A sobering take. I don’t think I’ve read this view before.
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Lots of fuzzy-bunny leftist talking points. “America sucks so bad, no wonder bin Laden wanted to kill Americans everywhere.” “It’s all America’s fault for not living up to its ideals.”
One of bin Laden’s primary complaints was the American presence on the holy sand of Saudi Arabia. Except that the main reason the U.S. had troops hanging around there was to protect Saudi Arabia from people like Saddam “who should I invade this week?” Hussein and bin Laden’s religious lunatics.
Then there’s this:
Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.” Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. “It increased the floor space available for rent . . . by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit,” the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.
which is mostly ridiculous. Anyone above the impact points was cut off, and adding a bigger stairwell wasn’t going to change the fact that they were smashed and filled with burning jet fuel. Anyone below the impact points was able to get out – except that the morons in charge kept telling people to stay at their desks and that all was well.
Rick Rescorla got pretty much everyone out of Morgan Stanley.
When a Port Authority announcement came over the P.A. system urging people to stay at their desks, Rescorla ignored the announcement, grabbed his bullhorn, walkie-talkie, and cell phone, and began systematically ordering Morgan Stanley employees to evacuate,
And this:
The phrase [“Lawyering to death”] appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, usually uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to get things done , laws and rules be damned. Anti-terrorism efforts were always “lawyered to death” during the Clinton administration,
The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism.
No, the message was that Clinton used every excuse he could make up, after the fact, to justify the fact that he hadn’t arrested bin Laden when Sudan wanted to hand him over because bin Laden was causing problems there. Clinton appointees further hindered everything they could by creating procedural barriers to things that needed to happen. At one point, some of Clinton’s holdovers stopped the military from killing someone who was almost certainly bin Laden fleeing Tora Bora because “we can’t be sure”.
This is just Bezos and Company trying to provide cover for the incompetent fuckups who would rather see 3000 people die than accidentally blow up the wrong terrorist. Never mind that Clinton blew up a Sudanese pharmaceuticals factory because he wanted to distract the media from his Oval Office blowjobs and post-blowjob soggy cigars.
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Actually, I see that bit about changing safety codes as a conspiracy crusher. It would be negligence/greed what contributed to the fall, no hidden charges/whatever. And yes, the fact that the fuel hit the columns. However, every bit helps…or destroys, in this case.
And I like the realization of a bit of luck in survival.
As to the ideology bit, yep, I guess from outside, from other parts of the world, that fated day kind of marks when the US government lost the plot. Somehow, something beyond the towers broke, and the internal unity was broken, the international trust betrayed. It does feel like Bin laden did win the psycho war by instilling fear and fueling a mad conflict abroad that has left a gruesome mark in the US military, as awful as the tragedy of the fall of the towers. Irak and Afghanistan are painful open wounds.
That over 20 years horrific mistakes were made over several administrations is beyond worrying, it is beyond liberal/conservative. It is, as I said, sobering.