I am very happy to have found this board. It’s extremely difficult to find kindred spirits who are on the same page about this. This is overt overkill. The maudlin obsession with 9/11 has thoroughly cheapened and commercialized this event. I dare not say this in mixed company, as to run the risk of being perceived as insensitive and unpatriotic. But the non-stop media coverage of this is highly exploitive, and sends the message that the terrorists won. They must be thrilled!
The message that is lost is that we created Osama Bin Laden. Lest we forget (and many never even knew this in the first place) that he started out as a CIA operative who ultimately turned on us. We created this monster.
Secondly, I have a very close relative who is a government employee who was part of a team involved in search efforts at the Twin Towers right after 9/11. She witnessed a number of New York City firefighters, who are being hailed as saints, wantonly looting the stores at the World Trade Center.
I pointed this out to my mom, who claimed they had a right to do this because they were “heroes.” HUH?!
I certainly was shell-shocked during 9/11; I cried for a week. And my heart goes out to the innocent people who lost their lives. But these sorts of shenanigans and the lies and hypocrisy surrounding this event and the way it is being exploited are making me sick already!
It’s not quite accurate to call bin Laden a “CIA operative”. He was a guy who happened to be fighting some other guys we didn’t like so we gave him money and weapons. It’s not as though the CIA was running the mujahideen or anything.
At best, he was a CIA asset, but even that’s a stretch.
Gee, it’s kinda arrogant to say the CIA “created” Bin Laden. There’s lots of stuff in this world that doesn’t originate with the U.S., y’know. You’re not all that.
I watched the entirety of the tribute ceremony. Everyone – from Obama to Bush to Giuliani – acquitted themselves with grace and dignity. It was – from start to finish, minus perhaps the Suzanne Vega cover – an exercise in class and humility.
The family tributes were un-put-downable and unforgettable. There was nothing schmaltzy, everything real. Was it repetitive? Of course it was. People miss their fathers and husbands. Listening to the daughters and wives was particularly poignant.
It was done as well as ever such a thing could be done.
The fact that they were repetitive pretty much demonstrates that they were schmaltzy and unreal.
I don’t remember anyone who said anything distinguishable from what everyone else said other than a kid who told his dad he was still learning to cook and an Indian woman who spoke almost entirely in cliches about liberty for 5 minutes while talking about her son.
I’ve always avoided watching these kinds of tribute events - they’re just not for me. Other people obviously feel differently about them and I don’t think it’s productive to say stuff like this:
Because it doesn’t send that message, and the terrorists (the ones who haven’t been shot to death) are not thrilled. That’s not a word I usually associate with terrorist religious fanatics. They’re not the happy-go-lucky type.
OK, the press coverage and the event are not the same thing. But it’s a major event and you can’t expect the press to ignore it. It was easy not to watch if you didn’t want to, although it was definitely hard to avoid it entirely unless you ignored both TV and the internet. I don’t think having Robert DeNiro talk about it really added anything - yeah, I get it, he’s a local guy and he’s a movie star, - and I complained a bit about the State Farm commercial (I never liked “Empire State of Mind” and having it sung by a children’s choir was not an improvement)
That’s how I’m inclined to feel about a lot of this stuff, but don’t forget that what’s maudlin for one person can be touching for another.
Already debunked, although I agree there are foreign policy lessons that were not learned.
Even if this were true, and it’s evidently not, it would say nothing about the majority of the firefighters.
I don’t think it was even that. We gave money to Pakistan to fund the mujaheddin, and Osama was a young guy who had gone to Afghanistan to fight with the mujaheddin. So the rag-tag army that he was part of received indirect funding from the US. Not exactly a “CIA operative.”
