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"assuming none of these documents are actually disinformation" that is always a possibility, the government does not have a good history of telling the truth.

• fennecfoxen 5y ago
  More saliently, the NORAD timeline of events was dodgy enough that the 9/11 commission referred the matter to the Inspector General of the DoD and DOT. "Commission staff believes there is sufficient evidence that the false statements made to the commission were deliberately false. The false testimony served a purpose: to obscure mistakes on the part of the F.A.A. and the military, and to overstate the readiness of the military to intercept and, if necessary, shoot down UAL 93." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._military_response_during_the_September_11_attacks#NORAD_timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._military_response_during_... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/08/norad200608 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/08/norad200608
  • boibombeiro 5y ago
    The FAA NORAD tapes from 9/11 is available on YouTube. I found it shocking how unprepared everyone seemed to be. I'm reading the Vanity Fair article, it adds context missing from the raw communication. It helps to understand why it sounded so chaotic. Is the movie worth watching? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYBhgEm3j7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYBhgEm3j7A
    • AndrewBissell 5y ago
      A major reason for that "unpreparedness" is that an improbably large number of exercises and drills just happened to be scheduled on that day: https://twitter.com/marina0swald/status/1435727546834989058 https://twitter.com/marina0swald/status/1435727546834989058
      • patentatt 5y ago
        I’ve always heard this line of reasoning/evidence, but never seen a break down of how improbable all of these events were, or how publicly known any of these could have been. For example, was the one large training exercise the impetus for many of the smaller exercises to be done simultaneously, and also somewhat knowable to an interested outsider? If so, it could be that the attack was planned at that time to take advantage of it. Or, is it the case that all of these exercises were super secret, rare, and independently planned, which would be much stranger and/or more suspicious. Seems like this is still somewhat knowable and relevant analysis that some enterprising journalist could undertake.
    • shadowgovt 5y ago
      Al-Qaeda hit upon a weakness of US response (partially through luck and partially through their own strategizing): the US intelligence community was still thinking about threats in the Cold War model and hijackings were a blind spot. They generally weren't anticipating hijackings to weaponize the plane, and they weren't anticipating an organized multi-hijacking scenario. Partially because both scenarios are militarily ineffective... Intelligence community thinking hadn't come around to the idea of warfare directed at civilian targets purely to demonstrate that the government was an ineffective defender (as opposed to warfare directed at military targets to damage and diminish military capacity).
    • ethbr0 5y ago
      For splicing together a bunch of different conversations, it sounds pretty methodical to me. @ 8:14 AM, original ATC (Boston Center) loses contact, attempts to reestablish contact, alerts various parties of no radio flight, makes them aware its flying without transponder, and clears traffic on its presumed heading. There's a lot of work to search on radars to fix the plane's exact position. @ 8:20, word comes in (from American) that confirms it's a hijacking, and related centers spin up to work that. Note, they're initially calculating endurance, given that hijackers typically want to fly somewhere. @ 8:34, the local Air National Guard is alerted, with a heads up that an official request will be coming shortly. @ 8:37, position is confirmed visually by another plane, with the hijacked plane descending. @ 8:38, NORAD (NEADS) is officially contacted, to report the flight has been hijacked and requesting an intercept. @ 8:41, military pilots are readying. @ 8:47, the World Trade Center is on fire. 33 minutes, to react to a situation that hasn't really happened in American airspace for a long, long time (ever?). The only gap I could fault all involved with would be somehow expecting the unexpected -- that plane hijackers wouldn't be interested in flying the plane to safety, but would instead intentionally fly it into a building. If that had been in the realm of considered possibilities, I assume fighters would have been scrambled much earlier. Edit: Casting about for an analogy. Imagine I called you up one morning, and I told you that you needed to have a VP or higher in your company authorize an action that might have serious legal ramifications, and needed to be coordinated with VP+ counterparts in 2 separate companies you've had some dealing with. We'll even put aside uncertainty and doubt. You trust me, and want to make it happen. Where do you think we'd be in 33 minutes?
• hanselot 5y ago
  Nice pivot. Since orange man bad not in office, lets set up the narrative that the government should be questioned now, as opposed to 4 years ago, when every word spoken by agents was to be treated as law.
• morpheos137 5y ago
  Most people don't understand watergate at all. Nixon is far less culpable than people like John Dean for example and I doubt it was ever about "spying" on DNC internal ops rather than some personal project of Dean's not even related to politics. Anyway as the saying goes the victor writes the history.