The Unasked Question.

The hijackers who struck the United States on September 11, 2001, have been studied like few people in history.

Government officials in many nations have reviewed the activities of these individuals prior to the attack. Some of these studies reach back several years.

Media personnel have combed through the histories of these men, and we now know an enormous amount of information about the attack down to the most minor detail.

Except for one extremely major point. There one question we have not asked.

We know WHO these people were. We even have interviews with some of their relatives and they tell us who they really were. Reporters have talked with their teachers, even their close family members. We know who they were like we have known few people from their country ever before.

We know WHERE they came from. We know where they went to school – and they were mostly very well educated – and we know where they lived and we know where they went on their journey from their homes and places of business to the training schools, and where they went to enter the United States just prior to their attack.

We know WHEN they decided to become martyrs. We know when they went to their killing schools, and when they joined their organizations and when they came to America.

We certainly know HOW they did their awful tasks. We know how they trained and how they studied and prepared for the attack. We know how they commandeered the aircraft and how they flew them into the buildings.

We know WHAT they did. We know this in excruciatingly reconstructed detail. We know what happened to the attackers and what happened to the aircraft passengers and what happened to the people in the buildings and what happened to the survivors and what happened to their families.

So this all fits well into the American way of thinking and analysis. We love to measure and to detail and reconstruct. These are all wonderful questions and their answers are such that they seem designed for a TV screen or a movie production.

There is only one question remaining. And that is the question we have not asked, and nobody in America knows its answer although most of the people in the rest of the world do know. We haven't asked the question because we wouldn’t understand its answer – and we wouldn't understand it because we don’t care about how they felt.

That question we did not ask, have not asked, and probably never will ask, is why?  Why did they do it?