President Clinton did warn the new President Bush about Osama bin Laden....
Some facts about 9/11 you may not know...
Many British people died
Other than the US, the country that sustained the most casualties on 9/11 was the United Kingdom. No fewer than 67 Brits perished that day, and many others narrowly survived. One of the lucky ones was Scottish ex-pat Andrew Cullen, who worked in the South Tower. He owed his survival to disobeying official instructions to stay put while authorities worked out what was going on.
The terrorists used elaborate codenames
The 9/11 attackers referred to some of their targets using elaborate codenames. They called the Pentagon ‘the Faculty of Fine Arts’, while the North Tower of the World Trade Center was ‘the Faculty of Town Planning’.
The attacks themselves were referred to as ‘the first semester’, while the 19 terrorists were dubbed ‘19 certificates for private education’.
One company lost the majority of its staff
Of its 960 New York employees, 658 were killed. The CEO, Howard Lutnick, survived because he was taking his son to school that morning, but his younger brother Gary was among the dead.
The co-creator of Frasier was killed
David Angell, Emmy Award-winning co-creator of the classic sitcom Frasier, was on board American Airlines Flight 11 with his wife Lynn when it struck the North Tower. By eerie coincidence, in a 1997 episode of the show, Dr. Frasier Crane receives a phone call from someone flying in on ‘American Flight 11’.
A much bigger terrorist plot was initially proposed
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, originally wanted to have nine planes flown into a variety of targets, including nuclear power plants. A tenth plane would have then been landed at an airport, where all male passengers would have been killed in a grisly media spectacle. This plan was deemed too complex and scaled back to “just” four planes.
Ground Zero burned for 99 days
The combination of jet fuel and combustible matter, such as office documents and furniture, meant that the wreckage of the World Trade Center burned non-stop for 99 days. Firefighters tended to this seemingly endless inferno around the clock.
One firefighter later said: “You couldn't even begin to imagine how much water was pumped in there. It was like you were creating a giant lake.”
Well, one thing most folks don't know, is that the objective of the attack failed.
Yes, the tragic event killed thousands of people and the visuals had/have a dramatic impact on our views of terrorism.
But, crisis managers and disaster recovery professionals have been discussing terrorism for decades before 9/11. We analyzed motives, geopolitical changes around the world, anticipated what types of terrorism would occur.
The objective of the 9/11 attacks had a main goal. To disrupt the United State banking system.
They knew, that by disrupting the international banking system, the residual affects would lead to currency devaluation, companies going bankrupt, jobs loss, welfare increasing, etc.
To truly understand how that could transpire is to know how the international banking system works and how money is moved around the globe. To simplify, when we go to sleep at night (here in the US), or from a markets perspective when trading stops, thats when 100's of billions of dollars start their movement around the globe. The saying 'money never sleeps', is not just a catch phrase, it is true.
As the sun moves, so does money.
At the end of our day, massive amounts of money move to countries in the Pac Rim, getting invested, getting loaned, if even for the 24 hour cycle. Then it moves through Europe, then through London money centers like Canary Wharf. As money moves, interest is added and payable to the recipient. Much of these types of transactions are described as derivatives. So, money leaving the US at the end of the day, when we sleep, could return the next day with added interest when we wake.
This is just a very high level of how money moves and increases. There are other instruments that facilitate money movement that are very complex. I am intentionally leaving out some important parts that shouldn't be discussed here.
Back to my initial point, 9/11 intent was to terrorize the world, but more importantly they wanted to disrupt the money flow around the world.
At the time of 9/11, many companies technology centers were physical buildings, owned and managed by those companies. That really started the 'cloud' era for technology. Distributed processing, with no (or little) single points of failure. Data Centers in Calif. wouldn't be impacted by a building fire in NY. Separating businesses geographically reduced the impacts of any one event to a specific area.
I can't go into details of how protections were in place for 9/11, but notice how little impact 9/11 had on how money flowed around the globe.
In that sense, they failed.