I want those pages.

And yes, those pages might be very interesting.

Has there ever been an explanation why the hijackers risked conspicuously attending flight schools under the noses of the US authorities, rather than, say, absolutely any other country in the world?

It's hard to find good help.

I can buy the idea that they either didn't think the possible risks through, or just believed they could get away with it long enough to pull off the attack. And also that they may have thought they could learn more about US aviation policy or protocol in the US than elsewhere.

I was sceptical about it being because there are more flight schools in the US, because AIUI they only acquired limited training anyway, which they could have received anywhere. But whatever competence and training they ended up with, they probably at least intended to get as much as possible, and train in bigger, more appropriate aircraft, so that is possibly a factor too.

Thanks everyone for the replies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

Because of that, they would probably stick out much less doing it here than trying to do it in one of the few EU airline training facilities.

In a sense, the comment upthread litigates the whole idea of a "sleeper cell."

You had organizations that had the signals but couldn't communicate, why is it anymore likely that the terrorists themselves were super geniuses?

Because there are more flight schools in the US than anywhere else, and if you want to do some flying in US airspace, those are in the best position to teach how it works, what controls there are, how to avoid them, etc.

Anything about the world trade center should have lit up intelligence reports like a christmas tree.

The hijackers even stayed in Laurel, Maryland, from which you can literally see Alpha and Bravo.

Yet the 9/11 commission only spent three visits and a paltry amount of time up at Fort Meade and NBP, anecdotally because the commute to the Fort is too long.

Edit in reply: No, they never put the intelligence together. See here for a not-terrible summary: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/the-al-qaeda-sw...

I find it very hard to imagine that the NSA and/or CIA would have let the attacks happen, even to protect key assets and methods. Maybe they had compromised some Mossad communication channel. Or maybe they had a double agent. But what would have been worth the risk to DC and NYC?

To an extent, as with all big data systems, massive collection of data has both opportunities and risks. The risk in overcollection (e.g., the NSA type programs) is that you collect so much damn information that you are either behind in analyzing it or flat out never get there [1-2]. Combine that with (as others have noted) the lack of translators and you get what you got [3]. The old maxim* that not all data is information (DIKW) heavily applies here [4]. This whole phenomenon becomes especially problematic when you are spending all that time energy and money largely trying to predict 'black swan' events using what has happened before as what to look for in the future (e.g., the TSA as a whole or the NSA still focusing on cold war languages pre-9/11 [3]).

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-whistleblower-overwhelmed-w...

[2] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/how-the-nsa-trie...

[3] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/31/lack-of-tran...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_Pyramid

Edit: *fixed typo of maximum to maxim

So the NSA might have known these people were learning to fly and maybe even preparing a hijack, but until 9/11 this was not dramatic -- if and when the hijack happened, they would have been expected to fly to Cuba or something and then dealt with. Pre-9/11, airplane hijacks had become rare since their '80s and '70s heydays, maybe there was some complacency (as in "yeah these guys will never manage it, and even if they do, we'll likely get most passengers back safely anyway, let them play"). Or at least that's what a sharp Occam's razor would suggest.

The fact that the 9/11 highjackers had planned to die as part of the hijack was a game changer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

I find http://911blogger.com/news/2013-05-16/hollywood-and-911-movi... but nothing there about anything broadcast on Fox.

First episode: https://youtu.be/EjbQ-BDh4PU

Edit: the author of your link addresses the episode in the comments section, "The Lone Gunmen Pilot Episode", and says that the article you linked was only focused on things "in production" when the attack occurred.

Vince Gilligan was an Executive Producer.

The actor playing the father, George Coe, was one of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players on SNL, then later played Ben Cheviot on "Max Headroom".

WTC was an iconic target, for sure.

And maybe the NSA and CIA weren't talking, either.

We see this all the time in large companies now, the difference is that rarely do people die as a consequence. Maybe the NASA Challenger accident is a comparable organizational breakdown.

I have always been curious about this as an organizational phenomenon. What percentage of documents are classified for actual security reasons as opposed to things like embarrassing the country or allies, covering up misconduct or outright illegal conduct, or just as the default reaction. Study would be impossible/impractical even with access, but it sure would be interesting.

> Indeed, some of the C.I.A.’s best information about Al Qaeda came from the F.B.I. In 1998, F.B.I. investigators found an essential clue—a phone number in Yemen that functioned as a virtual switchboard for the terror network. The bombers in East Africa called that number before and after the attacks; so did Osama bin Laden. The number belonged to a jihadi named Ahmed al-Hada. By combing through the records of all the calls made to and from that number, F.B.I. investigators constructed a map of Al Qaeda’s global organization. The phone line was monitored as soon as it was discovered. But the C.I.A., as the primary organization for gathering foreign intelligence, had jurisdiction over conversations on the Hada phone, and did not provide the F.B.I. with the information it was getting about Al Qaeda’s plans.

So was the NSA also monitoring the Hada phone? Or maybe providing technical support for the CIA?

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/10/the-agent

They definitely knew something: A month before the attacks they gave President Bush a briefing titled: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US"

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

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/10/the-agent

The agencies seem to be on the cycle of high compartmentalization -> criticism for lack of sharing -> low compartmentalization -> major spy scandal -> high compartmentalization.

Funnily, one of the attackers used to have a small internet cafe in my city before he learned to fly an airplane.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-...

The London Review Of Books is not a conventional outlet for Hersh's investigative journalism (he's a regular at The New Yorker, which has one of the more notoriously elaborate fact checking apparatuses in the industry) and not Hersh's first choice for publishing that story.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

This amounts to two serious, if heterodox, journalists coming to the same story about the Bin Laden raid independently. I'm convinced, personally, but I was already deeply jaded by the many retractions in the official story issued early on regarding the vital intelligence being arrived at by use of torture and mass surveillance, and what they cynically implied about State Department attitudes towards shaping public discourse.

[0] http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/...

[1] http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/...

(a) confirm no sources

(b) never have been fact-checked

(c) received no editorial scrutiny

Its author is offended that Hersh didn't give credit for the following claims, which the blogger claims to have broken herself:

* The US cover story of how they found bin Laden was fiction

* OBL was turned in by a walk-in informant, a mid-level ISI officer seeking to claim $25 million under the "Rewards for Justice" program.

* The Pakistani Intelligence Service -- ISI -- was sheltering bin Laden

* Saudi cash was financing the ISI operation keeping bin Laden captive

* The US presented an ultimatum to Pakistan that they would lose US funding if they did not cooperate with a US operation against bin Laden

* Pakistani generals Kiyani and Pasha were involved in the US operation that killed OBL

* Pakistan pulled out its troops from the area of Abottabad to facilitate the American raid

* The Obama administration betrayed the cooperating Pakistani officials

* The Obama administration scrambled to explain the crashed helicopter when their original drone strike cover story collapsed

But if you look carefully at these claims, you'll see that they're not particularly specific (the closest they get to "specific" is "knowing the names of two Pakistani generals who are so well-known they have Wikipedia pages"), have been corroborated nowhere, and, most importantly, are all predictable points in any narrative about Pakistan deliberately sheltering Bin Laden.

I think there's a reason nobody reported on Hillhouse originally.

Second: because the implication is that the New Yorker was unwilling to publish a piece that didn't fact-check out, and the London Review of Books was.

Hersh claims to have sold the story to LRB for the "politics" of it, the meaning of which is uncertain. But as he hopes to have a book published on the "war on terror", it is not out of the question that he selected them to establish rapport. And that he chose them, instead of resorting to them out of some kind of desperation owing to defects in the work itself, seems pretty clear.

[*] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/sy-hersh-bin-la...

[.] http://fpif.org/seymour-hersh-draws-even-criticism-lrb-new-y...

- edit -

The Obama administration is widely claimed by non-partisan journalists and journalist groups as being openly hostile toward the press and has used espionage provisions to prosecute officials deemed to have "leaked" inside information via the types of conversations that would previously have been considered business-as-usual. (Despite opening his presidency with rhetoric about being the most "open" and "transparent" administration in history.) This has resulted in administration staffers & officials being paralyzed and fearful of speaking with the press at all, stymieing journalists' attempts at effectively covering the government and acting as the fourth estate. While it is unfortunate that we cannot quantify whether one administration has experienced more or less scrutiny than others, blithely asserting to the contrary is not a reasonable position in this context.

[:] https://cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701813

The most important takeaway is that the sample size on leak prosecutions is very, very low, so happenstance alone can make a President look unusually hostile. Here, it's a combination of happenstance, a shift in media norms, and cases begun under the previous President.

What would you do with them? Surely you can't believe that keeping them secret protects an ally to the expense of America? Surely it's much more likely that keeping them secret protects an ally to the benefit of America.

America depends on an informed populace in order to guide its representative government.

Feed the population lies and hide secrets, and break democracy.

I have never heard a Salafi scholar promote any acts terrorism. In fact, every single high-ranking scholar in Saudi Arabia (those who call themselves Salafi), are all opposed to groups like ISIS, Al Qaida, and Al Nusra. There are dozens of audio clips on Youtube from such scholars who clearly warn the Muslims from these types of groups.

Here is one such video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xAZLE6JiqE

And another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNL9cwB-plY

And another (from arguably the most respected Saudi scholar): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J5s2PPwZcY

Here are two from a Muslim student of knowledge from the UK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05yw1IXM1k4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ocvexFXCo8

There is also a great book that references many of the Islamic verdicts given by the contemporary Salafi Muslim scholars that dispels much of the "Wahhabi" myth:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wahhabi-Myth-Dispelling-Fictitious...

I'm not here to preach; it just bothers me when people hijack words to push an agenda.

In Europe, foreign-funded Salafi Imams are generally the ones that recruit local Muslims to go fight for ISIS.

To give an actual example, in Bosnia the leader of the Salafi movement has been arrested for recruiting for ISIS.

The Vienna Salafi movement has been found to collect money that was then forwarded to ISIS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilal_Bosni%C4%87

Ask any mainstream Muslim who the Salafi scholars are in recent times and undoubtedly one of the first names mentioned would be the late Ibn Baz.

Ibn Baz was a harsh critic of Bin Laden and his ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_al-Aziz_ibn_Baz#Osama_bin_...

Here is confirmation from Al Fawzan (the most-respected Saudi scholar now) regarding Ibn Baz's (and his own) position with respect to Bin Laden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-a65Og2uow

Here is a translated video that includes the speech of a late Yemeni scholar, Muqbil Al Wadi'ee, regarding Bin Laden. It's worth listening to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO7BcXTc4zw

My point is that anyone can call themselves or ascribe themselves to anything. However, that doesn't necessarily make it a reality (yeah, yeah, no true Scotsman).

Counterargument: "No true Christian" could ever kill an enemy - Jesus was clear in this: turn the other cheek, die on the cross if need be, forgive 70 times 7 times, etc. In my sect, Christianity is totally pacifist. All true Christians are pacifists.

So there's no reason for any Muslim to harbor any enmity against any Christians, because no Christians have ever once harmed a Muslim (by my definition of Christians).

...

And so we're back to square one, arguing over who's really a Scotsman....

It's very funny how this usually ends with apologetic excuses

Actions speak louder than words, and there's an awful amount of Salafists preaching for ISIS

Details of religious cults are not interesting to me and I don't care what some guy in the desert (any of them) wrote in a book thousands of years ago.

This. From the outside, it looks like a conflict within Salafism.

It's hardly the only movement such things have happened to (eg revolutionary socialism vs reformist socialism).

- Sheikh Adel al-Kalbani, former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca

A refutation of Kalbani: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2wD5KSN-zI

But although the meaning of Salafism as a historical word would take quite a bit to unpack, it's clearly referring to a particularly fast-growing form of fundamentalist Islam today.

Now, as for the sermons... It is my experience that the Saudi's pray with one hand and dole out cash to terrorist groups with the other.

That makes zero sense. Why would they fund the people calling for their destruction? What exactly is your "experience?" It's just more unfounded conjecture.

Second, my experience comes from studying International Relations at Princeton.

For sources, there are too many sources to count for the assertion that Saudi citizens continue to give money to Salafist (for lack of a better word) non-state actors that target civilians. I can look up the canonical sources for you later tonight.

However, it's so common that a quick Google search will turn up the overall gist.

Can someone please (perhaps you if you're willing, s_q_b) help me clear this up once and for all?

Is there sponsorship of terrorism and other anti-Western activities coming from the rulers of Saudi Arabia?

I don't mean distant members of the royal family who are given control of minor ministries to shut them up, I mean those with whom the power genuinely rests.

I can fully believe that private Saudi citizens fund any random thing that they want to, but it stretches my credulity to believe those that hold the reins of power directly fund terrorism. They know full well they rely completely on the US for their continued existence.

What evidence is there on this either way?

">Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted 9/11 co-conspirator, says members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family helped finance al Qaeda in the years just prior to the 2001 terrorist attacks..."

When facing deposition, Moussaoui named specific names:

"He said in the prison deposition that he was directed in 1998 or 1999 by Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital database of donors to the group.

Among those he said he recalled listing in the database were Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many of the country’s leading clerics.

“Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money,” he said in imperfect English — “who is to be listened to or who contributed to the jihad." [Factcheck.org]

Then of course there are the charity fronts:

"Former Sen. Bob Graham, chairman at the time of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called for the release of the 28 pages on the day the report was made public, Dec. 11, 2002, and still holds that position.

Graham told ABC News last month that the U.S. government’s refusal to release the 28 pages is an effort to protect Saudi Arabia, which he said is “the most responsible for that network of support.”

“The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” Graham told ABC News.

The head of the House of Saud, the King, and much of the military believe that military integration, weapons sales, and mutual defense scenarios from the Americans will benefit Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia also has about ten trillion in oil reserves, and the United States needs oil.

Historically, Saudi Arabia was just the slice of the former Ottoman Empire the British and French let us rule. Hence Saudi Aramco's original name: "The Saudi-American Oil Company."

Lucky for us that Saudi Arabia turned out to have such large oil reserves. Of course, the area is also at a strategic naval point, both of which explain the number of United States' military bases in the region.

So some of the populace sees the Muslim world as being subjegated in their Holy Land, and some percentage of them are fans of violence and meyhem.

An analogous situation would be how rich Irish-Americans funded the IRA for decades, despite an official United States' government stance that they were a terrorist group.

If you want to hold forth as an expert, it's fair to ask: Did you take a couple online classes? Get a Ph.D. in international relations?

The computer science courses also put a drag on my GPA, because Princeton doesn't let you double major.

Nation-states are not consistent monoliths with predictable and precise objectives; they are aggregated magmas of competing and often conflicting interests. This is why it is important to have open debate among parties, so that such conflicts can be dealt with in the open, through constant compromises, not in the dark with daggers and suicide bombers.

Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_High_Commission_for_Reli...

Because if they're off destroying Syria or Iraq or Libya or the USSR, they're not causing mischief within Saudi Arabia.

That's especially true if you are yourself somehow affiliated with the religion, in which case: I'm sorry you find yourself litigating this here.

Whether or not you are, and whether or not these are good faith comments, I think this is a pretty weird place for HN to go.

A lot of this gets into questions of what defines a religion, if a religion even has a definition, or if it's just a contentless cultural virus that people use to interpret their own preconceived notions and practices in a predefined rubric.

Salafism is an easy target because many of its famous adherents are the unsavory sort, and it's "obscure" enough that people can bash it without seeming Islamophobic and even manage to present themselves as a bit cosmopolitan and knowledgeable. But there are definitely many peaceful adherents of it, and many who oppose terrorism within its ranks. You can deduce calls to terrorism from its muddled mess of scriptures and thinkers, but you can also deduce calls to peacemaking. Same as any other religion.

In the end, though, in a world with limited resources, focusing counter-propaganda efforts on Salafist communities seems like a pretty good idea. On the flip side, that almost certainly involves not stigmatizing all Salafists as terrorists.

I don't think that's relevant: 1) We can't read the texts except for translations; 2) Within every religion, among experts with great familiarity with the texts, there are a very wide variety of interpretations - so wide they sometimes fight wars over it (e.g., Protestants vs Catholics, Sunnis vs Shia, Jews vs. Christians vs. Muslims (all share the Old Testament; Muslims and Christians share the New Testament)), etc. 3) Adherents to religions are usually ignorant of and completely disregard the texts (lay Catholics didn't even read or hear them until the 20th century IIUC), except when convenient. For example, the Ten Commandments, the highest law, requires people to observe the Sabbath. I wonder if that includes posting on Hacker News?