I think Marley23, in post #39, probably has it right. I can’t figure any way to try and warn people without giving myself away. So it would come down to asking yourself, “Is it worth giving up my own life to stop something like this?”
Just posed the question to my husband. His view- he would save one person. Someone who was so important to their family or whatever, like a young Canter Fitzgerald employee. He would stop him/her and explain that he wasn’t going to let him/her go to work that morning. Something terrible is going to happen, and I can’t tell you how I know. I am saving your life because I can. You’ll never know how I know these things about you, and you’ll never see me again.
I’ve been trying to refrain from saying that. Thanks for being first.
It was an episdoe of UPN’s Twilight Zone revival. A time travelor got hired as a maid in the Hitler household. She eventually worked up the nerve to kill Baby Adolph and jumped off a bridge with him in her arms. The other maid went out and bought a new baby (Klara was never allowed to hold her son so she couldn’t have told the difference).
Back to the OP, I wouldn’t try to stop the attacks. Too great a risk of creating a timeline far worse than ours. I know it sounds morbid but I think I might find it hard to resist making comments like “Betcha another planes gonna crash into the other tower” or “They’re gonna bomb the Pentagon next” while watching stuff hapen live.
I’d bet heavy on the Pats to win the Superbowl.
I haven’t read any other replies yet cos I didn’t want them to influence my response.
I’d try to gather as much information about terrorist groups as possible and then use that to phone the police, tower security etc on the morning of the 11th and state that there was a bomb planted in the towers. I’d use my research so I could give a credible description of the bomb and possible location. That way, at least they’d evacuate the building and check. Perhaps before that I might even work out how to make some minor explosives and plant them places where I could detonate them without harming others - say in a schoolbus at night - just to get the point across that I was serious about destroying the towers. And of course, I’d also mention that my group had bombers on planes heading for the USA. Since I don’t know the flight numbers or anything I couldn’t give that info but I could give the locations of where ‘we’ were going to attack.
I’m pretty sure I’d go down for it or maybe even be executed at some point but I’d hope that I’d be able to save as many people as possible. And if I’m travelling back in time then perhaps I’ll happen across whatever sent me back and have it bump me forwards again.
def. call in bomb threats to boston, newark, dc, and nyc. give appox. time for the bombs to go off. ie between 8am and 10am. claim that the bombs are set on various planes so they have to check each one, add that men from saudia arabia and egypt are suicide bombers trying to get onto the planes in case the hidden bombs are duds.
call in for the entire wtc not just the towers. don’t want people too close if something goes wrong. call in for the pentagon.
use various pay phones and a voice disguise thingy. call news outlets as well.
On that thought, you could rent a smaller plane in NY, hijack that and get it to crash somewhere downtown (with a crazy manifesto mentioning another plan to crash bigger planes into the WTC, mentioning Al Qaeda en passant, names of those hijackers you know about and whatever else you think could help). That should get some of the agencies into high gear.
Of course you would sacrifice yourself and a random stranger. I don’t know that I’d be able to follow through with such a plan, though.
An interesting and thought-provoking thread topic.
I think it’s doable, but difficult. The difficult part would be getting the authorities to investigate the hijackers seriously. And there’s an easy way to do that. You have a month. Kill some of them.
Frex, I know Mohammed Atta was training to be a pilot, so I search records and pretext companies until I have Atta’s flight training school. Then I buy a pistol with a silencer and kill Mohammed Atta, not in public, but where I can get away with it. I quickly call 911 and explain why I did it, and where the body is. Then I call the FBI and do the same thing. I suggest that both look for evidence of the plot.
They think I’m nuts but they have to investigate, it’s a murder.
Then I find other hijackers (probably not a lot of people training to fly big jets in the US with Middle Eastern sounding names at the time, other than hijackers). Then go to other cities, kill a couple more hijackers in training, and make the same phone calls about them. Once again, they’ll think you’re nuts, but they’ll have to investigate, and there were things (phone records, etc.) that showed the plot was in progress before it happened. Warnings were given, and ignored. But the fact that this is federal murder investigation would make the researchers look harder. You have to figure that would disrupt the plot, and eventually alert the US that real plots were in progress.
Just don’t expect any help from the Bush Administration. Bush said, ‘I don’t believe in swatting at flies.’ This would have to be a ‘ground up’ kind of thing, with the cops and the FBI investigators finally getting the CIA involved.
All this is based on the notion that the Bush Admin. would want to know.
Yeah, I’d try to prevent it. But I do agree, a random Joe Blow would almost certainly fail at an attempt to do so by just notifying the relevant authorities.
If I was going to go the martyrdom route, what I’d do is, on September 10, 2001, board a plan from Logan airport, and hijack it using a box cutter. Best case scenario, I’d get myself mega-arrested, worst case scenario shot to death. Certainly a copy-cat hijacking wouldn’t be successful the next day, and hopefully enough new security measures would be enacted to forestall that kind of hijacking for a long long time.
If I could do it in a successful enough way, I’d try to leave behind some evidence suggesting I was in contact with Mohammed Atta. With the hope that a blatant enough clue would be enough to point authorities toward him once I’d caused a big enough stir.
We’re all assuming the person going back would WANT to stop the attacks. What if it were a shameless opportunist who decided to position him/herself to be the hero? You know pretty much exactly what’s going to happen, at least enough to know what’s going to collapse about when and when the danger will pretty much be over, so you could act all selfless rescuing people. Others would think you’re so brave to disregard personal danger, but really you’d just have timed it really well.
Edit: Double post. :mad:
OK, that’s just weird. I even did a search before posing my question to find out if it had been asked before. The really weird thing is the almost identical wording.
The only explanation is that someone read my post, then went back to 2003 to start an almost identical thread…
So you call in a bomb threat for the WTC. After the planes hit, you call the Pentagon and tell them the same thing is going to happen at the Pentagon, Capital Building and White House.
Well, as for just the part about protecting the buildings, how’s about getting in somehow, and running around pulling fire alarms, or setting fires in some places about an hour before the aircraft hit? Would that successfully get at least the top floors evacuated for a fire drill or something? It would work in some of our buildings here, but I have absolutely no clue how security and logistics work in very tall skyscrapers. I think Vegas is my only real basis for comparison, and I think I might employ some good old fashioned tear gas if given a chance.
Everyone’s assuming that the most important thing to do is to stop the attacks. I’d say the most important thing would be to capture the Al-Qaeda leadership before they went into hiding. At this stage their whereabouts are known, they’re in Afghanistan and they aren’t expecting anyone to come after them just yet. So slip a few operatives into the country and see if you can catch them by surprise. This would probably save more lives in the long run. Of course you still have to persuade someone in authority that you know what you’re talking about and aren’t a loony.
I’d buy a voice-disguiser thingy and call the FBI, stating that on the morning of September 11th, 2001, multiple members of Al Qaeda, mostly from Saudi Arabia, will hijack four planes leaving from Boston and New York to go cross-country, using box cutters as weapons. One of the operatives is named Mohammed Atta. Several of the operatives have received flight training in the US. The planes will be crashed into the World Trade center towers, the Pentagon, and another target believed to be the White House. Osama Bin Laden is the person behind the attacks. Some of the members may make “dry runs” on american flights beforehand to confirm their ability to board planes with the weapons.
Then, if it never appears in the news, use the same voice-disguiser to call in bomb threats to the WTC towers and the Pentagon on September 11th. Fuck the White House.
I know this isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but I’d hug my daughter that much tighter. She went to visit her dad in Seattle that week (August 5-11) and although it was not the only time she’d flown out there alone, it was the first time I was ever nervous about it. I don’t know why, but I was. When 9-11 happened, all I could focus on was that my baby girl had been flying home on a United flight by herself only a month earlier.
As for the kind of answer you want – I don’t have one. The thing is, although there are people who would believe me if I suddenly said “oh my gods, in exactly one month, a bunch of terrorists will hijack planes and fly them into the WTCs,” there’s nothing they could do to stop it effectively or thwart it indefinitely.
We know that there were more flights that were supposed to be hijacked that day. So, the first 4 were thwarted, how many operatives do you think were in flight training school just in case? I am betting more than we could know.
Not to mention what has already been pointed out – if this were thwarted without the world knowing about it, how much more lax would we be? Is there a possibility that a nuclear device could be sneaked into a big city and detonated? To avoid one catastrophe, does not negate the possibility of another.
One of my favorite takes on this theory is The Columbus Project by Orson Scott Card. It’s a well-written example of how trying to change the past without all the information could be more catastrophic than current reality.
It does all come down to how willing you would be to sacrifice yourself for others. For me, sadly, my family was not as affected by these events as many. Sure, I have a lot of military friends and family, but if not this war, then another, you know? We are miles and miles away from the events of 9/11 and being here for my children is more important to me than dying or going to jail to save strangers. Flame away, if need be, that’s just the truth of the matter.
To put some perspective on this – a few months before the events of 9/11, I had a very vivid dream in which there was some type of nuclear disaster in TN. In the dream, I was frantic because I was seperated from my children when this disaster occurred. I was trying desperately to reach them and eventually had to kill a policeman and do some other very unsavory things to get to my children. I woke up repeating a date 3-16-03. Loudly. In fact, by the time I reached conciousness, I was all but screaming “3-16-03.” My husband was very weirded out and wrote the date down. I told people to mark it on their calendars, I wanted to be reminded. For 2 years, I kept that date in my head. I made my father plan to come to my house for dinner on that night so that my family would all be together. My father passed away on 3-14-03. My husband remarked that I was “off” on my date – then, as we were talking to Red Cross to get my brother (then in the AF, stationed in Kuwait) home for the funeral, we noticed that the US was due to invade Iraq on 3-16-03*.
Now, the people I told to mark their calendars did so. Many of them have known me long enough to know that if I say “mark your calendar” or “remember this” that there will be a reason, but in the end, you know full well that they all want to believe that I am just FOS.
Even though I would be able to give a hell of a lot more details about the 9-11 attacks than I had about 3-16-03, how many of my friends would risk their lives/freedom for me? Maybe 3. That wouldn’t be enough.
Being the kind of person I am, I would do something. Most likely, I would end up talking to my brother and asking his advice. He has known me long enough to not question me too much about things and at the time had pretty high clearance. He might have been able to come up with a plausible (is that spelled correctly? it looks so weird) story about how he had credible evidence that something major was going to happen. The question is, though, that there has been documentation shown that we had enough credible evidence of something pending and yet still did nothing – aside from the President or one of the major bigwigs in DC being the one to wake up on 8-11-01 with full knowledge of the attacks, I don’t see any of us being able to make a difference. Or maybe one of OBL’s wives growing a conscience and making use of a handy knife.
*IIRC, we actually invaded on 3-20-03, but were originally scheduled to do so on 3-16-03.
Well, first off, I would spend about two weeks pissing and moaning - because whomever chose me to send back in time really effing screwed up.
In 2001 I’m diagnosed with major depression, and any credibility I might have with random strangers is shot, from the get-go. The best I could imagine doing, honestly, would be to find a way to get onto a plane ASAP, with a box cutter, and demonstrate that it can be a lethal weapon. I’d prefer to simply go to the media or FAA and explain that I have reason to believe that box cutters should be added to the list of items that aren’t allowed on planes - but, as I said, if I tried to say anything like that - they’d dismiss me as a loon. The only way I’d be able to get the method of the attack across to anyone would be by proving it could work.
And I’m not active enough, even back then, to think I’d really have a good chance to win in that kind of hand-to-hand fight - unless I went for the kill immediately. I don’t think I could do that. Not really, not up close.
Which leaves me with the “set bombs, or bomb threats” in the WTC, or appropriate airports. Which we’ve already agreed isn’t going to be very helpful.
Quite honestly, short of the sort of sacrifice and murder with a box cutter of my own, I don’t think that there’s any way I’d be able to get anyone to listen to me, before the attacks. And I don’t think I am cold blooded enough to be able to kill innocent strangers like that. Afterwards, I’d be accused of being an accomplice, if I’d made any attempts to warn anyone.
Perhaps the best thing I could do would be to send sealed envelopes to several people, labelled “To be opened in the event of the destruction of the Twin Towers” but again, we’ve got the lunatic thing to overcome.
The more I think about it, the more selling short on the market seems the only thing I could do.
Who knows, maybe others reached the same conclusion.