A year after the World Trade Center towers fell, I attended a software developer’s seminar at Sun HQ in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks away from the big hole in the ground.  Our classroom was well up one of those tall financial district towers and faced out toward the Statue of Liberty.  On a hunch one afternoon during break I strolled to the other side of the building and sure enough, there would have been a glorious view of the twin towers there, had they still been standing.  A little hesitantly I brought that up to our instructor, a young lady who seemed more then willing to talk about it.  I guess a lot of people in that city still needed to talk about it then.  Yes, she said, she had been at work there that day.  Yes, you could see the towers clearly.  In fact, she said, her co-workers on that side of the building saw the whole thing happen.

She sat at her desk in the front of our classroom during the afternoon break, telling us all this matter of factly.  And as her story came out, what struck me was how little people know about what is happening to them, when they’re right in the middle of it.  In the smoke and dust and confusion of the evacuation, as her and her office mates left the financial district to try and, somehow, make their way back to their homes when the streets were jammed, the bridges closed to traffic and the subways not running, nobody knew that one of the towers had already come down (they thought all the smoke and dust was from the fires), nobody knew if the attacks were still coming, and nobody knew which direction safety was.  She told us that it was when she and her co-workers got to the Brooklyn Bridge, that it really hit her how bad their situation was. Some of her friends implored her to come with them to Brooklyn where it might be safer, while others feared the bridge itself would be the next target.  She parted ways with some of her friends there, not knowing if she’d ever see them again.

It’s five years later, and many people in this country still don’t really know much about what happened that day. In all the anger over ABC/Disney’s right wing porn flick The Path To 9-11 (produced, unsurprisingly, by a secretive right wing network within the network…), I keep waiting for someone to preach a little fire and brimstone that ABC or any TV network, would dare produce and air a goddamned Docudrama on the anniversary of a terrorist attack that killed more Americans then died in Perl Harbor.  A docudrama for Christ’s sake!  Hey…how about…you know…a plain old Documentary?  You know…one of those things where the events are recounted, Factually, and people who were there tell their stories, and some kind of sense is made of the chaos of the event?  But then I must be living on another planet these days.  Documentary?  Factual?  Oh good heavens no…we’re a Television Network…it isn’t our business to actually keep Americans informed about anything…

But it’s not as though Dear Leader has been anxious to keep us informed either.  In fact one of the biggest sources of disinformation about 9-11 has been the Bush white house and the republican party.  And that isn’t merely because doing that dispicably serves them politically.  Joshua Marshall, writing about the relentless lying by Dick Cheney, posted this from a reader…

Speaking as a historian, no historians won’t be puzzling, not at all. A future historian might state, matter of factly, "Vice President Cheney, one of the administration’s most ardent advocates of war with Iraq, continued to maintain that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda long after the existence of such a connection had been disproved. Critics at the time noted that the Bush administration was unable to respond to changing circumstances in the Middle East because, instead of responding to new information, it simply reasserted its ideological premises. Subsequently historians have concluded this approach to problems was the chief reason for the Bush administration’s multiple failures, of which the debacle in Iraq is the most stunning – and, because of its lasting impact on America’s standing in the world – unfortunate example."

…it simply reasserted its ideological premises.  Yeah.  That’s the republican party I know and love.  Your Gay and lesbian neighbors of the Stonewall generation have been seeing it for decades.  Hell, we’ve had our faces rubbed in it time and time again.  Never mind the facts…here’s what we believe…  But don’t just go by us.  Ask the men and women of American science what it’s been like since the republicans took charge…

A week after NASA’s top climate scientist complained that the space agency’s public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.

"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency’s 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA’s technical staff."

The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency’s 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.

And…about that age of the universe thing….

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

Of course.  But…mind you…not a religious issue in the sense of…well…religion.  But politics.  The religion of the republican party is that it isn’t true, unless its in the party’s interest for it to be true.  The god of the republican party, is the republican party.

Mr. Wild declined to be interviewed; Mr. Deutsch did not respond to e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.

I’ll tell you how.  He was a party loyalist.  No, no…don’t mistake him for a devoted creationist.  That, he may well have been, but it wouldn’t have mattered.  What mattered wasn’t his devotion to god, but to the party.  That’s why he got the job.

The path to 9-11 didn’t start with Osama bin Laden.  It didn’t even start at the signpost that read The Ends Justify The Means.  That doesn’t get you there.  There’s a turnoff from there marked We’re On The Side Of God, but that doesn’t quite get you there either.  Somewhere down that road there is a signpost that reads: Truth Is What We Say It Is.  Take that road and eventually you come to 9-11.  And Iraq.  And Abu Ghraib.  And Guantanamo Bay.  And Katrina.  And our slowly warming planet earth.  The Taliban are resurgent.  Iraq is in chaos, and now we learn that Rumsfeld threatened to fire anyone who even thought about a plan for stabilizing it after the invasion.  al Qaeda is more popular now in the middle east then it has ever been.  Our military is stretched so thin it’s putting middle aged men and women back into uniforms they haven’t worn in years and recruting autistic teenagers.  And as long as the Bush gang is in power, we are staying the course.  Because truth is what they say it is.  Except it isn’t.

The one supremely damnable thing about what the Bush gang has done to America is this:  We had more then lies to fight the terrorists with, and yet they chose to fight with lies.  But understand this one thing: lies were all they knew how to fight with.  This serenely clueless mendacity on display didn’t just happen overnight.  It didn’t even start with the stealing of the vote in Florida in 2000.  Anyone remember the Brooks Brother’s Riot?  For certain, there isn’t a single one of those "rioters" who couldn’t look you in the face, even now, and tell you that what happened was a spontaneous act of local voter anger, even as they know damn well it was orchestrated and performed exclusively by republican operatives.  Truth is what we say it is…  Or as one Bush gang member famously put it:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

What they did: Turn the moral power of liberty and justice for all into a dirty joke every tinpot dictator in the world, and even the Taliban, could laugh at.  But that’s because they hated it too.  The Bush administration is an American cultural catastrophe that was in the making for decades.  Just ask your gay and lesbian neighbors.  We’ve had to endure their single-minded march away from justice, away from reason, away from the reality based community, for decades.