More 9/11 links — and a query

Tom will certainly enjoy this story about wargame simulations the US has been using lately:

"Much of the enthusiasm for EBO in the U.S. military is based upon technological advances in communications distribution, data-mining tools, graphical display, and social/demographic modeling tools similar to those used in advertising, marketing and political campaigns."

(1) Local disputes can blow up internationally, and so it is the business of the "international community" (let's pretend there could be such a thing) - not to mention of the U.S. - that such disputes get resolved, and by "resolved" I don't mean "settled temporarily in a way that leaves us with governments favorable to U.S. interests" or even "settled in a way that leaves states that make me, as a secular democrat, feel comfortable" or even "settled in a way that seems fair to me," but rather "settled in a way that makes the vast majority of the disputants more interested in building the prosperity of their country and their region than in continuing the dispute."

(2) HUGE subtext: What if those planes had carried nuclear bombs or anthrax spores in their baggage holds?

(3) Since 1945, we've been living with the possibility of worldwide chaos, the end of civilization as we know it, the possible end of all land-based life forms on Earth. International law and some form of world government - or world something - cannot be put off indefinitely. The U.S. has simply got to be willing to participate in international law, even though some of the results will be unfair by U.S. lights, or by Israel's lights, or by my lights, for that matter.

HEATHER SZERLAG: But just as some Democrats are giving way on capital gains, much of the Bush administration's free-market dogma also seems to be going out the window. Government intervention is now the order of the day as the White House works to bail out airlines, prop up financial markets, and coordinate rate cuts and monetary policy with the European Union. Richard Kogan, an economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says the parties' compromises on key ideological points are not likely to be permanent. But Kogan says the White House may be seriously rethinking at least one notion: the idea that anything the government does, the private sector can do better.

MR. RICHARD KOGAN (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities): Airline security was done by the private sector and it was done in a typical private-sector way, which is to say as cheaply as possible.

SZERLAG: Airport security lapses capitalized on by the hijackers may have been enough to shake the GOP's confidence in that article of the free-market faith. In Washington, I'm Heather Szerlag for MARKETPLACE.

Richard was also interviewed for CNN, but I don't know if they ran the clip.

“During the 1960s and 1970s, when most terrorism was vaguely left wing in inspiration, arguments were made that terrorism was a response to injustice. Hence, if there were more political, social, and economic justice, terrorism would more ore less automatically vanish. Seen in this light, terrorists were fanatical believers in justice driven to despair by intolerable conditions. But in the 1980s and ‘90s, when most terrorism in Europe and America came from the extreme right and the victims wer foreigners, national minorities, or even arbitrarily chosen, those who had previously shown understanding or ven approval of terrorism no longer used thesed these arguments. They could no longer possibly explain, let alone justify, murder with reference to political, social, or economic justice.”

ABC interview with Bin Ladin

One Man's Private Jihad

New Statesmen editorial

Dozens of links on ZNet

Jihad in Chechnya

I put this on a Wolfowitz thread, but maybe it should go here

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?_r=1&hp

CIA vs. Wolfie and friends at the Pentagon in 2001

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.
But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

These fears triggered a surge in counterterrorism spending. Mueller and Stewart estimated that the response to 9/11 by federal, state and local governments as well as private corporations has totaled $1 trillion. The costs include measures such as beefed up intelligence, hardening of facilities and more robust airport screening but exclude the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even granting that terrorism evokes powerful emotions and hence deserves more attention than other dangers, Mueller and Stewart contended, “a great deal of money appears to have been misspent and would have been far more productive—saved far more lives—if it had been expended in other ways.”

Mueller and Stewart noted that, in general, government regulators around the world view fatality risks—say, from nuclear power, industrial toxins or commercial aviation—above one person per million per year as “acceptable.” Between 1970 and 2007, Mueller and Stewart asserted in a separate paper published in Foreign Affairs, a total of 3,292 Americans (not counting those in war zones) were killed by terrorists, resulting in an annual risk of one in 3.5 million. Americans were more likely to die in an accident involving a bathtub (one in 950,000), a home appliance (one in 1.5 million), a deer (one in two million) or on a commercial airliner (one in 2.9 million).

The global mortality rate of death by terrorism is even lower. Worldwide, terrorism killed 13,971 people between 1975 and 2003, an annual rate of one in 12.5 million. Since 9/11 acts of terrorism carried out by Muslim militants outside of war zones have killed about 300 people per year worldwide. This tally includes attacks not only by al Qaeda but also by “imitators, enthusiasts, look-alikes and wannabes,” according to Mueller and Stewart.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/09/10/did-the-u-s-overreact-to-the-911-attacks/

The risk of death by cancer is 23,000 times greater than dying from a US terrorist attack.

xchuxk put this on facebook today and i had totally forgotten about it. ugh. oof. made my stomach hurt remembering everything. i don't think about that time a lot. anyway, music-writer types quoted. chuck, and mark s. and me and others.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-09-18/music/talking-world-war-iii-blues/

its not like a political thing or anything...