On the anniversary of 9/11, they come out of the woodwork: all the truthers, the partisan Dem Bush bashers who insist Bush had actionable intelligence on an imminent Al-Qaeda strike on America but he did nothing, allowing it to happen. Even my fellow libertarians remind us of subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with tens of thousands in lives lost or ruined and over $1T in deficit spending.
Familiar blog readers may remember my remembrance of the day. No, I wasn't involved in any of the attacks or a direct witness to them. I was doing IT consulting work in a suburban Milwaukee county. In the spring of 2001 I was living in Silicon Valley working various independent gigs after my former consulting company employer was shut down by its venture capital backer in the ongoing NASDAQ correction. This (Asian) Indian-American company was recruiting an Apps DBA position for a public sector project gig (I believe) in Austin, TX. As a native Texan who earned all 4 college degrees in Texas and with multiple nuclear family members living in the state, I wanted to return to Texas to work. The company president wanted to hire me to a permanent position, not a contractor; he also wasn't going to pay travel expenses for more than a month (meaning I had to move; they would pick up the bill). But the Austin gig wasn't due to start imminently. But he needed a replacement Apps DBA for his reference project in Wisconsin. I believe the story was his original DBA had been recruited by Oracle Consulting (a former employer) and the fixed-bid project was behind schedule. I did end up moving, but it was delayed because an idiotic last-minute demand by my contractor PM (not in the contract). I almost quit over that; my landlord had rented out my apartment expecting I was moving out that last weekend in July. I had movers scheduled, my car was getting picked up. My employer had wanted me to move to the Milwaukee area but this was their only local client in a project that only had a few months left. The company was located in Naperville (SW Chicago suburbs); I moved to the NW suburb of Buffalo Grove, with Metra rail service to Union Station in Chicago. Still, it was an 83-mile drive to the courthouse. And I had to there at 7:30 AM because they didn't trust the county DBA's to have the test apps up after backups, and testing had to be ready by 8 AM. And if I had to apply any Oracle Apps patches, I had to wait until after 7 PM.
So as you can tell, I was pulling in long work hours; the company president had promised me a bonus; the HR lady would later tell me buried in the employee handbook was a clause that bonuses aren't given on fixed-bid projects. But despite bringing the project back on track, I nearly got fired by the client. One of the contractual stipulations is I had to walk each of the county DBA's through the test upgrade process. So I had an appointment to walk the second DBA through it, she no-showed. It turned out she went to get her dog's nails clipped. I'm not kidding. So the next day, we contractors stopped for a restroom break on our way to a fast food lunch. I said to the guys, "You'll never guess why I had to work late last night..." What I didn't know was a county IT manager was eavesdropping in a stall and he pressed my PM to have me walked off the project immediately for not knowing my place as a guest. The same dude I had clashed with the last week in July. My PM, knowing without me, the project would not complete on time, and the company would lose money on the contract , with extended personnel costs managed to appease the client, probably promising I would be gone after go-live week. Meanwhile the on-site lead annoyed me by submitting a DBA for the Austin gig, hoping to win a referrer bonus--while I was bailing them out of the project from hell whose references they used to win the Austin bid.
So that sets my context for the morning of 9/11.My Indian developer friend came in a little late mumbling something incoherent about a plane hitting an office tower in NYC. I thought that was odd. Hundreds, if not thousands of flights daily and I had not heard of a plane hit a building. What was it--a Cessna with mechanical issues? I went back to work But, to my annoyance, I seemed to be the only one in the courthouse working. One of the clients brought in s small portable TV, and people were clustered around it. I heard bits and pieces from others passing by: UAL 93, the Pentagon, etc. It was clear the Pentagon was a military target, and it boggled my mind military jets didn't intercept it. But it wouldn't be until I got home that night that I got the full story via the Internet. The whole nation was dreading follow-up attacks. One thing I obsessed about was the morning rush at Chicago Union Station. It was like a moving wall of hundreds of people, an obvious soft target.
I knew there was going to be finger-pointing after the tragedies. I wouldn't say it was unthinkable given kamikaze missions in WWII and religious fanatics wearing suicide vests (Al-Qaeda started its suicide attacks in the nid-90's) to conceive of such an attack; we know Al-Qaeda opposed a US presence in Saudi Arabia and had declared war on the US in the mid-90's.
Even though I've transitioned to a less interventionist perspective as I've evolved to a more libertarian perspective, it's still off-putting to hear Ron Paul talk about blowback. Just about all the normal libertarian Twitter accounts were ranting over Bush's subsequent wars. I think the most irritating was the assertion Bush ignored a warning about Al-Qaeda and let it happen. No, the intelligence briefing he got was not specific and actionable. A lot of intelligence was fragmentary and/or flawed. I also won't go as far as others claiming Bush lied his way into Iraq. I think it's odd Bush went where his dad didn't in the first Gulf War. No, I knew Hussein wasn't connected to Al-Qaeda. It was a tragic error, and had bad joint intelligence behind it. But the events of 9/11 were an unforgivable crime against America.
