Were they not planning to go to Afghanistan beofre 9-11?
Now they had a reason.
[QUOTE=vanilla]
Way too many things that didn’t add up.
Including, but not limited to Bush claiming he saw the first plane, why he sat and did nothing; the material from the buildings take away quickly so they couldn’t be examined, etc./QUOTE]
Out of curiousity, could you give some other examples of “things that didn’t add up”?
What makes you think they were planning to go into Afghanistan? What makes you think they wanted to go there bad enough to risk being caught killing 3000 Americans?
I assume you are among those who think the WMD claim was a lie to enable the war with Iraq. Why not simply concoct a lie re: Afghanistan? That would have been much simpler and have had much less political downside than 9/11 did.
Look:
Tragedy in the US=Bad for President
Economic disaster in US=Bad for President
Expensive cleanup/increased security=Bad for President
All the above happened as a result of 9/11.
I’m sorry, but if Bush didn’t want to serve another term as president, he could have simply planned to step down after 2004 instead of being involved in something like 9/11, which has been very bad for his chances of getting re-elected.
They have been? Only because of his flubs since then. The bastard had incredibly high approval ratings after 9/11 - they were the best thing that ever happened to Bush. If he hadn’t gone on the Iraq misadventure, he likely would be retaining 60-70% popularity - it has been INCREDIBLY damaging to him, and he’s still hovering around 45, isn’t he?
I’m not even going to remotely suggest that there was any conspiracy involving him to do 9/11, but I wouldn’t say it was “very bad for his chances of getting re-elected.”
vanilla, you may be thinking of the claim that Rumsfeld et al wanted to knock Saddam Hussein out of power. Iraq, not Afghanistan.
Also, what Tuckerfan said. Ain’t it amazing how the idiot Bush can also be ruthlessly, evilly efficient? Eh, he’s obviously read the same pamphlets as did the bumbling incompetent Bill Clinton, who was consequently able to get away with hiding the murders dozens of his political enemies.
Paraphrasing King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “You have to know how to do those things when you’re president.”
Short term, I would guess than any sitting president’s approval ratings will go up after a national emergency. I think the long term economic consequences and inconvenience of tighter security that resulted from 9/11 has cost him considerable popularity.
The Iraq adventure is not as unpopular in the real world as it is on this message board. Failure of the stock market to fully recover, lost jobs, and inconvenience at airports are complaints about Bush that I hear more frequently than Iraq related items. These things can be attributed, at least in part, to 9/11.
What planning and preparation? People always say these guys were sooo smart and sooo well organized and it must have taken a hundred men a thousand years to plan this attack but I never hear anything to back it up.
I’ve flown a plane. I’ve flown small cesnas and I’ve taxied a 767 (gives you a [sub]small[/sub] idea of what it would be like to fly one.) I gaurantee I could hit one of those buildings.
If I was one of those brainfucked idiots I imagine the planning would’ve gone something like this:
terrorist 1 - “Hey Mohammed”
terrorist 2 - “Yes Mohammed?”
terrorist 1 - “Let’s attack the capitalist pigs with airplanes. We can hit the World Trade Center and destroy their pig-dog economy my main man.”
terrorist 2 - “Ok, we’ll buy tickets for flights that are typically empty, and going long distances so they will be full of fuel my good friend.”
terrorist 1 - “Sounds like a great plan my main man. Let’s get Mohammed and his cousin Mohammed and we’ll get started right away.”
::they join hands like they’re about to break a football huddle::
in unison - “1, 2, 3, Fuck the Mexicans!”
Obviously satirical but I hate hearing people praise them for being great strategists. Maybe there is something I’m missing but I just don’t see it. If it has to be praised for something I would say it was brilliantly simple, not brilliantly complicated.
And Zagadka, I know you weren’t praising them or speaking at length about it but you saying that reminded me of how often I hear people in real life do that. This post is not meant as an offense to you.
Granted, and I accept your example as both satire and hyperbole.
The “planning” I refer to is more along the lines of running the cells, getting them into America, getting their documentation, housing, financing, etc. I’m sure 19 people could have easily done the planning necessary to target the specific flights and do the timing - the plan worked because it was simple, I agree. But operating a terrorist cell within a hostile country is not an easy task, and I’m 100% sure that there were handlers and others involved in the planning and preparation for the attacks.
Additionally, information seems to indicate that the attacks themselves were conceived and partly planned at AQ meetings in SE Asia - it was not the cell itself that came up with the entire plan.
The hard part wasn’t hitting a building, it was pulling the whole thing off without getting caught. Whether this was a great strategy or not, it was way more than good enough. They caught the US by total surprise and inflicted almost 3000 casualties. You’re right that hijacking a plane isn’t that hard - that was part of the cleverness of the plan, of course, it was very low-tech. These guys hijacked and crashed four planes roughly simultaneously, and I think Zagadka gives a good accounting of some of the other complexities. This was several years in the making. Coming up with an idea and pulling it off aren’t the same thing.
The closest I’ll come to a Bush/9-11 conspiracy is the hypothesis that the Administration was vaguely aware that a major terrorist attack inside the United States was pending, and opted not to pre-emptively prevent it so they could exploit the ensuing fallout. Heck, Condoleeza Rice almost admitted as much in her testimony before the 9/11 commission; you’d have to be a moron to believe “The PDB about Bin Laden was just a historical document” was true.
Could you find a specific building in, say Riyadh…or even in London for that matter if thats all you did as far as planning. Not like these guys were native New Yorkers, you know? I’d guess that even a native New Yorker would have trouble finding the WTC while trying to fly a plane they were totally unfamiliar with into position to ram it.
And you a pilot? You should know things look a lot different from the air, and you have to GET the plan TO the target, not just fly it into it. I have no doubt if someone got me in the general vicinity I could bank the plane into a building…but actually having to fly by eye and find a target in a large modern city? I don’t think that would be as easy as you are making it out to be. And then, there is the fact it wasn’t a single act…it was a coordinated timed attack with multiple facets. Also, there was TAKING the plane too, you know? Had to coordinate THAT as well.
I think you are underestimating what something like this is to put together, how much planning would have to go into it to pull it off…and how much luck it took to bring off even the limited success that AQ achieved.
To answer the OP…no, the official story isn’t a conspiricy theory, at least not as your cite is thinking. As has been said, there certainly WAS a conspiricy…it was AQ though.
We’ve been through this recently in a thread looking at who was at fault for 9/11, which goes into all the timelines and events that happened. When you look at the actual events that happened, and the timing of the events (there was very little actual time between the first strike on the WTC and the second, not to mention the Pentagon strike, and there was a hell of a lot of confusion as to what was actually happening), and understand how much uncertainty and confusion there was at the FAA and NORAD, when you take into account that the actual arcitect that build the WTC was surprised it managed to stand up as long as it did, when you look at HOW the WTC was build and understand the forces applied to it that were never meant to be applied to it…i.e. when you actually look at the facts of the event, there just aren’t all these bullshit loose ends and inconsistancies the conspiricy theorists are all babbling about.
-XT
Why bother? Lots of danger that some well-meaning GI will get wind of the plants and tip off the media (see Abu Ghraib scandal), and Bush will look very bad indeed.
Much easier to claim that you went into Iraq to liberate the Iraqis and plant the seeds of democracy, and hope the public forgets about all your “imminent threat” and “nuclear program” rhetoric. Guess what? It seems to have worked!
LMAO - the WTC was far higher than anything else in New York - all they had to do was get to the correct altitude (and, y’know, there’s instruments and stuff), and then hit one of the two things that were visible.
This of course assumes they knew how to use said instruments (which, according to Cisco’s assertion they would only need to know the basics…he used a Cessna as an example…again, MY point was, they WOULD know, because it was part of their training), knew the aproximate location FROM THE AIR and how to get there from wherever in the flight path you were when they took over (again, to throughly beat this dead horse, they WOULD know how to do these things with the proper training…but wouldn’t have a clue if they had of just done it off the cuff as CISCO was positing). Not insurmountable problems by any means (as shown by the fact that they actually managed to do it), but not easy either without somekind of planning…which was my whole point. Or did you miss that part?
I’m sorry, but folks are underestimating exactly how difficult it is to find something like a single building, even if it IS a very tall building and apretty easy to identify building at that, while flying an unfamiliar plane at several hundred miles per hour in the heart of a modern city like New York. Without planning, without training in how to fly and at least the rudiments of how to navigate from where you are to where you are trying to get, it would be nearly impossible. This thing took a lot of time and effort…and a great deal of luck. Even then, it was only partially sucessful for AQ, as we know there were several other planes scheduled to be hijacked and rammed into buildings, and we know that one of the flights that WAS successfully hijacked never made it to any target at all but crashed in Penn.
-XT
Dude… Find the Hudson River. Follow it south to an island. The Hudson River is… not a small thing. Sort of sticks out. Fly over the island. South tip, there are two huge freaking towers.
Trust me, you don’t need any great navigational ability to pick those targets out.
If it’s an emergency you could probably get away with hopping into an airplane like I fly, turning the key, and going. MOST of the time you don’t find anything wrong on pre-flight after all, and given dire enough circumstances…
Definitely not something you want to make a habit of, though.
Don’t know if military craft are that easy to start or not - even if they were, you’d still have to drag them out of hangar (if they were in one), get in, get it started, get to the end of the runway… yeah, that’s going to take at least a few minutes to get them out, get them off the ground, and up to speed. You don’t just hop in, turn a key, and >bang!< you’re at Mach 1+
The other problem was the lack of communication and the confusion. It’s one thing to be on alert against a defined enemy in a declared war - quite another thing to be in peacetime, in the heart of your homeland, and suddenly not know what heck is going on and who’s attacking you.
The whole speed of deployment/catching a Boeing 7x7 issue has been covered before in other threads.
Dude…you live there. These guys didn’t. Dude, let me put you in an aircraft thats THAT big and who’s controls you are unfamiliar with and lets see if you can get to such a simple target without crashing into something else…oh ya, and let me fly the plane to somewhere first without you knowing exactly where that is, and THEN turn over the controls too you. Lets see if you can get there pretty much the first time, without having to meander all about looking for it. Dude, lets see you coordinate such an attack off the cuff with a bunch of other groups of people. Hell, let me give you any complex task to do with a group of 20 or more people and lets see how you handle it off the cuff. Have you actually ever tried to coordinate plans with a large number of people in different cities at the same time? Or any large group of people anywhere for that matter? I have, and its not the easiest thing in the world. Getting groups of people to do ANYTHING is like herding cats.
Again, you people are far under rating how difficult all these things are to do…without some kind of planning and coordination, not to mention training. Knowing how to fly a Cessna is not the same thing as knowing how to fly a passenger plane. Knowing where something is on the ground isn’t the same thing as knowing where it is from the air. Hijacking multiple planes on a tight schedule isn’t the same thing as hijacking one. Figuring out WHERE you are AFTER you hijack the plane is as important as knowing where your target is in respect to where you are at present.
Again (wack wack wack on the dead horse), none of these problems are insurmountable, nor are they rocket science. But its simply not something you do after a weekend meeting over dates and goat cheese at the local mosque.
-XT
They were familiar with them, from simulator practice.
That, no doubt, was part of the intensive planning that went on - a study of flight paths out of Boston Logan
They meandered a hell of a lot - one of the reasons ATC had no idea what they were doing.
It wasn’t. :rolleyes:
Not when the ‘incentive’ is a guaranteed place in paradise, it’s not.
Hence the training in Boeing sims.
Is anyone claiming it is?
What do you think I’ve been talking about in the past few threads? Ye gods man…read CISCO’s post and try and understand what I’ve been talking about here.
What I’ve been saying is that it DID take planning and training. WITH planning and training, it wouldn’t be that difficult. Without it, it would. Get it now?
-XT
The hard part of flying is generally landing - which the Bad Guys weren’t interested in doing.
Given how many images there are of the New York skyline, not to mention that navigational maps of the US are available at the vast majority of small airports across North American, with a larger scale “zoom” version for areas around Class B hubs (like the NYC area), and the availability of both GPS and flight simulators such as Microsoft’s, one could easily plan out such a thing in an afternoon and even get in a little practice at approaching one’s target on your average PC. Trouble finding the WTC? Not at all - two huge distinctive white buildings sticking up above the skyline are easy to spot.
Sure, things look different from the air… but you get used to it quickly. Distinctive buildings are commonly used at visual landmarks while flying. Boeings steer with a standard yoke/pedal arrangement, if you’re careful in the initial few minutes you’ll probably pick up a decent feel for the plane and be able to point it where you want. Visibility was excellent on September 11 - they could have seen the WTC from (depending on altitude) 50 or more miles away, giving them time to line up and aim for the towers.
Gotta remember - these guys (at least some of them) were licensed pilots. THAT’s where a big chunk of the strategy/planning came in - not in setting up the actual attack but in getting the operatives the necessary skills to pull this off. The flying part of this wasn’t that extraordinary from a technical standpoint. Inserting the operatives, getting them trained, deployed, choosing targets, weapons, and coordinating the multiple operations - that’s what’s remarkable and took several years and lots of money to pull off.
This I agree with.
This is NOT a big deal - the precise locations of big buildings like the WTC are published so pilots can avoid hitting them. This same information allows a Bad Guy to target them precisely.
90% of the training required (at least) is part of the standard private pilot curiculum. The remaining 10% of the information needed is mostly obtainable from reference works available to the public that any pilot would know how to obtain.
It used to be that you could buy time in a full-motion simulator of a big airliner style jet - folks used to give them to pilots as gifts for things like Christmas and birthdays and such. This also helped defray the cost of building and maintaining these machines. Sure it was a couple hundred bucks an hour, but the simulators are sophisticated enough you can log the time officially with the FAA. The Bad Guys HAD bought time in such simulators (Zacarais Mousasoui was nailed because of his unorthodox behavior at just such a facility). So it wasn’t like they had never been in the cockpit of their chosen target planes - they had been in a very sophisticated simulation of them.
And this sort of thing isn’t extraordinary. There are LOTS of private pilots with simulator time in jumbo jets. There are private pilots who actually own and fly big Boeings. The obstacle was always money, nothing more, and the Bad Guys of 9/11 had funding.
I think you’re overestimating the problem. As I said, pictures of the NYC skyline from many angles are readily available. The WTC were extremely tall and distinctive, easily picked out of the skyline. Picking out features from the air is something even student pilots become decent at quickly, and these guys had completed their “basic training” and then some. They weren’t unfamillar with airplanes they hijacked - inexperienced, yes, but not ignorant.
As a pilot, I’ve picked out buildings I’ve had no picture of, with no previous experience in the area, based just on a very description. Being told “Look for the biggest, tallest, white buildings in the skyline. They’re two identical square towers, one with a bunch of antennas on top” would be more than sufficient. And they had more than that to work with.
For that matter, they may have rented small airplanes and taken an airborne tour of the city skyline on one or several prior occassions. Tourists with pilot licenses often rent a small plane while on vacation - I’ve done it myself - and go sight-seeing locally. Just like you might go on a bus tour or drive your car through a scenic area while on vacaton. Did these guys scout out their targets from the front seat of a Piper Cherokee? Seems likely to me.
If they didn’t have the required skills to do just that they never would have gotten a pilot’s license in the first place. ALL flights require planning and navigation.
Almost any normal human being is capable of learning to do this. Actually, even a lot of abnormal people manage to do this (there are disabled pilots). The extraorindary thing here is the motivation and the use to which these skills were put. Really, it’s like rambling on about how Oklahoma City Alfred P. Murrah Bad Guy was so extraordinary because he knew how to drive a Ryder truck and could navigate the Interstate system.
First of all, as I’ve already mentioned, these guys weren’t totally unfamillar with the cockpit of a 757.
Granted, my intentions were far more benign, but I had to navigate on my own to locations I have never been to and return not once but three times before I was ever allowed to get my license. I managed to do with without “meandering all about”, and so do most student pilots.
During refresher training, my instructor actually has, on occassion, blocked my view of what’s going on, takes me to an undisclosed location, turned the airplane over to me, and told me to get unlost i.e. to return to a specific location. Locating yourself in space when you aren’t sure of your location is a skill introduced even before the first solo and it’s returned to again and again over time.
These are not extraordinary skills. Some people are better at them than others, of course, but all pilots have them to one degree or another.
Well, yeah, I’m sure they screened hundreds of potential operatives before choosing their 19 - 19 very dedicated guys with the same goals. True, a Cessna isn’t a Big Boeing (and, actually, I think most of these guys favored Pipers, not Cessnas) but there are certain basic skills that DO carry over from the small planes to the big planes, particularly in regards to making them go where you point them while they’re in cruise configuration. Identifying landmarks from the air, and locating where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there isn’t some amazing mental feat. Yes, you have to learn how to do it - you have to learn how to drive on a freeway, too, and tie your shoes and do a bunch of other things of various complexity. Locating where the plane is after a hijack isn’t that amazing, either - airliners follow predictable and regular paths. It wouldn’t take that much research to figure out pretty much what route a particular flight would follow, and after the hijack you’d know you’d have to be somewhere on that route. Or, if you really want to make it easy, buy a handheld aviation GPS, turn it on, and it will tell you where you are. No thought required. That’s assuming you don’t know how to use the on-board navigational equipment.
I’m not sure anyone was implying that was how it happened. The initial idea might have been hatched that way, but I don’t think this required years and years of incredibly detailed planning. What required the time and effort was getting the guys in place, trained, and funded.