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Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They may be scary looking but they are cartoons, not terrorists. |
On September 11th, 2001, George Bush made one of the most significant and critical errors of his presidency.
Personally, I think George Bush is a total boob, and he has made many mistakes and we will all be paying for some of them for years to come. This particular mistake, though, is one that a lot of other people in the Office of the Presidency may have made, so I don’t want to lean too hard on Ol’ George for this one. But it was a mistake. Here is what happened.
A well trained and well funded group of nineteen criminals hijacked four airplanes. They flew three of them into buildings and a fourth into a cornfield in Pennsylvania, having been thwarted by an impromptu attack by the passengers on the plane (they had planned it seems to fly that plane into a public building in Washington D.C.). Thousands died.
The mistake that Bush made in concert with his advisors was to ground all nonemergency civilian aircraft for a number of days. This had immediate and long term economic effects and it underscored the interpretation of this attack as a terrorist act as opposed to a criminal one.
I have no problem with the idea that this was a terrorist act. However, treating it like a terrorist act instead of a criminal act was the beginning of a series of events … many of which may have been appropriate responses to terrorism but not to a criminal act … that have changed world politics, the US and world economy, and society itself.
Six years after “911″ an advertising firm working for Turner Broadcasting company placed several dozen devices in urban areas across the United States. Some of these devices were noticed in Boston by people who jumped to the conclusion that they were bombs. The bomb squad in Boston detonated several of them. Mayor Menino is on the verge of calling for human sacrifice of the perpetrators. Turner is being threatened with a law suit. On hearing of this reaction in Boston, Turner ordered the advertising firm to immediately remove all of the devices from the numerious cities around the country where they have been placed. (See this article for typical coverage of the fiasco.)
I remember the days after 911 when the sky was so strangely quiet. I lived in South Minneapolis under one of the flyways. A day after the grounding of the airplanes, it was eerie to have the neighborhood be so quiet. At one point I heard a jet flying, and looked out to see a military jet fighter streaking by. The grounding itself made everyone think and act and feel differently to almost as much of a degree as the images of the World Trade Center Towers going down.
A few weeks after 911, I went down to the local deli to pick up some sandwiches. There was an older African American guy in a wheelchair in the deli. He is a local fixture, semi-homeless, a bit crazy but basically a nice guy and what one would call “harmless” (whatever exactly that means). He was leaving the deli at the same time as some folks were coming in. These folks were not from the neighborhood … actually, visiting from the Dakotas their daughter the college student in her new apartment. There was a bit of a tussle as they were coming in the deli and guy-in-wheelchair was trying to make his way out the door. No big deal but it flustered the visitors. They were already a bit nervous being in the city, and I strongly suspect people of color were not a familiar site to them. One of them mentioned to the other, along with a sigh-like letting out of breath one expresses after a close call … “Eh, I thought that guy was a terrorist,” and the other one said “Yea, me too.”
An old crazy guy in a wheelchair trying to make his way through a too-narrow doorway. What a threat.
Because of 911.
We let the congress pass the Patriot Act. Quakers and Unitarians are infiltrated by the FBI. We let them go to war in Iraq. We now routinely torture most of our prisoners (instead of just now and then). One has to be careful what one says.
Because of 911.
And now a crazy advertising scam with a cartoon character giving you the finger and some bells and whistles to attract your attention shuts down Boston and has the usually very sane Mayor Menino foaming at the mouth.
But not just because of 911. Rather, because 911 was the most successful terrorist attack ever, instead of merely a horrendous criminal act. We are like a woman in a physically abusive relationship who winces whenever her husband makes a quick move, or a dog treated so badly it cowers when a shadow passes across its eyes.
This is what George Bush should have done: I thought this at the time, dammit, and probably many others did too. He should have, in concert with the 50 governors and the mayors of the 100 largest cities (these people are organized to some degree, FEMA has their phone numbers and there is a way of communicating, so this is not unrealistic) ordered law enforcement officers onto every plane taking off for the indefinite future, maybe a few days, until this was figured out. Since the attacks seemed to be without major weapons and a matter of overpowering the crews, a few beefy guys and gals in the front of every airplane would have thwarted any further attacks. A few hours of grounding to get this organized followed by 12 hours of steadily increasing flights thusly guarded, would have still had an effect on air travel but the long term psychological effect would have been the exact opposite of what actually happened.
It would have been “Screw you” rather than “I just peed in my pants.” George Bush peed in our collective national pants when he caved to the terrorists at the first possible opportunity.
Instead of becoming a stronger society, we have become a society that is so skiddish that we can’t go to the deli without fear of terrorist attack. We can’t see a piece of junk in the corner and not think it is a bomb. And we are engaged in a long term war responsible for tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties because we are so skiddish we allow our government to talk us into anything.
If those planes had flown later that day, next morning at the latest, and we stuck our collective middle finger in the air at these criminals, hunted them down and captured them of course, but as criminals, traffic would have been a bit lighter yesterday in Boston.
14 Responses to “911 Reverberates in Boston”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 2nd, 2007 at 4:22 pm
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I also thought the same thing at that time.
While many fine points are made here, the source of the Boston
hysterical paraylisis is much deeper than anything Dubya has
ever done or not done. It is fundamentally Bostonian.
And I have heard Mayor Menino called many things–but sane is
not one of them:)
~Becky
“It is fundamentally Bostonian.”
It is true that these devices were put out in several cities and only in Boston did it make a stir.
I heard the Chief of Police (I think it was) virtually asserting the conclusion that this was one of those MIT pranks.
I believe I left Boston just after or just before Menino became mayor. He had been vice mayor, and I think took over for Flynn when Flynn left office to serve in some other appointment (ambassador to Ireland or something?) He was not foaming at the mouth too much then. He has been in office a long time, hasn’t he!
Gee…what would you have suggested be done as alternative?
At the time of the 9-11 attacks, there was no way to determine how many more possible threats existed. It would be foolish to assume early on that all attacks were to be North Eastern US. Why not think Chicago/LA/SanDIego/Dallas, or even Boston itself were targets. nor would it be prudent to assume that it was “all over” and there were no more attacks likely the next day.
After grounding all civilian aviation, the likelihood of plane hijack/attack dropped to near zero. And any planes in the air were much more easily monitored.
So now you, as the President, has the following decision: restart aviation immediately, or delay the restart until folks have a chance to take a breath for a day or two, and new security precautions can (start to) be implemented to prevent same tactics again.
I ask again, what would you have done differently?
PMax
Itcpmax:
Please re-read my post. The answer to what to be done as an alternative will be found there! You must have gotten bored and maybe distracted by the pretty girls in the “Recent Readers” box.
I was briefly distracted by my own picture in the Recent Reader’s sidebar (as in “oh, I’m a ‘pretty girl’ how nice!”) but now that I’ve reassembled my thoughts…
I just saw your link to this in Making Light, and appreciate the thoughtful post. The concept didn’t occur to me but I agree it would have been a much better response. A more patriotic one, as well, if you ponder that concept for a bit.
Dawno: Yes, more patriotic indeed. One can easily imagine the 1940s period style drawings of the broad chested strong jawed all American beat cop arms akimbo standing in front of the cockpit door while Norman Rockwell’s extended family is being served their peanuts. The caption reads:
“Not on my watch”
RE: “what would you have suggested be done as alternative? ”
from ICUPmax (ICTPmax??above):
Am I the only one who notices that so many Righties are more than willing to help create the lies, go to war for lies, have your children killed for lies, and then, when the blatant lies are revealed over and over for what they are( and the police state has virtually total control of the resources necessary to fight the lies, but they don’t) they, the tighty Righties, ask us, the non liers
what would you have done differently”,
or worse, they tell US ( as in U.S.–the real patriots who don’t believe in killing as the American way) ” well I don’t see you offering any better solutions…what would you have done differently” as if the big shit pile that they laid is somehow our mess to clean up, and our responsibility to take care of….and implying of course, that if we don’t take care of it, they will joyfully continue to shit all over the world with their little dastardly wars and oppressive deceptive policies of resource control.
Or is that just crazy lil’ me thinking this?
Cuz wut I woulda done differently was to actually learn to read the intelligence we had at the time, and I woulda donne it, and had an idea who was sending US that raid, and that event–and none of the evidence pointed to anything but GW’s former business partners the Bin Laden clade, and none of of the evidence, then, pointed to Iraq, and most of which evidence we now know, was in the FBI’s hands already as to the “who and how” of who did it–re: Colleen Rowley, et al…and based on the 1960’s COINTELPRO, etc, we knew they were in on it as well, if not instigating it( anyone seen the third bomber from OK city lately? Where did he disappear to…oh yeah,,,he’s back behind the desk at the CIA…)
…And then, I would have done s/th similar to what Greg suggested, cuz G-d knows we had then, as we have now, a glut of cops who have very little to do anyways, who could have been utilized better in flight, then, and there, when necessary–not now, six years after the fact, and there are even more of them doing less than ever, but GW then and now could care less about the truly “RIGHT” thing to do
911 was the best thing that ever happened to GW. IIRC, his approval ratings
skyrocketed in the weeks (or months) following the attacks. I’m sure it
didn’t take long for him to see the
opportunities that the attacks provided for him to make a name for himself,
so to speak. I’m cynical enough to believe that GW (and many other
politicians), upon hearing of the attacks, had a gut-level, almost
instinctual reaction of: “How can I use this to make myself, and my party,
look good?” Ya know, playing up their roles as victims. I
think his overreaction in the immediate hours and days after 911 was
quite deliberate.
In the movie Ghostbusters, one character, in attempting to convince the
mayor of NYC to let the ghostbusters implement a pretty off-the-wall
tactic in order to save the city from ghosts, tells the mayor, (who is
worried about his reputation), something along the lines of, “If this works,
you’ll have saved the lives of MILLIONS of registered voters!” GW has made it
to the highest office in the land–he may be short on smarts in some
respects, but obviously, when it comes to politics, he knows what he’s doing.
I’m sure he knew the value of playing up the danger America was in on 911.
It was a delicate balance–he had to make sure we knew just how dangerous
and evil our enemies are, while at the same time assuring us that he would
protect us from those dangers. Responding rationally to the attacks would
have been counter-productive–he needed to emphasize the threat in order to
make himself look like a big strong he-man for protecting his country.
He has obviously been using this strategy for a while now–we’re at war in
Iraq because he played up the dangers of Iraq (WMDs), and then tried to make
himself look like a hero by protecting us from those dangers. But I think
that strategy was being employed from nearly the moment 911 happened. Bush
is a criminal, and his modus operandi is magnifying dangers and then
coming to our “rescue”. Sorta like munchausen-by-proxy syndrome.
You pointed out things you think GW should have done following the attacks,
and I think your suggestions were right on the money. But I also think that
GW and team were well aware that they could have employed those reasonable
tactics, and in fact maybe some cooler-headed advisors suggested as much, but
the idea of a reasonable response was willfully discarded in favor of the
“overreaction” approach. Your approach may have been better for the country,
and for the world, but GW’s over-the-top approach was better for HIM. And it
worked like a charm for him, too. Not only did it garner higher approval
ratings for him, but his “war on terror” was a big part of why he was
re-elected.
I’d be wiiling to bet that the mayor of Boston, in his overreaction to the
“threat” to his city, was thinking a lot like Bush on 911. He may have
even been a bit disappointed that the “threat” turned out to be as
harmless as it was. If those had actually been bombs
placed around the city, he would had saved the lives of “millions of
registered voters”. And when he first found out about those “suspicious”
devices, I’m sure that’s what he was thinking. (Like I said, I’m a cynic).
So, your ides were great, but they were coming from a reasonable
person who wants the right thing to be done.
On a lighter note, some folks are pitching in to help the Boston authorities and the public
identify what is NOT a bomb….
http://flickr.com/photos/groov.....564032667/