Latest news is that the Bush Administration had received a warning that Al Qaeda might try and hijack a plane (albeit they had never conceived using planes as weapons.)
Its funny that this came out today. Earlier today, I was walking in Union Station and saw a scrolling marquee in the Post Office that said "United We Stand/God Bless America" and had reflected about how jaded I felt by those phrases. It occurred to me that somehow, in recent weeks, for the first time in a long time - I had started to feel safe again. I guess that the return to normalcy was only a natural reaction. The War in Afghanistan feels an awful lot like a victory right now, even if we haven't formally said so. And the memories of the anthrax attacks seem particularly distant, and I now flip past irradiated mail in my files without even thinking about it now. Over this wondering, I considered what historians might make of this Spring 50 or 100 years from now. If these months might be described as the moments when the world collectively held its breath before the Great War or before The Big One. I considered that today might be the sort of moment in history that will one day be deemed completely insignificant, remembered only for what has come before and what will come again. And then, I came home to this: http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/05/15/bush.sept.11/index.html I am usually wearing rose-colored glasses when it comes to the Bush Administration, and the sheer level of outrage I instantly felt shocked me. Its not even so much that the Bush Administration was unable to "connect the dots" (despite growing and disturbing reports that the Bush Administration was aware that suspicious Arabs were taking flying lessons in the United States - and now this warning) but also that this sort of story did not break until EIGHT MONTHS after September 11th. Maybe this is simply a matter of the media playing "gotcha" to create a story on a slow news day, but in my heart, I feel like I - and the American people - have just been treated with utter disdain. And I guess it won't be the first time that these people will have been burned by their miscalculated ability to keep a secret - which indeed, greatly worries me. Time for them to do some explaining to us. JDG
