopelessly corrupt, and we STILL haven't won, because no one really wins asymmetric warfare short of turning the insurgents and their country into a smoking glass crater. They did to us what we did to the Soviets not 20 years ago, and we fell for it.
...the families of EVERYONE who lost their lives as a result as a result... Iraqis, Afghans, Americans, EVERYBODY. I may be a little drunk right now but I am completely perplexed as to why everywhere and everybody's thoughts are focused on the people who lost their lives on that day, not the amount of lives that have been lost on the ensuing 3650 days since 2001. My thoughts are with all families of all nationalities who have lost their lives as a result, whether it be an Australian soldier, Iraqi family or an American who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. My thoughts are with you all.
The only politician in the public eye who has been "reexamining" US policy has been Ron Paul... and more recently the other politicos who have been following in his footsteps.
But keep in mind that unlike the others, Paul as ALWAYS been saying these things, for 30 years, while those others are just trying to get your vote, then will do whatever the hell they want if they get in office. Kind of like Obama.
This should be a day of mourning, not just because of the people who died (one of my managers at the time, Vladimir Tomasevic, I am lucky not to have been there too), but it's a day of mourning for the liberties and freedoms lost across USA but also across the entire freaking world. The entire world today looks more and more like a crazy toon town, with cops with machine guns everywhere, insane laws, TSA, just general loss of privacy, liberty, decency, everything, and this should also include the economic calamity that obviously worsened due to the insane response to the events.
This kind of response is not about fighting crime, which terrorism basically is. This kind of response is about destroying the human rights and freedoms, if that still means anything to anybody.
I wish to see return to normalcy and government non-intervention, so I think voting for Ron Paul is the obvious good first step. If the man understands one thing - it's liberty and the other thing is economy.
Also, WTF, USA? Where are 10 towers in place of those 2, 10 that are 5 times as tall?
You can't handle the truth.
First, thank you for your service to our country.
Second, fuck you for joining out of bloodlust. Service is a duty, not an excuse to become a heathen. Our military doesn't exist to settle feuds. It exists to uphold principles and rules of law, and to protect our nation from existential threats. Do you honestly think terrorist attacks from a landlocked nation that hasn't had a stable central government in three decades is capable of destroying our national sovereignty? Our failure to use restraint and common sense has cost this country its principles, the lives of your fellow soldiers, and trillions of dollars, all without making the world any safer from terrorism.
In short, your ignorance is more dangerous and has done more damage to this country than fundamentalist Islam.
As a citizen who is paying your salary, I wish I could fire you. You don't represent me or my values.
When I was a kid you'd turn the telly on and see another news report about the IRA blowing up a school or setting off a nail bomb in Soho. It happened too often to stop the country though and America didn't give two shits so the rest of the world didn't say anything. You just got on with it. This country's took a lot from terrorist attacks over the years but September 11th was the first proper kick in the teeth for the previously untouchable Americans who're brainwashed from birth to believe they're the greatest country in the world. That was probably a bigger shock than the lives lost - the fact that someone got to them. This really isn't flamebait so don't consider it as such please. Spare a thought for the lives lost in the attacks yes, but do these people ever spare a thought for the lives lost elsewhere. Those places not in the centre of the universe. http://www.amazon.com/Keep-Calm-Carry-T-Shirt-Red/dp/B004IC0WMM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315749737&sr=8-1
who did you want to invade and kill?
True. Of course, I also remember Palestinians cheering in the streets after the attack. Almost everyone in the world could be better behaved and more humane.
Yeah, you don't remember those here, do you. Every month USA seems to kill more innocent people abroad, in Libya, Iraq, Iran, you name it.
Why not remember those ? Because it's the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to think about. Everyday more money and resources are spent on military forces that could be used to educate children and help those who suffer, right in your own country. But this is not newsworthy stuff, and the big media is owned by the same people who control the military, so this is not something they want to talk about.
And terrorist attacks ? The facts point more to the fact that the terrorist, the same people who infringe on our human rights more and more every day, scanning our bodies at airports, spreading misinformation and lies and hogging resources that could be spreaded equally to actually create something great, are actually the US government and the people behind them.
Think for yourself, the mainstream media is bullshit and owned by the big money who also are dependent on the oil markets. Throw away your TV, it is the most powerful hypnotic spreader of lies ever inventend. Dismiss Hollywood, as their only task is only to make fiction out of our reality and make people believe that "that only happens in the movies".
THINK FOR YOURSELF. I would have thought Slashdot would even take into account all the controversy regarding 911 and stop just spreading the propaganda that we have been forcefed through all the mainstream sources.
I feel for those who lost loved ones during the attacks. But I have no sympathy for the real culprits behind this occultic mass murder.
GeoKone.NET
Science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings.
ours(average US citizen) is pathetically weak and short sighted. though, it's not like we have any direction or a plan to get behind.
Short sighted, eh?
Have you thought of the long term ramifications our invasions? And it's not just the emptying of our coffers (wars are extremely expensive) but it's also the chain reaction over the decades with regards to our foreign policy, economic health, and the liberties of our country.
And the pathetically weak part there .... I have a problem with you and other young people being over there and risking your lives for the stupidity of our elected officials. You may not have a problem with it, but I see it as a horrible waste of talent and life.
The main consequence of the attack was that Bush/Cheney invaded Iraq. It's now over 8 years later, and we're still at war in Iraq. No WMD, no Binladen connection, or any of Bush/Cheney's other lies were ever proven anything but lies. Like "the war will pay for itself". The Iraq War has cost us well over $3 TRILLION. It has cost us almost 5000 dead Americans, over 100,000 wounded Americans, and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis. Not to mention the severe costs of Americans torturing so many people.
We'll memorialize 9/11/2001 for a long time. But 3/19/03? What's that? It's the date the US invaded Iraq. Nobody wants to talk about that, so the war never ends.
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make install -not war
There is no doubt this was a tragedy and a sad day for the American people but from an outsiders perspective (an Australian perspective) this is what we saw happening to you guys.
Why has no forensic investigation ever been carried out and scrutinised? Why wasn't OBL tried and humiliated, and made to face his worst fear in front of the American public? I strongly feel that Americans have been denied actual justice and have instead been given a serve of McJustice by media/military. The true strength of Western democracies has been that they are countries run BY RULE OF LAW that has been refined over a roughly 800 year period. If we look at it from that perspective the military look like a very blunt tool, by comparison. Yet it was the tool of first resort. What does it say about our democracy that one of the strongest was so easily subverted?
The consequences of not applying those principles have drawn the U.S into an asymmetrical war that has cost trillions, without actually being able to hit a target of any meaning. I believe many forth amendment rights have practically been abandoned, you have a domestic spy policy now and bills introduced to protect the freedoms of everyday people are slowly being whittled down.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin "The constitution in it's current form will not save the United States from Despotism". The American people have been lied to and deceived, I'm ashamed to say in part, by an Australian Media mogul who learned how to do what he is doing to America in my homeland.
Justice delayed, Just denied.
The war that was being waged on America began when the Towers were hit but the enemy has attacked in such a way that the freedoms that protected US citizens have been hit far more severely than those Towers. The institution of democracy was weakened from within at one of the modern cradles of it's creation and now I see it more compromised than it has ever been. Human rights, the bedrock of your enviable Bill of Rights, the true strength of your nation were treated as an inconvenience to circumvented. Yet it's the only weapon capable of disarming a martyr.
Know your enemy, Know yourself, and whilst the truth must be painful for you to hear will you bludgeon to death the friend who has the courage to look you in the face and tell it to you? The one who says, "hey mate, yer acting like a dickhead". How can you possibly win in Iraq and Afghanistan when the real war is in the cathedrals of your institutions by an enemy who is manipulating you so skillfully that you dance willingly to the tune. Stop, friend, before you destroy yourself and ask who the real enemy is, what the true theater of this war is and what forces are at play?
How many of Ben Franklins warnings will you ignore? Why do I, an Australian, have to point out the wisdom of your own founding fathers whose words have been paraphrased ad infinitum;
Those who trade an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither security nor liberty
Then why America why, do you keep doing it?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No we don't.
Yes we are.
No we can't. I run the tech for an energy management equipment/network/software/support company in NYC that cuts energy consumption an average of 20%, mostly in heating oil/gas. The notoriously greedy building owners never pay the upfront costs, even when it pays back in under a year - that's close to 100% ROI, and rising with energy costs. The only way they do it is when there's government money and/or requirements to do it. Until NYC's law kicked in this year, building owners refused to even measure their energy consumption, let alone reduce it. This is the reality, not the "Mayor of Sim City" Ron Paul LARPing Ayn Rand.
The right thing would have been an "Apollo programme" for energy efficiency/alternatives to get our money, and the troops that always follow it, out of the Mideast. By now, a decade later, we could have cut our energy consumption by at least 30%, maybe more, and set trade policies to get all of our oil/gas from our biggest sources: Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean (and some gas from the Pacific). Instead we invaded Iraq, sending oil to $100:bbl for most of a decade, while promoting SUVs and even Hummers that get 1/3 the mileage we should require from cars. We could have interconnected regional and commuter rail, built more cargo and passenger interlinks. The $3 TRILLION we spent in Iraq so far could have bought us an energy, transit and building infrastructure that got the Mideast and much of the global corruption out of our hair permanently. Instead we spent the time, money and lives making things worse.
We don't need to do wild science fiction to solve our core economic/political problems. We need to do straightforward science and engineering. Which should be the easiest politics of all. Instead, we wanted a flight suit, a megaphone, and blood. We sure got it.
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make install -not war
The anniversary of 9/11 always pisses me off. No, not because 3000 people died. 3000 people dying was a tragedy to be sure and the relatives of the victims certainly have my condolences. What pisses me off is the cowardly way that we as Americans reacted and how we continue to behave.
After 9/11 we had a decision. We could either have been brave or cowardly. We chose the path of cowardice. Cowardice is submitting to terror by stripping ourselves of civil liberty, creating a department of "homeland security", and installing pr0n scanners in airports. Cowardice is secret no-fly lists and domestic spying. The worst cowardice was Americans mewing to their politicians to strip them of their liberties to save them from the oh-so-scary terrorist. Cowardice is the path we picked. We gave up essential liberties for a trivial amount of security.
The path of bravery would have been to have by clinging to our essential freedoms and liberties. The nation that stood down the fucking USSR, a REAL threat, managed to go half a century without surrendering their freedoms and running away screaming like cowards. Seriously, consider that. 9/11 stripped away freedoms that we had even when the US was facing down a nation armed with a nuclear arsenal big enough to wipe out the world multiple times over. We faced down a world ending threat and didn't balk, but when a couple of sheep herders managed to knock down two buildings in a manner that they can never repeat again, we promptly shit ourselves and surrender those liberties we guarded when facing down the existential threat that was the USSR. Talking about acting the part of the fucking coward. If there was ever a time to piss ourselves and wipe our ass with the constitution, it was during the Cold War.
Just think about it for a moment. In a time when it was our policy the literally destroy the world if our allies were attacked, you could get on an airplane unmolested and the fourth amendment was still actively enforced.
If you are an American, you are going to die by stuffing your face with too much fucking food. Fucking deal with it. You are not going to die in a terrorist attack. The food you stuff into your god damn face is going to be the death of you. That, or your own body is going to murder you with cancer. If you are really lucky, you might die in an exciting car accident. The fucking terrorist are not going to kill you. If you believe so, you are a god damn coward and an idiot.
Look here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
Fucking food bacteria kills 10x more people every year than terrorist did in 2001. It kills 300x more people than terrorist have killed Americans in the past decade. Terrorism in 2001 didn't even make it to the top 10 most likely ways to die. It falls well below chocking on your own god damn food over the past decade. That is right, stuffing food into your fat face is literally more likely to kill you than a terrorist.
So what pisses me off about 9/11 is that it is not a time for memorials and what not. What pisses me off is that we sit around circle jerking each other over how scary the terrorist are as we stuff our fat Americans asses with McDonalds food. We mew and bleat to politicians to protect us from one of the most unlikely ways to die imaginable, as we work on scoring a heart attack before the age of 60 by eating ourselves to death.
We could have a 9/11 style attack every single MONTH, and we would still have more people dying to being fat asses. Despite this, I don't see us cowardly begging the government to strip us of our civil liberties to save us from eating ourselves to death.
9/11 pisses me off each and every year because it is a sore reminder that when faced with a minor and petty threat to ourselves, we shit our pants, pissed ourselves, and picked the path of the coward. We gave up our civil liberties and elected asshole politicians who promised to rip apart the constitution. It pains me to think
Fair enough, but I can still blame Bush for ignoring his counter-terrorism team (eg: Richard Clark) practically screaming at him to take notice of Al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks. And I can blame Bush (and particularly Cheney) for railroading the country into a second, unnecessary war in Iraq, based on false information (eg: Downing Street memo). There's plenty more to mention, but you get the idea.
Yes, I also blame the Dems for going along with it. But there's no denying it was pushed by the neo-cons from the beginning.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I was once attacked by a dog. Since then I have carried around a solid gold tiger. It has made me the object of ridicule, my limbs are aching and I can barely afford to eat. But at least I haven't been attacked by any more dogs.
God bless your betters!
Not True. The number of deaths from drunken driving has been steadily reducing for many years. What we've done about it has been very effective. We've treated it as if it were a crime.
How effective do you all suppose it would have been to have declared "WAR" on drunk driving? My guess is that we'd have spent our treasury dry and had to borrow money from China. Probably would have ruined our economy. Sure glad that didn't happen.
It seems if we accept that 9/11 occurs every day in Iraq, then we must also accept that 9/11 happens every day in Libya. So, fuck those terrorist countries too for causing civilian deaths in a war zone.
Let's see... fuck Denmark, fuck Italy, fuck Netherlands, fuck Norway, fuck Sweden, fuck Spain, fuck Turkey, fuck Jordan, fuck Qatar, fuck UAE. Fuck them all.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Wait, wait, wait - the parent points out that there are thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians who have been killed or injured by US forces and he's modded "Troll"?!
Yeah, and you get -1 for questioning them. Huh. There's a lot of "Dumbth" in this thread so far, and I've only seen a third of the posts. "America, right or wrong!"
I do think hundreds of thousands of innocent casualties are far worse than a few thousand Wall Street Banksters (but I'll admit, I've developed a prejudice against the latter in recent years).
I'm not sure I'd blame the Iraq war on "*cough* oil *cough*", though. I blame it on Bush's arrogance, narcissism and naivete. That, and wanting to finish the job to make his pop proud of him.
OBL was a sh*thead, just as are all those who followed him (ask any *real* devout Muslim). That said, the US believing that ~3000 innocent (US based) civilians easily justifies hundreds of thousands of atrocities committed elsewhere is horrifying, to say the least.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Thinning out the Taliban? What are you talking about? The pourose border with Pakistan means the Taliban can move with relative ease to escape NATO forces. What's more they're receiving aid from Pakistani security services, so it's not like they don't have important allies.
The minute NATO leaves, the government will be overrun, collapse and everyone will be back where they started.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The US may not be winning the war but they sure as hell are thinning out the Taliban.
Evidence, and over what time period? In 2009 it was reported that "Taliban-led forces fighting US and Nato troops in Afghanistan have increased nearly fourfold since 2006, according to a US intelligence estimate". In the last few years the Taliban have managed to spread their influence (or, at least, philosophy) to largely destabilise the tribal regions of north west Pakistan, suggesting that their power over the last 5 years has increased rather than decreased. This graph of coalition casualties in Afghanistan shows that most deaths have occurred in the last two years, further suggesting that Taliban power isn't waning.
It's shameful that the media coverage is merely a flashback back to 9/11, and I here nothing about the subsequent fear, paranoia, and loss of freedoms that have engulfed the country. It was certainly a horrible day, but the aftermath on our country has been tens of thousands of times worse.
We got into two wars that we're STILL it., We have this lovely patriot act, which continues to be renewed with little debate. We have a continually fearful public, cowed into submission to The Official Reaction. We have ever increasing security theatre at airports. But yet no coverage of any of that. It's all about the day, and nothing about the disaster afterward.
AccountKiller
you realize that your attitude is exactly the same thing you hate
therefore, you are part of the problem
the idea is to rise above the hate, not simply invert the hate, and think that means anything
you've become just another empty pointless node in the endless cycle of tribal turf wars
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Start saying "1st of September" like the rest of the world does..
I remember that one too. I also remember that it was a fake, footage taken from some different event.
You remember incorrectly.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper