191–200 of 211 posts
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My impression was that the goal was to get the US presence out of the middle east. That goal failed pretty spectacularly.
Al Qaeda believes in a final apocalyptic war between Islam and basically everybody else, ending in a global Islamic Caliphate. Their goal is to provoke that war, which they believe they are already fighting. They just want everybody else to join in.
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No, the actual goal may have been to increase the visibility of Al Quaeda; serve as a recruitment poster and show that their group can hurt the biggest force on the planet with impunity in a way that can not be denied or spun. The mantra 'never leave a crisis unused' is enough to explain everything else that followed. Getting the United States out of the middle East was never going to happen as a result of this, rath…
Does that mean they would have lost if they had actually achieved the stated goal?
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This is something that I’ve completely forgotten until now. I remember all the major news sites were down and when they came back up, there were only simple html pages. It took a while before they restored to a slimmed down version. I have a memory of a picture on a news article that I can’t forget: there were tens of ambulances one behind another on a boulevard, waiting in line to help people.
I also remember several cable channels (non-news) entirely shut off programming for a few days after.
The required read is also the written statement of the planners of the attack (the copy of pdf on Penn Law): https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/5964-d-101-islamic-resp... "killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion. These actions are our offerings to God." They really tried hard to be very clean ab…
You forgot the first part: "America is the number one, and the largest country in the world, in spreading military might and terrorism. Also, America is the principle and greatest supplier to the occupying terrorist state of Israel in Palestine. Also, America supports and finances the terrorist regimes that govern the countries ofthe Arab world, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan."
“We ask to be near to God, we fight you and destroy you and terrorize you. The Jihad in god's cause is a great duty in our religion. We have news for you, the news is: You will be greatly defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq and that America will fall, politically, militarily, and economically. Your end is very near and your fall will be just as the fall of the towers on the blessed 9/11 day. We will raise from the ruins, God willing. We will leave this imprisonment with our noses raised high in dignity, as the lion emerges from his den. We shall pass over the blades of the sword into the gates of heaven.”
It’s worth reading in full to understand how they think and what their beliefs are.
Not sure I can read the article 9/11 was a traumatic experience for me. I remember vividly where I was and what I was doing and who I called and virtually everything about that day. I almost joined the military in response such was my reaction.
I actually did, joined joined the Air Force 3 years later as soon as I turned 18. Only recently got out after 10 years. I was on holiday at the time with my family, and we saw the first news at at a train station when we were waiting for a connection. It had a tremendous impact on me at the time. Once we got to our hotel, we were glued to the TV 10 hours afterwards, and I can vividly remember the horror of watching r…
Thank you for your service.
What are you up to now? I hear the job market for people with clearance that you likely have is pretty lucrative.
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I got misconnected once while trying to book a hotel reservation over the phone. Rooms became available 330 days out but a whole month at once, so when the reservation office opened at 8am or whatever on the first of the month, everyone would try to call in. So many people were calling this number that the system would start hanging up on people at random, so you'd just call back over and over hoping that you'd get c…
What hotel is this that people go to such lengths to book?
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So there's a conspiracy involving every level of the US government, the US Air Force, D.C. Air National Guard, the NTSB and possibly more, over...something that would be completely acceptable to do under the circumstances?
Plus the family members of passengers whose last conversations with their loved ones ended with some variation of, "we're going to try and rush the cockpit, I have to go". Not only that, but the conspiracy involves the military trying to convince everyone that they were completely unprepared. "We didn't shoot down an airliner, even though that's what anybody with sense would have done in that situation, because our f…
Since the Kennedy assaibation, the US Secret Service pre-secures everywhere the president goes, including armored escort cars snipers on the roofs of buildings.
Not having armed aircraft always ready to support Air Force One or Two seemed inconceivable to me. Even in a post-Cold-War environment.
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And neither does it explain 9/11.
You're missing the point of Hanlon's razor. It does allow for malice, but only in cases where incompetence is not an adequate explanation. So there's no contradiction.
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My impression was that the goal was to get the US presence out of the middle east. That goal failed pretty spectacularly.
This was, in fact, Bin laden’s goal. And he failed.
https://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223...
"Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.
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All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat."
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A lot of the Web wasn't geared for high load. Information was developing so rapidly that online was really the only effective place to go for information (such as it was -- there was rampant speculation). Many sites rapidly slimmed down their services and offered lightweight versions. A few lighter-weight sites remained up, notably, at the time, Slashdot. NPR refers to 9/11 as the event which made clear that the netw…
Slashdot was absolutely essential that day, seemingly the only site that was up
Slashdot (smaller audience) and Google stayed up. All the major (US) news sites were down.
https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towe...