9/11 ...

[lowprone]

Every American should watch ' Why Benghazi Matters ' .

This recently surfaced from Judicial Watch, Obama knew the attack would happen
10 days before.

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-...ys-in-advance/

[WillBrink]

Every American should watch ' Why Benghazi Matters ' .

This recently surfaced from Judicial Watch, Obama knew the attack would happen
10 days before.

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-...ys-in-advance/

Posted in OP.

[Belmont31R]

You really need to know what April Glaspie told Saddam when he inquired about solving the Iraq / Kuwait oil dispute himself and what the US response would be if any.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie

That is where everything truly went sideways. It happened because the UN didn't want to make a determination that slant drilling on the part of Kuwait into Iraqi oil reserves was theft of resources and the US didn't want to take a stand because Kuwait was using US slant drilling technology.

The entire fiasco could have been avoided if somebody was willing to tell Kuwait they couldn't slant drill across the border and everyone else was willing to pay the extra .05 cents a gallon. Also given the Iraq / Iran war that Saddam thought he was fighting on behalf the US as well as for himself, we probably should have ponied up for some Iraqi oil even though it was above market price just to show we appreciated the effort and to help him repair his economy after almost a decade of war that went nowhere.

If we did that, we wouldn't have had to go be Kuwait's errand boys and reclaim their country and we wouldn't have had to stage out of Saudi which was really one of the bigger problems for the Taliban / Al Quida guys. We could have avoided a metric shit ton of drama by just doing the right thing.

Iraq could still be a mostly secular, stable quasi democracy and Uday and Qusay could still be torturing soccer team members who failed to perform as expected. Not perfect but so much better than what we got and what we still have over there. With the money we saved by not getting into the first Persian Gulf War we could have sent Saddam to the moon to help establish a Chinese base camp.

OBL was going to be an outcast one way or another. I get he was mad that we had troops in KSA but its one of those things if weren't that he'd have been kicked out over something else. OBL was on a path towards extremism and terrorism no matter what.

I agree that we should support or at least not condemn secular govt's over there as the other option is muslim brotherhood or radical types. Thats why I don't get why Syria became such an issue because if we took that govt out the people who'd have filled the power vacuum would have been much worse. Iraq and Syria both are hosts to Kurds/Christians/Shia/Sunni. MB and other extremists don't play well with 3 of 4 of those groups, and that's what happened in Egypt after the 1st Arab Spring which had to be fixed with the 2nd Arab Spring that Obama was opposed to. He also sat back and did nothing when major protests were ongoing in Iran.

As far as the Taliban I don't really understand why they became the focal point other than war hawks wanting perpetual war. They didn't attack us, and the people there have the right to choose who they want in charge. A lot of rural AFG doesn't mind having them in charge. From watching interviews with a lot of Taliban people most of their contempt for us is just our presence where we don't belong. AQ left AFG in late 2001 and they want us gone. The Taliban is highly localized. We'd be better off putting those resources into attacking AQAP and subordinate groups in Africa.

As far as Iraq Im just saying once we went in the way things were handled was very stupid. Looking back, if given the chance, we shouldn't have gone in but once we did leadership failed the boots on the ground mission. Since we did we should support the groups that can make a difference and set them up as best we can. Lots of people in N Iraq could be transported to a western country and fit right in.

The ME is extremely complex and we haven't ever really gotten the policy perspective right.

[SteyrAUG]

OBL was going to be an outcast one way or another. I get he was mad that we had troops in KSA but its one of those things if weren't that he'd have been kicked out over something else. OBL was on a path towards extremism and terrorism no matter what.

I agree that we should support or at least not condemn secular govt's over there as the other option is muslim brotherhood or radical types. Thats why I don't get why Syria became such an issue because if we took that govt out the people who'd have filled the power vacuum would have been much worse. Iraq and Syria both are hosts to Kurds/Christians/Shia/Sunni. MB and other extremists don't play well with 3 of 4 of those groups, and that's what happened in Egypt after the 1st Arab Spring which had to be fixed with the 2nd Arab Spring that Obama was opposed to. He also sat back and did nothing when major protests were ongoing in Iran.

As far as the Taliban I don't really understand why they became the focal point other than war hawks wanting perpetual war. They didn't attack us, and the people there have the right to choose who they want in charge. A lot of rural AFG doesn't mind having them in charge. From watching interviews with a lot of Taliban people most of their contempt for us is just our presence where we don't belong. AQ left AFG in late 2001 and they want us gone. The Taliban is highly localized. We'd be better off putting those resources into attacking AQAP and subordinate groups in Africa.

As far as Iraq Im just saying once we went in the way things were handled was very stupid. Looking back, if given the chance, we shouldn't have gone in but once we did leadership failed the boots on the ground mission. Since we did we should support the groups that can make a difference and set them up as best we can. Lots of people in N Iraq could be transported to a western country and fit right in.

The ME is extremely complex and we haven't ever really gotten the policy perspective right.

I don't have much argument with any of that. But seriously Glaspie gave Saddam some serious mixed messages. There is a vocabulary you have to use with brutal dictators and even I can see how Saddam thought he had been given the green light to fix his domestic issue with Kuwait so long as he didn't make a mess.

Bush (41) is one of the worse Presidents in recent memory, imagine if we just let arabs handle arab business and we still had a strong (well better than the one we have with Saudi) alliance with Iraq. So many things could have been so much better. Seriously screw Turkey and Saudi, if we could have staged out of Iraq for the war on terror in Afghanistan we'd have had a shitload of better options.

Of course it's also true that we'd have solved a lot of other problems by letting Russia stay in Afghanistan without undermining them but we were too eager to pay them back for Vietnam and it did lead directly to bringing down the wall and freeing most of Eastern Europe. Of course Bush (43) wasn't a lot of help when Putin contacted us to ask if Russia could assist us with anything after 9-11 and rather than get on the same page Bush instead called him out on human rights abuses in Chechnya so he could avoid criticisms of fighting a religious war with islam even though that it technically what we had actually been given on 9-11.

All in all I feel we failed all those who fought and sacrificed, I seriously hope they feel otherwise.

[hotrodder636]

I was deployed on the USS Enterprise when 9/11 happened. Those who were there know the story or can look it up , we turned around off the coast of Somalia and went back to the Gulf.

I have not been to the memorials, my wife has and has some beautiful pictures. Seeing that memorial is the only reason I have for going to NYC.

[yoni]

9/11 was a resounding victory.

OBL stated he wanted to change Americans’ way of life and he certainly did.
PATRIOT ACT Safely still in effect
Privacy a quaint relic
Forever Wars
A schism within America that has only grown deeper
Radical ideas being forwarded by elected officials that would have been considered extreme for the even the most thoroughly Liberal politician 20 years ago.
A distinct loss of liberty that has been noticeable.
And people chomping at the bit to start another Cold War

Dig this: 20 years ago....

The future looked pretty bright
Vladimir Putin’s Russia was seriously considering joining NATO
Western Europe didn’t have all these problems
The migrant crisis was nothing that it is now
China was kept at a distance but in check despite the payola.
Cancel Culture didn’t exist
Race relations were the most amiable they’d ever been in 50 years.
Air Travel was easy.
We had essentially world peace.

And......here we are.

18 years. Seems like yesterday.
I won’t pretend to know the woulda shoulda coulda but I do know this....

I wish we had been more adult about it. I wish we didn’t go all Buenos Aires (The only good bug is a dead bug). I wish we’d collectively took a step back and weighed the options better.

I wish we’d rebuilt the Twin Towers to the exact same specs as if to say “We can rebuild. We are not changing for you or anyone else”

I wish we didn’t take the bait. I wish people hadn’t capitalized on the nation’s emotional scarring.

And most of all, I wish the young man or woman turning 18 today could have known what September 10, 2001 felt like. It was a Monday. No cares in the world. The biggest moral issue was stem cell research. You had Cable News that didn’t have constant news tickers scrolling by and nothing devolved into a shouting match. People could disagree with a smile.

Gas was just under a dollar a gallon.

You were more free to find yourself and travel. You could speak your mind and the worst that could happen was someone saying “I think you’re full of shit but okay”. No losing a job. No harassment. No being called a Nazi.

You’d have been shocked that is was the Liberal Left who were telling the dirty jokes with no limits. Nobody got mad, people just laughed it off.

There were real opportunities.

It was a positive and optimistic time. It wasn’t so tacky as a presumption of being like the 80s or 90s. Those days were thankfully gone. We had the future. We were the future. We were reaching people. We were doing things. We didn’t want a rehash of someone else’s time. It was our own.

And it was stolen from us.

Wish you could have been there. Because in 18 more years these will be the Good ol’ days.

Some of you reading this now will not be here to see that.
And perhaps that may be more blessing than curse.

But my advice to anyone would be to enjoy what you have now and to never forget.

And not in some cheap tragedy porn, crisis fetishizing. But never forget 9-10-2001. That last free day of the last free Americans.

Never forget what was taken from you. But also accept that you simply aren’t going to get it back.

Sorry we ripped you off. We just.....got carried away. We thought it was Pearl Harbor and after 5 years of kicking someone’s ass in a righteous war; we’d have a Post-War boom where everyone appreciated what we had more than ever had before. We were going to put it behind us on focus on living.

Didn’t work out thst way.

Sorry ‘bout that.

Amen I agree 100%. I watched a former Royal Marine missing both legs and an arm, treated like crap in Paris on Friday by airport security. While veiled women sailed through.

[Matthew]

This pilot took off fully intending to die by ramming her plane into flight 93 because her plane had no weapons onboard. An amazing story i had not heard:

https://tribunist.com/military/this-...redible-story/

Will, if you haven't seen it, watch Clear the Skies: 9/11 Air Defense . BBC documentary on how the United States Air Traffic Control System was given the order to get every single plane in US airspace and heading into our airspace air on the ground; it had never been done before. They did it in less than three hours.

They talk about the fighter pilots who were diverted from a training mission, unarmed, and given orders to try and intercept the plane believed to be headed toward the Capitol Building any way they could, including as you already mentioned, ramming an aircraft.

It's an intense, informative, emotional and impressive documentary as to the immediate response on September 11, 2001. It was a terrible day, and many terrible things have happened to our freedoms and to the United States since; but the performance that day of the passengers on Flight 93, our Air Traffic Controllers, of the immediate response to secure the President, secure Washington DC, initiate Continuity of Government, and clear the skies of all aircraft was incredible.

Here's a couple of links for you: DVD - https://www.amazon.com/Clear-Skies-1.../dp/B0009IW89Y

YouTube (in 5 parts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpPtjGCp4Ss