Terrorists hijacked four commercial jet aircraft from major airports in the U.S. on Tuesday September 11, 2001 with the intent of crashing them into high-profile American landmarks. Although the Pentagon suffered relatively minor damage, the spires rising above Gotham fell an hour after the terrorist attack. Estimates of 10,000 to 50,000 human casualties have been reported, among the confirmed dead are two executives from American high tech firms.

Details about who may be responsible are still not firm but one thing is certain ø our cowardly adversaries have a keen sense of symbolism. The terrorists chose to steal planes from ÒAmericanÓ and ÒUnitedÓ airlines, flying them into the stately and imposing World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. To these murderous thugs, the destruction of planes and sites are symbolic of AmericaÕs ineffectiveness. To them, they are two for three and consider themselves winners.

You see, the terrorists have little imagination and apparently get their ideas from reading Tom Clancy novels. Their idea was to take out American commerce by destroying the World Trade Center. If both of the towers were reduced to rubble, the same would happen to AmericaÕs already faltering economy. With the thousands of stockbrokers, merchants, bankers and investors murdered and/or displaced by the attack on the World Trade Center, AmericaÕs money machine would grind to a halt. The terrorists are under the assumption that seeing pictures of the World Trade Center towers crumbling will mean that America will plunge headlong into economic depression. How could we not? To foreign terrorists, the financial center of the world is housed in the World Trade Center in New York City. Twisted terrorist logic dictates that if the WTC is gone, all the money (except for theirs) disappears.

There is almost no historical evidence to show that disasters like this have any long-term effect on our economy. Rather than going back to natural disaster like fires and earthquakes, letÕs look at the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. During that time, the terrorists who planted the car bomb in the lower levels of the WTC were of the same mindset. If the WTC falls the terrorists assumed AmericaÕs economy would collapse too. When neither outcome came to pass, the terrorists were baffled.

What the terrorists did not understand was that the people working in the WTC, unlike them, have real jobs. Working in a high-rise office is a little different than blowing up buildings and extorting money for a living. When a terrorist has a bad day, he usually is thrown in jail where he endlessly appeals to leftist ÒrightsÓ organizations to ratchet up a PR campaign to get him favorable interviews with left-leaning western news organizations. When an American office worker has a bad day, she shrugs it off and goes to work the next day determined to make that day better than the previous one.

In 1993, the office workers displaced by the WTC bombing were back at work in other buildings in a day or two. Analysts and stockbrokers who survived the bombing in 1993 commented on TechTV news that the destruction of the WTC towers would not significantly disrupt their work now because the bombing eight years ago did not affect them then. It will dismay the useless and stupid terrorists to find out that things will be humming along on Wall Street in a few days. It will not be Òbusiness as usualÓ by any means, but the disruption to American and world commerce will be minor. Poor stupid terrorists!

In a testament to the workers in New York City, phone service and information technology services were almost uninterrupted. Even under the incredible strain of Internet requests for news (most of AmericaÕs news agencies are based in New York City) and the phone calls of concerned citizens, there were no reports of overloaded communications systems. Within an hour of the attack, the city was locked down and secure, again to the dismay of the terrorists. Internet and phone service coming in and out of the financial capital of the world is for all intents and purposes, unaffected. Poor stupid terrorists!

The plan was to disrupt communications and services in the financial center of the world with this murderous attack. Instead the terrorists succeeded in doing little more than rallying the world against them. The businesses and citizens of New York City will have computers, phones and temporary offices for all those displaced WTC workers within a week. There is also a good chance that rather than a bronze memorial and a beautiful park on the site where this cowardly attack occurred; two new World Trade Center towers will be built. Newer and taller towers built with the most technologically advanced construction materials, computer systems and communication devices ever constructed. Americans, in true American fashion, will make the next pair of towers better than the previous one.

This is what your attack has done. You poor stupid terrorists! <>

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