Word: toweritis
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...were his standard outfit. But at Arizona State University, he had the brains to get his marketing degree in 3 1/2 years--and with a 3.84-grade-point average. At school he got into the habit of climbing at night up the narrow ladder of a 200-ft. light tower at Sun Devil Stadium. He would perch at the top, look at the stars and wonder where he was headed...
...their actions such as firing on U.S. troops from the minaret of a mosque, knowing that the political damage the Coalition would suffer from destroying the minaret would be far greater than the tactical damage the insurgents would suffer from losing a couple of shooters taking refuge in the tower...
Maybe it's just as well that in those frightening days after Sept. 11 the nation didn't know what was in the CIA's files about terrorist plots to hijack a plane and fly it into the Eiffel Tower. Or about the secret memos that had been rocketing back and forth between intelligence agencies with titles like "Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks" and "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." Or that CIA chief George Tenet looked around in the summer of 2001 and saw that "the system was blinking red." Or that the FBI's chief of counterterrorism said...
...named Marwan, along with a phone number in the United Arab Emirates, but the CIA was slow to run it down--and never went to overseas governments for help. Marwan turned out to be Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center...
Bojinka was only one of several hints of potential attacks involving aircraft, yet U.S. intelligence did not give the idea serious consideration. Others included an attempt by Algerian terrorists to crash a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994. A foreign intelligence service told U.S. agents in 1998 of al-Qaeda plans to hijack a plane and bargain for the release of blind cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, who was in a U.S. prison for his role in the first World Trade Center attack...