Reply #16: I missed TV on 8/9/2001. Here is why. [View All]

I was out flying the line as captain of a MD-80. Early that morning, I was busy briefing my crew on the latest FAA security alerts regarding the high probability of hijackings within the US. I urged the flight attendants to be ever on the qui vive?, and to avoid entering the cockpit if at all possible.

Later in the morning in Tampa, after an uneventful leg from Pittsburgh, I reminded the first officer and gate agent that the Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, had stopped flying on commercial airline flights in July for security reasons. They were both surprised. They had missed it. I probably saw it first on DU (yep, Will Pitt and I were DU'ing back then, too), and later on the MSM.

Ashcroft had stopped flying commercial airlines. It was sinking in. Something was not right. It informed my being as captain for the rest of the month and into September.

In fact, I was so spooked by Ashcroft's decision that I made a mental note to log on to Fidelity when I got to the hotel in Boston that night and to shift everything out of stocks into money market accounts (I did and it saved me 35-40% of my 401k account a month later, after 9/11). (I had the same feeling again in August 2008 and did the same thing with my 401k, avoiding the bloodbath in September.)

We flew the rest of our trip without incident. Little did we know, however, that a couple of days earlier Condi Rice had presented Bu$h with a Presidential Daily Briefing memo titled 'Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States.'

That August was like the Summer of '42 redux 2001. Few felt the cold winds of war that blew from the offices of Bu$h and Cheney, and their criminal minions in the Pentagon. But the stage was being set and the Condit/Levy scene was a very important and necessary diversion for the Bu$h regime.