The Indian Point engineers assert that theirs reactors and all other structures contains radioactive material could survive a 9/11 style impact.
http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20130108221220/http://www.nei....
At the time of the attack, more modern aircraft were used, which had much thinner skins and were much more lightly constructed. Which means that they got much more shredded by the building construction as they passed through, and which also helped take off a lot more of the fire insulation from the trusses in the building.
Reality bites
They were instead purposely hit by much larger 747s and at a much higher cruising speed. This meant that the kinetic energy transfer was approximately 8x larger than expected. The 747s at the time of impact also held significantly more fuel (at least 100% more) than those utilised in the 707 attack model.
no, it was a 707 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eE8d94qGPo&t=232s
However, I always wondered if a large civilian plane like a 747 with a speed close to Mach 1 creates more or less impact. The 747 is ~12 times heavier, but it's also less than half the speed and spreads the impact across a much larger area.
At about 2 minutes in they show the aftermath. The plane is just gone, while the wall is a bit discolored...
That concrete block was not ridged. It moved when the plane hit it.
So the strongest aspect of concrete, compression, was tested. But the weakest, flexion, was untested.
What fun though.
More generally, in order to be successful a traditional armor piercing projectile needs two traits in particular: it needs to be harder than the target, and the projectile needs to be robust enough to not disintegrate on impact. Airplanes are neither of these; they're built out of soft aluminum and are built light to maximize payload, not to be robust. Consequently I would not expect an airplane striking a reinforced concrete building to ever behave as an armor penetrating projectile would.
The part that I'm a bit skeptical of is the suggestion that shrugging off a Phantom is equivalent to shrugging off a 747, which is more than an order of magnitude heavier. Throwing an airplane at a concrete building is like throwing a wet ball of modeling clay at a glass window. Likely to splat, like that phantom did, but if your ball of clay is big enough it might go through. A large enough plane might even knock the building off its foundation, rather than penetrate the concrete.
I know very little about physics and found this to be an unexpected point I’d like to understand more. Could you explain?
It might not have impacted NYC though, I just checked and the exclusion zones would likely have been well outside NYC city limits, but still, an epic disaster would have been the likely outcome.
Nuclear reactor security has been increased since then, but they're a major target today.
CIA management prevented this information from being disseminated by FBI agents posted inside "Alec Station", the CIA's Bin Laden group, several times, and they later lied about doing so. All this according to, among other extremely mainstream sources (in addition to the documentary record), Richard Clarke, who would know -- he was the Federal "Terrorism Czar" on 9/11 and has been fuming pissed about this since he found [1][2]. You don't need to be a whack job, a conspiracist, to be angry and mystified by this.
In many instances like this one, cursory investigation into claims of intelligence community "mistakes" or "incompetence" in these matters gives the lie to claims that these institutions somehow "dropped the ball" or "got it wrong" on 9/11, and are thus not to blame (either partly or fully) for the attacks. It's impossible to square such claims with a lot of the official paper trail. One can reasonably conclude that some of this stuff was not accidental. We hire these people to lie - why should we ever assume they're not?
(The best part? Many of the people involved in the events I describe were promoted in the years post-9/11!)
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/International/28-pages-questions-alle...
> In September 2002, he, along with J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on Trailblazer, a system intended to analyze mass collection of data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had been one of the inventors of an alternative system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen instead. Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that "it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had"[11] as well as noting Trailblazer's ineffectiveness and unjustified high cost compared to the far less intrusive ThinThread.[12] He was furious that the NSA hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot and stated that intercepts it had collected but not analyzed likely would have garnered timely attention with his leaner more focused system.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...
Here's a really good interview with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
I'm slightly more inclined to believe that the NSA's pre-9/11 behavior was actually "negligence" (as opposed to something else) than the CIA's, but it's still terrifying that these people missed what they missed. I've been pulled over by the cops on less than the hijackers had during their many, many months in the US.
There wasn't, like, one single person who had all this information and he was personally stopped by the head of the CIA from telling the executive branch. It was a SNAFU of competing interests and stupid bureaucracy.
The fact that these people were promoted afterwards, however.. yeah, my blood boils.
I hear where you're coming from, but after 20 years, there are several parts of the story for which I can no longer believe this was the case, or use this explanation to give the benefit of the doubt. (There are many other parts for which it does make sense.) I'll save myself looking like an internet crank and just suggest you give the podcast I linked to in [2] above an earnest listen. If you do, you may, like me, wonder from how high up the order came to personally stop the FBI man in question, Mark Rossini, from telling his superiors at the Bureau. It's at least George Tenet's former assistant, sent down to run Alec in '99.
I'm not sure what "all this information" refers to - no one knows exactly how much the institutions in question knew beforehand - but it's there in Chapter 6 of the 9/11 Commission Report (albeit buried in a footnote) that 40-50 people at Langley knew enough to stop the resulting plot had they wanted to, that senior CIA employees prevented the FBI from knowing about 2 Al Qaeda terrorists coming to and living in the US, and that specific upper management (whose names are now publicly known) told lower-level personnel that the FBI had been told when it's known that they hadn't. This is corroborated by serious, non-crank public servants who were there in the room when this stuff went down.
The result, for me, is that my default position on issues of war, terror, and other bloodshed has moved from "organizational dysfunction is the norm" to "I may never truly know, but these people are likely acting maliciously (to some degree) and/or lying about it (to some degree)". It's like, these people have jobs, and they do stuff. They're serious people, like many of us on HN, and they're competent a lot of the time. To the extent that we even know their track record, they have a track record: Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, Iran again (Stuxnet), etc., etc.
So it's reversed the Sagan standard for me, in other words: if "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", the idea that the professionals to whom we give vast sums to be excellent at lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and betrayal - spies, in other words - should be given a sort of "Mister Magoo" benefit of the doubt when lots of people die -- that's, for me these days, the more extraordinary claim.
That's where we differ. They're Mr. Magoo with money in my opinion. How many brilliant exploits have they ever had? Even their wins are, like, "we sponsored some death squads who killed the opposition and eventually the anti-communist guy won due to having overwhelming resources".
The CIA is called 'the company' in DC and it's apparently a super-corporate environment. I've worked in corporate. It's stupid. A big part of the stupid is the local ideology, which is a multiplier effect on the general 'none of us is as dumb as all of us' effect, and I could probably go a long ways with you critiquing the CIA's default and unspoken ideology. But I still think 'organizational stupid' is such an absolute..
And I can't even say they were wrong. I don't have better answers. The threat model is a porous-border threat.
>He asked me what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat, and making off with the millions of dollars of cash in that safe. And, I told him that, well I kind of laughed. I mean I didn't laugh at him. But I chuckled a little bit about it.
https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130304&page=1
Also good read: https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investi...
Atta rapping about being an assassin.
This was at least partly due to the Freeh / Reno policy of limiting info sharing between the agencies.
In the article I linked to, Clarke cites that information sharing in the IC was widespread, and you see in other sources that the idea of warring bureaucratic fiefdoms was in some cases very true (Freeh / Reno being great examples, as you say) and in other cases not true whatsoever. To me this means that it's tougher to generalize from a trend to any one case.
The Midhar and Hamzi visa and known entry into the US stuff doesn't look at all like simple tit-for-tat or institutional possessiveness, mainly because the FBI agents posted to the CIA precisely to "phone home" about AQ and Bin Laden had been doing so regularly for 18 months and had yet to be overruled on something they were going to share with the FBI. So why was that specific piece of info ordered not shared and then lied about?
Regarding WMDs, intelligence couldn't be released because it was supposedly sensitive.
What if they were required to release an md5sum of a tarball of the intelligence, perhaps with associated metadata to make it infeasible to fabricate/game. This process is overseen by a judge or independent body. Then 5-15 years later they release it in full when that intelligence is no longer sensitive?
This is a way to get around the excuse of sensitivity. Sort of like a time-shifted FOIA request. It'd be a great way to strengthen our democratic institutions, deter lying and corruption and manufactured consent, neuter conspiracy theories of a deep state, improve everyone's confidence in institutions, and for accountability and transparency.
Perhaps this isn't feasibile in practice, though, if the intelligence involves spies/assets that are still operational, or if it would involve revealing secrets around capabilities and methods. However, if that's the case, then they could release say 100 md5sums corresponding to the 100 documents, and only release the subset of which is no longer sensitive, with a judge appointed to determine the legitimacy of the claim of sensitivity, and forcing the release of the subset of documents not deemed to be sufficiently sensitive.
how about "stop fucking with other countries", instead?
maybe bring Kissinger to the international court?
Could be biased, could be propaganda, but I am for sure not alone thinking this.
Details? My understanding is a huge fraction of the Saudi population have jobs that amount to government sinecures (while immigrants do most of the real work). Are we talking about high-level members with real leadership positions, or some minor member of the royal family working in some ministry doing nothing and going off on his own?
Al Qaeda and many other jihadi outfits procure a lot of their funding from Islamic charities and schools (Madrassas) with complex and very opaque financial dealings. Also the Saudi government and individual Saudis donate to many Islamic charities, so its highly likely some of that money ends up with the jihadi's including Al Qaeda.
So yes there's almost certainly some truth to the allegations. Some powerful Saudis may secretly support them, some donate to charities and the money ends up with them, but no this is not official Saudi state sponsorship of Al Qaeda. In fact Al Qaeda consider the Saudi royal family and all of their associates to be apostates (essentially heretics) who can be killed summarily and they advocate for regime change and the establishment of a Caliphate.
Like I said, it's a real mess of family loyalties, rivalries, swinging political fortunes and opaque dealings. Game of Thrones has nothing on these people. Just look at what happened to Jamal Khashoggi.
That's a curious way to phrase it, given that he died in 2011.
A court affidavit filed on 3 February 2015 claims that Zacarias Moussaoui was a courier between Osama bin Laden and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud in the late 1990s, and that Turki introduced Moussaoui to Bandar.[76] Zacarias Moussaoui stated on oath and wrote to Judge George B. Daniels that Saudi royal family members, including Prince Bandar, donated to Al-Qaeda and helped finance the 11 September attacks.[77] The Saudi government continues to deny any involvement in the 9/11 plot, and claims there is no evidence to support Moussaoui's allegations in spite of numerous previous intense investigations, noting that Moussaoui's own lawyers presented evidence of his mental incompetence during his trial.[76] Leaked information from the redacted portion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that two of the 9/11 hijackers received $US130,000 in payment from Bandar's bank account.[78]
Are these in dispute?
Wow this is a great word. Hadn't heard it before. Thanks for sharing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud
Bush's close friend, known arms dealer... you guys still haven't figured this one out yet? HN is always the last to know.
I'm quite sure I saw an interview with Osama Bin Laden where he talked about that idea. They did consider it, but he said they didn't want to go for a nuclear reactor because they didn't want "things to get out of hand".
I don't remember if it was confirmed by the hosts/interviewer, or if it was my interpretation, but I took that to mean he didn't want the US to use nuclear weapons in retaliation, which he thought they would(might?).
Sometimes its useful to think inside the box
But yeah current Saudi Arabia is a good deal for the US, hard to get others so heavily intertwined financially. Might as well not touch it.
seems to me a political explanation is more likely, probably related to the holy war with Iran. In that case I never really understood why we took an anti-theocratic stance there.
Iran provides the perfect example of why we tolerate Saudi Arabia. From 1901 to 1951, Iran's oil was controlled primarily by the British. In 1951, a democratic movement lead to the nationalization of the oil industry, which quickly led to a CIA backed coup. For the next ~30 years, a Western backed dictatorship ruled and their violent rule lead to the 1979 revolution being overtly hostile to the West.
The West fears any other Saudi government would end up hostile to the West, given their decades of support for the monarchy.
If you hold an election after toppling a non-democratic government, you never know if that's going to be the last election or not. Also, you just can't trust that the people will elect your "guy". If you're already "controlling" the current leadership, no need to turn over the apple cart.
Very unlikely. Any military involvement anywhere near Mecca and Medina is off the table barring being invited or some utterly insane scenario.
I think you're being redundant there. US troops anywhere in Saudi Arabia is kind of a big deal.
I'm reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOdULpV810
TL;DW It had nothing to do with the regime in Saudi Arabia. Bin laden and supporters were a fringe group.
Yes, it has a regime.
> It’s the most powerful tribal family in a country of family/tribes all of whom have the same perspective.
Yes, the House of Saud is that, except not all the family/tribes have the same perspective (heck, even the House of Saud isn't internally super cohesive, though MBS’ recent internal purges and the implicit threat of more have reduced the degree of active viewpoint diversity within the House of Saud and Saudi elites more generally.)
> Never mind the fact that it’s a very rich country in country with obnoxious human rights abuses when it comes to migrant workers but still has no poverty. Even amongst the migrants.
Saudi Arabia has a low reported poverty rate (but not zero; 12.7%) but it's reporting is irregular and unreliable, and is generally held to underestimate poverty significantly in general. Poverty estimates among the migrants make up the bar majority of the labor force (and the vast majority of the low-skill labor force) are very high.
How in your opinion should women be treated? You don’t think they should be considered equal to men?
It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93.
Sadly this is mostly a myth. It is a little known fact that there were five separate U.S. military war games being run simultaneously with 9/11 and three of them involved airliner hijacking scenarios, including flying airplanes into buildings. Worse, these war games involved simulated inputs into NORAD and FAA radar systems, resulting in mass confusion. There is an excellent documentary that covers these war games, including actual NORAD, FAA and EADS audio [0].
"Was the plane having any difficulty flying?" "Yes, it seemed to be rocking back and forth" "Was this a navigational error?"
An announcement in the South Tower immediately after the crash instructed people to stay in their offices.
Even after the second tower was hit, the immediate reaction was that it was a second explosion in the North Tower caused by the fuselage of the plane.
4 minutes after the second plane hit, when it was clear that two planes were involved: "was it possible a navigational error directed two planes into the World Trade Center?"
It's incredible to think just how much our attitude and perspectives changed after realizing what exactly had happened.
Maybe large buildings should have cameras pointed at them with IR modes. Feed it to a national control centre that has experts on staff and links to other agencies. And make those kind of judgements thats will seem obvious in hindsight.
The end of Tom Clancy's 1994 book "Debt of Honor" featured a 747 being crashed into the Capital, which is about as close as fiction gets.
Obviously 9/11 wasn't some government conspiracy to purposely spark new wars, but the other details are eerily similar.
The sad thing is that uncovering that plot didn’t help prevent the actual attack based on it a few years later…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot#Phase_III:_CIA_pl...
The protocols did not contemplate an intercept. They assumed the fighter escort would be discreet, “vectored to a position five miles directly behind the hijacked aircraft,” where it could perform its mission to monitor the flight path of the aircraft.
In sum, the protocols in place on 9/11 for the FAA and NORAD to respond to a hijacking presumed that:
(1) the hijacked aircraft would be readily identifiable and would not attempt to disappear;
(2) there would be time to address the problem through the appropriate FAA and NORAD chains of command; and
(3) the hijacking would take the traditional form, not a suicide hijacking designed to convert the aircraft into a guided missile.
On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen. What ensued was the hurried attempt to create an improvised defense by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_cras...
Prior to 911, hijacked planes were not an unknown thing. I don’t know numbers, but remember periodic events in the news of x plane that was hijacked landing at y airport with local officials needing to meet hijacker demands for it to return to its flight.
Was weird when it happened, but we also didn’t have the hour of processing through security we do now.
[0] skip to about 20min https://youtu.be/DYBhgEm3j7A
This led to disruption of the response. When flight 77 (Pentagon plane) was reported as having dropped off of the transponder radios, by the time NORAD was notified the information had become garbled in a game of telephone and they thought they were receiving reports on flight 11, which is one of the two that struck the Trade Center towers. They scrambled jets to New Jersey instead of onto any predicted flight path for flight 77.
Additionally, the fact that members of the Saudi government aided and assisted the hijackers, and that they were tracked and monitored by both the FBI and the CIA, yet no action was taken to stop them, not even a simple warning to airlines to increase security after that Aug 6th Presidential Daily Briefing? What a debacle.
We should have left Iraq and Afghanistan alone and done the regime change op in Saudi Arabia, except that Wall Street likes its petrodollars so Washington props up the House of Saud and its theocratic dictatorship. And that's still going on.