‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’ • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#171

Post by bluntfang » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:47 PM UTC

mkl wrote: post #125

dTal wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no evidence the passengers suicided. They were attempting to save themselves. There was a struggle in the cockpit, and the aircraft crashed. It may even have been that the terrorists crashed the plane when they realized they weren't going to make it to their target. This meme is unhealthy, and disrepectful to the fallen.

There is no meme. There is no disrespect. There is no claim of suicide in that comment. Both the passengers and the fighter pilots were willing to do whatever it took to prevent the plane being used to kill a lot more people on the ground. The passengers' phone calls in the article suggest they knew they were likely to die whether acting or not, and as it happened they acted before the fighters could intercept. The a…

>Both the passengers and the fighter pilots were willing to do whatever it took to prevent the plane being used to kill a lot more people on the ground.

considering all the passengers are dead, you can't make that claim. We'd all love to believe the passengers were selfless, and it definitely made for a great movie, but pretending like we knew what their intentions were is disingenuous at best.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#172

Post by varjag » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #156

varjag wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Osama bin Laden was not Saudi royal, his commoner family became rich in construction business. It was precisely the alliance of Riyadh with the States that motivated his jihad, so you are on the same page with him wrt American assistance. At the time of attack, he was a fugitive from the Kingdom for nearly a decade.

> Osama bin Laden was not Saudi royal, I think this was the first thing Saudi court told the Americans. Whomever those guys were, they were integral to Saudi polity. > It was precisely the alliance of Riyadh with the States that motivated his jihad. Which did not preclude his affiliates from receiving money from "private" officials in his "exile" well into mid-naughties. His close relatives were continuing their life…

There is no doubt about OBL provenance really, question is at which point you associate the act of a (former) citizen with his country of origin.

One of the hijackers was Egyptian, can't remember ever hearing calls for severing (substantial) American ties with Egypt off that. As reprehensible Saudi regime was (and is, under the rule of bonesaw prince), saying that the USA supports Saudi despite 911 is factually exactly backwards.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#173

Post by lostlogin » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

stef25 wrote: post #104

Obligatory reading: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looming_Tower Important name in this event in Ali Soufan. The amount of conspiracy theories here are surprising.

It’s a good tv series too.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#174

Post by kristofferR » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

cantrevealname wrote: post #31

The article has photos from inside the bunker during the actual crisis. Who took the pictures? It seems that VP Cheney’s official photographer went into the bunker with him: On July 24, 2015, the National Archives and Records Administration released 356 photos shot on Sept. 11, 2001, by Vice President Dick Cheney’s official photographer David Bohrer. The publication was the result of a decade-long fight by Frontline…

Interesting to know that Robert Mueller was in the room.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#175

Post by SiempreViernes » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

I'm surprised the national guard apparently hasn't trained for combat operations within mainland airspace, I though at least the national guard was an actual defensive force, and not an expeditionary one.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#176

Post by shantly » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:05 PM UTC

zeta0134 wrote: post #9

dghughes wrote: post #3

I remember working that day (a cool and sunny Tuesday) and each place I went to I asked them to turn on the TV. Nobody was interested in turning on the TV or even changing the channel to any news channel. What I thought had happened was a large aircraft accidentally ran into the Empire State building again like had happened many years ago.

I was in the 7th grade, and in my Texas History class in the morning when the news hit. We had a television system that would play news broadcasts for the whole school to start off each morning, and as soon as the news broke, the administration turned those on and had all the classrooms tune in. At first we thought it was a freak accident... and then we saw the second plane hit. "Shaken" is the word. It was all anyon…

> "Shaken" is the word. It was all anyone could think about for the rest of the day.

Best essay I've read that captures the experience of the few days right after in the parts of America that weren't especially close to where it happened is DFW's "The View from Mrs. Thompson's" in the collection Consider the Lobster.

Looks like Rolling Stone's got it available:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/david-fost...

Those who've grown up after 9/11 may not appreciate how many fewer US flags (or representations of same) one used to see on a given day, even in Red State America. I mean they were around, of course, just not quite as everywhere.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#177

Post by goto11 » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #150

goto11 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was that the goal was to get the US presence out of the middle east. That goal failed pretty spectacularly.

Stated goals and actual goals rarely align.

Yeah, maybe the actual goals of the terrorists was to make everybody wait longer in airports and getting annoyed? As just revenge for the betrayal of Sykes-Picot and the desecration of the holy lands.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#178

Post by mkl » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC

bluntfang wrote: post #171

mkl wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no meme. There is no disrespect. There is no claim of suicide in that comment. Both the passengers and the fighter pilots were willing to do whatever it took to prevent the plane being used to kill a lot more people on the ground. The passengers' phone calls in the article suggest they knew they were likely to die whether acting or not, and as it happened they acted before the fighters could intercept. The a…

>Both the passengers and the fighter pilots were willing to do whatever it took to prevent the plane being used to kill a lot more people on the ground. considering all the passengers are dead, you can't make that claim. We'd all love to believe the passengers were selfless, and it definitely made for a great movie, but pretending like we knew what their intentions were is disingenuous at best.

We have the phone call information. The passengers knew the fate of the other planes, and decided to try and regain control to avoid that. This is clear from the phone calls. They weren't selfless at all; they were trying to save their own lives.

I don't think there's anything disingenuous or speculative in what I'm saying. I'm being very general and going by the article's phone call information (I haven't seen that movie).

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#179

Post by amalcon » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #84

plutonorm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, it seems a little convenient that they didn't have to shoot the plane down. Do we have any evidence that they didn't shoot the plane down and then construct the passengers saving the day story after the fact?

You got downvoted, but still there is no certainty on this. Fighter planes were there, they knew where they were headed. Shooting down the plane above non-residential area seemed like the best option. On the other hand, passengers overmastering the terrorist through the cockpit door already seems unlikely, and more unlikely still once overmastered, not trying to land safely. So yeah, bringing news that you shot down…

So, I used to believe this too. There's a lot of information that has come out since then, a whole investigative commission, many details, and a lot of people who would have needed to lie consistently and continually to this day.

Sure, it's possible that that happened. Lots of things are possible. It's just so astronomically unlikely at this point that it's not really worth considering until some evidence appears.

Re: ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

#180

Post by swish_bob » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:46 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #103

Noctem wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I've never heard of that happening. If anyone knows, I'd love to hear a technical explanation of how and why that could occur.

I don't have a technical explanation for how call misrouting can happen except to observe that the endpoints are entirely reliant on the network to get this right, they don't even tell each other "Hi I'm X trying to call Y" and "Hi I'm Y answering a call from X". On Strowger electro-mechanical exchanges one of the nice features is that a random piece of the exchange handles each dialed call. This means the human intu…

Back in the dim and distant past I worked Tech Support for Psion. One gloriously quiet morning our number was redirected to the house of some poor woman in South London who eventually just gave up and left her phone off the hook.

Sadly I couldn't enjoy it, as I was running late for work and mistimed my jump onto a bus, breaking my ankle ...