The day before 9/11 a government official announced they had lost several trillion dollars. Don’t know where it went could be in my other jeans. Then 9/11 happened and nobody ever talked about it again. I think he was referring to the Pentagon audit.
The killing of Henryk Siwiak. A person who was murdered in NYC on 9/11. Not properly investigated because law enforcement was diverted to the terror attacks.
Paula Poundstone was arrested for alleged lewd acts and child abuse involving her three adoptive and two foster children which was overlooked because of 9/11.
Michael Jackson gave two shows in New York, together with his brothers. That was on September 7 and on September 10. That’s why I was in New York on 9/11. And on 9/15, I had to board a plane to get back home to Germany.
The 2001 crisis in Argentina was an economic, social, and political catastrophe caused by unsustainable external debt, a collapsed convertibility model, and years of corruption and adjustment. It ended with the country in default, the famous “corralito” that blocked savings, looting, repression, and five presidents in less than two weeks. I was 4 years old, and it was my mom birthday..
People were crying because their homes and workplaces were being looted. People were standing guard on the roofs of houses with guns.
Enron collapse was well known, but its effects were unrealized back then
They cooked the books by putting a lot of their negative accounts in international banks not so easily seen by financial review boards like Arthur Anderson. They claim everything’s fine; employees who were also stockholders knew inside it was not.
The selling of stocks, collapse of a major corporation, through the actions of stockholders who knew better what was going on, is still seen today. And corporations now bow down more to stockholders than customers or their own employees as a result.
It was discovered that the McDonald’s Monopoly game had been rigged by an insider for years and all the largest prizes were funneled to his personal friends as well as the Gambino crime family. The trial for this fraud started on September 10, 2001 so pretty much all news coverage was overshadowed by 9/11.
On 9/11, during the news broadcasts, i remember a news ticker at the bottom specifically calling out that the band “Anthrax” was changing their name to ‘basket full of puppies’. It was actually a press release they put out, and in the paranoia there was limited thought, and someone saw the name ‘anthrax’ during a time of heightened terrorism, and put it right on the news ticker.. https://www.loudersound.com/features/anthrax-basket-full-of-puppies
Metal Gear Solid 2 predicted social media and it’s affects on politics and society at large.
A quote from the game:
“Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds leaking whatever ‘truth’ suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in ‘truth’.
And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Pretty accurately reflects the mess we’re in today. And this is before Facebook or even Myspace existed.
I was working in a Staples which at the time, used an AS400 system, unix based.
Somehow, I managed to change the entire store network address to ‘Store Groovy’ rather than just my password. Needless to say, absolute chaos. Tills, vpn, phones, everything went down. No idea how I did it, but I royally fucked everything up.
The sales manager told me to sort it before leaving for the day. He and I didn’t get on.
I said “You’re the manager, manage”. They tried to sack me but failed.
In Seattle a woman climbed up on the railing of the ship canal bridge contemplating suicide, onlookers pissed off by the resulting traffic jam told her to jump which she did. She somehow survived the impact an in the days following the city was forced to take a look in the mirror. A few what has our city become articles were published but then 9/11 happened. To this day do not know what became of the jumper.
In the UK, a government communications advisor got into a lot of trouble specifically for sending an email on Sep 11th suggesting that it was “a good day to bury bad news”, if there was anything that needed to be announced but the government didn’t want people to really pay attention to it.
I mean, she was right, but unfortunately it got leaked and it did look pretty insensitive…
They caught the Green River Killer, the most prolific serial killer in the USA, a few weeks after. If 9/11 had not happened, I believe this would have been the major news event of the year. He killed for decades.
All the warnings that 9/11 was coming. In fact, all the warnings that 9/11 was coming from as early as the Clinton years.
In December 1998, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center reported to President Bill Clinton that al-Qaeda was preparing for attacks in the U.S. that might include hijacking aircraft.
In April 2001 Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance asked for humanitarian aid for the people of Afghanistan. Massoud told the European Parliament that his intelligence agents had gained limited knowledge about a large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil being imminent. Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before the 9/11 attacks. On the same day, Vladimir Putin called Bush and expressed his concerns over Massoud’s assassination, warning him that “something larger might be afoot”.
On May 1, 2001, the CIA informed the White House that “a group presently in the United States” was in the process of planning a terrorist attack.
On June 13, 2001, Osama bin Laden made a tape for supporters mentioning a possible attack on the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. The plan was said to involve a plane packed with explosives being crashed into the summit to kill President Bush and other world leaders in attendance.
The President’s Daily Brief on June 29, 2001, stated that “the United States is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Osama Bin Laden”. The document repeated evidence surrounding the threat, “including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.”
The CIA reiterated that the attacks were anticipated to be near-term and have “dramatic consequences”.
In July 2001, J. Cofer Black, CIA’s counter-terrorism chief and George Tenet, CIA’s director, met with Condoleezza Rice to inform her about communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. Rice listened but was unconvinced, having other priorities on which to focus. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld questioned the information, suggesting it was a deception meant to gauge the U.S. response.
On the same day, FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams sent a letter to FBI headquarters warning of suspects connected to al-Qaeda who were attending flight schools in Arizona, and demanding further investigation. This document is known as the Phoenix Memo.
On August 6, 2001, the President’s Daily Briefing, titled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US warned that bin Laden was planning to exploit his operatives’ access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike. Rice responded to the claims about the briefing in a statement before the 9/11 Commission, stating the brief was “not prompted by any specific threat information” and “did not raise the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles.”.
On 23 August 2001, the Mossad gave the CIA a list of 19 suspects living in the US who were believed to be mounting an imminent attack on the United States. Only four of the names are known, but all belonged to eventual hijackers in the attacks.
The head of the Algerian state intelligence service DRS, General Mohamed Mediène, went to the US, a few days before the 9/11 attacks. He spoke of an imminent attack against the United States based on a secret memo sent on September 6 by Smaïn Lamari, the number two in the DRS at the time.
Shortly after the attacks, only two civilian planes were authorized to take off: the one carrying members of the Saudi royal family and people close to Bin Laden, and the one bringing General Mohamed Mediène to Algiers.
The only shocking thing about 9/11, is that it was allowed to happen at all. People talk about 9/11 being an inside job, but the reality is that Bush and co, were just utterly fucking useless at their jobs.
On the very same morning the Concorde made it’s first flight with passengers since being grounded the year before. Commercial flights would resume a couple months later but it was doomed. There was a slump in air travel and supposedly a significant number of Concorde customers died in the World Trade Center.
Two weeks before 9/11, the murder of a 5-year-old girl in London, Ontario. At home that was the big news story just before 9/11, and fortunately locally she didn’t get forgotten.
The Walkerton tainted water inquiry, which was taking place at the time of 9/11. This inquiry implicated Ontario premier Mike Harris, who announced his resignation in early October 2001.
A number of Canadian Alliance MPs called on leader Stockwell Day to resign. They broke from the party and formed their own caucus. This, along with the Walkerton inquiry were probably the biggest news stories in Canada in the weeks leading up to 9/11.
Death of Ernie Coombs, aka Mr. Dressup just days after 9/11. While mostly unknown outside Canada, he is known for being a mentor to Mr. Rogers. They had worked together on a children’s show on the CBC before Mr. Rogers moved back to the US to start his own children’s television program.
In Texas a few days after 9/11, a barge hit the Queen Isabella bridge on South Padre Island, and knock down a section of the bridge. Eight people died. The news was mostly confined to local area news.
Aunt May discovered her nephew Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Amazing #35 (Vol.2) ended with May finding Peter beaten & bloody in his tattered Spider-Man suit after a battle with Morlun. The next issue was supposed to be their conversation but ASM #36 became a 9/11 tribute issue and their conversation was pushed back until afterwards in the two following issues that released in January & February of 2002.
On Sunday 9/9/2001 60 minutes aired an interview with Anne Heche in which she proclaimed her ability to communicate telepathically with far away space aliens (or maybe inter dimensional beings- don’t remember the details). It was the main focus of every late night shows monologue on Monday. Never mentioned again by Tuesday for obvious reasons
>The initial investigation into the crime may have been hampered, police believe, by the diversion of law enforcement resources in the city in the wake of that day’s terrorist attacks, which ultimately killed almost 3,000 people. Since Siwiak was not robbed, wore camouflage clothing and spoke poor English with a heavy accent, detectives have speculated that his killer may have thought he had something to do with the attacks. Siwiak’s homicide is the only one recorded in New York City on September 11, 2001, since the city does not include the deaths from the attacks in its official crime statistics.
He’s like if the guy who survived both atomic bombs had worse luck. This guy worked in Lower Manhattan but got evacuated (obviously). He still needed money so he went to a temp recruiting office and comforted a woman whose husband worked in the tower, then learned about a job that he could take later that night.
>Throughout most of 2001, Siwiak had been working at a construction site in Lower Manhattan. On the morning of September 11, following the attacks, the job site closed down as that part of the city was evacuated. Siwiak could not afford to wait until work resumed, so after walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, he took the subway back to his sister’s home. After looking through the classified ads in the Polish-language newspaper Nowy Dziennik,[5] he found one with a cleaning service at a Pathmark supermarket in the Farragut section of Brooklyn. To fill out the paperwork, he went to an employment agency in Bay Ridge that served the city’s Polish community.[3]
>At the employment agency, Siwiak comforted the owner, whose husband worked at the World Trade Center and had not contacted her since that morning (she later learned her husband had indeed died in the attack).[6] He learned he could start late that night, and returned to Far Rockaway. There he called his wife, Ewa, in Poland to tell her he was safe; he had witnessed one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center.[7] “I told him just in case: don’t leave tonight, because it can be dangerous in New York”, she recalled
In November, a passenger aircraft with 260 people aboard crashed into a neighborhood in Queens and killed numerous people on the ground. It was the second deadliest accidental plane crash in US history and caused evacuations from office towers in Manhattan. But when it transpired that it was not a terrorist attack it fell out of the news and was largely forgotten
I’m mostly kidding… but I remember how it was hyped as a mysterious invention that would revolutionize transportation forever, and college friends of mine actually got up early for the news conference about what it was (a perpetual motion machine?? Flying cars??) only to find out that it was… a scooter.
The FBI caught a pharmacist who had spent decades diluting chemo drugs for cancer patients. Truly a twisted and vile thing to do. It was on the cusp of breaking national headlines when the agent in charge was set to meet with the director of the FBI, on the morning of 9/11… there’s a podcast that tells the story.
Comments
https://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/2001-events-that-9-11-made-us-forget
All of these
Just a few weeks after the attacks on September 11, a passenger aircraft crashed in suburban Queens, NY, killing 260 people on board. This event coincided with the aftermath of 9/11, so naturally people assumed it was a second wave of attacks.
The Chandra Levy disappearance and ensuing media circus around Gary Condit
Locally, there was a pretty decent sized earthquake on the evening of Sept 9 under Beverly Hills
Summer of sharks!!!
The day before 9/11 a government official announced they had lost several trillion dollars. Don’t know where it went could be in my other jeans. Then 9/11 happened and nobody ever talked about it again. I think he was referring to the Pentagon audit.
My childhood friends birthday is on 9/11 so that had to suck for him going forward.
The killing of Henryk Siwiak. A person who was murdered in NYC on 9/11. Not properly investigated because law enforcement was diverted to the terror attacks.
Slayer released God Hates Us All
Forrest Gump sequel was about to be greenlit but 9/11 happened and they never revived the project because it seemed too fucked up to do
Dale Earnhardt died ….
Paula Poundstone was arrested for alleged lewd acts and child abuse involving her three adoptive and two foster children which was overlooked because of 9/11.
Michael Jackson gave two shows in New York, together with his brothers. That was on September 7 and on September 10. That’s why I was in New York on 9/11. And on 9/15, I had to board a plane to get back home to Germany.
The 2001 crisis in Argentina was an economic, social, and political catastrophe caused by unsustainable external debt, a collapsed convertibility model, and years of corruption and adjustment. It ended with the country in default, the famous “corralito” that blocked savings, looting, repression, and five presidents in less than two weeks. I was 4 years old, and it was my mom birthday..
People were crying because their homes and workplaces were being looted. People were standing guard on the roofs of houses with guns.
Enron collapse was well known, but its effects were unrealized back then
They cooked the books by putting a lot of their negative accounts in international banks not so easily seen by financial review boards like Arthur Anderson. They claim everything’s fine; employees who were also stockholders knew inside it was not.
The selling of stocks, collapse of a major corporation, through the actions of stockholders who knew better what was going on, is still seen today. And corporations now bow down more to stockholders than customers or their own employees as a result.
The anthrax attacks that same year.
Executed what’s his fucking face from the Oklahoma City Bombings.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud
McDonald’s Monopoly Fraud came to light.
It was discovered that the McDonald’s Monopoly game had been rigged by an insider for years and all the largest prizes were funneled to his personal friends as well as the Gambino crime family. The trial for this fraud started on September 10, 2001 so pretty much all news coverage was overshadowed by 9/11.
The Massacre of Royal Family of Nepal.
On 9/11, during the news broadcasts, i remember a news ticker at the bottom specifically calling out that the band “Anthrax” was changing their name to ‘basket full of puppies’. It was actually a press release they put out, and in the paranoia there was limited thought, and someone saw the name ‘anthrax’ during a time of heightened terrorism, and put it right on the news ticker.. https://www.loudersound.com/features/anthrax-basket-full-of-puppies
Metal Gear Solid 2 predicted social media and it’s affects on politics and society at large.
A quote from the game:
“Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds leaking whatever ‘truth’ suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in ‘truth’.
And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Pretty accurately reflects the mess we’re in today. And this is before Facebook or even Myspace existed.
Thuy Trang, who played the Yellow Power Ranger in Might Morphin Power Rangers, passed away a week before 9/11
Enron’s collapse happened the next month.
george harrison death occured 11-29-2001…it should have been huge news but ended as a footnote for 2001
I was working in a Staples which at the time, used an AS400 system, unix based.
Somehow, I managed to change the entire store network address to ‘Store Groovy’ rather than just my password. Needless to say, absolute chaos. Tills, vpn, phones, everything went down. No idea how I did it, but I royally fucked everything up.
The sales manager told me to sort it before leaving for the day. He and I didn’t get on.
I said “You’re the manager, manage”. They tried to sack me but failed.
That’s my 2001 mayhem story
The Diamondbacks took down the Yankees in the World Series
In Seattle a woman climbed up on the railing of the ship canal bridge contemplating suicide, onlookers pissed off by the resulting traffic jam told her to jump which she did. She somehow survived the impact an in the days following the city was forced to take a look in the mirror. A few what has our city become articles were published but then 9/11 happened. To this day do not know what became of the jumper.
In the UK, a government communications advisor got into a lot of trouble specifically for sending an email on Sep 11th suggesting that it was “a good day to bury bad news”, if there was anything that needed to be announced but the government didn’t want people to really pay attention to it.
I mean, she was right, but unfortunately it got leaked and it did look pretty insensitive…
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/16/Whitehall.uk1
The coughing major was on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire UK and ‘won’ the game 2 days before 9/11
They caught the Green River Killer, the most prolific serial killer in the USA, a few weeks after. If 9/11 had not happened, I believe this would have been the major news event of the year. He killed for decades.
All the warnings that 9/11 was coming. In fact, all the warnings that 9/11 was coming from as early as the Clinton years.
In December 1998, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center reported to President Bill Clinton that al-Qaeda was preparing for attacks in the U.S. that might include hijacking aircraft.
In April 2001 Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance asked for humanitarian aid for the people of Afghanistan. Massoud told the European Parliament that his intelligence agents had gained limited knowledge about a large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil being imminent. Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before the 9/11 attacks. On the same day, Vladimir Putin called Bush and expressed his concerns over Massoud’s assassination, warning him that “something larger might be afoot”.
On May 1, 2001, the CIA informed the White House that “a group presently in the United States” was in the process of planning a terrorist attack.
On June 13, 2001, Osama bin Laden made a tape for supporters mentioning a possible attack on the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. The plan was said to involve a plane packed with explosives being crashed into the summit to kill President Bush and other world leaders in attendance.
The President’s Daily Brief on June 29, 2001, stated that “the United States is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Osama Bin Laden”. The document repeated evidence surrounding the threat, “including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.”
The CIA reiterated that the attacks were anticipated to be near-term and have “dramatic consequences”.
In July 2001, J. Cofer Black, CIA’s counter-terrorism chief and George Tenet, CIA’s director, met with Condoleezza Rice to inform her about communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. Rice listened but was unconvinced, having other priorities on which to focus. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld questioned the information, suggesting it was a deception meant to gauge the U.S. response.
On the same day, FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams sent a letter to FBI headquarters warning of suspects connected to al-Qaeda who were attending flight schools in Arizona, and demanding further investigation. This document is known as the Phoenix Memo.
On August 6, 2001, the President’s Daily Briefing, titled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US warned that bin Laden was planning to exploit his operatives’ access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike. Rice responded to the claims about the briefing in a statement before the 9/11 Commission, stating the brief was “not prompted by any specific threat information” and “did not raise the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles.”.
On 23 August 2001, the Mossad gave the CIA a list of 19 suspects living in the US who were believed to be mounting an imminent attack on the United States. Only four of the names are known, but all belonged to eventual hijackers in the attacks.
The head of the Algerian state intelligence service DRS, General Mohamed Mediène, went to the US, a few days before the 9/11 attacks. He spoke of an imminent attack against the United States based on a secret memo sent on September 6 by Smaïn Lamari, the number two in the DRS at the time.
Shortly after the attacks, only two civilian planes were authorized to take off: the one carrying members of the Saudi royal family and people close to Bin Laden, and the one bringing General Mohamed Mediène to Algiers.
The only shocking thing about 9/11, is that it was allowed to happen at all. People talk about 9/11 being an inside job, but the reality is that Bush and co, were just utterly fucking useless at their jobs.
Aaliyah died in a plane crash just a couple weeks prior. She was only 22. Also infuriating given it was a completely preventable death
The day before 9/11, George Carlin taped a comedy special titled “I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die”. It never saw the light of day.
On the very same morning the Concorde made it’s first flight with passengers since being grounded the year before. Commercial flights would resume a couple months later but it was doomed. There was a slump in air travel and supposedly a significant number of Concorde customers died in the World Trade Center.
In Canada, we had a few news stories:
I got my braces off on 9/11, and no one gave a shit. Real big day for me, I was so excited.
In Texas a few days after 9/11, a barge hit the Queen Isabella bridge on South Padre Island, and knock down a section of the bridge. Eight people died. The news was mostly confined to local area news.
My wife died a couple of weeks earlier.
Not really big news to most people, but was some crazy shit for me. And, her, I guess.
Apple launch their 1st ipod, guess it started change how people listen to the music
Aunt May discovered her nephew Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Amazing #35 (Vol.2) ended with May finding Peter beaten & bloody in his tattered Spider-Man suit after a battle with Morlun. The next issue was supposed to be their conversation but ASM #36 became a 9/11 tribute issue and their conversation was pushed back until afterwards in the two following issues that released in January & February of 2002.
On Sunday 9/9/2001 60 minutes aired an interview with Anne Heche in which she proclaimed her ability to communicate telepathically with far away space aliens (or maybe inter dimensional beings- don’t remember the details). It was the main focus of every late night shows monologue on Monday. Never mentioned again by Tuesday for obvious reasons
In 2001, Enron’s scandal broke, marking one of the biggest corporate collapses in U.S. history.
6 million cows and sheep were slaughtered and burned in the UK due to the foot and mouth epidemic.
Guy got murdered in NYC on 9/11 just for being in the wrong neighborhood. The killer still hasn’t been found.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Henryk_Siwiak
>The initial investigation into the crime may have been hampered, police believe, by the diversion of law enforcement resources in the city in the wake of that day’s terrorist attacks, which ultimately killed almost 3,000 people. Since Siwiak was not robbed, wore camouflage clothing and spoke poor English with a heavy accent, detectives have speculated that his killer may have thought he had something to do with the attacks. Siwiak’s homicide is the only one recorded in New York City on September 11, 2001, since the city does not include the deaths from the attacks in its official crime statistics.
He’s like if the guy who survived both atomic bombs had worse luck. This guy worked in Lower Manhattan but got evacuated (obviously). He still needed money so he went to a temp recruiting office and comforted a woman whose husband worked in the tower, then learned about a job that he could take later that night.
>Throughout most of 2001, Siwiak had been working at a construction site in Lower Manhattan. On the morning of September 11, following the attacks, the job site closed down as that part of the city was evacuated. Siwiak could not afford to wait until work resumed, so after walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, he took the subway back to his sister’s home. After looking through the classified ads in the Polish-language newspaper Nowy Dziennik,[5] he found one with a cleaning service at a Pathmark supermarket in the Farragut section of Brooklyn. To fill out the paperwork, he went to an employment agency in Bay Ridge that served the city’s Polish community.[3]
>At the employment agency, Siwiak comforted the owner, whose husband worked at the World Trade Center and had not contacted her since that morning (she later learned her husband had indeed died in the attack).[6] He learned he could start late that night, and returned to Far Rockaway. There he called his wife, Ewa, in Poland to tell her he was safe; he had witnessed one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center.[7] “I told him just in case: don’t leave tonight, because it can be dangerous in New York”, she recalled
Some guy successfully got away with murder on 9/11 because the police were too busy at Ground Zero to investigate the killing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Henryk_Siwiak
In November, a passenger aircraft with 260 people aboard crashed into a neighborhood in Queens and killed numerous people on the ground. It was the second deadliest accidental plane crash in US history and caused evacuations from office towers in Manhattan. But when it transpired that it was not a terrorist attack it fell out of the news and was largely forgotten
There was an enormous industrial accident in France that was thought to be terrorism at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toulouse_chemical_factory_explosion
The release of the Segway!
I’m mostly kidding… but I remember how it was hyped as a mysterious invention that would revolutionize transportation forever, and college friends of mine actually got up early for the news conference about what it was (a perpetual motion machine?? Flying cars??) only to find out that it was… a scooter.
The FBI caught a pharmacist who had spent decades diluting chemo drugs for cancer patients. Truly a twisted and vile thing to do. It was on the cusp of breaking national headlines when the agent in charge was set to meet with the director of the FBI, on the morning of 9/11… there’s a podcast that tells the story.
The Chandra Levy-Gary Condit saga