I recenlty saw an interesting report from the Whtie house about the September 11th high jackers, that I’d like someone in the teeming Billions to help me out with.
Some of the 9/11 high jackers, were taking street fighting lessons and other such combat lessons before the high jacking. They were presumably preparing to storm cockpits or some such other dastardly deed on those doomed flights. My heart goes out to the people on those flights.
But my question is this: If the high jackers were big bad trained Al Queda operatives, why did they need to take street fighting or combat classes here in the U.S?
Does this not strike anyone as particularly odd, or am I just missing the picture?
Al Quaida is a terrorist organization relying mostly on training guerrilla fighters. Most of the required expertise is therefore either in the use of weapons, or explosives. Unarmed hand to hand combat is quite rare in an actual war. Most training focuses on using and maintaining your rifle, which is the primary weapon for infantry, and is nearly always going to be more effective than a dozen black belts.
The Al Quaida terrorists of 9/11, on the other hand, were training for a special mission - hijacking a plane. They did not expect to have any weapons more effective than their box cutters and knives, and most likely expected to perhaps need some backup skills in hand-to-hand so that they could still take over the cockpit from the pilots if they lost their knives.
Thus they would seek out H2H training for the special situation, as they sought out pilot training, so they could fly the planes into the WTC. Pilot training for the average Al Quaida terrorist would be almost as big a waste of time as learning karate, since few terrorists fly airplanes.
FYI - did you know that one of the heroes who prevented Flight 093 from attacking Washington DC was Jeremy Glickman, a former US National Collegiate judo champion?