How did I not know this?

[heidi]

More about Flight 93 in today's Salon.

How did I not know until just now that Flight 93 took off after one of the flight attendents on Flight 11 reported a hijacking?

Did you know this? Did you know that nearly 20 minutes passed before Betty Ong called the flight ops office and reported the hijacking of Flight 11? Did you know that the FAA's policy was not - and it's implied, still is not - to ground all planes during a hijacking?

This is utterly mad. How did it never occur to anyone at the FAA that hijackings might be a multi-site tandem assault, such that they would create a workable plan to deal with such things?

And I still have a question - does anyone know the answer? - why wasn't Bush told that a hijacking had taken place? Why wasn't he told anything until the first plane slammed into the tower and hundreds of people had been killed?

I haven't read the full report yet; I plan to, but I haven't yet. Systematic failures at every level of intelligence and government - that's pretty bloody obvious - but I want to know, what is the current stand? If there's been a hijacking, and it's been reported by an airline staffer, will the government still allow planes to take off?

And if so, why?

Comments

[dreagoddess.livejournal.com]

Because before 9/11, there hadn't been any coordinated multiple hijackings like that. And every other time someone hijacked a plane, their goal was to collect a lot of money, political prisoners, whatever the heck their goal was, and then release the hostages and go away. Or kill all the hostages and go away. Tragic, but not of the 9/11 level. The reason 9/11 took us so completely off guard is because no one even THOUGHT that there might be a multiple coordinated hijacking with the sole goal of destroying occupied buildings. Put yourself back in the pre-9/11 world, not the one now where we consider someone shifty-looking at McDonald's a possible terrorist. Why should it be a worry when it had never happened and there'd never been an idea it would.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

The reason 9/11 took us so completely off guard is because no one even THOUGHT that there might be a multiple coordinated hijacking with the sole goal of destroying occupied buildings.

But they had. That's what the COmmission Report says - from Sunday's New York Times:

Most prominent among those reports, the commission said, was one circulated in September 1998, based on information provided by a source who walked into an American consulate in East Asia, that ''mentioned a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city." A month earlier, it said, an intelligence agency received information that a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade Center.

We the public may not have known, but they the government did, or should have - and if they didn't, it was unconscionable neglect.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Ditto to that.

Also, if you recall from the actual day, it took them a good long time to get all the planes out of the sky. I doubt very much that even if there had been a policy in place to ground all planes that Flight 93 would have been grounded. 20 minutes is not a lot of time to make a decision and get it communicated to the field. I would imagine that Flight 93 would still have been in the air, best case scenario.

Never mind that the FAA is really rotten when it comes to standing up to the airlines.

We're looking back from a different perspective

[amandageist.livejournal.com]

I remember the day; and I remember being impressed that, once it became clear what *was* going on, how swiftly things were grounded and air traffic screeched to a halt. Any blinking period of disbelief or denial seemed to be minimized--that was a luxury left to the population at large.

The whole shock of the thing was the *unthinkable* nature of it. That our response was as coordinated as it was, in the face of something truly monstrous on a scale not imagined, I will give credit for.

I will give the 9/11 investigators many points, but you can only cite a "failure of imagination" so far. I recognize that there were breakdowns, our network could have been far stronger, and terrorism should already have been higher on everyone's list--but still, if this scenario had been floated as potential, pre-9/11, it would very likely have seemed farfetched.

We have learned so much in the past few years about the mindset of these people, what they are prepared to do to themselves, their children, their world, that now it seems standard-issue. But then? No.

It is a sad education; to have to make myself understand that there is a perception that would see an American baby as a potential enemy to be killed, rather than an innocent. I am still trying to learn it. But very few of us could even have gotten our minds around it pre-9/11.

~Amanda

Re: We're looking back from a different perspective

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

I will give the 9/11 investigators many points, but you can only cite a "failure of imagination" so far. I recognize that there were breakdowns, our network could have been far stronger, and terrorism should already have been higher on everyone's list--but still, if this scenario had been floated as potential, pre-9/11, it would very likely have seemed farfetched.

But the scenario was floated. Under Clinton, there were reports about something just like this happening:

Most prominent among those reports, the commission said, was one circulated in September 1998, based on information provided by a source who walked into an American consulate in East Asia, that ''mentioned a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city." A month earlier, it said, an intelligence agency received information that a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade Center.

And Clinton's team put a plan in place to kidnap Bin Laden back in 1998 as well - but the CIA killed the plan as being "too risky". Furthermore, those plans, which had been developed in 1997, were to be carried out during the summer of 1998, when the whole country was too involved in watching the impeachment thing; Republicans were going to the press and saying that Clinton's focus on Bin Laden was just to distract people from the impeachment lead-up and process. And you know what? Maybe they were - maybe he wanted to distract people by this amazing accomplishment of capturing this terrorist - but wouldn't it have been great if the CIA hadn't stopped them from trying?