--- So what.
Jesus Christ on a piece of toast! I have SO had it with this
muckraking about 9/11. These pseudo-Watergate investigations the
networks are currently running to see who knew what and when they knew
it and if they conspired to keep it a secret and
the Mossad was in on it to provoke the Palestinan suicide bombers so
that Saddam would rear his ugly head and we'd have a justification for
going to WAR, GODDAMNIT! are pissing me off beyond belief.
Let's just get one thing clear, shall we?
Anyone who read Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor knew that an airliner could be used as a weapon. In Debt of Honor
a grieving and vindictive Japanese commercial pilot decides to avenge
the loss of a family member who died in a short lived war between the
US and Japan. He steals a commercial airliner. Flies it across the
country. Loads up with fuel somewhere on the east coast and then slams
the plane into the Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress
where Jack Ryan is supposed to be sworn in as VP. Clancy made pains to
make sure the gas tanks on this jet were full, so as to have a big ass
fireball when the plane crashed. How many millions of people read
Clancy? It was a horrific scenario, but it was fiction---something we never thought would happen in real life.
But that's not the only example of this in modern media. Remember the X-Files spinoff, The Lone Gunmen? In one of their episodes, they actually had Byers, Frohicke and Langly on a shuttle that was on course to crash directly into the Twin Towers.
This episode aired in the spring of 2001. We'll never see that episode
again. Chris Carter took a page from Clancy, yet---of course---made it
into a government conspiracy that the uber-conspiracy geeks had to
prevent. But no one thought that this would ever happen in real life.
Let me repeat that just to make sure you got it down correctly: NO ONE EVER THOUGHT THIS SORT OF THING COULD HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE
Before 9/11, the jetliner-full tank o'gas-slam into building scenario
was straight out of an action movie or a suspense novel. Does it
surprise me that NORAD ran the scenario through the computers? Nope.
But it doesn't prove anything about what anyone knew and when they knew
it, either It is not the effing smoking gun the media has been looking
for to feed off the 9/11 Commission's hearings in an election year. It
is not the piece of evidence that is going to bring Kristin
Breitweiser's husband back from the dead, no matter how much she beats
her breast, wails and moans about the government's failures on CNN.
It's not any of those things.
Admit it, please, even though it means admitting something rather
unflattering about America's capabilities: we got caught with our pants
down on 9/11. It happens. It's a horrible thing to say, I know, but the
fault for 9/11 lies squarely at the feet of the nineteen terrorists who
planned, hijacked and maimed and murdered for the greater glory of
Allah. Despite our creative community's best efforts to tell us that
yeah, this is a plausible scenario, we didn't think this could happen.
The people didn't think this could happen. The government didn't think
this could happen. No one thought this could happen. We were caught
with our pants down. But right now it's important to pull our pants up.
We have to do this so we don't take one in the ass again. Make no
mistake about it, kids, this is where the zipper is getting stuck and
is leaving us even more vulnerable to another attack. If there's a
commission every time we have an attack, to learn what we did wrong,
well, it doesn't bode well for keeping the terrorists out of our
business, does it? Figure it out so another three thousand people don't
have to die.