Has It Been That Long?

Of all the images, moving and still, from 9/11 that have been employed to captivate the horror of that day, this picture of Mohammad Atta is, for me, more evocative than any other.  This man was the lead hijacker of the first plane to strike the first building on 9/11, and the leader, in fact, of the entire network of 19 nihilists that struck that day.

His very face has all the ingredient of that day: steel, ash, a total lack of pity.  Death.  He posed for this picture while getting a driver's license in Florida, and it is clear, as so many things are in retrospect, that he was already ready.  Perhaps he was hoping that the DMV clerk would somehow end up on one of the planes. 

There are so many aspects about what those people did on that day that could be written about that writers have a hard time picking just one.  This was a massive conspiracy, spanning continents, with multiple rabbit holes of logistics, planning, funding, and operational support.  There were so many targets, so many thousands of tons of steel and glass, so many thousands of innocent people sucked into the whirlwind of it.

9/11 is, to the writer, like an elephant to an ant; it can only be explored an inch at a time.  Here are a few inches that have been on my mind since the 15th anniversary of the attacks.

Big picture:  the War on Terrorism is an even bigger failure than the war on drugs.  Terrorism has increased by 6000% (not a typo. six thousand percent) since 9/11.  But most of that violence has occurred outside of the U.S., so we don't focus on it.  But we have set the Middle East on fire.  They had the gas; we brought the matches.

Other Thoughts:

Why is there no footage or photograph of the plane crashing into the Pentagon?  The Pentagon has released a handful of individual frames from a surveillance camera, none of which clearly show a plane.  We know there were several other surveillance cameras on nearby buildings, but those are all classified.

Why?  If a plane crashed into the Pentagon, and there is video of it, how could it possibly threaten national security to show something that the government says already occurred?  Mark my words, if video of the World Trade Center plane crashes could have been kept secret by the government, they would have.

Think about the psychology of an organization that will not release images of an event that that very same organization wants us to believe happened.  The government creates conspiracy theories by its obsession on keeping things secret even if it insists that we accept the obvious truth of those things.

I assume a plane hit the Pentagon, but I know these two things:  Firstly, the government claims to have, and refuses to release, objective evidence of that event in the form of video footage.  Secondly, there is no independent video or photograph of an airplane approaching or impacting the Pentagon.

Washington DC, as opposed to New York, does not have modern skyscrapers.  It is less dense and lower-lying than New York.  Because of this, any aggressive, low-flying aircraft would be far more visible from much further away in DC than it would be in lower Manhattan.

And, like New York, Washington DC is full of people with money,  people in media, and tourists.  In other words, people with CAMERAS.  And yet, there is no photograph or film, from any source, of an airliner flying fast and low along the Potomac River even though everyone in DC would have already known that hijacked airplanes were being flown into buildings representing American power.

The only footage that does exist is in the hands of the government, but they won't release it because it needs to be secret even though everyone "knows" what it shows, but we only know that because of an unshowable tape.  It's exhausting.

Another thought:  I think the most likely cover-up being orchestrated by the government is that some of the hijackers were working for our government and were, in fact, double agents sent by bin Laden to infiltrate our intelligence services.

Consider: the CIA would have been desperate from 1998 to 2001 to recruit agents that could infiltrate al Qaeda and pass us information on the next attack.  These recruits would ideally be young Arab men.  What it the CIA unwittingly recruited al Qaeda members to spy on al Qaeda?

What if some of those terrorists came to the US under CIA protection, claiming to be tracking the "real" terrorists while, in really, they were the real terrorists?  And what if you were a CIA agent who, on that awful day, saw pictures of the hijackers, knowing that some of them were being supported and paid by your very own agency?

What would you do?  You would bury that information.  And you would tell yourself, not without reason, that if the truth ever came out....

9/11 will never end.  I'm confident that most of the government's account of what happened is true, but I am equally as confident that some of it is not.  We are all left to live in the chasm between those two truths.