The Untold Pre-History of 9/11(nationalinterest.org)
15 pointsby baud1472589 hours ago1 comment
  • adrian_b6 hours ago
    As a non-US citizen, what has always astonished me, already while watching a direct TV transmission of all the events of that day, and seeing live the following attacks, was not that the first plane successfully hit its target, because despite all the evidence presented in TFA that this should have been predicted, it was a surprising enough attack.

    What has baffled me was how it was possible in USA for the second and the third attack to succeed, instead of the planes being shot down long before reaching their targets, because there has been ample time for that.

    As noted in TFA, based only on a suspicion that it could be a hijacked plane and without any evidence, in 1973 Israel shot down an airplane, killing more passengers than all the passengers killed by terrorists during the first decade of hijacking attacks against airplanes.

    Unlike in that Israel case, on 9/11, after the first plane crash there was absolutely no doubt that any other such plane must be shot ASAP, so they should have been located and intercepted. It would be very weird if the US military did not have adequate radar stations in such important areas, like around the Pentagon and New York.

    • CharlesW4 hours ago
      The 9/11 Commission¹ (see page 7) found that the existing FAA/NORAD protocols were "unsuited in every respect" to hijacked airliners being used as weapons.

      Additionally, "the NEADS air defenders had nine minutes' notice on the first hijacked plane, no advance notice on the second, no advance notice on the third, and no advance notice on the fourth."²

      More recommended reading: "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes", https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/09/norad200609

      ¹ https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.pdf

      ² https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch1.htm

      • adrian_b2 hours ago
        I assumed that NEADS did not receive appropriate notices, but this it what I do not understand how could it happen, and if it happened, why did not heads fall for this, immediately after the events.

        While I was watching the TV, before the following attacks, I was thinking that they must track now where all the other airplanes already in flight are, to determine if everything is OK with those, and if not, to find them.

        If I was thinking about this, as an amateur, I cannot believe that there were not many in the US military thinking the same during those moments.

        There was a half hour until the second hit. I would have expected that in ten minutes maximum it would have been known if all the other flights are in their normal trajectories, or some are missing.

        When 3 more planes were found missing, I would have expected a full scale operation to find them on the radars.

        Perhaps another 10 minutes for finding the planes and another 10 minutes to shoot down the one that was going towards the Twin Towers, was short, so perhaps the second hit could have been forgivable, but until the one that hit the Pentagon there has been an enormous amount of time, much more than sufficient to locate and destroy the plane.

        In Europe where I live, until the recent Russian wars there was a much lower likelihood of wars or terrorist attacks than in USA, but nonetheless, for as long as I remember, around important targets, like big cities or military objectives, there have always been dense anti-aircraft defenses and radar stations, ready day and night to intervene in the unlikely event of some kind of aircraft attack, and the air space has always been scanned continuously for suspicious or unidentified aircraft.

        I expect that the biggest military spender would have more of those than here and better radars, so if properly used they should have been able to find immediately the missing airplanes.

        If that did not happen I can only assume that some people with high positions in the military command have made serious mistakes and under pressure they have failed to take the necessary measures.

        This is not very surprising, but then I would have expected the guilty people to be exposed and some "lessons learned" to be applied, to prevent for such a situation to ever happen again.

        However, after 9/11 I did not hear any word about the obvious mistakes of the US administration and military, but only about the bad terrorists, and instead of hearing about measures to prevent the repetition of such mistakes I heard about things like the "Patriot" Act, which gave inappropriate powers to the US government, which was the great beneficiary of the 9/11 attacks, not the terrorists.

        Thanks for the link to the complete report.

        EDIT:

        Thanks again, I have read the report and it was much worse than I could have imagined. The confusion and lack of coordination of FAA and NORAD were unbelievable.

        On the other end of the Earth, people who watched TV were better informed in real time about what was happening, than the people who worked in FAA and NORAD and had to solve the situation.

        So much was wrong that indeed it would have impossible to identify directly responsible persons. The main problem was, as you have said, that the protocols to be followed in such a situation were completely inadequate, and even those had not been followed (i.e. for any hijacked airplane a military escort should have been immediately deployed, but due to very bad coordination the hijacked airplanes were not located in time).