The Butterfly Effect

Or "If Wishes were Horses we'd all Wish for Cars"

From chaos theory to a movie theme to a possible title for the upcoming 911 commission report. According to the WaPo

The final report by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks details as many as 10 missed opportunities by the Bush and Clinton administrations to detect or derail the deadly terrorist hijackings, but the panel stops short of saying the attacks should have been prevented, according to government officials and others familiar with the document.

The report, to be released publicly tomorrow, includes a list of 10 "operational opportunities" that the government missed to potentially unravel the Sept. 11 plot, said a government official who has read the document. Six of the incidents listed came during the Bush administration and four were during the Clinton years, this official said.

But the nearly 600-page report acknowledges that many of the opportunities were long shots and that others would have required a lucky sequence of events to alter the outcome, said sources who declined to be identified because the commission wants the document kept secret until its release.

In other words, the butterfly effect. And those who haven't seen the movie should consider doing so and ponder the implication for various 911 "what if" scenarios.

After all, the movie was demonstrably profitable, and a DVD can be bought for 20 bucks or so, and rented for less. That's certainly less costly than the 911 inquiry that (assumingly, the report isn't released) refrained from developing "speculative fiction" scenarios in detail beyond that in the final paragraph quoted above.

Need help firing up the imagination? Try here, here, here, and here

My personal favorite is this one, because it includes this excerpt that has stuck in my mind for some time:

Mohammad Atta was a confused young man, his aspirations torn between the houris of the Koran and the showgirls of the Las Vegas Strip. He had not yet reached the last stage of his personal jihad. Perhaps, if left free, he would have resolved his inner conflict on September 11, 2001, and that resolution might have been one that we Westerners would not have understood or approved. Nevertheless, there is nothing that he could have done to a small number of New York-bound airplane passengers that would have been more shocking to the American sense of justice than what George W. Bush's, Richard Cheney?s and John Ashcroft?s American government did to him and his comrades.?

Of course, fiction aside, we can only speculate that the real 911 commission had all possible info...

(Hat tip Instapundit for some of the above links)