Back to the Beginning

"My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country."
"Liberty or Death!"
Freedom is worth dying for. Everyone seems to agree with that in concept, as long as they aren't the ones dying. Like the song says,
"Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die."-Peter Tosh

Even the Dead-Red Pro-Bush brigades bleat endlessly on the subject. It's the "Noble Cause" that our soldiers are dying for right now. But are they willing to do it? Let's take a look.
Lately, the topic of Security vs. Civil Liberties has dominated the public discourse. Fox News has been hammering their polls showing terrorism to be more of a concern than the infringement of Rights. Well, there you have it. Every American who said they were willing to allow their rights to be taken from them in order to protect them from terrorists made the decision to not risk dying for freedom. They sold liberty for the possibility of security. They could still get hit by a car, anvil, falling poodle, or any one of the millions of things that kill people everyday, but at least they do not have to worry about exploding Arabs sitting next to them on the bus.

3000 people died on 911. It's a significant number by itself. It is a tiny fraction when compared to the death tolls for cancer, accidents, obesity, suicide, crime, etc.
It's about the same as the number of US troops killed in Iraq so far and less than the number of troops killed in the War on Terror. I don't really understand why we had to create a bigger pile of bodies in retaliation for the first pile of bodies. Maybe we felt some how emasculated and had to show the world we could kill Americans too. I don't know.
We didn't have to do it that way though. We had a back up plan. Remember the advice about plastic wrap and duct tape? Homeland Security advised everybody to buy plastic wrap and duct tape in order to prevent a bio weapon attack. People jumped right on it. In no time at all people in cities across the country wrapped themselves up in patriotic airtight houses and apartments. Approximately 5000 of them did the job so well that no possibly contaminated air got near them for the rest of their lives.
Anyone get the joke? I could not find the exact number, but it's somewhere around 5k deaths due to asphyxiation. Ran out of air. Killed themselves in their own houses just to make sure the boogy man couldn't hurt or kill them.
People do foolish things when panicked. For that reason I thought now would be a good time to remind everyone of a few things they accepted as facts back when everything was a little crazy.
Here's CNN's candid way of letting everyone know who was to blame.
And here is Donald Rumsfailed informing US Forces that the investigation was complete and the guilty parties identified.
Yes, in less than 24 hours we answered the "who, what, when, were, and why's" had reporters in Kabul and bios, with graphics, for everyone involved. Couldn't get a truck of ice cubes to New Orleans in less than six days, but back in the day... we were on it!