Coming upon the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, the stories are starting to pile up on the history of it all, though, the biggest single reminder of that event can be seen nowadays and the view is not pleasant.
Despite what the pundits and the GOP blubber, the attack on the World Trade Center turned the US into a large, near-useless pile of shit.

The problem isn’t US peoples, the issue belongs to the assholes in Washington, D.C., who allowed a horrible tragedy to become entangled in a much, much-bigger tragedy and that’s the fall of the House of America — in a just one short decade, the US  led the world into spinning completely out of control.

And the world and its peoples are far less safe because of it.

(Illustration found here).

While the US (and the world as it seems) is more concerned about weather right now than anything — Tropical Storm Lee is dying, leaving a huge amount flooding on the Texas coast and is spreading the water up into the Tennessee Valley, while at the same time, Hurricane Katia is gaining strength as it churns through the Atlantic, this morning south-southwest of Bermuda — the spirit of the 9/11 attacks looms large in the media.
There’s all kinds of stories — even on CBS is a new video of the crash of United Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field — and in the next few days, leading up to Sunday, most-likely there will be a ton of such stories.
But what was it all about, and what’s happened in the ensuing decade?
War, famine and disaster, that’s what.

Noted UK correspondent, Robert Fisk, has an essay up at The Independent on the lie of 9/11, and comes up without an answer beyond, why.
The money bit:

But I’m drawn to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan whose The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11.
“All the evidence … indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level,” they write.
One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on “the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel.”
Palestine, the authors state, “was certainly the principal political grievance … driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg”.
The motivation for the attacks was “ducked” even by the official 9/11 report, say the authors.
The commissioners had disagreed on this “issue” — cliché code word for “problem” — and its two most senior officials, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, were later to explain: “This was sensitive ground …Commissioners who argued that al-Qa’ida was motivated by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict… In their view, listing US support for Israel as a root cause of al-Qa’ida’s opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy.”
And there you have it.
So what happened?
The commissioners, Summers and Swan state, “settled on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive.”
There’s a hint in the official report — but only in a footnote which, of course, few read.
In other words, we still haven’t told the truth about the crime which – we are supposed to believe – “changed the world for ever.”
Mind you, after watching Obama on his knees before Netanyahu last May, I’m really not surprised.

Despite what George Jr. blubbered nine days after the WTC attack: “Americans are asking `Why do they hate us?’ They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

The problem with that — a lie.
Osama and his boys were just involved in what’s called ‘Blowback,’ a retribution for the US foreign policy of shit-kicking anyone we wanted in their own lands.
And then George Jr. pulled his own US version of a blowback scheme and it’s been horrifying.
A New York Times editorial last week:

Historians will label the events of that September morning 10 years ago as the most destructive act of terrorism ever committed up to that time.
But I suspect they will also judge America’s last decade as one of history’s worst overreactions.
Of course, overreaction is what terrorists hope to provoke.
If judged by that standard, 9/11 was also one of history’s most successful terrorist acts, dragging the United States into two as yet unresolved wars, draining the treasury of $1 trillion and climbing, as well as damaging America’s power and prestige.
These wars have empowered our enemies and hurt our friendships, and have almost certainly generated more terrorists than they have killed.

And it never ends, mainly because George Jr. and his guru, The Dick, have attempted to re-write history.
Read a most-excellent post at Daily Kos on how George Jr.’s administration not only screwed up defending the US, but were still able to maintain their arrogant incompetence.
Quite a hat trick.

The always noted Frank Rich explains his version of the event in a piece at The New Yorker, and hence dips into the horror of the last 10 years.
And the debris it created.
Some bits:

Now, ten years later, it’s remarkable how much our city, like the country, has moved on.
Decades are not supposed to come in tidy packages mandated by the calendar’s arbitrary divisions, but this decade did.
For most Americans, the cloud of 9/11 has lifted.
Which is not to say that a happier national landscape has been unveiled in its wake.
…
National unity proved to be short-lived.
An extreme, jingoistic patriotism soon gripped the land, accompanied by a rigid code of political correctness.
You were either with the White House or you were with the terrorists.
If you didn’t subscribe to what Joan Didion called the “fixed ideas” of 9/11, then it could be said “the terrorists have won.”
ABC News found its patriotism questioned when it dared ban flag pins for its on-air journalists; the journalist William Langewiesche was heckled at readings for his book American Ground, a scrupulous firsthand account of the marathon ground-zero cleanup in which not every participant emerged a saint.
Each time Hollywood attempted earnest (if less than brilliant) dramatizations like Flight 93 and World Trade Center, it would cue a debate about whether it was “too soon” to go there.
The most famous journalistic photo of 9/11, Richard Drew’s “The Falling Man,” was banished from view following its morning-after appearance in the Times.
…
In retrospect, the most consequential event of the past ten years may not have been 9/11 or the Iraq War but the looting of the American economy by those in power in Washington and on Wall Street.
This was happening in plain sight—or so we can now see from a distance. At the time, we were so caught up in Al ­Qaeda’s external threat to America that we didn’t pay proper attention to the more prosaic threats within.
…
In such an alternative telling of the ­decade’s history, the key move Bush made after 9/11 had nothing to do with military strategy or national-security policy.
It was instead his considered decision to rule out shared sacrifice as a governing principle for the fight ahead.
Sacrifice was high among the unifying ideals that many Americans hoped would emerge from the rubble of ground zero, where so many Good Samaritans had practiced it.
But the president scuttled the notion on the first weekend after the attack, telling Americans that it was his “hope” that “they make no sacrifice whatsoever” beyond, perhaps, tolerating enhanced airline security. Few leaders in either party contradicted him.
Bush would soon implore us to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and would even lend his image to a travel-industry ad promoting tourism. Our marching orders were to go shopping.

Read the whole post, worth the time.
And it’s hard to believe in the few days after Sept. 11, 2001, the entire world was on the side of the US — yes, even the Iranians marched in the streets in support of all US peoples.
Then….