How did this play out after 9/11?

The story line was more about terrorism in general, though they certainly had a lot of people thinking it was odd that it came out so quickly after 9/11. For some reason, people forget or pay no attention to what's going on around them.

Prior to 9/11, Al-Qaeda had already targeted the World Trade Center by a vehicle loaded with explosives years earlier, attacked embassies, and attacked the USS Cole (2000). Hezbollah was probably more familiar to the average tv-watching American because of the years of violence and hostage-taking in and around Lebanon. At any rate, this show covered a lot of plots that could have come from the era that started, more or less, with the attack of the USMC barracks in Lebanon, a period which also saw the rise of IEDs. Since the Hezbollah methods were adopted by A-Q and other terrorist organizations around the planet, The Agency didn't pinpoint 9/11 as the focus, but it did influence stories.

A timeline note related to the speed with which the show appeared after the 9/11 attacks--bin Laden had been in the occasional news for years because of his joining the Afghans against Russia. He issued his fatwa in 1996, followed within a couple of years by embassy bombings. The Cole was attacked in Oct. 2000, and it was around the end of Feb./start of March 2001 that it was known that A-Q was responsible. You may not know there were many years where any terrorism on the planet would be claimed by numerous groups, though we don't see much of this now. In 2001, it was still not immediately obvious which body did the attack. Even though A-Q was emerging as a large organization, it also had (has?) component groups that are different orgs with varying amounts of involvement, sort of like memberships (active, sponsor, chapter, at large, just send the newsletter...) where they aren't all involved in every action. I think that shows up in Agency assignments, too, although it isn't part of our common knowledge in the USA. At any rate, it's not a show just about retaliation for the single awful day, it's a well-done look at a very complex threat to people around the world.

~If you go through enough doors, sooner or later you're gonna find a dog on the other side.~