Also on today’s menu at the News Café:
Mount Washington 9/11 Tribute Monitored For Bird Safety
US DOJ Orders Preservation of 2024 Election Records
Reflecting on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Timothy Snyder observed, “Sadly, Americans in power responded as the terrorists would have wanted; indeed, we exceeded their expectations, making the world much worse for ourselves and everyone else.”
The article is worth reading in its entirety, as Snyder argues, “Americans in power did what the terrorists wanted. They attacked us, said President Bush, because ‘they hate freedom.’ And his reaction in domestic policy was to use the instruments of our own government to undo our own freedom. The pertinent example was the formation of a Department of Homeland Security. It placed a grab-bag of agencies under a single authority, treating them all (for example, border management) as a matter of ‘security.’ Yes, the bags of the terrorists should have been more carefully searched. Yes, international terrorism, which killed about 3,000 people that day, was a threat to be taken seriously. But other things made us insecure…. Attaching the notion of ‘security’ to one kind of threat made all the rest worse.”
He explained, “The definition of the border as exclusively a matter of security prepared us for a domestic politics, the one we have now, in which our leaders tell us that we will be safe when we divide the people living in America into ‘legals’ and ‘illegals,’ us and them — and build ever more concentration camps for them.
“The notion of a Homeland, which echoes the Nazi fascination with Heimat, was just as dangerous. At the time, it was an exotic label for a government department, not really in keeping with American English or American institutional traditions. But the word ‘homeland’ has since been normalized, in its essentially fascist sense. Under the current administration, we are instructed to think of a vulnerable ‘homeland’ threatened by some of the people who live there.”
The foreign policy response to 9/11 was to invade Iraq, and “our elected officials became co-authors of that psychological script. The Bush administration consciously invented the connections between Iraq and the primarily Saudi terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. And the high degree of mendacity was itself a problem, since it led Americans to distrust their government, and enabled the rise of Trump and his ilk. But it also had consequences around the world. These invented pretexts were the reason for an act that violated the most basic precept of international law: the ban on unprovoked wars of aggression.” And so we find ourselves in a war of choice with Iran today, and Ukraine finds itself trying to repel Russia.
Snyder, writing from a bunker in Kharkiv, Ukraine, sums it up this way:
Do not let terrorists who hold state power tell you how to react to terrorism.
Do not be provoked, do not enter the mental world of the terrorist, foreign or domestic; think for yourself. And do that thinking in the future: not as a reaction to some orchestrated horror, theirs or ours or anyone’s; not amidst a cloying nostalgia in which we were always right because only others can do wrong; but in the hope that we can make this quarter century better than the last.
Commemoration is a singular chance to reflect. Americans in power will try to use this anniversary to [say] that everything happened exactly as it had to, and that we should bow our heads rather than use them.
We went along twenty-five years ago. We should not do so again. Thinking about the last quarter century, we can choose to think differently.
And what we failed to do then we can do now. We can think of our security as part of our freedom, as our education and our health and ability to realize our best selves. We can turn from sources of energy that kill to sources of power that enliven. We can love our country but recognize that our only homeland is a common one, the earth itself.
Mount Washington 9/11 Tribute Monitored For Bird Safety
New Hampshire Fish and Game and NH State Parks are working with New Hampshire Audubon, scientists from Cornell University, and the New York City Bird Alliance to make sure migrating birds are not harmed by Renee Plummer’s plans to have the state pay tribute on the 25th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks to those who died that day. Plummer, co-founder and vice-president of Two International Group at Pease International Tradeport, is coordinating The Honor Summit, which placed two huge LED lights on Mount Washington to project beams from September 9 to the 12th.
Conservationists are worried, with Carol Foss, a senior advisor with New Hampshire Audubon, saying, “This is the peak time for fall migration for songbirds. They migrate at night and they can be attracted to and confused by outdoor lighting.” That is especially likely over Mount Washington, which typically lacks light pollution.
The groups have developed a protocol to turn the lights off if the birds seem to get disoriented by the beams of light. In a test earlier this week, they observed that birds had modified their behavior to avoid the new lights.
Discussion: Foss and her team will be using binoculars, spotting scopes, and a thermal monocular that can detect heat signatures from birds and bats to monitor the migration, and she is encouraging others to minimize outdoor lighting during this time of year, and again in the spring when birds head back north.
US DOJ Orders Preservation of 2024 Election Records
The US Department of Justice sent a letter on September 4, just as the 22-month window for preserving records of the 2024 election was set to expire, to New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan and election officials in other states, demanding that they preserve all ballots and electronic records from 2024, citing potential violations of the federal Civil Rights Act and “ongoing litigation” against the state.
The federal government filed a lawsuit against New Hampshire last year after the Trump administration unsuccessfully sought confidential voter data, and it sent election monitors to the Granite State this week to observe the primary elections.
Scanlan sent an email to election officials across the state on September 10, ordering them to preserve, and not shred, the ballots, even though the federal government provided no “factual or legal basis” for the demand, and he reiterated that the ballots remain confidential. “This office will evaluate any demand to inspect or copy such records on a case-by-case basis when and if USDOJ makes a demand,” Scanlan said.
Discussion: The US Department of Justice called for a “pre-litigation hold” based on an “investigation and ongoing litigation as to the extent to which you [the Secretary of State’s Office] have failed to comply with your duties under the” Civil Rights Act and Help America Vote Act. Scanlon wrote, “USDOJ has not identified any basis for believing the State may have failed to comply with any specific provision of the CRA or HAVA during the 2024 state general election. Nor has USDOJ identified any state election procedure that needs to be corrected to comply with the CRA or HAVA in the upcoming November 3, 2026 state general election. Nor has USDOJ provided any evidence indicating that any state or local election official may have violated federal law at any point in the past 22 months. Even though USDOJ did not send this pre-litigation hold letter to N.H. municipalities and failed to identify any factual or legal basis for demanding that the Secretary of State enact a pre-litigation hold, based on legal advice from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, this office is instructing all municipalities to preserve the records identified in the attached letter, including election records and ballots relating to the November 5, 2024 state general election, until further notice.”