Our 9/11 Memories

God Bless America…..

And the LAST person we want in the role to “protect” us from terror?

http://www.blogatroid.com/TEAT.jpg

I turned on the news and saw the fire in the towers, which were still standing. I thought it was just a terrible fire. Then I went outside and walked out to the Hudson River, about two miles north of the Twins. The sky was filled with smoke and I thought, wow, that fire is a lot worse than I thought. I didn’t realize the first tower had fallen while I was walking to the river, that’s why there was so much smoke.

A man told me the tower had fallen over, and I dropped to my knees. There were thousands of people on the highway watching. Then the second tower fell — it just flatlined. My parents live ten blocks from the tower, and I thought I had just watched them die. Luckily, the phones in the area were still on, so I called and found they were all right.

The funny thing is, my mother had stored up a month of emergency supplies for Y2K. When nothing happened, we all made fun of her. But when 9/11 hit, everyone in her building came to her for candles, batteries and bottled water. So I decided, hey, she’s pretty smart.

I was living in Europe and watched it all shortly after the first plane hit, Euro station had it direct from a US station. Many Brits around me cried.

It was surreal and scary. Like time froze. My sympathies to all affected.

When the 2nd plane made contact with its WTC tower, I said, “We are now at war with Islam”

A lot of people had no idea what I meant by that , I’m sure many thought I was paranoid/crazy.

But that is what we are in. My statement was actually wrong because it’s’ not us who are at war with them, but they are at war with the rest of the world, including us.

Many people have the reflex to protest with “Not every Muslim believes in Jihad.. supports Jihad”.. fine whatever..

Islam is at war with the world. We represent and protect the systems of law that Islam says are against Allah. We are target number 1 until we no longer have the will or ability to get in their way.

This war will go on until one side masters the art of brutality and destroys the will of the other. That is the nature of war with people who believe Allah wants them to be as brutal as possible.

I’ll leave with this quote.. has anything changed? With the cowardly, ignorant people trying their best to handicap our nation, do we have a chance?

John Wesley (1703-91):

“Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it…have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind”.

I was living on an AF base and my husband was on leave (vacation), he was watching TV and called for me to see what was on TV. At first I thought it was a movie and when I found out it was for real, it was surreal. I couldn’t stop watching it.

My husband put his uniform on and headed into work. He was there for a couple of daysbefore coming home. The security forces shut down the base, humvee’s with armed soilders were patrolling the base.

My son attended a school off base. They had to leave all backpacks at school, at the gate they were searched, the bus was searched before they were allowed back on base.

When my daughter was coming home from work, it took her 4 hours to get to the gate and then they wouldn’t let her on. I had to go off base, secure her automobile, and escort her onto the base.

This senseless attack on civilians was cowardly. My heart goes out to all the people affected and the loved ones that are still coping with their loss.

I was a thousand miles away on 9-11-01 but listened to the reports on the radio driving to work.

It was devastating and we were put into a state of alert at work for the entire day. The uncertainty was very real. For several days we wondered if a war was about to begin.

What I remember more is going to Manhattan in April of 2003. A firetruck drove down the avenue at Times Square and the people on the street started cheering and waving. Some stopped walking and put their hand over their heart as the truck passed by. The firetruck had the names of their fallen fire fighters painted on the side. Some New Yorkers were moved to tears.

Those gestures by New Yorkers on that beautiful Spring day struck me deeply. I felt a sense of being a part of a nation, a great nation that had stood despite devastating circumstances.

When I saw the picture of Obama not placing his hand over his heart when Clinton and Richardson did made me turn away from him immediately.

I lived on the west coast at that time and was up when it happened, though I didn’t know about it until my husband called me from work and said “turn on the tv”. I did and watched the footage. He then said “what do you think?” I said “terrorists” and that was about it. I am not surprised considering the amount of attacks against US bases, embassys, ships and troops.

I am still not over it. Will not vote for the spineless gumby that the DNC has put forward. I want someone on the wall and at the gate, not opening the door.

First plane hit. A friend called from his business.

“You hear about the plane crash?”
Yes.

“There was a guy who recently said we’d regret how we’ve done things in the Mid East and Israel.”

“I think this is him.”

I walked to the store, around the corner from the house, and we went to the neighboring business. It was a television store, closed now(thank you Bush economy) and we made it a giant situation room.

Every network was on.

Then the second plane hit. His assertion was right, and he knew who probably had something to do with it.

Yet AWOL sat in a class room needing to be told what to do. Some guy running a music store buy/sell/trade, who read papers and watched news when he got from work around raising several kids, had it right.

Who could have imagined?

One of the NBC umbrella of broadcasters had a passenger from the flight that went down in PA on the station. Their seat was in third class near the plane’s tail.

“It’s okay now, there’s a plane outside the window, a fighter plane.”

…fuzzz, silence…
Announcer/newsreader:
“We seem to have lost contact with the passenger, we’ll maybe get back with that caller in a few minutes.”

We also recall seeing a bunch of people celebrating the tower’s fall and filming it. Turns out they were Mossad. Thought they were Mideastern from the dark hair, eyes, etc. to have heard the announcers say, they ended up being questioned.

So much for the best and the brightest being in command on that day, aside from the recently demoted Richard Clarke.

Has anyone noticed the abscence of Michelle?
If she loves her country so much now, why wasn’t she at the ceremonies with hubby at 9/11 today?’

She must be in hiding? They are afraid she will say something or else she is mad at hubby for all the smooching he does with other supporters and Biden’s wives. (giggle).

Let’s not bash Michelle. I do not like her much and not at all her husband but she too is a woman in an historical role. A whole lot of trash has been thrown her way. I have made some snarky comments myself. But I really see how damaging it is to all women when we put any woman down with comments that have a gender bias. Let’s really take a principled stand and put sexist comments off limits for all females.

After the attack, a British colleague (I was overseas in SE Asia) told me that Afghanistan was a graveyard for superpowers and there’s no way that we would succeed against the Taliban. I let the comment go but it upsets me to this day – not because he was right in any way, but because I should have told him to go to hell after everything the US has done for the British.

9/11 still breaks my heart because it showed me that our allies wouldn’t be there for us after everything we’ve done. Even now, every NATO member knows we need more troops in Afghanistan and more international support to go after terrorists in Pakistan, Iran, and Syria. But what do they do? Nothing.

Washington Post Smears Sarah Palin on 9/11

Total abuse of “Freedom Of The Press” that the Troops are going out to defend.

More Media Smears And Lies!

Kristol: The Washington Post Distorts Palin on Page One

Here are the headline and the first two paragraphs from an article posted online that apparently will be on the front page of Friday’s Washington Post:

“Palin Links Iraq to 9/11, A View Discarded by Bush”
By Anne E. Kornblut
 Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008; A01

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 — Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

The idea that Iraq shared responsibility with al-Qaeda for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. On any other day, Palin’s statement would almost certainly have drawn a sharp rebuke from Democrats, but both parties had declared a halt to partisan activities to mark Thursday’s anniversary.”

Kornblut’s interpretation of what Palin said is either stupid or malicious. Palin is evidently saying that American soldiers are going to Iraq to defend innocent Iraqis from al Qaeda in Iraq, a group that is related to al Qaeda, which did plan and carry out the Sept. 11 attacks. It makes no sense for Kornblut to claim that Palin is arguing here that Saddam Hussein’s regime carried out 9/11—obviously Palin isn’t saying that our soldiers are now going over to Iraq to fight Saddam’s regime. Palin isn’t linking Saddam to 9/11. She’s linking al Qaeda in Iraq to al Qaeda.

People can debate how intimate that connection is, and how much of the fight in Iraq is now against al Qaeda in Iraq–but it’s simply the case that Palin is not saying what Kornblut says she is, and that the Washington Post is, right now, leading its paper with a clear distortion of what Palin said.

Posted by William Kristol on September 12, 2008 12:02 AM |

not bashing Michelle, but asking where she is. it is striking that she was not there and Cindy McCain was there.

I live in the Bay area, so it was really strange that that so much had already happened by the time we woke up that day. I turned on NPR that AM for the news and at first thought they were talking about a small plane hitting one of the towers. It took me about 30 seconds to grasp the enormity of what they were talking about and then I turned on the TV (Peter Jennings, I think) to see the live images from NYC.

I remember crossing the Richmond-San Rafael bridge to go to work and looking over at the Golden Gate bridge in the distance and thinking “that’s a target” and then instinctively hit the accelerator to get across that bridge fast.

A co-worker had been in Richmond, VA visiting family and was coming back to SF on 9/11 from Washington Dulles. It was almost 24 hours before we heard that he was okay, his flight had been cancelled. Another co-worker had a friend who had just started a temp job at the WTC. For days he searched all of the internet sites that popped up with pleas for information on missing persons. But his friend was never heard from again, there was just a listing on one of the sites that said he was last seen on the 92nd (I think) floor of WTC 1. May he and all of the victims rest in peace.

Sad: This was the part of your question about Michelle that I thought had a sexist ring to it.

They are afraid she will say something or else she is mad at hubby for all the smooching he does with other supporters and Biden’s wives. (giggle).

I have no problem at all with where was she and this was important why wasn’t she there. I guess after all the comments to HRC and now to Palin I am getting burned out or up over put downs and tee hees.

Michelle has never shown a love of country either. Actually it would have been disingenuous of her to show her face today. She doesn’t care. No amount of backtracking and flag waving from her is going to alleviate the fact that she has participated in a hate based theology, introduced her children to such hate and has rubbed elbows with the likes of terrorists, middle eastern arms dealers, and the Nation of Islam.

The PC police can beg to go easy on her, but that doesn’t erase the fact that she has ulterior motives. In another time, she could have ended up like Ethel Rosenberg.

If Hillary and Sarah are the light and good forces, then Michelle is the opposite.

I live on the west coast ,that morning the DJ on the clock radio said a plane had hit the world trade centers,I looked at the clock and said over and over again there is a three hour difference people were at work , people were at work .My spouse came into the room and said you need to come in here. I watched the second plane hit ,then watched the buildings collapse,I will never forget that, That day the world changed for me.

GOD BLESS AMERICA ,TODAY AND ALWAYS

Two things no one ever talks about 9/11:

Obama Bin Laden planned 9/11 over a long period of time. He says the next attack will be the same. (Is 7 years long enough to throw us off?)

2nd we blame Bush and the Republicans for this mess the country is in, but this is exactly what Obama Bin Laden planned by hitting the towers. It was not just to destroy the towers and be symbolic, he meant to throw the whole world into disarray.

Please place Michelle comments in a thread for her.

I was at work at my retail job that morning, no televisions or live radios in the place at all, when a co-worker who had the day off thought to call in and tell us all what was going on.

I can imagine it from his point of view, sitting in his living room alone and seeing the news coverage, and he called maybe not so much for our benefit, but probably because like any human being, he needed to give words to what he was seeing. He called us with every new development and with each phone call it became harder and harder to process what he was saying. I remember thinking that surely it wasn’t so bad? It couldn’t be! It seemed he was making less and less sense. But when the phone call came about the towers actually crumbling to the ground, I guess that’s when we all at work finally realized the magnitude of what had happened, having not yet seen or heard any of the news coverage ourselves.

I rushed home on my lunch hour and turned on the television. Even knowing what had happened based on my co-worker’s phone calls, I wasn’t prepared for the images I was now seeing hours after every one else.

I’m one of those people who watch every year now that I work at home when the networks replay the coverage in real time on Sept. 11. I did it again this year. The shock, anger and sadness feels the same as it did in 2001.

God bless the victims on those planes, in those buildings, and the brave NYC emergency responders who lost their lives that day.

I was working on my job in Chicago. Systematically we were all evacuated from our work places. On the train home, someone asked me if I would be all right and I replied that I wasn’t sure.

When I finally reached home, I kept the news on trying to get a grasp of what happened. I didn’t sleep for two days, my heart hurt for the suffering others were going through.

We all became a single people under one flag.

I will never forget 09/11/2001. Lost my brother in that terrorist attack. Rest in peace, bro.

There are three ONE hours DVDs that were produced by the BBC, titled THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES that should be required viewing by everyone who visits No Quarter. I can only post this in a comment. Perhaps others more central to the nexus of this information giving blog could post this to further our general understanding of how we have been manipulated by those in power and whose agendas continue to move us toward more terrorism and not less. Forewarned is forearmed.

This is a link of an reenactment of what went on inside the WTC that day

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CE78907C2107BAA1

“Inside the WTC”

It was made by Discovery Channel / A&E those kind of channels.

At the end it closes with these words by one of the survivors:

Don’t push it under the rug
Don’t forget it
Because it’s gonna happen again
And I believe they’re going to try again
It wont be tomrorow…
It wont be next year…
But they’re coming back

I will always remember that day as most will. I was at work. We had an area that dealt with Wall St and so they had televisions to watch the market and it came on the news. Word spread quickly as someone in our department announced what had happened. No one I know was affected by this directly but the United States is my country. I was talking w friends yesterday who don’t vote and think it’s “no big deal”. I said do you think it is no big deal to be oppressed and live somewhere like China or North Korea?? No answer. I heard the usual excuses like our vote doesn’t count, Congress and the President control everything. I said, EXACTLY. And who do you think elects them to do that?? WE DO. Cripes, in Indiana we have voting machines. You can vote early in several locations or vote election day. I have done both and it only took me 5 minutes. All I know is I refuse to stand by and do nothing while crazy ass Obama and his merry pea brain pod bots try to take over our country.

McCain/Palin 08

God Bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her and guide her, through the night, with a light from above.

From the mountains, to the prairies,to the oceans, white with foam

God Bless America, my home, sweet home…..

I have been watching the NBC coverage of the WTC attack. Ironically, I heard Larry being interviewed by Couric as the tragedy unfolded. In addition to evoking the horror, the pain of the original incident, it has made me even more aware of what it is about BO that prevents me from ever supporting him.

The people who planned the WTC attack were filled with hatred for this country, its citizens, its history. The groups BO has associated with are filled with the same hatred, from black Liberation theologists to Nation of Islam adherents, from Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground to Jeremiah Wright, Bill Phlegler, Louis Farrakhan, Khadafi, Chavez, Michelle and the list goes on and on.

Anyone who truly remembers WTC can never vote for a person who has the slightest taint of anti-Americanism.

This is the first time I’ve seen the entire chronology from the original plane hitting the tower to the second plane’s impact, the collapse of the first tower and the strike on the pentagon all reported in real time. Of course I’ve read about the attack, watched the fires and smoke from NJ, visited ground zero a couple of days later, saw St. Paul’s chapel covered in ash and soot, but watching the entire incident unfold is beyond belief even though it’s 7 years later.

The hatred, the venom, the deliberate murder of thousands of innocent Americans, the glee with which the ‘Great Satan” was confronted on its own territory reminds me of the attitude of so many of BO’s mentors, from “Goddamn America Wright,” to “White folks greed serves a world in need Barry,” to “I didn’t do enough William Ayers.”

It is sickening. I can’t understand how any of the reporters or politicians who were part of the WTC attack, reported on it, experienced it, knew people who died in it, can now support BO. Andrea Mitchell was there . . . Couric was there . . . Mat Lawrey was there . . .

My daughter called me to turn on the news, because she knows I never watch day time TV.
We have family in that area, and one that had previously worked in the North Tower.
I am not sure that I have come to terms with the horror, even now! I can’t grasp the inhumanity of terrorism!

I remember both. In 1993 I was on the east coast and just happened to be home and watching the local station when the bomb exploded and the coverage started. I couldn’t stop watching as hundreds of gasping, choking people spilled into the streets. I called my spouse at work because I had to share what I was seeing. And as unbelievable as it was that this could happen in the USA I had faith that our government would catch the terrorists who did this. And it did.

I was on the west coast when the planes hit. I again was home when it happened. It was like deja vu only so much worse this time. The same screaming sirens, firetrucks, policemen and hundreds of gasping, choking people spilling out into the streets.

I saw the live feed of the second plane striking the second building, I saw George W. Bush, who knew what had happened sitting there as if nothing happened and I wondered where the Secret Service agents were and why wasn’t Bush being hustled away. Anyone who has seen the tapes of John Kennedy’s assassination knows how fast the Secret Service reacts when the President is in danger and yet no one moved. I knew how bad this was and yet the Secret Service and Bush didn’t?

We had friends there but had no way of reaching them for days. Our friends had family there who were first responders and all fortunately survived but they did not know that for days either. Friends weren’t sure if their child’s flight was involved and there was no one to call for information. A friend had a niece whose husband worked in the Pentagon. He got up to hand deliver a report and moments later his office was destroyed. He survived.

While the rubble burned these are the practical things that occupied our minds. Besides the hundreds and thousands of faces that spontaneously appeared on that wall, the memories that stay in my mind is that tall piece of twisted steel still standing amid the debris. It was like a defiant gesture to the terrorists and I wish it had remained as a testimony to all who died there and as a symbol of our national spirit that did not die there.

And the absolute stillness in the skies after the plans were grounded that I had never experiences in my lifetime, like a lingering tribute to all those who had died. And the jolt of adrenalin of a lone aircraft breaking that stillness in the night even though I knew it was a fighter circling the skies.

Seven years. And it’s like it happened yesterday.

I was working in NJ — a stone’s throw away from lower Manhattan. I saw the Word Trade Center on my way to and from work every day and suddenly it wasn’t there. Some who worked with me actually saw the towers fall. Every day for at least a month, the skyline over Manhattan took on an eerie and ominous look — changing every day.

Strangely, when I left for work that day, I told my husband that I felt weird but didn’t know why. On my way there, I was soothed by the beauty of that day and the profusion of daisies that covered the roadside.

Later on, I knew why my intuition was correct when all Hell Broke Lose.

I had too many memories of that day in Manhattan and they will never recede.

The most poignant happened about a little more than a month later. I got a call in my office from a women in Rhode Island who dialed the wrong number and got me.

She was obviously upset. She had received a call that they found her 25 year old son’s driver’s license in the pile of Ground Zero, which would be the only possession she would have of him since he perished. Even after she knew she dialed wrong she felt she had to tell me her story and his.

Every memory of 9/11 including the people I knew who perished reinforces the fact that we need, first and foremost, a real Commander-in-Chief and not a smooth talking lightweight who is completely untested in crisis situations and will fold.

Well I thought~

LaRouche’s Warning Was Right

Yes speaking in January 2001, Lyndon LaRouche, made a warning that what we could expect from a Bush/Cheney Administration was a new ‘Reichstag Fire’
event to be used as the excuse for ushering in a police state here in America and the launching of war in Asia. LaRouche recognized this reality as he knew the modus operandi of the the Bush/Cheney networks. The relevant background was and is the ongoing collapse of the world finacial system to which we are still in the midst of and to which LaRouche had long documented the strategy of the Anglo-American finacial elite to use war as a means of staying in power.

Now the financial System continues its meltdown and both Obama and McCain and are no different in be pawns to the next phase of the operation, historically known as the ‘Great Game’ to keep Asia embroiled in war. As such the war against Russia and China.

This is the Brzezinski plan of which the neocons are on board with.

Of course Barkey is extremely dangerous because he has left cover. The left cover of the left which would never challenge the Bush Administration and the ‘official pet-goat story of the 9/11 commission.

The Russians know otherwise!

Now it is ironic considering this blog that it was
LaRouche who had won Presidential Primaries in Akansas and Michigan in 2004 and then was deemed not a Democrat by the DNC, blostered by the same 5-4 Supreme Court that gave Bush the Presidency. This even though he was the 2nd Democratic Candidate to qualify for Federal Matching Funds for his campaign…and how did he get on the ballot.

The issue was that the DNC, to whom LaRouche was unmercifully critical, did not want to hear from LaRouche delegates at the convention, nor at Platform Committee meetings.

LaRouche said that the Democratic Party should not be a ‘private country club’ but it is and now people who should have at least dialogued with LaRouche and his ideas ar now realizing that he was right.

So on that morning of September 11, i immediatly recalled LaRouche’s speech, and I then remembered the LaRouche organization’s previous call in 1999:

To put Great Britain on the list on nations that sponsor terrorists

Yes! For it had been confirmed that many known terrrorists organizations had offices in London…

Larouche & Co. had long shown that radical Islam had been nurtured and concieved by British Intelligence networks.

As to the 9/11 operation, LaRouche knows that this was a black op run by forces in and around intelligence agencies of several countries. This was not ‘blow-back’ as the Obama-left crowd want you to think, but a deliberate pretext towards changing the very nature of power in the U.S.A towards pre-emptive war.

It continues, America supports Chechen Terrorism, with the funding of Ilse Ahkmadov, via Obama advisor
Brzezinski.

The only way to 9/11 Truth is to stop war against Russia to which the Russian’s may well weigh in against the lies of Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Obama, McCain and now Palin…

Putin is more our President than any other, he supports FDR in his country and is fighting the enemies of America —Soros and his bosses the British!

Don’t be fooled any longer by the charade

With no quarter on the lies of 9/11 and beyond.

I watched the news last night; Obama & the McCains each laying a rose on the memorial.

First, Obama TOSSED his rose on the heap as though it meant nothing. McCain glanced at him, then respectfully placed his rose on the memorial. As he stood up, Cindy McCain also respectfully placed her rose.

To me, that said it all.

I was at work in Roanoke, VA, about 30 mins south of DC by plane. We were in a meeting in our conference room, which had a wall of windows that looked out over the airport. Someone burst into the meeting and turned on the TV – the only one in the office – and we all sat mesmerized as the tragedy unfolded. Not 5 minutes after the TV was turned on, all sorts of planes started landing – big jets included. Within 30 minutes there was nowhere left to park them!

Thankfully I did not lose anyone that day, but I still mourn for many of my firnds and family that did. We cannot forget, we must always remember, or we are doomed to experience it all over again.

I think 9/11 is still fresh in everyone’s mind. My heart goes out to all families who were affected. One thing I can’t forget is obama’s mentor Wright and his remarks he made about 9/11. Someone whom sits in a church for 20 yrs must have the same views.

Talk to your dealer, dude. i think you got a bad batch.

That’s true. Obama says he’s a patriot, but has long and close relationships with two people who used 9/11, a horrific unproved attack that killed thousands of Americans, as an excuse to bash the country. Its stunning to me that someone can hate America so much that they side and/or sympathize with obvious evil.

BTW I was in Bali in 2002, just a few weeks before the bombings that killed 202 people and injured 139, mostly Australians, Indonesians, and British on vacation. Bali is one of the most beautiful vacation spots on earth and the people are as nice as they come. Attacking a place like that with no geopolitical significance in an attempt to kill innocent tourists is just pure evil and the economy of Bali was devastated for more than a year.

God Bless America.

Bill Ayers is a terrorist as well as many more Obama worked with and they have funded his campaign.People wake up.

Obama didn’t even go to the site of flight #93 Those people save the white house that’s where the plane was heading for.John McCain went as well in Washington.Obama had lunch with Bill Clinton instead of going to the site of # flight 93.Obama ranned around in all the other countrys but made no attemp to really stop and go to the site of Flight #93

John McCain was there then and now.Obama sent an email out.Or should I say his staff.To busy having lunch with Bill Clinton.

God Bless America and the people who died from the hands of terrorist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIUCFvdkDUU

Here’s an article from 11 Sep 01 by Mark Steyn, who i think is the best writer in the country. He has been ahead of his time on topics like jihad and European depopulation

A WAR FOR CIVILIZATION
Topical Take

Thursday, 11 September 2008

This is what I wrote seven years ago, on Tuesday, September 11th 2001, for the following morning’s National Post in Canada and that week’s Spectator in Britain. This version is fromThe Face Of The Tiger, with second thoughts at the foot of the page:

You can understand why they’re jumping up and down in the streets of Ramallah, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. For one day they reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful Presidential vagrant, bounced further and further from his White House to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska, by a security staff which obviously understands less about the power of symbolism than America’s enemies do.

And, for those on the receiving end, that “money shot”, as they call it in Hollywood – the smoking towers of the World Trade Center collapsing as easily as condemned chimneys at an abandoned sawmill – represents not just an awesome loss of life but a ghastly intelligence failure by the US and a worse moral failure by the west generally.

There was a grim symmetry in the way this act of war interrupted the President at a grade-school photo-op. The Federal Government has no constitutional responsibility for education: it is a state affair, delegated mostly to tiny municipal school boards. But one of Bill Clinton’s forlorn legacies is that the head of state and the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nation on earth must now fill his day with inconsequential initiatives designed to soothe the piffling discontents of soccer moms and other preferred demographics of the most pampered generation in history: programs to connect elementary schools to the Internet, prescription drug benefits for seniors, government “lock-boxes” for any big-ticket entitlement the focus groups decide they can’t live without, and a thousand and one other woeful trivialities.

And so the President was reminded of his most awesome responsibility at a time when he was discharging his most footling. If you drive around Vermont and Massachusetts and California, you spend a lot of time behind cars with smug bumper stickers calling for more funds to be diverted from defence to education, because this would prove what a caring society we are. Tuesday was a rebuke to those fatuities: the first charge of any government is the defence of its borders – and, without that, it makes no difference how much you spend on prescription drug plans for seniors. From the moment Colin Powell advised against marching on Baghdad and ended the Gulf War, the world’s only superpower has been on a ten-year long weekend off. It loaded up the SUV, went to the mall, enjoyed the good times and deluded itself that in the new world politics could be confined to feelgood initiatives – big government disguised as lots and lots of teensy-weensy bits of small government.

Yesterday’s atrocities were a rude awakening from the indulgences of the last decade, with some awful stories to remind us of our illusions – disabled employees in wheelchairs, whom the Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive.

On Tuesday, the post-Cold War era ended and a new one began.

The first named victim I was aware of was the wife of the Solicitor-General, Barbara Olson, whom I sat next to at dinner a few weeks ago. She was one of the “blonde former prosecutors”, which sounds like a rock band but was the standard shorthand for the good-looking female commentators who turned up on CNN every night during impeachment – she was smart, witty, a fearless scourge of the Clinton Administration. She’d postponed her trip to California by a day so she could wish her husband Ted a happy birthday on Tuesday morning and so found herself on American Airlines flight 11. She had time to call to tell him her plane was being hijacked and that she had been hustled to the back of the cabin with the other passengers and flight crew. By then, the Solicitor-General knew that two planes had deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center. He told Barbara what was happening –that she wasn’t in the hands of some jerk who wants his pals sprung from jail and a jet to Cuba but cooler customers with bigger plans. A few seconds later her flight ripped through one side of the Pentagon.

I’m sure Ted Olson, in the course of the day, saw some of those TV pictures of taxi drivers, merchants and schoolchildren in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine passing out candy to celebrate the death of his wife and thousands of others. This is not terrorism – five guys in ski masks plotting in a basement. This is war, waged in the shadows but openly cheered by millions and millions of people and more covertly supported by their governments, including some who are, officially, our “allies”. America lost 2,403 people at Pearl Harbor, 2,260 in the War of 1812, 4,435 in the entire Revolutionary War, and 4,710 on the worst day of the Civil War. It is entirely possible that the final loss on Tuesday will exceed those totals combined. That’s war.

What matters now is how the US reacts. President Bush, echoing a long line of British Prime Ministers responding to IRA attacks, called the perpetrators “a faceless coward”. “Cowardly,” agreed Rudy Giuliani, and Jim Baker. Those Prime Ministers were wrong and so are the President, the former Secretary of State, and the Mayor of New York. The men or women who do such things are certainly faceless but not, I think, cowards. A coward would not agree to hijack a plane. Many others might do it for, oh, $20 million, a change of identity and retirement in the Bahamas: those would be the stakes if life was run by Warner Brothers or Paramount and the terrorist was played by John Travolta or Bruce Willis. But very few of us would agree to hijack a plane for the certainty of instant, violent death. We should acknowledge that at the very least it requires a kind of mad courage, a courage 99% of those of us in the west can never understand and, because of that, should accord a certain respect. Assuming (as Barbara Olson’s phone call seems to confirm) that no United or American Airlines flight crew would plough into a crowded building even with a gun at their heads, the men who took over the controls were sophisticated, educated people, perhaps even trained jet pilots who could be pulling down six-figure salaries in most countries but preferred instead to drive a plane through crowded offices in one all-or-nothing crazed gesture. If these men were cowards, this would be an easier war. Instead, they are not just willing to die for their cause, but anxious to do so.

And what causes are we willing to die for? By “we”, I mean “the west”, though in truth these days that umbrella doesn’t cover a lot – the United Kingdom, most of the time; France, when it suits them; Canada, hardly at all, not in any useful sense. Even America’s sense of purpose has shrivelled away since the Gulf War: Why was there such a comprehensive intelligence failure? Is it because the US has come to rely too much on electronic surveillance – satellites, telephone interceptions – and virtually eliminated human intelligence – the old-fashioned spies who go into deep cover at great risk to themselves? And is the delusion that you can fight terrorism with computers from outer space just another wretched example of the nouveau warfare pioneered by Mr Clinton in Kosovo? Or, to be more accurate, not in Kosovo but far above it and then only after dark on clear nights, dropping Tomahawks at a million bucks a pop on empty buildings. One quasi-governmental network of killers can find four fellows who can fly a jet willing to commit suicide on the same day, but the Clinton Doctrine tells the world that the greatest military power on the face of the earth no longer has the stomach for a single body-bag. The doughboys of the Great War went off singing, “We won’t come back till it’s over/Over There!” But not Mr Clinton’s army: We won’t go over till it’s over/Over There! Such a craven warmonger cannot plausibly call anybody else a “faceless coward”. In Kosovo, America declared it was prepared to kill, but not to die. Their enemies drew the correct lesson.

There are cowards elsewhere, too. The funniest moment in the early coverage came when some portentous anchor solemnly reported that “the United Nations building has not been hit”. Well, there’s a surprise! Why would the guys who took out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon want to target the UN? The UN is dominated by their apologists, and in some cases the friends of the friends of the fellows who did this (to put it at its most discreet). All last week the plenipotentiaries of the west were in Durban holed up with the smooth, bespoke emissaries of thug states and treating with them as equals, negotiating over how many anti-Zionist insults they could live with and over how grovelling the west’s apology for past sins should be. Yesterday’s sobering coda to Durban let us know that those folks on the other side are really admirably straightforward: they mean what they say, and we should take them at their word. We should also cease dignifying them by pretending that the foreign ministers of, say, Spain and Syria are somehow cut from the same cloth.

There is also a long-term lesson. The US is an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. Britain, France and the other old powers believed in projecting themselves, both territorially and culturally. As we saw in Durban, they get few thanks for that these days. But the American position – that the pre-eminent nation on earth can collectively leap in its Chevy Suburban and drive to the lake while the world goes its own way – is untenable. The consequence, as we now know, is that the world comes to you. Niall Ferguson, in his book The Cash Nexus, argues that imperial engagement is in fact the humanitarian position: the two most successful military occupations in recent history were the Allies’ transformation of West Germany and Japan into functioning democracies. Ferguson thinks the US, if it had the will, could do that in Sierra Leone. But why stop there? Why let ramshackle economic basket-cases like the Sudan or Afghanistan be used as launch pads to kill New Yorkers?

Instead of an empire, the US belongs to Nato, a defence pact of prosperous western nations in which only one guy picks up the tab, a military alliance for countries that no longer in any recognizable sense have militaries. The US taxpayer’s willingness to pay for the defence of Canada and Europe has contributed to the decay of America’s so-called “allies”, freeing them to disband their armed forces, flirt with dictators and gangster states, and essentially convert themselves to semi-non-aligned.

The British no doubt will respond by pointing out how lax American security is, compared to Heathrow or even Waterloo Station. And they’re right. Granted, every democratic government knows that sometime somewhere some killer will wiggle through the system. But yesterday all the killers got through. Had the conspirators attempted to seize four planes but succeeded in taking only three, we could have consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we had merely a 75% failure rate. But they successfully commandeered every plane they aimed for: a 100% systemic failure.

The killers picked their point of embarkation well: Boston’s Logan Airport is a joke. It is, first of all, not an airport but a building site, and has been for years, a maze of extremely permanent temporary signs, construction sheeting and makeshift walkways, all adding to the chaos. I wasn’t catching a flight a couple of weeks back, just meeting one, but it was delayed and I wanted a coffee and newspaper and discovered I had to go through to the “secured” area to get them. Overwhelmed by unnecessarily increased traffic, the security guards could give only a cursory glance to most bags, and a few sailed through the scanner while their eyes were elsewhere. At Logan, “airport security” is an oxymoron.

So let the British gloat: they’ve got great security systems. But on the other hand what was the point, given that they’ve decided to surrender slowly, piece by piece, to the IRA? When a great power is faced with a terrorist enemy, it has to win – fast and decisively. It has to identify the leaders, remove them silently and ruthlessly, shred their infrastructure and thus deny them the kind of victories that encourage civilian supporters to think their cause is a going concern. In the Fifties, the British did that in Malaya and saved that country from Communism. A decade later, when the IRA re-emerged, they no longer had the stomach for it.

Let us hope that America doesn’t show the same lack of will. This is, as the German government put it, an attack on “the civilized world”, and it’s time to speak up in its defence. Those western nations who spent last week in Durban finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world’s future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces. And after Tuesday America is entitled to ask its allies not for finely crafted UN resolutions but a more basic question: whose side are you on?

The above column is virtually as it appeared in print, including a few things I was wrong about. The death toll: more than Pearl Harbor and the War of 1812 but less than the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. I was wrong, too, about the “courage” of the suicide bombers: I was not yet sufficiently immersed in the psychosis of Islamism and its perverted death-cultism, in which before committing mass murder one carefully prepares one’s genitals because paradise is a brothel. Many readers objected to the passage about the Americans with Disabilities Act, and I apologize for giving offence – I’d probably just skip the point if I were writing it today. But the images and stories of the disabled were among the most heart-wrenching of the day, including that of the able-bodied man who stayed – and perished – with his wheelchair-bound friend because he could not bear to leave him and let him die alone. I don’t understand why we sue small mom’n’pop businesses because their general store in a remote rural town has no wheelchair ramp, but we cheerfully encourage the disabled to work on the 80th floor of skyscrapers whose first move in an emergency is to shut down the elevators.

Everything else – the ugliness of the Arab street, the uselessness of Nato, the self-loathing of the west, the incompetence of Logan Airport – is just as true today as it was then.

Are you guys serious?I see some people never learn.MCain is another Bush and Palin knows nothing about the policies as shown on interview on t.v.Don’t make the same mistake you made twice already(electing Bush),which shows how stupid America really is and second don’t be afraid of change(Obama)as you guys realize that he might become president.Maybe you’re scared of the difference?