Terrorists: 5, USA: 1

Just days after 9/11/01 I posted on a BBoard at Carnegie Mellon noting that the terrorists had not yet won. Today some people are celebrating because Osama Bin Laden is dead. I'm not, because even with his death the terrorists are still winning.

On 9/11 I was an undergraduate at C-MU; I saw a note that the first tower had been hit by a plane on the AP news wire and forwarded it to several bboards; several people told me later that my post was the first word they had of the attacks. I remember watching the towers fall, over and over again. I remember hearing an airplane and being one of scores of people who went outside to look up at the sky, and look for reassurance in each other. I remember great relief identifying the plane as a fighter, not an airliner. I was scared on 9/11.

But not as scared as I was when I heard President Bush tell the world 'you are either with us or against us.' That was a victory for the terrorists: they had just been recognized as a global power by the most powerful nation on earth. Not even in WWII, fighting some of the most evil monsters ever to wear human skin, did the allies lay such a declaration before the world.

The disgustingly named Patriot Act and the formation of the TSA were another pair of victories: the terrorists had made us sacrifice our essential liberties for an illusion of security.

Then the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Why those countries? Why not pick the nation in the Mid East that had done more than any other to aid in the 9/11 attacks? Why Saudi Arabia's immunity? Or why not the nation(s) Osama was believed to be hiding in? Even in October of 2001 it was an open secret that Pakistan was a possible location - perhaps he was not there then, of course, but with what we know now it is hard to believe that officials, many of them quite senior, in Pakistan were not aware of his general location.

But now, almost ten full years after the 9/11 attacks, we have finally killed the ring leader. Rejoice! So will the TSA be stood down? No, our current administration is already warning us that this may lead to retaliatory attacks. So those 'temporary' 'emergency' measures turn out to have been neither temporary nor effective, and the 'emergency' appears to be permanent.

Don't get me wrong, some things have improved since 9/11: the armored cockpit doors on commercial aircraft and the measures to prevent people from rushing the cockpit are good, effective steps that have the added bonus of in no way compromising our rights. But groping by the TSA in no way adds to our security and is yet another erosion of our liberty.

It is a sign of the times that when I was thinking of the scorecard for the title I considered assigning three points for the TSA and their escalating steps along the road to bureaucratic waste and ineffectiveness. Then I couldn't decide if it should actually be four, or five, and finally decided to simply award them one for simplicity's sake.

So we've won a single battle, but we are still loosing the war.

On the bright side, we haven't lost yet. In commemoration both of the 100th anniversary of its adoption as the US Army's principle sidearm and the 10th anniversary of 9/11, this summer I am going to purchase a Colt 1911. Because while the right to keep and bear arms has been eroded, it still remains. Because while we are loosing, we have not yet lost. We can still win.

We can repeal the ill-named Patriot Act's provisions, and all other legislation contrary to the US Constitution. We can disband the TSA entirely, and let the airlines, individually, decide what they will allow on their planes and bear any expenses they choose to spend searching. We can punish the nations that actually bore responsibility for 9/11.