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Me and 9/11
Sep. 12th, 2004 09:24 amMany folks were posting about 9/11 and their memories of the event. Interspersed with my morning of heaving and weaving, I watched a special on PBS about 9/11. Bill Moyers was reviewing the 9/11 report. I'll need to watch it again, because most of my mind was not dedicated to the review of the facts at that time.
But every time I saw the footage of the building collapse, I would start to get weepy. And when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dslartoo posted the picture of the New York skyline with the beams of light shooting into the air, I got weepy once again.
As was said in the Lion King musical last night, "Yes, the past can be painful. But you have two choices: you can run away from it, or you can learn from it."
And what has our country as a whole learned from 9/11?
I was talking to the head of our physical security department at work the other day. He attended a conference on anti-terrorism. It featured security experts from Israel. They brought up the issue that really, you cannot possibly step up security enough to prevent suicide bombers from getting in. The only thing you can do is retaliate after the fact.
Oh yeah. That's worked swimmingly for Israel.
So, back to 9/11 and our own lessons. What seems abundantly clear from 9/11 is that we did suffer from a failure to acknowledge perfectly good intelligence that gathering up to 8 years before 9/11. And it was our leaders who failed to respond accordingly. We also have issues in our disaster preparedness policies. There was a great deal of confusion and lack of leadership in responding to the fact that passenger planes were falling off the radar. Fighter planes were dispatched at the first whiff of hijacking, but they didn't know where to go. There needs to be improvements at every level, including and most importantly, the Executive Branch. What I have not seen in the news, and need to research, I suppose, is what our leadership has done to improve response time when such a tragedy starts.
What I have seen our leadership do is make a choice to go after another country that that had no direct impact on our terrorism situation. To answer unique and underhanded methods of terrorism with standard warfare is rather nonsensical.
Just how do you exactly fight against people who are willing to die for the cause? And this type of "soldier" is far different from our own. Our soldiers are willing to take the chance to die, but notice we haven't been big on bringing our own suicide bombers into the fray. These suicide bombers are more dedicated to the cause of these terrorist organizations than to their own lives and families. And in some cases, they become martyrs so their families we'll be better taken care of. So maybe the key here is we need to come up with a way to ensure there are less people in this world with nothing left to lose. Their lives are so meager and poor and full of suffering that they figure death by explosion against the enemies they hate is preferable to living. Manipulative religious groups are able to take a hold on the minds of the desperate and downtrodden because these folks, in life, desperately need a reason to believe something better can be out there.
So, on the path we are currently on, I see no end to the strife and violence. We can only have safety among those we trust, and in this new sort of terrorist driven combat, we can trust no one.
But every time I saw the footage of the building collapse, I would start to get weepy. And when
dslartoo posted the picture of the New York skyline with the beams of light shooting into the air, I got weepy once again.As was said in the Lion King musical last night, "Yes, the past can be painful. But you have two choices: you can run away from it, or you can learn from it."
And what has our country as a whole learned from 9/11?
I was talking to the head of our physical security department at work the other day. He attended a conference on anti-terrorism. It featured security experts from Israel. They brought up the issue that really, you cannot possibly step up security enough to prevent suicide bombers from getting in. The only thing you can do is retaliate after the fact.
Oh yeah. That's worked swimmingly for Israel.
So, back to 9/11 and our own lessons. What seems abundantly clear from 9/11 is that we did suffer from a failure to acknowledge perfectly good intelligence that gathering up to 8 years before 9/11. And it was our leaders who failed to respond accordingly. We also have issues in our disaster preparedness policies. There was a great deal of confusion and lack of leadership in responding to the fact that passenger planes were falling off the radar. Fighter planes were dispatched at the first whiff of hijacking, but they didn't know where to go. There needs to be improvements at every level, including and most importantly, the Executive Branch. What I have not seen in the news, and need to research, I suppose, is what our leadership has done to improve response time when such a tragedy starts.
What I have seen our leadership do is make a choice to go after another country that that had no direct impact on our terrorism situation. To answer unique and underhanded methods of terrorism with standard warfare is rather nonsensical.
Just how do you exactly fight against people who are willing to die for the cause? And this type of "soldier" is far different from our own. Our soldiers are willing to take the chance to die, but notice we haven't been big on bringing our own suicide bombers into the fray. These suicide bombers are more dedicated to the cause of these terrorist organizations than to their own lives and families. And in some cases, they become martyrs so their families we'll be better taken care of. So maybe the key here is we need to come up with a way to ensure there are less people in this world with nothing left to lose. Their lives are so meager and poor and full of suffering that they figure death by explosion against the enemies they hate is preferable to living. Manipulative religious groups are able to take a hold on the minds of the desperate and downtrodden because these folks, in life, desperately need a reason to believe something better can be out there.
So, on the path we are currently on, I see no end to the strife and violence. We can only have safety among those we trust, and in this new sort of terrorist driven combat, we can trust no one.
