"Since September 11, 2001, the United States has experienced a 17 percent decline in overseas travel, costing America 94 billion dollars in lost visitor spending, nearly 200,000 jobs and 16 billion dollars in lost tax revenue," the Discover America advocacy campaign said in a statement.

AFP: 'Unwelcoming' US sees sharp fall in visitors since 9/11

For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review.

This was widely discussed at Phreaknic. Watch online...

FRONTLINE: cheney's law | PBS

noteworthy wrote:
Yes, though "apologists" is rather loaded language. I'm not particularly interested in an argument, but what part of Bin Laden determined to strike in US requires further explanation?

Simply put, the part where that justifies law breaking by the executive branch. In particular, many of the legal arguments for the power of the executive to do things like engage in warrantless surveillance are directly tied to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force which obviously did not exist at this time. I don't agree with those arguments anyway, but they are now completely irrelevant, and the executive is left with not even their own arguments for why these programs were legal.

This is not about whether or not the NSA should be survielling Al'Queda. Obviously they should be and obviously the law ought to allow them to. No one has ever, ever argued to the contrary.

This is about whether or not there are checks and balances in our system of government wherein the actions of the executive are reviewed or authorized by the judicial and or the legislature. Prior to this revelation the sentence beforehand included the minor caveat "during the war on terrorism." Now that caveat has been removed. We are now talking about whether or not the NSA needs court authorization to spy on Americans AT PEACE TIME.

RE: Pre-9/11 wiretap bid is alleged - Los Angeles Times

Former Chief Executive Joseph Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Details about the alleged NSA program have been redacted from the documents, but Nacchio's lawyer said last year that the NSA had approached the company about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records.

This is something that I'd noticed but hadn't posted on yet. I've kind of been waiting for another shoe to drop, but the implication is that increased NSA spying was a policy of the Bush administration that was unrelated to 9/11. Apologists will argue that islamic terrorism was a threat prior to 9/11 and the government knew it was a threat, and now it is clear that this sort of program is necessary. Frankly, the same is basically true for the USA PATRIOT Act, which was a collection of various law and order wish lists that were easy to pass in the wake of 9/11 but designed and desired in advance.

Pre-9/11 wiretap bid is alleged - Los Angeles Times

In September, Iraqi civilian deaths were down 52 percent from August and 77 percent from September 2006, according to the Web site icasualties.org. The Iraqi Health Ministry and the Associated Press reported similar results. U.S. soldiers killed in action numbered 43 -- down 43 percent from August and 64 percent from May, which had the highest monthly figure so far this year. The American combat death total was the lowest since July 2006 and was one of the five lowest monthly counts since the insurgency in Iraq took off in April 2004.

Iraq: Better Numbers

The military schedule synchronizes with the political one. By this time next year, if Iraq has not turned the corner, a good guess is that the Republican presidential nominee will be facing a choice: Promise to wind down the war, or lose the election. Whichever choice the nominee makes, the die will be cast.

Democrats have every reason to be angry at Bush's evasion of political accountability for the mess he has made in Iraq. Democrats, Republicans, and all other Americans have every reason to be angry at Bush for making the mess to begin with.

But anger does not justify impatience. If Petraeus says he needs more time, he should get it. If he fails, a course correction won't be long in coming. The 22nd Amendment has seen to that.

Reason Magazine - Be Angry—but Patient

What soldiers call the “battle space”... is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army...

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear....

Two of the authors of this essay were KIA on Monday.

The War as We Saw It - New York Times

This newspaper was not wowed by either man. The spin General Petraeus put on the military achievements of the surge exaggerated the gains. Mr Crocker's claim to see a spirit of sectarian reconciliation bubbling just beneath the surface of Iraq's stalemated politics was even less convincing. But on one point Mr Crocker was surely right. If America removes its forces while Iraq remains in its present condition, the Iraqi future is indeed likely to be disastrous. For that reason above any other, and despite misgivings about the possibility of even modest success any time soon, our own view is that America (and Britain) ought to stay in Iraq until conditions improve.

The Iraq war | Why they should stay | Economist.com

The Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq (released Sept 10, 2007) was the two-part report released by U.S. Army general David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker on progress by the Iraqi government in the ongoing Iraq War.

Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In my two years in the government, I witnessed top officials and bureaucrats in the White House and throughout the administration openly worrying that investigators acting with the benefit of hindsight in a different political environment would impose criminal penalties on heat-of-battle judgment calls. These men and women did not believe they were breaking the law, and indeed they took extraordinary steps to ensure that they didn't. But they worried nonetheless because they would be judged in an atmosphere different from when they acted, because the criminal investigative process is mysterious and scary, because lawyers' fees can cause devastating financial losses, and because an investigation can produce reputation-ruining dishonor and possibly end one's career, even if you emerge "innocent."

Why, then, do they even come close to the legal line? Why risk reputation, fortune, and perhaps liberty? Why not play it safe? Many counterterrorism officials did play it safe before 9/11, when the criminalization of war and intelligence contributed to the paralyzing risk aversion that pervaded the White House and the intelligence community. The 9/11 attacks, however, made playing it safe no longer feasible. . . .

On the other hand:

I deplored the way the White House went about fixing the problem. "We're one bomb away form getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court," Addington had told me in his typically sarcastic style during a tense White House meeting in February of 2004.

After 9/11 they and other top officials in the administration dealt with FISA they way they dealt with other laws they didn't like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations.

These are both from the same book. More.

Two views of Bush Administration Civil Liberties Policy