Because the organized apparatus of national intelligence failed to follow-up on and make prominent this “field” information…
1) In 1995, authorities in the Philippines scuppered a plan — masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who had also plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — for mass hijackings of American planes over the Pacific. Evidence developed during the investigation of Yousef and his partner, Abdul Hakim Murad, uncovered a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. And as long ago as 1994, in an incident that is well known among terrorism experts, French authorities foiled a plot by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group to fly an airliner into the Eiffel Tower. "Since 1994," says a French investigator into al-Qaeda cases, "we should all have been viewing kamikaze acts as a possibility for all terrorist hijackings."
2) The Phoenix Memo: Agent Williams wrote the memo on July 5 (2001), detailing his suspicions about some Arabs he had been watching, whom he thought were Islamic radicals. Several of the men had enrolled at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. Williams posited that bin Laden's followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil-aviation system as pilots, security guards or other personnel, and he recommended a national program to track suspicious flight-school students. The memo was sent to the counterterrorism division at FBI headquarters in Washington and to two field offices, including the counterterrorism section in New York, which has had long experience in al-Qaeda investigations.
… we all as ordinary citizens naively viewed the events of 9-11 as inconceivable and non-anticipatable. Remember asking and hearing: "Who would have ever thought...?"
Was it all just a missed intelligence failing? Or, perhaps, was such information quashed, consciously or subconsciously, because of the implications it held, if popularized, for panicking the Travel and Tourist industry? In a time of “Peace”, could our most malleable myth of “Economy” sustain such adverse publicity without suffering a recessionary setback? And, if travelers were frightened away and nothing happened (possibly as a result of proper precautions), what politician in the world would have been willing to take responsibility for such costs of a "non-event"?!
Some might protest that further precautions could have been taken without ever trembling consumer confidence. I disagree. No specific warning or effective counter-measure could have been enacted without widespread air traffic industry cooperation, and hence, the eventual outleak of “damaging” publicity.
Yet now that we’re “at War”, the vice president of the U.S., Cheney, has become an augur with Rasputin-like predictions of “not-if-but-when” calamity. He’s become a Prophet! Howdy-damn!!
Well, remaining consistent with my appellation, here’s my trendy not-prediction: Some day the world will end in a dusty death upon the last syllable of recorded time.
But the question remains: Should it not come to pass, am I willing to take full responsibility for a golden eternity?
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