It definitely would have fulfilled the political aspect of Osama’s desire to attack an economic, military and political target at once.
Deadliest Plausible 9/11
- Thread starter JRogyRogy
- Start date
Agreed, but the main problem as I see it is that this sort of attack would have a lot more chances of exposure. You’d have to pull in hundreds, if not a thousand people. That means much more chance for fuck ups, blind dumb luck or changes of heart to bring the FBI down on your head.
Edit: I see I’m out of date, Kudos @Captain Homicide
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Not really. same number of people., 21 terrorists. Now they just go to truck driving school (or smarter, two or three schools) instead of flight school. Same process, even less oversight. Truck drivers are always in some demand.
aaronupright
Banned
Some points.
1. OBL wanted to hit symbolic targets. Causalities was something he was a lot more ambivalent about. He wasn't really interested in mass casualties, he felt they were counter- productive, he turned down some proposed attacks since he thought the casualty levels would be good high. If anything, he felt OTL attacks were almost too successful. He had not excepted the towers to fall.
2. It's actually not easy to identify buildings from the air. One of the reasons they cut back on some of the proposed targets was that they realized that they couldn't identify targets positively from the air, which is why they restricted themselves to highly prominent landmarks.
1. OBL wanted to hit symbolic targets. Causalities was something he was a lot more ambivalent about. He wasn't really interested in mass casualties, he felt they were counter- productive, he turned down some proposed attacks since he thought the casualty levels would be good high. If anything, he felt OTL attacks were almost too successful. He had not excepted the towers to fall.
2. It's actually not easy to identify buildings from the air. One of the reasons they cut back on some of the proposed targets was that they realized that they couldn't identify targets positively from the air, which is why they restricted themselves to highly prominent landmarks.
The deadliest possible attack taken as a whole was the OTL one, if you don't consider Iraqi or Afghani lives to be worth less than American ones. All other variations are rounding errors.
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We do not know about the people onboard the second plane that hit the WTC. The plane went down to New Jersey and then turned back. Might the passengers have seen the burning first tower? Might they have started to discuss action?
I guess you mean the Air France Flight 8969 hijacking by GIA terrorists on Christmas eve 1994. The hijackers commited the error of wanting the plane refueled before crashing it into either the Eiffel Tower or the Champs-Élysées and landed in Marseille, where the French anti-terrorist special unit GIGN stormed the airplane on Boxing day.
Economic hub of NYC, military HQ, and aimed at the hall of government. Other than some randomly enormous naval base and the actual White House (though even then old george was out,) what would be the best targets? Most infrastructure can be rebuilt quickly enough.
I could see the FBI and CIA hqs for destroying the plans and data, but those seem impractical to launch a plane at
It depends on the actual desired long term results.
The targets picked were terrific symbols, as you outlined. What they represented, however, barely blinked. The Dow closed at 9605.51 on September 10th. On December 10th, 2001 it closed at 9921.45. GDP fell for 2001 to only +1.0%, by 2004 it was up to 3.8% The economy literally stood back up and didn't even bother to dust itself off. Utter complete and total failure (unless you held shorts on the insurance industry, in that case HUGE W). Attacking the U.S. military Headquarters? Even a direct hit wasn't going to destroy the Pentagon, you need a nuclear weapon (or a direct hit by a 50 meter wide Iron meteorite) the place is a quarter mile across). Congress? House wasn't scheduled to convene until 12:30 , Senate was at 11:00, the vast majority of members were in their offices (which are in entirely different buildings); might have gotten some members, but a quorum would have survived, and the rest would have been replace in a matter of weeks. White House? POTUS was in Florida. Great symbol to attack; total dry hole in practical terms.
But the oft stated goal of bin-Laden was to create a global jihad against the U.S., in no small part by having the U.S. "declare war" on Islam, starting with a pogrom against Muslims in the United States . 9/11 totally failed (the knucklehead who manage that was GW with Iraq 2003 and that had nothing to do with bin-Laden's plot, and even then it's is mostly an airball) Attacking symbols piss people (and countries) off. When powerful countries get pissed off they spend a decade hunting you down and send two Boat Teams of SEALS to your house in Pakistan where they snuff you (and your son who was dumb enough to try to stop them), fly your body out to a carrier and give you a proper burial somewhere in the Persian Gulf where there can't even be a site of pilgrimage. Attack people is what causes real fear and over reaction. Killing kids in school or shooting up shopping malls (well, at least in 2001) scares people, terrorized them. bin-Laden was thinking like a Hollywood producer making a Summer blockbuster. He need to be thinking like Black September or Hamas.
Thankfully his ego was too huge to allow for that.
I have thought of several ways they could have made 9-11 a lot more lethal
I am not going to say it, because I don't want to give anyone any ideas
These two are the most obvious
1) attack 1 hour later when everyone has arrived at work
2) hit the twin towers as low as possible, trapping more people and leading to a faster collapse.
That could have resulted in the deaths of 10,000 people.
I am not going to say it, because I don't want to give anyone any ideas
These two are the most obvious
1) attack 1 hour later when everyone has arrived at work
2) hit the twin towers as low as possible, trapping more people and leading to a faster collapse.
That could have resulted in the deaths of 10,000 people.
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The September 11th attacks actually working without terrorists going rogue, getting caught, missing their targets, or screwing up borders on ASB to begin with. So, the fact that it worked against humongous odds, would seem to me not to need tinkering with. Any tinker screws it all up due to butterflies. The idea that blowing up some gas trucks (because those are so easy to buy, I bought one on Tuesday) or randomly shooting children (which would be confused as either inner city violence or, if it were intentionally done in suburban schools, it would remove any claim to moral authority which in reality Al Qaeda was making--why not just light kittens on fire and threaten to do so every 30 minutes until your demands are met? Talk about not being taken seriously.) Being that we know that three out of four the planes hit, if the two DC planes' men were dedicated to follow up car bombings weeks apart after 9-11, maybe they can get the US to have a permament feeling of fear. But, in reality, we had anthrax in the mail weeks later and then a plane crashed in the middle of Queens NY in November...so we already had that feeling anyway. Pretty much, 9-11 was Osama's sickle cut. Screw with it and you screw everything else up.
Considering the amount of friction involved in such an operation, I think the results were pretty optimal.
One thing I don't know, is if OBL actually understood that the twin towers would collapse in that situation? If the towers had simply burned for a while and not collapsed, Al Qaida would have had a beautiful propaganda image, but not one anywhere near as lethal.
I understand in hindsight why the towers collapsed, and why it was inevitable in those circumstances, but I'm not sure how many people knew that before the first tower actually fell.
One thing I don't know, is if OBL actually understood that the twin towers would collapse in that situation? If the towers had simply burned for a while and not collapsed, Al Qaida would have had a beautiful propaganda image, but not one anywhere near as lethal.
I understand in hindsight why the towers collapsed, and why it was inevitable in those circumstances, but I'm not sure how many people knew that before the first tower actually fell.
Considering that the planes were being flown in excess of 500 MPH by barely trained pilots, I think AQ were very lucky that both planes hit their tower at all. It is possible that they could have accidentally hit more on-center, or more off-center, or higher or lower, but I don't think the pilots who were flying could have deliberately "picked" a better spot, because they were barely in control of the planes as it was.
Or something like the Rose Bowl. Fly the four planes into the seating of the stadium and you might get 90k+
Calbear's idea of schools would be more to enrage the American public though. You might get more responses from the world as well. Would bin Laden realize this would make his movement seen as murders of children and nothing more worldwide?
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As I said in my previous comment Osama was a zealot but even he would recognize that targeting children would be a far worse look than targeting important buildings filled with soldiers, workers and politicians. The Twin Towers burning is a better jihadist recruitment ad than dead children lying in the street. He was college educated and if you read his reasoning for the attacks (US foreign policy, decadence, previous attacks on Muslims etc) you’ll see killing children en masse wouldn’t have been the most sensible kind of attack given his worldview. Killing people wasn’t the main goal.
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