You wake up tomorrow - It's Aug 11th, 2001. What do you do?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was playing this game in my head the other day. Assuming you’d want to stop the terrorist attacks (I don’t know why you wouldn’t, but I can’ t assume everyone would), could you do it in a month?
Do you know enough about it? How would you tip off the authorities or ground the planes?

I don’t think I could do it. I don’t have enough facts stored in my head to present any creditble evidence. I don’t know the flight numbers or destinations of the two planes that hit the WTC. I know the fuckers that flew the planes into the towers took flying lessons and were uninterested in learning to land, but I don’t know when or where they took these lessons.

The only real facts I know and remember is the day and time and place. The best I could probably do is alert the FAA and military (I still have USAF connections - though I don’t know if they’re connections in high enough places)to what will happen. Once the planes quit communicating and turned back towards New York, They might shoot them out of the sky, but that still kills everyone on the planes and anyone who happens to be in the debris field.

I do know that flight 93 was the one that crashed in PA. I could probably get tickets for that flight and then go batshit insane once the plane leaves the terminal. I may get arrested, but it would keep that plane on the ground long enough to keep it from ever taking off once the FAA figured out what was going on.

How about it? What would you do? Do you think you could have stopped the attacks knowing only what you know right now?

2

If you phoned in a bomb threat to both the WTC towers early on the morning of 9/11, I wonder if they would have been evacuated/not opened for business?

3

Good thinking. Wouldn’t save the buildings or plane passengers, but it would save all the WTC occupants and be a slap in the face to the terrorists.

4

I’ve considered this before and even if you tried to tip off the authorities you wouldn’t be taken seriously. You could try calling the airlines, the airports, the WTCs, the Pentagon and hope that at least one would take you seriously enough to stop a flight or evacuate a building but chances are good they wouldn’t. You could get on on plane and hope to create enough of a fuss to keep it from taking off but chances are you’d just get thrown off and arrested and the plane would still take off then you’d be in big trouble once the planes hit.

If you tried to do it anonymously there’s still a good chance you would be found and arrested. The planes would still hit the buildings and you’d be held as a suspect even though you tried to warn the authorities. In the aftermath of 9/11, it’s likely you’d have then been tried and convicted even without any evidence that you were involved.

Even if time travel were possible I don’t think it would be possible for one average citizen to stop the attacks. Maybe someone with connections like someone high enough up in the CIA or NSA who could take the evidence they did have and convince people they knew what the terrorists had planned and maybe get all those guys stopped and held before they got on the plane. But then what? Would they really have enough evidence to charge them? Maybe they could deport most of them but would another cell take over their mission?

5

Also would have saved the lives of many NYC emergency workers. And I think a bomb threat would be the best way to change the situation (what a goddamn awful thing to say).

6

My first reaction, other than telling someone that you’re from the future, and that you’re trying to stop this, with proof is to get a few people together, then get one on each of the flights that was hijacked. Have them go after the terrorists verbally after the plane is sealed, saying you saw a knife and you don’t want to die, and oh my god terrorists! Or, do the "start freaking out so bad that the plane needs to turn around. Heart attack just after takeoff is complete?
And the other is to do four simultaneous conventional hijacking with your buddies/the A Team to Cuba. If hostages must be executed to secure your getaway… you know where to start.

7

I kind of know all sorts of facts that have stuck to the wall in my brain. I know at least two names of the guys involved along with tidbits from the news shows on the events prior to that day. That should be enough for an investigation that could lead them to uncover even more clues.

If I spit out all of the random facts that are in my head about the people and places involved in that incident, I honestly think they’d listen. There would be too many varifiable random facts that I could give them. Combined with the fact that at the time I was in the military and my whereabouts were detailed and officially logged so I wouldn’t be suspected of anything. Hell, I’d even tell them that I got my facts from reoccuring dreams and nightmares.

I wonder if the winning lottery numbers from that day would still be 911? Hmmm…

8

Here’s some problems that I’ve just realized.
Bomb threat on WTC:
The planes still hit the towers. Passengers die, possibly members of bomb squad die, planes and buildings destroyed. Partial victory, but we’d probably still be stuck in Iraq 6 yrs later.

Somehow ground the planes:
You succeed in stopping the 9/11 attacks but are likely thrown in jail and, since nothing that would have happened was proven, the terrorists are free to give it another try.

The only win-win is to convice enough of your friend that this is going to happen. Get a group on all 4 of the planes and somehow sneak weapons (like tazers) on board. When the terrorists try to hijack, zap the crap out of them and everyone survives. I’d take the odds of a tazer over a box cutter anyday. Of course, this doesn’t prove that they would have destroyed the towers, but at least the perps would be imprisoned and we would stay out of the desert. The downside of this is that there’s no way to convice that many people to do what it would take to stop them. And of course there’s a chance your intervention on the plane would fail and everyone would die anyway.

9

You could go to the airports, identify the hijackers and start shooting them. If you kill the four who flew the planes, 9/11 would be averted.

Of course, you would probably be shot by the police, and if not you would end up in prison, but it might be worth it.

10

Sure 9/11 would be averted, but nothing would happen but me in prison or dead. Then we’d all be talking about the 10/11 or 11/11 attacks. There’d have to be a way to prove what they were going to do and still stop them to really win this hypothetical.

11

If you shot the four hijackers who actually flew the planes, they would have to train some other guys. So it would be averted like I said, not stopped.

You could also set off real bombs in the WTC late on Sunday night. The buildings would be destroyed, but a vastly lower number of people would be killed.

12

At first it seems like there’d be lots of obvious things you could do, but as others have demonstrated, the more you think about it the more problems emerge. Personally, my limited knowledge of the details of the attacks (despite watching and reading as much about it as most other people) would inhibit me greatly. I would probably bang my head on the wall for days trying to remember the flight names. Right now, I can remember United Flight 93, of course, and I remember Flight 11 hit one of the towers. But which airline (American?), and which tower? That I don’t remember for sure, so I’d be SOL in regards to directly stopping one (possibly both) of the WTC planes, as well as the one that hit the Pentagon.

On the other hand, I definitely remember the name of the terrorist leader, Mohammed Atta, and the fact that he was on one of the WTC planes. If you could somehow warn the authorities about him, that alone might be enough: if the feds would have started closely monitoring Atta a month before the attacks, chances are they would have discovered something about the plot, and maybe stopped it completely. So I’d probably devote most of my time to trying to point the authorities toward Atta, providing as many details of the plot as I knew: the method of attack, the dates, the targets, Flight 93, etc.

The remaining problem would be: how to do all of this anonymously? Even if it turns out that your information does foil the attacks, you’d certainly be arrested as an accessory. It’s not very likely that the authorities would accept “But I came from the future!” as a reasonable explanation for someone knowing details of a massive terrorist plot beforehand.

So how about this: use public access computers in various public libraries across the country. Set up dummy e-mail accounts and flood the authorities with what you know about the plot. If this gets no results, repeatedly post the warnings and the details of the upcoming attacks on every message board, news site, blog, etc. that you can think of. Basically do everything you can to warn as many people as you can as often as you can. As fast as stuff spreads online, it shouldn’t take long before people all over the world are saying, “Did you hear about those weird anonymous warnings that there’s going to be a huge terrorist attack on September 11, with planes flying into buildings?”

At the very least, this will get the terrorists’ plans out in the open, scare the crap out of them (they’d have to assume they had a traitor in their midst), and probably stop the attack.

(The downside is, once again, that it may only delay the attack.)

13

That’s a good point. Atta’s is the only name I can remember of any of the plotters, and it’s the only way I would ever have a hope of putting anyone on the trail of the hijackers.

14

Yeah, looks like just about the only thing I could do is park an unidentified van outside of the Towers early in the morning and call in a bomb threat. I have no idea what to do with the hijackers…although if all of us get to travel back in time maybe we can put ourselves on the planes and take down the terrorists.

And now, for something slightly different…

This thread is made of awesome, just because it gave me the mental image of someone screaming: “I DON’T HAVE TIME TO EXPLAIN!!!”, Jack Bauer style.

15

This isn’t a bad idea. Of course, you still have the aftermath to explain of why a group of, say, 20 interconnected individuals just happened to decide to fly on that day with tazers on the exact flights that had attempted hijackings.

16

Yeah, it’d be pretty impossible to explain. But, at least the 20 of us would be the only ones inconvienced severly. It’s better than the 1000’s dead on the day and 1000’s more in a war.

17

I don’t know what the bomb threat procedures would be pre 9/11 (or pre the earlier attempt), but probably buildings of such stature get them all the time - you might end up having to walk into one of them and shooting a few windows out to get them to listen. Sucks for you, but would save a lot of lives in the long run. :frowning:

18

I think it’s doable. Difficult, but doable. I have enough credibility, enough knowledge, enough people I know in power that would take me seriously, that it would prevent 9/11. It may not prevent 10/11 or 11/11, but it would certainly crimp a lot of styles. If you only gave me a week, or a couple of days, much harder.

Very interesting question.

19

How about call in a bomb threat to Logan and JFK or whereever? Or call in a bomb warning on those particular planes while they’re on tarmac, and maybe get everyone thoroughly searched?

20

Get contact information for the FBI, NYPD, FDNY, Port Authority, Mayor Giuliani, The Pentagon, The Potus, The NY Times and every other major newpaper, United Airlines, etc.

Go to a public library somewhere far from home with internet access. Send a mass Email to all of the above concerning a conversation that you overheard that puts your life in danger. Go into details of what is planned and hope that at least one of the dozens of organizations you have notified will react.

Jim