Letters to the Editor
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The Fix Was In, Sort Of
The late afternoon of September 11th, taking a ferry from Port Jeff, Long Island to Bridgeport, CT, the only way off the island that day, in a boat jammed with cars and people who had escaped from lower Manhattan and been stranded at airports, I remember hearing James Baker on the radio they piped across the boat. He said 9/11 proved the US government had become too restrained, that the government had to have the power to reach out and do dark things.
That's always suggested to me that the Bushies were looking for a fight. They're too incompetent to have planned 9/11, in my view, but they clearly had and have ideas about government that I'd hope most Americans would reject. Ideas like political assasinations are okay if they further US policy. What followed 9/11 has never surprised me given Baker's comments on the day of the tragedy. The bodies weren't even cold.
While I ascribe some of Baker's comments to the heat of the moment, being upset as everyone was at the time, it also contains more than a grain of truth about the future, about how these people view US government policy.