Both are still applicable to the current state of our government, despite having been written years ago. The American people still go begging for answers and real change.
***********************************************
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/chi-0209040291sep04,0,6324694.story“Those touched by Sept. 11 will never be forgotten” -September 4, 2002
“…It has been said elsewhere that if the terrorists hate us for our freedoms, they have done a fine job of dismantling them. Our own leaders have been too quick to attack our freedoms.
The current secrecy of our government is inappropriate. Our politicians are disturbingly casual about getting to the bottom of what was the most immense failure of government in American history.
And from the start, some have been in a rush to capitalize on that day in September.
It is our duty to speak up. We may fairly criticize one another, but we must never strive to silence one another.
President Bush is correct when he jokes about how much easier his job would be if America were a dictatorship. Democracy is the difficult thing.”
******************************************************
“The Power of Remembrance” -September 11, 2003
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/09/11_power.html“…In fact, were it not for the efforts of four mothers who were widowed on Sept. 11, known as "The Jersey Girls," we wouldn't have an investigation into 9/11 at all - hobbled and constrained as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be by the Bush/Cheney administration.
The women; Lorie van Auken, Kristen Breitweiser, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza continue to find a lack of official cooperation as well as a great deal that doesn't add up. They wonder why NORAD - North American Aerospace Defense Command - didn't act as they should in the case of any air attack. And if it's true the administration did not know specifics prior to 9/11, then why is it Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to fly commercial airlines in the weeks before 9/11? Why did Bush sit in a classroom joking with second-graders after he was told the attack on America was underway, while, as Mrs. van Auken puts it, "...my husband was burning in a building."
For obvious reasons, it's best not to argue that an investigation such as this is pursued merely to gain political benefit. Aside from insulting widows, that argument only reminds us that a sinking Bush presidency itself gained a number of benefits from 9/11. Let's remember the PNAC, Project for the New American Century and its "Pearl Harbor" statement which said a domestic disaster would be helpful in implementing plans to invade Iraq and sweep the Middle East. Let's remember that George Bush himself said 9/11 was part of his having "hit the trifecta." That's our Mr. Bush, the man who really knows how to put the "con" in "compassionate conservatism."
The group has not found any satisfactory answers to their many questions, nor do they see any proof that we're safer now than prior to 9/11. A subsequent lack of spectacular, multiple attacks within our shores does not prove much more than that a disaster of Sept. 11 proportions would never have happened had our government been doing its job. So then, why didn't it? When we know the answer to that, then we might begin to safeguard ourselves.
… I look at footage of the collapsing towers listing and sinking like a ship into an ocean of poison smoke and human vapor, a scarred and scorched Pennsylvania field, a seared and shattered Pentagon, and I still see something terribly wrong. I still see things that should not have happened. And still there are no answers.”
--The only edit I would make in that essay today would be that Max Cleland and voters were most likely also victims of election fraud. It’s amazing how America’s situation has deteriorated since 9/11. And that’s pretty much how “everything’s changed since 9/11”, as that old Bush administration saying goes.