At ProPublica Tim Golden and Sebastian Rotella remark on the revelation that the Saudi government was more involved in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 than has heretofore been revealed publicly:

The Saudi government has always denied any role in the attacks, noting that al-Qaida and its former leader, Osama bin Laden, were sworn enemies of the royal family. But the 2016 report shows that FBI agents found evidence that several Saudi religious officials working in the United States had connections not only to people who assisted the hijackers but also to other Qaida operatives and suspected extremists. At the time, there were many Saudis in the country who had diplomatic credentials but were mainly involved in religious activity. The FBI later investigated many of them for extremism.

and

“This validates what we have been saying,” said James Kreindler, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs. “The FBI agents working this case detailed a Saudi government support network that was working in 1999, 2000 and 2001 to provide the hijackers with everything they needed to mount the attacks — apartments, money, English lessons, flight school.”

Not only should this be publicized but there should be repercussions, both for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and for the federal officials who concealed it. For the KSA I have two words: civil suits. The figure that should be sought should be in the tens of trillions of dollars, it should be sought not only by the U. S. government but by the families of those killed on 9/11 and those who have died in the various fronts in the War on Terror.

What about the officials? In particular I’d like to know what national interest was served by concealing the KSA’s involvement. U. S. national interest, I mean.

It is as I have been saying for some time: the Saudis are not our friends. They cannot be our friends.

There is quite a difference of opinion on the vaccine mandate which President Biden announced yesterday. At The New Republic, for example, Tim Noah is enthusiastic:

President Biden is imposing the most comprehensive Covid vaccine mandates thus far, requiring federal employees and most private sector workers to get vaccinated.

The new mandates to combat the delta variant, which is starting to slacken economic growth and perhaps even the ferociously tight labor market, arrive after months of dithering within the Biden administration over how aggressively to police workplaces about Covid-19.

[…]

I’ve been very hard on Biden’s reluctance to impose health protections against Covid-19 in the workplace. He waited way too long. But he seems now to be making good on his promises. With new Covid cases approaching January’s levels, Thursday’s moves are better late than never.

and the editors of the New York Times are supportive:

Faced with this avoidable catastrophe, President Biden is right to order tighter vaccine rules, which he did for roughly two-thirds of the nation’s work force on Thursday. “We’ve been patient,” Mr. Biden told vaccine holdouts. “But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”

The president moved to require all executive branch employees, federal contractors and millions of health care workers to be vaccinated. Workers at private businesses with 100 or more employees will have to either get vaccinated or take a weekly Covid test. Any business covered by the order must offer its employees paid time off to get their shots or recover from any side effects.

As incursions on bodily autonomy go, this is pretty mild stuff. No one, the Times columnist David Brooks wrote in May, is being asked to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima.

but a group of Republican governors are challenging the diktat in court:

A number of republican governors, who have long fought mask mandates and other safety regulations intended to stop the spread of the deadly virus, immediately argued that this rule change infringed on their personal freedom and was unconstitutional. The change was an attack on private businesses and states rights, they claimed.

“Biden’s vaccine mandate is an assault on private businesses,” tweeted Texas Governor Greg Abbott. “I issued an Executive Order protecting Texans’ right to choose whether they get the COVID vaccine & added it to the special session agenda. Texas is already working to halt this power grab.” Last week Abbott enacted legislation that would prevent the majority of women in Texas from choosing whether or not to receive an abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also questioned Biden’s ability to issue the mandates. “I don’t believe he has the authority to just dictate again from the presidency that every worker in America that works for a large company or a small company has to get a vaccine,” he said on a radio program hosted by former President Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon. “That is outside the role of the president to dictate.”

Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota wrote on Twitter that she would see Biden “in court,” and Governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina said in a statement that “Biden and the radical Democrats (have) thumbed their noses at the Constitution.” Governor Mark Gordon of Wyoming also said he was preparing his state’s attorney general to take action.

while in an op-ed in the New York Times Robbie Soaves, editor of the libertarian site, Reason.com warns:

The president’s plan is certainly well intentioned. The vaccines are the only tried-and-true strategy for defeating Covid; government officials should both encourage vaccination and make it easier to get vaccinated. Health officials must continue selling people on the vaccines by emphasizing the considerable upside: Vaccination decreases transmission of the virus and turns hospitalization and death into very unlikely outcomes. It provides such robust protection that 99 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the United States now occur in the unvaccinated population. Vaccination works, and it’s the right option for a vast majority of Americans.

But forcing vaccines on a minority contingent of unwilling people is a huge error that risks shredding the social fabric of a country already being pulled apart by political tribalism.

The president should not — and most likely does not — have the power to unilaterally compel millions of private-sector workers to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs: Mr. Biden is presiding over a vast expansion of federal authority, one that Democrats will certainly come to regret the next time a Republican takes power. Moreover, the mechanism of enforcement — a presidential decree smuggled into law by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration — is fundamentally undemocratic. Congress is supposed to make new laws, not an unaccountable bureaucratic agency.

For my part while I have no problem with vaccine mandates in the abstract, think that at this point there is ample evidence for at least the short term safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, and believe that more state and local governments should be mandating vaccinations, I’m a ways and means kind of guy and doubt that the federal government has this power. Before you point out the venerable court cases asserting that government does, indeed, have that power, find one that ruled that the federal government has that power. If it does have the power, it can only be wielded by act of Congress, and the president does not have the authority to make such mandates on his own and the Congress does not have the authority to delegate that power to the president or an executive branch agency. I also suspect this is another of the myriad well-intentioned decrees which there is no actual intention of enforcing which I think weakens the rule of law in general.

It does raise an interesting question, however. At this point I know of no state which has an unconditional COVID-19 vaccine mandates or even a universal mandate conditioned on the absence of religious objections. Illinois doesn’t have one. Why not? I think it’s because the governors fear political repercussions.

There is one thing that President Biden has not done, is certainly within the federal government’s authority, and in which I think that President Trump was remiss in the early days of the pandemic: curbing and controlling travel between the states. My explanation for this, is that fear of political blowback overrules all other considerations.

I don’t have anything insightful to say so I’ll keep it short. I think we should avoid projecting how we felt or feel on others and not judge them for how they feel or felt. I didn’t feel fear on that day; I observed more anger than fear but I didn’t feel either—I felt sorrow.

I’m seeing an enormous amount of claptrap being written about the events of that day and since. Perhaps I’ll post about that tomorrow. If you read anything good, please share it with us.

Update

Esquire, “Who Was the Falling Man from 9/11?”, Tom Junod
John Kass News, “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About 9/11?”, John Kass

In his 9/11 20^th anniversary column in the Washington Post David Ignatius tries to contrast two different things:

Radical pessimism is a mistake on this 9/11 anniversary. These two decades witnessed many American blunders but also lessons learned. Our military commanders discovered how to project power at relatively low cost, in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Despite the Taliban’s triumph, Islamist radicalism has been gradually on the wane — in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and a half-dozen other places.

and

What’s indisputably true is that a cycle in U.S. history has ended. I don’t just mean the post-9/11 effort to remake the Middle East by force. A larger process has been at work over the past century, as the United States gradually replaced the European colonial powers and took up their burden. This post-post-colonial era is dead, thankfully. The American people won’t stand for it anymore, and neither will the rest of the world.

There is so much wrong with the first it’s hard to know where to start. I can think of any number of lessons we should have learned but I can’t think of one that we have actually learned. “Relatively lost cost” are weasel words. Relative to what? There’s no fixed standard so it’s non-disprovable. Since 2001 we’ve spent more than $6 trillion making war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Perhaps that is relatively low cost to Mr. Ignatius but it sounds like a lot of money to me particularly since I’m skeptical that any of that spending has made us the least bit more secure than we were on September 10, 2001. Today is the anniversary we should be celebrating. And what is his evidence that “Islamist radicalism has been gradually on the wane”? I think it’s just biding its time and, indeed, will always be there under the surface.

And is the “post-post-colonial era” really dead? I think that the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who reliably call for military interventions and, indeed, like Mr. Ignatius, believe we should be at war forever in Afghanistan are completely unrepentant. They, too, are just biding their time. As evidence I would point out that the Biden Administration is full of them: Samantha Power and Susan Rice immediately leap to mind.

In a piece at the Atlantic author Garrett M. Graff makes the argument that following the attacks on September 11 the U. S. did almost everything wrong. Here’s the kernel of his piece:

As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, I cannot escape this sad conclusion: The United States—as both a government and a nation—got nearly everything about our response wrong, on the big issues and the little ones. The GWOT yielded two crucial triumphs: The core al-Qaeda group never again attacked the American homeland, and bin Laden, its leader, was hunted down and killed in a stunningly successful secret mission a decade after the attacks. But the U.S. defined its goals far more expansively, and by almost any other measure, the War on Terror has weakened the nation—leaving Americans more afraid, less free, more morally compromised, and more alone in the world. A day that initially created an unparalleled sense of unity among Americans has become the backdrop for ever-widening political polarization.

The things we got wrong which he identifies are:

• As a society, we succumbed to fear.
• We chose the wrong way to seek justice.
• At home, we reorganized the government the wrong way.
• Abroad, we squandered the world’s goodwill.
• We picked the wrong enemies.

I’m not entirely in agreement with everything on his list but I think he has a point.

I was not frightened on 9/11; I was sad because I saw pretty clearly what was going to happen. That may explain why I have opposed practically everything we have done in the aftermath.

Right on cue Joel Kotkin has a post at The American Mind on the decline of the family, not just in the United States but all over the developed world in which I include China. It’s dramatic, it looks like it’s accelerating, and it will have profound effects, few of them good. Here’s Mr. Kotkin’s peroration:

These are not issues of right or left, but concern the future of our civilization, not just economically but spiritually. Social democracy, as first developed in places like Sweden, sought to bolster families, not hem them in. Some conservatives have placed similar emphasis on the family unit. The debate should be not the utility of supporting families, but how best to do it.

This is a choice we need to make.

The days of motherhood, apple pie, and the flag being things which all Americans agree are unarguably good are long gone. The tragedy of it all is that for so many people, as Mr. Kotkin documents, a solitary life is not their preference.

At RealClearPolitics Chicagoan Tom Bevan makes a plea to Illinois Gov. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot:

The truth is that children in Chicago are in far less danger of dying from COVID than they are from getting shot and killed.  According to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, over the last 18 months there have been 5,500 COVID-related deaths in the city of Chicago. Only 10 of those (.0018%) were 18 years old or younger.  

Contrast that with the number of children 18 years old or younger  who’ve been killed (36) or wounded (203) by gun violence in Chicago in just the first 8½ months of 2021. The numbers from 2020 are even worse: 115 children  killed and 646 wounded.   

Remember, too, that most of this violence is confined to just a few neighborhoods in the city and that the overwhelming majority of these victims are African American kids. 

Over the last year and a half we’ve been told minority communities needed extra resources because they’ve been disproportionately impacted by COVID. We’ve been told that Black Lives Matter. Shouldn’t those same principles apply when it comes to children dying in the streets of America’s third-largest city on a depressingly regular basis?  

For years, our leaders have thrown up their hands at this violence and taken the easy way out by blaming a lack of gun control laws in neighboring states. (The city of Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country.) At the same time, these leaders have been too often quick to demonize police, enacted policies like eliminating cash bail, and prosecutors have continued to let violent criminals back onto our streets. And so kids keep dying. 

Maybe if our leaders started treating gun violence in Chicago as a disease – a virus and a plague – they would devote the same level of attention and effort to eradicating it.  

I think that the reason that Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot aren’t devoting more attention to the surge in homicides in Chicago is that they can’t think of anything politically acceptable to do about it. Most of the homicides are gang-related or people getting caught by stray bullets. A good start would be to stop releasing career criminals without bail but that’s against the present orthodoxy. Problems include the collapse of the family in the black community, lack of economic opportunity in a city from which companies are fleeing faster than they’re being formed, and a public education system that’s good primarily for those who have jobs in them but they can’t say any of those things without political repercussions.

In an op-ed in the New York Times former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg presents his prescription for the city’s post-pandemic recovery:

The first is urgent: improving vital services New Yorkers rely on every day, including policing, transportation, sanitation and education.

and

The second broad challenge is more difficult, and inevitably in tension with the first: focusing on the city’s future years from now. Ultimately, the mayor will be judged not by the next day’s newspapers, but by the next generation. It’s his job to look beyond the light at the end of the tunnel and start building more tracks, even when it’s unpopular to do so.

then

In partnership with the state, the mayor can work to get trains on a full schedule again, which would help employers in every industry bring back their workers. It would help thousands of small businesses and their employees reclaim their customers. And it would provide confidence to those who may be thinking about opening a business of their own.

His prescription is conjoined with his endorsement of Eric Adams for mayor.

The one question he doesn’t address, understandable for a New Yorker and a former mayor at that, is whether New York City should recover. Given the obvious increased risk of spreading disease in crowded living conditions, the general movement of the population away from big cities, the near-certainty of future pandemics however good or bad the handling of this one has been, and the increasing acceptability of work-from-home, I think it’s a question worth considering.

The editors of the Washington Post say that President Biden needs to “reset” his policy with respect to COVID-19:

It is time for President Biden to reset the battle against covid-19. The nation’s high expectations for recovery were dashed this summer by the onslaught of the delta variant and the irresponsibility of a large share of unvaccinated people who fell ill. The country has the tools to fight back; it is now suffering through a self-inflicted epidemic. In his planned address to the nation Thursday, Mr. Biden can launch a fresh campaign to use those tools, and the country must help him carry it out, aggressively and wisely.

Let me pause there to question the editors’ interpretation of events. I agree with them that we should be doing more to encourage people to get vaccinated. I think they’re overestimating the degree to which it’s a “self-inflicted epidemic”. Or maybe it’s just poor diction on their part. IMO a “Zero COVID” strategy has always been beyond our reach. How else do you explain the surge in cases in highly-vaccinated Israel? Adjusted for population we’re seeing about the same number of deaths per day as Portugal where the vaccination rate is 86%. If you decide to do your own calculations, Portugal has less than 1/30^th of our population. When you combine ease of transmission, asymptomatic spread, and so-called “breakthrough” contractions of the disease I believe that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that “Zero COVID” is not a practical goal.

But I agree with this:

Most importantly, Mr. Biden ought to give the nation an unvarnished look at where the pandemic response is going. Many people believed, in June and early July, that the end was near. The cruel toll of the delta variant has left them disoriented and worried. In an article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Forever Virus,” experts cautioned the virus “is not going away.” It will not be completely eradicated, new variants are possible, herd immunity is not imminent and the virus may circulate for years to come. Still, we must find a pathway to resilience and survival. Mr. Biden should lay out realistic expectations, setting goals for the government and for the nation as a whole.

I think they’re underestimating the difficulty not just rhetorically but politically in delivering such a message, particularly when so much policy in so many locales has been dedicated to other goals. It would not just require President Biden to admit he was wrong or, perhaps more charitably, that circumstances have changed but that governors and mayors have been pursuing futile strategies as well.

Is that sort of nuance and charm within the president’s range of ability? I guess we’ll find out.