Before the Titanic went down, there was an eerily prescient novel about a similarly sized ship with inadequate lifeboats hitting an iceberg. But nobody believed the Titanic itself would meet such disaster.
Why, God Himself couldn’t sink such a mighty vessel! :smack:
…yeah.
Very eerily. The ship in the novel was named the Titan.
If the administrations took that possibility seriously, then my underlying premise is wrong. My impressions to this point based on media reports were that it was not taken seriously, although I have not done serious research on the matter, as perhaps some above posters have done.
You don’t need to look to works of fiction. It’s not as if nobody ever used a stolen plane to attack DC. Cessna attack on the White House anyone?
I second commasense’s doubt of this claim. I live west of DC but work in the city (although I did not work in the city on 9/11).
When 9/11 occurred, we were very aware of the presence of fighter jets in the sky suddenly, because it was so novel. We hardly ever see them now – I have a hard time believing we’re unconsciously overlooking them. I don’t believe fighters patrol over DC routinely outside of Iron Eagle remakes.
Just wanted to add that Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachmann also imagined the possibility of a plane being used as a weapon in “The Running Man” - where the protagonist flies a plane into an office tower.
Wilbur Smith also wrote about a plot to use a DC3 (?) to either drop poison into a reservoir or posion gass over a crowd (I think poison gas over a crowd, but its a LONG time since I read the story)
If you want to establish some fictional precedents, watch some West Wing dvd’s. In the episode, In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, Part I, that was broadcast on October 4, 2000, Jed Bartlet got a briefing from his National Security Advisor about a possible terrorist attack by “bin Laden” against the United States.
They had considered the possibility, but thought it was a fair price to kill Steven Seagal.
Governments directly told them they had info of terrorists who would fly planes into buildings in America. It was not something vague. They were both friendly and unfriendly countries who relayed the info.
Somewhat similarly: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052104379.html
When faced with a choice between malice, ignorance, and incompetence, the latter two win most of the time.
Hey, if we actually believed Executive Decision, we’d have Steven Segal and Kurt Russell on a F-117 with an oversized vacuum cleaner ready to take down any stray airplanes at a moment’s notice.
Is this a woosh? Bin Ladin had already been implicated in several attacks on the US by 2000, predicting that he’d do so again is hardly an out there guess. He was even on the FBI’s ten most wanted list at the time, IIRC.
Bin laden was added to the “10 most wanted” list in June of 1999, in connection with the August 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa.
He wasn’t well known to the general public before that, but he wasn’t exactly flying under the radar. The NY Times had done a full-length story on Bin Laden by 1996, and his name appeared in news stories about Islamic militants a few years before that.
I didn’t think they had just coincidentally made up the name. But this is a thread about al Qaeda references in fiction that were made before 9/11.
No it’s not. The OP asked whether Al Qaeda was inspired by the events of a 1996 film, and more particularly, whether the fact that such an attack was imagined in fiction meant that it should havebeen imagined as a real threat.
There’s no way to answer the first for sure, and I think we’ve established that lots of folks in the intelligence/security community had conceived of the threat.