You're planning a terrorist attack while sitting somewhere in Afghanistan. What do you need? Well, you've got the site all figured out, it's the WTC and the Pentagon and possibly the Whitehouse.
Okay, so now you need some planes and that means you need some pilots. Now you already know, from having flown airlines, that pilots have to be carefully trained because large commercial aircraft are not easy to fly. So, if you've sent some jihadist to American flight schools to be trained to fly heavy aircraft, do you send them to schools where only light private planes are flown? As a very wealthy child who has been educated in the U.S. are you unaware of the difficulties of operating heavy aircraft? Well if that is the case then your planned attacks have absolutely no chance of coming off. But, even so, wouldn't you want to have someone watch and see how your pilots are taking to their training and report back how they are doing? Of course you would, this plan is costing you tens of thousands of dollars. So, if it's reported that your pilots can't fly small aircraft and/or aren't good students, you'd certainly want to make some changes to your plans. Worse yet if you discover that your pilots/skyjackers are drinking, visiting strip clubs and hooking up with strippers, while spending your money like it's going out of style. My guess is you'd be really deeply concerned about the chances of your projects success.
So, that's a real world, quick and dirty look at the kinds of problems OBL would have had to be satisfied with and still hope that his plans would succeed in spite of it all.
Now, let's try it from the vantage point of some cabal working on this side of the Atlantic, some people with power and connections strong enough to cover up their mistakes by preventing any investigators from finding them. After all, if OBL was the culprit, do you think he would care at all about what investigators might find? There's a very limited choice of what kind of culprits would care whether or not there were bombs or controlled demolitions. While, on the other hand, if the WTC buildings were so weak that a few scattered office fires would turn them to dust, that's certainly something the gov't would want covered up, no?
But, just for this hypothetical we'll leave that aside as well, to concentrate on the task that faced any such planners. My guess is that the first thing they'd want to know is, what kind of damage they could expect an airliner, crashed into the towers, could do. They'd have to turn to engineers for that information. We now know that they'd have discovered that the planes would break apart and fall largely outside the buildings. That would leave the buildings intact with minimal, if any, damage to show. That would definitely not be a good start for a plan that was supposed to provide a "New Pearl Harbor.
Well, they would figure that if they could just get the planes to hit the towers, explosives, planted inside, could easily augment the damage. But there would be a problem with all that aircraft debris landing outside. Because they couldn't find 19 skyjackers of the desired decent to populate the planes, it would be almost impossible to prevent people from discovering there were no hijackers. The North wood plan, which seems a template for 911, used passengers boarded under carefully crafted aliases, fingerprint and dna analysis could unravel any such plans. Luggage might also contain clues, running counter to the desired effects.
Well, let's see, what if we just did away with the idea of using real planes? They could simply use fake ones instead. Carefully prepared fake video footage could be fed to the media, played through their control rooms and only a couple of people would have to know. After all, who doesn't believe video footage played on the news? You need only one live shot, altered to make it appear different, then fed to the several news outlets. After which, you have plenty of time to create more copies from different angles, by "amateurs" who come forward in the next few days. But this plan hinges on getting that "live shot" out really fast, because otherwise newscaster have nothing to point to, to silence a growing chorus of people saying they did not see any plane. "You must have missed it, here let me play the video again!"
Okay, so now you need some planes and that means you need some pilots. Now you already know, from having flown airlines, that pilots have to be carefully trained because large commercial aircraft are not easy to fly. So, if you've sent some jihadist to American flight schools to be trained to fly heavy aircraft, do you send them to schools where only light private planes are flown? As a very wealthy child who has been educated in the U.S. are you unaware of the difficulties of operating heavy aircraft? Well if that is the case then your planned attacks have absolutely no chance of coming off. But, even so, wouldn't you want to have someone watch and see how your pilots are taking to their training and report back how they are doing? Of course you would, this plan is costing you tens of thousands of dollars. So, if it's reported that your pilots can't fly small aircraft and/or aren't good students, you'd certainly want to make some changes to your plans. Worse yet if you discover that your pilots/skyjackers are drinking, visiting strip clubs and hooking up with strippers, while spending your money like it's going out of style. My guess is you'd be really deeply concerned about the chances of your projects success.
So, that's a real world, quick and dirty look at the kinds of problems OBL would have had to be satisfied with and still hope that his plans would succeed in spite of it all.
Now, let's try it from the vantage point of some cabal working on this side of the Atlantic, some people with power and connections strong enough to cover up their mistakes by preventing any investigators from finding them. After all, if OBL was the culprit, do you think he would care at all about what investigators might find? There's a very limited choice of what kind of culprits would care whether or not there were bombs or controlled demolitions. While, on the other hand, if the WTC buildings were so weak that a few scattered office fires would turn them to dust, that's certainly something the gov't would want covered up, no?
But, just for this hypothetical we'll leave that aside as well, to concentrate on the task that faced any such planners. My guess is that the first thing they'd want to know is, what kind of damage they could expect an airliner, crashed into the towers, could do. They'd have to turn to engineers for that information. We now know that they'd have discovered that the planes would break apart and fall largely outside the buildings. That would leave the buildings intact with minimal, if any, damage to show. That would definitely not be a good start for a plan that was supposed to provide a "New Pearl Harbor.
Well, they would figure that if they could just get the planes to hit the towers, explosives, planted inside, could easily augment the damage. But there would be a problem with all that aircraft debris landing outside. Because they couldn't find 19 skyjackers of the desired decent to populate the planes, it would be almost impossible to prevent people from discovering there were no hijackers. The North wood plan, which seems a template for 911, used passengers boarded under carefully crafted aliases, fingerprint and dna analysis could unravel any such plans. Luggage might also contain clues, running counter to the desired effects.
Well, let's see, what if we just did away with the idea of using real planes? They could simply use fake ones instead. Carefully prepared fake video footage could be fed to the media, played through their control rooms and only a couple of people would have to know. After all, who doesn't believe video footage played on the news? You need only one live shot, altered to make it appear different, then fed to the several news outlets. After which, you have plenty of time to create more copies from different angles, by "amateurs" who come forward in the next few days. But this plan hinges on getting that "live shot" out really fast, because otherwise newscaster have nothing to point to, to silence a growing chorus of people saying they did not see any plane. "You must have missed it, here let me play the video again!"
