Five for 9/11

With five years of horror, terror, warmongering, incompetence, and tedium behind us already, I'm no more able to compose a coherent statement on 9/11 than anyone else. The best I can do are a few impressions.

1. In his speech last week, the president mentioned Abu Zubaydah by name as proof that torture harsh interrogation works. Maybe, maybe not. This Times article seems to show that Zubaydah gave up what information he did while being interrogated by the good-cop FBI, and clammed up when the bad-cop CIA team took over. The "more stringent tactics" employed by the CIA personnel apparently led Zubaydah to stop talking. I'm sure nothing like this happens at Guantanamo.

2. In case you'd lost track, the hunt for Osama bin Laden has all but petered out, as this Washington Post article shows. Most of the reasons are bureaucratic:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's sense of territoriality has become legendary, according to these officials. In early November 2002, for example, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike. "How did they get the intel?" he demanded of the intelligence and other military personnel in a high-level meeting, recalled one person knowledgeable about the meeting. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them. "Why aren't you giving it to us?" Rumsfeld wanted to know. Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop...

Today, however, no one person is in charge of the overall hunt for bin Laden with the authority to direct covert CIA operations to collect intelligence and to dispatch [Joint Special Operations Command] units. Some counterterrorism officials find this absurd. "There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!" one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. "Nobody!"

3. This squabbling is evident, I think, in OBL's "most wanted" poster shows this: it makes no mention of 9/11.

4. How can anyone sill be surprised by the conclusion that there were no ties between the 9/11 bombers and Saddam Hussein? Read this Parade magazine piece to find out. The ranter, Wilton Sekzer, lost a son in the attacks and sought "revenge" by having his dead son's name inscribed on bombs being dropped on Iraq.

After 9/11, I couldn't work. But I thought, I gotta do something. Somebody has to pay for 9/11. I want the enemy dead. I want to see their bodies stacked up for taking my son. That's when the President said, "Iraq." On the basis of that, I thought we should go in there and kick Iraq's ass. And I wanted Jason to have a part in it. And that's when I said, "Put his name on a bomb." ... Months later, I was watching TV when President Bush came on and said he didn't know why people connected Iraq to 9/11. He said: "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th [attacks]." I said, "What did he just say?" I mean, I almost jumped out of my chair. I siad, "What is he talking about? What the hell did we go in there for? If Saddam didn't have anything to do with 9/11, then why did we go in there?"

Sorry for your loss, but you're an effing idiot. Millions of us knew that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 even before Mr. Dead or Alive crippled the hunt for bin Laden by moving troops from Afghanistan to Iraq - or before the first American soldier died, or the first Iraqi family was blown to smithereens (maybe by your son's bomb), or the first contractor was beheaded, or Halliburton lost its first billion.

5. Finally, why the hell were New York Giants players and coaches wearing NYFD and NYPD hats at last night's Manning Bowl? (See Tom Coughlin gesturing in the left-center here.) Sickening.