A Day Late and a Dollar Short: 9/11 Musings from a Boomer

I was early 20s. I’d say it made me unshockable to tragedy. After watching on TV the people trapped in the building that day, seeing the people who fell, and then the buildings collapse, nothing else since will ever be truly shocking in terms of what humans do to other humans.

I was surprised at how hurt people were that Americans are hated! Wow, none of them had ever walked in my shoes as a hated gay before and it was hilarious seeing how difficult it was for them to process.

[quote]I had a lot of faith in our intelligence agencies, and was sure they would be aware of any large-scale attempt like this in advance and be able to thwart it.

They were aware of it, but Bush the younger had been seated in the WH by the SCOTUS and he and Cheney decided that the Clinton Administration's obsession with Osama bin Laden (since the bombing in '93) was a waste of resources better aimed at their personal demon Saddam Hussein. There were warning signs; there were FBI agents worried about Middle Eastern men using local flight schools to learn about how to fly passenger jets, down to the detail that these men even joked about not needing to learn how to land the planes. They were aware of the cells of support. They knew who Mohammad Atta was and had him under surveillance. Recall Richard Clark's public statements about the dismantled bin Laden task force and George Tenet running around with their hair on fire over it all — only to be told to STFU because there was a new sheriff in town and wanted no talk about all that silly stuff that had the previous administration alarmed.

Eventually, the 9/11 Commission summed the attack up as a "failure of imagination" but they failed to place the blame where it belonged and complete that sentence: a failure of imagination to consider that the previous administration was right about anything. The Bushies' animosity toward Clinton for "stealing" Bush the elder's second term had a cost.

I was 43.

[quote] I had a lot of faith in our intelligence agencies, and was sure they would be aware of any large-scale attempt like this in advance and be able to thwart it. I think that was the most stunning thing for me...

The couldn’t even thwart an unarmed storming of the US Capital. Almost makes you think they didn’t want to.

I was 32. I was moving back to the US at the time and frankly didn’t have enough mental energy to really concentrate on it at all at the time. It was a much bigger terrorist attack than anything else, but I’d seen other terrorist attacks when i lived abroad. I felt at the time the paroxysms of grief to be embarrassing and childish. The commemoration of the event is important but far too many people reacted like they often do about things, “its about me, me mE!”

I was 35. After living overseas for a year I had recently returned to the US. I was not surprised that something like this happened but was shocked at the scale. Zealots plus unlimited funding are devastating. I went to work late that day and while people were clearly upset they had no concept of what a fundamental paradigm shift was happening before their eyes. Life is not the same, as anyone who has flown since then can attest. This lapsed Catholic went to a midday mass.

I think what creeps me out is despite all the might of government (any government) those terrorists conceived and executed this incredibly simple, incredibly effective plan. It was just so simple. It stunned me.

What unnerves me now, a little, when I think about it, which is rarely, is whether or not it's like earthquakes or fault lines. Is someone else out there, plotting now? Are we due for another? Are we overdue? Or was it a one off?

R7 I'm also waiting and wondering when the next big bad thing will happen. I guess in a way January 6th qualifies. But in the aftermath of 9/11 as I reflected looking back on our government's policies and the way we operate abroad, we have been blundering and causing destruction and chaos for many years. Eisenhower unleashed the CIA to actively engage in covert actions to destabilize and even assassinate perceived threats to the "free world" seeing communists around every corner, and attacking any leader who embraced neutrality or who refused to respond to our ultimatums. We've caused havoc all over the world South East Asia, Africa, Europe, South and Central America, and none of it eventually accrued to our benefit. Looking back, ask yourself how the fuck did our CIA miss the fact that the Ayatollah was orchestrating demonstrations and disturbances from Paris to destabilize the regime of the Shah who was illegitimate and who was installed by the U.S. after we assassinated the popular leader of Iran? Take any of our debacles, Vietnam is another obvious one, where we popularized the "Domino Theory" and invested blood and treasure in a pointless war.

[quote] Zealots plus unlimited funding are devastating

The entire operation cost bin Laden less than US$1 million.

We've spent over US$8 Trillion on "the war on terror" since 9/11. That amounts to US$1 Billion per day. Think about what we could do with that much money if instead of wasting it in Afghanistan and Iraq we put it into solving the homeless crisis (estimated cost as of 2023: US$20 Billion per year), education (estimated cost to pay off all student loan debt if up to $50,000 per borrower were forgiven: US$1 Trillion / President Biden's plan for up to US$10,000 per borrower: US$373 Billion), means-tested guaranteed basic income (US$517 Billion per year), or if that seems too much, consider the cost of making the child tax credit of $2000 per year permanent (US$12 Billion per year).

Bin Laden's plan was brilliant. He knew he could never topple the United States through force, but could trick us into spending ourselves silly on war to the point we can't solve simple domestic problems.

Except America would never do any of alternatives you list, R9. It's not in the national DNA. It just isn't. All anyone would want is tax cuts. What's happening, the $8 trillion, the country is quite comfortable with. It props up the national myth.

Everytime I go to my neighborhood supermarket and see the cashiers and baggers in t heir 70's who struggle to get around I think of the complete lack of will to make anything better . I live in the South where Medicaid is a bad word. So we have hundreds of thousands of people with no health insurance.

I learned to avoid tall buildings.

[quote]I was early 20s. I’d say it made me unshockable to tragedy. After watching on TV the people trapped in the building that day, seeing the people who fell, and then the buildings collapse, nothing else since will ever be truly shocking in terms of what humans do to other humans.

WWII atrocities, especially by the Japanese, and the many forms of torture devised by humans throughout history long ago raised the bar for me on "truly shocking." Even just what passed for official (political and religious) punishment in , say, the Tudor Era gives what happened on 9/11 a run for its money. The only differences are the scale and that it happened to us.

I forget how many months later, a woman I work with and her husband took their teenage kids to see the site. They took pictures with smiling faces. Just seemed weird to do that.

[quote]I read a book a week.

Someone sounds VERY single. I bet you were a fat forty.

And are now a fat sixty-two.

I was 19. I already thought society was collapsing and the WTC attacks were just more evidence. Here we are 22 years later and society is still collapsing. Sure takes a long time.

And, R15, I’d suggest that you’ve never read a book in your sad, shallow little life.

tl;dr etc

It revealed that 19 out of 20 people will just wave flags and weep, instead of being cynical and wondering how, when and why.

I'm the character in the movie who says, "Now wait a minute, this is fucked up. We can't just sit here and cry. Are you with me..... anybody?!".

I was 38, and I knew people who were killed that day in the Towers. It changed the lives of their families forever. In the weeks afterwards, living in the New York metropolitan area...time sort of stood still. The coverage was 24/7. And then the funerals happened. The first I went to was of a guy who jumped. The last was in February 2022 of a guy who was a firefighter whose body was found then. His mother never got over it. She went from a happy-go-lucky, caring woman to someone with a tinge of sadness about her. I can remember visiting his family about a week after the attacks. They were clinging to hope, literally clinging, but you could see the resignation in his parents' faces.

That was hard.

What changed the most in life after 9/11apart from the personal was air travel.

It was an evil thing to do. Incomprehensible.

It was shocking because it was the first time an enemy attacked us here and did major damage. At the time, we didn’t know if there would be more attacks. Now I think they just got lucky that day. Either there is no one else out there that wants to hurt us that badly, or they don’t have the resources, or they are inept - or our national security agencies really are that good - because there haven’t been any more attacks like that. I don’t really expect there will be.

[quote]Bin Laden's plan was brilliant. He knew he could never topple the United States through force, but could trick us into spending ourselves silly on war to the point we can't solve simple domestic problems.

He saw that overspending in the Middle East helped speed up the collapse of the USSR, and he wanted to try and repeat it with the US. Maybe he succeeded. Time will tell.

Get a blog, OP. Substack maybe?

R21 “an enemy”

Bonnie R19- That is terrible... And how did the family know that their family member jumped?

In all these years, other than the falling man himself (which is not definite, but likely- and Karen Juday (also likely based on the jumpers clothing and her husband insisting that it was her) I have never heard of any jumper being verified..

I'm a 'boomer' and 9/11 woke me up. Naively, I didn't pay close attention to world events or politics. I was in Chicago when it happened, and nobody knew what was happening at first ( at least I didn't). I woke up that morning to the CNN headline " America under attack". Then the first bldg fell. I think many people started to rethink the narrative of the government. We went to Iraq. Why? The horrific events of that day have stayed with me since. Fuck it, I won't go on and on, but I couldn't imagine being in your shoes, OP, or anyone who saw what happened first hand.

I was 24 and in Lower Manhattan and saw the whole thing. At the time, I was not interested or following world news and I was definitely extremely immature. I was scared out of mind, it was a very terrifying day. My boyfriend was Israeli and very very informed and passionate about what was going on. I kind of shut down and just zoned out the whole thing. years later, I have become very interested and learned exactly what happened. I grew up in New Jersey and went to a famous Catholic university…. This means I knew quite a number of folks killed, the financial firms on the top floors of WTC were Cantor Fitzgerald and Fred Alger, both heavily Irish Catholic firms that tended to hire from the same geographic socioeconomic classes. I also knew someone at Marsh McClennan the consulting agency who was killed. Sadly all the folks I knew who died were my age, PLUS two fathers. Ugh.

R25...there were quite a few people who leapt to their deaths from the Towers. I don't know the exact number, but there is video of them. As I recall, the family was told he jumped.

I reread what I wrote above, It was February 2002 that I went to the last funeral.

One of the friends who died in the attack was a year ahead of me in high school. We went to the same college too and had the same major. He went on to law school. He married and had a little girl...one or two years old at the time. Part of me still aches for that guy. He was just so nice.

The fireman i knew wasn't great in school, kinda farted around until he became a fireman. We were the same age, and you could tell that he finally had found his niche in life. He had a girlfriend, a nice apartment in Downtown Manhattan close to the Towers. He was on the phone with his sister after the first attack occurred, and he told her he was okay, but had to hang up and go into work. The family had a funeral/memorial in late September. The church was overflowing with people. In Feb, after they found his body, they had another smaller ceremony.

I knew one of the victims that was in one of the towers from high school. I didn’t know him well - high school was 40 years ago. He was 2 years younger than I am. His name was David Barkway and I believe he also attended my church. This was kind of a coincidence because as Canadians it was less likely he’d have been there that day. He as on a business trip with his pregnant wife.

This is a Macleans’ article from 2011. Macleans is/was a popular magazine here in Canada. His wife is interviewed.

I can’t think of anything, in terms of media, that was a bigger event in my lifetime. I’m 58.

My aunt's friend was the mother of one of the victims on the plane which hit the north tower. He had been visiting her in Boston and left that morning to go back to his home in California. She was in denial for a long time because there were no remains. She finally accepted his death because she realized that if he hadn't died he would have contacted her. There's so many sad stories from that day.

I mean, I kind of understand it. I was 27, but 9/11 is history now to a high school student. And it the annals of history, what right do we have to be so devastated by 3,000 Americans dying that we are still rending our garments year after year? I think of the British soldiers at Flanders Field and, of course, the victims of the Holocaust (just in recent history) and it must seem very egocentric to those who see 9/11 as far removed from them as I did the Vietnam War. Which, by the way, we really dropped the ball with remembering those American heroes, so it makes this outpouring seem even more outrageous to some.

I remember watching a documentary about it and in one scene the firemen and other official types were standing in the lobby of one of the twin towers and you could hear the thuds on the awning of the bodies falling and landing. There were a lot. You know at least their families had a body they could lay to rest. At least they didn't get incinerated.

Unfortunately not true, R32 - the bodies of the jumpers were atomised from having two 110 storey buildings come down on them.

I'm from Flyoverland Nowhere, but a friend was going to NYC on business in 1996 and offered to take me with him free (frequent flyer miles, all expenses paid, etc.). I'd never been there before, or to any big city really. We saw "Kiss Of The Spider Woman" with Vanessa Williams, ate at Carnegie Deli, visited the Natural History Museum... and went up to the observation deck of the WTC.

So when they came down so horrifically, I had a disquieting connection to them.

The next time I visited the site- by myself this time, in 2004- it was just a deep pit.

<- Actually Google tells me it was probably '94 or '95 when I was there, because that's when Williams was in the musical.

I was hosting the Taiwanese family of my brother's wife (basically his in-laws) His house was too small so they were spread out in my guest rooms and couches. They were supposed to fly back to Taiwan on the morning 9/11. My brother called at 6:30 or 7 am to tell me to wake them and try to explain to them that they would not be able to fly that day and when I said "why"? he said, "turn on the TV". I feel that I saw the towers collapse on TV in real time, so maybe it was 6:30 (I live in the Pacific Time Zone). Of course I was glued to the TV for the next several hours - so much happened between 9 am eastern time and 4 pm eastern time.

I think what stunned me was the audacity of the attacks and the coordination of the attacks. I didn't realize until that day how conservative my brother was. It was 630 in the morning, and he was there telling me it was all Bill Clinton's fault. When I came fully awake, I was like, "uh, wait, who is president right now and has been for 9 months"?

I had lived in New York in the early 1980s, had dined at the Top of the World, knew lots of people in New York, and one of my apartments (which was in Williamsburg Brooklyn) looked out on the WTC (at least from the fire escape), so I felt very connected to it even though it had been more than 15 years since I lived in the city. I think that the speed of the events and the obvious human tragedy of 3000 people dying in the space of a few minutes was part of what made the day unforgettable for all of the people who were watching it.

I was also similarly moved by the deaths in the Indonesian tsunami a few years later in 2004. Also sudden, many many many times more deadly. However, that couldn't be laid at the feet of a hostile force which had been scheming for a long time to create maximum carnage. I think Americans have always felt relatively safe on our continent, far from the areas where conflict is a constant threat and reality, and to be attacked in such a violent way on our own soil was a real body blow - a loss of innocence and naivete.

R34, I had to be reminded, post-9/11, by a then-friend that we had been to the WTC in the ‘90s. I had no memory of that.

A peek inside.

[quote]I feel that I saw the towers collapse on TV in real time, so maybe it was 6:30 (I live in the Pacific Time Zone).

The towers collapsed at 10 and 11:30 ET.

[quote]I had lived in New York in the early 1980s, had dined at the Top of the World.

Not sure where that was, as the WTC restaurant was Windows on the World.

R39: it was more like 10am and 10:28am. They were gone within two hours of the first plane hitting at 8:46am.

[quote] and he was there telling me it was all Bill Clinton's fault.

That's interesting and somewhat expected, but what's even more interesting is that this blame game didn't take hold. As I wrote at R3, the problem with trying to blame Clinton was that his administration had a bin Laden task force set up and running in what would become Homeland Security with dozens of agents and several big names at the CIA (including director Tenet) involved who would (and did) vehemently protest any such blaming. Recall Richard Clarke's "hair on fire" testimony in which he accurately laid the blame at Bush's feet — and was summarily politically exiled.

9/11 was in no way Bill Clinton's fault. Let's just admit and confirm this from the outset. After the 1993 WTC bombing, his administration knew the towers were a target and did the appropriate thing to protect the homeland; it was Bush and Cheney that disbanded the task force and did so with some attitude, telling reporters that they thought Clinton's obsession with bin Laden was a waste of time and resources when we had "a real enemy" in Saddam Hussein (who was a brutal dictator and a bad person, but no threat to the US as was shown after we spent US$Trillions going after him). The Bush administration's obsession with Hussein was, in fact, the real problem, and the irony is that Hussein himself offered to leave Iraq and take Uday and Qusay with him for the paltry sum of $2 billion (IIRC), but that was no way to make military contractors rich so of course the Bushies said "No way! We must drain the US treasury into [italic]our[/italic] pockets!"

I always try to stick to the facts about 9/11 and avoid all of the wild conspiracy theories because they are just that, theories. There are factual details that can't be overlooked, however: the company that Dick Cheney ran between his government service as Ronald Reagain's DefSec (oh gosh, no malfeasance there!) and naming himself Bush's VP was running Halliburton, the company that had lost a major case and was being held responsible to remove the asbestos they'd used building the towers, to the tune of US$2 billion (the cleanup effort was barely under way and is responsible for many of the rumors that went around trying to claim that the inspectors and early work performed that fueled some conspiracy that the towers' collapse was a controlled demolition and utter nonsense).

Then there's the connection between the Bush and bin Laden families who are co-founders and owners of the Carlyle Group, a private investment house. Of course, we can't forget that after shutting down the airspace over the entire country stranding US citizens across the globe, the FAA was instructed by the White House to allow a 747 loaded with members of the bin Laden family to take off and leave US airspace unhindered. And tying up the Bush family's protection of bin Laden, there's the fact that we had Osama cornered in Tora Bora and the Bush White House issued a stand down order letting him escape to Pakistan.

And finally, there's the fact that Bush and Cheney both refused to testify under oath to the 9/11 Commission.

What remains astounding to me is that the country was redirected away from bin Laden and toward Saddam Hussein (by DIck Cheney who suggested as early as about 10:45 that fateful morning was to blame for the attacks — completely baseless and without merit). What then followed should be the subject of a thorough investigation as we know for fact that the Bush Administration lied about WMD, sending Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice to testify in front of the UN with the shakiest of evidence that the real professionals in national security knew and said was bullshit from the moment the Bushies put it out there.

As in all matters, when the Republicans accuse it is really a confession, so when they poopooed the Clinton obsession over the real threat — bin Laden —and instead focused on their obsession with Hussein, we should have known there was more to the story.

It looks as if the first couple days was a recovery effort, hoping to find some trapped/injured people. But except for those Firemen who survived on that staircase, very few people were found in the debris.

I guess that's when they called in the cranes to start scooping.

[quote]Bin Laden's plan was brilliant. He knew he could never topple the United States through force, but could trick us into spending ourselves silly on war to the point we can't solve simple domestic problems.

People like you are truly stupid. Arguments like this are the reason why I stopped contributing to Democratic political sites like DailyKos, etc. Yes, the so-called War on Terror could have been prosecuted in a more efficient, more humane manner. But to act like we spent a trillion dollars on national security and got NOTHING out of that investment is just plain idiotic.

In retrospect, I don't even really hate W anymore, At one time I did hate him. Now I think he was doing what he genuinely thought was the right thing to keep us safe. Yes, they lied to us about WMD in Iraq. No, we should have not have gone to war there. But the aims underlying that war, and the lies told to the public to support it, were not entirely irrational.

My point is, there is a reason there has not been another attack like 9/11. It is not just luck.

[quote]I always try to stick to the facts about 9/11 and avoid all of the wild conspiracy theories

Then why does 75% of your post regurgitate wild conspiracy theories that are supported by the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence?

[quote]The towers collapsed at 10 and 11:30 ET.

The towers collapsed at 9:59 AM and 10:28 AM EST.

If you are going to correct others and be a total douchebag about it, at least get your own facts right, R39.

Three things (among many) I remember. My friend Beth telling me about her 94 year old Italian grandmother's reaction as she sat alone at home watching the TV all day with repeated shots of the WTC towers collapsing. She was in tears, not so much for the World Trade Center, but rather New York City. She thought every building in the city was falling from 9:30 in the morning onward. I guess at 94 all tall buildings look the same but she thought Manhattan was collapsing, building by building, as airliners hit them all day long.

The other is that I wasn't on American Airlines out of Logan at 8:15 that morning. On September 10th the gastroenterologist I'd seen at Mass General told me I needed surgery and that, "No, a trip to Puerto Rico followed by a three-week transatlantic cruise would not be a good idea." The trip was insured, so I said "Que serra, serra" and instead of going on vacation went to work the next morning to tell them I'd be around until the surgeon scheduled me. I never watch TV in the morning and wasn't listening to the radio in the car, but as soon as I walked in the door heard what had happened. Not knowing which planes were hijacked, I wondered if we were supposed to be on one of 'em. The flight to San Juan wasn't cancelled. Instead it was put down in Raleigh, NC and stayed there for the week. But for the doc, we would have been in Terminal B at Logan, mingling with the hijackers as they transited their flight from Portland onto the planes they'd bring down in an hour or two. And then wondering how we'd get home from North Carolina.

The last was the service for a friend and former neighbor who died of a heart attack the previous weekend at the age of 50. It was heartbreaking because both he and his widow had found each other later in life after bad first marriages. We'd been to their wedding the previous October: not even married a year. It was held on a beach on Saturday the 15th, a spot that on any other day would have been under the path arriving flights use to land at Logan when coming from the south. The silence - no planes overhead - was so poignant: life as we knew it had stopped for a while.

Ok, R44, I'll play: what did I say that was not true? I did not connect the dots and draw conclusions based on the facts I recited; rather, I recited well-known facts backed up by actual evidence albeit somewhat unknown at the time but nevertheless true (Cheney did run Halliburton and was paid throughout his Vice Presidency by Halliburton; he and Bush refused to testify, the Carlyle Group is owned by the Bushes and bin Ladens among others, Bush did issue a stand down order that let bin Laden escape Tora Bora, the lies Powell and Rice promulgated have been proven to be just that, etc.). None of this is flimsy nor circumstantial.

But go on, prove me wrong. We'll wait.

[quote]But the aims underlying that war, and the lies told to the public to support it, were not entirely irrational.

Oh, I get it. Lying to line the pockets of defense contractors is ok, but saying that Bush lied to line the pockets of defense contractors is just beyond the pale.

Got it.

This is an interesting chronology of events, using footage/audio from different sources.

What 9/11 now reminds me , is that some of the first and loudest complaining bout how the govt did not stop this small , really small operation from happening , would be the same type complaining the loudest about heavy handed govt attempts to find these bad guys like the govt looking into their every posts, their emails, their phone calls, their private conversations looking for clues and tips.

Serious spying on US citizens and just every one else in the world.

The other thing that 9/11 reminds me is that some do serve some do kick in doors and run into harms way but most bitch complain and well bitch and complain some more.

I was 16 and in my junior year of high school. I was driving to school that morning and listening to the radio. After a song finished, one of the radio DJs came on air and said that they were reports of two planes crashing into the World Trade Center.

I got to school and some students were talking about it. My first period class was a ceramics art class. The art teacher had the TV on CNN. The following class was P.E., the gym didn't have a TV. The teacher took us to the woodshop/welding building that had a TV and we watched the footage on the NBC affiliate. Third period was English class and the teacher said she wanted to do a short lecture on scheduled readings and then we would watch some of the news footage. Right as she turned on the TV, the principal came on the intercom and said classes would be dismissed after lunch and that the buses were being called in for the kids who didn't drive to school. Fourth period was a physics class and that teacher didn't want to delay lesson plans. It was good he did that because we needed another break from the news footage.

We had lunch and then left. When I got in my car, the radio station that I had been listening to was playing a feed from a news radio station. I remember a man on the radio describing the chaos around WTC. My mom worked as a cook in the same school district at another school. She called sometime after I got home to check in. Her work day ended at 2:30 pm. She came home and called my aunt because my cousin was living in DC at the time. My aunt couldn't reach my cousin on his cell phone due to the systems being jam-packed with calls. She wasn't able to reach him until the late afternoon. My cousin's now ex-wife had been down the street from the Pentagon when the plane hit.

Over the years, I have wondered if another 9/11-type attack would happen again. But, given the political climate in this country, I wouldn't be surprised if any terrorist attacks are domestic-based like far right wing groups.

[quote] Lying to line the pockets of defense contractors is ok,

This is exactly the type of wild conspiracy theory you claimed earlier to not engage in, R3.

But thank you for proving my point. Otherwise I would have had to spell it out in response to your challenge at R47.

#51, Donald Trump keeps dog whistling to his followers that his indictments are about them, too: 'Your freedom... your way of life'.

r39. Thanks for your heartfelt concert about my chronology. I said that my brother called early in the morning. 6:30 am on the West Coast is 9:30 am on the East Coast, in case you didn't realize that. If I turned on the TV sometime between 6:30 and 7, I would have seen, in REAL TIME (as everyone watching network news in the US would have seen). smoke billowing out of the towers and then within a few minutes, I would have seen the collapse of the first building that fell. I'm not seeing the issue you have. Sorry about saying Top of the World. I thought Windows on the World, but that thought didn't translate to my fingers. Thanks for keeping me honest in my memories.

What everyone forgets is that the first bombing was in '93. Clinton didn't do a fucking thing either over 7 years. The very summer of that Sept bombing the CIA was complaining that they didn't have enough arab interpreters. That's only Bush's fault? In fact Clinton was also a good friend of Epstein. Cut out the shit that either party is better. They are both shit. You've got to be brain damaged to think that all these politicians aren't all of them out for themselves ripping off trillions in taxes. Now our best democratic candidate is a man ready for assistant living. Imagine Kamala Harris as president. Though better than Trump what a joke Democrats couldn't do better. Four years and we knew Biden would not be a good candidate at 82 and nobody did anything.

R56, It was a failure to coordinate among agenciesof the United States government.

After Pearl Harbor in 1941, inquiries revealed the dots were there but were not connected. Various departments, entities, and agencies knew the Japanese were planning to attack the United States, but the departments, entities, and agencies had not coordinated with each other and share their intelligence.

Sixty years later, the same failure occurred. And that was the problem..

You can fault each administration, but it makes no sense to me that in 2001, the FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence were not working together to pinpoint trouble across administrations.

AND STILL, no matter how much planning and coordination, it takes just one to slip under the radar and succeed with tragic consequences.

As the old cliche goes, " We have to be right 100% of the time. They only have to be right once."

I will say this about Clinton. He knew Bin Laden was a threat and he was trying to get him. Bush certainly knew it was Bin Laden in September, 2001, and yet Bin Laden was not caught and his network dismantled until Barack Obama did it in 2011.

My personal theory is that the Cheney group was desperate to go into Iran. He and Netanyahu were in sync. In order to get to Iran they had to subdue Lebanon, and make sure Iraq was no threat. Then stupid, arrogant Saddam Hussein offered a bounty to the families of young Palestinians who were willing to turn themselves into suicide bombers and blow up buses and restaurants in Tel Aviv.

Cheney's group was so focused on Iran, they never took the threat of Al Qaeda seriously. They were aware of Al Qaeda and they knew Bin Laden was a terrorist, but IMO, they thought another terrorist attack on the U.S. would be a useful, precipitating incident to go into the Middle East and "get" Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon under control. It was a dream shared by Bebe.

It was a case of "Be careful what you wish for..." Cheney's group wasn't thinking big enough. They were thinking car bombs in parking garages. Maybe a subway disaster. Something manageable. As Condi said so eloquently, "We had no idea they'd fly planes into buildings..." or something like that.

Oh you can't prevent crimes. You can only be smart and not take stupid chances. i.e. don't leave your purse in your unlocked, running car while you run into the gas station.

There's very little you can do. If someone wants to attack they'll find a way.

Putin did it.

Atta boy... Maybe if he had just lost his virginity he would have been more mellow? I suspect tinymeat.