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Remembering 9/11

by — ,

I’m not big on posts like this, but 9/11 was obviously one of the most significant events of our lifetime. For someone who’s always been interested in the world both within and outside of America’s borders, the attacks of that day signified for me a new era in how America interacts with the world. It forced all of us to take our ideals and re-shape them for a new era, one in which technology made the world smaller and more interdependent than ever, but the old rules about needing to provide necessary constraints against government never went away.

The one thing I remember about that morning 10 years ago was how quick I just “knew”. It’s not that I ever imagined a terrorist attack like the one we experienced, but it was merely the odd coincidence of my phone ringing at 6:30am and then minutes later hearing a radio news reporter say the words “and one tower has fallen” before I reflexively banged on my snooze button. It clicked in my head instantly that something major was happening and I jumped out of bed, ran to the living room and put on the TV. I made it into work by about noon that day – after frantically calling friends and family out east – and was little more than a zombie, unable to focus on anything other than the realization that America wasn’t immune from spectacular acts of violence.

One thing that I find interesting is that when I hear the stories of others – particularly those of an older generation – talk about it, I’m often struck by how many of them instantly thought: this is war. I never thought that. I still don’t. At the time, I was a 26-year-old who believed that the world was at a point where wars like World War II couldn’t happen again. There was too much interaction in all aspects of our global existence for that to happen again. Five years and a month before that horrible day, I was at a Pizza Hut in St. Petersburg, Russia. The end of the cold war occurred while I was in high school, and the world I began to explore was supposed to be content with free market economies and shitty American pizza. But for those who lived through earlier times, the violence of 9/11 was seen through a lens of many years of concern over an event like that coming from a foreign government hell-bent on annihilating America.

Terrorism is an act born of powerlessness. It’s the most craven expression of political impotence one can conjure. The logic of terrorism is that the average everyday person isn’t sufficiently animated by your plight, and therefore they bear some guilt for it. It’s a twisted pathology that will sadly exist throughout the history of humanity. We can’t defeat it any more than we can defeat other failings of the human condition. But we can make it worse whenever we support policies that leave people powerless. Personal and political autonomy needs to be a focus in everything we do politically, and how we interact with the world.

But very little of that has happened. Instead, we’ve allowed ourselves to be terrified and submissive, giving up many of our own freedoms out of a baseless fear of further attacks. It would be too simple to blame that on one particular group. This was an all-American trend in the days and months after 9/11, but the trend is finally reversing. 9/11 signified the onset of a new mindset of “permanent war” in Washington. We accepted it because that day scared us. But it’s time to recognize that no matter how horrible an act of violence is, allowing our government to be unrestrained in the name of “fighting terrorism” is far worse.

Comments

  1. 1

    I’ll use a Koch Brothers financed rag to illustrate a point:

    Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

    http://reason.com/archives/200.....terrorized

    We could be sucker-punched again. If not today then maybe some other day.

    I’ll tell you what scares me more (even more than dying walking across the street) and that’s insane right wing idiots knee-jerking this country into another war HAVING NOTHING TO DO with who is sucker punching us.

    Compared with dying by terrorism – that’s almost a 100 percent gold-plated certainty.

    Al-Qaeda is an extreme Sunni sect. Iran is ruled by Shiites and Iran is TARGET #1 of the insane neo-con cult which controls the “minds” of a few choice trolls here – see the “friendo” from Montana and Puddydope.

  2. 2

    “But it’s time to recognize that no matter how horrible an act of violence is, allowing our government to be unrestrained in the name of “fighting terrorism” is far worse.”

    “We” didn’t allow the negligence and excesses of the self-appointed Bush administration. “We” didn’t elect those slimeballs; both of those elections were stolen. Nor did the Democratic Party’s voters and grassroots supporters allow the theft of those elections; the people at the top of the party did. They kicked the stool out from under “we the people” just as they always do.

  3. 3

    For a long time, America’s money-crazed and greed-driven culture refused to do anything about airline security because it wasn’t cost effective to protect against the occasional hijacking. Then Al Qaeda made it cost effective by showing us (a) how easy it was to take over an airplane and (b) how much damage could be done with an airplane after it was taken over. Today, we continue spending billions of dollars a year to protect ourselves against guys who are dead. There seems to be an almost complete lack of thoughtful rationality in our culture.

  4. 4

    As we commemorate the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor 2.0, let us not forget that every day innocent Americans are being slaughtered by guns that don’t kill people — until people who shouldn’t have guns go berserk with them.

    “At least two gunmen armed with possible semi-automatic weapons opened fire outside a Florida nightclub early Saturday morning, killing two people and injuring 22, according to police.”

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44468555/ns/us_news/

  5. 5

    On this solemn day of remembrance, I’d like everyone to remember that the Republicans in Wisconsin’s legislature introduced a bill that would allow anyone to carry a concealed gun anywhere in that state, no background check or permit required.

  8. 8

    http://thinkprogress.org/secur.....9-11-wars/

    The $1.2 Trillion Trap: What America Gave Up For 10 Years Of War Since 9/11

    By Zaid Jilani on Sep 11, 2011 at 8:00 am

    Today is September 11th, the tenth anniversary of the horrific and inhumane Al Qaeda-led terrorist attacks that killed approximately 3,000 innocents. As Americans pause and reflect on how these attacks changed our country and the world, we should reflect upon one of deceased terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden’s primary goals: bankrupting America. In an audio tape from 2004, Bin Laden explained that Al Qaeda had adopted a “policy” of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” through provoking it into engaging in perpetual warfare in the Middle East and South Asia.

    Nearly ten years after the United States sent our military forces into Afghanistan, our country has spent $1.2 trillion engaging in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the National Priorities Project (NPP). The wars are expected to cost much more than that by their conclusion, with some estimates ranging up to $3 trillion for the Iraq war alone.

    By spending this much money on wars that ended up being America’s longest in history, the United States in some ways fell into Bin Laden’s trap. This money could’ve been used in ways that would’ve invested in America — securing access to health care, a decent education, and infrastructure for alternative energy. Using NPP metrics, ThinkProgress has assembled ten alternative policies that the United States could’ve pursued instead with this money that has been spent on the wars so far:

    – Provide 63.3 Million Scholarships For University Students Every Year For Ten Years

    – Give 58.9 Million Children Low-Income Health Care Every Year For Ten Years

    – Give 23.6 Million People Access To Low-Income Healthcare Every Year For Ten Years

    – Provide 20.68 Million Students With Pell Grants Worth $5,500 Every Year For Ten Years

    – Provide 15.12 Million Head Start Slots For Children Every Year For Ten Years

    – Provide Veterans Administration Care For 14.7 Million Military Veterans Every Year For Ten Years

    – Hire 2.01 Million Firefighters Every Year For Ten Years

    – Hire 1.76 Million Elementary School Teachers Every Year For Ten Years

    – Hire 1.73 Million Police Officers Every Year For Ten Years

    – Retrofit 69.4 Million Households For Wind Power Every Year For Ten Years

    – Retrofit 26 Million Households For Solar Photovoltaic Energy Every Year For Ten Years

    These numbers reflect only the monetary costs of the wars. The human costs are much more difficult to calculate, both because it is it impossible to quantify the value of a human life and because calculating the death toll among Iraqis and Afghans is very difficult. But over 6,400 American soldiers have perished in Iraq, Afghanistan, or supporting theaters and death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan combined are in the hundreds of thousands.

    The cost in blood and treasure of these wars since 9/11 demonstrate that they enacted a heavy toll on our country, and this data should inform our actions in the future.

    Why.

  9. 9

    @6

    I bet you say the same thing the same thing about Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt too…

    its been interesting watching the lefty spin of 9-11, 10 years later.

  11. 11

    This comment won’t be popular….

    Maybe the most productive & patriotic thing to do 10 years later is to stop the 9-11 death porn. Time to realize the worst things from that day til now were self inflicted.

  12. 12

    I have been absolutely sickened by CNN’s coverage leading up to the ten year anniversary of 9/11. Someone told me that someone in their AOL chatroom estimated that over 50% of their 9/11-related stories in the last two weeks have been about Muslims-Americans, and how they have suffered from the made-up bias of Islamaphobia in the years since their religious brethren attacked me and my country.

    Fuck you, CNN! Muslim-Americans are not the victims of 9/11. The fact is, 100% of the 9/11 terrorists were Muslim, and nearly 100% of the victims were non-Muslim. Why doesn’t your reporting reflect that?

  13. 13

    Wow, there’s some perfect fake outrage right there.

    So, you didn’t read or see it, but someone told you that they saw someone in a chatroom make an unverified statement.

    Release the hounds, fire the torches. I’m pissed cause someone may have said that someone else did something that I don’t agree with and I have no proof it’s true but the fact that someone told me it happened is enough to throw all them sons’a’bitches in jail or string em up.

  14. 14

    “Terrorism is an act born of powerlessness.”

    Wait a minute. I see these piece of shit liberal-progressives driving around Seattle in their 25 year old Volvos affixed with War is Terrorism bumper stickers.

    So if you libs believe war is terrorism, and America is leading the world in war-making right now, that means you believe we are the biggest terrorist nation on earth.

    So then how does that jibe with your belief that terrorism is born of powerlessness?

  15. 15

    When I heard about 9/11, I thought: “Well, they’ve gone and done it.”

    And I still believe that. Today is a day when we should remember the Maine, feel sorrowful for the brave men who died at Harper’s Ferry, remember the war of aggression that the north perpetrayed on the south by occupying the federal government’s Fort Sumpter. Let’s not forget Pearl Harbor, where FDR allowed the Japaneses to attack our fleet in order to get into WW II. And above all, let’s not forget the flimsiest flim-flam of thenm all, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which got us into Vietnam on a very serious basis.

    The biggest lesson we should remember from these incidents is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    But, you may say, if we do not honor our fallen soldiers, then it means they died for nothing. I remember to this day that guys who graduated highschool maybe a year ahead of me were dead in Vietnam before I finished my senior year.

    Did they die for nothing? Not entirely. Many indifferent students found the motivation to excell academically so that they could be like our future vice president, Dick Cheney, who has stated that he did not go to war because he had better things to do.

    So did my classmates from highschool who never returned from that other pointless war.

  18. 18

    9. F.U. Manchu spews:

    @6

    I bet you say the same thing the same thing about Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt too…

    its been interesting watching the lefty spin of 9-11, 10 years later.

    09/11/2011 at 12:26 pm

    Of course, with his dreadfully below average reading comprehension skills, the emperpor max-minidick completely missed that History has already spoken.

    The Bush crime organization fucked up, like they fucked EVERYTHING except looting the treasury of the budget surplus that Clinton left them. THAT they did well.

    But the emperor max-minidick LOOOOOOVES stealing money, and cutting social services, and cutting money for public education, and cutting money for roads and bridges, and cutting money for police and fire departments. SHIT…that’s a private venture opportunity…that’s ANOTHER SIX FIGURE INCOME the the greedy bastard emperor max-minidick can brag about.

    You know emperor max-minidick is such a cheap ass bastard that he won’t spend $250 or 500 extra PER YEAR of that Big-ASS SIX-FIGURE INCOME he can’t stop bragging about…he won’t give a little back to the country and the people who made good fortune possible for the emperor max-minidick.

    Boy oh boy…NOBODY’S going to be erecting statues to this shitass, the emperor max-minidick.

    Oh…and I guess the emperor max-minidick didn’t hear about what the Washington Labor Realtions Board said about his little Koch-sucking pals in Federal Way…nope, didn’t think so.

  20. 20

    http://slog.thestranger.com/sl.....ls-big-lie

    We Will Never Forget Powell’s Costly and Deadly Lie

    Posted by Charles Mudede on Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 1:13 PM

    Even he can’t forget it:

    (see video interview at original site)

    He is no Edith Piaf. He has regrets. And did you see that piece of information? Each US soldier in Iraq costs the tax payer almost a million dollars a year. Yet the soldiers are not returning as millionaires and buying big homes.

    A little late huh, Colin? Like McNamara…a little late.

  21. 21

    http://crooksandliars.com/nico.....le-911-leg

    September 11, 2011 05:00 PM

    While Thinking People Grapple With 9/11 Legacy, RWNJs Shoot The Messenger

    By Nicole Belle

    Toure on The Dylan Ratigan Show on Friday, Sept 9, 2011

    Cognitive dissonance is a dangerously rampant phenomenon among the right wing. It’s astounding how they can simultaneously hold that they are the epitome of patriotic Christians, and yet not want to examine that they have spent the better part of ten years cheerleading the senseless deaths of thousands of lives that posed no threat to us and the miserly constraining of union rights and health benefits to the first responders.

    It’s human nature to not want to feel like a bad person. I get it. But it’s also a sign of a maturity and self-awareness to acknowledge that we do make mistakes…big ones. And to acknowledge that is the first step towards not repeating it. There’s not a whole hell of a lot about the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that feels good to honor. I still grieve the deaths on that day (someone I was very close to died on Flight 93), but the legacy of what this nation has done using 9/11 as the justification brings me up short.

    And I’m not alone. Cliff Schecter has pointed it out in a post below that was cross-posted on Al Jazeera. Dan Abrams notes his own reluctance as the then-General Manager of MSNBC to re-broadcast the 9/11 footage on the fifth anniversary (which the channel is doing again today). David Gergen also bemoaned the role of the media. And Paul Krugman also published an op-ed acknowledging the wisdom of being circumspect:

    What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

    A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

    The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

    Ouch. Questions about the appropriateness of the timing aside (and personally, I think we can be adult enough to deal with it) that hurts on a deep psyche level. And let me tell you, right wingers are just not having it. (links go to wingnut sites, give them clicks at your own peril)

    But is Krugman wrong? Yes, almost 3,000 people died that day, needlessly, horribly. But that day was the impetus for us to attack and invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks and posed no threat to us. To date, we’ve lost 4,752 allied service members in Iraq and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. How is this not a black mark of shame on the legacy of 9/11? How can we praise the first responders’ bravery on one hand and then deny them assistance for the mesothelioma they contracted despite Bush administration assurances that the air was safe to breathe? How can we deny that Osama’s goal to bankrupt and terrorize the country from within certainly looks like it happened as we hemorrhage trillions of dollars in multiple quagmires in the Middle East and grandmothers and six year olds are invasively groped as they attempt to travel by plane.

    But the right wingers don’t want to acknowledge that. Better to shoot the messenger and tell all their followers how much liberals hate America.

    So because I’m a liberal…a dreaded “lefty” I spin this atrocity into…something…acording to the famous historian and commentator emperor max-minidick. The emperor max-minidick and the puddypussy and the troll and all the rest are complete fucking idiots. Dead fucking wrong and complete idiots.

  22. 22

    http://articles.cnn.com/2004-0.....LLPOLITICS

    Former antiterror adviser says Bush ignored 9/11 warnings

    July 29, 2004

    The White House’s former counterterrorism coordinator blasts President Bush in a television interview and a new book, saying the president ignored warnings about terrorist attacks before 9/11 and has done “a terrible job” battling terrorism since then.

    “Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism,” Richard Clarke told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an interview Sunday night. “He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We’ll never know.”

    Clarke said he asked for a Cabinet-level meeting in January 2001, shortly after the president took office, to discuss the threat al Qaeda posed to the United States. “That urgent memo wasn’t acted on,” Clarke told CBS. Instead, he said, administration officials were focused on issues such as missile defense and Iraq.

    Nah…this doesn’t mean anything.

  23. 23

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....00282.html

    Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice

    In 2001, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, President Bush and then-CIA Director George J. Tenet ……………. (By Eric Draper — White House Via Associated Press)

    Sunday, October 1, 2006

    On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.

    Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.

    For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders called “findings” that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden. Perhaps a dramatic appearance — Black called it an “out of cycle” session, beyond Tenet’s regular weekly meeting with Rice — would get her attention.

    Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he’d seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer’s instinct strongly suggested that something was coming. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.

    He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism director: “It’s my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one.”

    But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.

    Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.”

    Sheeeee-it…that was just Condi and Rumsfeld…who were THEY anyhow…

    …and tha “lefty rag”…that “Washington Post”…fuck, just another union rag…more fukkin “lefty spin” so procalims emperor max-minidick

  24. 24

    http://www.associatedcontent.c.....tml?cat=37

    10 Warnings About 9/11 Attacks that Pres. George W. Bush Ignored and Lied About

    Timothy Sexton, Yahoo! Contributor Network

    Apr 27, 2010

    “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.” Condoleezza Rice.

    “No warnings.” Ari Fleischer, Pres. Bush’s 9/11 press secretary after being asked by a reporter “Had there been any warnings that the President knew of?”

    “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Dana Perino, Pres. Bush’s press secretary.

    “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.” Rudy Giuliani

    “We inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.” Mary Matalin.

    Well, at least there is some truth in Mary Matalin’s revision of history. While Pres. Bush did not inherit the 9/11 attacks, he did inherent plenty of security intelligence that pointed not just to an attack by Al Qaeda, but that they would hijack airplanes to fly into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

    1. The National Security Agency’s electronic spy network system provided a warning that Islamic terrorists may be planning to hijack a commercial plane to use against America. This warning was provided in June 2001. And the warning indicated that the target of the hijacked planes were iconic architectural structures that represented American evil. This particular warning is particularly troubling in light of Condoleezza Rice’s statement about nobody predicting 9/11 since she is quoted thusly: “It is highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near future.” CIA Director George Tenet tested the limits of crying wolf by becoming so frantic about the report that people started avoiding and ignoring him.

    Well fuck, at least it wasn’t ELEVEN!

    THAT should make emperor max-minidick feel better.

  25. 25

    http://www.associatedcontent.c.....tml?cat=37

    How ’bout a few more:

    2. Clinton appointee Richard Clark, the top counterterrorism expert in the Bush administration, informed several agency heads in a White House meeting held on July 5, 2001 that something truly monumental and disastrous was being planned by Al Qaeda and that it was going to happen soon. Each of those agencies was immediately put on high alert. Each of those agencies went off high alert after a couple of weeks.

    3. Another piece of evidence that makes Condi Rice’s “nobody could have predicted” statement….troubling. On August 6, 2001, members of the CIA met with George W. Bush personally to inform him that Al Qaeda planned to hijack commercial jets and attack within the United States. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration decided not to release the information that this meeting had taken place. It only became public when CBS investigated and broke the story, thus placing Rice in a considerably uncomfortable situation. The White House responded by having Ari Fleischer lie about the title of the briefing memo. Fleischer said the title of the memo was “Bin Laden Determined to Strike the United States.” The actual title was more ominous by virtue of the one word that Fleischer left out: Bin Laden Determined to Strike In the United States.”

    4. Russia. Israel. Egypt. Morocco. Jordan. The intelligence agencies of all these countries warned US spies in the weeks leading to 9/11 that a large-scale attack against the United States could happen very soon. Warnings included information such as the attacks were being planned for late summer or early fall and that the targets of the attack might be located in New York City.

    5. As far back as 1993, intelligence agencies-one of which Condoleezza Rice was head of at the time of the 9/11 attacks-had issued a study that predicted terrorist hijacking of planes to be used in simultaneous attacks in multiple cities against targets representing American culture.

  26. 26

    http://www.associatedcontent.c.....tml?cat=37

    Here’s the rest:

    6. Yet another piece of evidence that Condoleezza Rice was either totally unprepared and unfit to head the National Security Agency or that she is one of the coolest liars in American history. In 1995 police in the Philippines discovered plans by Al Qaeda that involved either exploding US jets in the air or hijacking them and flying them into the Pentagon and…the World Trade Center.

    7. Terrorism experts met with security officials employed by the FAA in 1998. The topic? How to deal with terrorists flying planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Again, this is what the head of the National Security Agency told the world immediately following the events of 9/11: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.”

    8. 1999. The National Intelligence Council issues a warning that Osama Bin Laden might be training his terrorist operatives to hijack planes and fly them into the White House or Pentagon.

    9. The Pentagon held a drill in late 2000 that simulated what the response would be….to a plane crashing into the enormous building.

    10. As part of the transition from the outgoing Clinton administration to the incoming Bush administration, the new team was informed by the old team that the number one security threat facing America was Al Qaeda sleeper cells inside the United States. Part of the Clinton strategy to deal with this threat was to attack Al Qaeda. The Bush administration, deciding that the threat wasn’t immediate enough, abandoned the Clinton plan entirely so that they could come up with a plan of their own for dealing with Al Qaeda. The date of the Bush administration’s very first Cabinet-level meeting on the subject of terrorism: September 4, 2001.

    Yeah…but it’s all lefty spin to the emperor max-minidick and the puddypussy too.

    Just like the dick head emperor max-minidick says…we’re just little people. You need a SIX FIGURE INCOME to figure out shit like THIS:

    EGT to hire through Federal Way-based union contractor

    By Erik Olson / The Daily News The Daily News Sunday, July 17, 2011 5:30 pm

    Federal Way-based General Construction Co., a subsidiary of Kiewit Infrastructure West Co., will start working at the terminal this week, Larry Clarke, EGT’s chief executive officer, said Sunday.

    The remainder of the 50 jobs at the terminal will be administrative and support positions, he said. The terminal is scheduled to open this summer or early fall.

    “We’re willing to hire union labor, and we got what we think is a good agreement with General Construction. Local, family-wage jobs is a really good news story,” Clarke said.

    He added that General Construction hires workers from the International Union of Operating Engineers, but he did not know which local.

    General Construction has worked as a union contractor in the Longview area for more than a half century, according to a statement Sunday from company spokesman Gregg Woodward.

    “General is proud of its long-standing excellent relations with the operating engineers union and other unions,” Woodward wrote. “It looks forward to continuing its work in Longview as a union contractor.”

    Representatives from Local 612, based in Tacoma, could not be reached Sunday to comment on whether union operators would be willing to work while EGT remains at loggerheads with Longview-based International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21.

    EGT’s attempt to wedge another union into the conflict was a big surprise after a week of union protests aimed at trying to force the company to negotiate a contract with the ILWU.

    Union officials argue that their agreement with the Port of Longview states that all longshore jobs on port property must be done by Local 21 members.

    “I’m stunned that they’ve contacted another union,” Dan Coffman, president of ILWU 21, said Sunday. He said he had no details about General Construction, and he forwarded all questions to the union’s San Francisco-based headquarters.

    In January, EGT sued the Port of Longview in federal court, arguing that the company was not bound by the port’s agreement to use Local 21 labor for all longshore work at the 38-acre leased site. The company’s attorneys say ILWU labor would increase its costs by about $1 million annually. A trial is scheduled for next year.

    This month, Port of Longview attorneys asked a judge to order EGT to honor the working agreement with the ILWU and hire Local 21 labor.

    Clarke said he doesn’t think hiring General Construction will end the lawsuit, but he declined to comment on specifics.

    Frank Randolph, the Port of Longview attorney, said that the two sides still need to determine in court whether EGT is obligated to hire Local 21 labor.

    “Whatever they do doesn’t change their obligation. That’s what we’re trying to get resolved,” he said.

    Portland-based EGT is owned by St. Louis Bunge North America, Japan-based Itochu Corp. and Korean shipper Pan Ocean STX. Its principal owner, Bunge, earned $2.5 billion in profits in 2010.

    Yeah…you need a BIGG-ASS income to be able to really scew people. That emperor max-minidick…he’s a REAL man, man.

  27. 27

    @19 Everybody’s a Democrat, troll. If you took a poll, it would probably show that 99% of the population are Democrats, because the GOP is so disreputable nobody wants to admit being a Republican. Can’t say I blame them.

  28. 28

    Cheaper Gas Ahead?

    Yeah, probably, short-term it’ll likely get better before it gets worse. Long-term probably will see higher oil prices. A weak economy reduces demand, which brings prices down. This fall might be a good time to buy oil stocks ahead of higher prices later.

    The overthrow of Gadhafi and winding down of Libya’s civil war will have effects on the global oil market beyond just restoring Libyan production. (Repairing war damage will take some time, so it’ll be a couple years before production is fully retored.)

    Libya has Africa’s largest oil reserves. What’s more, Libyan oil is high quality oil, is cheap to produce, and is located near European markets.

    But what’s really interesting about Libya is that decades of sanctions against the Gadhafi regime have left Libya’s oilfields underdeveloped — and have left much of the country unexplored. Experts say Libyan’s pre-war production of 1.6M bpd could be boosted to 3M bpd, although this will take billions of dollars of investment and up to 10 years. Improved recovery technology could extend existing reserves — and there might be a lot of unfound oil still out there. Nobody’s saying Libya is a Saudi Arabia, but like Iraq, its oil potential has been under-exploited for a long time, therefore it has potential to add significantly to world production capacity over time.

  29. 29

    @24 et seq.: Sidney Blumenthal, a top aide to President Clinton, recounted that:

    “Bush’s approach in most situations seemed a reactive combination of calculations to avoid his father’s mistakes and to reject Clinton’s policies. This was especially clear in international affairs: in his first nine months he reversed Clinton’s policy toward China …; in the Middle East, by withdrawing U.S. involvement in the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians; toward Korea, by abandoning the negotiated accord that had frozen the North’s nuclear program and by humiliating President Kim of South Korea, who was promoting North-South reconciliation … contributing to a wave of anti-Americanism in a country that was among the staunchest American allies; by withdrawing U.S. support from the Kyoto treaty on global warming; and by forsaking Clinton’s efforts to address the dangers of international terrorism.

    “During the transition between administrations, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger arranged several extensive briefings on this last subject for Bush’s incoming national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice, and others on the Bush team, including Vice President Cheney. One briefing lasted half a day. Berger told them that Osama bin Laden was an ‘existential threat’ and told them that he wanted ‘to underscore how important this issue is.’ In another briefing, Richard Clarke, head of counterrorism in the NSC, the single most knowledgeable expert in the government, gave them a complete tutorial on the subject. In yet another briefing, CIA officials were brought in to go over all the intelligence available on terrorism.

    “Don Kerrick, a three-star general and outgoing deputy national security adviser, overlapped for four months with the new Bush people. He submitted a memo for the new National Security Council warning of the danger of terrorism. ‘We are going to be struck again,’ he wrote. But as Kerrick explained to me, he received no answer to his memo. ‘They didn’t respond,’ he said. ‘They never responded. It was not high on their priority list. I was never invited to one meeting. They never asked me to do anything. They were not focusing. They didn’t see terrorism as the big megaissue that the Clinton administration saw it as. They were concentrated on what they thought were higher priorities than terrorism.’ The Principals meeting of national security officials took up terrorism only once, after constant pressure from Clarke, on September 4, 2001, and at that meeting they discussed using unmanned Predator drone spy aircraft, but no decision was made. ‘Unfortunately,’ said Kerrick, ‘September 11 gave them something to focus on.’”

    — Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2003), pp. 797-798.

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: By any legal standard the Bush administration was negligent.

  30. 30

    I personally couldn’t even turn on the TV today, grateful now.

    I’m not a fan of HuffPost, but this short documentary narrated by Tom Hanks just kept me coming back to watch a few times, so positive. This is how ‘Real Men’ deal with a crisis showing compassion, not so much of the rage:

    Here’s the link:
    Tom Hanks Narrates ‘BOATLIFT,’ Honors Untold 9/11 Story Of Mariner Heroes (VIDEO)-12 min.
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....56529.html

    An excellent short on Huffington Post narrated by Tom Hanks. It is the telling of how the mariners were able to shuttle over 500,000 people safely off of the island in less than 9 hours. They worked without any organization and on their own. There were tugboats, ferrys, fishermen boats, pleasure crafts all working one trip at a time to take people off the island. It is the largest maritime evacuation in history.

    Not planned and not one single injury.

  32. 32

    Foreign stock markets were sharply down in advance of Monday’s NYSE trading on rumors that Greece will be unable to avoid default.

  33. 33

    I skipped the 9/11 porn yesterday – well actually, I turned on the TV briefly and there was some talking head recounting his experience in the news room, spliced with views of the second tower being hit. Too, too much.

    When I think back, what is so tragic, beyond the immediate loss of life and shattered families, is the enormous missed opportunity. I recall a palpable feeling of community, and a desire to do something good together – to respond in a way that brought us together and transcended the evil.

    Instead, we had ShrubCheney in the WH and we got cynicism and deleted civil liberties and a looted treasury and 100,000 dead Iraqis. I always will wonder how things would have transpired with President Gore, if the attack had happened in the first place.

    @8 Rujax!
    Yes, those sorts of calculations are so clearly illustrative of our missed opportunities. Why can’t someone with a bully pulpit – someone running for President, for example, have the cojones to stand up and say, “Hey America, what do you want – the snake oil and the wars and the few really really rich people getting richer, or schools and roads and colleges and consumer protection and clean energy? Hey – which is it going to be?”

    Back after the Iraq war had been going on for just a few years I did a back of the envelop calculation, that I’ll repeat here:

    US Electrical Generating Capacity, By fuel:
    Coal: 337000 MW
    NG: 454610 MW
    Oil: 63600 MW
    Total: ~855000 MW

    At a cost of about $1.7M per installed MW of solar, it would cost about $1.4 Trillion to ENTIRELY replace the fossil fuel electrical generating capacity of the US.
    While this doesn’t address feasibility or siting or a whole host of other issues, the point is, for what we’ve already spent for NOTHING BUT DEATH AND DESTRUCTION AND SORROW, we could totally replace burning dinosaurs with clean wind.

    Fuck George W. Bush and all he represents.

  34. 34

    makes me laugh to see how much I have gotten into rujajaxoff’s head – the simple minded are so easy to fuck with.

    @30
    An excellent short on Huffington Post narrated by Tom Hanks. It is the telling of how the mariners were able to shuttle over 500,000 people safely off of the island in less than 9 hours. They worked without any organization and on their own. There were tugboats, ferrys, fishermen boats, pleasure crafts all working one trip at a time to take people off the island. It is the largest maritime evacuation in history.

    Not planned and not one single injury.

    Thats a great story. Amazing how people are come and work together in the face of a major crisis.

  36. 36

    re 35: I don’t believe that you are not having fun. I’ve never known a conservative who did not enjoy confrontation as long as they were physically safe themselves.

    Bush and Cheney are cases in point. “Mission Accomplished!!”

  37. 37

    @4 This is truly bizarre in that it coincides with the Florida state government’s new initiative to enforce a state law trumping any local ordinances restricting gun ownership or use, extending even to such things as discharging a firearm into the air in a populated area.

  38. 38

    @3 A few days before 9/11, my wife, our son and I were returning from visiting our daughter a year after she’d moved to Los Angeles. As we prepared to board our flight out of LAX, we were discussing with one another how sketchy security seemed to have become, especially since I’d done a lot of business travel during and after the first Gulf war. I forgot to take my keys out of my pocket, and the metal detector made nary a peep. All the security personnel seemed bored, and nobody’s carryons were being scrutinized save for the pass through the X-ray machines. This seemed rather curious considering that it wasn’t all that long since the arrest in Port Angeles of the guy with the trunkload of explosives and the attack on the USS COLE.

    I wouldn’t even begin to speculate on what this might have represented. Just that it was.

  39. 39

    I didn’t pay much attention to the “tenth anniversary” hoopla either. I put in a very busy weekend helping put on the Circus of Dreams shows at ACT Theatre to raise funds for children’s brain cancer research. I just pray that we as a nation can find ways to settle our arguments with the rest of the world in a fashion that won’t mean the kids we help survive don’t wind up becoming victims of senseless mayhem when they grow up.

  40. 40

    @38 For all the billions of dollars spent on airport security, the screeners haven’t intercepted a single terrorist yet. They have, however, caught passengers trying to smuggle the damnedest things aboard airplanes, including:

    1. A sedated baby tiger in a suitcase;
    2. A woman tried to take her dead husband aboard in a wheelchair;
    3. Baby monkeys stuffed in a man’s underwear;
    4. A crocodile;
    5. A dead cow wrapped in plastic;
    6. A bathtub;
    7. Coconut trees;
    8. A parrot;
    9. Tires;
    10. Sunflowers;
    11. Tarantulas; and, of course,
    11. Snakes.

    (Compiled from several websites.)

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