Five years on, 9/11 remains the dominant story of our time. That's because, as they say, 9/11 is the "new normal." The state of alert will be with us for a very long time. The "war on terror" will never end. Presidents will come and go, but the threat of another attack will always loom, and the horror of a possible nuclear attack will also be with us, one of the byproducts of the cold war, when two superpowers spent billions of dollars on weaponry. Some of these weapons are not accounted for.

It's fashionable to say today that you knew 9/11 was coming. Right wing Republicans have adopted a new talking point, repeated endlessly on talk radio and Fox News: that Bill Clinton dithered when terrorists were plotting against us during the 1990's, starting with the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing and continuing with attacks on an American embassy and the U.S.S. Cole.

But the reality is that this country was sleeping during the 1990's. The growth of the Internet and more television news stations only made us dumber. The Internet is wonderful and much news is disseminated without gatekeepers, but you have to know where to find the information. It's like a library hidden in the forest. As for television news, despite more 24-hour news channels, they broadcast absolute shit most of the time, fixating on true-crime stories and echoing war propaganda.

It never occurred to us that terrorists would strike the U.S. Recent books about the "war on terror" show that the country was on a secret red alert during the late 1990s and early 2000s as intelligence specialists began to obsess over bin Ladin and issued warnings about his intent to strike the U.S. But the country was distracted by the Clinton impeachment story of 1998, which broke in January when Monica Lewinsky's picture went on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and ended in December, when the U.S. Senate voted to impeach the President. We lost a full year during the 1990's to a bullshit scandal that never justified the wasted millions of dollars and hours in trying to undo Clinton's electoral victories.

The 2000 presidential election was a turning point. All the right wingers who complain that Clinton did not care about terrorism forget that the Republicans nominated an inexperienced Texas governor who said nothing during the campaign about terror, soothing us instead with pap about "compassionate conservatism" and maintaining a "humble" foreign policy without any nation-building. These campaign promises were either lies or wholly delusional. The election was rife with irregularities and a disgraceful Supreme Court ruling handing Bush the win. The real tragedy is that the American public gave Bush enough votes to make it close.

Memories of the 2000 election result were receding by September 2001. We did not know that summer that bin Ladin was plotting to terrorize the country. We did not know that some people in the foreign policy establishment were fixating on war with Iraq. The country should have been on red alert that summer. Anyone familiar with the Presidential Daily Briefing knows Bush learned on August 6 that bin Ladin wanted to attack inside the country. On vacation, probably reading some book about baseball and clearing brush in Crawford, Texas, Bush responded to this alarming news by telling the intelligence agent that he had covered his ass. Those were Bush's exact words, according to Ron Suskind, and the Bush administration has not questioned that account. Bush and his staff had reason to know that terror was around the corner, but on September 10, 2001, "Mr Ashcroft sent a request for budget increases to the White House. It covered 68 programmes, none of them related to counter-terrorism. He also sent a memorandum to his heads of departments, stating his seven priorities. Counter-terrorism was not on the list. He turned down an FBI request for hundreds more agents to be assigned to tracking terrorist threats."

We were sleeping during the first week of September 2001, and the Bush administration was sleeping also. Could September 11 have been prevented? We will never know. What if Bush flew back to Washington on August 6 and gave a televised address that week on the terror threat and issued an executive order to lock down the airports and secure the cockpits? Would that have deterred the attacks? Criminals run away when they know they are detected. Hindsight is 20-20. But these are questions worth asking. Sadly, no one is asking them.

One of the real tragedies is that a true clown was in the Oval Office on September 11. Insiders tells interesting stories about how the presidents actually farts in the presence of new staffers and curses like a drunken sailor. It is an absolute fact that the President has almost no intellectual ambition. No one felt secure in the knowledge that Bush was handed massive decision-making responsibilities on September 11. He was not elected to fight wars or to make important national security decisions. He probably thought being president would be easy. It seemed easy for Clinton, riding high on the technology boom, fouling up his legacy only through his sexual relationship with an intern. Surely, Bush thought to himself, I would never have an extra-marital affair, and the government pretty much runs itself these days, particularly with a bureacracy numbering in the thousands. We know that, in running for president, Bush calculated that his legacy would be complete with a successful war in Iraq. Building a good legacy was easy in late 20th Century America.

September 11 taught us that the President does make a difference. It also makes a difference who advises the President. Few raised an eyebrow when Bush's Vice Presidential pick was a man who can only be described as a social degenerate. Here's the Wikipedia entry for Dick Cheney:

Among the many votes he cast during his tenure in the House, he voted in 1979 with the majority against making Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, and again voted with the majority in 1983 when the measure passed.

He voted against the creation of the U.S. Department of Education, citing his concern over budget deficits and expansion of the federal government. He also claimed the department was an encroachment on states' rights.

He also voted against funding Head Start. As a vice presidential candidate in 2000, he reversed his position.

In 1986, after President Reagan vetoed a bill to impose economic sanctions against South Africa for its official policy of apartheid, Cheney was one of 83 Representatives who voted against overriding the veto. In later years, Cheney articulated his opposition to "unilateral sanctions," against many different countries, stating "they almost never work." He also opposed unilateral sanctions against communist Cuba, and later in his career he would support multilateral sanctions against Iraq. However the comparison to Cuba is not exactly apt, as the European Community had voted to place limited sanctions upon South Africa in 1986.

In 1986, Cheney, along with 145 Republicans and 31 Democrats, voted against a nonbinding Congressional resolution calling on the South African government to release Nelson Mandela from prison, after the majority Democrats defeated proposed amendments to the language that would have required Mandela to renounce violence sponsored by the ANC and requiring the ANC to oust the Communist faction from leadership. The resolution was defeated. Appearing on CNN during the Presidential campaign in 2000, Cheney addressed criticism for this, saying he opposed the resolution because the ANC "at the time was viewed as a terrorist organization and had a number of interests that were fundamentally inimical to the United States."

It should have raised eyebrows that Bush's Vice Presidential choice was a man who headed Halliburton, a multi-national energy corporation which also profits from international reconstruction and development efforts. Again, Wikipedia:

Halliburton operates two major business segments: The Energy Services Group provides technical products and services for oil and gas exploration and production, and the KBR subsidiary is a major construction company of refineries, oil fields, pipelines, and chemical plants.

Cheney is now running the country, according to nearly all insider-accounts of the Bush administration. Did anyone care that a war profiteer would have its foot in the Oval Office? No one cared. When we did start to care, it was too late. President Bush could not be removed from office when he launched the Iraq War, and Halliburton's relationship with that war is now the stuff of legend. But there is nothing we can do about it but protest.

Protesting is as American as apple pie. And it's not as fattening. Protesting is natural and even required no matter who occupies the Oval Office. Our foreign policy is usually up to no good, and our domestic policy is no better. The system is so corrupt that even President Ralph Nader would have risked becoming a war criminal. The system is larger than any one man.

Much was lost on that day. The loss of life goes without saying. The new normal means endless war for whatever purpose the government decides. Today Iraq, tomorrow Iran. The next day, a country as obscure to us as Iraq was during the 1980's, when Ronald Reagan played footsie with Saddam Hussein and we directed our hate towards Libya. The new normal also means that dissent is demonized by the most powerful elements of American society, and we face the very real prospect that another terror attack could curtail civil liberties forever.

As it now stands, your phone may be tapped and you will never know it. The history of cold war America was the history of surveillance against leftist activists. If I'm a betting man, I would say that some component of the infamous Cointelpro surveillance program is still with us. It did surface out of the blue during the 1980s when the Reagan administration declared war on those who dissented from American foreign policy in Central America. The stakes are higher today because now we have a real enemy. And the infrastructure that sought to silence dissenters is still with us. Whatever the government tells us about its intentions in tapping the phone lines of terrorists, the very real possibility that your phone is also tapped cannot be discounted. Tapping the lines of innocent people has always been the American way. Whatever the government is doing in this regard, it will continue to do it for maybe the rest of our lives.

Newspaper columnist Bill Press is not a household name, but a recent column raised good questions about the current Bush policy of demonizing dissenters. Recall a few weeks ago when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared war protesters with Nazi appeasers. It's not that Bush is a Nazi or even a facist. It's that he does what any good authoritarian does in times of war. I can't say it any better than Bill Press:

Americans won’t be fooled by Bush’s new terror tactics, any more than they’ll be spooked by his new fondness for comparing Osama bin Laden to Hitler and critics of the Iraq war to Nazi sympathizers. But Bush keeps plugging away, on the theory that if he tells the same lies often enough, people will start believing them. As he explained in March 2005: “In my line of work, you gotta keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in . . . to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

Sound familiar? It should. Bush’s words are strikingly similar to those of another famous propagandist: “Of course, the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along. . . . Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.” That’s how Hermann Goering put it at the Nuremberg trials in 1945.

So who’s sounding like a Nazi now?