It’s a frightening scenario Freedom. The signs so far are good. Your government so far has seen through the red mist. As long as they don’t do anything that can be widely characterised as an outrage (cf. various things that have been suggested on this MB, sigh) we won’t get to stage two, and the terrorists will fail.
I have a few ideas on this which haven’t been too popular.
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I don’t think they were trying to kill as many people as possible. If so, they would have taken later flights and hit the WTC when it was full of people.
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I don’t think they expected to collapse the WTC. All the experts, even the people who built it, said it could take a hit from a 707. Nobody expected the fire to weaken it that quickly, otherwise, there wouldn’t have been all those firefighters in it, which leads to
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I don’t think they expected to kill half the firefighters in NYC or all of the bomb squad members. If they did, there would have been firebombs going off all over the city that night, and it didn’t happen.
However horrific this was, however many people were injured or died, if the people behind it had planned better, done more research, or just plain wanted to hurt us more, they could have.
They did this just to show they could.
If the terrorists were too successful, their first clue might have come in the afternoon, when Moammar Qaddafi referred to the attack as “an unparallelled act of brutality.” When I heard this I thought," and he would know."
By the same token, the hijackers deliberately chose trans-continental flights full of fuel, and crashed them not long after takeoff. They may have calculated on starting a fire. A structural engineer could have told them the exact altitude to hit to maximize the chance of collapse.
And crashing around 9 o’clock may have been calculated as well. Business was getting started, so the buildings weren’t vacant. The sun was up, people were on the streets (with cameras, which is important). Meanwhile, the rest of the country was still waking up and saw it all happen live on TV.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. We just don’t know at this point.
When we saw it burning, the first thing we thought, and knew, was that this attack was timed to kill as many people as possible.
If they wanted to only blow up the buildings, they would have done it on a weekend or during the night. At 9:00 am on a weekday morning, you’re looking to kill as many innocent people as possible.
You’re out, in other words, to cause a massacre. They succeeded. They won’t live long to enjoy it.
Well, ABC just reported that two more groups of five terrorists each were arrested today trying to board planes at La Guardia and Kennedy. In one case, the group had tickets for a flight that had been cancelled when La Guardia was shut down (right after the second plane hit WTC), and in the other, they had attempted to board a plane at Kennedy on Tuesday morning but security noticed their knives and the group left without boarding… and then tried it again today.
So if ABC has its facts right, that means there were six total groups attempting to hijack planes; that means that only half of them were successful. And as for were they too successful- they felt like it was worth trying again today. So something tells me that the group doesn’t think it went too far- and actually thinks it didn’t go far enough.