Drat. I just wrote a cogent response that is now floating in cyberspace. It was about the different ways I see us using the phrase "government involvement in 9/11." Miss Priss, I think you reference the possible role that the level of our (un)preparedness may have played in the unfolding of events that day. How off/old/wrong was our intelligence? Did the administration and the intelligence communities actually abet the hi-jackers by their naiveté and denial? Given an explicit warning the week before, and choosing to ignore it because the targets were soft -- does that inaction, for example, rise to the level of culpability?
JumBob, I think you use the same phrase to mean the govt having a willful and active role as an agent/actor in the events of 9/11. Co-conspirators, as it were. And your message, in part, seems to be that by not debunking the woo being floated by conspiracy buffs and revisionists, we are giving tacit support to that woo. And it understandably pisses you off!
My difficulty comes from being repeatedly called a moral relativist, just because I want to learn -- insofar as it is possible -- why the terrorists did what they did. Why are critics of U.S. policy made to look like moral relativists? I think the reasoning must be roughly this: "Some critics are trying to get us to understand the terrorists, to see things from their point of view. But to do this would be to acknowledge that they're right from their point of view, just as we are from ours." Note that this doesn't in fact amount to moral relativism: you can maintain that someone is right in their own eyes without granting that they actually are right about anything whatsoever - certainly without granting that they're right to crash airplanes full of helpless people into occupied buildings. But to acknowledge that the terrorists and their sympathizers were right from their own point of view might suggest that we should try to make sense of and imaginatively occupy it. That we persist in difficult conversation. To ask why the terrorists did this, is to question U.S. policies, from the deadly pre-9/11 embargo on shipments to Iraq to our alliance with an Israeli state that has kept Palestinians homeless. I wish that U.S. "responses" to the terrorist attacks had included a revision of those policies.
People hear/read me and assume that I am sympathetic to the actions of the terrorists -- all because I drone on and on about persisting in conversation with al-Qaida's broader base. Pre- and post- 9/11 U.S. policies are, I guess, what I reference when speaking of "government involvement in 9/11."
Well, I've been bad by continuing the theft of this great thread. But I appreciate the chance to speak. One of my cats is trying to get between me and the screen -- echoing the consensus that I stop. NOW.
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