Fifteen years old today I wrote a blog about 9/11, at that time, ten years prior.
I wrote this here back on June 7, 2010, arguing for surgical special-ops warfare over mass troop deployment.
Bin Laden was still alive. ISIS didn't exist yet. I'm reposting it as-is today, on the 25th anniversary, because it's a time capsule of where my thinking was—not because I got everything right. The "secret war" approach I was pushing for became the dominant U.S. counterterrorism strategy through the 2010s, and it did not turn out to be as clean as I argued below.
Worth saying that up front. Admit your mistakes, do better next time. The idea I had was sound. What was missing was never the tactic—it was an accountability structure that no administration, including the one I trusted to run it, ever built, because the legal architecture available to them was designed for the opposite.
Now, all bets are off. We're watching an administration whose motives and mechanisms we can't verify—and what surfaces is often worse than what we feared. Or could ever have imagined, on both sides.
Don't act like this current administration whenever you make a mistake, you foolishly double down and dare people to correct you in a corrupt autocratic playbook format of being an "American" presidential administration.
History is going to shred this period of our shared history, no matter how much this administration tries to divide us for purposes of power and corruption.
But first, today:
Today, all four living former presidents stand together at Ground Zero for the 25th anniversary.
Same soil, same names read aloud, same silence at 9:37.
The sitting president was not there.
He was at the Pentagon instead—a venue with one microphone, one audience, and zero other former presidents standing nearby for comparison.
No New Yorkers who clearly despise Donald Trump, his lies about everything, and 9/11—where he did not bring a crew with him on that day, as he incessantly repeats the lie, unneeded, undesired, un-American.
The reported reason, per the Times last week, is a dispute over a speaking slot in New York, which he denies.
Denial or not, the outcome is the same.
One ceremony seats four presidents shoulder to shoulder in front of the cameras that built their legacies.
The other seats one, with nobody around to share the frame, to highlight what he isn't and can never be:
A decent American, a decent man, a great president.
Controllable is not a character flaw. It's a production choice.
Some stages just have fewer people who can upstage you—simply by existing.
Monday, June 7, 2010
U.S. 'secret war' expands globally?
The Washington Post had a June 4, 2010 article titled: "U.S. 'secret war' Expands Globally as Special Operations forces take larger role." It would seem that the Obama Administration is using more and more secret teams to go in and take out dangerous radical groups.
Is this bad?
I had been proposing this since 9/11. I brought this up again and again, at least to family and friends, back when we entered Iraq under the pretenses of having information leading to Iraq having Weapons of Mass Destruction and there being a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda; a contention I never bought, nor understood. Even when the Bush White House said they had intelligence indicating this to be true I didn't believe it. I thought, well I suppose its possible, but I found it hard to believe for obvious reasons. Why did Congress?
My contention then, as it is now, is that we should not send in mass amounts of troops. What we needed were smaller, specialist hit squads. Yes, this sounds scary. Yes, these have been misused the world over by dictators, terrorists, war lords, crime bosses. But which makes more sense: sending in many American troops to lose their lives on blanket, shotgun-like approaches to taking out the bad guys? Or sending in small teams, with proper intelligence, to mark and remove only those individuals that would best serve our goals and save the most lives?
You can argue all kinds of things about this. It could go over limits. How do you control it? Are there moral or ethical implications? On and on.
But look at what we have now. How many have been killed on both sides? How many innocents? Wouldn't it have been better to send in the smaller teams, targeting specifics, than using bombs, war theater tactics, shooting missiles from afar and using drones? Even if specialist squads killed a few innocents (which I'm thoroughly against, but that's yet another topic), how many have we killed now, using our current tactics? I doubt we could even approach the current numbers.
This is not political assassination. This is targeting specific individuals or groups, to strategically and surgically take out those who are actively supporting the killing of people outside the intent of their goals. My point in that statement is: when a group wants the US out of their country, killing US citizens, or their own—and typically innocent people—is outside the intent of their goals.
Terrorists justify their murderous actions because they are too small, too poor, too powerless, and so they use larger-than-life actions to draw attention to their group, their goals, or their issues, in order to get their way or bring popular or media attention to their cause.
But this has gotten out of hand. Frequently, their original goals change over time, or they lose track of their intention, or their core beliefs, and begin to rationalize. Since they do NOT have a centralized government to guide them, it is easy for them to lose their way. Yes, it can be easy for a state-governed group to lose sight of its origins; but far easier for those run by a small rag-tag committee, or a war lord, or a rich, deluded ex-national businessman.
Mostly these people are lost, missing something in their lives, and want to subvert process to attain goals through any means possible. That might be understandable. But it is just as understandable that someone would want to stop them. Once a terrorist organization kills innocent people, they lose the right to be justified and righteous.
The same is true of a nation state. And they should be called to task by the world stage, the UN, and their allies. But terrorists have none of this. So they need to be put down as swiftly as possible, by any means possible, just as they do it. But care needs to be used in not harming innocents.
Not harming innocents is the core concern in all of this.
So, let's start bringing back the troops. Less talk, more action.
Those in charge of these teams need to be conscious of the need to do right, to execute with need and justice, and avoid at nearly all costs the loss of innocent life. Because once they start killing innocents, they are out on the same limb as those rotted and diseased souls who have lost their way themselves.
Back to today, 25 years after 9/11 and we have what? Abused America for electing an erudite decent black man, twice? Elected a career criminal and failed TV game show mob boss type, twice?
9/11 did more damage to use than even the Republican Party and what have we accomplished?
We have set ourselves up repeatedly for more and worse to happen under this administration, under the current ruling party who is under the autocratic criminal thumb of this (and no, it cannot be stated to much, or two often) corrupt president.
We have a lot of work today ahead of us.
Work that will have to now also tackle the issue of a too strong Executive (something both parties have indicated now for decades and then when back in power, did nothing to rectify it, weakening Congress one administration after another), with a corrupt ruling parry and a SCOTUS who seems to have no relationship to that Court's past or America's present.
We CAN obviously do better. We will.
America...
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