Proximity to Evil

My mind has just been blown. Last night I caught a piece of a documentary about the 9/11 terrorists. There were 4 planes, and one of the 4 was flown by two men that lived in my home town. Not only were they in the same city, the lived in the same neighborhood.

Let me backup. The documentary was about the amount of information that the "Intelligence" community had before the attack actually happened, and it was detailed. They had phone records of calls to the safe house in Yemen where Bin Laden was living and had setup Headquarters, records of wire transfers from Yemen to the Bank of America where my mother does her banking and literally next-door to the bank that I use. The NSA had records of the guy's Driver's License, Visa, Car Insurance, Car title.... All of them in his name, even though the CIA knew that he was known to be affiliated with Al Queda.

The point of the presentation was to highlight the failings of the CIA, NSA, and FBI in not sharing information. Apparently because of jurisdiction they couldn't, NSA only monitors internally, FBI is after a crime is committed, and CIA isn't allowed to operate in the USA or something like that. Because of that negligence or shortfall, these guys were in the country legally. They were officially indistiguishable from an exchange student, or a migrant worker. They had the same rights and protections of an American resident.

None of that is what stood out to me most though. On a much more personal and less globally significant level I was struck by the idea, that I very likely had seen this guy, or at least been in a proximity of less than 100 yards at some point. I can make this claim and I'll explain why. On the documentary they showed the actual mosque they attended. The map below shows it on google maps. For privacy I don't want to share my parents address, but it's literally 3 or 4 blocks away. Every Friday, this street Ecstrom would be PACKED around 1-2pm and I never understood why. I learned later that Muslims have something called "The prayer of Friday" which either begins or ends their sabbath equivilent. In any case, I can't count the number of times I'd been stuck in that traffic. For all I know, one of the jay walkers was THE guy. Even if it wasn't one of the guys that walked in front of my car, he was in that building at some point when I was driving by.

http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=7050+Eckstrom+Ave,+San+Diego,+CA+92111+(Islamic+Center+of+San+Diego:+Mosque)&sll=32.820731,-117.166207&sspn=0,359.990655&ie=UTF8&ll=32.820668,-117.166003&spn=0.005725,0.009345&t=h&z=17&iwloc=addr&layer=c&cbll=32.820766,-117.166121&panoid=0G0ijW9Ybjz4gjCmzTKV5A&cbp=12,138.01612196192457,,0,4.317912251189721