So here’s my theory on 9/11 (U.S. knew it was imminent)

Great Debates
1

No, nothing about controlled demolitions, or Israeli intelligence, or a U.S. attack on its own people.

But I do believe that the top of the U.S. government knew that this attack was imminent (despite not specifically knowing where and when), and I believe that the top of the U.S. government planned a response before the attack occurred.

Am I nuts? Famously there was a presidential daily briefing on August 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”. If that was the title, it’s unfathomable that they didn’t discus the potential aftermath.

Attorney General John Ashcroft also stopped flying commercial aircraft that summer.

Bush was out of the White House for the majority of that summer, to the point that the press was commenting.

The attack was in September, and we started a war October 7th.

And while I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this statement, I read it in September, 2001, and it has always stayed with me.

The tragedy that was 9/11 horrified me then, and it still does today. I don’t think the U.S. government- even at the very top - had any actionable intelligence that would have enabled them to stop a terrorist attack. But I do think they knew it was coming, and I think they did expect that it would lead to war well before the rest of us contemplated the tragedy.

So, what do you think? Incidentally, I’m fine with thread drift - 9/11 is a weighty topic, these 25 years later. I watched some documentary videos yesterday, and shed some tears, so this was on my mind. Thanks to all who reply.

2

I think governments know everything thats going to happen. No, I have no cites.
I just wonder why Norad was so incompetant.

3

The question is just what level of detail was known. Did the US know that bin Laden was planning a major attack against the US in the near future? Almost certainly. Did they know that that attack would be carried out via hijacked airplanes deliberately crashed into targets? Maybe. Did they know that the attacks would be on the morning of September 11, 2001, directed at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon? Almost certainly not.

4

Agreed.

Cynically, though, I think the administration was planning its response before the attack occurred.

Perhaps that’s inevitable, and Bush was in an intractable position.

I mean, do you publicly announce that there is a threat of a plane being hijacked by a suicidal jihadist, thereby interrupting air travel, and commerce, across the country? Or is it your duty to do so, so everybody is on high alert?

How much of an alarm do you raise?

The presidential daily briefing refers to hijackers. They would have anticipated suicide bombers, although I can imagine you’d also be concerned about other forms of public transportation (subways, for example).

Basically, a presidential address that warns people might just set off a nationwide panic, to say nothing of the bigotry against certain groups.

But if you don’t take any action as president, aren’t you being derelict in your duty to the country?

5

The government has contingency reports at the ready with regular updates for just about every reasonable scenario you can imagine. If something happens they just pull the report that at the most needs a few tweaks. Of course and obviously they had a plan ready. That’s how it works.

7

Moderating:

Tread carefully in this thread with replies.

The following is explicitly not allowed according to the rules:

9

It doesn’t appear to me that Norad had a role at the time.

Besides, I’d don’t think there was realistically enough time to scramble fighter jets to stop the first 2 planes. It seems to me that it wasn’t until after the 2nd plane hit the tower that people understood that this was a coordinated effort, and that any commandeered plane at that point was a guided missile.

10

And once that was known, further attacks of that form became impossible even without specific governmental action. As seen with Flight 93.

If the specific threat of crashing hijacked airplanes were anticipated, there were measures that could have been taken without inciting panic. For instance, the simple measure of putting locks on cockpit doors, which was done very quickly after the fact.

11

We were less than a year on from the USS Cole bombing, and almost 10 years into a sustained string of al Qaeda terror attacks. It would defy logic to think that the US didn’t have plans drawn up targeting their training facilities, plans that were probably central in debates about when the US should act (preemptively, or what the threshold would be for a coordinated response). What the US didn’t have was a good answer to “state sponsors of terrorism.” I don’t know that there’s any evidence that the US was planning attacks for October 2001, but I don’t think there needs to be to explain the rapid action.

As for the attacks themselves, the evidence suggests that officials new something was coming, and that something may be hijackings, but officials also felt like they were doing the things they needed to do to screen passengers. Nevertheless, those two things are (IMO) enough to explain high ranking officials avoiding commercial air travel. Whether or not the public deserved the same information depends on details that are still classified.

Of course, any suggestion that the government knew the attackers would hijack planes and use them as piloted missiles is square in CT territory.

12

My opinion is that they must have had evidence that something was coming, some kind of terror attack, but of what kind of attack and of what level of damage, they did not have specific evidence. That one cabinet officer stopped flying commercial, and the President spent a lot of time out of the White House, are not telling evidence of much of anything except after-the-fact wisdom.

It seemed clear to me that some powerful elements in the administration did want to go to war before the attack, and so they would have had plans for war ready on any of various kinds of provocation.

I think the OP.s point of view is wrong, and that the evidence supporting their view is cherry-picked.

13

I apologize if my intervention seems a bit strange, but I’ve nurtured this thought for some time. Soon after the 9/11 attack, I was reading a book about Mahatma Ghandi and I noticed that the mass meeting he organized at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa took place on September 11 (1906), when he officially launched his resistance movement. This coincidence sent shivers down my spine. Bin Laden was an educated man and I think he might have known about it.

It is hard to guess what a wild person will do. However, people like Bin Laden (who regard themselves as providential leaders) tend to perform theatrical gestures that could somewhat become predictable if you were aware of their backgrounds, systems of values, and ultimate goals. But you will probably need a poweful machine to decrypt twisted minds like that.

14

There are only 365 days in the year, and a heck of a lot more than that events in world history. Coincidences like that are inevitable.

15

Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, coined two words that describe the thought processes of conspiracy theories.

One is “patternicity” - assigning patterns to meaningless noise. The other is “agenticity” - taking the falsely created patterns and assuming that they must have intent behind them. Both are related to “confirmation bias” - ignoring all contrary evidence and cherry-picking only those instances which confirm the conclusion you’re already come to.

Real historians certainly do sift through all previous events and try to understand which are important. Finding out that the pilots had taken flight lessons in America is obviously a step related to the events of 9/11.

The issue here is whether instances that appear part of a pattern - leaders avoiding commercial aircraft - are indications of awareness or have more mundane causes. Bush never took any commercial flights; that he avoided them is meaningless. That he took a long vacation is part of a pattern, but a pattern that went back many presidents.

That the U.S. had plans to attack Osama bin Laden is true; they had had them since 1987. The historic question is whether they were waiting for a trigger - any trigger - that would give an excuse for a full fledged military operation against the Taliban. That the attack actually targeted Saddam Hussein looks like confirmation that they had plans, but those had no direct connection to 9/11. He had no ties to the Taliban, nor was he leader of Afghanistan. It’s far more likely that Bush Jr. was seeking revenge for his father’s loss of the presidency.

Your statement is hard to argue with, although one could quibble about what “imminent” meant. In the years before Trump, however, launching pre-emptive attacks on countries not shooting at us was unthinkable. A trigger was necessary. Only in hindsight can a series of dots leading to that trigger be identified. Earlier in 2021 those dots were part of a much larger cloud. They had to nucleate like water does around silver iodide seeded in clouds to create rain.

16

Exactly. AIUI, investigators have not ever found solid evidence that the date was chosen for any symbolic significance. It was on a Tuesday, after the summer travel season, chosen for typically light passenger levels on the flights.

17

And it was only a few years earlier that we bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox.

18

I think the important distinction that gets missed by conspiracy theorists is the difference between aspirational plans of the enemy versus active intelligence that can be acted on. There was a counter-terrorism advisor who wouldn’t shut up about some plot involving planes and the senior officials at the time told him if he couldn’t make with the hard evidence they were tired of hearing about it.

The sky is a busy place, with about 4,500 planes in the air when 9/11 happened. What would a perfect NORAD response look like?

The idea wasn’t unheard of. It was a plot point in a popular Tom Clancy novel that had been published years before, where a jetliner is used as a missile to destroy the Capitol and most of the US government.

19

It was long an open secret in Washington, that one of the, if not the most concerning security issue was hijackers flying planes into government buildings. Most definitely not a “conspiracy theory”. If you mean the government generally was not aware those specific individuals were planning such an enterprise is a different matter.

The documents released probably make more sense in context. They probably had (and continue to have) a gazillion threats just like they had every day 365 days a year. They are numerous and probably start looking like background noise or wallpaper after a few decades.

20

Yes, I mean I don’t believe it fit the known MOs of any terror groups. Planes were hijacked, and suicide bombings happened, but I don’t think there was any credible intel that suicide plane bombs were on the horizon. All training for dealing with hijackers up to that point reflected the current threat understanding, which is why the cabin doors weren’t locked as a matter of course.