What do you do in order to avert disaster?
Call the FAA.
-FK
Wow, I’ve thought about this before. I guess I would make a bunch of calls to the NYC police department, the FBI, the airports, etc. I’d try to make them all at once from some obscure payphone so hopefully they wouldn’t come chasing after me to arrest me. I don’t know. I’d probably make all the common mistakes made by clairvoyants in TV shows like Early Edition. Like running down the street trying to convince chuckling police officers that something terrible is going to happen.
It’s really too bad this couldn’t happen.
Two options:
- Stop the planes from taking off.
- Evacuate the towers (for sake of ease, I’ll disregard the Pentagon. Apologies in advance to those who lost someone at the Pentagon)
Option #1
As I see it, there are few ways to stop a plane from taking off. The easiest would be a bomb threat, but that would only delay the plane taking off. You would have to stop the flight altogether. If someone at the FAA would believe you or give a damn, then I think Fuji might be on to something.
Option #2
Again, you could use a bomb threat to get everyone out of the towers before the planes arrive. Other than that, you could use any other method to get people out of the towers. Of course it would cause widespread panic, but that’s better than death. You could start a small fire in a bathroom or something, just so the alarms go off. You could throw some flour into the air and shout “Anthrax!”. Whatever.
Make as many phone calls to as many people as I can think of, and maybe call in a bomb threat to the Boston Airport to stop the planes taking off.
Dont forget that if you should somehow avert this disaster. It may happen again next week, or next year…
Bomb threats would only delay the inevitable.
I think the most effective, although partially self sacrificial thing to do would be to memorize the names, faces, dates, and locations of the hijackers, and the numbers of the flights, taking in as much detail as I can before traveling back in time.
Then walk into the nearest FBI office and say that I am the leader of a terrorist cell group associated with Osama Bin Ladin, and they are planning a major terrorist act against the WTC and Pentagon the next day that must be stopped at all costs.
Blalron seems to have a good idea. I don’t think you’d even need to throw yourself to the lions that way - the FBI knew that some or all of the future hijackers were terrorists associated with bin Laden. They definitely knew Atta’s name - if they could just be convinced he was really involved, that might be good enough. While preparing for the hijackings, he (and others, I think) actually booked flights (to test how crowded they were and such, I guess) under their own names. The paper trail was there, and this was in fact a VERY stupid move on their part. Many intelligence people knew something was coming. The security chief at the Trade Center, a former FBI guy, definitely knew. He even seemed aware that September would be the time. Just a nudge in intelligence probably could’ve made a difference.
Whether that averts future attacks, obviously, is different. But September 11th could’ve been prevented.
NIce thought. But I doubt it, IMHO>
I missed this. Truly. Can you give me a cite?
What I said about him - his name was John O’Neill, and he died in the Towers - comes mostly from a New Yorker piece. He was in the FBI from about '76 to 2000. As is usually the case with their profiles, I found him a fascinating guy, sort of a Bond-style intelligence man (in that he preferred to be something of a man about town in New Yorkinstead of anonymous).
He worked on the World Trade Center bombing case (and helped organized the arrest of Ramzi Yousef), then moved into counter-terrorism, and finally became head of conter-terrorism in New York. He investigated the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia. So he knew a lot about bin Laden, as all of this is blamed on Al Qaeda.
It’s annoyingly hard, or impossible, to search the New Yorker online. But I’m tihnking of something near the end of this piece in which someone who knew him well relates an exchange they had. It was something to the effect of
Friend: 'At least the bombing in ‘93 wasn’t so bad.’
O’Neill: ‘They’ll be back to finish the job.’
And something about the wording (this was dated as occurring in August of '01) made me think he meant “and soon.”
This wouldn’t be hard at all. Get to a payphone, call the FBI, and tell them you know 20 Arabic-looking men are planning to hijack the four flights with small knives or box cutters. Agents would doubtlessly investigate, which would blow the whole plan.
Calling in bomb threats or whatnot is silly; the thing to do is to stop the MEN, not the planes. Stop them before the planes take off. If you’re transported to Sept. 10, you’d have plenty of time to find an FBI agent who would take the tip seriously and act on it.
There are some good ideas here, but I don’t think any of them would work with the possible exception of Blalron’s plan. Everyone else’s relies on people believing things which… strain credulity. I mean, how hard is it to disregard the opinion of someone you don’t know from Adam giving you some sort of outrageous story about people flying planes into the Twin Towers? What are the odds of that?
The trouble with stimulating investigations is that, in the US before the current Homeland Security paranoia, the terrorists were innocent until they actually DID something. They wouldn’t be held for long, if at all.
Assuming anyone believed you at all, of course.
9/11 would simply become 9/17, or 9/23, or 11/14…
If I have the opportunity, before my time trip, to memorize all the details of the attacks and the terrorists’ personal info, I would simply kill the terrorists before they ever got to the airport.
Quiet, unremarkable murders… performed when the terrorists are sleeping, waiting for buses, etc. Nothing noteworthy, just a few more incidents of apparently random violence in a city famous for just that.
The terrorists are NOT going to be on full battle alert 24 hours a day, any more than you are. They lived in the US for months with no problems and no cause for worry. Knowing where they lived and how they spent their time, it’d be fairly easy to catch them off guard and kill them before they had a chance to respond.
Murders with NO apparent motive, by someone who has NO connection to the victim, leaves NO worthwhile clues, is NOT a resident of the same city, and is GONE before any investigation gets going, are almost impossible to solve. I’d get away clean, unless I just royally screwed up.
The hijackers traveled together, didn’t they? You could try and stop some of them on the way to the airports. There were two hijackings out of Logan Int’l, right? If you knew how they got there, you could do something silly and conventional like create a traffic jam or slash the tires. They’d miss that day’s flight at least, and that’d buy you more time to do something else.
Depends on how much preparation time I get. If I could study the files and so forth I would think that calling in an anonynous tip to the FBI with details of the who, where, and when followed up with phony bomb threats to the WTC and the airports (giving the flight numbers) and possibly calls to the local police that there is a domestic disturbance at the terrorists house should put enough of a moneywrench in the works to prevent the attacks.
But, if time travel movies have taught me anything, anything that I do will likely end up contributing to the attacks or make things a whole lot worse.
Try and get George Bush to visit the Pentagon.
I don’t see how Blalrons plan could fail.
It wasn’t as though we were completely innocent and law-enforcement was clueless. This was the second attack on the WTC, after all.
You could say an Arab man you had befriended had laid out the entire plot for you. You would have names and locations. You would also have the flight-school information. These men would all have been detained and they would all be carrying damning documents and box-cutters.
I would start with RickJay’s plan and if that didn’t work I’d go with Blaron’s plan with a follow-up call giving the specifics.
Whoops, I meant Ellis’s plan as last resort.