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FBI releases 9/11 investigation document that scrutinized Saudis
- neom 5y agoCrux of the article: The FBI document released Saturday contains significant redactions, but nevertheless shows FBI officials were skeptical of claims by various witnesses that Saudis in the U.S. who met with the two hijackers did so accidentally through chance encounters. It was “difficult to reconcile” the connection between the hijackers and those who gave them support, the FBI document states, noting that one individual claimed he met the hijackers at a 7-Eleven convenience store in northern Virginia “during a ‘chance meeting’, in a uniquely similar fashion to the way Bayoumi described his ‘chance meeting’ with Hazmi and Midhar in Los Angeles.”
- compsciphd 5y agoit makes a little sense to question this. It make more sense that they had chance encounters at a mosque (i.e. "strange" visitors who are visiting an area are common to visiting local religious institutions). with that said, there's a joke that many jews make when they travel, of playing the game "spot the jew", and I can imagine if I ran into a jew at a random 7-11 I'm more likely to have a friendly chit-chat than with other random people, so I can imagine that the same might hold true for saudis. I could very easily imagine if they were in a location with a reasonably sized saudi ex-pat community that there would be many of these chance encounters with other saudis. I could imagine "white bread" FBI agents that aren't from a minority, might not be able to comprehend how minorities find each other and make connections in random locations. with all that said, it be proper for the FBI to chase down all these threads.
- nkozyra 5y agoI think the details of this are a little more coincidental than you and I connecting randomly because we're Jewish.
- compsciphd 5y agoyou mean not coincidental?
- imglorp 5y agoAt least conservative jews and muslims both wear distinctive headwear, and sometimes grooming, so it's decent odds of greeting one another on the street. Most other backgrounds, not so much.
- ksaj 5y agoI agree with this. I'm white from Toronto, Canada. A decade or so ago I worked in Saudi Arabia and as I was walking out of a coffee shop I saw another white guy walking past... so of course he stood out by the way he looked and the way he dressed. But not only that, he was someone I met up with at 2600 meetings every month in Toronto. We chatted, and he was staying in a compound that I had stayed at a number of times before. It was a total chance meeting, as neither of us knew the other had even left Toronto for any particular gig. Prior to that I didn't even know what he did for a living. So chance meetings certainly can and do happen. In this case it was actually someone I knew. But we initially noticed each other because we similarly stood out in the surrounding population. Likewise, during prayer times (Saudis pray 5 times a day!) I would stay in whatever restaurant or cafe and they would shut the window blinds so the religious police (Muttawa) wouldn't see us and give us grief for not being at prayer. Every time, the place always had numerous other white people whom I didn't know and didn't meet. But you could be sure several of us bumped into each other repeatedly at these cafes, despite not knowing each other at all. Our only connection was being white and non-Muslim. Exactly the reverse of what's being touted as suspicious coincidences here.
- redis_mlc 5y agoSure, but 911 goes much deeper than "chance encounters at a mosque": - it's been reported that Saudi embassies were involved in the US. The US govt. would have sigint on their communications. Stay tuned. - often mosques get stricter imams after large donations from KSA - the Saudi royal family is known to donate to Islamists - Canadian mosques were involved in arranging citizenship, etc. for one of the organizers - in Islam, the only guaranteed path to heaven is jihad, or funding jihad - the latter is something anybody can do with little risk and high perceived reward. (This is partly why France finds 50 people supporting each Paris attack. It takes a village.) When you combine the above with OBL being independently wealthy, you can start to understand how this happened.
- h2odragon 5y agoMany FBI agents are Mormons, and have the same automatic assumption of fellowship you speak of.
- nebula8804 5y agoDefine 'Many'. Do you have any stats?
- h2odragon 5y agoI don't. I've met some Mormon FBI agents, and read things like this: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-mormons-make-great-fbi-recruits https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-mormons-make-great...
- nebula8804 5y agohuh well thats fascinating.
- MauroIksem 5y agoI call it "what kind of brown are you"?
- TuringNYC 5y agoI find it dubious to call chance encounters even "encounters." Muslims are encouraged to pray in congregation, even during travel. You find a random Mosque with several hundred people and perform your prayer rituals there (for most busy people, that is only for Friday congregational prayers.) You are also encouraged to smile at and greet everyone, even though you dont know them. As a former Management Consultant, i've been in dozens of random mosques in random cities (based on where my client happened to be.) In SF alone I've visited in five or six on Fridays in the year before COVID as I flew in for work meetings. I dont know anyone at any of these, but you try to smile and greet people as you are encouraged to. Now imagine you create a graph of where you've been and who else has been there. You can find all sorts of co-incidences because the graph doesnt account for the degree of connectedness (near zero) Another reason others faiths often dont fully understand this is due to the workday challenge in the west. Muslim mandatory congregational prayers are on a workday (usually Friday 12-1 or 1-2), so we dont get to enjoy the community feel of a long congregation with socializing before/after that one could achieve on a Saturday or Sunday. Instead Muslims often find themselves rushing back to work for a 2pm meeting. If you're unlucky and your meeting starts at 2pm sharp, you are brisk walking back and swapping New Balances for wingtips on the elevator up. The workday challenge also means that the congregational prayer is not in your home community, it is whatever is closest to your office. Sometimes, you have multiple depending on whether you're at the downtown or uptown office, etc.
- compsciphd 5y agoreligious jews pray 3 times a day as well. It's common in cities with reasonable size jewish populations to have afternoon services in different office buildings scattered throughout the city where people meet up every work day. so that experience is common to them as well.
- geoduck14 5y ago>of playing the game "spot the jew" That can get dangerous very fast!
- Alex3917 5y agoJust like how, according to the 9/11 commission report, on the morning of 9/11 there was a "chance meeting" between the two guys who ran the investigation into attacks (Porter Graham and Bob Goss) and the guy who wired 100k to the lead hijacker (Ahmad). source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_Goss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_Goss
- tpmx 5y ago> On the morning of September 11, 2001, Goss and Graham were having breakfast with General Ahmad [head of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)] Secondary source for the $100k money transfer from the ISI head to Atta: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/22/usa.september11 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/22/usa.september1... > Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?
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- throwawaysea 5y agoThe ISI has also been implicated in giving harbor to Al Qaeda (like with bin Laden) and the Taliban (helping them rebuild and take over Afghanistan again). Between these and near constant state supported terrorism against India, how is it that Pakistan has escaped all accountability and public scrutiny? I would love to learn more about the foreign policy or diplomatic dynamics that may be involved here.
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- kotaKat 5y agohttps://archive.is/47mdz https://archive.is/47mdz
- jeroenhd 5y agoThat's strange, I'm getting a TLS certificate error when I visit that website now. Is it just me? Edit: must be a DNS issue, the website resolves to cloudflare-dns.com so I guess it must be part of the website's operator's childish fight with Cloudflare's DNS resolver for not forwarding the resolving IP subnet to their DNS servers.
- SquareWheel 5y agoYou're probably using Cloudflare DNS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
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- echopurity 5y agoDoes the report mention how the usa helps the saudis run a dystopian nightmare of religious brutality that created terrorist ideologies and the 911 terrorists themselves?
- acgt 5y agoThis NPR news doesn't require subscription. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/12/1036389448/biden-declassifies-secret-fbi-report-detailing-saudi-nationals-connections-to-9- https://www.npr.org/2021/09/12/1036389448/biden-declassifies... So Saudis has connections with 9/11 terrorists, and Washington invaded Iraq instead?
- CrazyPyroLinux 5y agoAs Ron Paul once said (about the Federal Reserve), "If that doesn't make any sense at all to you...then you understand it just fine."
- acgt 5y agoI was just suggesting the Iraq war is a mistake.
- pstuart 5y agoAs were our misadventures in Afghanistan.
- mcguire 5y agoI have never seen a coherent explanation of what was going through anyone's mind regarding the Iraq war. The nearest I've heard is that Iraq was Bush's idee fixe going into office. (My personal theory was that Bush realized Afghanistan was not going to get him re-elected to a second term.)
- hindsightbias 5y agoThere’s only one conspiracy that is logically consistent with the outcome - that Cheney was a witting or unwitting asset of the Iranian regime.
- atatatat 5y agoconspiracy theory**
- will4274 5y agoDocument here: https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11-attacks-investigation-and-related-materials/9-11-material-released-in-response-to-executive-order-14040/april-4-2016-electronic-communication-part-01-of-01/view https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11-attacks-investigation-and-related...
- mcculley 5y agoWhere is the actual report?
- junon 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502758
- swarnie 5y agoA question for the American dominated commenters on this forum.... How many more years and anniversaries do you intend to do? You got 9/11'd, spent 20 years invading two countries who weren't responsible, ignored and apologised for the one country that was responsible and are still not very good at the Paralympics. when does it end?
- ssijak 5y agoAs long as the US is putting ~$800B into military per year, the answer is never.
- vorpalhex 5y agoWe had a domestic terror attack, invaded two countries that the terrorist organization lived and thrived in, removed and dismantled most of their support structure. Admittedly we failed to rebuild the Afgani state. Gotta call it quits eventually, 20 years is one hell of a try. We still took the most gold in the regular olympics though. So probably in another 30 years when someone else makes a gaffe in that area.
- pstuart 5y ago> Admittedly we failed to rebuild the Afgani state. Funny, the only talk I remember around then was "bombing them back to the stone age". We had zero legitimacy in that invasion -- it was a jingoistic angry retaliation with no clear plan on what to do other than "kill terrorists". Irony alert: we probably created more terrorists than we killed.
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoAnd yet we denied them the ability to carry out large-scale attacks in the US for the next 20 years.
- mistermann 5y agoCausality if far more complex than perceived by the subconscious mind.
- dmix 5y agoThis is one of the Saudi’s frequently mentioned in the report in connection to two hijackers, who was being financed by a Saudi princess married to a US Ambassador: https://911research.fandom.com/wiki/Omar_al-Bayoumi https://911research.fandom.com/wiki/Omar_al-Bayoumi > FBI agents involved in the case had received several reports that led them to believe al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence officer, living and working secretly in the U.S. His cover story was that he worked for an aviation logistics company owned by the Saudi government, but investigators found he never did any work for the company. > Bayoumi got the hijackers an apartment and helped open a bank account, obtain car insurance, get Social Security cards and call flight schools in Florida—and also threw a welcoming party for the hijackers, during which he introduced them to the local Muslim community. The Al Saud princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haifa_bint_Faisal_Al_Saud?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haifa_bint_Faisal_Al_Saud?wpro...
- Scoundreller 5y ago> but investigators found he never did any work for the company. Not just him, but there were about 50 employees at this Saudi aviation company that were being paid and not showing up to work. Clearly this was immigration fraud to bring people to the US, but I’ll bet these “ghost” jobs haven’t been cracked down on by immigration authorities.
- wombatmobile 5y agoI'm not a conspiracy theorist or anything. I just wonder how WTC7 collapsed in 5 seconds despite not being hit by any aircraft. The video just has always baffled me, and no explanation, including NIST's, has come close to passing the pub test. https://ine.uaf.edu/projects/wtc7/ https://ine.uaf.edu/projects/wtc7/
- pupdogg 5y agoNIST is still withholding the mathematical model data that was used for their simulation of the collapse to derive their results. More recent rebuttal from NIST can be found here: https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/20-years-later-nists-world-trade-center-investigation-and-its-legacy#comment-102311 https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/20-years-later-nis... FYI: Shyam Sunder, the author of the article, was the lead investigator of this collapse.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoI just checked the nist report. An airplane impact doesn't even matter, wtc7 wasn't hit by one. It did not collapse in 5 seconds, 5 seconds was the visually obvious footage, but many things happened before that, it took 7 hours. - Debris from wtc1 ignites fire on at least 10 floors. Sounds believable to me. - floor 7-13 fires got out of control, primary sprinkler system failed, the redundancy or backup system didn't not work due to damage from the tower 1 and 2, the water supply for the backup relied on the cities water system which was mia on that day. This caused the fire to spread diagonally across the building. Sounds ok to me, I don't think anyone could make this up and it would be allowed into such a report without review. There's much more but assuming usual explosives, this has to be considered: The smallest charge capable of initiating column failure would have resulted in a sound level of 130 to 140 dB at a distance of at least half a mile. This would be quite a couple seconds or max a minute before the full collapse, but no footage had such sounds, nor did witnesses report such sounds, and any nearby seismology equipment would detect irregularities. Just for reference 130-140 decibels are much louder than I would have thought, 130 is peak stadium crowd noise, 135 is an air raid siren, 140 is a jet engine take off.
- mistermann 5y ago
- yawaworht1978 5y agoLooks like the only reason why some of these mentioned weren't on the planes was because they cannot operate one. With the described anti western and anti Jewish sentiments and views, being Saudi citizens(I presume) , why would they want American citizenship? Saudi embassy/consulate staff involved meeting these people? This looks so dodgy, the Kashoggi case has shown that Saudi diplomat staff doesn't respect territorial laws when being hosted. Mediterranean restaurant is some sort of key word or red herring, not just because of the rather offensive "beneath their status" statement, but clearly if it's more than just Mediterranean than in name, their last priority would be to cater for halal food and I am pretty sure that the Mediterranean dressing style would be viewed as "beneath their status" (but certainly not style, if I mad add this). So they didn't go there for the food, but to meet with other lackeys, to not been seen in the usual, not under status locations.
- pupdogg 5y agoWhatever happened to the $2.3T (trillion) dollars that went missing as per Donald Rumsfeld's speech on September 10, 2001? I think we forgot to follow-up on this question...leading ourselves into greater debt year-after-year since then. Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-war-on-waste/
- hindsightbias 5y agoTrump said the troops stole it: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/trump-us-troop-stole-millions-and-millions-in-iraq-224352 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/trump-us-troop-stole-...
- throwaway829 5y agoThat article makes no reference to Rumsfeld's 9/10 speech. This is just a generic Trump is bad article.
- knownjorbist 5y agoIt's directly linked to the same sum discussed by Rumsfeld.
- pupdogg 5y agoI think you're confused. This is money before Iraq ever came into the picture (post 9/11). This is money that was reported "unaccounted for" 1 day prior to 9/11.
- jl6 5y agoThe article makes it pretty clear that the $2.3T figure is about efficiency, sloppy accounting and diffuse accountability. It’s not like there was $2.3T cash in a van that got stolen.
- pupdogg 5y agoAgreed! But if look at the timing of it, the efficiency, accounting, and accountability seemed to be worsened 6x times more to date.
- pupdogg 5y agoYet the coalition of 3400 architects and engineers still do not have computer inputs of NIST's mathematical models used for simulating how the buildings were destroyed. As per NIST: "This information was exempt from public disclosure under Section 7d of the National Construction Safety Team Act because it was determined by the Director of NIST that release of the files might jeopardize public safety." References: 1. https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/20-years-later-nists-world-trade-center-investigation-and-its-legacy#comment-102311 https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/20-years-later-nis... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiwpj7aa9c8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiwpj7aa9c8
- resoluteteeth 5y agoBecause they don't want to teach terrorists how to take down skyscrapers?
- pupdogg 5y agoTwo planes are hijacked and then rammed into two of the tallest buildings in the world. Both buildings collapse, while causing another 3rd building to collapse as well. I'm not sure how a mathematical model would help/teach the terrorist any more than the already available public videos of the attacks.
- newbamboo 5y ago“Some mysteries are better left unsolved really.” Spinal tap
- timdaub 5y agoIt's weird, all my coming of age I believed that 9/11 had something fishy going for it. I fell for the popularized conspiracy theories. There were videos propagated through Google Videos. I don't hold them much anymore. Still to this day, I'm extremely skeptical of some of the official stories. I don't get the point of classified documents in this case. And there are still many open questions like e.g. why WTC 5 collapsed without an airplane impact. Dunno, I guess eventually with more years passing we'll start to learn more diverging stories and potentially the truth?
- dilyevsky 5y agoWtc 5 didnt collapse it was demolished. Wtc 7 did. Which do you think is worse getting hit by an airplane or getting hit by another massive building as it collapses?
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Wtc 5 didnt collapse it was demolished. It experienced fire and partial collapse due to being hit with part of the fuselage of UA 175 and other debris from the North Tower. (“Without an airplane impact” is, of course, a false description.)
- mistermann 5y agoWas the collapse of WTC 7 due to getting hit by another building?
- dilyevsky 5y agoIt was hit by north tower collapse then fire raged on for many hours as sprinkler system had failed etc. I think structurally it still shouldn’t have collapsed but it doesn’t require a grand conspiracy to explain the failure here.
- mistermann 5y agoIt may if you want your explanation to be correct though. And technically, a grand conspiracy is subjective, and a bit of a false dichotomy. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence The complexity of the problem is such that it is extremely difficult to not make a cognitive error during contemplation, even leaving aside the famous unreliability of the multiple systems this cognition sits on top of. Think of how hard it can sometimes be to debug a system for which you have the literal source code for, which sits on a highly trustworthy base. Now consider reality, for which you have no source code, but you do know (at least during certain mental states, but not necessarily all) that it is chock full of bugs, indeterminate behaviors, etc.
- supperburg 5y agoI recently read Islamic imperialism, a history from Yale university press. The first thing you need to know is that in the Middle East, countries do not exist. What we call countries are conglomerations of loosely associated factions from top to bottom. That’s why there isn’t a single middle eastern state that is stable and also free of brutality, except the black sheep. Even if some Saudi people were involved, saying that “the saudis” were involved doesn’t make sense. The higher levels of the Saudi dynasty were certainly not in favor of 9/11 even if the fundamentalists in the country hadn’t lost any sleep over it. Bin laden was an outcast. He left Saudi Arabia and went around to various places and at one point ended up in Northern Africa where he was engaged in evicting the Americans from Somalia. He said that the Americans he fought in Somalia were so weak and retreated so readily that it opened his mind to the possibility of inflicting real damage to the United States. But around this time he became more high profile and was evicted from his host country and wasn’t welcome anywhere, including Saudi Arabia. That should be a big hint about the Saudi theory. He made an appeal to the UK for political asylum, which based on his rhetoric at the time was like hitler asking for asylum in Israel. If the UK had granted him asylum 9/11 wouldn’t have happened. But they didn’t. From there he ultimately moved on to Afghanistan and the tribal regions of the Pakistan border where there is no presence of government. Bin laden was a religious fanatic who outwardly pursued The universal adoption of islam and protested foreign occupation of the pan-Arab community, even the willful presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia after the invasion of Kuwait. He killed 3,000 people because the saudis willingly hosted American troops. Mind-bending. But this leads to the next point which is that despite his outward behavior, inwardly he probably had political ambitions and all indications point to yet another repetition of history in that region — a small group of people justify violence in the name of Islam and then promptly transform into a conventional state, built upon violations of Islam, as soon as they have captured the material means to do so. Bin laden, who probably thought 9/11 would cause the United States to remove itself from the Middle East, only made it to step one. And this has interesting consequences for the future landscape of terror. We probably won’t see another attack from the Middle East. Attacks from these groups are almost always pragmatic, even if they are done in the name of “Islam,” and almost always the pragmatic target is some other player in that region.
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- 10xrubberduck 5y agoMay or may not be related: https://www.rferl.org/a/saudi-russia-arms-weapons-/31425164.html https://www.rferl.org/a/saudi-russia-arms-weapons-/31425164.... So seems like they are making moves on the other side. Which US probably doesn't like. So something's going on with the timing of these news.
- anticodon 5y agoMore like Saudi Arabia could be the next target for the US attack. Reason is simple: it possesses large deposits of fossil fuel but spends "too much" (from American point of view in the world with rapidly declining energy resources) for internal consumption. By bombing Saudi Arabia, killing millions and destroying infrastructure (e.g. oil-fired power plants), USA will reduce consumption of fossil fuels by Saudi Arabia and leave more for export to the US.
- 1024core 5y agoSaudi Arabia is the Land of the Two Shrines. If you want to kick the hornet's nest (not just regular hornets, but Asian Murder Hornets), that is the way. You'll have 1.5B pissed off Muslims if the US does anything hostile against the Saudi Kingdom.
- newsclues 5y agoBut you can let Iran and Saudi alliances fight it out.
- 1024core 5y agoyes, you can definitely utilize the millennia-old Shia-Sunni conflict to knock the Saudis down a couple of notches. They have been busy solidifying a wall around Iran. Pakistan is, basically, their bitch. Pakistan and Saudis have an agreement, that should the Saudis need, the Pakistani nukes will be made available within a few hours. No wonder the Iranians want to develop nukes; the Saudis practically have them!
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- barneygale 5y agoA couple of contentions from 9/11 truthers never made much sense to me: Firstly, why would the government plant explosives/thermite/whatever in the buildings? Flying planes into buildings would be enough pretext to start a war on terror, if that was the intention. You don't need to ensure they collapse with additional explosives. Secondly, why would they use a missile rather than a plane when targeting the pentagon? If you're planning to make the public think a plane hit the pentagon, why not just use a plane?
- pan69 5y agoI'm no 9/11 truther but I'm fascinated by the subject at the same time. It's such a complex subject and there are no easy and simple answers. There are many angles to take into consideration. I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle as with most things these days. I thought this video was interesting since it doesn't really seem to claim anything. It's asking difficult questions though: The Debate: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=829 https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=829 Part 1 - Air Defence: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=878 https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=878 Part 2 - The Hijackers: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=3378 https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=3378 Part 3 - The Airplanes: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=5802 https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=5802 Part 4 - The Pentagon: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=7011 https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=7011 Part 5 - Flight 93: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=8272 https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=8272 Part 6 - The Twin Towers: - https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=9681 https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=9681 Part 7 - Building 7: https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=16141 https://youtu.be/LgYNPaO1rNY?t=16141
- imglorp 5y ago> the truth is somewhere in the middle Beware of false equivalences though. Some facts are black and white even if parties are trying to muddy the water, retain secrets, or whatever. Eg, flat Earth: there is no middle and by humoring the story tellers elevates them to credence they haven't earned.
- stordoff 5y agoOne suggested explanation for the first point I've seen is that it was to limit damage to the surrounding areas in case of an uncontrolled collapse. I don't recall any evidence being presented for this claim though, and it doesn't strike me as particularly plausible, as it doesn't seem worth complicating the plan to such a degree for seemingly little benefit. The use of a missile rather than a plane has never made any sense to me - one unexpected photo, or even a plausible witness account, gives you a problem, despite there being an obvious way to avoid it. It also invites questions if the result is inconsistent with a plane crash in any way.