Guest Blogger

I'm reproducing here something my sister "Athena" posted to an Internet discussion; the topic was how the Administration has screwed up so badly after 9/11.

A 9/11 Analogy

Let me give you an analogy that I think points out very clearly how badly this administration has taken the fight against terrorism off the rails.

Back in 1994, I read an article in Time Magazine that scared the crap out of me. It was about the militia movement. Heavily armed paranoids, training in the woods for what they believed would be the inevitable confrontation with the federal government - and their numbers were growing.

Whatever happened to the militia movement? Oklahoma City happened. The craziest fringe of the movement put words into action, and most of the militia members, confronted in living color with the end result of their rantings, were understandably appalled. There are still a few of them left, there are always nutcases, but by and large the militia movement was killed by the OKC bombing.

That's where Islamic extremism was on 9/11 and 9/12. Yes, there were a few idiots who danced in the streets. But there were many more, all throughout the world and including the Muslim world, who were shocked and horrified, and felt true revulsion for the attack and sympathy for the US. Over and over I've seen the right mention the street dancers, but I never see them talk about the many more we saw on television, shedding real tears as they brought flowers and sympathy notes to US embassies around the world. I saw flowers from Iranians and Iraqis - do you remember that? Do you remember the banks and banks of flowers at every US embassy around the world?

The 9/11 attacks could have killed Islamic terrorism as thoroughly as OKC killed the militia movement. It didn't because of the way the Bush administration handled it.

You don't think so?

Let's imagine then, that we'd handled OKC the way we're handling terrorism today.

Every friend, relative, and coworker of McVeigh and Nichols have been rounded up and shipped to Cuba, where they are housed in kennels for years with no access to lawyers or any recourse to challenge their detention. Members of militias are rounded up, those that don't take to the woods - and they're shipped off to the Gitmo kennels too.

Then the president decides that the real threat is over there, one county over from McVeigh's old schoolteacher. The county is occupied by US troops. People's doors are busted in in the middle of the night, people are cuffed and dragged away with bags over their head, detained for months, even people who've been determined to be no threat. Men and women and young boys are stripped and photographed and humiliated and kept awake for days, some are sodomized, and some are beaten to death, and some are smeared with excrement and photographed being pointed at by jeering troops.

Do you think that would kill the militia movement? Do you think the members who hadn't been rounded up would just fade away, sure that they'd been wrong? Not hardly - you've just proven them RIGHT!

There are not enough troops and police in the whole United States, not with round the clock recruitment and training, that could have stifled the militia movement if we'd behaved like that, proven them so conclusively right about the threat posed by the federal government. Washington would look like Baghdad.

But we didn't do that. We handled an outrageous crime like an outrageous crime, punished the guilty and not the innocent, and those who at one time shared sympathy with the perps were ashamed to admit that they'd ever believed as they believed.

If only we'd had an administration less paranoid and less drunk with military might, we might be able to say the same about Islamic terrorism today.

But we don't - so here we are.