EXPERTS VS. CRACKPOTS Less than three months before the 9/11
And then, there was FBI agent Colleen Rowley , who sent memos to the director of the FBI telling him about Midlle Eastern males showing up with lots of cash at flight schools in Minnesota and Oklahoma, asking to learn how to fly an airplane but not how to land one. Her warnings were ignored at headquarters, where she was no doubt viewed as a crackpot. Perhaps even as that “hysterical woman.” FIGHTING THE LAST WAR To make sure this sort of terrorist attack never happened again, Washington spent hundreds of billions, if not trillions, adding more layers to the national security bureaucracy.
attacks, ABC News reporter John Miller addressed a conference of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators in Albuquerque. Miller was one of the very few Western journalists who had interviewed Osama bin Laden. Miller told the 700 people attending the conference that al Qaeda was planning “significant attack on the U.S... and soon.” One of the bomb techs who attended the conference remembers, “sitting there and watching Miller’s video presentation. It showed bin Laden vowing attacks and cutting to images of the Pentagon, New York, and the Capitol. And I was thinking, ‘No way. There’s just no way they’re going to attack all these things.’”
MORE FROM GEOFF NORMAN Click on title to read more of his work in American Consequences : The Debt Trap: Paying for College Forever... The New School of Hard Knocks Schools realized they had a product that people wanted, no matter the cost. And the divide between those who had only a high school education and those who were college graduates became, increasingly, the central fact of American economic life. If you were on the wrong side of that divide, you would likely be left behind to live a life of struggle and worry, ending in frustration and despair. But My Pension! That Was a Promise When public-sector employees are already being paid more than their counterparts in the private sector (where people are held accountable for performance and can actually be fired), their unions turn their sights to what they will earn when they are no longer working. That is to say, to pensions. Here to Stay: Heroin My plan was to start there, drive south, and learn more about what I had begun to think of as a heroin “epidemic.” I saw the assignment, in part, as a road trip. I thought about taking my fly rod but decided against it. That turned out to be the right call. It was not a fun trip.
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October 2020
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