Today at TomDispatch ( link ) Tom Engelhardt discusses the disproportionately strong response to the 9/11 attacks as opposed to the equally threatening anthrax attacks that soon followed. A $6 billion per week war launched on the flimsiest of connections to 9/11 still rages on while the response to the anthrax attack goes nowhere and its unresolved menace has all but vanished from our national consciousness.
While we consider that, let's not forget the 2003 cyanide bomb plot that never "grew legs" and now lives at the bottom of our media's memory hole.
What's interesting, and goes along with what Tom Engelhardt was saying, is that for our current administration the severity of threats to national security are measured by their ability to rationalize actions our president wanted to take anyway, not by any rational or proportional assessment of possible damage to US lives that might result.
The Tyler Texas case, involving malice aforethought and enough poisonous cyanide to kill many times the number of people who died in NYC on 9/11, was "solved" by accident, unaided by any provision of the USA PATRIOT Act, and was settled quickly and quitely in court, without torture or extreme rendition, without declaring the suspects combatants, or without holding suspects in solitary confinement without access to lawyers for years on end.
At this stage there isn't much that anyone can do to put these three threads of our recent terrorist history into perspective. There will be no rational national debate on what it is our government is protecting us from or whether our resources are being used in the wisest ways to do that. I guess all we can do is remember the forgotten so that if Reason ever returns to America some sense may one day be made of all of this.