I can’t believe that there isn’t a long list of possible terrorist scenarios that government officials and think tanks have that INCLUDED the possible practice of crazed suicidal fanatics securing a plane and flying it into American buildings. There must be many more such easily possible acts on this list, including things like anthrax that I won’t mention because I don’t want to give anybody any ideas.
If anybody did think of the plane device, why didn’t the government guard against it by merely installing anti-highjacked ground to air missiles in major cities?
Everyone assumed that there were people on the White House for instance ready to fire at suspicious planes. Also, why were any planes allowed to fly over the capital anyway?
I’m sure someone considered it somewhere, along with a vast number of other possible terrorist attacks. The job of any security agency is to decide what is likely to happen and guard against it: you cannot guard against every possible attack in every possible location. I suppose in this (tragic) case that this was not since as a particularly likely threat.
It’s not feasible to guard every tall building in every city in every state with missile batteries. Even if it where logistically possible, you’re talking about turning one plane into tons of metal and burning fuel spread over a large area. Not a pleasant alternative.
I’ve certainly heard this one before. Stinger SAMs on the roof, I think. I assume that the highest profiles government buildings are more likely to be considered targets, and that the human cost of shooting down planes aimed at them is regarded as ‘acceptable’ given the VIPs being protected.
Space. There’s always a demand for routes over cities since flights to city airports have to come from somewhere. London is regularly overflown, since there just isn’t the airspace available anywhere else for planes to take off or land.
I meant seen, not since. Sorry.
The problem is that nobody knew what the hijackers wanted to do until it would have been too late to use SAMs.
I don’t believe it’s a necessity, since AFAIK, civilian planes aren’t allowed to fly above Paris.
(Though the admnistrative limits of Paris are the same than during the XIX° century, so what is considered “outside the city limits” in Paris would possibly be considered as “inside the city limits” in London. But anyway, planes still cannot fly over the downtown.)
[BOOK SPOILERS]
Read Tom Clancy’s ‘Debt of Honor’ and the continuation in ‘Executive Orders’. In ‘Debt of Honor’ a Japanese terrorist crashes a 747 into the Capital building while Congress is in session, thus decapitating the American government (with the exception of now vice-President jack Ryan of course).
Tom Clancy spoke on the news right after the bombings. Apparently, when he asked some general or someone (after he wrote the book) if they had planned for such an event he was given a response “we will now!”.
re: Why Wasn’t This Scenaria Foreseen?
It should have been foreseen, that’s why there are so many conspiracy thoeries on the sdmb:
Another conspiracy theory crawls out of the woodwork.
Did the U.S. allow the 9/11 attacks in order to spark a conflict in Afghanistan?
Did the CIA know about the WTC attack plans, or are they just impotent?
Statement from the Workers World Party http://www.workers.org/
…
"Under these conditions, it would be irresponsible at this time to jump to conclusions as to what political forces were behind these
attacks. Many, many times in the past, going back to the battleship Maine in this country and the Reichstag fire in Germany, bogus
explanations have been fabricated by the authorities in order to line up the population behind a course of aggression.
It should be remembered that the 1964 congressional resolution giving a blank check to the Johnson administration for the Vietnam
War was passed 98-2 after a fabricated “attack” on U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf that was later exposed in the Pentagon
Papers.
On Sept. 12, a resolution passed the U.S. Senate 100-0 that gives the present administration the same kind of unrestrained
authority to wage war and to finance the Pentagon with whatever funds it requests. In the context of the present capitalist
economic downturn, everyone should understand that this means with Social Security funds–the trillions of dollars set aside from
workers’ earnings for their retirement–more than anything else.
The pronouncements of U.S. leaders from President George W. Bush on down make it clear that the government’s priority is to
restore the image of unchallenged U.S. hegemony in the world by unleashing its powerful military somewhere. There can be no
doubt that the targets will be peoples in oppressed countries where the mass sentiment is already one of anger at past U.S.
aggression and extreme exploitation".
…
It was forseen. Terrorism experts forsaw it, aviation experts forsaw it, policy experts forsaw it. Hell, I even saw it on the series premiere of “The Lone Gunmen” a while back.
The trouble is, forseeing isn’t believing. It’s one thing to know intellectually that something is possible; it’s quite another thing to see that possible event actually occur.
Plenty of people tried to warn us.* Plenty of people tried to warn England about Nazi Germany in 1939. Plenty of people tried to warn the US about Japan in 1941. Sometimes, alas, we can only believe after our worst dreams have come true.
*Lest the conspiracy fans dig in here, I’m talking about general something-big-is-coming warnings, not date-time-and-flight-number warnings.
Re London: the bounds of the City of London are only a small bit of the larger metropolis, as with Paris. The City of London proper is the area formerly bordered by the old medieval walls. The metropolis as a whole has a much more bureaucratic name–Greater London, maybe.
This is coupled with the “it’s never happened before” syndrome that helps foster disbelief in extreme circumstances. Maybe tomorrow the sun won’t come up. We have no written statement or agreement that it will, but since it’s always been this way, we’ll probably keep believing that the sun will come up every morning, right up until the day it doesn’t. There’s never been a similar attack on the US before, so we believed right up until it happened that it never would…