One way 9/11 could have been prevented

[cthulu2016]

I will never understand why folks did not put together the two major terrorism concepts "airplane hijacking" and "terrorists are willing to commit suicide in order to kill a lot of other people." It's kind of obvious.

But our thinking about hijacking was very old, passed down from the 1970s when there was an epidemic of people hijacking planes, often to Cuba. The hijackers were usually individuals with a handgun and after the pilot landed the plane to Cuba the passengers were allowed to return to America.

It was rare for anyone to die in these incidents. And nobody wanted guns going off in a pressurized cabin. And if the pilots resisted and was shot then nobody on board could land the plane and everybody dies.

So the policy was, "cooperate with hijackers."

That policy was flawed. It should have been, "cooperate with hijackers, but with the understanding that under no circumstances permit a hijacker to fly the plane. To prevent that, you should lay your life on the line because the odds of anyone on the plane surviving if the hijacker flies the plane are very slim."

Condi Rice's limited imagination aside, people had imagined airplanes being used a cruise missiles. But that concept was obviously not a big enough part of aviation security culture.

Should it have been?

I am usually pretty forgiving of not preventing every weird thing that *could* happen. But in this case I think there should have been more thought about intentional plane crashes, because I'm not an aviation security expert and it was on my mind because of the Egypt Air crash shortly before Bush took over. It appeared that the pilot intentionally flew the plane into the ocean and, because he was offering a muslim prayer as he did so there was a lot of speculation that the incident might have been equivalent to a suicide bombing.

And it doesn't matter what really happened with the Egypt Air flight. What matters is what people thought and assumed. The concept of an intentional plane crash as an act of Islamic suicide terrorism was very much "out there."

[Bluenorthwest]

1. No one could imagine, but in 1994 it was attempted...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_8969

[BattyDem]

4. No one could imagine, except the writers of a TV series.

"The Lone Gunmen" Pilot Episode aired on FOX on March 4, 2001.

[Schema Thing]

2. Before the whole event was over, I had worked out

the methodology of the highjackers in my mind (and I had never given it a moment's thought previously).


I knew they used knives and I knew there were at least two, but probably many more, highjackers per plane.

[Odin2005]

3. The saying goes that generals are always fighting the last war.

I think that applies, here.

[leveymg]

5. I believe the MO was amply understood, but somehow, the risks and results were underestimated

and the teams known to be inside the US were allowed to run around free and never rolled-up. Ultimately, that decision was Bush's, and he refused to issue the arrest order. We still have to speculate exactly why and what his intentions were, and it looks like that will never be publicly revealed because the present Administration has effectively immunized him.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies had been tracking the Flt. 77 hijackers since the January 2000 al-Qaeda planning summit and that team's entry into the US in January was noted at CTC, but the notification to the FBI was withheld by order of the "Assistant Director". Director Tenet was personally briefed on several occasions about the Flt. 77 hijackers and the Kuala Lumpur meetings. CIA knew they were here, but on numerous occasions sabotaged FBI efforts that might have led to the hijackers arrest. Some of the higher-ups in the Bureau also appeared to have had a role in obstructing field investigators, and the same is true at the Pentagon. Obviously, there was some sort of highly-secret interagency counter-terrorism operation going on, that appears to have gone horribly wrong. The only alternative explanation that makes any sense at all is even harder to contemplate.

[HopeHoops]

6. Two of the early Superman cartoons involved planes - "The Bullet Plane", and "The Japatuers"

(Not sure on the spelling of the second)

The first involved a plane designed to be used as a missile to crash through buildings and keep going. I forget how he stopped them.

The second had some REALLY stereotyped Japanese agents stealing a "super bomber" and ended with Superman catching the plane on the street before it could explode in the middle of the city.

The statement "nobody ever imagined anyone using a plane as a missile" is infantile. How about the fucking Zeros in WW-II? The concept wasn't exactly new.