I was probably just as much a pawn of the Ulster Defense League, the folks on the other side, but I didn’t want to be a pawn of anyone, so I left. That 300-member organization was using my stories about their acts to influence people all over the world. I worked long ago as a reporter in Northern Ireland, and left that gig specifically because I began to feel like a pawn of the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republic Army. The point of terrorism is to leverage the efforts of a small group in an attempt to modify the behavior of a much larger group. Twenty-two years ago, I was a Fed investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, so I have some experience of how governments approach disasters. I’m a longtime pilot, and a guy who used to work in the Middle East. The magnitude of this disaster and its sister at the Pentagon in Washington is too great to ponder, so we are left wondering what we could have done to prevent it, and what we could do to keep it from happening again. Only the rising cloud of smoke and ash marred the sky. The carnage was easy to see even from a distance. A cold front had passed through the night before, leaving the day startlingly clear.
My smarter and handsomer brother was in Northern New Jersey on Tuesday looking across the water at what was for just a moment longer the single remaining tower of the World Trade Center. For the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, here - unedited - is my column originally published September 13, 2001.
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