Foreshadowing of 9/11 (NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY THREAD)

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

I’m not really sure where to put this, but I’m going to dump it here, since it could fit into almost any of the Forums.

I was in the dentist’s office today and while I was waiting some two hours for him to come yank a tooth, I read a fairly recent Reader’s Digest (it was the one that has Bruce Willis on the cover) as it was the only thing handy. In it was an article on a French judge who leads the French anti-terror effort. On a raid in 1994 they found plans for an Al Qaeda operation. The terrorists were going to hijack a jet-liner and crash it into the Effel Tower!!!

So its obvious that Al Qaeda had been planning to use jets as cruise missiles for some time. I’m puzzled why this information wasn’t shared with the rest of the world when it was discovered. It might not have prevented the events of 9/11, but then again, it might have hampered their efforts enough that fewer people would have been killed.

I realize that this isn’t exactly MPSIMS material, but I couldn’t think of a better place to put.

#2

In a Sports Illustrated’s little “This Week’s Sign That The Apocalypse Is Upon Us” section (from well before 9/11 maybe a year or so) noted that Osama Bin Laden and his cronies were using sports chat rooms to communicate.

I also noticed that the “This Week’s sign …” section stopped running for a couple of weeks after the attacks. Snippets about ridiculous goings on in the sports world just didn’t seem as big of a sign as having jets flown into buildings, I guess. Although I’m no longer a subscriber to SI, I think they’ve started running the section again.

#3

There must be a ton of threads about this, but seeing as I haven’t contributed anything to them…

There was this very poorly-timed ad for “Flexon” frames running the week of the attacks. (That particular ad was printed 9/12 – no idea how long it had been running before that.)

And there was the notorious “Coup” album-cover, which was out on the web in late July, promoting an album scheduled to be released in November 2001. Of course, they changed the artwork for it’s actual release.

Then there was that message board thread on board for pilots and flying enthusiasts, speculating about what would happen if someone flew an airliner into the WTC buildings. They made a pretty fair estimate. (This was discussed here – dunno if it survived the latest purge…) I’d have hated to have been the guy who originally started that thread. (It was from about 10 months before.) I’m sure the FBI gave him at least a cursory interview.

After an event of that magnitude, a lot of things seem like foreshadowing that really weren’t. I remember seeing The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart about a month after the attacks. It was filmed during the construction of the towers, and a running gag is Stanley’s dealing with the noise - (his apartment is right across the street.) He’s trying to be casual about it while putting the moves on some girl… “Oh, they’re building something over there.”

The shots of the first stages of construction seem eerily familiar after being saturated with images of the wreckage. Just those first few floors and a lot of dust a noise. Gives an unintentionally tragic overtone to the film.

#4

I just read Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men. I’m 99.9% sure it came out before Sept. 11 because I’m sure he would have written a ton about it, but in one part he casually remarked something about “being about as welcome as Osama bin Laden at an airport”.

He did have quite a bit on Enron too, well before that scandal broke.

#5

Ok, that was just too damn creepy. What the hell were they thinking when they made that first cover???

#6

They say the following on Snopes:

More.

#7

When I interviewed at CIA last year, one of the questions they asked me was " Have you ever heard of someone named Usama Bin Laden? And would you know where he is right now?"
I believe I answered something along the lines of " If I knew that, I’d already be working for you."

I remember seeing articles six months before 9-11 about how terrorists were using chat rooms and porn sites to exchange information. What particularly interested me was stegography, or embedding information in digital images. Pretty cool way of hiding sensitive communiques–in PORN!

Something that will haunt me for the rest of my life is that on the evening of Sept. 10, a friend who was living with us and I were having a discussion about domestic terrorist attacks. I prophesised that there would be a strike against a major US city within six months. I thought it’d be biochem, though.

And due to a stomachache I almost didn’t go into work that day. Why will that haunt me?

#8

When I interviewed at CIA last year, one of the questions they asked me was " Have you ever heard of someone named Usama Bin Laden? And would you know where he is right now?"
I believe I answered something along the lines of " If I knew that, I’d already be working for you."

I remember seeing articles six months before 9-11 about how terrorists were using chat rooms and porn sites to exchange information. What particularly interested me was stegography, or embedding information in digital images. Pretty cool way of hiding sensitive communiques–in PORN!

Something that will haunt me for the rest of my life is that on the evening of Sept. 10, a friend who was living with us and I were having a discussion about domestic terrorist attacks. I prophesised that there would be a strike against a major US city within six months. I thought it’d be biochem, though.

And due to a stomachache I almost didn’t go into work that day. Why will that haunt me?