I was wondering this; aircraft hijacking has been around since commercial flight was invented in the early 20th century. One could argue that things were much more lax in the past and that the 9/11 hijackers would have had it much easier when they could bring actual bombs onto planes during the ‘Golden Age’ of hijackings.
I’m also assuming that terrorism wasn’t a new thing and just as prevalent (different ways) if not more today and also, the idea of flying planes into buildings wasn’t unimaginable.
So, why was it until the beginning of the millennium that we finally saw planes being crashed into buildings? Better yet, how did governments not realize that the policy of co-operating with hijackers was silly?
A theory: plane hijackings were generally carried out by internationalist terrorists, while suicide attacks were generally carried out by religious terrorists. It took the world’s first major internationalist religious terrorist organization, al-Qaida, to combine the concepts.
The missing component was “terrorists willing to die for the cause”. Islamic terrorists prior to that point would either hijack and divert/hold hostages (like in Marseilles in 94) or plant a bomb and not be on the flight (see : Lockerbie)
The idea of systematic, planned suicide attacks as tools of terror rather than desperation/last ditch really only took off in the mid 80s. I mean, think about it. You have to find a crew of guys who not only don’t care if they live or die, but still care about life or The Cause enough that they’re willing to train and acquire skills and plan for a more effective suicide. That’s not rational, and I would expect such people are few and far between. By comparison, the idea to walk into a café with a suicide vest or to drive a truck full of explosives into a building can be made in the spur of the moment. Living with “I’m going to drive a plane into a building” for multiple years and not doubting or realizing “WTF am I doing with my life ?!” is another kettle of fish.
There’s also the fact that flying a large commercial flight isn’t exactly a walk in the park, and it’s pretty stupid to go to the trouble of acquiring all those skills and then only taking advantage of them the once.
There was a previous plan to blow up the WTC so you could argue al-Qaida definitely wanted to make an attack on US soil, and had targetted these iconic buildings.
Perhaps it was an matter of finding, as we now say, the right ‘delivery system’.
What they came up with was fantastical in scale and concept.
On another note, it brings up the hijacker on Flight 93, Ziad Jarrah. Don’t really believe in conspiracies regarding 9/11 and not interested in them to be honest, but this has to be the most baffling question. Why would an attractive young Lebanese man who grew up in a wealthy house, attended a secular Catholic school, enjoyed life and never expressed ideations for murder only go to join the worst murder suicide of the century?
I can understand Atta seeing as he grew up in a very strict environment but Jarrah, doesn’t make sense at all.
I think this is a Western projection tendency - the belief that people are motivated primarily by material things and that if prosperous and well to do, have no reason to “go bad.” Many people who join ISIS come from wealthy, secular Western countries. Some serial killers or mass murderers, AIUI, came from rich families. Bin Laden himself came from one of the wealthiest families in the Middle East.
I meant that OBL apparently wanted to keep the ‘Planes Operation’ under wraps as possible; part of that meant sharing the targets with very few people.
It suggested that the muscle hijackers didn’t know they were about to crash into WTC and Pentagon until they were either in the cockpit with the pilot hijackers or approaching the targets.
“We’re going to crash this airplane into the WTC / Pentagon / White House.”
“We’re going to crash this airplane into something important.”
“We’re hijacking this plane and might get hurt or killed by a SWAT team before it’s over.”
“We’re hijacking this plane, but every time that’s happened before the US authorities have negotiated a peaceful settlement; we’ll end up arrested & tried but probably no worse.”
For sure the guys who ended up steering the jets started out at door #1. I would expect that most of the rest of the hijackers were somewhere between door #3 & #4.
The subset of people “willing to die for their cause (if truly necessary)” is much larger than the subset “willing to commit (known guaranteed) suicide for their cause”. This is true even in cultures that have been (recently) fetishizing suicide.
Is there any reliable evidence out there on what the “muscle” really expected?
Very few people know that that Charles Lindbergh’s initial 1927 plan was to crash the “Spirit of St. Louis” into the Eiffel Tower, but he ran out of gas and had to land at the airport.
Eight years earlier, Alcock and Brown, noted British WWI aviators, championed England’s domination over Ireland by crashing their Transatlantic airplane into a bog in Connemara.
Adolf Hitler devilishly terrorized the American citizens of Lakehurst, New Jersey, on their own soil by having the Hindenburg explode directly over their heads.
This is the correct answer. The concept has existed for decades (infamously forming the plot of a shitty Tom Clancy novel in which a suiciding pilot–in this case Japanese, following a brief war between the US and Japan–flies his airliner into the US Capitol) and security analysts had long warned of the vulnerability of allowing the flight deck to be readily accessed from the passenger cabin, a readily addressible issue which would have rendered the September 11 terrorists unable to do more than slash at passengers with the (at the time legally carried) box cutters. It was low hanging fruit that awaited semi-competent zealotry and coordination, and even then, the signs of such an attack were clear but lost in bureaucratic miscommunication between intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
If I had a plan that ensured I would get control of an aircraft with a list price of 200 million dollars, I would seriously consider whether my ends would be better served by monetizing that aircraft as an alternative to using it as a weapon. At one point they had four aircraft, their passengers, crew, and cargo. That’s got to be close to a billion dollars. You’ve got to be crazy to throw that much money at some buildings.
Hold hostages? That’s been done numerous times before, and almost always ends with the hijackers/hostage-takers eventually dead and not getting what they wanted, probably via SWAT sniper after a long standoff.
Sell the airplane? How? Who is going to buy four airliners that no airline or customer can legally purchase? Those airplanes didn’t have enough fuel to fly very far. How would you refuel them? Those airplanes would instantly be known worldwide; registration/serial numbers and everything. Suppose some FARC cartel leader in Colombia wanted them. How are you going to fly those airliners to the customer without being shot down by the U.S. Air Force?
Strip the plane down to its metal components and sell those? Stolen Boeing 757 and 767 components is an awfully small market to fence such goods.
What al-Qaeda achieved with the 9/11 attacks - 3,000 killed and over a trillion dollars’ of loss directly and indirectly inflicted on America - far surpasses anything they could have done by selling the goods or getting ransom for hostages.
Also, I don’t think the 757 and 767 were worth $200 million apiece. That sounds more like Boeing 777 (early-model) territory.
Huh? That’s the worst example you could pick since the goal of these hijackers was precisely to crash the plane on the Eiffel Tower, as mentioned in your own link, in fact :
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
the terrorists murdered three passengers, with the intention to blow up the plane over the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
[/QUOTE]
And this was already known at the time. I remember interviews back then where it was stated that if the hijackers had refused to land in Marseilles, it would have been shot down since the French government had received intelligence about their plan to crash it in Paris.
By the way, some time before 9/11, plans to similarly hijack and crash an aircraft were uncovered during the arrest of a terrorist cell in the Philippines.