In my last essay I spoke about my experience and feelings on the day of the attack. There I admitted I couldn’t encompass all I wanted to say in one entry. I hope to keep this to 2 volumes, but we’ll see.

In the first few weeks and months it was good to see that as a nation we came together. Like most Americans I had not voted for President George W. Bush the previous November. I felt he didn’t have enough experience, or frankly, smarts to run the country. But, like most of us, I fell in line behind him and I have to credit him with his ability to articulate our grief and pain.

But I felt at the time that he needed to make a critical decision. We knew early on that the mastermind of the attacks was Osama bin Laden who led a terrorist organization called Al Qaeda. We also knew that he was living in Afghanistan and the government of Afghanistan (led by an ultra orthodox Muslim group called the Taliban) granted bin Laden refuge.

So do we treat these attacks as a criminal matter or an act of war? If we saw it as a criminal matter we would deploy the FBI to investigate and hope to capture bin Laden and those who planned the attack. If we saw it as an act of war President Bush could convene Congress and ask for a declaration of war against Afghanistan according to the Constitution. It should be noted that the Congress has not done this since December 8, 1941.

President Bush did neither. Instead he addressed Congress and asked for support for a war on terror. It was overwhelmingly granted.

Unlike previous declarations this did not specify a nation (even as wars in Korea and Vietnam did). The declaration gave no indication of our objectives or even when we would know the war was over. President Bush spent the rest of his administration using this equivocation to his advantage.

Shortly after the declaration we began to round up those we suspected had a hand in the attacks. So here’s the problem: if we saw 9/11 as a criminal attack these people would have been suspects and would have had certain rights (the right to remain silent, the right to counsel, the right to be arraigned, etc.). If we saw 9/11 as an act of war these people would have been prisoners of war (POW’s) and would have had certain rights (support from the Red Cross, the right to be treated within the rules of the Geneva Convention, etc.).

But the Bush administration skirted these rules and made up a category called “enemy combatants.” This allowed them to detain people with virtually no protections. They were sent to prisons in several locations, primarily to the US Naval station in Guantanamo Bay Cuba. The Bush administration then argued that these detainees didn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the United States as they were being held in another country (Cuba) but since Cuba has no jurisdiction over Guantanamo that was a blatant lie. Some of these enemy combatants have been held for nearly 20 years with no ability to argue their case or ask that prosecutors prove their case.

Twenty years later we still don’t know what victory in the war on terror is.

OK, this essay is long enough. Looks like I’m going to Volume 3.