If you only took the time to read one article about 911 this week, I’d recomment this one from Since that Day by Truth-out.org.

Nine years, four national elections, two wars and two presidents since that day, and where are we now as a nation? Broke, deranged and dangerous pretty much sums it up. We have Christian-Taliban pastors in Florida with filthy souls threatening to burn the Qu’ran, as if such an act had any meaning beyond a desire to make money, and a national news media apparatus all too happy to give them all the ink and air time he could ever wish for. We have seething crowds threatening arson and murder because a Muslim community center might get built next to a strip club on the site of a defunct coat store. We have national caricatures like Sarah Palin charging people more than $200 for the chance to meet with her on that day, as if she has any significance at all. We’ve got stabbings and beatings and firebombings, and this is nine years later.

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We are a nation of euphemisms now. It’s not spying on the American people, it is "national security." It’s not holding someone in a hellhole without charges or trial, it is "indefinite detention." It’s not kidnapping, it is "extraordinary rendition." It’s not murder or assassination, it is "targeted killing." It’s not torture, it is "enhanced interrogation." It’s not wildly and patently illegal and immoral on its face, it is "war."

We are a lessened nation nine years later, and much of the damage has been done by our own hand. It is one thing for people to react with fear and rage after an outrageous act of violence. It is quite another for the leaders of those people to exploit that fear and rage for their own dark and greedy purposes, and nine years later, we are down in the ditch thanks to exactly that sort of behavior. Thousands of American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tens of thousands more have been grievously maimed. Millions of civilians in those two countries have been slaughtered or shattered, but we may never know the true scope of the carnage, because "we don’t do body counts."

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