IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

Also, it wasn't an air strike against the pipeline, it was the Iraqis dumping oil to prevent US marine landings (from what I heard, they were planning on setting it on fire if there were any ships there? Game-of-Thrones-style).

The air strike was to prevent further spillage:

> On January 26, three US F-117 fighter-bombers destroyed pipelines to prevent further spillage into the Persian Gulf.

A given channel, or even entire networks, would often start out pretty free. Dissenting discussion and arguments were allowed, if not encouraged. Users could hold and share their own beliefs without fear of repercussion. It was generally a fun experience. The channel or network would see growth.

But as the community became larger and more established, certain users would often end up becoming ops, and they'd start to enforce their own beliefs upon the entire community. People would start getting kicked or banned unnecessarily for very minor "violations", which most often involved just holding a different opinion than an op.

These kicked or banned users wouldn't come back, those users who liked them would have less incentive to return, and eventually there'd be more people getting booted or leaving than there would be new people coming and returning. The channel withers. If this happens with enough channels, the network withers. As networks wither, IRC itself withers.

Even Reddit opened just a couple years ago their own server @ irc.snoonet.org.

Coding chatbots for IRC is still a really fun way to practice NLP concepts.

And yet they still successfully sell this system to many countries.

For example Tom Clancy's Debt of Honour wraps up with a Japanese airliner flying into the Capitol Building killing off the majority of the US Government.

The Empire State building has been hit multiple times by planes including a serious incident involving a B-25 in 1945:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-25_Empire_State_Building_cras...

and the WTC had been the subject of multiple previous bombings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing

Planes attacking buildings – especially the World Trade Center – is certainly something that had been imagined.

There were two aspects to 9/11 which surprised people. First, that it was four planes which were hijacked: For security screeners to allow one armed hijacker onto a plane may be poor luck, but for armed hijackers to get onto four planes looks like carelessness. (With apologies to Oscar Wilde.)

Second, while the prospect of planes crashing into towers had been considered -- and in fact all modern skyscrapers are designed to survive such an impact -- the aftermath of 9/11 was the first time the prospect of aircraft fuel being used to bring down a skyscraper was ever widely contemplated. If the two planes which hit the WTC hadn't been carrying enough fuel to reach LAX, the fires would not have burned for long enough to bring the towers down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot

"The Path to 9/11" has a few historical inaccuracies but it provides a good dramatization of the key events in the 90s that led up to 9/11. It's well worth watching.

Thank you all for those references. I learned a lot today.

For something in the terrorism realm, check out Air France 8969. It was hijacked with the intent of using it to destroy the Eiffel tower (either by crashing into it or by blowing up the plane over it). It never happened because the French discovered the plan while the plane was on the ground and attacked it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)

The "no one ever imagined" line is put forward by DC insiders to cover for the fact that they never planned for a well known attack vector. Reporters spend a lifetime building connections to senior civil servants and have no problem running with lines like that if it will help their contacts keep their jobs.

Literally, from peoples' mouths, "Better to lose some freedoms than to be scared."

He covers everything from Japan's desire for the oil production of Indonesia to Germany's doomed synthetic fuel effort. The author also covers Nimitz's focus on denying oil resources to Japan, a strategy that eventually let him land several fatal blows to the Imperial Navy and end the war in the Pacific.

Nimitz was so successful in that strategy that near the end of the war, the Japanese began using kamikaze attacks against American naval vessels as a fuel-saving tactic, since pilots only required half as much fuel to complete their mission.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Prize-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110...