9/11: Around The Blogosphere

Remembering the Day

• For Thou Art With Us — Sarah Bunting @ TomatoNation.com was there.
  

  We come up the rise to the corner where a crowd of people has gathered, all looking up, and the towers come into view — the south tower closer to us and to the left. “Ohhh, man,” we both say, and “Jeeeesus Christ,” and “This is not good. This is not good at all. This is fuckin’ bad.” So dumb. So dull. We sound like frat boys when the keg is dry, but there’s nothing else we can say about what we’ve got in front of us. In front of us, high above us, the south tower has a huge hole torn through it, a burning, screaming maw with thick black smoke pouring out. Occasionally, flames lick up one corner of the twisted mouth of the hole and then retreat, only to reappear on the other side. It doesn’t seem real. It doesn’t even seem that serious at first, actually, until I remember just how big the building is, how many stories high — and that the hole must therefore cover twelve stories, at least. “This isn’t the kind of history I want to be present at,” I say, lamely, to Bob. “Me neither,” he says.

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Work Your Brain — 09/02/06

First Some Fun

• Thursday Thirteen #3 — Baggage @ Baggage That Goes With Mine wrote thirteen reasons why the internet is better than real life. This is my favorite.
  

  11. On the internet, you can pop into a forum or a blog and tell a person that their beliefs are dumb, they should be breastfeeding, they should never co-sleep, they should divorce their husband, they should shave their legs, and they should stop wearing mom jeans. In real life, people would punch you in the face.

In Memory Of Katrina

• But you can keep them for the birds and bees — Mac @ PeskyApostrophe wonders about all of that Katrina aid money the U.S. asked for and got from other countries last year. She comes to the same conclusion I did.
  

  I’m appalled at a variety of things when it comes to the Katrina rebuilding effort and FEMA’s role in it all, but this is a whole new level of incompetence. As part of my new job, I am now involved in grant-writing. In a good portion of grants, the grantee expects a report as to how the money was used. While I’m sure these gifts did not come with any reporting requirements, if one of our grantees found out their money had been either wasted or didn’t got to the program for which it was intended that would pretty much guarantee they’d never give money to us again. And you have to wonder if, should another emergency situation arise, these countries would think twice about giving aid money to the U.S. if we’re not going to use it and use it wisely.

• First the Flood, Now the Fight — Spencer S. Hsu @ WashingtonPost.com wrote a special report on the butting of heads between FEMA and state and city officials in the rebuilding of the Gulf States and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA swears it’s not trying to be difficult but the process seems to be designed to wear down those requesting help until they just give up and either take what little they’ve been given, which isn’t much if anything.
  

  Through hundreds of such disputes large and small, the most costly disaster in U.S. history is fast becoming its most contentious, with appeals and disputes worth nearly a billion dollars bogging down repairs of critical public systems and delaying the return of residents.

  Current and former officials at all levels blame FEMA workers’ inexperience with eligibility rules, weaknesses in U.S. disaster laws and inconsistent treatment by Congress for much of the wrangling. The huge scale of the storm and honest disagreement over whether federal or local taxpayers should pay the tab add to the conflict.

  “Disasters should be difficult to declare. . . . But once you get them, FEMA should not worry about cutting costs,” said Daniel A. Craig, who stepped down in October as head of FEMA’s recovery division and is now consulting for New Orleans. “Public entities are eligible for everything they have lost due to the disaster. It is not up to FEMA to cut corners or makes sure money is saved.”

  Gil H. Jamieson, FEMA’s deputy director for Gulf Coast recovery, agreed that “we’re in this to rebuild the city” and added: “We are not in it to delay for the sake of delay. Are there folks who sometimes hose it up? Absolutely. But I think we’re doing a good job of helping it recover.”

  The disputes come as the costliest part of the recovery begins: restoring water, power, roads, bridges, schools and other public facilities along the Gulf Coast. Agency veterans said the spending will have more impact on the physical rebuilding of the Gulf area than anything else FEMA does over the next decade, possibly eclipsing its role in aiding individual victims of the storm.

  The Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, for instance, sustained $446 million in storm losses, said Executive Director Marcia St. Martin. But FEMA has committed just $113 million so far.

  FEMA notes that New Orleans promised U.S. environmental regulators $640 million in repairs before Katrina, and that the antiquated system is too big for the Crescent City’s reduced population.

  “That’s what makes a city — if you don’t have water, sewer and drainage, you don’t have a city,” lamented Robert Jackson, spokesman for the sewer board. “The money so far only scratches the surface of the devastation.

  Hat Tip: Susie @ Suburban Guerrilla

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The Failure Of Afghanistan

I’m alway on alert for stories and reports about how things are going in Afghanistan. We hardly ever hear anything about how things are going over there since the invasion of Iraq started and, yet, supposedly, Afghanistan is really where all of this War on Terror stuff started. At the very least, Afghanistan is where the Taliban and Osama Bin Ladin was after 9-11. And we did a lot of bragging in the early days about how we were bringing them freedom and democracy and how we were going to rebuild the country. Remember all of that?

Now, Afghanistan hardly gets a mention in the news. Even when they had elections, it wasn’t even one of our top stories. Iraq has taken over our lives. Afghanistan is the forgotten bastard child. Kind of a shame really because apparently a lot has been happening while we weren’t looking.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Freedoms, Democracy, Taliban, Kandahar, Pakistan, al-Qaeda

Women’s Right’s In Afghanistan Almost As Bad Now As Under The Taliban

Three years ago, President George Bush told us, “The mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school – today women are free.”But very little has changed. Most women still wear the burqu, not because it’s all the rage, but because they fear they have to. A third of Afghan women in Kabul are forbidden from leaving the house by the male members of the family. It is still next to impossible for a woman to get a divorce in Afghanistan, even from an abusive husband.

Just because we swept in and knocked back the Taliban, doesn’t mean that we instantly changed social attitudes and traditions that have been around probably since before there was tea in Boston Harbor.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Women's Rights, George W. Bush, Taliban, Dr. Massouda Jalal

Afghanistan — The World’s Top Producer of Heroin

Remember the War on Drugs? “Just Say No?”

The War on Terror has not only dwarfed the War on Drugs, it’s kind of sort of aiding and abedding the drug “bad guys”.

Afghanistan, that place we liberated from the Taliban, that place we hardly hear about any more because of Iraq and all of our successes there, is now the “world’s largest exporter of heroin, and the opium used to produce it, supplying 87 percent of the world market.” In 2004, Afghanistan produced 4,000 tons of opium, most of which was converted into 400 tons of morphine and heroin.

“It is not only the largest heroin producer in the world, 206,000 hectares is the largest amount of heroin or of any drug that I think has ever been produced by any one country in any given year,” says Robert Charles, who until last spring was assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, overseeing anti-drug operations in Afghanistan.

Charles says Afghanistan is producing more heroin than Columbia is producing cocaine. [“Afghanistan: Addicted to Heroin (60 Minutes)”]

According to a report on last night’s 60 Minutes, heroin production in Afghanistan has increased more than 2,000% since 2001. Wow. How long until drug lords become more powerful than the tentative new-born democracy do you suppose?

In fact, a number of suspected drug lords have been given key positions in the government. The most prefered method of transportation of the drug is the use of official vehicles like government transports and police cars. I wonder how much of that money is going to support terrorists.

Doesn’t it make you feel warm and cozy and safer knowing that we’ve done such a bang up job over there in the Middle East?

Tags: Iraq, War on Terror, War on Drugs, Afghanistan, Taliban