GOODY TWO SHOES: Not Giving Credit Where Credit’s Due
On September 11th, The New York Times published an article by N. R. Kleinfeld recalling the day that "dawned different and stayed that way,” the day after the terror attacks that brought down the World Trade Center:
Traffic was thin and sidewalks quiet. The stock exchange didn’t open, nor the airports, the schools, Broadway. People loaded up on bottled water, batteries, canoes. The law enforcement presence was intense: men with machine guns, gunboats circling the harbor.
Downtown, fires burned, smoke plumed. The odor stood.
It was a city humbled and scared, where the possibilities of destruction had been recalibrated.
The article then fast-forwards to 2009. NYC never became “a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines” because the next attack never came:
[G]limpses into a few aspects of the city help measure the gap between what was predicted and what actually came to be.
You could start at one downtown street corner. The wisdom of the day after was that New York would never again bunch together important institutional nerve centers, binding them together in vulnerability.
On Sept. 11, American Express had its headquarters at the southwest corner of West and Vesey Streets. It is still there. Since then, Verizon has settled its headquarters into the northeast corner. Goldman Sachs has assumed the northwest. All that’s missing is the southeast corner. That will be filled by the tallest building in America.
In the 1,855-word article, Kleinfeld could not spare a few words to credit the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies for the bleak future that did not come to pass – at least, not on his watch. Just 72 hours after this article was published, the NYPD and FBI announced raids at three homes in Queens that had been visited by a suspected Al Qaeda “associate,” reports the New York Post:
The suspect - described as a Queens-born man in his late 20s who has an Afghani father - had been under surveillance by the FBI in Denver, where he lives. But the investigation quickly turned to New York as intelligence indicated he was heading here to obtain bomb-making materials, sources said. …
One New York man was arrested as the emergency search warrants were executed.
The man, whose name was withheld, had allegedly notified an imam that the FBI was looking for their Denver pal, and the Muslim leader, in turn, contacted the suspect's family to have them warn him.
Authorities believe the people whom the "al Qaeda associate" met with locally share Osama bin Laden's hard-core anti-American and radical Islamist ideology, sources said. …
The combined team of NYPD and FBI agents was looking specifically for bomb-making materials such as fuses, timers, explosive gels, powders and TNT, sources said.
No materials were found, sources said.
After the raids, counterterrorism officials warned police departments nationwide to be on the lookout for evidence of homemade bombs, reports The Associated Press:
The joint FBI and Homeland Security intelligence warning, issued Monday, lists indicators that could tip off police to homemade hydrogen peroxide-based explosives, such as people with burn marks on their hands, face or arms; foul odors coming from a room or building; and large industrial fans or multiple window fans. The warning, obtained by The Associated Press, also said that these homemade explosive materials can be hidden in backpacks, suitcases or plastic containers.
Justice Department spokesman Richard Kolko said that the notice “was not intended for the public” but it’s public knowledge now, thanks to AP. The only good that could come from AP’s loose lips is if terrorist bomb-makers take out their window fans to make themselves less conspicuous, and succumb to noxious chemical fumes before getting the chance to maim and kill innocent Americans.
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