Perhaps the Most Tragic Victim of 9/11: The Man Who Knew

As Shakespearian tragedy goes, the story of John P. O'Neill has to go down in history as one of the most tragic among the many stories of September 11: a victim of the very terrorist attack he had been warning of for years:

For six years, John O'Neill was the FBI's leading expert on Al Qaeda. He warned of its reach. He warned of its threat to the U.S. But to the people at FBI headquarters, O'Neill was too much of a maverick, and they stopped listening to Him. He left the FBI in the summer of 2001 and took a new job as head of security of the World Trade Center.

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To clarify, when I say John O'Neill was "perhaps the most tragic victim" of September 11, I do not mean that his life meant more than the others, or that the deaths of the other victims were any less of a tragedy to their loved ones.

I use the word "tragic" in the Shakespearian sense. There's a note of irony to O'Neill's death. If the government had listened to John P. O'Neill, his death and the death of 2995 others might have been avoided.