More on Phone Calls
As my wife and I were talking the other evening about the recent revelations about checking telephone calls, we came up with a scary thought. If they looked at our phone calls in the 6 months following 9/11 they would have seen a lot- and I mean, at times, regular daily calls to both Spain and Cuba. Obviously someone to be watched. That would raise eyebrows, especially if you then dug deeper and found that prior to September, 2001, there were no phone calls to either place.

Sounds too suspicious to be coincidence, doesn't it?

And with just that little bit of information and a lot of paranoia, guess who could have been on a watch list?

Since I have flown a number of times since then without any problems, I am guessing that I have not been on such a list. Perhaps they didn't get our phone records. Perhaps they dug into it and saw that there was nothing to worry about. Perhaps they missed it- until now as I am making this public confession.

So was there a conspiracy? Spain and Cuba?

Well, our daughter left for a school year in Spain just prior to 9/11 and needless to say the events of that day were enough to put us on the phone a great deal. And with cell phones and special rates, we called and talked often.

She then came home for Christmas break and went to Cuba with a St. Olaf Interim program. Unfortunately, she had mono which the doctor here had not diagnosed properly. It looked like strep. She gets to Havana and goes downhill and ends up in the international hospital there. Since it was a literature class and not a Spanish class she was the only one who was fluent in Spanish. Again, daily- or even more than that- phone calls to Havana.

As far as I know nothing came of those kind of phone calls. But it doesn't take much to see how mountains could be made out of molehills in the wrong hands.