10 ms·

When reviewing 9/11 attacks (likely the biggest and most disastrous intelligence failure in U.S. history, give or take Pearl Harbor), it's worth remembering tha

When reviewing 9/11 attacks (likely the biggest and most disastrous intelligence failure in U.S. history, give or take Pearl Harbor), it's worth remembering that it could have been much worse. If the first plane had hit Indian Point nuclear reactor what, 30 miles from NYC and upwind? It's likely a Chernobyl/Fukushima disaster would have resulted with an exclusion zone well into NYC. That was reportedly part of the plan but as I recall they wanted a more media-friendly target. Additionally, the fact that members of the Saudi government aided and assisted the hijackers, and that they were tracked and monitored by both the FBI and the CIA, yet no action was taken to stop them, not even a simple warning to airlines to increase security after that Aug 6th Presidential Daily Briefing? What a debacle. We should have left Iraq and Afghanistan alone and done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia, except that Wall Street likes its petrodollars so Washington props up the House of Saud and its theocratic dictatorship. And that's still going on.

mlcrypto 5y ago
Too many coincidences. Also we couldn't mobilize any fighter jets at all when a plane goes off course?
- JamilD 5y ago
  Not quite an answer to your question, but in the 60s and 70s hijackings were quite common (86 hijackings in 1969) and weren’t seen in the way they are now. The common understanding was that the hijackers wanted to re-route the plane somewhere else, and that everyone would end up alive but inconvenienced. It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I thought I remembered the plot to the 1996 film “executive decision” as being a debate whether to shoot the passenger jet out of the sky because the plane was going to be used as a missile, but i just read the plot again and they were going to detonate a nerve agent bomb on board the plane while over a us city, so, similar but not quite a prediction of the predicament.
    - trothamel 5y ago
      (Spoilers) The end of Tom Clancy's 1994 book "Debt of Honor" featured a 747 being crashed into the Capital, which is about as close as fiction gets.
      - anonymousab 5y ago
        A bit closer is the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, where a March 2001 episode featured a plot to crash an airliner into the world trade center and blame it on terrorists to justify a new war. Obviously 9/11 wasn't some government conspiracy to purposely spark new wars, but the other details are eerily similar.
        strogonoff 5y ago
        A plot one of the stages of which included potentially crashing an airplane into WTC[0], among other targets, was uncovered (mostly, it appears, by accident) and thwarted in the mid-nineties. The Lone Gunmen plot coincidence is less curious considering that plot could have served as an inspiration, although the means of hijacking were very different in the series. The sad thing is that uncovering that plot didn’t help prevent the actual attack based on it a few years later… [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot#Phase_III:_CIA_plane_crash_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot#Phase_III:_CIA_pl...
    - JamilD 5y ago
      I just started watching the historical footage from CNN; it's interesting to hear the commentary in between when the first and second planes hit the tower. "Was the plane having any difficulty flying?" "Yes, it seemed to be rocking back and forth" "Was this a navigational error?" An announcement in the South Tower immediately after the crash instructed people to stay in their offices. Even after the second tower was hit, the immediate reaction was that it was a second explosion in the North Tower caused by the fuselage of the plane. 4 minutes after the second plane hit, when it was clear that two planes were involved: "was it possible a navigational error directed two planes into the World Trade Center?" It's incredible to think just how much our attitude and perspectives changed after realizing what exactly had happened.
  - kolanos 5y ago
    > It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93. Sadly this is mostly a myth. It is a little known fact that there were five separate U.S. military war games being run simultaneously with 9/11 and three of them involved airliner hijacking scenarios, including flying airplanes into buildings. Worse, these war games involved simulated inputs into NORAD and FAA radar systems, resulting in mass confusion. There is an excellent documentary that covers these war games, including actual NORAD, FAA and EADS audio [0]. [0]: https://www.corbettreport.com/911wargames/ https://www.corbettreport.com/911wargames/
  - mlcrypto 5y ago
    Wow 86 hijackings and nobody in intelligence could ever conceive of how that could go horribly wrong
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      Most people survived them though so there wasn't a huge reason to do anything particularly drastic, using planes as a suicide missile was basically entirely new. Even on the day of there was speculation about why the planes 'messed up' and flew into the WTC buildings which shows just how unusual it was. Most hijackings were essentially mass kidnappings for ransom to get money, release prisoners or get promises of policy changes and ended with a negotiation or storming the plane.
- jorgesborges 5y ago
  You can listen to real-time audio of FAA and NORAD track planes and scramble fighters [0]. This is not an easy task considering nobody knows what is happening and literally every plane in the country is being redirected and landed simultaneously. [0] skip to about 20min https://youtu.be/DYBhgEm3j7A https://youtu.be/DYBhgEm3j7A
- dharmab 5y ago
  This is covered in the 9/11 commission report. Quoted below: The protocols did not contemplate an intercept. They assumed the fighter escort would be discreet, “vectored to a position five miles directly behind the hijacked aircraft,” where it could perform its mission to monitor the flight path of the aircraft. In sum, the protocols in place on 9/11 for the FAA and NORAD to respond to a hijacking presumed that: (1) the hijacked aircraft would be readily identifiable and would not attempt to disappear; (2) there would be time to address the problem through the appropriate FAA and NORAD chains of command; and (3) the hijacking would take the traditional form, not a suicide hijacking designed to convert the aircraft into a guided missile. On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen. What ensued was the hurried attempt to create an improvised defense by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced.
  - jsgo 5y ago
    Yeah, I don’t think 3 can be overstated. Prior to 911, hijacked planes were not an unknown thing. I don’t know numbers, but remember periodic events in the news of x plane that was hijacked landing at y airport with local officials needing to meet hijacker demands for it to return to its flight. Was weird when it happened, but we also didn’t have the hour of processing through security we do now.
  - kolanos 5y ago
    In 1999 there was a professional golfer named Payne Stewart who died on a Learjet flight along with five others after it depressurized mid-flight. The plane continued flying on auto pilot and the FAA scrambled three separate fighter jet interceptions, involving five F-16s, the first one making visual contact with the Learjet approximately 20-30 minutes after the Learjet pilots became unresponsive. There was speculation at the time that the FAA was prepared to shoot the flight down if it was at risk of crashing in a populated area. The Pentagon later denied this, however, the Canadian government said this was their policy should the flight enter their airspace. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_cras...
- jdavis703 5y ago
  We did mobilize fighter jets (albeit without missiles, so essentially if the pilots intercepted it’d likely be a suicide mission). Also after 9/11 people straying in to no fly zones over DC would be escorted out by fighters.
  - ykl 5y ago
    IIRC the fighters that were mobilized planned to ram since they took off without time to load missiles onboard, but all of our fighter keys have ejection seats. I assume the plan was to eject.
    - generj 5y ago
      To ensure the fighters crippled the passenger plane, at least one of the scrambled National Guard pilots ruled out ejecting. The other hoped to eject before impact. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44459345 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44459345
- onion2k 5y ago
  Few people would want to make a call to shoot down two full passenger jets over a city. With hindsight it would have been the right option, but at the time it's unlikely it would have happened even if there had been fighters with missiles available.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    Hijackings also weren't usually suicide missions before then either so it would have been a big leap to decide to shoot them down when you'd normally expect demands and a chance to take it out on the ground rather than just killing everyone on board.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Al-Qaeda actually gamed out this aspect of the American response and concluded (apparently correctly) that the US was ill-prepared for a multi-hijacking scenario. This wasn't rocket science... They basically looked at all available information on threat modeling the US had done, and noticed that we had constrained ourselves to a single hijacking event. They correctly surmised that intelligence infrastructure (including NORAD) would be off of their playbook if they hijacked multiple planes at once. This led to disruption of the response. When flight 77 (Pentagon plane) was reported as having dropped off of the transponder radios, by the time NORAD was notified the information had become garbled in a game of telephone and they thought they were receiving reports on flight 11, which is one of the two that struck the Trade Center towers. They scrambled jets to New Jersey instead of onto any predicted flight path for flight 77.
vmception 5y ago
We could have done regime change in Saudi Arabia and still had petrodollars Sometimes its useful to think inside the box But yeah current Saudi Arabia is a good deal for the US, hard to get others so heavily intertwined financially. Might as well not touch it.
- yyyk 5y ago
  >We could have done regime change in Saudi Arabia and still had petrodollars Very unlikely. Any military involvement anywhere near Mecca and Medina is off the table barring being invited or some utterly insane scenario.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    "...barring being invited or some utterly insane scenario." I think you're being redundant there. US troops anywhere in Saudi Arabia is kind of a big deal.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I don’t really understand what US/allies get from maintaining a theocracy in SA, chevron and british petroleum predate the modern kingdom, right? why is it good business sense to let the royal family siphon cash like there’s no tomorrow? seems to me a political explanation is more likely, probably related to the holy war with Iran. In that case I never really understood why we took an anti-theocratic stance there.
  - vmception 5y ago
    taking over places is more expensive than letting people have their own self determination. distributes the load, still gets the resources and influence. greater levels of animosity avoided, sometimes completely.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Saudi Arabia broadly respects western wishes, they let the western companies make billions of dollars off their oil while the monarchy also makes billions of dollars. The West worries that if they rock the boat, a situation like Venezuela or Iran will happen, where the state tries to cut out the western companies from getting a cut. Iran provides the perfect example of why we tolerate Saudi Arabia. From 1901 to 1951, Iran's oil was controlled primarily by the British. In 1951, a democratic movement lead to the nationalization of the oil industry, which quickly led to a CIA backed coup. For the next ~30 years, a Western backed dictatorship ruled and their violent rule lead to the 1979 revolution being overtly hostile to the West. The West fears any other Saudi government would end up hostile to the West, given their decades of support for the monarchy.
542458 5y ago
Re: Indian Point - containment buildings are pretty armoured by design. The Indian point containment vessel walls are several feet of high-grade steel reinforced concrete. You might be thinking of the skinny, low quality rebar used in common construction at this point - this isn’t that, the rebar here is 2.25 inches thick, made of good-quality steel, and spaced every fifteen inches or so. The containment building is also smaller than a 747, so you can’t transfer the entire plane’s energy to it like you could with a larger target like the towers. The Indian Point engineers assert that theirs reactors and all other structures contains radioactive material could survive a 9/11 style impact. http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20130108221220/http://www.nei.org/corporatesite/media/filefolder/EPRI_Nuclear_Plant_Structural_Study_2002.pdf http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20130108221220/http://www.nei....
- adwi 5y ago
  > The containment building is also smaller than a 747, so you can’t transfer the entire plane’s energy to it like you could with a larger target like the towers. I know very little about physics and found this to be an unexpected point I’d like to understand more. Could you explain?
  - whoisburbansky 5y ago
    The plane isn’t perfectly rigid, so it would only be able to impart as much energy to the structure as contained in the part of the plane that gets sheared off while colliding with the containment building.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jwagenet 5y ago
    As a layman there are probably few theories behind this statement: 1. The plane is not an energy monolith, any part of the plane larger than the building (eg wings) would have its own inertia which continues to rip off and around the building rather than drive all energy/mass attached to plane to the point of impact. 2. A smaller building may act like a plow if circular or hit on a corner, diverting energy as in 1. 3. If you simplify the side of a building to a supported plane, a larger plane may deform to failure more than a small plane due to the distance between supports ( other walls of building)
tablespoon 5y ago
> Additionally, the fact that members of the Saudi government aided and assisted the hijackers... Details? My understanding is a huge fraction of the Saudi population have jobs that amount to government sinecures (while immigrants do most of the real work). Are we talking about high-level members with real leadership positions, or some minor member of the royal family working in some ministry doing nothing and going off on his own?
- ogma 5y ago
  A court affidavit filed on 3 February 2015 claims that Zacarias Moussaoui was a courier between Osama bin Laden and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud in the late 1990s, and that Turki introduced Moussaoui to Bandar.[76] Zacarias Moussaoui stated on oath and wrote to Judge George B. Daniels that Saudi royal family members, including Prince Bandar, donated to Al-Qaeda and helped finance the 11 September attacks.[77] The Saudi government continues to deny any involvement in the 9/11 plot, and claims there is no evidence to support Moussaoui's allegations in spite of numerous previous intense investigations, noting that Moussaoui's own lawyers presented evidence of his mental incompetence during his trial.[76] Leaked information from the redacted portion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that two of the 9/11 hijackers received $US130,000 in payment from Bandar's bank account.[78] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud Bush's close friend, known arms dealer... you guys still haven't figured this one out yet? HN is always the last to know.
- simonh 5y ago
  Saudi politics and personal relationships are a mess. It is true that Bin Laden is a member of a very powerful family in Saudi and so obviously has a lot of personal connections there as do his close associates. He is however estranged from that family and has been for a very long time, but may have some in Saudi who have grievances against the house of Saud and are sympathetic to the jihadis. Al Qaeda and many other jihadi outfits procure a lot of their funding from Islamic charities and schools (Madrassas) with complex and very opaque financial dealings. Also the Saudi government and individual Saudis donate to many Islamic charities, so its highly likely some of that money ends up with the jihadi's including Al Qaeda. So yes there's almost certainly some truth to the allegations. Some powerful Saudis may secretly support them, some donate to charities and the money ends up with them, but no this is not official Saudi state sponsorship of Al Qaeda. In fact Al Qaeda consider the Saudi royal family and all of their associates to be apostates (essentially heretics) who can be killed summarily and they advocate for regime change and the establishment of a Caliphate. Like I said, it's a real mess of family loyalties, rivalries, swinging political fortunes and opaque dealings. Game of Thrones has nothing on these people. Just look at what happened to Jamal Khashoggi.
maybelsyrup 5y ago
Never forget: the CIA, at the highest levels, knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers had multiple-entry visas to the US and were living in the country in the year before the attacks. They knew they were al-Qaeda, and they knew they were important enough to have been at a big AQ powwow in Kuala Lumpur in 2000. CIA management prevented this information from being disseminated by FBI agents posted inside "Alec Station", the CIA's Bin Laden group, several times, and they later lied about doing so. All this according to, among other extremely mainstream sources (in addition to the documentary record), Richard Clarke, who would know -- he was the Federal "Terrorism Czar" on 9/11 and has been fuming pissed about this since he found [1][2]. You don't need to be a whack job, a conspiracist, to be angry and mystified by this. In many instances like this one, cursory investigation into claims of intelligence community "mistakes" or "incompetence" in these matters gives the lie to claims that these institutions somehow "dropped the ball" or "got it wrong" on 9/11, and are thus not to blame (either partly or fully) for the attacks. It's impossible to square such claims with a lot of the official paper trail. One can reasonably conclude that some of this stuff was not accidental. We hire these people to lie - why should we ever assume they're not? (The best part? Many of the people involved in the events I describe were promoted in the years post-9/11!) [1] https://abcnews.go.com/International/28-pages-questions-alleged-saudi-spy-cia/story?id=40697425 https://abcnews.go.com/International/28-pages-questions-alle... [2] https://www.doubleasteriskmedia.com/rich-blee-podcast https://www.doubleasteriskmedia.com/rich-blee-podcast
- cronix 5y ago
  Bill Binney (Tech Director/NSA) wasn't promoted. He quit just after 9/11 after He leaked that we had all of the intel to discover and piece together 9/11 in our systems, but the administration was prioritizing bulk collecting data over actually analyzing it. > In September 2002, he, along with J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on Trailblazer, a system intended to analyze mass collection of data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had been one of the inventors of an alternative system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen instead. Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that "it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had"[11] as well as noting Trailblazer's ineffectiveness and unjustified high cost compared to the far less intrusive ThinThread.[12] He was furious that the NSA hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot and stated that intercepts it had collected but not analyzed likely would have garnered timely attention with his leaner more focused system.[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_official) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o... Here's a really good interview with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
project2501a 5y ago
> done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia, how about "stop fucking with other countries", instead? maybe bring Kissinger to the international court?
- herbst 5y ago
  From a naive bystander view it looks like a majority of war's and suffering in the world in my lifetime is just there because the US does not stop to enforce their crippled idea of democracy on other countries (and US oil interests). Could be biased, could be propaganda, but I am for sure not alone thinking this.
- afroboy 5y ago
  Then how Israel will stand when Muslims get their shit together?
gremloni 5y ago
Saudi Arabia is not a regime. It’s the most powerful tribal family in a country of family/tribes all of whom have the same perspective. Never mind the fact that it’s a very rich country in country with obnoxious human rights abuses when it comes to migrant workers but still has no poverty. Even amongst the migrants. Not to mention that in my opinion they treat women exactly how they should be treated.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Saudi Arabia is not a regime. Yes, it has a regime. > It’s the most powerful tribal family in a country of family/tribes all of whom have the same perspective. Yes, the House of Saud is that, except not all the family/tribes have the same perspective (heck, even the House of Saud isn't internally super cohesive, though MBS’ recent internal purges and the implicit threat of more have reduced the degree of active viewpoint diversity within the House of Saud and Saudi elites more generally.) > Never mind the fact that it’s a very rich country in country with obnoxious human rights abuses when it comes to migrant workers but still has no poverty. Even amongst the migrants. Saudi Arabia has a low reported poverty rate (but not zero; 12.7%) but it's reporting is irregular and unreliable, and is generally held to underestimate poverty significantly in general. Poverty estimates among the migrants make up the bar majority of the labor force (and the vast majority of the low-skill labor force) are very high.
- kzzzznot 5y ago
  > Not to mention that in my opinion they treat women exactly how they should be treated. How in your opinion should women be treated? You don’t think they should be considered equal to men?
fighterpilot 5y ago
> Iraq Regarding WMDs, intelligence couldn't be released because it was supposedly sensitive. What if they were required to release an md5sum of a tarball of the intelligence, perhaps with associated metadata to make it infeasible to fabricate/game. This process is overseen by a judge or independent body. Then 5-15 years later they release it in full when that intelligence is no longer sensitive? This is a way to get around the excuse of sensitivity. Sort of like a time-shifted FOIA request. It'd be a great way to strengthen our democratic institutions, deter lying and corruption and manufactured consent, neuter conspiracy theories of a deep state, improve everyone's confidence in institutions, and for accountability and transparency. Perhaps this isn't feasibile in practice, though, if the intelligence involves spies/assets that are still operational, or if it would involve revealing secrets around capabilities and methods. However, if that's the case, then they could release say 100 md5sums corresponding to the 100 documents, and only release the subset of which is no longer sensitive, with a judge appointed to determine the legitimacy of the claim of sensitivity, and forcing the release of the subset of documents not deemed to be sufficiently sensitive.
- IAmGraydon 5y ago
  Interesting idea!
fouc 5y ago
> We should have left Iraq and Afghanistan alone and done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia I'm reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOdULpV810 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOdULpV810 TL;DW It had nothing to do with the regime in Saudi Arabia. Bin laden and supporters were a fringe group.
goodluckchuck 5y ago
Failure and success depend on your point of view. At some point, when people continuously fail, you have to consider that maybe it’s not an accident.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
iratewizard 5y ago
Pearl Harbor was unforeseeable. We knew the range of their planes and did not remotely expect that they would come anyways, when a return trip would be impossible. 9/11 on the other hand, was deemed a real threat during Clinton's administration.
- jl2718 5y ago
  This sounds like old information. Things have been declassified since then.
  - iratewizard 5y ago
    Don't tease information and then not provide a source or explanation
  - exikyut 5y ago
    (See sibling reply)
- exikyut 5y ago
  Actually Pearl Harbour WAS forseeable; it was attacked/chosen because the Japanese saw the US dismiss the results of two war game tests on the exact site. The Japanese also waited for similar conditions to those used in the war games tests for maximum effectiveness. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075
grecy 5y ago
> *It's likely a Chernobyl/Fukushima disaster would have resulted with an exclusion zone well into NYC* I'm quite sure I saw an interview with Osama Bin Laden where he talked about that idea. They did consider it, but he said they didn't want to go for a nuclear reactor because they didn't want "things to get out of hand". I don't remember if it was confirmed by the hosts/interviewer, or if it was my interpretation, but I took that to mean he didn't want the US to use nuclear weapons in retaliation, which he thought they would(might?).
dmead 5y ago
It was in the pdb for August.

mlcrypto 5y ago

Too many coincidences. Also we couldn't mobilize any fighter jets at all when a plane goes off course?

JamilD 5y ago
Not quite an answer to your question, but in the 60s and 70s hijackings were quite common (86 hijackings in 1969) and weren’t seen in the way they are now. The common understanding was that the hijackers wanted to re-route the plane somewhere else, and that everyone would end up alive but inconvenienced. It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I thought I remembered the plot to the 1996 film “executive decision” as being a debate whether to shoot the passenger jet out of the sky because the plane was going to be used as a missile, but i just read the plot again and they were going to detonate a nerve agent bomb on board the plane while over a us city, so, similar but not quite a prediction of the predicament.
  - trothamel 5y ago
    (Spoilers) The end of Tom Clancy's 1994 book "Debt of Honor" featured a 747 being crashed into the Capital, which is about as close as fiction gets.
    - anonymousab 5y ago
      A bit closer is the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, where a March 2001 episode featured a plot to crash an airliner into the world trade center and blame it on terrorists to justify a new war. Obviously 9/11 wasn't some government conspiracy to purposely spark new wars, but the other details are eerily similar.
      - strogonoff 5y ago
        A plot one of the stages of which included potentially crashing an airplane into WTC[0], among other targets, was uncovered (mostly, it appears, by accident) and thwarted in the mid-nineties. The Lone Gunmen plot coincidence is less curious considering that plot could have served as an inspiration, although the means of hijacking were very different in the series. The sad thing is that uncovering that plot didn’t help prevent the actual attack based on it a few years later… [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot#Phase_III:_CIA_plane_crash_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot#Phase_III:_CIA_pl...
  - JamilD 5y ago
    I just started watching the historical footage from CNN; it's interesting to hear the commentary in between when the first and second planes hit the tower. "Was the plane having any difficulty flying?" "Yes, it seemed to be rocking back and forth" "Was this a navigational error?" An announcement in the South Tower immediately after the crash instructed people to stay in their offices. Even after the second tower was hit, the immediate reaction was that it was a second explosion in the North Tower caused by the fuselage of the plane. 4 minutes after the second plane hit, when it was clear that two planes were involved: "was it possible a navigational error directed two planes into the World Trade Center?" It's incredible to think just how much our attitude and perspectives changed after realizing what exactly had happened.
- kolanos 5y ago
  > It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93. Sadly this is mostly a myth. It is a little known fact that there were five separate U.S. military war games being run simultaneously with 9/11 and three of them involved airliner hijacking scenarios, including flying airplanes into buildings. Worse, these war games involved simulated inputs into NORAD and FAA radar systems, resulting in mass confusion. There is an excellent documentary that covers these war games, including actual NORAD, FAA and EADS audio [0]. [0]: https://www.corbettreport.com/911wargames/ https://www.corbettreport.com/911wargames/
- mlcrypto 5y ago
  Wow 86 hijackings and nobody in intelligence could ever conceive of how that could go horribly wrong
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    Most people survived them though so there wasn't a huge reason to do anything particularly drastic, using planes as a suicide missile was basically entirely new. Even on the day of there was speculation about why the planes 'messed up' and flew into the WTC buildings which shows just how unusual it was. Most hijackings were essentially mass kidnappings for ransom to get money, release prisoners or get promises of policy changes and ended with a negotiation or storming the plane.
jorgesborges 5y ago
You can listen to real-time audio of FAA and NORAD track planes and scramble fighters [0]. This is not an easy task considering nobody knows what is happening and literally every plane in the country is being redirected and landed simultaneously. [0] skip to about 20min https://youtu.be/DYBhgEm3j7A https://youtu.be/DYBhgEm3j7A
dharmab 5y ago
This is covered in the 9/11 commission report. Quoted below: The protocols did not contemplate an intercept. They assumed the fighter escort would be discreet, “vectored to a position five miles directly behind the hijacked aircraft,” where it could perform its mission to monitor the flight path of the aircraft. In sum, the protocols in place on 9/11 for the FAA and NORAD to respond to a hijacking presumed that: (1) the hijacked aircraft would be readily identifiable and would not attempt to disappear; (2) there would be time to address the problem through the appropriate FAA and NORAD chains of command; and (3) the hijacking would take the traditional form, not a suicide hijacking designed to convert the aircraft into a guided missile. On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen. What ensued was the hurried attempt to create an improvised defense by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced.
- jsgo 5y ago
  Yeah, I don’t think 3 can be overstated. Prior to 911, hijacked planes were not an unknown thing. I don’t know numbers, but remember periodic events in the news of x plane that was hijacked landing at y airport with local officials needing to meet hijacker demands for it to return to its flight. Was weird when it happened, but we also didn’t have the hour of processing through security we do now.
- kolanos 5y ago
  In 1999 there was a professional golfer named Payne Stewart who died on a Learjet flight along with five others after it depressurized mid-flight. The plane continued flying on auto pilot and the FAA scrambled three separate fighter jet interceptions, involving five F-16s, the first one making visual contact with the Learjet approximately 20-30 minutes after the Learjet pilots became unresponsive. There was speculation at the time that the FAA was prepared to shoot the flight down if it was at risk of crashing in a populated area. The Pentagon later denied this, however, the Canadian government said this was their policy should the flight enter their airspace. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_cras...
jdavis703 5y ago
We did mobilize fighter jets (albeit without missiles, so essentially if the pilots intercepted it’d likely be a suicide mission). Also after 9/11 people straying in to no fly zones over DC would be escorted out by fighters.
- ykl 5y ago
  IIRC the fighters that were mobilized planned to ram since they took off without time to load missiles onboard, but all of our fighter keys have ejection seats. I assume the plan was to eject.
  - generj 5y ago
    To ensure the fighters crippled the passenger plane, at least one of the scrambled National Guard pilots ruled out ejecting. The other hoped to eject before impact. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44459345 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44459345
onion2k 5y ago
Few people would want to make a call to shoot down two full passenger jets over a city. With hindsight it would have been the right option, but at the time it's unlikely it would have happened even if there had been fighters with missiles available.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  Hijackings also weren't usually suicide missions before then either so it would have been a big leap to decide to shoot them down when you'd normally expect demands and a chance to take it out on the ground rather than just killing everyone on board.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Al-Qaeda actually gamed out this aspect of the American response and concluded (apparently correctly) that the US was ill-prepared for a multi-hijacking scenario. This wasn't rocket science... They basically looked at all available information on threat modeling the US had done, and noticed that we had constrained ourselves to a single hijacking event. They correctly surmised that intelligence infrastructure (including NORAD) would be off of their playbook if they hijacked multiple planes at once. This led to disruption of the response. When flight 77 (Pentagon plane) was reported as having dropped off of the transponder radios, by the time NORAD was notified the information had become garbled in a game of telephone and they thought they were receiving reports on flight 11, which is one of the two that struck the Trade Center towers. They scrambled jets to New Jersey instead of onto any predicted flight path for flight 77.

vmception 5y ago

We could have done regime change in Saudi Arabia and still had petrodollars Sometimes its useful to think inside the box But yeah current Saudi Arabia is a good deal for the US, hard to get others so heavily intertwined financially. Might as well not touch it.

yyyk 5y ago
>We could have done regime change in Saudi Arabia and still had petrodollars Very unlikely. Any military involvement anywhere near Mecca and Medina is off the table barring being invited or some utterly insane scenario.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "...barring being invited or some utterly insane scenario." I think you're being redundant there. US troops anywhere in Saudi Arabia is kind of a big deal.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
I don’t really understand what US/allies get from maintaining a theocracy in SA, chevron and british petroleum predate the modern kingdom, right? why is it good business sense to let the royal family siphon cash like there’s no tomorrow? seems to me a political explanation is more likely, probably related to the holy war with Iran. In that case I never really understood why we took an anti-theocratic stance there.
- vmception 5y ago
  taking over places is more expensive than letting people have their own self determination. distributes the load, still gets the resources and influence. greater levels of animosity avoided, sometimes completely.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Saudi Arabia broadly respects western wishes, they let the western companies make billions of dollars off their oil while the monarchy also makes billions of dollars. The West worries that if they rock the boat, a situation like Venezuela or Iran will happen, where the state tries to cut out the western companies from getting a cut. Iran provides the perfect example of why we tolerate Saudi Arabia. From 1901 to 1951, Iran's oil was controlled primarily by the British. In 1951, a democratic movement lead to the nationalization of the oil industry, which quickly led to a CIA backed coup. For the next ~30 years, a Western backed dictatorship ruled and their violent rule lead to the 1979 revolution being overtly hostile to the West. The West fears any other Saudi government would end up hostile to the West, given their decades of support for the monarchy.

542458 5y ago

Re: Indian Point - containment buildings are pretty armoured by design. The Indian point containment vessel walls are several feet of high-grade steel reinforced concrete. You might be thinking of the skinny, low quality rebar used in common construction at this point - this isn’t that, the rebar here is 2.25 inches thick, made of good-quality steel, and spaced every fifteen inches or so. The containment building is also smaller than a 747, so you can’t transfer the entire plane’s energy to it like you could with a larger target like the towers. The Indian Point engineers assert that theirs reactors and all other structures contains radioactive material could survive a 9/11 style impact. http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20130108221220/http://www.nei.org/corporatesite/media/filefolder/EPRI_Nuclear_Plant_Structural_Study_2002.pdf http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20130108221220/http://www.nei....

adwi 5y ago
> The containment building is also smaller than a 747, so you can’t transfer the entire plane’s energy to it like you could with a larger target like the towers. I know very little about physics and found this to be an unexpected point I’d like to understand more. Could you explain?
- whoisburbansky 5y ago
  The plane isn’t perfectly rigid, so it would only be able to impart as much energy to the structure as contained in the part of the plane that gets sheared off while colliding with the containment building.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jwagenet 5y ago
  As a layman there are probably few theories behind this statement: 1. The plane is not an energy monolith, any part of the plane larger than the building (eg wings) would have its own inertia which continues to rip off and around the building rather than drive all energy/mass attached to plane to the point of impact. 2. A smaller building may act like a plow if circular or hit on a corner, diverting energy as in 1. 3. If you simplify the side of a building to a supported plane, a larger plane may deform to failure more than a small plane due to the distance between supports ( other walls of building)

tablespoon 5y ago

> Additionally, the fact that members of the Saudi government aided and assisted the hijackers... Details? My understanding is a huge fraction of the Saudi population have jobs that amount to government sinecures (while immigrants do most of the real work). Are we talking about high-level members with real leadership positions, or some minor member of the royal family working in some ministry doing nothing and going off on his own?

ogma 5y ago
A court affidavit filed on 3 February 2015 claims that Zacarias Moussaoui was a courier between Osama bin Laden and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud in the late 1990s, and that Turki introduced Moussaoui to Bandar.[76] Zacarias Moussaoui stated on oath and wrote to Judge George B. Daniels that Saudi royal family members, including Prince Bandar, donated to Al-Qaeda and helped finance the 11 September attacks.[77] The Saudi government continues to deny any involvement in the 9/11 plot, and claims there is no evidence to support Moussaoui's allegations in spite of numerous previous intense investigations, noting that Moussaoui's own lawyers presented evidence of his mental incompetence during his trial.[76] Leaked information from the redacted portion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that two of the 9/11 hijackers received $US130,000 in payment from Bandar's bank account.[78] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud Bush's close friend, known arms dealer... you guys still haven't figured this one out yet? HN is always the last to know.
simonh 5y ago
Saudi politics and personal relationships are a mess. It is true that Bin Laden is a member of a very powerful family in Saudi and so obviously has a lot of personal connections there as do his close associates. He is however estranged from that family and has been for a very long time, but may have some in Saudi who have grievances against the house of Saud and are sympathetic to the jihadis. Al Qaeda and many other jihadi outfits procure a lot of their funding from Islamic charities and schools (Madrassas) with complex and very opaque financial dealings. Also the Saudi government and individual Saudis donate to many Islamic charities, so its highly likely some of that money ends up with the jihadi's including Al Qaeda. So yes there's almost certainly some truth to the allegations. Some powerful Saudis may secretly support them, some donate to charities and the money ends up with them, but no this is not official Saudi state sponsorship of Al Qaeda. In fact Al Qaeda consider the Saudi royal family and all of their associates to be apostates (essentially heretics) who can be killed summarily and they advocate for regime change and the establishment of a Caliphate. Like I said, it's a real mess of family loyalties, rivalries, swinging political fortunes and opaque dealings. Game of Thrones has nothing on these people. Just look at what happened to Jamal Khashoggi.

maybelsyrup 5y ago

Never forget: the CIA, at the highest levels, knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers had multiple-entry visas to the US and were living in the country in the year before the attacks. They knew they were al-Qaeda, and they knew they were important enough to have been at a big AQ powwow in Kuala Lumpur in 2000. CIA management prevented this information from being disseminated by FBI agents posted inside "Alec Station", the CIA's Bin Laden group, several times, and they later lied about doing so. All this according to, among other extremely mainstream sources (in addition to the documentary record), Richard Clarke, who would know -- he was the Federal "Terrorism Czar" on 9/11 and has been fuming pissed about this since he found [1][2]. You don't need to be a whack job, a conspiracist, to be angry and mystified by this. In many instances like this one, cursory investigation into claims of intelligence community "mistakes" or "incompetence" in these matters gives the lie to claims that these institutions somehow "dropped the ball" or "got it wrong" on 9/11, and are thus not to blame (either partly or fully) for the attacks. It's impossible to square such claims with a lot of the official paper trail. One can reasonably conclude that some of this stuff was not accidental. We hire these people to lie - why should we ever assume they're not? (The best part? Many of the people involved in the events I describe were promoted in the years post-9/11!) [1] https://abcnews.go.com/International/28-pages-questions-alleged-saudi-spy-cia/story?id=40697425 https://abcnews.go.com/International/28-pages-questions-alle... [2] https://www.doubleasteriskmedia.com/rich-blee-podcast https://www.doubleasteriskmedia.com/rich-blee-podcast

cronix 5y ago
Bill Binney (Tech Director/NSA) wasn't promoted. He quit just after 9/11 after He leaked that we had all of the intel to discover and piece together 9/11 in our systems, but the administration was prioritizing bulk collecting data over actually analyzing it. > In September 2002, he, along with J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on Trailblazer, a system intended to analyze mass collection of data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had been one of the inventors of an alternative system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen instead. Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that "it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had"[11] as well as noting Trailblazer's ineffectiveness and unjustified high cost compared to the far less intrusive ThinThread.[12] He was furious that the NSA hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot and stated that intercepts it had collected but not analyzed likely would have garnered timely attention with his leaner more focused system.[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_official) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o... Here's a really good interview with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs

project2501a 5y ago

> done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia, how about "stop fucking with other countries", instead? maybe bring Kissinger to the international court?

herbst 5y ago
From a naive bystander view it looks like a majority of war's and suffering in the world in my lifetime is just there because the US does not stop to enforce their crippled idea of democracy on other countries (and US oil interests). Could be biased, could be propaganda, but I am for sure not alone thinking this.
afroboy 5y ago
Then how Israel will stand when Muslims get their shit together?

gremloni 5y ago

Saudi Arabia is not a regime. It’s the most powerful tribal family in a country of family/tribes all of whom have the same perspective. Never mind the fact that it’s a very rich country in country with obnoxious human rights abuses when it comes to migrant workers but still has no poverty. Even amongst the migrants. Not to mention that in my opinion they treat women exactly how they should be treated.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Saudi Arabia is not a regime. Yes, it has a regime. > It’s the most powerful tribal family in a country of family/tribes all of whom have the same perspective. Yes, the House of Saud is that, except not all the family/tribes have the same perspective (heck, even the House of Saud isn't internally super cohesive, though MBS’ recent internal purges and the implicit threat of more have reduced the degree of active viewpoint diversity within the House of Saud and Saudi elites more generally.) > Never mind the fact that it’s a very rich country in country with obnoxious human rights abuses when it comes to migrant workers but still has no poverty. Even amongst the migrants. Saudi Arabia has a low reported poverty rate (but not zero; 12.7%) but it's reporting is irregular and unreliable, and is generally held to underestimate poverty significantly in general. Poverty estimates among the migrants make up the bar majority of the labor force (and the vast majority of the low-skill labor force) are very high.
kzzzznot 5y ago
> Not to mention that in my opinion they treat women exactly how they should be treated. How in your opinion should women be treated? You don’t think they should be considered equal to men?

fighterpilot 5y ago

> Iraq Regarding WMDs, intelligence couldn't be released because it was supposedly sensitive. What if they were required to release an md5sum of a tarball of the intelligence, perhaps with associated metadata to make it infeasible to fabricate/game. This process is overseen by a judge or independent body. Then 5-15 years later they release it in full when that intelligence is no longer sensitive? This is a way to get around the excuse of sensitivity. Sort of like a time-shifted FOIA request. It'd be a great way to strengthen our democratic institutions, deter lying and corruption and manufactured consent, neuter conspiracy theories of a deep state, improve everyone's confidence in institutions, and for accountability and transparency. Perhaps this isn't feasibile in practice, though, if the intelligence involves spies/assets that are still operational, or if it would involve revealing secrets around capabilities and methods. However, if that's the case, then they could release say 100 md5sums corresponding to the 100 documents, and only release the subset of which is no longer sensitive, with a judge appointed to determine the legitimacy of the claim of sensitivity, and forcing the release of the subset of documents not deemed to be sufficiently sensitive.

IAmGraydon 5y ago
Interesting idea!

fouc 5y ago

> We should have left Iraq and Afghanistan alone and done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia I'm reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOdULpV810 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOdULpV810 TL;DW It had nothing to do with the regime in Saudi Arabia. Bin laden and supporters were a fringe group.

goodluckchuck 5y ago

Failure and success depend on your point of view. At some point, when people continuously fail, you have to consider that maybe it’s not an accident.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

iratewizard 5y ago

Pearl Harbor was unforeseeable. We knew the range of their planes and did not remotely expect that they would come anyways, when a return trip would be impossible. 9/11 on the other hand, was deemed a real threat during Clinton's administration.

jl2718 5y ago
This sounds like old information. Things have been declassified since then.
- iratewizard 5y ago
  Don't tease information and then not provide a source or explanation
- exikyut 5y ago
  (See sibling reply)
exikyut 5y ago
Actually Pearl Harbour WAS forseeable; it was attacked/chosen because the Japanese saw the US dismiss the results of two war game tests on the exact site. The Japanese also waited for similar conditions to those used in the war games tests for maximum effectiveness. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345075

grecy 5y ago

> *It's likely a Chernobyl/Fukushima disaster would have resulted with an exclusion zone well into NYC* I'm quite sure I saw an interview with Osama Bin Laden where he talked about that idea. They did consider it, but he said they didn't want to go for a nuclear reactor because they didn't want "things to get out of hand". I don't remember if it was confirmed by the hosts/interviewer, or if it was my interpretation, but I took that to mean he didn't want the US to use nuclear weapons in retaliation, which he thought they would(might?).

dmead 5y ago

It was in the pdb for August.