I had wanted my first real post upon returning to be away from politics, but as luck would have it, I returned on September 10 and last night was my first night home.  Today everyone it seems is going on and on about 9-11.  And it was such a significant date in what may prove to be the decline of the United States as either a beacon of liberty or an example of democracy that something needs to be said.

It should go without saying that the destruction of the WTC and the deaths of so many airline passengers and crew is a great crime by any reasonable standard.  For a few days Americans of almost every political persuasion stood together in shock and outrage at the attack.

And then things started going seriously awry because of the abysmal quality of people then running the government and dominating the media.  In no particular order…

· The attack was used to justify invading a country entirely uninvolved with the crime, an invasion which ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as well as thousands of the invaders, including many good men and women who had volunteered to defend our country, not to assault other countries.

· The attack was used to justify making torture the official policy of our government.

· The attack so weakened the rule of law that the architects of that torture parade around today as heroes and some even write books bragging about what they did rather than serving the rest of their lives in jail, as they should.

· The attack was used to pass the so-called “Patriot Act,” which has as much to do with patriotism as AIDS has to do with safe sex.

· The attack was used by the bad to shift patriotism from devotion to our values to devotion to our power over others.

· The attack led to endless war in Afghanistan, now a truly bipartisan endeavor, with no clear goals and no sense of what the original mission was.

· The attack led to creating a privatized army of mercenaries to take over the job of American soldiers – creating a corporate controlled military elite with a vested interest in perpetual war.

· The attack was used to waste billions, perhaps trillions, much in outright fraud and corruption, in response to Al Qaeda’s expense of well under one million. This wasted money is largely responsible for the deficit that today both parties claim to be concerned about at the expense of reducing the good government can do serving American citizens. They and their corporate masters prefer bombs.

· The attack demonstrated that America’s media elite has likely entered terminal incompetence as journalists who were proven correct continue to be ignored while journalists and hacks who beat the drums for war continue to have national forums to parade their incompetence and moral depravity. (Yes, I mean you, among many others, Thomas Friedman.)

· The attack unleashed the religious bigotry of far too many so-called “Christians” against Muslims, strengthened their malign political influence, and even encouraged some short sighted Pagans to join forces with them in their anti-Islamic and anti-American jihad.

· The attack demonstrated that many Americans lack the personal courage to stand by our country’s principles or the personal devotion to freedom that our founders had, and in the process turned the word patriotism from something admirable into something many of us find loathsome.

As events in Libya are now showing, our elite has learned absolutely nothing regarding the stupidity of intervening in the internal affairs of other countries.

I could go on, but the point should be clear.  The response of the American government and media was beyond disgrace, their major representatives not fit to hold their heads up in decent company.

It could have been different.

Here is what could have come from those crimes, if we had had decent leaders, a competent media, and a larger percentage of Americans who understood what this country once stood for:

· We could have seen that our dependence on oil had made us dependent on many of the world’s most unsavory and brutal regimes and even without the obvious ecological reasons, initiated efforts to wan the modern world from its dependence on petroleum. This shift could not have taken place instantaneously, but it could be far along by now.  All we would need to have done to accomplish quite a bit was put a tax on petroleum, and to keep conservatives happy, offset it with cutting Social Security taxes.  Labor would be cheaper, oil more expensive, and we would therefore be developing new energy methods while simultaneously becoming more efficient with the oil we did use.

· We could have demonstrated, as many European countries have continually done, that the best method for dealing with terrorism on our soil is the law and the courts.

· Given the Taliban’s support for Al Qaeda (and I have read different analyses about just how true or solid this was) we should have blown up many government buildings in Afghanistan thereby making it clear there would be a high price for harboring bin Laden and company, but not have gone in with troops.  No boots on the ground and no prolonged bombing.  The point would be to make the price for harboring criminals who killed Americans too high for countries to do so, and nothing more. Many of us argued for this response at the time.

That is a far smaller list, but one that would have been worth taking some pride in.  Too bad it does not apply.

(Small spelling corrections and clarifications made on 9-12)