9/11 REVISITED
Twenty-three minutes,
58 seconds over America

From Attytood courtesy of Eschaton, a missive inspired by the release of the transcript of Flight 93's black box recording:

You can board a SEPTA R5 express train at Suburban Station during rush hour and get all the way to Villanova in that amount of time. Or make it nearly to the end of an episode of "Seinfeld," a show about nothing. But even though 23 minutes and 58 seconds is a long time, it apparently wasn't long enough for the American air defense system to intercept an unambiguously hijacked jetliner, even as the White House had been aware that the U.S. had already been under attack for upwards of an hour.

People said that America would never be the same again after 9/11, and it was true, although not in the way that many of us were thinking in those first few hours as the World Trade Center smoldered. The cockpit recording and transcript from the doomed United Flight 93 -- released today in the trial of terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui -- shows what most of us knew all along, the courage and nobility of everyday Americans.

For a good chunk of the 31-minute recording, the passengers are locked in a death match with the hijackers -- fighting for their lives and the lives of those on the ground, with no help from the government that had boasted since the start of the Cold War that America has the best air defenses in the world. Later, it would be rank-and-file soldiers thrown into harm's way in Iraq without proper body armor, and then the good people of New Orleans, left to fend for themselves.

On 9/11, where was NORAD, the jet fighter squadron tasked with defending America's skies?

Click here for the rest.

The essay, after firmly reestablishing that there continue to be numerous unanswered questions about the official 9/11 narrative, goes on to observe that the left side of the blogosphere has been severely delinquent in demanding answers. Atrios' take is that everybody got caught up in Iraq, and I think that's probably true to an extent. As for myself, however, I must admit that I've stayed away from 9/11 in recent months simply because I've been afraid of destroying any small amount of credibility I might have by engaging in what many would surely take as conspiracy theory.

I think I kind of weirded myself out back in the summer of '03 when I posted "MY DAWNING 9/11 REALIZATION." In that essay I strung together some of what was then known about 9/11 and concluded that Bush had to know it was going to happen--the conventional wisdom was and still is that a series of intelligence and communications failures amounted to a perfect storm. I don't know if I still think that Bush actually knew the attack was coming, but the we-just-fucked-up explanation is too damned pat. There was certainly a whole lot going on about which we know nothing.

Of course, there's probably some truth to the we-fucked-up point of view: when I concluded that Bush knew, I was assuming that he was a fairly competent individual; this was well before it became painfully clear how badly the Iraq invasion had been handled, well before New Orleans was left to rot after Katrina. The President is extraordinarily incompetent. We know that for sure now.

But there are still so many questions that incompetence does not answer:

*Why did Bush end Clinton's policy of leaning on the Saudis about their funding of Al Qaeda?

*Why did Bush end Clinton's investigation of the bin Laden family?

*Why did then Attorney General Ashcroft greatly diminish counter-terrorism as a Justice Department priority?

*Why did National Security Advisor Rice ignore explicit warnings about Al Qaeda flying jets into buildings?

*Why did Bush sit for seven excruciating minutes listening to a class of first graders read a goat story after he learned that we were under attack?

These are questions lifted from my 2003 post. Obviously, there are many more, and they will not be answered until millions of Americans demand it. That's not going to happen without the media getting involved. The Attytood guy is right: the blogosphere really needs to pound away at this topic, left too long idle, especially the big guys. Unless this happens, we'll probably never know what was really going on.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$