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What's So Special About Those Killed By Hijackers on September 11, 2001?
by Robert Higgs

...On any given day in the United States, more than 6,000 people die. Although some are elderly and may be viewed as persons whose inevitable "time has come," others perish tragically, because they are young or because they are especially worthy and still full of potential. Many persons just leave home for work or shopping and never return, being cut down by accidents or cardiac arrest. Some are murdered – on a typical day about fifty homicides occur. We may presume then that on September 11, 2001, for every person who died at the hands of the murderous hijackers, more than two other persons died in other ways. Why do the deaths of the Twin Towers decedents merit such lavish remembrance whereas the deaths of others whose lives ended on that day merit no remembrance at all? Is there something memorably heroic about having happened to be in the wrong building at an unfortunate moment?

Perhaps the 9/11 deaths stir such hyper-emotional fascination because so many persons perished together. Nobody can know about or keep track of all the thousands of separate deaths that normally occur across the country each day, but everybody can remember just two big adjacent buildings falling down only minutes apart.

Neither the government nor the media, however, make a big ado about commemorating the events of April 19, 1995, when another devastating terrorist attack mangled the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 167 persons (including 19 children) and injuring another 675 persons who required medical treatment. Might the relative lack of interest in recalling this calamitous attack have something to do with its having been mounted by a native-born American and veteran of the U.S. Army, rather than by Arab Muslim zealots? Might the apparent eagerness to forget the attack and its victims spring from the government's desire to discourage the recollection of what motivated it, namely, the government's own murderous assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco precisely two years earlier?

I have a hypothesis about why the government and its lapdog media continue to stimulate such bloated observance of the tragedy of September 11. I maintain that doing so helps greatly to justify the government's initiation and continued prosecution of its current spate of military campaigns, conquests, and occupations in Southwest Asia. Even though the Bush administration has never produced a shred of credible evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, the administration has never ceased to claim or to insinuate that some "link" existed. This big lie, persistently repeated, has had a big payoff. According to an IBD/TIPP poll conducted during the first week of September 2003, some 63 percent of the respondents believe that al Qaida and the old Iraqi regime were connected....