There’s a new comic book out called EX MACHINA, and it deals with the superhero turned mayor of NYC. I’m about to give a spoiler for the end, but it should be worth it.
The Mayor has retired from super-heroics, and is being given grief by an old friend about it– he asks “How many more more lives would have been lost if you had not put this on one last time that day in September? You were a hero!”
“No, I was a failure. If I were a real hero… I would have been here in time to stop the first plane.”
This is especially poignant to read after reading articles like 9/11 Tapes Reveal Ground Personnel Muffled Attacks which has lines like:
The families heard a tape that has just now surfaced. Recorded by American Airlines at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Tex., even as the first hijacked airliner, Flight 11, was being taken over, the tape shows the airline�s top management was made aware beginning at about 8:21 a.m.�25 minutes before the impact of the first plane into the World Trade Center�s north tower�that a group of men described as Middle Eastern had stabbed two flight attendants, clouded the forward cabin with pepper spray or Mace, menaced crew and passengers with what looked like a bomb, and stormed the cockpit in a violent takeover of the gigantic bird.
Despite all the high secrecy surrounding the briefing, a half-dozen different family members were so horrified by voice evidence of the airlines� disregard for the fate of their pilots, crew and passengers that they found ways to reveal some of what they heard on those tapes, and also what they felt. To them, the tapes appeared to show that the first instinct of American and United Airlines, as management learned of the gathering horror aboard their passenger planes on Sept. 11, was to cover up.
The response of American�s management on duty, as revealed on the tape produced at the meeting, was recalled by persons in attendance:
“Don�t spread this around. Keep it close.”
“Keep it quiet.”
“Let�s keep this among ourselves. What else can we find out from our own sources about what�s going on?”
“It was disgusting,” said the parent of one of the victims, herself a veteran flight attendant for United Airlines. “The very first response was cover-up, when they should have been broadcasting this information all over the place.”
That instinct to hold back information, some of the families believe, may have helped to allow the third hijacked plane to crash into the Pentagon and contributed to the doom of a fourth flight, United Flight 93. The United dispatcher was told by his superiors: Don�t tell pilots why we want them to land. The F.B.I. and the F.A.A. have also held back or, in one case, destroyed evidence in the government�s possession that would tell a very different story of how the nation�s guardians failed to prepare or protect Americans from the most devastating of terrorist attacks on the homeland.
How much worse must it be for those who might have had the power to stop the second plane… and didn’t? Or the third? Or the fourth from even taking off?
Read this timeline and ask why the word didn’t get out to the people who could have prevented it from happening again. And then ask why no one has been fired. (I assume that some must have had enough sleepless nights to quit.)
Why heads have not rolled from the highest level on down is beyond me.It angers and breaks my heart everytime i think about that day.I saw on 20/20 the other night that the plane that hit the pentagon was off radar for 36 minutes!!!Excuse me ?Did no one think that was unusual?I just wish the passing of the buck would stop and people would admit they dropped the ball and TRULY make changes so it never happens again.