How Osama bin Laden damaged America — explained by Michael Grant (a colleague of mine when I was a staff reporter on the San Diego Union) RIGHT HERE. An excerpt:
Reaction is bin Laden’s sword. At first it was a tiny sword, no bigger than 19 boxcutters being snuck through security. Today the sword is huge, for one simple, maddening reason, one reaction that bin Laden was counting on: we are helping him swing it, with our Iraq war, and Patriot Acts, and surveillance schemes, and end runs on the Constitution, and dissolution of values and principles into so-called correct ideology.
So much damage, that sword has wrought in five years. And now it is so late, and we are bleeding from so many cuts. There must be someone in my country’s leadership who has the skill, intelligence and determination to take the sword out of bin Laden’s hands. But I can’t think of a name. All the famous names, in the national leadership, and I can’t think of one who would know exactly what to do, and how to do it, at this point. It certainly hasn’t been George Bush. He may be the Decider, but what we need desperately is a Uniter.
We need someone to remind us who we are. The Bush administration keeps telling us we’re safer than we were five years ago. I don’t feel safer. There’s this huge sword swinging around. Our leadership, with all its display, is acting just like the terrorist wants us to act, then suggests we are dead wrong if we disagree. It makes all of us out to be acting just like the terrorist wants us to act. But we’re not that way. I watched the buildings burning on Sept. 11, and at some point got on email and messaged everybody I knew that we should think what the terrorists would want us to do, and then do the opposite thing. Nobody objected, or disagreed. So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know how to fight a terrorist. We just all need to be brought together in this quiet, firm, fight, and quickly.
Read it in its entirety.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.