While most of us are rightly celebrating the fact that Osama Bin Laden is dead, Radley Balko also correctly points out that Bin Laden may well have achieved exactly what he wanted to achieve with the World Trade Center attack. In The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright lays out how Osama bin Laden's motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war--an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam. Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama's first term, we'll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion. But that's really just the start. Far more important to me: We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we've changed since September 11 . . . We've sent terrorist suspects to "black sites" to be detained without trial and tortured. We've turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they'd be tortured. In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret. We've abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them. The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens. The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens. Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president's designation of them as an "enemy combatant," essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I'd also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn't have been tolerated before September 11.) The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact. The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the "terrorist" designation in the first place. Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual. American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship. Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country. The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants. ... Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn't something a special ops team can fix. And just as his death will not end the war on terror, it also will not end the war on the constitution that has been waged with equal vigor by Bush and Obama. http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2011/05/why_bin_laden_won.php#more
Kind of makes you wonder...did we lose more money and americans by going after this guy than if we just left well enough alone?
I have said it before and Ill say it again, Bin Laden in his wildest dreams could never have hoped to destroy America as much as Bush, Obama, Bernanke, and Greenspan have. In 2000 when Bin Laden was plotting his attacks America was fresh off the Tech Boom, and America was rolling, 10 years after his attacks America is on its knees due to horrible leadership, and horrible policy from all sides running the country into the ground.
Mothers of politicians should do more to teach their kids that Revenge really doesn't achieve much. Osama sparked a 10 year long Revenge mission. Now the U.S. is in an economic hole.
you named the real traitors to our nation. I do not even call obama a traitor because he did not get elected on false pretenses. we know he would spend us to death and try to adopt other socialist ideas. OBL was the excuse neo cons (fromer socialists) needed to adopt their liberal friends play book. Expand govt, restrict freedoms and spend us to the point of no return.
I would give Obama a little more leeway if he didnt double down on our horrible foreign policy. He said he was going to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and i actually thought given the fact that he is a far lefty that he would get us out of there. Instead he doubled down in Afghanistan, and got us into a new war in Libya, where we are siding with rebels with ties to Al-quaida. We are supposedly out of Iraq but now we have 50k troops there that will never leave, and will cost us billions more per year.We keep meddling in everyone elses affairs so much that we dont even know who is on our side anymore. I.E. pakistan, or the Rebels we are currently helping. Didnt we learn anything about helping out these psychopaths when the Taliban turned on us? We help these guys out, then they get power and we are public enemy number 1. I cant stand U.S. foreign policy, it makes no sense in my eyes to continue blowing up sand huts with cruise missiles that cost us 500k-1 million a pop, then we rebuild the sandhuts and put someone else into power and they turn on us. I have always wanted to just pull away from it all and just live an isolationist policy. If the rest of the world wants to wipe themselves out let them. The entire world uses our military and no one ever pays us for the cost we have to bear, through both loss of life, as well as financially. I drank the koolaid, and actually believed that if nothing else a democrat would get us out of all this shit. We are going to be at war with libya for many years as well now, and we will never pull all the troops out of afghanistan. That is a guarantee.
just read this. ron paul seemed to isolationist to me a few years ago. then buchanon swayed me... and now I also am turning isolationist, with tarriffs and no income tax. We might have a renaissance.