9/11 anniversary

This is a pretty good post and it basically lays out some good point about the media's coverage of this anniversary. It's also worth mentioning here, that we still haven't caught the man responsible, and in fact we sort of bailed on that mission:
"He[Bin Laden] was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2002.

White House spokeswoman Michele Davis said she would not comment on the specific allegation. "Military and intelligence units move routinely in and out," she said. "The intelligence and military community's hunt for bin Laden has been aggressive and constant since the attacks."

The Pakistani intelligence service, notoriously difficult to trust but also the service with the best access to al-Qaeda circles, is convinced bin Laden is alive because no one has ever intercepted or heard a message mourning his death. "Al-Qaeda will mourn his death and will retaliate in a big way. We are pretty sure Osama is alive," Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.

Pakistani intelligence officials also say they think bin Laden remains actively involved in al-Qaeda activities. They cite the interrogations of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a key planner of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and Abu-Faraj al-Libbi, who served as a communications conduit between bin Laden and senior al-Qaeda operatives until his capture last year.

Libbi and Ghailani, who was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004, were the last two people taken into custody to have met with and taken orders from Zawahiri and to hear directly from bin Laden. "Both Ghailani and Libbi were informed that Osama was well and alive and in the picture by none other than Zawahiri himself," one Pakistani intelligence official said."

Atrios brings up some good points on the Afghan war also.
"the one little thing I actually give George W. Bush some credit for. Basically, the story was that Afghanistan had been taken over by bad people (it had), those bad people were harboring bad people involved with 9/11 (they were), and the country had been pretty much destroyed between the Soviet invasion and the Taliban rule (it had). So we were going to go get the bad guys (we got some), create a new democratic national government (now known as the city government of Kabul), free the people - especially women - from tyranny (not so much), and rebuild the country to such a fantastic degree that it would be an utter inspiration to the world and create democracy-and-America-loving people everywhere (not)."