It’s been a couple weeks since the blackouts and we still have officials saying they don’t know the cause. There’s a widely dismissed Al-Quedah claim that they did it.
How are officials so sure it wasn’t terrorism? It wasn’t more than a couple hours before there were announcements that it was not a terror attack. How did we know?
I find operator error a lot easier to believe than a coordinated attack, but it seems to me we were dismissing a terror attack too quickly.
We know what failures occured. What we don’t know yet is why certain safety mechanisms failed, causing more failures to cascade along the grid. Sabotage is a possibility, but it is unlikely. It would make a lot more sense to plant a bomb in a generating plant or a substation to cause a blackout than to sabotage long range transmission equipment and hope for a random failure. (You could do both, I suppose, but it’s clear that the initial failures in Ohio were not sabotage or bombs.)
I agree with you, i live in the uk, and i saw the coverage of the blackout soon after it happened, and they were very very quick to tell us that it was not terrorism, I thought to myself how can you say you don’t know what caused it, but it definaltey wasn’t terrorism. To be honest i think that if it was an act of terrorism then the american government would not admit to it. Nobody was killed or hurt, so why tell the nation that all the efforts to prevent terrorist attacks have not worked.
I think that if it was an act of terrorism then the blackout that occured may only have been a small part of it, it could have been part of a plan to shut down the whole power system of the USA ( a very very very hard thing to do). Obviously the blackout was the only inccident that we heard about
I think the government could get away with it if they did cover it up, because its not the type of major attack that the world has been expecting, why create a fuss when its easier to lie.
Don’t get me wrong i am in no way saying that the blackout was an act of terrorism, i am just exploring the possibilities.
The blackout itself was caused by power surges that in effect moved backwards through the system, causing automatic safeties to shut down the power stations that were connected.
An act of terror might take down a particular line or station, but would be unlikely to cause the cascading effect that was seen.
As far as I can tell, therefore, the immediate determination that it was not terrorism was the result of how the system failed, a type of failure that would not be the result of a terrorist-type event.
No terrorist could have planned or foreseen the massive clusterfuck that lead to the widespread blackout. When a tree falls on a power line and takes down the whole northeastern grid, that’s the work of pureblood American ingenuity…in reverse. 
You might as well ask if terrorists were responsible for the 2000 Election, the Clinton Impeachment, the Davis Recall, etc…
If I recollect correctly the announcement “no indication of terror attack” went out to international news agencies very soon after the blackout’s beginning. No way that the ultimate cause could have been even approximately known at this point.
My guess is that the US authorities based this announcement on the fact that no fires, explosions or security events had been reported on any part of the electricity infrastructure.
9/11? (it was in all the papers.):eek: