Today is the anniversary of 9/11. Like anyone of a certain age, I remember the day well. I remember people huddling around a TV in the conference room of the office I was working in at the time. I remember it taking me 3 hours to get home that afternoon (we were let out early) even though it usually took me 10 minutes. I remember driving past the part of the Pentagon every day for months watching crews reconstruct it. I remember having an odd feeling of missing out - that less than a year before, I had been working at the Department of Justice and imagining what I would be doing had things turned out differently.
As time went on and the revelations dripped out, that the Bush team ignored briefings and warnings about Al Qaeda, the spiraling catastrophe in Iraq played out, Afghanistan was forgotten, and Bin Laden got away, it started to look different. It started to look like competency and experience actually mattered. That putting an incurious legacy hire in the most important job in the world was a bad idea. History has erased this signal failure, reimagining it as an attack that we could not imagine (even though there is plenty of evidence that people in the intelligence community did just that) and giving Bush and his cronies a pass for the worst terrorist attack in the history on the country.
Now, it has just sort of faded into the background. I guess it is like Pearl Harbor. At a point, it loses its impact. People who lived through it die off or we move on, but, the brief euphoria around Obama's election aside, 9/11 was just the prologue to 20 really shitty years.
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