FRDE’s post in this thread made me realize that I have no memory whatsoever about who I initially assumed/suspected was responsible for the 9/11 attacks before I heard about Al Qaeda. This is strange because I can clearly remember assuming that Islamic terrorists were responsible for the Oklahoma City attacks, though maybe I wouldn’t remember that detail today if the assumption hadn’t so famously been proven wrong. So who did you suspect was responsible for 9/11 – domestic terrorists, Islamic terrorists, or another group?
Well my views are coloured by being British, we had quite a lot of trouble from the IRA - including a bomb in my home town, they blew themselves up in the doorway of my local bank.
Since I’ve been to Moslem countries on business, Bahrain, Malysia, Indonesia, Sudan - at the time I did not regard any of them as particularly fanatical
- especially the Sudanese who I met, who were senior officials, well educated, intelligent and kept talking about the Koran which was a bore.
Since 9/11 I’ve learnt a fair bit about the Moslem setup, although I was taken aback yesterday by an interesting article by Martin Amis in the Observer Review.
A ‘martyr’ skips straight into paradise, bypassing the day of judgment, but incredibly he/she gets to take 70 of his/her mates along as well.
For a believer, suicide bombing makes perfect sense.
Bush; my very first thought was “I can’t believe Bush actually went and did it”. Why, you ask ? Because my opinion of him and the Republicans is just that low.
I thought it was an accident. Then the second plane hit and I thought “oh shit”. I was a bit too young then to have any idea who might have done it.
I also thought it was an accident at first. “That air traffic controller is so going to lose his job” thought I. Until the second plane hit. I don’t think I’d heard of al Qaeda before then but I assumed, correctly, that it was Arabs.
Pretty much the same line of thought as jabiru. This was soon followed by a panicked phone call home as I remembered my parents were flying out of Boston that day (they were fine. They had tickets to Seattle for that afternoon and had no idea that anything was going on when I called).
Accident for the first plane, and I actually thought it was domestic terrorists for the rest - another attempt like McVeigh. I figured it would be a LOT easier for people living in the country, with all the freedom to move around and get on planes pretty much anywhere to pull something like this off. It was obviously “anti-American” in target, but I thought it was a domestic group, unhappy with the current government etc.
I didn’t think “Bush did it” or the government did it - it was way too elaborate and too traumatic, I thought it was just too ridiculous a thought. It would have had to involve too many people, too many important people, with a lot to lose if they were found out, and those aren’t the kind of people to do something like that. I figured another group of nutjobs like McVeigh or the sad, screwed up adult version of the kids who conducted the Columbine massacre.
I thought it was bin Laden. I had recently completed graduate studies in international relations and had read a lot about the growth of international terrorism and bin Laden specifically.
The end of Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor sprang immediately to my mind. I didn’t think of any particular group initially. I just know my first words were, “OMG it is Debt of Honor.”
After the second plane hit, making it clear it was an intentional attack, I immediately thought it was bin Laden.
I thought the first plane was terrorists but I was hoping it was an accident. Sounds funny to put it that way. When the second plane hit I started packing my duffel bag. I assumed correctly that it was moslem extremists. Everytime I read a post from someone who believes the conspiracy theories I feel like reaching through the internet and choking them out. This morning I saw a MSNBC poll which had over 38% saying the government did it.
I did not know what to think when the first plane hit, at first we did not even realize it was a jet and I guess I assumed it was a horrible accident. Then on live TV we saw the second jet hit and I started saying something like, “damn terrorist, damn religious fanatics, they just killed tens of thousands of people.”
I was sure it was related to the prior attempt by Muslim fanatics to blow up the towers. I then remembered my cousin was working in tower two and I started crying. Turned out by dumb luck she was home sick, recover from pneumonia. Probably one of the only times you can be thankful for pneumonia.
Jim
I didn’t have any guesses. When they started talking about Bin Laden, people over here were going “bin who and al what? Is that someone we should know about?”
Pretty much my response. I never heard of Bin Laden until after 9/11. And since the way I heard of the attacks was ‘someone bombed the WTC with an airplane’, accident never entered my mind.
The Serbs.
I immediately thought about bin Laden. I remembered how al Queda had performed simultaneous attacks in the past and this certainly had the same MO. I also thought about Debt of Honor and thought, “Oh crap, the Capitol will be next!” Didn’t think about the Pentagon.
In the SDMB thread of that day someone posted almost immediately that they thought of bin Laden. Anyone have the link to that thread?
I thought it was most probably Arab terrorists (I too still remembered the previous WTC bombing although I wouldn’t have been able to remember the names Bin Laden or al Qaeda). Because of Oklahoma City, I still reserved some room for other possibilities, though.
When the first plane hit, they were initially reporting it on the radio as just “a plane,” and I thought someone had accidentally flown a small plane into the tower, like a single engine prop-job Cessna or something. As soon as the second plane hit, I thought holy crap, this is no accident, it’s Osama bin Laden and al Queda.
Exactly the same for me. I remember listening to the initial coverage on NPR as it was happening, on my commute into work. They were saying a plane had hit the WTC, no specifics about size or passengers or damage. I just imagined a hobbyist in a small prop plane getting lost and crashing into the tower. Then I got to work and opened cnn.com and saw the images…
I wasn’t here when the planes hit, of course, but I’ve read that entire thread. I can’t find it for the life of me - apparently the search doesn’t go back that far - but it was linked to recently, I’d say within the last two months, by someone in a 9/11 discussion thread. It was amazing and horrific to see everyone posting as the news came in. And it made me just a little bit proud to be part of the SMDB.
I didn’t know or care who had done it. To this day I’m not sure. Al Queda and Osama bin Laden, of course, take credit for it, so at least for being the kind of madmen who would take credit for something like that they should be punished. But the US has a lot of enemies, and it could have been anyone. There is proof of Al Queda ties, but we don’t know what kind of accomplices they had or…really anything.
Don’t know. All I remember is the weird surreal-ness of it all, and talking to a friend of mine from New York who could see everything going down from her window.
~Tasha