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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.
It's not even November yet.
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.
I try to remember the thousands upon thousands of civillians in the Middle East who have perished, as well as the poor souls in America.
I'm sick of that aspect being completely ignored so often by Western Media.
My hat is off, hand on heart - to all of the victims of the event, and the consequences.
Would love to be able to fly without being treated like a criminal though.
In 1714, the Spanish army crushed the Catalan resistance and imposed their barbarian culture upon them. A whole nation obliterated.
In 1973, the US-backed Pinochet overthrew the democratic government of Chile. At least 3,197 died.
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.
I sure didn't think i'd be spending the ten year anniversary of 9/11 in Afghanistan... but here I am. strange how life works out. i remember on that day, i wanted nothing more then to find the people who'd done it and make them pay... i wasn't in the military back then.
now, i'm here, they know they've won, we've announced our intentions to leave(surrender) and they attack almost daily. their(Islamists) resolve is stronger then ever. 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.
nope, never thought ten years later, this would be happening.
...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.
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.
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
The best writing I've seen on 9/11 was by Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter knew how the US government worked, and foresaw just about everything that has happened since right from the start:
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.
I should note that every that I applied to Ron Paul above should be equally applied to Denis Kucinich, who is very liberal but shares many of the foreign policy views of Dr. Paul and was also suppressed by his own political party for not being nationalistic enough.