Complacency Led To 9/11

Peter Worthington, The Sun, makes it clear that we had a continuous stream of warnings but we ignored them because we were too busy living the good life........

The Final Say The future is always unpredictable, but 9/11 brought about the renewal of resolve among democracies that we are under threat

By Peter Worthington

Is it really five years since those four hijacked airliners targeted America, in the most devastating sneak attack since Pearl Harbour, 1941?

The two attacks on the World Trade Center, one on the Pentagon, and the preventive crash of United Flight 93 in a Pennsylvania field, thanks to gallant passengers who may have saved the White House, marked the "official" beginning of the war against terrorism that the civilized world is engaged in today.

I stress "official," because the terror war has been going on for a long time without the developed world realizing it.

The massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics was an early battle -- misunderstood because it seemed to only to be against Israel. But the war continued unabated, ignored or misread by the targets of terror.

The sabotaging of Pan Am Flight 103 by Libyan terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people from 21 countries, was another battle in the war. So was the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241, followed by innumerable incidents and bombings, such as 19 U.S. airmen killed by a car-bomb attack on their quarters in Saudi Arabia.

There was the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, 2000, that killed 17. Even the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, which the Clinton administration pretended was a domestic crime and not terrorism(!), was followed in 1998 by attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 263 and injured 5,000.

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Worthington_Peter/2006/09/10/pf-1821341.html