(09-12-2021 10:41 AM)tanqtonic Wrote: At the time, I was a mid- to late level associate in large law firm.
One of our clients was Akamai, and as such I did work with their patent portfolio. And, one of their key inventors and high level executives was someone I spent a decent amount of time with. He had been in the Israeli army, and had gone through the basic stages to join one of their anti-terrorist assault units. However, he did not complete that training.
He is widely believed to have been the first one to die that day. I heard that he had been on Flight 11 late in the afternoon of 9/11, when we had to call him on an issue. I will always remember the exact words from the assistant that we got to: "Danny isnt available. He was on Flight 11." Nothing more, nothing less. Just a pause on both sides of the line, and us in the room wishing everyone there the best -- hoping to cut the call before the obvious stress and horror on the other side of the call came forth, us not wanting to be any further trigger, and us in that room not just in shock about the day in general, but how it had directly affected someone we all knew and worked with.
Months later, when we had to do the Patent Office work for death of an inventor, we had to prove up that he was in fact dead. We used the flight manifest as part of that.
We hadnt known the extent of that day until that later point. The manifest showed he had been seated in seat 9B. The manifest also showed Mohammed Atta was the passenger in set 9A. And, we also submitted the transcripts of the attendants’ calls to the ground. Those transcripts refer to the first passenger killed was the person seated in 9B. He was stabbed to death.
I will never forget how numb I felt looking at that manifest, and those transcripts, realizing that someone I had spent many hours with had been literally seated next to the leader of the terrorists on that flight and had died at his hands. I realized last night that I still get strong vestiges of that feeling even 20 years out.
Thank you for sharing that story. I watched a lot of the History documentaries the last few days, and his story was one of them that I hadn't heard before (the doc was called "Four Flights"). Had he been seated almost anywhere else, he may well have been able to alter history and stop the hijackers beforehand. Instead, he had one seated directly behind him, which he didn't know, and likely died while confronting the two in front of him.
When I think of the thousands of brave and innocent American citizens who died in various ways that day, I am reminded that it is clear that our country has enemies who do not subscribe to or care about Western or Judeo-Christian values, and there are no rules for them and their tactics--in fact they laugh at and mock our rules for society. The ideologies are completely incompatible with stable and free societies, yet some pretend they are and thus cause us to be weaker and threaten our own stability. We just saw and are continuing to see the inhuman madness in Afghanistan when we leave a power vacuum in a disorganized and embarrassing thoughtless manner instead of an orderly and tactically thoughtful way.
Freedom does not come free, and while we'd like everyone in the world to be peaceful, respect rule by law and by their people, the truth is that most of the world remains far from those ideals, and does not function rationally enough to negotiate at high levels with. Billions of dollars of our foreign aid get stolen and diverted regularly from those poor and suffering people it is meant to help.
Some people you just cannot negotiate with, unfortunately. Imagine the absurdity of having social workers on those planes with the 9/11 terrorists and then see who has been shouting for de-funding of our police and opening our borders, all while terrorizing our own citizens with arbitrary and unscientific mandates that seek to consolidate their power like our totalitarian enemies. Yet that is exactly the wrongheaded idiocy being advocated by the Left nightly on their propagandized "news" and in their own bubbles of ignorance. Those on the Left have far more in common with groups like talibams and communist genociders than any on the right these days. That fact is not lost on Americans like your friend who died, and it is not lost on those tens of millions of Americans who are resisting the tyranny of their own government currently weaponized against their Constitutional freedoms many have already fought and died for so that we may have them.
Remembering Sept 11 is not enough, for if we do not totally and unapologetically resist the current tyranny of those current ignorant and evil-hearted powermongers who allegedly hold power in our own government when it goes against those Constitutional values and rights, we are not much better off than those we see doing it to their people overseas. Those who contribute to the removal of Western and Judeo-Christian values that were the impetus for and cause of our having our own country are just as much to blame as those enemies who seek to destroy us. We must all rededicate ourselves to returning to the core values that most in this country once shared and admit that without the objective truths that underlie them, we cannot defeat those enemies who not only do not share them, but will use the fact that our country is built on them to destroy us because of them.
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Wanted to honor the 20th
