"History Channel Documentary: "The Road To 9/11"" Topic

Wow. They present an amazing timeline and a huge amount of pieces to the puzzle. Truly monumental.

I can almost understand why there are people who believe there was some sort of government conspiracy, almost.

But the overwhelming number of the missed opportunities was the result of 1) incompetence, 2) complacency and 3) misplaced trust by a wide array of people from all walks of life, from too wide a pool of individuals making mistakes all over the world, with some of those gross mistakes going back to people who should have been tracked since the days the Soviets were in Afghanistan (long before the fear of being labeled an "Islamophobe" became an excuse). Add to that the 4) lack of communication between all the departments and agencies, and between the US and foreign governments, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

That's what makes this story even more shocking than any fiction novel written about the despicable attack.

Is anyone else watching it? Have you learned anything new from the segments of the show that have played so far?

Dan
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I haven't seen this yet, but I've found in any event. When what the main stream news media reports does not match up with what the investigating agencies say what happened. Then the public tries to fill in the blanks. That usually evolves into a conspiracy theory. Some times the conspiracy theory turns out to be fact.

You know, I was in the Navy on 9-11-01. Was on the way back from morning PT when one guy shouted out from his barracks room that a plane had just hit the WTC. Went into the office and all hell was breaking loose.

When the announcement was made that the fourth plane "was no longer a threat" over the building PA system, I honestly thought that the US had shot down United 93.

Complacency and incompetence are always much more likely explanations than any conspiracy.
Conspiracies are very hard to keep secret and most people aren't terribly good at their job.
Perhaps lack of competence is a better term.
Good or fully competent is over on the right of the normal distribution curve.

Complacency is the main one though.
You could walk onto a plane in the US with a knife in your back pocket and nobody stopped you.
There were third world countries had far tighter security.
Even though there were terrorist attacks, they weren't taken seriously enough and the assumption was future terrorists would be like the old ones.
They weren't so keen on the whole dying for a cause thing.
All the procedures were based on that thinking.
Nobody sat there and thought through what could be done by people happy to die for their cause.
Nobody considered that there might be a new type of terrorist out there and what they might be up to.

Now the pendulum has perhaps swung in the other direction.

Yeah I remember the days when flying with a buck knife in your back pocket was no big deal.

Now you can't even fly with a 1/2-inch pen knife or scissors.

Not sure I feel any safer.

Incompetence is many times more likely than a conspiracy. In some ways a conspiracy would be less disturbing than a complete failure of the intelligence system – traitors are nothing new, but a multi-billion-dollar organization of organizations that cannot do its job…that is not any more comforting.

SouthernPhantom,

You are absolutely right.

Dan

Incompetence all the way.

Let's face it, the most powerful man in the free world could not keep a, well you know – it involved a cigar and an intern in the Oval office, as a secret.

Just for fun:

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After the assassination of President Sadat in Egypt, there were clerks who didn't bother to check the name of an old blind man before issuing him a visa* to come to the US. They probably felt they were being kind in helping expedite the immigration process for a poor old man to come to America. Today they would probably also do it out of fear of being labeled "-phobic".

Well, if they had just bothered to check the list of names, several more assassinations (like Kahane in 1991) and bombings would never had happened later, including the first attack on the WTC (with the truck bomb). And the same "blind Sheik" would not have issued Fatwahs (kill orders) and moved others to finally bring down the WTC buildings and attack the pentagon and to commit other terror crimes in other countries.

Dan
* Once he was issued the visa and arrived to the US in 1990, many wealthy individuals and loud activist organizations were waiting to help him and to defend his stay. And they helped him take advantage of legal loopholes and inter-agency communication impediments of that time to slip through the system.
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I remember an old report that claimed that Khalid Sheik Muhammad had planned the entire 9/11 attack all the way from the Philippines, where he was most of the time when not in Qatar, but I had never seen it explained as clearly as I heard in this documentary. He proposed his plan to Bin Laden all the way back in 1996.

As with so many other Al-Qaeda members, he first started off as a member of the Ikhwan (The Muslim Brotherhood).

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Dan
PS. KSM loved his disguises too. However, my favorite one was his Rosie O'Donnel look, right before he was taken off to Guantanamo:

> Let's face it, the most powerful man in the free world could not keep a, well you know – it involved a cigar and an intern in the Oval office, as a secret.

That same man, when trying to warn the other party and the country of the danger was LOUDLY accused of fear mongering to try and distract others from where he was putting his cigar… So let's cut the feces about that…

Paul, you missed my point altogether.

It was our inability to make a conspiracy work when only two people were involved. A 9/11 conspiracy would require hundreds if not thousands of people.

So, how reliable is the History Channel, these days?

MH

The history channel is fair to good in parts.

However, my favorite one was his Rosie O'Donnel look, right before he was taken off to Guantanamo:

Are we supposed to guess which photo is the RO'D disguise?

A 9-11 conspiracy would have had to involve HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people. Possibly millions.

Among them: the intelligence agencies of the western world, especially the US, UK and Germany

The New York City Fire Department, Police Department, and Department of Buildings (the latter cannot even conspire with itself, trust me)

Air traffic control in the US and Canada

The employees of the civilian engineering firms employed in the analysis, for example, Thornton Tomasetti. TT didn't know *exactly* who would be in the NY office at the time, and their staff includes some foreign born engineers, all of whom would have had to be "cleared" in advance.

Everyone working in the towers, who obviously would have seen the months of extensive preparation buildings like that need for controlled demolition, and said nothing. Bear in mind, they would have had to do all the "demo prep" while maintaining the towers in a fully operable condition, in full view of the public. This has never been done before.

The workers actually employed to do all that, and to emplace all the demolitions. And the engineers that would have planned it. (Conspiracy theorists don't realize that when they say "it looked too clean" that kind of rules out it being a government project) It didn't look clean from up close, btw, the infamous "they fell in their own footprints" claim would be quite a shock to the badly damaged and destroyed nearby buildings, like St Nicholas Church, destroyed by falling debris.

New York's construction unions, who would surely notice the battalion sized labor force showing up every day for six months to do that extensive prep work. They said nothing. Obviously "in on it".

(For those that don't know, when you watch a video of a large building being demolished, you are seeing the last few moments of a very long process, which includes, among other things, pre-cutting selected steel beams throughout the structure so explosives all work on the first run and the building falls "right". The last thing you ever want is a partial collapse, which is extremely dangerous.)

I've been in construction in NYC ever since getting out of the army.