Apparently (if I have the story straight) the FBI Phoenix office wrote a report in July, 2001 that warned of Arab suspects enrolling in flight schools. The report wasn’t acted upon (or not well enough acted upon) by September 11th.
Maybe I’m getting more conservative in my middle age, but how does this retroactive finger-pointing help anyone at all? We all know hindsight is 20-20. The FBI creates thousands of reports, and they are all followed up on as necessary. The FBI is not psychic. The attack on September 11th was unprecedented in scope and technology. How could someone have ever predicted that jet planes would be turned into living bombs to be used against political targets?
I’m sure that in time we will discover plenty of “warnings” that were “unheeded.” Who knows, maybe Jeanne Dixon predicted “some kind of violence involving the Middle East” last year–how could we have ignored a crystal clear sign like that, folks? All that is just more rationalized backstory–not the facts.
Our society seems determined to shoehorn its own stories into tragedies–don’t we realize or even care that this junk just cheapens the real events? People are already letting September 11 fade in their minds–this doesn’t help. It was a horrible tragedy, perpetrated by a man and an organization who could have used their millions to publicize their message in any number of ways other than violence. Now it’s too late. Let’s just leave things well enough alone, remember the day as it happened, and do what we need to do now.