Path to 9/11 follow-up

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  • Mimi 09.12.2006

    Way cool you went to col­lege with Michael Ramirez.

    I didn’t have the four plus hours to kill, plus I lived through 9–11 and the after­math, I don’t need to see a fic­tion­al­ized account of it.

  • Well, you’ve been hang­ing around here long enough to know that I’m pretty con­ser­v­a­tive, but I still think that the whole “fic­tion­al­ized” thing has been blown way out of pro­por­tion. It wasn’t some hack piece, and the inac­cu­ra­cies that I’ve heard of are just cos­metic. I don’t know why ABC didn’t work harder to get some of the sup­port data right, but if you took all of that away and only left the things that are his­toric fact, you’d have:

    * that dur­ing the pre­vi­ous administration’s eight years we had an esca­lat­ing series of ter­ror­ist attacks on Amer­i­cans, start­ing with the 1993 bomb­ing of the Trade Center

    * that the offi­cial response was to ignore the attacks or make speeches with pat ref­er­ences to out­rage. (Oh, I for­got. Clin­ton did respond once. He blew up an aspirin fac­tory in Khar­toum, for which he was burned in effigy every­where. So much for the love of the global community.)

    * that the ter­ror­ists responded to this non-response by build­ing their coali­tion, fund­ing their efforts, estab­lish­ing train­ing camps and lay­ing bet­ter and bet­ter plans for bet­ter and bet­ter attacks

    – you’d still have “the path to 9/11.”

    I think the per­cep­tion has been that this is just par­ti­san­ship and none of this mat­ters right now. But I think it’s entirely ger­mane to the cur­rent war — we have to at least once look back and hon­estly real­ize that the kind of for­eign pol­icy that seems the most civ­i­lized and ele­gant is what has allowed rad­i­cal Islam to grow and spread.

  • You are right, I actu­ally lumped all of the 9–11 memo­r­ial shows together — the movies, the live feeds, the Path to 9–11.

    I think every­one botched it, but I also think that we bear a bit of respon­si­b­lity for actu­ally fund­ing OBL at one point as well. It’s a tan­gled web we weave, and no one steps away look­ing per­fect and no one steps away with all the blame either.

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