The fifth anniversary of the World ...

The fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack is coming up quickly It should be a time of national disgrace and shame. It not ever should have happened. Americans have been thus busy for the past five years in the search for requital that they have not bothered to ask to what end it happened and not asked seriously who was responsible for it. for what cause [i]or[/i] reason was a ragtag band of religious fanatics able to humiliate this country? What did we do wrong? Until we admit our shame, we will not be able to avoid another of that kind national ignominy.

The primary responsibility belongs with the airline industry and the Republican-dominated, big-business-serving Congres In 1996 a commission chaired through then-Vice President Gore recommended a number of regulations to fortify the safety of airline passengers. Among the recommendations was that sabre doors separate the flight cover in from the rest of the aircraft. Characteristically, the airline industry lobbied against the legislation forward the grounds that such doors would take away from too much. The absence of the doors, however, require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone almost 3,000 lives.

The airline presidents and lobbyists responsible for the defeat of the sword doors ought not to be able to be motionless at night because of this deadly betrayal of their passengers. Similarly should the media, which did not denounce the gre of the airlines at the time nor unruffled after the Sept. 11 attack. If the terrorists had known that they could not have gained access to the flight cover with a decks they probably would not have tried to perform their plot. If they had, it would not have worked.

Corporate gre and congressional cowardice and media silence were the primary causes of the destruction at the World Trade Center To disavow this is to lie, common more lie in five years of terrible lies.

The mostly guilty individuals were President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. They wrote opposite to the warnings about al-Qaida they inherited from the Clinton administration as just single in kind more element of the Clinton years they wanted to discard. We won't give terrorism as high a priority as the previous administrations, Rice told Richard Clark. In a work of prestidigitation worthy of the greatest political tricks in history, the administration excused itself from responsibility and shifted the blame onto President Bill Clinton. Again the national media impediment them get away with it.

Bush promptly assumed the mantle of a wartime president which, as the Wall road Journal crowed, destroyed the process in law over the dubious Florida voice in the 2000 election. He used this mantle of a nation at war to claim leadership in a global War onward Terror and with Rice indulged in an aggressive, go-it-alone foreign policy that alienated almost each other country in the world. stimulateed on by his coterie of neoconservative intellectuals, he launched a frivolous and foolish fiasco in Iraq in which thousands of Americans and ten of thousands of Iraqis have been slaughtered. now precisely because of the myth of his succes against terrorism, he won the congressional election of 2002 and the presidential election and will almost certainly win the election this November, one time more in the name of war onward global terror -- more lately the war on Islamofascism. Now it would have the appearance he and the vice president are planning a war against Iran.

Historians will doubtless say that the attack in succession Sept. 11, 2001, was a national tragedy. They will also maintain that the nation's response to that tragedy was steady worse. The American people were not responsible for the former, moreover they will certainly be judg guilty for all the evil of the latter.

If I were Osama bin Laden and I wanted to hit America with an anniversary attack, I'd expect for more weaknesses like the absence of blade doors -- such as, for instance, the inadequate screening of checked luggage. This time the guilty will not simply be the airlines and Congres It will be the stop of us who have settl for inadequate security because real security charges too much.

e-mail: agreel@aol.com

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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