Like most people I find it really hard to watch anything about 9/11. My memories of that day are so strong, fortified by remembrances told us at the time by a brother-in-law in the NYC Fire Department who worked in the “pile” from the time the planes hit until a week after without going home.
I believe 9/11 would not have happened if Al Gore was president at that time. I have thought that ever since a friend who worked in the Clinton White House told me about the daily briefings Clinton convened every morning to discuss whatever came up in the intelligence reports.
Clinton asked question after question and then tasked the relevant official to report back about anything troubling that was looming out there. So he’d order, say, the Secretary of State to get back to him on this or that development by such and such a time. The Secretary would go back to his building and tell whichever assistant secretary was relevant to get on it immediately. The assistant secretary would tell the desk officers etc. Every relevant official would be calling their people with this message: THE PRESIDENT NEEDS AN ANSWER IMMEDIATELY. Naturally THE PRESIDENT would get his answer.
This all ended when George W. Bush came to office. He was bored by the morning briefings, paid little attention, joked around and did not demand answers to much of anything. Hence, when his national security advisor told him that there was some ominous stuff coming out of the Middle East, he was not much interested. His lack of interest led to her refusing to call the meetings that were being demanded by certain national security officials to discuss an imminent Al Qaeda attack on New York “maybe by plane.” Nor did the President accede to the security officials’ request that FBI and CIA be ordered to get over their rivalry for a minute and share all the information each had.
Nothing was done. Nothing.
I asked my friend if President Gore would have been as diligent and demanding as Clinton. He said that having observed Gore during those Clinton meetings, he would have been “worse.” By worse he meant better, even more demanding, even more tenacious and even more “terrifying” if he didn’t get his answers at the appointed time.
But Gore was not president.
And so 9/11 happened which led immediately to one ill-conceived war, Afghanistan, and another one that was intentionally ginned up by bloodthirsty neocons, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby and other war criminals. And don’t forget Netanyahu who had been agitating for a US war with Iraq for years and whose grand ideas inspired the aforementioned neocons.
Obviously, none of these people and their bloody plans would have been anywhere near President Gore.
So why was Bush, and not Gore, in the White House.
It was because Ralph Nader took 97,000 Florida votes from Gore, more than enough for Gore to carry the state. Absent the fools who voted for Nader, there would have been no Florida recount, no “stopped” recount and no five Supreme Court justices to hand the White House back to the party of the presidents who had appointed them.
How many dead resulted from that stolen election? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Who knows?
But it gets worse. Al Gore had one issue that mattered to him above all others. It was climate change. In fact, it was Vice President Gore who basically introduced the whole idea of “global warming” to the American people. He told us that we still had time to reverse it and he had the plans and the people to do the job.
President Bush didn’t understand or care about climate change. At the insistence of the oil companies, he even took down the solar panels that were on the White House roof. The fossil fuel industry didn’t even want a basically symbolic reference to alternate energy sources at the White House. The Bushies (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc) thought the whole climate issue was a joke and they joked about it. Meanwhile the neocons were dancing on the White House roof because they finally had the war in Iraq that they dreamed about.
What else? I believe that without the illegitimate Bush presidency and the illegitimate Iraq war that that Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice lied us into, there would have been no Trump presidency. Here there is no straight line from the 2000 election except that by 2016 virtually every American (including the ones who voted for Trump) knew that the government lied to get the Iraq war they wanted. As the phrase went, “they lied and our soldiers died.” These people may not be geniuses but you don’t need a high IQ to recognize that the Iraq war was based on that giant lie about imaginary WMDs. For some reason, that added mightily to their distrust of government.
The now older Nader voters were back too. This time they voted for one Jill Stein who might have cost Hillary Clinton the votes she needed to win. (This isn’t as clear as Nader effect because it isn’t as obvious that the Stein nuts would have voted for Clinton, had the Green Party not been on the ballot).
The 2000 election steal then set the stage for all the horrors we have seen since 2000 and which, in my opinion, are pretty much irreversible.
But for today it’s enough just to force ourselves to remember that 9/11 did not just happen. It was the result of an incompetent president put into office illegitimately and by monsters in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia whose goal was not to destroy our “freedom” but to kill as many Americans as they could. Additionally, they may well have succeeded in turning America into a giant nuthouse but that was just serendipity. No one could have envisioned the county we are today. And the whole planet is paying the price.
h/t JW