9/11 Trauma Defense - It’s a Lie…

Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism “czar” under Presidents Clinton and Bush is fed up with Bush administration officials using the attacks of September 11, 2001 as justification for their various policies.

[Editor: From Clarke's Sunday editorial in The Washington Post:]

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president’s national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president’s office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.

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Let me also add that I understand the horror Mr. Cheney felt on that tragic morning. I also understand what most Americans felt as their nation was being attacked. But only a few of us can say that we have had the extra horror of having our homes, neighborhoods, and lives destroyed by those attacks. I lived at 25 Broad St., almost at the corner of Wall St. If you look at a map, you will see just how close my home was to that carnage. Yet despite what I saw and continue to see in my dreams, I would never support the kind of crimes carried out by the Bush administration and I will never accept that the 9/11 attacks unhinged them. The fact is that the Bush administration was already planning a way to go to war with Iraq. The attacks of September 11 had nothing to do with that choice and cannot be an excuse for those actions. But I digress as I often do. Here is some more from Clarke’s piece:

“Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. “If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people,” Rice said in her recent comments, “then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again.’

Those Americans who dropped out of eighty-story buildings were smashing into the ground of my neighborhood, into the small park where I played chess. Those American bodies were literally on my doorstep, in front of my grocery and movie theater that I went to every weekend. Those attacks and those dead bodies hit me at home, not on television. So I fully agree with Clarke that these justifications are insincere. I would go further and call them lies. No one I know who was hit in their home or lost a loved one supports what the Bush administration has done. Yet people far away from the dead bodies, and the smoldering furnace of ground zero claim to be the most traumatized. I have noticed also that people in the deep South who were nowhere near the attacks were the most vocal about creating a police state in order to avoid another attack. Cowards die a thousand times, so the saying goes.

In any case, Cheney was so traumatized that he met with his lawyer David Addington that very same day - while the fires raged and while the country was uncertain if the attacks had stopped - to find a way to blame these attacks on Iraq. That is not trauma. That is opportunism of the most cynical kind.