Remembering 9/11: It matters that Bush lied

Parade Magazine is not your highbrow media. A lot of us probably think of it as waste paper, a colorful piece of the Sunday newspaper we throw away, along with the supermarket ads and (maybe) the comics.

Today, Parade ran a personal story by a retired New York City cop who lost a son who was working on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center on 9/11. As I post this, the picture above appears on the Parade site but the link there to the full article is broken.

Wilton Sekzer wanted revenge. He asked U.S. military in Iraq to write his son's name on a bomb: "In loving Memory of Jason Sekzer." They did, on a 2000 pound guided projectile, and sent him pictures. He collected the pictures and felt he had done something.

Then he got a shock:

Months later, I was watching TV when President Bush came on and said he didn't know why people connected Iraq to 9/11. He said: "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th [attacks.]" I said, "What did he just say?" I mean, I almost jumped out of my chair. I said, "What the hell is he talking about? What the hell did we go in there for? If Saddam didn't have anything to do with 9/11, then why did we go in there?"

I'm from the old school. Certain people walk on water. The President of the United States is one of them. It's a terrible thing if someone like me can't trust his President. ...

I feel that the government exploited my feelings of patriotism. But I was so insane with wanting to get even, I was willing to believe anything.

...I should never have put my son's name on the bomb. Am I sorry? No, because I acted under the conditions at that time. Was it wrong? Yeah, it was wrong. But I didn't know that.

It's not easy to be calm when you lose your child. You want revenge. When people heard my story, I got a lot of emails. One guy wrote: "What about the other fathers whose sons were killed by that bomb?" You know what? He was a right to say that, because we were lied to. And if I found out the bomb killed innocent people, I'd feel terrible that I put my son's name on it.

Once Mr. Sekzer realized that the bomb was not the memorial he wanted for his son, he persuaded the City of New York to name a street for Jason. He writes:

The bomb was a reaction to anger. The street sign will be here forever. Two different categories.

Activists owe it to the Wilton Sekzer's of the world to keeping demanding truth from our rulers.