Qing4theloo
Active Member
A few thoughts on what is today, twenty-five years after the 11th September attacks.
My family were in Izmir, in Turkey. We had been to the UK in the Summer and had returned to Turkey. I was working at IYTE (University) but it was still "vacation" as the term didn't start until October, so we had a few days down in Bodrum. The day after we got back, I had nipped in to work to see if anything was going on by way of planning meetings etc. but none of my colleagues were around, so I went back to our flat.
One of our kids mentioned that there had been "a bomb or something" and my first thought was that it was maybe Kurdish militants up in Istanbul or somewhere. So I turned on BBC World to hear that the second (North) Tower had just collapsed. It was the first thing I had heard about the attacks. Just awful.
As details emerged, I couldn't believe how easy it had been for the terrorists.
At airports in Turkey, you had to go through the x-ray scanner to get into the terminal, let alone go airside. I seems that, because the planes used in the 9/11 attacks were internal flights, the passengers hadn't gone through any security checks at all. And as for getting into the cockpit ...? I mean, what the actual ..... ?
Of course, tightening up security at airports was never going to be enough. Apart from the grief, it was a major embarrassment to the government of George Dubya, who used the outrage to launch the War on "Trrrrr", a war without clear aims or any apparent endpoint (like the War on Drugs, but that's another story). It took us into a questionable war in Afghanistan and a totally bogus war (as we now know) in Iraq. Of course, we didn't know whether Saddam had WMDs or not, but it was pretty obvious that he hadn't been behind the 9/11 attacks. It had nothing to do with "making the World safer" and everything to do with finishing the job that George Bush Snr had been prevented from doing in 1991.
It's hard to look back to 2001 and see ways in which the World has got better since. For me, the last high point was Live8 in 2005, when we actually thought it would be possible to "Make Poverty History". The Pink Floyd reunion, "Comfortably Numb" guitar solo and all, was followed a few short days later, by the 7/7 attacks in London. Then the financial crash, then the 2010 election, Cameron's bogus "austerity", then Brexit ....
There's a lot to undo, but there are signs of hope if we look for them. Burnham is stating to poke through what seems to be an avalanche of things that need doing and have needed doing for years, not helped by the Orange idiot or the faux rage of the right wing puppeteers.
My family were in Izmir, in Turkey. We had been to the UK in the Summer and had returned to Turkey. I was working at IYTE (University) but it was still "vacation" as the term didn't start until October, so we had a few days down in Bodrum. The day after we got back, I had nipped in to work to see if anything was going on by way of planning meetings etc. but none of my colleagues were around, so I went back to our flat.
One of our kids mentioned that there had been "a bomb or something" and my first thought was that it was maybe Kurdish militants up in Istanbul or somewhere. So I turned on BBC World to hear that the second (North) Tower had just collapsed. It was the first thing I had heard about the attacks. Just awful.
As details emerged, I couldn't believe how easy it had been for the terrorists.
At airports in Turkey, you had to go through the x-ray scanner to get into the terminal, let alone go airside. I seems that, because the planes used in the 9/11 attacks were internal flights, the passengers hadn't gone through any security checks at all. And as for getting into the cockpit ...? I mean, what the actual ..... ?
Of course, tightening up security at airports was never going to be enough. Apart from the grief, it was a major embarrassment to the government of George Dubya, who used the outrage to launch the War on "Trrrrr", a war without clear aims or any apparent endpoint (like the War on Drugs, but that's another story). It took us into a questionable war in Afghanistan and a totally bogus war (as we now know) in Iraq. Of course, we didn't know whether Saddam had WMDs or not, but it was pretty obvious that he hadn't been behind the 9/11 attacks. It had nothing to do with "making the World safer" and everything to do with finishing the job that George Bush Snr had been prevented from doing in 1991.
It's hard to look back to 2001 and see ways in which the World has got better since. For me, the last high point was Live8 in 2005, when we actually thought it would be possible to "Make Poverty History". The Pink Floyd reunion, "Comfortably Numb" guitar solo and all, was followed a few short days later, by the 7/7 attacks in London. Then the financial crash, then the 2010 election, Cameron's bogus "austerity", then Brexit ....
There's a lot to undo, but there are signs of hope if we look for them. Burnham is stating to poke through what seems to be an avalanche of things that need doing and have needed doing for years, not helped by the Orange idiot or the faux rage of the right wing puppeteers.
