How the Panicked Response to 9/11 Caused Our Current Crisis – and the Possible Collapse of America
On the morning of 9/11 in 2001 I was in my apartment in Huntington Beach getting ready to go to work. A friend called and said, “Turn on the TV.” “Why?” “Just turn on the TV.”
I turned on the TV and saw the aftermath of the planes flying into the towers of the World Trade Center. My first thought: How horrible! My second thought: They’re going to use this to take away our liberties.
I called my parents in Arizona and told them about it, and some other friends and relatives. Then I called my editor at the Orange County Register, Cathy Taylor, and the rest of our staff on the Commentary section. We decided to wait a bit.
There were concerns about terrorists attacking the Register’s big orange building in Santa Ana. About an hour later, we decided to go in to work. We had a newspaper to put out. The roads were deserted like the first weeks of COVID.
Our editorials and columns were among the few in the country calling for protecting our liberties above all else. America is about freedom and the rule of law. Unfortunately, we were not heeded. Congress quickly passed the misnamed USA Patriot Act, better termed the Traitors’ Act, giving vast new powers to the federal police agencies. We especially warned Republicans the new laws eventually would be used against them by a radical Democrat administration.
That started happening with the Obama presidency, as the recent Durham Report uncovered. In the Heritage Foundation summary:
He concluded that there was no basis to immediately launch a full-fledged investigation against Donald Trump; that the FBI failed to follow up on intelligence reports that Hillary Clinton had approved a scheme to manufacture the Russia hoax and that her campaign funded opposition research to supply to the FBI and media with the false narrative; and that FBI leaders willingly subverted FBI policy, quashed investigations into Clinton’s potential violations of the law, and more.
Then there was Hunter Biden’s laptop, on which the FBI sat for years to protect the candidacy of his father. We have learned from the Twitter Files the FBI and other agencies also manipulated the election. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression summarized what was uncovered in Congressional hearings:
In Part 6, independent journalist Matt Taibbi described the FBI’s contact with Twitter over the past few years as “constant and pervasive,” going so far as to call Twitter a “subsidiary” of the FBI. In Part 7, The Free Press’s Michael Shellenberger provided evidence suggesting that the FBI’s and the Department of Homeland Security’s repeated warnings to Twitter about foreign election interference led the company to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Just before the 2020 election, 51 intelligence agency veterans wrote a lying letter attacking the laptop story in the NY Post as Russian disinformation intended to help Trump. On April 23, the Wall Street Journal reported on
the revelation last week that the Biden for President campaign helped to organize the open letter that spread disinformation about Hunter Biden’s famous laptop computer on Oct. 19, 2020.
The House Judiciary and Intelligence committees released portions of a deposition transcript exposing the origins of the statement from 51 former U.S. spies declaring that Hunter’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The admission came from Mike Morell, former deputy CIA director under Barack Obama. The letter served its political purpose of giving the media and Joe Biden the opening to dismiss the New York Post’s laptop scoop as Russian disinformation.
The actions by these corrupt officials have not been punished. But their letter played a key role in electing to absolute power the disastrous Biden regime under which we now suffer in agony. And the regime has the temerity to say Trump is a danger to democracy!
The dumb Republicans of 22 years ago didn’t heed our warning of making sure we didn’t devolve further into a full-blown police state. They didn’t see how the federal police agencies, at the time run by moderate Republicans, easily could be weaponized by liberal Democrats. Or that the progressives who once staunchly defended our liberties could turn around and destroy all our liberties to maintain their power.
I remember Republicans telling me as their excuse, “But we were attacked!” But what’s the point of this country if we’re not free? If the police state is allowed to take over? Aren’t we competent enough to prevent terrorist attacks while upholding the Bill of Rights?
Now the question is whether the federal police agencies even will allow us to hold a fairly honest election in 2024. Or will they interfere as they did with the Hillary Russiagate dossier caper in 2016? Or the laptop coverup of 2020?
That’s the crisis of 2024. If it’s not resolved, the country could devolve into civil war and even break up. All because the fool Republicans of 2001 panicked and set us on the road to tyranny.