Alternate 9/11 where home-grown domestic terrorists do it

I couldn't think of any other title for the thread.

But I just wondered sometimes is that what if Al-Qaeda never did the attacks on 9/11 and instead home-grown domestic terrorists crash two planes into the Twin Towers, a plane into the Pentagon and fail to try to crash a plane into either the White House or Capitol Building only for the passengers to rebel in a heroic sacrifice.

What if there was a War on Domestic Terror instead in which the US began going after white supremacist, black supremacist, anarchist, eco-terrorist, Christian fundamentalist and other home-grown terrorist groups?

Would it be possible?
 
Decent scenario but you'd probably need to push the clock back a decade or so. By 2001, US homegrown extremists in general were a spent force, and had neither the manpower nor the money that Bin Laden had at his disposal. There's also the issue that domestic terrorists are generally less suicidal - unless an alternate McVeigh decided to study tactics from 1980s Lebanon. If you pushed the date back to before 1993, you could feasibly have an alternate attempt to park a Ryder truck under the WTC. If that worked as Ramzi Yousef had originally planned, that would place casualties near the quite disturbing number of 50,000, as there couldn't feasibly be any evacuation if the towers are taken down quickly. Could make for an interesting (and terrifying) 1990s US Civil War TL if done right, but you'd probably need a few more butterflies here and there.

To spice things up you could try and integrate the post-9/11 conspiracy theory that Saddam supposedly played a role in providing funds for the OKC bombing (ludicrous, but Saddam wasn't alien to funding far-right groups in the West). ASB option would be for Ted Kaczynski to somehow take down the twin towers with some of his wooden explosives, or he manages to fly a plane for a more ironic alternative.
 
I don't see you getting a new civil war out of an Alt 9-11. The mother of all FBI manhunts, sure, but not any kind of mass uprising beyond a few scattered militia bands.
 
If you want an alt-9/11, you need a group big enough to sacrifice at least four people who are able to overpower an entire plane's worth of people AND fly the plane to begin with. I don't think there was a single group like that in the United States in 2001 unless a foreign government funds them, which increases the likelihood of them getting caught. And it's amazing to me that the 9/11 plot was never discovered to begin with.

So basically the best you can do is get a guy like Joe Stack who hates the IRS and the government and also knows how to fly a plane hijacking a plane with boxcutters and flying it into the WTC or another big building. I think you'd easily be able to find suicidal anti-government people who would choose flying a plane into a building as their way of terrorism, it's just you need to find someone who can fly a plane to begin with, as well as hijack a plane.

Incidentally, the Columbine shooters fantasised about hijacking a plane from the Denver airport and flying it into a building in NYC, which in their plan would've come after they blew up the school and killed the cops and other first responders. Totally implausible, I think, for them to even get on the plane, let alone hijack it. So possibly if someone flies a jetliner into a building, it would be the sort of pilot whose personality matches that of school shooter or other mass shooter. But this would only be one aircraft crashed into a building, for definitely less casualties than 9/11.
 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing Could some of these get hold of planes? I don't know if they could they would have I guess, so the question is - how do they get the capability.

You need to be able to fly a airliner, AND you need to be able to hijack it to begin with. 9/11 gives a template, but how many people would look at a boxcutter before then and think "oh, perfect way to hijack a plane!" Can one guy with a boxcutter and some mace be expected to hijack a plane? Or even two guys with boxcutters and mace? Pre-9/11, you'd probably just see a terrorist group looking to bomb an airplane rather than hijack and crash it into a building.

Further, I think it's more plausible that you'd only have one airliner hijacked by these guys, simply because I don't find it plausible they could think bigger and get the resources to do four attacks without being discovered.
 
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