Watcher of Weasels:

The Path From 9/11

Bryan Preston does an amazing job of summing up where things stand now that we are five years out from 9/11.  It's impossible for an excerpt to do it any justice...  do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing.  (If you need a pick-me-up after that, then be sure to check out the lovely Bethany's summary of 9/11 week.)

Jeff Goldstein describes how 9/11 led to his own political awakening...  and Mary Katharine Ham says we all need to wake the hell up and start paying more attention to the 9/11 conspiracy kooks instead of just writing them off as harmless.

Baron Bodissey looks at 9/11 from a slightly different perspective, and hopes that we will find another Jan Sobieski someday.

Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred peers into America's soul and finds it wanting.  Banagor doesn't sound very optimistic either...  and as he looks back in anger, he wonders whether there should have been a nuclear response to 9/11.

Betsy Newmark tries to find a silver lining in the whole Path to 9/11 controversy...  namely, that it reminds us of what a weasely dirtbag Sandy Berger was and still is.  However, she laments the decision to condense things (such as the 8-10 blown opportunities to get Bin Laden) into composite scenes: “There was quite enough from the true story that they could have used rather than casting doubt on the show's veracity by fabricating scenes.  Now they've given Clinton's defenders a legitimate hook for their complaints by criticizing the mini-series for having fabricating "fake but accurate" scenes.  Imagine if this same debate were taking place over real scenes for which a lot of evidence exists.  The whole discussion would be completely different.  We'd be talking about what Clinton's administration did and did not do regarding Al Qaeda rather than whether a docudrama that makes up scenes is worth broadcasting or watching.  I so wish that that were the debate we were having rather than seeing people defend the fictional in the docudrama.”

I enjoyed Cox and Forkum's latest update to their Confronting Terrorism series...  but, for my money, this magnificent piece of work from 2004 is a picture worth 2,996 words.