OK, so you’re talking about 24 middle eastern people well trained in sharpshooting buying sniper rifles and coordinating a set of 120 murders a day while travelling extensively and having the entire FBI chasing them?
I don’t think they would get away with it. Maybe for the first day. Maybe a few of them could do it for a little longer. Some would mysteriously disappear to Gitmo before they started. Some would be caught once they started. A few might get away with it. Assuming that AQ could get 24 expendable sharpshooters into the US for an attack that is more subtle and less shocking than one carbomb… not to mention the coordinators and support crew, so that is another dozen… all of which must know enough about the plot to execute coordinated strikes, but not enough to tattle on the others…
It just doesn’t seem bloody likely. Then again, if you had told me that they could hijack 4 airliners at one time 4 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I just think that the overall effect wouldn’t be that great - a series of carbombs would be better. It isn’t always about how many people die, but about how good it looks in the paper the next morning.
I’ve actually always wondered why they don’t just bomb the lines outside of the security checkpoints at airports. You have about a hundred people standing in an enclosed area. That would totally shut down the airline industry for a while, those airports for longer, kill a bunch of people, and leave us scrambling for a way to defend that (how do you defend against a suicide bomber bombing a line at a security checkpoint?)
As with minty green, I am very curious about the veracity of this statement. Because we cannot know what their plans were prior to the attack, all we have is this statement of what their plans might have been. How can we be assured that this is so? Where does this quote come from and what evidence do we have that it is true?
It really just sounds like Pee-Wee Herman: “I meant to do that.”
It really just sounds like the sort of thing one wants to hear from the war-protest quadrant. “See? I told you we shouldn’t be in Iraq, that’s just what they’d want us to do!!!” Because it may be what the war protesters want to hear (at least in my interpretation), I have to ask if it’s too good to be true.
Yea, because Allah knows that our exercise in Iraq hasn’t pissed off and polarized the Muslim world against us. :-p
I always love how, supposedly, AQ was telling the truth when they wanted the Socialists elected in Spain, but lying when they said they wanted Bush elected. We have to remember that these people are as much politicians as anyone else - they do whatever makes them look the best. If they think they can get away with convincing people that they can manipulate elections in Spain or speed up their withdrawl from Iraq, that’s what they’ll say, though all evidence points to the attacks being planned long before this time. If they think that Bush is being a good recruiting poster, that’s what they will say. If liberals think that the war is going badly, that’s obviously what they will say (“we told you so”). Sometimes it is true, sometimes it is a lie.
Obviously, I think it would be a stretch for anyone to expect America to shrivel up and die after 9/11. Therefore, that theory can be safely set aside. Remaining theories are that it is a death wish for themselves, a publicity stunt for their recruiting/conspiracy to create conflict with the Middle East, or they didn’t think ahead very much and just wanted to strike out. Or something else. It is an ink blot - everyone will see their own motive behind it.
See, there’s this myth now that after 9/11 the world came together and started singing Kumbayah together in love, peace and harmony. But then that big bad Bush came along and ‘squandered’ it all by going after Iraq.
The fact of the matter is, the love and good will around the world lasted about two weeks. As soon as the U.S. announced that it was going after the Taliban, huge protests began around the world. There were numerous protest in London organized by the Stop The War coalition and International ANSWER. Estimates of attendence for the biggest one ran anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000, depending on who you ask.
Yeah, everyone was just rallied around the U.S., weren’t they? This was only a few weeks after 9/11, mind you.
The fact is, everyone loved the U.S. only when it was kicked and down and burying its dead. The minute it got back on its feet and started going after the bad guys, the old order re-asserted itself.
In fact, there were far greater protests against the war in Afghanistan than again the war in Iraq.
I’m still looking for the “hundreds of thousands” you cited, Sam. Or are you saying we should round up every anti-American-post-9/11 nutjob on the planet, lump them into one group, and hope that the total number will actually approach six digits all together?
The Stop the War coalition said that over 100,000 protested in London on one day, and there were many days of protests.
And let’s not forget that a whole bunch of people on this board were against the war in Afghanistan at that time. Luckily for them, all those posts vanished in the great SDMB meltdown, or you can bet I’d be reminding them of it.
Great. Now do you have a credible source, one that isn’t run by the Moonies?
Incidentally, the alleged lost posts that you refer to were from approximately mid-January 2002 to March or April of that year. The war in Afghanistan was on for several months before that. Plenty of time for you to dig up all those alleged posters decrying the war in Afghanistan. I’m sure there were a couple, but that’s hardly surprising given the international nature of this board.
It has been a while since the WTC attack. On the other hand, it seems to me that such attacks in the US only happened at long intervals even before we started spending billions on the so-called war on terror. I think we need a lot more evidence before we can say anything in either direction about the matter.
For example, what is the historical mean time between attacks in the US? And what is the standard deviation of those times? Sush information would give us some insight into whether or not the time since WTC is significant.
I don’t see how the matter can be settled for sure. It is an uncontrolled experiment. There is no control group and we don’t know that our war on terror (don’t laugh, it’s serious) is the only, or even the principle, determinant.
Sure they did. However, their ‘estimates’ of numbers can be treated sceptically. The police estimated 15,000, which is still more than I would’ve thought, to be fair, but nothing like the 1 million + (or 2 million + if we’re going with the Stop The War Coalition numbers!) marching against the Iraq ‘adventure’.
I would imagine that if the Stop The War folks actually got 100,000 folks in one protest, there’d be pictures of it in the major media – sorta like the stuff we got with the Anti-Iraq-War protests, which were impressively massive.
But even assuming the numbers were accurate and not overly exaggerated (cough*ahem), I still fail to see the “hundreds of thousands” Sam Stone was flogging. At least in my book, “hundreds of” suggests more than one hundred, since there’s supposed to be a plurality involved…
The Khalid Shaikh Mohammed story doesn’t seem very credible to me…Or, if it is, it seems that they were pretty stupid. The implication seems to be that they were planning the same sort of attack (and, indeed, I remember that Bin Laden issued some statement shortly after the attacks that claimed that there would be more planes crashing into buildings…which I also took to be meaningless bluster).
The original attack was premised on the element of surprise…Indeed, that was the diabolical brilliance of their plan. You can probably only hold off a plane of passengers with box-cutters if they believe the worst thing that you could possibly do is to kill all of them…And, indeed, the plane where the passengers found out what was going on in the larger scheme of things via cell phone and revolted and that crashed in Pennsylvania is evidence of this.
Besides which, there was the issue of how easy it would be for anyone vaguely Arabic to show up at flight schools without attracting attention. Hell, even before 9/11 they attracted attention, just not quite enough for the authorities to connect all of the dots.
And, of course, there was the increased security on airplanes. Before 9/11, you could probably get things like box-cutters onto planes without question. And, if they managed to catch you, you could just feign ignorance that you can’t take such a thing on-board. I am not claiming that security is good enough that it is impossible to get such things onto planes now (didn’t someone smuggle some of these things onto a plane several months after 9/11 purportedly to demonstrate the security weaknesses?), but it is at least a much riskier endeavor.
Yeah…I am sort of amused that Sam is willing to accept the Stop War Coalition’s numbers so uncritically. I can’t imagine that he was quite so willing to at the time. Even when I am sympathetic with a protest, I still treat the numbers that event organizers claim are there with a certain amount of skepticism.