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OLBERMANN: And lastly tonight, a special comment on why we are here. Half a lifetime ago I
worked in the now empty space behind me. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here
again, trying to make sense of what had happened and was yet to happen, as a reporter. And
all the time I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people,
including four of my own friends, two in the planes and as I discovered from the missing
posters, seared still into my soul, two more in the towers. And I knew as well that this
is the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen of whom my family can claim half
a dozen or more as our ancestors.
I belabor this to emphasize for me this was and is and always shall be personal, and anyone
who claims that I and others like me are soft or have forgotten the lessons of what happened
here is at best a grasping, opportunistic dilettante and at worst an idiot, whether
he is a commentator or a vice president or a president.
However, of all the things of those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast,
of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only
in our minds, none of us could have predicted this. Five years later this space is still
empty. Five years later there is no memorial to the dead. Five years later there is no
building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from
us by cowards and criminals. Five years later this country's wound is still open. Five years
later this country's mass grave is still unmarked. Five years later this is still just a background
for a photo op. It is beyond shameful.
At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial, barely four months after the last soldier
staggered from another Pennsylvania field, Mr. Lincoln said, "We cannot dedicate. We
cannot consecrate. We cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled
here have consecrated far above our poor power to add or detract."
Lincoln used those words to immortal words to their sacrifice. Today they could use those
words to rationalize their own reprehensible inaction. We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
we cannot hallow this ground, so they won't.
Instead they bicker and buck-pass. They thwart private efforts and jostle to claim credit
for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars and elaborate
self-congratulations and buying off columnists to write you on good a job they're doing,
instead of doing any job at all.
Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets and look carefully,
sir, on these 16 empty acres the terrorists are clearly still winning. And in a crime
against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed, but did not enact,
you have done nothing about it.
And there is something worse still than this vast-gaping hole in this city and in the fabric
of our nation, there is its symbolism, of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath reduced
to lazy execution. The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and
painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity here and throughout the country. The government,
the president in particular, was given every possible measure of support. Those who did
not belong to his party, tabled that. Those who doubted the mechanics of his election,
ignored that. Those who wondered of his qualifications, forgot that.
History teaches you that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away
from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not
to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.
Terrorists did not steal our newly regained sense of being American first and political
50th, nor did the democrats, nor did the media, nor did the people. The president and those
around him did that.
They promised bipartisanship and then showed that to them bipartisanship meant that their
party would rule and the rest would have to follow or be branded with ever escalating
hysteria as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers. As those who, in the vice president's
words, yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."
They promised protection and then showed that to them protection meant going to war against
a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we learn from our own Senate
Intelligence Committee, hated al Qaeda as much as we did.
The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped in to supporting a war on the false
premise it had something to do with 9/11, is "lying by implication." The impolite phrase
is "impeachable offense."
Not once, in now five years, has this president ever offered to assume responsibility for
the failures that led to this empty space and to this the current and curdled version
of our beloved country.
Still, there is a snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness. Even his most
virulent critics have never suggested that he alone bears the full brunt of the blame
for 9/11.
Half the time, in fact, this present has been so gently treated that he is seen not even
to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.
Yet, what is happening this very night, the miniseries, created, influenced, possibly
financed by the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavelli continues to be televised
into our homes. The documented truths of the last 15 years are replaced by bold-faced lies,
the talking points of the current regime parroted the whole sorry story blurred by spin to make
the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent and the party in office seem like
the only option.
How dare you, Mr. President? After taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love
and transmuting both into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming
it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear in to the campaign slogan of three elections.
How dare you or those around you ever spin 9/11?
Just as the terrorists have succeeded, are still succeeding, as long as there is no memorial
and no construction here at Ground Zero, so too have they succeeded and are still succeeding
as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.
This is an odd point to site a television program, especially one from March of 1960,
but as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth and of this country suggests, even television
program can be powerful things.
And long ago, a series called the "Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled
"The Monsters are Due on Maple Street." In brief, a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion
by extraterrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out, a neighbor pleads
for calm, suddenly his car and only his car starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien.
Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street,
guns are inevitably produced. An alien is shot, but then he turns out to be just another
neighbor returning from having gone from help.
The camera pulls back to a nearby hill where two extraterrestrial are seen, finally, manipulating
a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there is no
need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then they
pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it is themselves.
And then in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable
prescience, given where we find ourselves, tonight. "The tools of conquest," he said,
"do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply
thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record,"
he said, "prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened
search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own for the children and the children yet
unborn."
When those who dissent are told time and time again, as we will be if not tonight by the
president, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus, that he is preserving our freedom,
but that if we use that any of that freedom we are somehow un-American. When we are scolded
if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11," look in to this empty
space behind me and the bipartisanship upon which this administration also did not build,
and tell me this - who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President. You have.
May this country forgive you.
Our coverage of the president's address is next. From Ground Zero, I'm Keith Olbermann,
goodnight and good luck.