That’s incredibly prescient! What the hell?
The difference on 9/11 was that A) they actually did that, B) they used fully loaded very large airplanes (767s), C) they used two planes for the same attack (four in total but the two hitting the towers were noteworthy by themselves) and D) the buildings actually collapsed.
Remember that at the time airplane hijackings were usually about ransom (either money or releasing political prisoners) and the usual threat scenario were attacks against the airplane itself. Also following 9/11 there was a huge hysteria around the use of "dirty bombs" (conventional bombings using radioactive material to contaminate a civilian population center) which despite its many depictions in TV shows never actually ended up happening (mostly because radioactive material is difficult to acquire and transport in the amounts necessary to perform such an attack whereas the hijackers just needed sharp objects and enough flight training to hit a large building while avoiding hitting anything else).
It'd be an overstatement that this was due to happen but in abstract the scenario wasn't unexpected. The truthers are right about one thing: the scenario was a known possibility. That doesn't mean how it played out is how it was anticipated or that anyone in a position to intervene knew exactly how it would play out once it started.
This standard assumption is a critical point for understanding 9/11.
The well-established procedure was to keep talking with the hijackers, get the plane on the ground at an airport, and negotiate to get the hostages out, etc. Airplane hijacking was also remarkably common, and despite this, there were no real efforts to take measures like reinforcing aircraft cockpit doors.
That set of assumptions is completely incompatible with assuming that hijackers are on a suicide mission.
So the suicide mission succeeded in the first three airplanes, but withing an hour or so, when passengers on the 4th hijacked plane had heard about the other planes being crashed into buildings, they realized that they were all already dead, so attacked the hijackers, and the plane crashed into a field in PA. Fighter jets were also scrambled so quickly that they had no time to load ammunition/armaments, and the mission was to take down the plane (but it went down first); this would also have been almost surely suicidal for the unarmed fighters, having to make contact in midair.
So, as a side-effect, in a single morning, the entire set of assumptions underlying hijacking was eliminated, and hijacking was also essentially eliminated. Any potential hijacker would be treated with the assumption that they were on a suicide mission, and had essentially zero chance of survival, let alone achieving their goal (money or release of prisoners). I don't recall hearing of a single hijacking since then (although a few instances of pilot suicide taking the passengers with them).
How would the unarmed fighters even have taken down the airliner?
I do remember that flap about dirty bombs. It was pretty scary for a while. Thankfully it never eventuated. It's weird how Byzantine the "successful" attack scenario ended up being, versus the techno-sophistication of our imagined ones. Sad and a tragedy nonetheless.
Maybe there was an attempt but it was thwarted in one of those stories that will never make the news because it's all classified.
I looked through his magazines. I remember one magazine recommended that security forces should be on the lookout for terrorists using passenger planes as essentially human guided missiles. Went way into details of how much explosive power fuel would have etc.
I suppose it wasn't especially prescient, more like obvious for any expert in the field.
That is a really odd thing to say on the context of security. If people did indeed have this rationale, I would be surprised at the obvious and absurd display of incompetence.
A vulnerability is a vulnerability, and you expect the attacker to decide how much impact he will try to cause (with a bias into "a lot"). The part about 3 planes is reasonable (something at this level of organization should raise an alert somewhere).
Honestly, that doesn't make any sense to me and I'm doubtful. I work at a company that had a data center (built pre-2001) 10 or 20 miles from an airport. It was built like a literal bunk because (IIRC) their threat model included "jet airliner crashes into datacenter" (no terrorism required).
It looks like they were testing/modeling that scenario with nuclear power plants way back in 1988:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/us/threats-responses-reac...:
> The 19 experts, many of them retired, work or worked at universities or companies that build or operate reactors. In an article on Friday in the journal Science, they dismiss fears voiced by opponents of nuclear power that the nation's reactors are vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
> "We read that airplanes can fly through the reinforced, steel-lined 1.5-meter-thick concrete walls surrounding a nuclear reactor," the article says, "and inevitably cause a meltdown resulting in 'tens of thousands of deaths' and 'make a huge area uninhabitable for centuries,' to quote some recent stories." But, they add, "no airplane regardless of size, can fly through such a wall."
> The article says the scenario "was actually tested in 1988 by mounting an unmanned plane on rails and 'flying' it at 215 meters per second (about 480 m.p.h.) into a test wall." The engines penetrated only about two inches and the fuselage even less, according to the article.
Something with two engines at 480 mph is a jet, definitely not a Cessna-type general aviation plane.
I wonder if targeting the control building, or the transformers/electrical shit that connects to the grid with a jetliner would be more effective. Or maybe a shipyard with 'nuclear vessels'.
I guess you're referring to these magazines not being especially prescient, but rather a standard analysis and I'd agree. But on the off chance you meant the Lone Gunmen spin-off, I mean...1) same year, 2) same location, 3) same type of attack, 4) same backstory or consequence...I'd say that's pretty fucking prescient. To land a broad-strokes analysis is not specific; but this is highly specific! It's just wow.
well he was weird and he subscribed to a lot of funny things that would normally be boring things for specific employments that he was not employed as. He basically wasn't employed as anything.
For example he also subscribed to in depth geopolitical analysis journals whose target demographic was evidently people in diplomatic corps - which he was not.
Because then you qualify in my book as a little weird, but I guess our mileage may vary.
on edit: he was a cool enough guy and certainly I myself am prone to non-normative behavior but as I said he was weird, and one thing that you would notice he had a bunch of stuff he didn't really have reasons for having, so you put it down to his weirdness as potential cause, because when someone has a big flag "weird" everything out of the ordinary about them gathers beneath that flag.
― Oscar Wilde