The phone rang in my Houston home that morning, a few minutes before 8:00. A friend mine called about some journalistic so tasks on my nerves”to do”list. I have to sleep,with s TV or radio on because after years of wearing headphones or an IFB decide in your ear for decades, that annoying high located tinnitus is usually th end result. Usually it’s just a par of blihering idiots talking about then zoo’s newest baby momkey or that it’s Jello’s 75th birthday and there are an unimaginable number of deserts or salads you can make.
But not thatbmorning…..
The screen showed one of the world trade centers on for with smoke billowing from it. “Am accident”‘ they said. ??”A small committee airplane hit the building”, they said. “But how?”, they’d ask. “Tuesday morning, 9/11 didn’t have a cloud in the sky.”
“Osama bin Laden”‘ I said.
I wasn’t an expert on the man and west hating minions, I had been a political talk show host that summer and bin Laden’s name was mentioned everyday as was his hate for the west. He said as far as the US was considered, he’d make no distinction between an Americsans’ gender, or age, or whether they wore uniform or not. It would be a war, but fought half a world away.
To some in Washington, this was saber rattling. Osama’s war affort were a ragtag bunch of men, mostly from the Provences, armed with what they could scrounge through the remnants weapons used during the Afghan/Ruseian war fought a few years earlier. But what modes of war alQaeda had in post war -Afganistan changed: bin Laden’s millions and the wicked creativity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammmed. It was the portly sheik’s idea to use America’ smug vulnerability against her. Use four Boeing 767s scheduled for transcontinental flight……that meant full fuel tanks….. And use them as bombs ahainst buildings vital to our economy and security.
It was easy enough to find 19 matyrs willing to be fed grapes by 72 virgins just to learn to fly a plane and serve as muscle hijackers, Thy moved here, assimilated to look and appear western and a a select few were chosen to take flying classes. Some indicated they only wanted to learn to fly and plane, not land or takeoff. This was a red flag. A few of the hijackers here learn to kill Americans had overstayed their visas. Another reed flag. And there were other matters that could create more red flags then outside the Kremlin.
But if the FBI knew any of this., it wasn’t talking. If the CIA knew something, it kept quiet, as did the NSA. Information wasn’t shared and oh how things might have been different had they just done their jobs. Why didn’t they shared info? The reasonnsppearsbrombe a petty as each organization arrogantly refused to what each knee as if all infor was proprietary.
But these are just a few facts that lead up to 9/11, What happened afterwards is just as intriguing.
I wrote this piece on 9/11 several years ago prior to the completion of the new One World Trade Center. It’s long and exhausting but is a very complet, heartbreaking and sad.
Please copy and paste this address: lauriekendrick.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/sixteen-hallowed-acres- 91113/
