September 11

Seven years ago, Osama bin Laden orchestrated a deadly attack on innocent civilians in downtown New York, murdering nearly 3,000 people. When an aide told President George W. Bush "America is under attack", he responded by sitting and doing nothing for seven minutes. He did not ask where the attack occurred. He did not ask if the attack was large or small. He did not ask if further attacks were expected. He did not ask if the attack was conventional or biological or nuclear. He did not ask for a single further iota of information for a full seven minutes. This was the President of the United States--after being told, simply, "America is under attack".

In the months that followed, President Bush persuaded the American public that Saddam Hussein was partly culpable for the September 11 attacks, and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a grave and imminent danger to the United States. Both of these claims were false. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

Today, Osama bin Laden remains at large. Somewhere in the mountainous region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he wakes up every day and breathes the air we breath and gets warmed by the sunshine we get warmed by and experiences the thousands of subtle joys of being alive--joys that he deprived nearly 3,000 innocent people of on September 11, 2001.

And George W. Bush is still the President of the United States.