9/11: Could We Have Stopped It

McClatchy, on this 6th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, pose the provocative question of whether or not we could have stopped the attacks.

Two numbers scrawled in a notebook that belonged to terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui could have given the FBI a chance to identify several of the Sept. 11 hijackers before they struck six years ago, according to officials who are familiar with the bureau's massive investigation of the attacks.

The notebook entries recorded the control numbers for two Western Union wire transfers in which suspected al Qaida coordinator Ramzi Binalshibh, using an alias, sent Moussaoui $14,000 from Germany in early August 2001, before he went to a Minnesota flight school to learn to fly a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

A check of Western Union records probably would have uncovered other wires in the preceding days for similar sums of money to Binalshibh — who'd been turned away at the U.S. border four times because he was a suspected terrorist — from an al Qaida paymaster in Dubai. On one of those receipts, the paymaster listed a phone number in the United Arab Emirates that several of the hijackers had called from Florida.

While McClatchy does not go as far to say that the attacks could have been completely stopped by acknowledging this notebook, it does suggest that this evidence could have played a role in helping to find out about more about Moussaoui and the people that he was connected to. It saddens me to this information wasn't investigated before the actual attacks. It's an interesting conundrum to ponder, but given a lot of the government's actions before the attack, this lack of diligence is not particularly surprising.

9/11 Conspiracy Theorists: You're All Wrong

I actually meant to comment on this yesterday, but I forgot. I got caught up looking at some people have sex on HBO. Before, I address that title, let me comment on this new HBO show Tell Me You Love Me. Aside from having the creativity to take your title from a fairly well-known Cardigans song, this show is groundbreaking because you actually get to see some male junk. Everyone's objectified! Huzzah! Anyway, it's not a particularly exciting show to watch. Actually, it's pretty boring. It's like an updated, less interesting version of thirtysomething. That's actually a bit of an insult to thirtysomething, but it's the best that I can do for now.

Back to my original complaint. I was watching the History Channel last night and there was a show on 9/11 conspiracy theories. The idea had popped into my head when Mos Def, someone whose politics I generally agreed with, suggested that 9/11 was a conspiracy. The show laid out some of the conspiracies that had been floating around. Much like the grassy knoll, there are many theories surrounding the falling of the towers. Some people believe that it is a government conspiracy, a corporate conspiracy, etc. I'm confident in making the following statement: these people are idiots.

With the JFK assassination, there was a possibility that it was an outside shooter. But, with recreations of the fatal shot done on television, we all learned that the magic bullet wasn't so magical; it was just a regular bullet shot by a highly trained former marine, a marine that was widely considered as a very good marksman. But, this fact does not stop the conspiracy theorists who believe that this whole thing is a cover-up. We will never know who Oswald was working for or why he did it, but that's sort of immaterial. We just know that Oswald acted alone and let off all of the shots that killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Why will be one of the all-time great mysteries. Thanks for nothing Jack Ruby. But, I digress.

The JFK Assassination is exactly like 9/11. We know who committed 9/11. We have pictures and manifestos from them before they did it. We have al-Qaeda acknowledging the 19 men. But, on top of this, we saw it happen. Unless you didn't have a television, you saw the two planes hit the World Trade Center. You can see the second plane fly directly into the tower. I watched this with my own two eyes as I'm sure millions others around the world did too. Even if you didn't have a television, the pictures were in every newspaper in the country following the event. The fact that there are conspiracy theories surrounding this confounds me to no end. There's no conspiracy to be had. There were a bunch of men who had grown angry at the United States, hatched a plan then executed said plan. Period. That's what happened.

The CIA wasn't involved. They tried to stop it. The White House could be considered responsible, but that's from their own stupidity more than complicity. Defense didn't have a motive. No one has a motive to destroy these two towers with airplanes other than the 19 men who did. Also, why would the Defense Department want to destroy their own building? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

I don't mean to be so flippant about conspiracy theories because a lot of people believe that 9/11 is a huge conspiracy. I'm just one of those people who believe that the conspiracy theories are crocks of shit, paranoid explanations of a reality that is far simpler and less explicable: some assholes took out two buildings with planes, cost us a few more structures in collateral damage, gave an administration an unfortunate death grip on the national psyche, and sent thousands of Americans and Iraqis to their untimely deaths. That's what happened. That's all that happened.