The Ignorance of the Obama Administration
My father died suddenly when I was 11 years old. I last glimpsed him through the rear window of my parents’ Pinto wagon as he exited the car at the city hospital where he worked as a maintenance man. Seven hours later the phone rang and my world was never the same. I can still hear my mother’s screams echoing from 32 years ago.
I have gone on, made a family of my own, and become successful in my own way. But some wounds never heal. They don’t scar. And while they don’t hurt as much as they once did, they nevertheless do hurt and occasionally even bleed.
My father’s death is like that to me. It wounded me and changed me in ways that are so numerous that it’s impossible to state for sure what ways exactly other than to say every way possible. I am the man I am today because of my father’s death. I am the father I am today for the same reason. My son has now passed the age I was when I lost my father, and each day with me still around is a small triumph in my modest goal to never have him experience what I experienced in 1977.
What about “closure”, “getting over it” or other lame commands stated by well meaning people who have absolutely no clue what they are talking about? I’m amazed at how quickly the “c” word gets thrown about after a tragedy. Within hours of the Fort Hood shootings I swear I heard it used once by someone discussing the investigation. I’m sure the person’s motives were pure, but to even mention the concept when the corpses of loved ones are still warm shows a callousness, emotional ignorance, if not downright stupidity about grief. Better that the loved ones be ignored and left to their devices than for such goat-like prattling in the aftermath of a massacre.
I am deeply troubled by the Obama administration for a similar reason. The decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) in New York shows an ignorance by the administration and lack of appreciation of the magnitude of the 9-11 attacks. Worse it betrays the fact that this administration has not learned the lessons of 9-11 and endangers the American people by failing to prevent future attacks.
Here’s an experiment: ask a friend what they were doing that day, and let the memories of 9-11 come back from the closet that most of us have hidden them in. For some of us it makes us feel uncomfortable. For others it is downright painful. Yet either way that day touched us and changed us forever.
9-11 wounded us as a people and each of us individually. While most of us were lucky to not have a friend of loved one die in the attacks, we each still suffered that day from the pain of our identify as Americans. This is exactly what the men like KSM and Osama Bin Laden intended. What they had not intended was to provoke a war that would send the former into a prison without trial and bury the latter under hundreds of tons of rubble in Tora Bora (for the record I personally believe Bin Laden is dead).
9-11 damaged us. It changed how we looked at the world; we weren’t too big to be hurt after all. Our safety disappeared. Every public place could be the venue for the next attack. We closeted ourselves in our homes. Comedy died because no one felt like laughing. David Letterman and Jay Leno avoided the air waves knowing that the time wasn’t ripe for us to laugh. Even such irreverent staples as The Onion begged “We want our boring lives back.”
Eventually we got them back. 9-11 changed us but eventually normality reasserted itself and the flag stickers that we all spontaneously pasted on our cars and in our shop windows faded and were removed. 8 years on we have achieved a new normalcy and the fear and determination that 9-11 inspired have been replaced by our own personal day-to-day concerns.
But the pain is still there. And it will be there forever just as the pain has never left those who experienced November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy died.
Unfortunately members of the Obama administration including the President himself seem ignorant of the pain of 9-11 and more importantly, it’s lessons. Has anyone in the administration even read the 9-11 Commission Report? The failure to prevent the shootings at Fort Hood show that the “Chinese walls” separating our law enforcement agencies – a key reason for the failure to prevent the attacks according to the report – have been reconstructed after being torn down briefly under the Bush administration. The report showed that the battlefield was not a place to conduct criminal investigations protecting the rights of the accused. Finally it proved that the terrorists had become adept at using the legal system to its advantage. Like a virus that hijacks a healthy cell, destroying it and flooding the body with copies, al-Qaeda and other like minded groups used the limitations of international and domestic law to raise money, recruit, plan and execute terrorist attacks around the globe. Yet the authorities have been unable to develop a prevention strategy of their own to prevent these attacks.
The legal system is designed to punish crimes after they have been occurred and to deter future crimes through the severity of those punishments. It is reactive after the fact and has difficulty being proactive, preventing the attacks from occurring. Had the 9-11 hijackers been stopped and searched before the attacks, civil liberties and Muslim groups could have accused the authorities of “racial profiling.” Had the authorities clamped down on the preaching of radical imams there would have been accusations by these same groups of religious persecution. These limits are real, as shown by the failure of the authorities to stop Maj. Hasan from shooting up Fort Hood.
Yet the Obama administration clings to the legal system that existed prior to 9-11 and has changed very little since. Like the human immune system the American legal system is a remarkable system. Most of the time both systems function well and protect us. But terrorists can evade and hijack that system just like HIV can infect the human body. In both instances something must be done to halt or reverse the infection.
With HIV our society has come up with drugs that destroy the virus and hold it at bay. With terrorism our military has attacked the militancy at its sources in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The solution is not perfect: I’d be happy to see Riyadh added to the list – but it has been effective. Since 9-11 there have been countless plans devised to kill Americans on American soil, but only one – the Fort Hood attack – has been successfully executed.
Now the Obama administration wants to stop the anti-virals and surgeries and let the system take care of the disease of terrorism. This is akin to an HIV positive man quitting his antivirals in the belief that he never had HIV to begin with. When such a man acts, he’s the only one who suffers. When the Administration acts, we are the ones who ultimately pay the consequences.
My father drank and smoked for most of his life. I quit both. He hated travel and was afraid to fly; I have lived in some of the world’s most exotic places. He was distant from his children; I struggle not to hug my son in public to avoid embarrassing him. Most importantly I faced my father’s death and learned from it. The Obama administration on the other hand hides from 9-11 and willfully ignores its lessons. The trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed is the ultimate proof of that.
Jack Snyder:
Scott,
I think you’re not quite accurate on parts of your 9-11 assessment. You state: ‘Had the 9-11 hijackers been stopped and searched before the attacks, civil liberties and Muslim groups could have accused the authorities of “racial profiling.”’ This suggests that PC behavior had contributed to a security breakdown and let to 9-11. Though PC behavior plays a role in many things in our society, it didn’t have any effect on that fateful day.
We had no security breakdown on 9-11; at least not at the airports. Not even close. If the terrorists had stormed the airports with weapons and bombs, fighting their way through airport security, and forcefully hijacking jets, then we would’ve had a security breakdown.
As it was, the terrorists boarded the planes with perfectly acceptable (at the time) items; boxcutters not exceeding a certain length (4 inches, 6 inches, I can’t remember). Security worked fine; these men did not attempt to bring anything that would prevent them from getting on the planes.
We did, however, have a doctrine breakdown. We’ve all been taught by law-enforcement to not resist or fight a criminal in hostage-type situations; i.e. bank robberies and hijackings. We are told if we resist we are likely to get ourselves and others injured or killed. We are told to let the proper authorities handle it; i.e. meet demands, negotiate hostage release, etc.
Once word had reached the passengers of the 4th hijacked jet, they resisted the hijackers and contributed to the plane crashing before reaching its target. They changed their doctrine!
I believe lack of communication between the various law-enforcement and intelligence branches was somewhat of a contributing factor, mostly in slowing the flow of information, or stopping it all together, between the various branches. But the very act of terrorists taking over the jets was not the result of PC or poor security. Searching the terrorists would not have altered the end result as they would’ve been allowed to board with the boxcutters. And the passengers did what they’ve always been told to do by not resisting them.
I believe many of the points you’ve brought up in this post are valid, but I think you’re exceeding your reach on that particular point.
17 November 2009, 1:17 pmScott Kirwin:
Jack
17 November 2009, 5:27 pmYou’re probably right on the point that on Sept 11, 2001 there was no reason to suspect the Muslim hijackers.
However PC doctrine evidently has come into play in the case with Maj. Hasan. Short of writing letters stating that he was going to kill some Kafirs on a particular date and signing them in blood I’m not sure what would have forced the hand of the authorities.
Jack Snyder:
I agree with that point.
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20 November 2009, 4:57 pmSteve:
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