By STEVE KING
Just as with Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, we should have seen 9-11 coming.
In each case, there were all kinds of clues that were ignored or misinterpreted.
From what happened to me and another Browns beat writer at the time, the fragility and gaping holes of our terror defense system was there for all to see. The terrorists saw it, too — you couldn’t miss it — and they took full advantage of it to wreak havoc on the U.S. exactly 20 years ago today, on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bill Rabinowitz, who now covers the Ohio State football team for the Columbus Dispatch, was covering the Browns at the time, and he and I ended up on the same flight out of Cleveland for Greensboro, S.C. as we traveled to cover the club’s preseason finale against the host Carolina Panthers in Charlotte o Aug. 31, 2001. We stayed at a hotel adjacent to the airport in Greensboro, about an hour’s drive from the stadium in Charlotte, N.C. He rented a car and we rode back and forth together to the game, which Cleveland, under first-year head coach Butch Davis, ended up losing 23-20 in overtime.
I got up early the morning after the game to go for my daily run and noticed Bill’s rental car still in the hotel parking lot. I immediately knew something was wrong since he was on an earlier flight than me back home and should have left for the airport long before that.
When I caught up with him in Cleveland a couple days later, I found out what happened. He said the hotel failed to give him his wakeup call and he overslept, finally waking up only 14 minutes before his flight was to depart. He yelled at the front desk attendant, told him to hurriedly get someone to drive him to the airport in his rental car, drop him off and then return the car to the rental company.
Somehow, some way, Bill made his flight.
Yes, despite awaking 14 minutes before his departure time, he still got to the gate in time to board the plane, running through the security checkpoint and then the airport like a sprinter. That was absurd, unbelievable. That should not have happened.
We had a good laugh about it, but it underscored the fact that the security people at Greensboro had not done anything close to a thorough job of screening Bill and checking him through. It was that way with passengers at every airport in America.
A little less than two weeks later, on Sept. 11, several groups of terrorists hurried through security checkpoints at various airports on the East Coast, boarded planes with weapons and bombs and hijacked them.
Later that afternoon, after the attacks had occurred and the entire country was trying to figure out what happened, why it happened and how it happened, I thought back to the scenario in Greensboro and went into a cold sweat.
We had all been duped.
Twenty years later, I still get that same chill in my backbone when I think about it.
