r/news • u/Upstairs_Drive_5602 • 19h ago
CIA warned of threat of 'explosive airplane' years before 9/11, documents show
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c17j94ew1lno465
u/DogPlane3425 18h ago
Tom Clancy "A Debt of Honor" published 1995
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u/DogsAreOurFriends 18h ago
Black Sunday by Thomas Harris 1975.
Ok fine it was a blimp.
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u/internetlad 17h ago
How about that ship that exploded in Halifax harbour? Basically the same thing b
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u/DogsAreOurFriends 16h ago
Kind of weird that was a ship, not an aircraft. And an accident. And not ramming a building. But other than that, yeah just the same.
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u/__Geg__ 15h ago
It was the plot of the pilot episode of the X-Files spin off, The Lone Gunman, that had premiered earlier that year.
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u/mountain-skies 6h ago
Pilot episode of Seven Days was about the White House getting hit by planes. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167720/
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u/fritzie_pup 15h ago
First time I finished reading that, I was on a plane and accidentally left it there..
One of the few Tom Clancy books there is no way today they'll make a movie from for sure, and thought of that then.
Was a really great story, but now holy cow is very not farfetched these days.
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u/Goldhinize 16h ago
Yeah I had read A Debt of Honor during a late 90’s Tom Clancy binge and I swear one of my first thoughts seeing the 2nd plane hit the tower was how it seemed like a plan lifted straight out of the book. Scary
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u/DogsAreOurFriends 15h ago
There was also the nutball Navy pilot who tried to commandeer a Fed Ex plane (using a spear gun) to kamikaze or at least commit suicide in a wild way.
Speaking of that: WW2 kamikaze in general- 1944z
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u/ThrowawayAICS 18h ago
Pretty much every terror attack has been warned about in some way or other, some quite a lot.
The primary problem with intelligence services has never been to find out what might happen, it has always been to shift out the serious from the noise, then figure out not just what is going to happen but when, where, and by whom.
Pretty much every intelligence service on the planet is juggling dozens of possible attacks at any given moment, some of the more targeted ones are managing hundreds or even thousands. Most never happen at all, sometimes the conspirators find out the government is on to them and shelve their plans which can then be taken off the shelf years later by a member who know the plan but has since joined a different group.
Sometimes terror groups will even sell attack plans they've made to other groups.
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u/Lord0fHats 18h ago
And even then, you don't always get people who take the intelligence seriously.
Several ranking officers in the US military basically got drummed out after Pearl Harbor because they'd gotten multiple transmissions warning them 'The Japanese fleet is moving and we don't know where, be on alert' and they were not on alert. In their defense, this exact warning had been issues a few times across the fall and summer of 1941 as the US and Japan moved toward war. Every time Japanese forces did anything the US warned its foreign service stations that they needed to be on guard, such as when the Imperial Army invaded French Indochina in September. They'd gotten that message so many times they'd kind of stopped taking it seriously and then Japan hit Pearl Harbor and invaded the Philippines, Malaya, and the rest of the South Pacific.
And even then, after several field commanders knew the US and Japan were at war, many of them were extremely slow responding which cost the US a lot like when the Japanese caught a lot of the Philippine based air forces on the ground and unprepared despite having hours to prepare.
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u/ThrowawayAICS 18h ago
There is also that, but for things like that commanders have an additional problem, which is that people normalize their situation over time. It's not just commanders who stop caring.
If you put everyone on alert over and over again, the individual soldiers start slacking. They can't be on alert all the time, if they're on a high alert for months on end they start slacking because high alert starts being associated in their mind with fuck all happening.
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u/The_OtherDouche 10h ago
Also, the FBI absolutely HATED the CIA. Literally some firefighters vs the police beef. John Kiriakou talks about it a good bit in his podcast. The FBI always dislikes the CIA because it was originally dreamed up to be under the umbrella of FBI’s control and ended up becoming its own agency, so most reports the CIA sent for them to investigate (anything domestic) the FBI just didn’t even look into cause they were appalled at the idea of anyone else helping them with domestic defense.
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u/BubbaTee 16h ago
Billy Mitchell (the father of the US Air Force, and commander of all American air forces in WW1) screamed about Pearl Harbor for years.
He predicted the Japanese would attack it on a Sunday morning, and predicted the direction they would attack from. He predicted that battleships, which the Navy brass was still obsessed with, would be sitting ducks for attacks from the air.
When he implied that military command was being negligent for not preparing for such an attack, President Coolidge personally ordered him to be court martialed, and forced him to retire.
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u/insaneHoshi 6h ago
He predicted the Japanese would attack it on a Sunday morning, and predicted the direction they would attack from. He predicted that battleships, which the Navy brass was still obsessed with
He predicted this in 1924.
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u/Available-Goat-6938 13h ago
It's why the US Navy after WW2 had multiple intelligence programs as the #2 procurement program priority, the only program which received more funding were the sub launched ballastic missile programs.
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u/dutchwonder 6h ago
And then there is actually implementing countermeasures.
The response to a group of armed men claiming to have bombs and taking over a plane full of hundreds of civilians is not naturally to bet against them and immediately try to land or crash risking all life aboard.
Nor would it be something you or I would normally accept as being "standard procedure"
Same with "Why didn't they just intercept them?" like they are not asking for a system where any civilian aircraft anywhere in the US could at a moments notice be marked hostile and shot down by USAF fighters in minutes.
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u/Reasonable_Tap_8215 8h ago
It’s funny how you say this because 25 years later we know with certainty there was warning about 9/11. But I watched Good Morning America live coverage earlier (of that day) and they were talking to a former FBI who specifically says “most terrorist attacks don’t come with any warning. Real life isn’t like an action film.” 🤦🏻♂️
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u/LadyIgnacia 18h ago
The Clinton administration told the Bush admin during the transition of power that they believed an attack was being planned. The Bush admin sat on it.
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u/ThrowawayAICS 18h ago
Sat on it isn't really correct, across the CIA and th FBI there were over 70 operations working on Bin Laden at the time.
But that doesn't really help when they don't figure it out soon enough.Knowing isn't unusual, having some people warning about its critically is also common. There's usually some or even a team that does in fact spot it. There's the issue of getting it to the right people and getting them to understand the urgency, then getting all the info you need.
In the case of 9/11 there were numerous warnings of different attacks Bin Laden may do towards american targets both in the US and in other places. But they varied greatly, failed to show a when, a where, a who, and a conclusive how.
This was partly made worse by lack of shared intelligence between agencies because while the CIA had in fact a good idea about the who, they did not have a how, when or where.
Meanwhile the FBI had managed to figured out the how, the where, and had narrowed the when down to "preparations are being made" which implies soonish.But neither agency was sharing with the other.
In total it's known that there were over 70 different operations in play working on Bin Laden at the time of the attacks.
But that's the other thing, you gotta figure it all out before it happens.13
u/za419 17h ago
Yeah, we all remember that they missed 9/11, but we forget that they missed plots to bomb the WTC, to bomb various ships operating in the Middle East, to bomb various embassies, et cetera, all of which didn't actually happen because they chose the airliner hijacking plan instead.
It's definitely one of those hindsight things, where it's very obvious how the pieces they had fit together to tell the story of what was about to happen, and we ignore all the ways to fit them into puzzles that turned out not to matter.
Lack of intelligence sharing is definitely a big downer though. It's entirely possible that someone would have managed to identify the correct way the pieces fit together if they had all of them in one place - But again, hindsight is 20/20.
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u/ThrowawayAICS 17h ago
I also forgot to mention, there is a numbers element.
If your intelligence service is 99.99% effective that sounds really good, but it means one in every ten thousand attempts get through.
The fbi alone prevented 640 just last year. That is getting close to 2 a day.
That isnt all, that is just the fbi. Cia, dhs, and state agencies all come in addition to that.
It adds up fast.
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u/Broncosonthree 17h ago
I also think it’s interesting to consider that there are successful operations that are never announced or shared, for any number of reasons. Every unsuccessful plot is learned from. The offending groups can learn how they got caught, if their comms are vulnerable, if someone is being watched, who might have been surveilling them etc. Unaffiliated can learn the same and use that intel to improve their own methods. I’d be willing to bet there are more plots directly thwarted that we don’t know than we do know about. And there are even more that are abandoned or prevented because of good, preventative intelligence work.
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u/BubbaTee 16h ago
They did all those things (WTC, attacking ships, attacking embassies). They did all those things during Clinton's presidency - 1993 WTC bombing, USS Cole, and Kenya/Tanzania embassy attacks. All under Clinton.
The idea that Clinton was good against terrorism until Bush ignored it is revisionist bullshit. They both had the same CIA, FBI, and NSA working for them.
Also, people hate TSA even after 9/11. There is absolutely zero chance that TSA could've ever been implemented before 9/11 as a preventative measure, no matter what any report said. Only Israel had that level of airport security before 2001.
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u/za419 14h ago
Well, but that's my point - Those are all things they were able to do, those are all things they could have done, those are all things they probably either considered doing again or that US intelligence agents thought they might do again. There was probably evidence you could assemble to point to them actively planning to do some of those things in the imminent future. But, none of those things were the one they chose to execute in September 2001.
When we look back and assemble the puzzle, we have the advantage of knowing the answer. Seeing the picture on the box, as it were - But they did not have that going in. If you don't know whether you're putting together a picture of a giraffe, or a lion, or a sunflower, and you're just sort of trying to put pieces together until you get something, it's much harder to tell what is and isn't in the right place.
I still hate the TSA, but mostly because they're ineffective. If they were annoying and effective it'd be fine, but annoying and ineffective is bad IMO.
Regardless, yeah. Obviously. Even if they had the information that "Terrorists working for Al-Qaeda intend to hijack four aircraft sometime in September and fly them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and the Capitol Building", it'd still be fairly hard to effectively prevent it - You can't shut down all air traffic for an entire month, passenger screening won't fly, all you can really do with that (rather excellent) amount of information is tell pilots to be really careful and that hijackings will pose a mortal threat unlike in previous years.
It's not easy.
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u/BubbaTee 16h ago
"An attack is being planned" is completely meaningless. It's like saying it's going to rain somewhere on Earth tomorrow.
Where was the attack going to be? In Saudi Arabia (Khobar Towers)? In Yemen (Aden Hotel)?
Clinton was president in 1998 when Al Qaeda bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Why did he just "sit on that" and let 224 Americans die?
Clinton was president in 2000 when AQ attacked the USS Cole. Clinton was president was AQ attacked the WTC the first time, in 1993.
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u/sulla226 18h ago
It could probably have been assumed that al-Qaeda was planning another attack at that point. The embassy bombings and the USS Cole attack both happened late in Clinton's term. Obviously they weren't going to stop trying to attack us. Bin Laden was a well-known figure in intelligence circles at that time.
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u/ih-shah-may-ehl 7h ago
Yeah i know someone in intelligence and it's as you say. They are swamped by hypotheticals without timrline. So yeah the cia was warabout planes. But without timetables or details along with thousands of other potential threats
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u/drainedbatterypower 18h ago
John O'Neill warned them so many times too and he died on 9/11 https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-the-man-who-knew/
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u/bkendig 18h ago edited 18h ago
Aw man. He couldn't convince the FBI of the threat of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, so he quit that job and went to work as head of security at the World Trade Center ... in August 2001.
O'Neill started his new job at the World Trade Center on August 23, 2001. In late August, he talked to his friend Chris Isham about the job. Jokingly, Isham said, "At least they're not going to bomb it again", a reference to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. O'Neill replied, "They'll probably try to finish the job."
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u/Dull-Contact120 18h ago
That’s the guy to contact if you go back in time.
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u/Lesurous 18h ago
Obviously not because no one listened to him then
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u/ExodusPHX 16h ago
But he would listen to you! And with your powers combined, save the world.
Can you imagine 9/11-less America today?
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u/MXC_ImpactReplay 15h ago
Same shit would have been jammed through with different excuses, we’d be exactly where we are now. But it would be wonderful to save the 3,000 deceased victims.
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u/mybustlinghedgerow 15h ago
And those who've died since then from cancer and other illnesses caused by the toxic air.
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u/V_T_H 17h ago
Part of the issue with interagency failures for 9/11 was that Michael Scheuer had a personal problem with O’Neill and thus didn’t want to share CIA information on bin Laden with the FBI. He thought O’Neill was “duplicitous”. One of those two men was completely correct about what was going to happen. The other (the one who is still alive) is a QAnon psycho.
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u/monkeyamongmen 14h ago
He's also a birther, anti-vax, pro civil war, and has called for American Jews to be 'scoured from the continent'.
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u/BananasPineapple05 18h ago
Do we all remember Condoleeza Rice's dismissive tone about the August 2001 Presidential Briefing Memo entitled Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States? Because I sure do.
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u/CrankyYankers 50m ago
Then after the attack something like, "Well we had no idea that planes blah blah blah..."
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u/captsmokeywork 18h ago
Peter Bergen literally interviewed Islamist terrorists saying how easy it would be to hijack a plane and use it as a weapon.
Late 1990s.
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u/Wiseduck5 18h ago
The pilot of the X-Files spin-off was about flying a plane into the WTC. It aired early 2001.
It was well known enough idea to make it into pop culture.
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u/rockmasterflex 18h ago
Right but like what would the desirable effective prevention reaction be? Ground all flights forever until the threat is cleared? Do the tsa before the tsa (even tho tsa has proven to be ineffective)?
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u/NanquansCat749 18h ago
Wasn't the big thing reinforced cockpit doors and generally restricting access to the cockpit?
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u/ACommonMarble 11h ago
At the time, the concern was that the terrorists would execute the passengers.
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u/NanquansCat749 9h ago
Yes, I meant after 9/11, I remember that being talked about as the new last line of defense.
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u/DirkBabypunch 7h ago
Terrorists had been highjacking or blowing up airliners for decades, so moving another stel and using the planes as weapons eventually isn't a huge leap.
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u/virtual_adam 18h ago
So is the take here that Americans would have happily and openly accepted a post-9/11 TSA/CIA/FBI earlier?
One surprise attack is always easier than constant 24/7/365 defense across every airport small to large in the US
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u/DoNotResusit8 18h ago
No shit.
There was an incident in France that the authorities knew ended in the highjackers flying into the Eiffel Tower or some other structure in France. This was before 911.
All the western governments were aware of the threat but couldn’t imagine it really happening.
They all failed.
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u/Few_Advisor3536 17h ago
Theres a pretty cool movie about this called L’assaut. Its about the paramilitary unit that went in and stopped the hijackers while the plane was refuelling.
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u/V_T_H 18h ago
I mean it was pretty telling that it took all of 1 minute after the 2nd plane hit for a host on Fox to say that it could have been Osama bin Laden. Intelligence agencies knew about this possibility, they just had absolutely no interagency communication and so it all went ignored.
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u/FrogTrainer 17h ago
Wasn't a stretch considering Bin Laden already tried to take down the WTC in 1993.
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u/KarateKid917 17h ago
And he was known for multiple, coordinated attacks at once after the embassy bombings in Africa
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u/premature_eulogy 11h ago
And the Bojinka plot to hijack airliners and fly them into buildings (as well as straight up bomb some of them) was thwarted six whole years before 9/11.
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u/Skwuat 16h ago
I mean yeah, but its not like the warning said "hey, were goinf to target september 11th, 2001. These are the flights were going to use. These are the terrorists to look out for."
The lack of jet scrambling to intercept is kind of nuts when you consider how much was said over the communications with air traffic control and the terrorists, but its not like its easy to prevent it from happening without knowing specifics. There are just so many flights everyday.
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u/Galactapuss 12h ago
Scrambling jets is not a quick process at all
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u/KDR_11k 4h ago
That sounds like a real problem, what would those airbases do if their radar picked up cruise missiles headed for them?
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u/Mordoch 1h ago
It depends where you are talking about, but in the US the idea has been cruise missiles can't really be launched without the incoming aircraft being detected far in advance so there is time to scramble jets. (Post September 11th the US also has jets ready to scramble comparatively more quickly to respond to a hijacked airliner type situation.)
Other countries have different situations, but some of them include strengthened hangars that can't easily be destroyed for example. Even a regular hangar can complicate surprise attack by preventing satellite intel from determining which are actually occupied by aircraft at a particular time. In an actual wartime situation (which air attacks are expected) aircraft tend to be moving around frequently to complicate an adversary figuring out what to target (with greater efforts at concealing them from satellites) and aircraft are more frequently on higher alert which means a quicker scramble reaction time.
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u/Skwuat 5h ago
Im sure theres a pretty expedited way to do it if youre being told that 4 passenger planes have been confirmed to be not only hijacked, but also headed towards nyc and washington dc.
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u/Galactapuss 1h ago
I don't think there was any way that they could've gotten birds in the air in time to prevent the attacks.
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u/thefoodiedentist 18h ago
Well, its not a new technology or tactic. Us has first hand experience in pearl harbor. So many click baity articles for 9/11
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u/ACommonMarble 11h ago
I'm not subscribing to read but I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA had thousands of warnings about thousands of possible attacks. It's not like the government wasn't already on the watch for terror threats.
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u/Felon_musk1939 6h ago
Considering the recent behavior of the U.S. Government I am 100% convinced they had ample warnings that were ignore. Just like right now.
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u/load_of_chode 18h ago
Well no shit, Islamic terrorists hijacked civilian planes many times before 9/11. It happened enough times that there's a whole Wikipedia article about it.
Targeting aircraft full of innocent civilians is kind of their thing.
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u/Stuporhumanstrength 9h ago
There's also the long-known "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" memo delivered to George W. Bush a month before the 9/11 attacks
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u/AmphibianMammoth 16h ago
Terrorist organizations are known to flood the zone with disinformation so the true plans get buried with the lies
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u/Shot-Swimming-9098 14h ago
I was playing golf as a single the summer before 9/11 at a shitty par 3 course in El Segundo. I got paired up with a guy who was waiting on his daughter, and had enough time for 9 holes. I started chatting with the guy, and found out he was a retired diplomat from India. I asked him what the craziest situation he ever had to deal with was, and he said it was when Osama bin Laden hijacked an airplane and flew it to Afghanistan. He asked me if I knew who bin Laden was, and I obviously said no. He said, "You will eventually. He hates America and he loves stealing airplanes."
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u/BooRadleysFriend 6h ago
Not to mention Alex Jones had a good bead on this in July 2001. Mentions exploding jet liners and the twin towers. Intel knew this was coming and did nothing to prevent it. It was the perfect opportunity to push through the most invasive surveillance the world has ever known
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u/yourcousinfromboston 18h ago
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll is a must read
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u/mybustlinghedgerow 16h ago edited 16h ago
Years before? Does that mean they should’ve implemented post-9/11 airport security systems in the 90s? That would’ve been very unpopular.
Edit: u/NanquansCat749 mentioned securing the cockpit. They’re totally right, that should’ve been done before the attack, since they knew airplanes could be weaponized. That could’ve stopped all the high jacking
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u/BubbaTee 16h ago
"The US should've implemented the TSA-level security measures before 9/11! Bush ignored it!"
-the same people who oppose flock cameras on every block
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u/Ok-Blood4340 13h ago
Deadbolt lock on a cabin door… world wide 24/7 surveillance and searchable index. Same same.
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u/CoderJoe1 14h ago
George Carlin mentioned years before 9/11 how awful it would be if terrorist realized they could fly hijacked airplanes into buildings.
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u/Reasonable-Turn-5940 13h ago
I still remember sitting in a barbershop, reading a TIME magazine article on Osama bin Laden. Never heard of the guy before. And in it he says there will be an unprecedented attack on the United States. And I thought "huh...Wonder if that'll happen. I'll need to keep an eye on the news". Then a few months later 9/11 happened
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u/funkymunkPDX 5h ago
We knew this after it happened but was drown out by patriot panic and hysteria.
Domestic mass shooters have killed more Americans than Islamic people over the last 25 years yet we're supposed to be afraid of outsiders.
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u/kevinstu123 4h ago
Haha. True. Locals have killed more than outsiders. Wh ite trash has killed more innocent lives in far greater number.
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u/WittyUsername816 10h ago edited 10h ago
Bush was warned of a credible threat, chose to do nothing, then used it as an excuse to start stripping freedoms with things like PATRIOT and PRISM. We have known this for years and unfortunately done very little with it.
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u/nellyruth 11h ago
The Coup accidentally predicted it in June 2001 with its unreleased Party Music album cover.
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u/No-Squirrel3735 3h ago
Yes we never saw planes flying into ships in the pacific theater of world war 2 either; it never happened until 2001. We are so dumb
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u/Winter-Fact-7233 3h ago
The minds of our spies who warned of "explosive airplane" need to be directed to the topic of drone attacks. And now, 25 years later, also the minds of the descendants of those C.I.A. agents.
The U.S. military, oddly, seems to be behind the beat? Re: drones, e.g., the barracks attack in the Middle East?
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u/Qcgreywolf 2h ago
To be fair, I am positive that there are dozens or more of plans always in the works from deranged groups.
The important job our agencies have is to determine the credible threats and the ones more likely to succeed.
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u/DaveDegas 1h ago
They wanted a new Pearl Harbor, and they conveniently got one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."
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u/CrankyYankers 56m ago
Any idiot could look at an airplane and think, "Hey, that could be used as a bomb".
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u/Nasha210 18h ago
I could have sworn there was a movie back in the 90s where they talk about flyingnplanes into buildings and blaming Muslims to get funding for a war
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u/mybustlinghedgerow 16h ago
There’s a movie (Wag the Dog) about faking a war to distract people after the president sexually assaulted a child while running for re-election lol.
Just to clarify, I don’t think 9/11 was some conspiracy. I do think the war in Iran is way closer to the plot of Wag the Dog. Great movie.
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u/aztronut 18h ago
There were plenty of other warnings that were closer in time to the actual incident as well. Al Franken does a good job of documenting all of this in some of his books, he calls it "Operation Ignore" by the GWB/Cheney admin.
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u/Tech-Film3905 16h ago
CIA knew everything and allowed it to happen. It didnt warn anyone.
Two of the hijackers were CIA and Saudi intelligence recruits
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u/This_isR2Me 14h ago
Old news, just like how Israel was warned of the October attack, History rhymes.
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u/ThatsItImOverThis 13h ago
The Bush government didn’t have to orchestrate it, they just didn’t try to do anything to stop it.
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u/funky_bebop 12h ago
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/0506/chapter5.htm
The CIA and FBI knew more details about the hijackers and just didn’t do anything. They deserve the blame.
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u/PigFarmer1 16h ago
It didn't help that the Bush administration was filled with cold warriors who were terrified of Russia. The voices within the administration who raised the alarm over terrorism were silenced.
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u/Seagoon_Memoirs 16h ago
the threat of an aircraft impact was always noted
and was included in design specs
but the aircraft were so much bigger and fully laden with fuel, that was not anticipated
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u/TrainDestroyer 9h ago
I mean shit it was known as far back as WWII. The US lost like 50ish ships (sank, not just damaged) to Kamikaze, and any physics professor could tell you "Slamming 400,000lbs into a building at 600mph is going to do a lot of damage"
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u/clashrendar 16h ago
Now there are drones that can do that. And Starlink exists so a country could control it from the other side of the world. And there are people in charge who would let that happen to gain more power.
Sleep well...
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u/Puzzleheaded_Tie6917 15h ago
Hey, there might be a big earthquake in California some day. Consider your selves warned…….
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u/rddman 15h ago edited 8h ago
There were much more concrete warnings shortly ahead of sept 11 2001:
Another warning came from Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, in April 2001 in a speech before the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, in which he asked for humanitarian aid for the people of Afghanistan. Massoud told the parliament that his intelligence agents had gained limited knowledge about a large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil being imminent. Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before the 9/11 attacks on September 9, 2001.[9]
On 9 September 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Bush and expressed his concerns over Massoud's assassination, warning him that "something larger might be afoot".[10]
On 23 August 2001, the Mossad gave the CIA a list of 19 suspects living in the US who were believed to be mounting an imminent attack on the United States. Only four of the names are known, all belonging to eventual hijackers in the attacks — Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and Nawaf al-Hazmi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_intelligence_before_the_attacks
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u/Hyroto77 6h ago
What about explosives planted in a building and all the people of a certain group going on holiday?
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u/Ranger176 14h ago
The more interesting question which remains unanswered is why the CIA didn’t alert the FBI to the presence of the two hijackers in the US until just a few weeks before the attacks. There’s been speculation over the years that the CIA was trying to recruit them as double agents but fucked up and got a lot of people killed.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Donald_C._Canestraro
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u/BloodshotDrive 15h ago
A major function of the intel community is to identify what threats are credible
This doesn’t necessarily mean anything
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u/EatinSumGrapes 18h ago
The more I learn about the events 9/11 set into motion to create the world we have today and about all the warnings the government had... yeah I do believe there was a conspiracy to make sure it happened. I think almost everyone in government/security was trying to prevent something like 9/11, but all it takes is a few powerful people pulling some strings to get around the systems in place.
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u/SeaNational3797 17h ago
Are we sure “explosive airplane” wasn’t just a failed Castro assassination attempt?
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u/Bzr21 15h ago
For years before 9/11 - CIA and other foreign intel agencies had scenarios on the books for large commercial jets being used in that way - but USA would not have needed to create DHS & TSA - just stop letting small weapons - knives - boxcutters etc. get through. As for removing the shoes - we can thank the so-called; "shoe-bomber" - the idiot who tried to light his sneaker on fire midflight.
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u/TheFuzziestDumpling 14h ago
Hell, the Port Authority were warned about it as far back as 1993. I'm very close with someone they consulted with about security after the bombing, who straight up told them they need to be more concerned about attacks using airplanes.
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u/Kurtotall 11h ago
I seem to remember it was a common assumption for a long time that terrorist would fly a plane into the twin towers
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u/wip30ut 9h ago
they knew it was a possibility (one of a dozen+ attack vectors) for years, but there was no political appetite to enact high-level Patriot Act-type security measures or even bomb Afghanistan & hunt down Bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks. The American public doesn't want our leadership engaging in preemptive wars against every conceivable threat.
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u/Felon_musk1939 6h ago
Hey, who remembers when the U.S. blamed Canada for the 9/11 attacks. Oh, you forgot about that? We didn't.
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u/Drekkful 18h ago
Of course they let an attack happen instead of stopping it because why get in the way of a good tragedy to exploit.
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u/Nasha210 18h ago
Didnt the CIA plan tonfly planes into some buildings and blame it on some south american country during the Clinton administration?
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u/firelemons 14h ago
9/11 aging like a fine milk. The US is helping Israelis annex middle east land for oil that can just be phased out by green energy at this point and there weren't any WMDs. Israelis and Americans probably carried out an order of magnitude of 9/11 equivalents at this point.
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u/banditweird 17h ago
There’s a good podcast called Operation Tradebom about the earlier WTC bombings. It ends with 9/11 commentary and makes it seem like some people weren’t too surprised it happened.
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u/alpha_rat_fight_ 19h ago
“The Osama bin Laden I Know” by Peter Bergen is a pretty good book about this. It was published in 2006. This has been known for a while.