The good news is that the New York City remembrances make it a policy preventing people from speaking during the memorial services, denying trump the chance to turn a somber gathering into a twisted celebration of his own "greatness".
All that rage I'd normally have at this shitgibbon, well I'm letting it out now and then stepping away.
Today, I would rather encourage the various readers of this blog to find some peace within yourselves, find some good things to do for others this day and even this weekend, and try to revel in the small joys and calm comforts we can achieve for ourselves and each other.
What becomes troubling is the loss of remembering how things were before that day, what exactly we were enjoying, what we were debating amongst ourselves, what we were hoping to do with our lives in the futures we were about to engage.
At best I can remember what it was like moving into an actual home at the age of 31 - a townhouse - instead of living in apartments through my 20s. I can remember I was still thinking of living in South Florida as a temporary thing - even though I'd been there since 1994 - because I was still job-hunting for library work back up towards Tampa-Clearwater where my family and high school friends still lived. Here I am more than twenty years later and I feel regret that I didn't make an honest effort to settle down where I was - to go out and make more friends away from work, to do a better job of finding a love life, stuff like that - because it added into my lack of a social life that affects me still.
And that's just me, and that's me being selfish when this day we need to remember the people we left behind.
What the world was going into 2001 was a lot different than the world we are now in 2023. We've been into and out of troubling wars that did nothing to resolve the political woes of the post-Cold War and in some respects made them worse across the Middle East and Europe. Our nation seems to have gone into this mental fugue state were we don't even talk about what we'd done in Iraq and Afghanistan, unlike the discourse and self-reflection that haunted us in the 1970s over our wreckage in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. There hasn't even been any public discussion about war memorials for those occupations as though we're ashamed to admit we were in those places for 10-20 years, as though our failures to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan can't be mentioned.
It's as though we as a nation are only trying to remember the parts where we alone were the victims of a global tragedy, going through the motions to honor the dead in New York and DC and Pennsylvania and nothing more.
But the things we're remembering about 9/11 are not the things as they were. They're just our folklore now, legends fading into myth. We're not remembering the facts of how we failed ourselves and the world leading up to Bin Laden's attack, and how we're failing now as wars continue to rage across the world from our inability to confront the rage of little men in power.
Welcome to the world that not only Bin Laden wanted, but the world that Bush and Cheney and Halliburton and Putin and a hundred dictators and wannabes wanted. All the things we've become after September 11. It's not how we should be honoring the ones we love.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the official U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, launched in March 2003 as part of George W. Bush's attempt to avenge America after September 11... and personal revenge against Saddam Hussein's attempts to assassinate George's father.
The start of the Second Persian Gulf War - do people really remember the first one in 1991? - all came about because there were factions in the Republican foreign policy ranks who really wanted to "democratize" the Middle East, but we couldn't do with our allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt because it would disrupt their totalitarian regimes, and we couldn't do with our enemies like Iran or Iraq unless we were directly provoked. But hey, somewhere had to pop up to build that Utopia, right?
A lot of Americans still bought those lies, as we were still barely years away from the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. The pain and the rage were still raw and tangible.
We had a plan to invade, and also a plan to occupy and get out. Except the occupation was a disaster.
The Bush Plan A for ending the war revolved around propping up an Iraqi ally puppet Ahmed Chalabi as Saddam's replacement, hold elections with a pro-American government, announce victory and get out. But the nation-building plans proved more complex, and Chalabi turned out to be an unreliable ally that neither the Iraqis nor Americans could trust in power. When Paul Bremer issued a controversial order to disband the still-needed Iraqi army and Ba'ath Party, it sparked an uprising that turned the occupation into an almost decade-long quagmire. Bremer's action, and the failure by the Bush administration to control such miscues, pointed out clearly that there was no Plan B dealing with Iraq.
And the poor citizenry of Iraq paid the price for it. They're paying it still, as the chaos of those years allowed sectional factions like ISIL to rise up and spill more blood well into the 2010s.
So here we are, 20 years later. Have we - the United States - learned from our failures?
Arguably No.
We still have Far Right elements of our government still eager to start opportunistic invasions and occupations wherever they want (except for helping out Ukraine, because they don't want us facing off against Putin).
We never held any of the architects of that godless torture regime - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld (RIP), John Yoo, Jay Bybee, several others - accountable for their human rights and Habeus violations. There are nations - not just Iraq but also our NATO and regional allies - still calling on us to do so.
Our (mostly Republican, but even Democratic leaders from that period share the blame) political leadership failed us repeatedly, driven by blind rage and mindless ideological fantasy. Those failures keep happening, as the lack of accountability by all of them - Presidents and Congresscritters, Generals and Analysts, Media Elites and Corporate Criminals, all of them honorable bastards - haunt us to this day.
It feels a bit bittersweet that given how chaotic and busy this year's been - so many other things to report on today - that this year's remembrance of September 11th seems less important than other years.
For all the chest-thumping and flag-waving over December 7th - the attack on Pearl Harbor - it too fell in importance as the generations most affected by it aged away, leaving behind the echoes of sorrow and fear that reverberated that day.
For all the rehashings of November 22nd - the assassination of JFK - it too is fading into legend, the constant re-enactments of phantom riflemen hiding at the Grassy Knoll turning into punchline rather than serious debate over what really happened that day.
As someone who can still remember vividly what it was like that Tuesday: Being at Main Library in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, running into my former supervisor Barbara tearfully telling me about the second tower getting hit, watching the first tower fall on a snowy-screened television with poor reception, telling a young couple why the county government center was closed and that "one of the towers is just flat out gone," returning to Northwest Regional in Coral Springs where it was the quietest I had ever heard that place, going to a blood donation center in Lauderhill and waiting well into darkness with the long queue of people in the parking lot wanting to do something in that moment...
And time moves on, children grow up, there is a generation going into college now born well after that tragic day.
One of the librarians came late to the meeting. She brought word about a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City. We immediately thought it was a tragic accident. I considered the weather up in the northeast might have been foggy or rain-filled for something like that to happen. As librarians we all knew our trivia, and noted there had been a plane crash hitting the Empire State Building back in World War II due to bad weather.
I didn't find out until later that the entire Eastern seaboard of the United States had clear blue skies. I found out after that training meeting that a second plane hit the second tower. We all found out what was going on as the day got worse.
It was going to be such a beautiful day...
The Irish have been coming here for years/ Feel like they own the place/ They got the airport, city hall, concrete, asphalt/ They even got the police/ Irish, Italian, Jews and Hispanics/ Religious nuts, political fanatics in the stew/ Living happily not like me and you/ That's where I lost you...
- "New York," U2
That day remains such a gut-punch to those who lived through it that the emotional scars won't ever go away for us. One of those national traumas - like hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbor - that cut across everything: If you were an American, regardless of gender or age or ethnicity or religion or even politics, you felt the blow in some way.
We had the Neoconservatives jump up in eagerness to send us all off into their interventionist wars in the Middle East. While going into Afghanistan made sense - where the 9/11 culprit Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cohorts were hiding - in our rage and revenge we got dragged into another quagmire of a decades-long occupation that only ended last month to tears and further political recrimination. And by 2003 these Neocons made it worse tricking us into an Iraqi invasion/occupation that shredded our international standing and broke our military.
Whatever unity we had in the wake of the Twin Towers falling was gone the second our rage got the better of us.
We haven't seen many beautiful days since 9/11, have we...
And love is not the easy thing/ The only baggage you can bring/ And love is not the easy thing/ The only baggage you can bring/ Is all that you can't leave behind...
- "Walk On," U2
Recovering from the trauma of 9/11 is an ongoing thing for a lot of people. Many of the survivors from Ground Zero itself - and the families who lost loved ones there and at the Pentagon plane attack and those on Flight 93 - have to carry their guilt and sorrow to the end of their days. The rest of us who stood on the sidelines watching the tragedy unfold have to come to terms with the unresolved anger we've felt that has now branched out into waves of violence and recrimination towards ourselves.
The culture wars that Falwell and Robertson and others had been pushing on 9/11 have pretty much consumed the mental state today of a Far Right evangelical Republican Party, to the point where the biggest threat to our nation's safety isn't overseas terror groups like ISIL it's homegrown groups like Proud Boys. Our rage has gotten, is getting the better of us as Americans, and even in our remembrances of that tragic morning it's going to take a lot of letting go for us to move on into days that could be beautiful again...
Leave it behind You've got to leave it behind All that you fashion All that you make All that you build All that you break All that you measure All that you steal All this you can leave behind...
While we're coping with pandemic horrors here in the United States, we have to cope with the horror of our foreign policies failing as our decades-long military and political intervention into Afghanistan falls apart.
In 2005, I was an adviser to an Iraqi infantry battalion conducting counterinsurgency operations in and around Baghdad, one of the most violent parts of Iraq during one of the most violent periods in that conflict. It was difficult to have any hope at the time. I returned to Iraq in 2009, this time in Mosul, where my unit advised and supported two Iraqi-army divisions, one Iraqi-federal-police division, and thousands of local police officers. This time, I sensed more progress: Leaving Iraq in 2010, I felt we had done a great job, turning a corner and building a capable and competent security force. A year later, I found myself in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, recruiting and training Afghan police units and commandos. After nine months there, I again rotated home thinking we had done some good.
I would be proved wrong on both counts. In 2014, by then stationed at the Pentagon, I watched in dismay as the Iraqi divisions I’d helped train collapsed in a matter of days when faced with the Islamic State. Today, as the Taliban seizes terrain across Afghanistan, including in what was my area of operations, I cannot help but stop and reflect on my role. What did my colleagues and I get wrong? Plenty...
What is happening right now in Afghanistan is horrifying. It’s awful. Tens of thousands of people will be slaughtered, the women and children of the area will be sent backwards in history hundreds of years, chaos and brutality and backwards ass theology will rule the day, and it will be awful for a long time to come. And it was all entirely predictable and completely inevitable...
We’ll see a lot of blame thrown at Joe Biden over the next couple of months, and no doubt right-wingers will blame him for “losing” Afghanistan, but most of it is bullshit. Are there some things that could possibly have been done better? Sure. Much of the bitching by our warrior class is focused on the timing of the withdrawal (often ignoring the fact that it was Trump who set the original date), saying we should have waited until the winter when the majority of the Taliban will be at home and it won’t be “the fighting season,” the name for what you and I know as summer and fall. And I suppose he could have. And then we would be reading all of these headlines next spring and summer instead of right now. That’s the thing about delaying the inevitable, it is, in fact, just a delay. This was going to happen no matter when we left and there is nothing anyone can say that will convince me otherwise...
So what the hell went wrong with American intervention in Afghanistan?
If you ask me, it all went wrong at the beginning when we charged into Afghanistan back in 2001.
We went into Afghanistan not for any humanitarian reason, not to stop the Taliban's horrific abuse of women. We went in because September 11 happened, Osama Bid Laden pulled off his big attack on the United States and wounded us far worse than any enemy nation ever could. And so wounded, and angry, and vicious, and blind, we charged into the country that was giving him safe haven in order to hunt him down and punish his extremist allies.
We went into Afghanistan out of revenge.
We didn't go in with a grand objective, and we certainly didn't go in with a coherent plan on how we were going to get out of Afghanistan in a timely fashion. We had no exit strategy in the first place.
Oh, our political leadership - George W. Bush's administration at the time - thought they had a plan: clear out the Taliban, kill Bin Laden, install a puppet regime that would perform like a westernized democracy (but really leave in place a corrupt autocrat), and get out.
As for our nation-building efforts to stabilize a nation that had been literally The Graveyard of Empires for 1000 years, let's refer back to Mike Jason:
From the very beginning, nearly two decades ago, the American military’s effort to advise and mentor Iraqi and Afghan forces was treated like a pickup game—informal, ad hoc, and absent of strategy. We patched together small teams of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, taught them some basic survival skills, and gave them an hour-long lesson in the local language before placing them with foreign units...
But from my tours in Iraq through to my time in Afghanistan, larger systemic problems were never truly addressed. We did not successfully build the Iraqi and Afghan forces as institutions. We failed to establish the necessary infrastructure that dealt effectively with military education, training, pay systems, career progression, personnel, accountability—all the things that make a professional security force. Rotating teams through tours of six months to a year, we could not resolve the vexing problems facing Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s armies and police: endemic corruption, plummeting morale, rampant drug use, abysmal maintenance, and inept logistics. We got really good at preparing platoons and companies to conduct raids and operate checkpoints, but little worked behind them...
Over these past 20 years, there have been many failings. We checked the box when it came to saying that we had trained our partners, spun a rosy narrative of progress, and perhaps prioritized the safety and well-being of our troops over the mission of buttressing partner capacity... We didn’t send the right people, prepare them well, or reward them afterward. We rotated strangers on tours of up to a year and expected them to build relationships, then replaced them. We were overly optimistic and largely made things up as we went along. We didn’t like oversight or tough questions from Washington, and no one really bothered to hold us accountable anyway. We had no capacity or experience with some of our tasks, and we stumbled...
In short: We failed to nation-build in Afghanistan because nobody at the political level - not in Washington DC and not in corrupt Kabul - took it serious enough to follow through. We got stuck going through the motions, posing for the cameras, cheering on the minor successes while sweeping the major disasters under the rugs.
Even shorter: We had no exit strategy.
Unspoken in all of this was how Bush the Lesser shifted focus away from Afghanistan onto the more "glorious" and desired target of overthrowing Saddam in Iraq. While we were still engaged on the ground in Afghanistan, our military under Rumsfeld - and pushed along by Dick Cheney (aka Halliburton's Best Bud) and other neoconservatives eager for war as a profiteering scam - pursued an invasion of Iraq that was under-manned and under-planned, and ended up becoming a quagmire just like Afghanistan did. But where the disasters in Iraq made the front pages - thanks to the Big Lies of WMDs that turned out to be fake - the disasters in Afghanistan got shunted to Page 16 of the newspapers and rarely talked about on the cable pundit shows: It all turned into a forgotten Shadow War that nobody cared about.
Leading up to trump taking over in 2016. A blustering amateur at foreign policy and nowhere near being "smarter than the generals," trump made the big show of figuring out a ceasefire plan with the Taliban in 2020... which was so full of loopholes that the Taliban are exploiting in 2021 as they retake most of the major cities. The peace deal was more trump's attempt to win a Nobel Peace Prize and win over voters for 2020 than it was a serious attempt to broker a lasting peace in a part of the world that's known only war for generations.
Again, we had no exit strategy.
We were blinded by rage when we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and we are now stumbling out blind and drunk 20 years later with nothing to show for it but the tears and blood of the Taliban's victims.
Are we doing enough now to help evacuate the thousands of Afghanis - especially women - who are going to suffer under Taliban rule? Because we can't stop them from retaking that nation. It's no longer a question of "If" but of "When."
...There is a reason terms like “mission creep” exist. There is a reason when I was a young E-3 my tank commander and Troop CO gave me reading lists, and included on those lists were books like Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy and A Bright Shining Lie and All Quiet on the Western Front and About Face and so many others that sit on my bookshelf to this day. There were lessons to be learned. And we didn’t learn them, myself included. I will grapple with my own culpability the rest of my life.
And I know that my seeming nonchalant writing here about this can seem smarmy and irritating, and I hope that is not what you are taking from this. It’s horrible. I feel terrible for all those innocents. I feel terrible for all our guys who served there and are dealing with trauma and injuries, barely getting their lives back together finally, only to turn on the tv, stare at the horrible images unfolding while glancing at the scarred stumps where their legs and arms used to be, realizing everything they gave everything for has turned out to be nothing.
But while this horror is occurring right now, we can still take advantage of the opportunity to learn this lesson once more. Maybe this will save us a couple generations of needless military adventurism, like Vietnam did before we went and fucked up our memories in Gulf War I and thought war was easy again. Stop listening to the war pigs. Ignore them. Stop listening to the Kagans and Ledeens and the Cheneys and the Kristols and the Tom Cottons and the Friedmans and that one curly hair young twat name Michael something or other who was all over the tv in the late aughts. Don’t let this happen again...
It's all tragic, there's nothing we can do - other than to continue pumping in more bodies and spilling more blood - to stop it, and we're likely setting ourselves up for the next cycle of international terrorism that will drive us back into roaring rampages flattening the countryside and solving nothing.
Even Charlie Wilson saw this coming and nobody else cared enough to stop it coming.
There will be services and memorials throughout the day across New York, DC, and Pennsylvania. With this being an election year, don't be surprised if the partisan spins come out (and someone accusing Biden of being in charge of the Presidency back in 2001 when it was Dubya and his crew who screwed up).
And yes, I am angry and afraid and upset. If trump steals away the 2020 results with his voter suppression and Russian aid (and any other "legal" trickery he'll encourage) we are facing the nightmare of having THAT Shitgibbon in the White House when the 20th anniversary rolls in next year.
For the LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, AMERICA, do NOT let that Shitgibbon be there to twist what should be a solemn memorial into his personal ego-stroking. /headdesk
It took a few seconds. It took a few seconds to realize that one plane was an accident. Two planes, one right after the other… hitting each tower…
I knew then it meant war.
The lobby TV was terrible, snow and static, and I went up the 8th floor to see if reception for a TV in the staff lounge was better up there. It wasn’t. They tried moving it into a meeting room closer to the windows to see if that could help. And barely. There was still a lot of static and snow, and some of the guys I was with didn’t agree with me when I swore one of the towers had collapsed...
Our whole country hasn't been the same since.
Since then, a raw nerve has been exposed. A terrible, racist pulse of anger has driven half of this nation into rage towards anyone Muslim, anyone Latino, anyone Black, anyone and everyone who fits the definition of "Other."
It's why there's a raging Shitgibbon in the White House, someone who tapped into that racism and obsession and used it - still uses it - as a weapon.
It's why we're still in Afghanistan 18 years later, unable to secure any lasting peace because that effort was so mismanaged the second we leave it falls to chaos and the Taliban again.
There's so much to go over and it's all coming in too fast I can't keep up with the blogging outrage. But here's where we are at halfway through April 2019:
The Democratic House finally had a committee - the Ways and Means - request trump's hidden tax returns and did so in a way the IRS and Treasury Department could not block without facing the threat of jail time. trump's buddy Secretary Mnuchin refused to turn over the tax returns. It's now a question of what the committee's response will be (right now they've extended the deadline but at some point someone's going to have to flinch in this Game of Chicken).
The problems at the southern border are getting worse, where the immigration system we had that was working is at the point of collapse. trump's obsession with ending illegal immigration has intermixed with the legal system of asylum seekers. As a result the asylum courts are backlogged to forever with no relief in sight.
And just to show trump isn't all focused on hating Mexicans and Central Americans, he's spent this weekend bashing Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to the extent that her personal safety is in danger. Going on a selectively edited quote from a false extremist, a fellow Congressman Dan Crenshaw accused Omar of attacking 9/11 victims and trump followed through on that crap.
At this point, you need to follow this link to Adam L Silverman's article atBalloon Juice and read the whole thing. As a foreign intelligence guy and terrorism expert, Silverman can see exactly what's happening here:
There is much more exposing the fraud that is Mohamed Tawhidi at the link. Unfortunately, all Congressman Crenshaw saw was someone claiming to be a Muslim cleric bashing Congresswoman Omar for saying something she didn’t say, which gave him both an excuse and a rhetorical weapon to go after Congresswoman Omar to score political points. This was, unfortunately, all Congressman Crenshaw was actually interested in.
So what did Congresswoman Omar actually say? Not the barbered clip taken out of context, but the actual remarks? I’m glad you asked. Here are the full set of the remarks before the barbered clip put out by Tawhidi and then amplified by Congressman Crenshaw. This portion of her remarks begin around the 12 minute mark of her speech and immediately follow Congresswoman Omar discussing how Muslims, in regard to fully claiming their civil liberties, can liberate themselves...
Unfortunately Congressman Crenshaw’s political and rhetorical attack was picked up and transmitted by Brian Kilmeade, the left boob of Fox News’ morning show A Blonde with Two Boobs on a Sofa, which is also doing business as the President’s Daily Briefing. And that’s how it got to the President who then decided to take the gasoline pump, turn it on, pump gasoline all over, light a match, and throw it in. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post decided that wasn’t a visible enough conflagration, so they threw a crate of fire crackers onto the pyre.
All of this, from the fake imam who conservatives and extremists on the right love to quote to Congressman Crenshaw doing exactly what you’d expect him to do in amplifying and weaponizing Tawhidi’s rhetorical hit job to the President finding a way of making it all about him because he cannot stand it if anyone else is getting any coverage to Rupert Murdoch’s minions making it worse, the die has been cast. Right now, somewhere in the United States, at least one white man who most likely describes himself as both a “patriot” and a “good Christian”, but possibly a “good Jew”, is planning to assassinate Congresswoman Omar in order to save the Republic from her. And at least one of these white men will be smart about what they are doing. They will hold their planning close. They will not make a threatening phone call and leave their real names with a staffer. They won’t tweet that they’re going to shoot her or cut her throat or whatever other snuff fantasy gets them off. They will, instead, quietly plan all while stewing in their own juices until their own internal pressure has built to the point where they decide to take action. And that day, which will, unfortunately, eventually come, will be a very, very, very bad day for America...
If you think angry rhetoric is just venting, that it's just the price for Free Speech... Just remember what happened to George Tiller. It's the same goddamn thing happening with the media over-inflating the danger, riling up the easily riled wingnuts, and just waiting for a fuse to get lit. And then when (not if) Omar is attacked - even if she gets out of it wounded - those same demagogues will step back and say "oh we didn't MEAN for it to happen, First Amendment bitches" and move on to the next target of their hate speech.
I've been primed for a while now for this darkest timeline to get worse, and the last six months IMHO there's been an escalation in hostility among the Far Right. The shit has been getting real, but damn I know that this is just DEFCON 3 level of madness. All it's gonna take is one more crazy plan by trump to become "law" and we're DEFCON 1 and the mess turns bloody.
A personal note: I am running into high school students born after 9/11. An entire generation that has grown up in the shadow of the War on Terror. They're writing term papers on what happened this day 17 years ago. (Poorly researched term papers... /headdesk)
A War on Terror that has failed to resolve even half of the conflicts that bedevil the Middle East and does nothing for the painful refugee crisis surrounding Syria, Yemen, North Africa. A crisis now spilling into Europe fueling a harsh rise of Far Right anti-immigrant sentiment that may have been a key factor in Brexit (a separate nightmarish issue of its own right now).
An argument can be made that the attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon using passenger aircraft is a direct link between Osama Bin Laden and donald j. trump. That Bin Laden's attacks were so traumatizing that a large portion of the citizenry is willing to lash out in anger at everything they fear, eagerly accepting the leadership of any conman offering salvation through brutal repression of the dread Other.
If only one could hop into a time machine and go back to 1999, to find Bin Laden, and let him know that the results of his planned attacks would lead to a donald trump presidency.
Would Bin Laden recoil at the horror of even THAT level of madness?
...nah, probably not. Bin Laden was a dick just like trump.
You know, at some point you kinda have to stop saying "Worst Congress Ever" because the downward spiral has to end and genuine competent leadership somehow earns its way behind the driver's seat of the national bus.
But not this week.
And this was a special kind of stupid on display: the Bipartisan version where both parties in Congress committed a collective brain fart. Granted, I'm going to end up yelling at the Republicans more BECAUSE THEY'RE THE IDIOTS IN CHARGE OF THE WHOLE CAPITOL BUILDING but still, credit where credit's due the Democrats were a bunch of morons about this too...
The enactment on Wednesday of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act should have been a triumphant moment for Republican leaders in Congress. They had succeeded, after years of trying, in overriding a presidential veto for the first time and forcing a bill into law over the strenuous objections of Barack Obama.
Just remember, Obama objected to the bill.
“It appears as if there may be some unintended ramifications,” McConnell lamented at a press conference barely 24 hours after all but one senator voted to reject the president’s veto of the legislation, which would allow victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S. court. On the other side of the Capitol, Ryan said that he hoped there could be a “fix” to the very law he allowed to pass through the House—one that would protect U.S. soldiers abroad from legal retribution that the Obama administration had warned for months would follow as a result of the law.
Just remember, Obama's administration warned for months there were legal ramifications that Congress - made up of lawmakers who are supposed to UNDERSTAND the law and its ramifications - needed to consider about this bill.
...How could a Congress plagued by gridlock pass legislation with overwhelming bipartisan majorities, initiate a rare veto override, and then immediately voice regret about the problems the new law might cause?
The answer is a mix of sensitive 9/11 politics, an unusually powerful bipartisan alliance, election-year timing, and a heavy dose of mistrust and miscommunication between two branches of government that rarely see eye to eye.
Also known as the Perfect Bullshit Storm.
For years, victims of the 9/11 attacks and their families have pushed for a change in the law that would exempt acts of terrorism on U.S. soil from the principle of sovereign immunity, which prevents lawsuits against foreign governments and officials in American court. The families want to sue the Saudi government for damages over its alleged ties to the 9/11 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi citizens. The Saudis have denied any involvement, and as CIA Director John Brennan made clear on Wednesday, the U.S. government has backed up their denial...
...The 9/11 families had two influential senators in their corner: Charles Schumer of New York, likely the next Democratic leader, and John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Republican. With their backing, a revised version of the bill cleared the Judiciary Committee in the spring and then passed the full Senate on a voice vote—a rarity for legislation that drew such vociferous opposition from the White House. Any senator could have objected, but then as now, none wanted to go on record against a proposal billed as “justice for 9/11 families.”
Political Courage at its finest, across the board, which is why I'm none too happy with Democrats about this mess. Just for the record, Schumer should be barred from any leadership role with the Senate Democrats regardless of minority or majority seating, just on this craven stupidity alone.
...Yet because the legislation first passed the Senate without debate, many members only became aware of the administration’s concerns in the last several weeks after Congress returned from a long summer recess. The House passed the bill in similar fashion—without much debate—two weeks ago, and Obama returned it with a veto message last Friday.
“This is a bill that should have been given a greater airing,” Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland told me on Thursday. “It was not on my radar screen until after the train was leaving the station. The next thing I know, it’s on the president’s desk.” Cardin is no backbencher; he is the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and along with the panel’s chairman, Bob Corker of Tennessee, he spent the last several days scrambling to work out a compromise with the Obama administration that would have kept the bill, as written, from becoming law. Time ran out this week, however, as McConnell decided to bring up the veto-override vote just before lawmakers left to campaign for reelection.
This is where the sins of letting Congress set its own vacation schedule - itself an insane process where they take so many days off NOTHING REALLY GETS DONE - have come back to bite these morons on the ass.
Either way, neither Democrats nor Republicans objected to the vote, and the 97-1 tally was an overwhelming rebuke of the White House. Only Harry Reid, the retiring Democratic leader, supported the president’s veto. Vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine wasn’t in town to vote, but following the lead of Hillary Clinton, he said he would have gone against Obama and overturned the veto. Hours later, the House voted 348-77 to make the bill a law.
And why, exactly, was this override a bad thing?
Appearing at a CNN veterans forum Wednesday night, Obama called the override “a mistake” motivated by lawmakers’ understandable concerns about emotional 9/11 politics and the looming election. He reiterated the objections he outlined in his three-page veto message—that by overturning sovereign immunity even for terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, Congress could be exposing U.S. personnel to lawsuits and other legal action all across the globe. Under current law, the U.S. government can exempt a country from sovereign immunity by having the State Department designate it as a state sponsor of terrorism (which it has not done for Saudi Arabia). “This is taking that out of our military and our intelligence and the hands of our national-security professionals and putting it into the courts,” Obama said. “And that’s a mistake.”
Hence the Congressional leaders' sudden outpouring of "Oh Crap" about the law they just confirmed. All of a sudden a lot of survivors from Iraq and Afghanistan are getting emails and faxes from lawyers up and down the National Geographic atlas.
This is what happens when you get a combination of partisan brinksmanship, localized pandering (Schumer playing to his voter base back in NYC), and outright ignorance of the consequences by those who should know better about the law they are supposed to craft.
And while I admit both parties are to blame, I'm still aiming most of my ire at the idiots among the Republican leadership. It's THEIR House and Senate they control, it's THEIR rules for getting bills passed, it's THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE DOING.
And of course, these damned Republican leaders, such profiles of leadership, are blaming Obama instead of themselves:
For their part, Republicans blamed the White House for waiting too long to warn lawmakers about the bill’s “potential consequences,” as McConnell put it. “That was, it seems to me, an example of a failure to communicate on a piece of legislation that was obviously very popular,” the Majority Leader told reporters.
I'm sorry, Mitch, but what part of those tidbits I highlighted - that the Obama administration had warned for months, and He reiterated the objections he outlined in his three-page veto message - did you NOT FUCKING NOTICE? Did you even READ Obama's veto notes? Aren't you required in your duty to, you know, get an inkling of what your political opponents are talking about just you can adequately rebuke them? Weren't you at all worried about the military and intel people - the ones who are actually part of a civil service that tries to remain nonpartisan - yelling at Congress "HOLY SHIT YOU MORONS DON'T PASS THIS BILL"?
YOU FAILED, MITCH, YOU FAILED TO DO YOUR OWN DAMN JOB. Blaming Obama for your own idiocy is no excuse.
Swear to God, every Congressional moron responsible for this shitshow should apologize to the nation on bended knee or resign, and yes I will say both sides. Starting with the morons at top - McConnell and Ryan - and work our way down to any intern caught abusing the vending snack machines. I don't care if that Milky Way bar is overpriced at $4.25 a pop, it's your damn fault you live in a metro with an excessively high cost-of-living.
Here we are fifteen years into a War on Terror where the crimes our own nation committed - a torture regime, unjustified invasion and occupation of Iraq that was based on lies - remain unanswered. Worse, the likes of Trump wants to bring that torture regime AND a re-occupation of Iraq (this time to blatantly take all the oil) back.
It has been fifteen years for my people, for our nation, for the United States sitting in the shadow of our own demons, driven into the shade by our fears and our rage. Kept there by a political faction among the Far Right who profits from keeping their fanbase fearful and mad. Any sane policy on keeping our nation safe gets ignored. Any hopeful expression of our nation's diversity and openness of culture gets mocked and insulted and beaten. Any attempt at justice - ending a prolonged and possibly illegal detention of prisoners at Gitmo, for starters - gets denied.
And the United States stumbles on, still bearing the scars of that Tuesday. We won't heal. There are those among us who can't.
And we're still stuck in a nightmare doomed to get worse if the biggest fear-monger of them all gets his orange-colored ass into the Oval Office.
This will not end well, if at all, in my lifetime, will it?
Let us also state that a successful con artist is not only a good liar, he knows how and when to mix in a troubling fact (more than truth) in order to convince his audience he's not (always) a liar. It helps to make that truth-based-on-facts statement even when it costs him nothing to say it, or that it could cost him something (that he's willing to trade off for a bigger scam later). The suckers would view it as a sign of integrity.
Hence, Trump's weekend endeavor to undermine his primary opponent Jeb Bush's foundation. Jeb had been campaigning - haphazard and unconvincing - about being the legacy heir to his older brother George W. Bush's administration. Jeb is trying to trade off on the meme that Dubya "kept us safe" during and after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001.
During a discussion about foreign policy with Bloomberg News, Trump nuked Jeb's position from orbit (via Digby at Salon.com):
This past weekend, the Donald finally pushed a button that was too much for Jeb to bear: He made the factual observation that Jeb’s brother had been president on 9/11. Well, all hell broke loose, as every GOP establishment figure rose up in untamed fury that Trump would be rude enough to bring such a thing up. Why, that’s sacrilege...
For a day, Trump ignored the follow-up questions and Twitter outrage over his statement. And then Trump swung around with another punch saying (link to CNN):
...He took another shot at Jeb Bush for claiming that Bush's brother, the 43rd president, kept the nation safe.
"I'm not blaming George Bush," Trump said. "But I don't want Jeb Bush to say, 'My brother kept us safe,' because September 11 was one of the worst days in the history of this country."
It wasn't just on the Sunday shows that Trump attacked Bush over his brother's tenure.
Here's the thing: Trump's attacks are not only against Jeb and not only against George W., the attacks are against the entire neoconservative narrative surrounding 9/11.
The neoconservative movement had been wounded by the reality of their failure of policy covering Iraq, Afghanistan, the mistreatment of our allies, and their inability to stop or even contain remaining rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. They still had their media allies, however, and those neocons kept arguing their points based on the Narrative that the neocons were the only strong and smart foreign policy experts on the market.
That Narrative is why the likes of Wolfowitz and Cheney still get invites to talk shows and private speaking events. That Narrative is why the Republican Party itself is still dominated by neocons on foreign policy matters, to the point where the neocons are the party Establishment.
And the modern Republican Party is more about Narrative - the outrage, the disconnect about fear-mongering and war-mongering, sticking to their talking points instead of enacting policy - than anything. Unravel the Narrative for the lies that make it, and you unravel the party.
(Trump's) latest ugly truth came during a Bloomberg TV interview last Friday, when he said George W. Bush deserves responsibility for the fact that “the World Trade Center came down during his time.”
Politicians and journalists erupted in indignation. Jeb Bush called Trump’s comments “pathetic.” Ben Carson dubbed them “ridiculous.” Former Bush flack Ari Fleischer called Trump a 9/11 “truther.” Even Stephanie Ruhle, the Bloomberg anchor who asked the question, cried, “Hold on, you can’t blame George Bush for that.”
Oh yes, you can. There’s no way of knowing for sure if Bush could have stopped the September 11 attacks. But that’s not the right question. The right question is: Did Bush do everything he could reasonably have to stop them, given what he knew at the time? And he didn’t. It’s not even close...
...During that same time period, the CIA was raising alarms too. According to Kurt Eichenwald, a former New York Times reporter given access to the Daily Briefs prepared by the intelligence agencies for President Bush in the spring and summer of 2001, the CIA told the White House by May 1 that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist attack. On June 22, the Daily Brief warned that al-Qaeda strikes might be “imminent.”
But the same Defense Department officials who discounted Clarke’s warnings pushed back against the CIA’s. According to Eichenwald’s sources, “the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat...”
...Finally, on August 6, the CIA titled its Daily Brief: “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US.” The briefing didn’t mention a specific date or target, but it did mention the possibility of attack in New York and mentioned that the terrorists might hijack airplanes. In Angler, Barton Gellman notes that it was the 36th time the CIA had raised al-Qaeda with President Bush since he took office...
This is the real scandal - not Trump hitting Jeb and George - in all of this: we still haven't resolved the glaring failure of leadership of the previous Bush administration when it came to handling legitimate terror threats. And now Jeb is touting that failure as a success he can build on to be President himself.
It's already had an effect: Jeb has gotten questions about his attempts to compare 9/11 to Benghazi - trying to paint his brother George as effective and triumphant and Obama/Hillary as complicit criminals - and was unable to reply well. As noted by Amanda Marcotte, also at Salon:
...Bush’s weakness on this front was embarrassingly evident in a weekend interview on CNN with Jake Tapper, where he tried to blame Hillary Clinton for the four deaths in Benghazi because “had a responsibility at the Department of State to have proper security” but then denied that his brother had any responsibility for the 3,000 deaths on 9/11, because, “It’s what he did afterwards that matters.”
In other words, if you’re a Democrat, you are obligated to prevent violence, but if you’re a Republican, there is no obligation to maintain security so long as you wear flight suits after thousands of people die horrible deaths on your watch. Tapper pointed out that this is a double standard, but Bush’s response seemed more petulant that somber in the face of so much tragedy...
In short: Jeb can't defend his brother's mishandling of 9/11 and attack Hillary - the likely Democratic nominee in 2016 - about Benghazi (and the Republican obsession about that is another scandal backfiring on them, but I digress) without coming across as a hypocrite or an idiot.
This is in some respects a brilliant move by Trump. He's in the lead in polling by comfortable margins. Fox Not-News CAN'T ignore him, nor any other media outlet right now. He can afford in some respects to take the hit from outraged neocons: partly because the neocons are themselves more discredited in the reality-based world than he is, but mostly because at this moment the GOP primary base is more aligned to Trump than to the neocons who are viewed as the Establishment wing.
Trump's own foreign policy stances are troubling, if not insane and offensive: He himself argues that 9/11 wouldn't have happened on "his" watch because his anti-immigrant policies would have stopped the terrorists from even being here. But he can attack Jeb and his neocon allies on this matter and - so far - get away with it, because as a true Outsider of the GOP he's not tainted by their disasters. He's able to critique the failures of Bush the Lesser - as a means of kicking the platform Jeb is standing on to knock his likeliest opponent out of the game - because he was never part of them.
This is a fight long overdue, not because it hadn't been happening - Democrats have been attacking the Republicans and the neocons in particular for these failures for years - but because this is now a fight within the Republican ranks itself. Republicans and their media partners could shrug off Democratic complaints as mere rants by conspiracy-driven hippie libruls. Not now, not with the top-polling candidate for 2016 breaking out the "Truther" chainsaw on themselves.
Thing is, going after the neocons is a risky move. These guys do not play fair or selective: we're talking about a group of know-nothings who bullied every critic they had between 2001 to 2006 out of office and ruined reputations of anyone who crossed them. They even broke laws and scuttled CIA covert ops doing so. Granted, Trump is shameless enough and rich enough that he may be untouchable, but I guarantee you that the knives are coming out for this alley fight. Trump is pissing on neocon turf, and they don't take kindly to that level of disrespect.
It pains me that I can't remember the names of the two ladies I was working with at the Broward Library's technology center that Tuesday morning, going over the new training materials for the Groupwise email system we were deploying for our county library system. I am lousy with names, and I didn't work with them often enough to retain that knowledge.
I do remember Barbara's name, my former supervisor at North Regional, who was also at the Main Library in downtown Ft. Lauderdale that morning for a different meeting. I bumped into her on the Second Floor lobby area where they set up a television with lousy antenna reception to broadcast the news about the planes hitting the Twin Towers.
She was the one who told me about the second tower.
The rawness of that day remains with me. So much has changed since then but I still remember where I stood, how I felt, what it was like to drive back to Northwest Regional to await more bad news, the parking lot of the blood bank at night where a hundred people stood with me waiting our turn to donate blood because there was nothing else we could do but cry and pray.
I feel bad still because this is all I can do, just sit here and repeat the same story, unable to change the past and in no position to fix the present outside of my own meager rants and political activism. I'd like to be able to take the rage and sorrow I have and convert it into solutions and salvation. But 9/11 is a reflection of a human sin that both saints and tyrants struggle against with no honest solution in sight...
Last year, I was worried about how the world had remained a bloody, violent place since 2001 as the Syrian Civil War was well into its third year. It's now in its fourth, and due to the extremist group ISIL it's bled over back into neighboring Iraq which still hasn't recovered from the ill-planned Bush/Cheney occupation.
Last night Obama gave a speech outlining how we were committing airstrikes against the Islamist State psychopaths. We are remaking military commitments to a nation we tried to exit back in 2011, mostly because we as a nation failed to leave Iraq in better shape than when we invaded it in 2003. Mostly because we dove head-first into a Middle East quagmire out of anger and blind rage.
We had no reason to invade Iraq in response to what Bin Laden did to us on 9/11. The reasons were fabricated by a Bush/Cheney administration that wanted to invade Iraq for other objectives (finishing off Saddam, placating our allies in the region who didn't like having a dictator for a neighbor, seizing all that oil and natural resources). We had no plan for what to do with nation-building. Well, there was a plan: remove Saddam and his ilk, put in pet Chalabi on the throne, sign up all the oil rights, exit Iraq. When it happened that nobody in Iraq wanted Chalabi and he wasn't the puppy Cheney thought he was, it turned out we had no Plan B.
Because with the Middle East there IS no Plan B. Just an ongoing, 5000-year cycle of violence and madness that will only end when everybody's dead.
And we are all stuck. The innocent people in the Middle East trapped between warring factions. Other nations tied to the region through all that damn oil. A United States that's morally and politically obligated to keep dropping itself into that quagmire because we've been breaking things there since World War II and we're stuck paying the bills for the next century.
We're bombing away in Iraq today. Because the Towers fell thirteen years ago. We have no idea when we can stop bombing.
Today is another remembrance of 9/11/01. On this day we remember that 2,000-plus people lost their lives to 19 idiots seeking glory in death, ordered by another group of idiots who hid in a cave and didn't have the balls to do the deed themselves.
Today we remember that we as a nation launched a war on Afghanistan where those idiots were hiding, protected by a fundamentalist Taliban regime. Today we have to remember that we're still in Afghanistan fighting those Taliban forces who will most likely re-seize power the second we leave, which is pretty much what the cave idiots want out of us: perpetual war.
Today we remember that we as a nation got lied to by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney regarding Iraq: that Saddam was tied in with those cave idiots (that was a lie), that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (that was a lie), that Saddam was a threat to Middle East security (the 1991 Persian Gulf war neutered his forces), that felling Saddam would bring peace and democracy to the Middle East (Cheney and Co. wanted to put Chalabi on the throne and leave a puppet regime in place).
This last remembrance is key, because it's a very good reason why a vast majority of Americans do not want our nation under Obama to go starting another military action in the Middle East. On this day, we're thinking about Syria as much as we're thinking about the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Flight 93.
The Syrian civil war is one of the messiest results of the Arab Spring of two years prior (the collapses of Egypt and Libya over this summer are starting to get as bad). We've got 2 million refugees across the borders and 4 million more displaced within Syria: a massive humanitarian disaster in the making. Adding to the problem is that the current Assad regime isn't a friendly or humane government... and that a growing number of Syrian rebel forces are tied into the Al Qaeda cave idiot extremists, meaning the U.S. really doesn't have an honest side to back.
The biggest headache is how Assad's government does have WMDs in the form of chemical weapons. While warfare is a bloody mess regardless what weapons are used, chemical warfare is a Big No-No: the risk to civilian exposure is the biggest worry, especially since there's little warning when the attacks come and there's not a lot of people going around with gas masks. When the fighting got worse, but the U.S. had no reason or allied support to go in, Obama issued a stern warning (the "red line") that chemical weapon usage would cause reprisals.
Forced to uphold the "red line", Obama did what every other President seeking military action would do: call on allies to back him up. This time, however, our allies refused. In a public display of rejection, the British Parliament voted against the call for support. Going to the UN for a military airstrike - missile or aerial bombing - was out of the question with Syria's backer Russia nearly certain to veto any action.
This brought him back to the U.S. going to Congress to ask for a resolution (something Presidents are supposed to do, but because of constitutional question marks they avoid this step). This was originally viewed as the one thing the Republicans would actually back Obama on... except now there's no guarantee as the House GOP obstruction game-plan (destroy Obamacare, destroy Obama, destroy the government, etc) is back in full effect.
The worrying thing is how the knee-jerk reaction comes so easy on this: the urge to use military force as the first step rather than the last. There is this lingering paranoia among our political leaders that nobody wants to look "weak". That nobody wants to be accountable when something goes wrong, except for when a military strike could go wrong, in which case the answer would be an escalation in the fighting.
The current situation - the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the chemical weapons, it won't stop the fighting but it will reduce the need for the world power(s) to get further entangled - provides some hope for the present and the future. If the United States can get Russia to back the effort, if Russia can get Syria to sign onto the chemical warfare treaties limiting their use, if Syria honestly gives up control of those weapons to international (UN) observers... For the first time in what seems like decades, we would have a diplomatic solution to a problem rather than a military one.
And wouldn't that be a better legacy Post-9/11 than yet another war?
I was at the main library in downtown Ft. Lauderdale meeting with
other librarians in the tech lab (computers) departments. The library
was switching to a new email system (groupwise) and they wanted us to
perform the in-house training. Meeting started at 9 am. One of my
coworkers was late, coming in and saying there was news a plane had hit
one of the Twin Towers...
...When we finished the meeting, we
left the classroom and walked out into the foyer area and up the
escalator to the library’s main floor. They had dragged out a TV on a
cart and was trying to get a signal. For some reason, TV reception was
lousy in that building, and they didn’t have cable connection. I saw an
old boss of mine who was also at the library for a meeting and
approached her, asking what was going on. “Oh my God,” she told me. “There was another plane hitting the other World Trade Center tower.”
It
took a few seconds. It took a few seconds to realize that one plane was
an accident. Two planes, one right after the other… hitting each tower…
I knew then it meant war...
Not much has changed since 2009. Except that our fighting in Iraq is lessened now that our military and political presence there has dropped. The fighting in Afghanistan has increased, mostly through an attempt to finish the nine and a half years we've been there trying to keep the allies of Bin Laden from regaining power there.
A lot has changed since 2001, but most of it is due to political partisan BS that isn't appropriate to note during this somber moment. The one thing I can note is that Bin Laden is dead, answering for his part in the attacks ten years ago among some of the other sins he'd committed the years before. It may have been a bloody justice without the courtroom, but this was a man who admitted to his part and sought to commit more acts of war to prove himself mighty rather than decent. It was a bloody justice but it was done.
We are as a nation today opening memorials at the ground of the World Trade Center, and near Shanksville PA. There will be remembrances and muted celebrations across the country today. There isn't much more to do other than mourn the dead and build again...
I was at the main library in downtown Ft. Lauderdale meeting with other librarians in the tech lab (computers) departments. The library was switching to a new email system (groupwise) and they wanted us to perform the in-house training. Meeting started at 9 am. One of my coworkers was late, coming in and saying there was news a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers.
It was sad to hear, but we all knew the story about the Empire State building getting hit with a plane back in the 1940s, so we assumed it was a tragic pilot’s error or bad weather or something (it was a clear day that morning in Florida. I think it turned out the whole Atlantic seaboard had clear skies… it was going to be such a beautiful day…) So we settled in, going over the email system, what we should teach, what the handout materials should look like, etc. It took about an hour, just sitting there in the classroom lab unaware of what was happening outside.
When we finished the meeting, we left the classroom and walked out into the foyer area and up the escalator to the library’s main floor. They had dragged out a TV on a cart and was trying to get a signal. For some reason, TV reception was lousy in that building, and they didn’t have cable connection. I saw an old boss of mine who was also at the library for a meeting and approached her, asking what was going on.
“Oh my God,” she told me. “There was another plane hitting the other World Trade Center tower.”
It took a few seconds. It took a few seconds to realize that one plane was an accident. Two planes, one right after the other… hitting each tower…
I knew then it meant war.
The lobby TV was terrible, snow and static, and I went up the 8th floor to see if reception for a TV in the staff lounge was better up there. It wasn’t. They tried moving it into a meeting room closer to the windows to see if that could help. And barely. There was still a lot of static and snow, and some of the guys I was with didn’t agree with me when I swore one of the towers had collapsed.
By that time, reports of the Pentagon strike were all over the place, rumors about other buildings getting hit with car bombs, more planes in the air… The call went out from the county government: everyone close down and go home.
Every skyscraper in Ft. Lauderdale was closing (the odds of terrorists striking South Florida seemed ridiculous, but by then panic was unshakable). The parking lot for the library was actually a few blocks to the other side of the government center across the street. I walked across and met a young couple who were trying to enter the government building. The county center had already locked their doors. The couple didn’t know. I told them. “Terrorists are flying planes into buildings. They hit the Twin Towers. One of them’s gone, just flat out gone.”
By the time I got to my car and got the radio on – the first time I could clearly get news about what was happening – the second Tower fell.
I couldn’t go straight home: while the downtown buildings were closed, other library branches were still open and I had to report back to the NW Regional branch in Coral Springs. When I got there, the whole staff knew. I met with my tech lab workers and we all talked about what was happening in low hushed tones. There were probably 7 patrons in the whole building, just one in that lab. Just before lunch time, the word came down that all libraries were closed until further notice from the county.
That whole day ended up with me in a daze. I went home first, sitting with my two cats and watching CNN for hours. Reports on the last plane – Flight 93 – started coming in. By the afternoon, I felt restless, despairing. I decided to go donate blood. I had never done it before: I hate needles, was terrified of doing it, but that day… well I wasn’t the only one. The only blood bank anywhere in North Broward was crowded well out into the parking lot. I ended up standing there for three hours before it had gotten so dark that you couldn’t see the persons you were talking with (few parking lot lights). So I went home and went back to donate blood that Saturday.
They ended up not taking my blood. I tested positive for Hepatitis C and spent the whole month of October getting re-tested before they confirmed it was a false positive. They never told me what I did test positive for, though. But I digress.
