Remembering the Dead on 9/11

I just read an unbelievable piece from the Booman Tribune's Steve D about remembering those who died on 9/11. I have copied excerpts down below.

For all the poon hunters and google horn balls who end up on my site, I am sorry for the multiple political posts but it is 9/11 and our world has been WAY FD up ever since that horrible day.

On a personal note, I lived in DC on that morning and I was still sleeping. I drove out alone to the Pentagon that evening and watched the Pentagon still burning. I believe it took almost 2 days for the smoke to stop.

It was a very surreal experience. I still to this day think what it was personally like to watch a plane go in to the Pentagon and the mental anguish all of those who were directly affected.

Oh on I side note, I wish we had Osama Bin Laden's head on a platter! The devil is probably not in some caver either! Enjoy the Read.

Today, six years later, the memory of their deaths that day is a bitter one which still haunts me. I have watched as Republicans, politicians and ordinary party members alike, have perverted the memory of those who died to justify even greater atrocities.

An illegal, preemptive war in Iraq that has killed hundreds of thousands and made millions of innocents refugees. The use torture as the official policy of our nation. The loss of habeas corpus. Warrantless surveillance of our neighbors, friends and families.

The suppression and demonization of dissent. And a host of lies swallowed whole by a news media either too gullible, too enamored with access to power or too intimidated to tell the truth.

And always, always, the evocation of the dead is made without any acknowledgment, by those whose abuse their memory, of who they were, what they were, the lives they led, the people they left behind to mourn them.

They have become a mere symbol, an icon for the right wing, a talking point to be trotted out by pundits and cynical politicians alike.

Just another prop, a slogan to place on a bumper sticker, a by now standard reference in countless speeches by our President and his supporters to validate his failed policies of death and destruction, of war without end, and of justice, not delayed, but forever denied.

The greatest change in our country since 9/11/2001 has been the failure of those in power to remember these dead as real people, whose lives were as full of joy and sorrow as our own.

Instead, our leaders and our media pundits and all the very "serious people" of Washington think tanks, who offer their ill-informed advice so freely on the op-ed pages of our newspapers and at conferences of "experts" and policy makers, have savaged their memory, turning the dead of 9/11 into the faceless "3000" who must only be employed to attack and besmirch those who question the murders and atrocities which are perpetrated in their names on a daily basis.

Our political and military leaders long ago abandoned justice for these poor souls, allowing Al Qaeda, the organization that murdered them, to regroup and thrive in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

We cannot even claim that what we are doing in Iraq amounts to petty vengeance on their behalf despite General Petraeus' best efforts to equate the small, disorganized band of terrorists who call themselves Al Qaeda in Iraq (and who account for an ever smaller amount of the violence in that war wracked country) into the same people who ordered the deaths of the people I knew.

Their deaths and our memory of them have been made to serve a lie, and the political goals of men and women whose moral values are inversely proportional to the size of their ambitions.

In a sane universe, we would have hunted down and brought their killers to justice, not with indiscriminate bombing that kills thousands of innocents, but through the careful and diligent pursuit of these criminals by our armed forces and our law enforcement agencies, working in tandem with our allies in the region.

Those who we captured would not have subjected to torture, making it impossible to ever bring them before the bar of justice, but would have been tried in a court of law for their crimes as required by our laws, our constitution and our legal traditions. Sadly, insanely, none of that has been done.

The deaths I, and you mourned, six years ago, have morphed into thousands, perhaps millions more, and it was our government that ordered these additional deaths, and our military which carried out these horrific orders. Six years, and the souls of those who died on September 11th have found no rest, no peace.

Every day our memories of them are tortured, distorted and abused. Every day more misery is inflicted upon innocents, many of them children, many of those children now orphans, all in the name of the those whose lives were so cruelly taken from them six years ago.

We have not honored their memory by bringing out the best in our society in response to their deaths.

Instead we have defiled it, by resorting to the worst impulses, propagating and implicitly sanctioning the most inhumane acts, and playing on the darkest, most hateful passions in our collective nature.

9/11 didn't change everything, but everything it changed has been for the worse.

Remembering the Dead on 9/11
Osama likely chillin in Northern Pakistan Compound
Booman Tribune