DBWI: September 11 Terror Plot Successful?

As we all know, on September 11, 2001, a terrorist plot by al-Qaeda was uncovered and stopped cold by the National Guard. The plan was, apparently, to hijack four passenger jets and use them as missiles to attack various targets, these targets being both of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the Capitol Building. Afterwards, Afghanistan turned over Osama bin Laden after Bush threatened military action.

But what if the plot was successful? What if the planes successfully hit their targets? What would the damage be like, and how would American culture be affected?
 
We'd probably go into Afghanistan and catch bin Laden later that year, and the whole thing would be over. How hard could it be?
 
I doubt that the damage would be too extensive. Planes are made of aluminum, and it doesn't seem likely that it could actually destroy any of the buildings. If they did kill a few hundred though, the USA would be willing to invade Afghanistan unless they hand over bin Laden. However, they most likely would have, so I don't think that this would be too different from OTL.
 
I doubt that the damage would be too extensive. Planes are made of aluminum, and it doesn't seem likely that it could actually destroy any of the buildings. If they did kill a few hundred though, the USA would be willing to invade Afghanistan unless they hand over bin Laden. However, they most likely would have, so I don't think that this would be too different from OTL.
Exactly. Jet fuel can't melt steel beams.
 
I wouldn't be sure that only a few hundred would die, at peak hours the Twin Towers have over 30,000 people in them, slamming two large passenger planes at these buildings at high speeds would cause serious damage to the buildings, not to mention that the jet fuel, while not hot enough to MELT steel would be more than enough to cause the buildings to catch fire.

So now we have two major skyscrapers with 30,000 some odd people in them that have just been hit with two passenger planes, and the buildings have just caught fire.

And since the Twin Towers have a lot of office space, that's a LOT of paper and other flammable material that's just caught fire.

I'd bet that there'd be thousands of people trapped in the upper levels of a burning skyscraper.

That's a lot of injuries and deaths via fire and smoke inhalation.


Then we have the Pentagon and the Capitol Building...

Not sure which one would get hit first, but my guess is that if one of them get's hit then all the other government buildings would be evacuated since it would be obvious that this is an attack on the American government as a whole.

The President and his staff would either be taken to some shelter in the bowels of the White House, or yanked out of DC altogether...

Though I'm not sure if Bush Jr. was even IN DC at the time... He spent a lot of time at his ranch in Texas, then again due to how he got the Presidency and how people responded to that, and how his one-term turned out... Yeah, I'd have spent a lot of time on vacation too.
 
So the FBI don't follow James Woods declaration as valid? he did was in that now legendary 'trial run' in that plane in boston-LA.
 
Well, what happened was one of the supposed hijackers got a bit too drunk in a nightclub in Fort Lauderdale and "blabbed" unknowingly to an undercover FBI agent working on another case. That perked the interest of US legal authorities and quietly, the FBI, working with the New York and Massachusetts National Guard, set up a "sting" to stop the hijackers the day of the attack: September 11, 2001.

What they found after the hijackers got arrested was unusual: pilots who trained to take off, but never land, Boeing 737, 757, 767 and MD-80 airliners and a LOT of box cutters that was supposed to be used as weapons. Their ringleader, Mohammed Atta, confessed he was part of al-Qaeda and got funding from groups associated with them. The fact most of this ring were Saudi nationals ended up causing a HUGE embarrassment for the Saudi government, and let's just say a number of Saudi government ministers got "sacked" or mysteriously retired.

But it still resulted in much tighter security restrictions, though. Security screening became MUCH more thorough, and for a while they even banned anything that had a battery in it on airliners until better screening equipment became available (e.g., you can't bring a cellphone, portable music player, let alone a laptop computer, on a plane).

With revelation that Osama bin Laden nearly pulled off a horrible terrorist attack, efforts increased to either capture or kill him. That was accomplished on September 25, 2001, when F-15E's operating from Diego Garcia used the GBU-28 "bunker buster" bombs and permanently sealed the caverns where bin Laden was hiding at the time in southern Afghanistan--those collapsed caverns are now his tomb....
 
So the FBI don't follow James Woods declaration as valid? he did was in that now legendary 'trial run' in that plane in boston-LA.

To be fair we are talking James Woods here. He is not known as the most down to earth and trustworthy source. I'm shocked that the FBI did take his word for it.
 
The President and his staff would either be taken to some shelter in the bowels of the White House, or yanked out of DC altogether...

Wasn't Bush at an elementary school in Florida on the day the attacks were to take place?
 
Wasn't Bush at an elementary school in Florida on the day the attacks were to take place?

No clue, I'm not even sure what the President's schedule would have been at the time. But if he was there in Florida he'd have been forced to cancel whatever photo-op he was in and get onto Air Force One to head to a classified secure location until it was determined that Washington DC was in no further danger. Then I assume he'd return to the White House to give an emergency speech, either from the White House or an emergency session of Congress about the situation to the American people.

After all, FOUR national icons have been attacked in a coordinated assault (not sure how long it would take Osama and his band of idiots to take responsibility), the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the Capitol Building are THE symbols of America's financial and political power.

This is major, even if the actual damage to all four structures is minimal.

At this point the pressure on GWB to capture and/or kill the people who did this would be MASSIVE.
 
Yeah, Bush II really got a boost from the September 11 Sting, and his move into Afghanistan gets all kinds of comparisons to his father's Gulf War. Too bad for him the luster wore off by 2004 and people weee more concerned about the economy, which was slogging along, and President Kerry took over.

Best thing that could have happened to McCain, though. The McCain-Romney ticket in 2008 wiped the floor with Kerry, who couldn't do anything with the economy and came off as a butthead when Saddam started his saber-rattling again.

And to think health care reform came from the McCain administration. It was kind of a pet project of Romney's anyway and a big reason he crushed Hillary Clinton in 2016 - she didn't have much of a record in the Senate to run on except opposing McCain.
 
Yeah, thank god the Republicans nominated Romney this past election and not Donald Trump. His plans screamed Adolf Hitler.
 
Yeah, thank god the Republicans nominated Romney this past election and not Donald Trump. His plans screamed Adolf Hitler.
The real estate mogul? Why on earth would the GOP have ever nominated him for any government position, let alone POTUS? And what's all this nonsense about him being a Nazi?
 
America probally would have gone into afganistan rather then just bombing stratigic places and going home.

Which would have been a disaster, the place is called the grave yard of empires for a reason.
 
Actually I've had some additional thoughts, since the would-be hijackers were only armed with box-cutters, wouldn't at least ONE of the flight's passengers have picked up on this and fought back?

In addition, what are the odds that at least one of the flights would have had an armed air-marshal on board?
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
You guys are aware that many people consider this 9-11 stuff a big fat government lie? Passenger jets, buildings, FBI and heroic national guard saves the day? Sounds like someone read a trashy novel, faked the evidence and blew away some poor freedom fighter in a cave for a nefarious world government plot.
 
Guys guys I think you're all missing a major point

While the fire caused by jet fuel couldn't melt the steel structure it could cause it to warp and with the heavy load of the people above the impact zone it could collapse

Also why no real mention of the Capitol? I'd imagine Congress would all wanna convene after the attacks started if they weren't in there already. Imagine most of Congress being wiped out. Crazy.
 
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