MCViewPoint

Wrong: Bin Laden won, you and I lost.

Government Won on 9/11

Lives were lost, along with innocence. But the innocence lost that day had less to do with terrorism or even the threat of terrorism than it did with what we all knew was coming: an exponential rise in the size and scope of the American state. The specter of growing state power frightened even those eager to endorse it, as most Americans were in the days following.

The entire US national security apparatus, a trillion-dollar enterprise extending far beyond the Pentagon and alphabet soup intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA, had failed utterly in its ostensible mission. All the airport security, nuclear missiles, air defense command centers, bombers, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, destroyers, spooks, spies, analysts, and supercomputers could not protect a single American from a small group of middle-class Saudi kids with box-cutters and a few hours of Cessna training.

16 years later, the War on Terror™ has yielded hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Americans, Iraqis, and Afghans, ongoing and intractable wars disguised as nation building, the Patriot Act, illegal executive actions, trillions in new federal debt, vastly increased federal surveillance powers, rubber stamped FISA court warrants, TSA at the airports, a useless Department of Homeland Security, overflowing VA hospitals, and increasingly militarized police here at home. More importantly, it has yielded a distressing complacency toward grotesque federal power.

It has not yielded peace, or liberty, or security. But liberty vs. security was never the choice.

Be seeing you

I am not a number. I am a free man!