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‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’

politico.com

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

#41

Post by throwbrow »

I was riding the 7 train from Astoria, Queens, to my job at the big Citigroup tower in Long Island City. It was after the first plane hit and, with the 7 being an outdoor subway line with a great view of the Manhattan skyline, we in the first car could see the gaping hole and smoke billowing. I assumed it was an accident. When I got to work I said dismissively to colleagues, “That must be the dumbest pilot ever.” We went up to the top floor of the 40-something floor building to watch. Not too long after, the second plane hit and we knew it was no accident. They evacuated the building and sent us all home. Riding the 7 train back and all the passengers shocked and exchanging what they’d hears. Someone said there were planes headed for DC. The 7 stopped at Queens Plaza. End of service, out of abundance of caution for NYC subways. We were all standing on the platform looking at the towers burning. Then we saw the first one collapse. Straight down in a cloud of smoke.

For me, native New Yorker, the skyscrapers are like our heart. Someone cut our heart out. I thought nothing would ever be the same. Months later I felt so panicky on subways, thinking something awful was bound to happen again. The way things snapped back to near normalcy just a few years later was something I never anticipated. Neither did I foresee the way this event would be used to justify an illegal invasion if Iraq just a few years later. I felt and still feel disgusted by how this tragedy has been exploited. But I guess that’s politics.

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

#42

Post by sudosteph »

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 4th grade when it happened. I remember kids on the bus that morning joking that "some idiot flew a plane into a building". Didn't think any more of it.

Throughout the day, more and more people had their names called on the intercom by the school office and left early. I kept seeing teachers, out in the hallway, whispering to each other. Hearing people crying in the distance. I still was totally oblivious, even though nearly half the class was missing by the end of the day.

Somehow, I didn't grasp that something really was wrong right until the moment the bus pulled up in front of my house. My dad was standing at the mailbox waiting, which I never saw him do before. Even weirder, he was supposed to be flying out of town that day - we were supposed to go to the neighbors house until Mom could get us. I don't think he knew what to say. I asked him why he was still home, and he just said I needed to come inside and watch the news. So I watched it with him. I watched it a long time. I remember feeling anger mostly - maybe exclusively. I didn't even know what the WTC was before then, but I knew whoever did that was evil. I wanted desperately to fight back then, though I admittedly had no idea of who to fight or how.

Every year after that, whenever the intercom called someone to leave early from school, I had to suppress a bit of worry I couldnt control. Part of me is always wondering, "Is it happening again?"

- In retrospect, I can't imagine how hard it must have been on the adults in my life on that day. Those poor teachers, many who were just out a few years out of college themselves, just trying to get us kids through the day without breaking down themselves. It didn't make sense to anybody when it happened. How were they supposed to explain something that insane to a 10 year old?

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

#43

Post by m0zg »

colordrops wrote: post #28
m0zg wrote: post #23

I thought it was an elaborate prank and it wasn't really happening. My first thought literally was "someone is pranking us with CGI". It was just too unbelievable to really absorb. I only realized it really was happening when I discovered it was on all the channels, and when the second tower got hit. This will go down in history as the most unbelievable screwup of three letter US agencies ever. It came out recently t…

Considering the nature of the rest of the comments in this thread, I'm sure this will be completely taboo. There is a strong argument that the three letter agencies let this happen to further the agendas of the monied elite, and the media owned by that same elite class did everything they could to bury the truth. I don't expect this comment to last long here, but it's it no way an absurd assessment of the nature of t…

I think you need to dial down the cynicism a little. There's no way murdering 3K+ people was an "inside job". Even if we accept your cynical premise that the goal was to manufacture consent for a war, it could have been achieved with far less loss of life, or perhaps even none at all. So my vote is firmly on the side of incompetence rather than malice. As Reagan used to say, if those folks were any good, they wouldn't be working for the government. Or something to that effect.

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

#44

Post by kortilla »

plutonorm wrote: post #38
philwelch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's also chilling, when you think about it a little more, is that a group of civilian passengers made more or less the same decision, and that's the reason these fighter pilots survived the day .

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?

Construct the black box audio tapes and the phone call recordings as well? Also compromise all of the ntsb agents in a way that they wouldn’t whistleblow with the many pieces of evidence that would be obvious to them of a shoot down?

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

#45

Post by adventured »

opan wrote: post #36
colordrops wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the nature of the rest of the comments in this thread, I'm sure this will be completely taboo. There is a strong argument that the three letter agencies let this happen to further the agendas of the monied elite, and the media owned by that same elite class did everything they could to bury the truth. I don't expect this comment to last long here, but it's it no way an absurd assessment of the nature of t…

Can you tell me more? Any guesses to how it furthered agendas? It certainly changed stuff like airport security. I could see it being allowed to happen to make people take the war on terror more seriously. It would depend on how much of the current state of things could be predicted to determine reasoning. I'm sure even in the internet age there is plenty of forbidden knowledge.

Amusingly the parent has the strongest conspiracy setup premise entirely wrong (has nothing to do with monied elites). The only conspiracy theory that makes any sense at all, is that it was allowed to happen as an excuse to get the US deeper into the Middle East, so various regimes could be destroyed.

Alternatively, 9/11 did happen due to pure incompetence, and they were opportunistic about 9/11 and the emotions afterward, using that to go on a war spree to accomplish the Pentagon's agenda.

Four star general Wesley Clark [1] provides the setup (speech on YouTube below). Their post 9/11 plan was to destroy the governments of seven countries in five years, based on a plan that existed all the way back to 1991 as explained to Clark (then a one star general) by Paul Wolfowitz (stating that they only had 5-10 years to clean up old Soviet regimes in the Middle East before the next great superpower - China - comes online to challenge the US position; 10 years post 1991 = 2001; China joins the WTO in 2001). Keep in mind the very considerable stature of the military commander that is saying this openly. He flat out says it was a policy coup, that took over the US Government, and was spearheaded by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Clark says they could hardly wait to finish off Iraq so they could move the focus on to Syria, which we later did of course (this speech by Clark is from 2007), demolishing the country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY2DKzastu8

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Clark

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

#46

Post by basch »

adventured wrote: post #24

A companion story from Politico from September 2016: "We're the Only Plane in the Sky" "Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board." https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/were-the-onl...

I came to post the same thing. Is it a new edition of the same book, or has that article grown and grown into a new book just coming out?

It's interesting that the story from 2016 has the link to the new amazon book at the top.

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

#47

Post by dredmorbius »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #17
dredmorbius wrote: post #2

This is a phenomenal oral history of the events, learning of, and response to the events of 9/11. If an emergency is a circumstance in which ongoing realities are emergent and aren't predictable based on previous experience or world-models, this is a phenomenal example of those dynamics. Commander Anthony Barnes: That first hour was mass confusion because there was so much erroneous information. It was hard to tell w…

If an emergency is a circumstance in which ongoing realities are emergent and aren't predictable based on previous experience or world-models, this is a phenomenal example of those dynamics I like this characterization somewhat, though I think there needs to be a [perceived danger] variable not accounted for. Perhaps: An emergency is a circumstance in which realities are perceived as existentially dangerous and aren'…

The definition's a working one, and subject to modification, but I feel it's a good start.

I've been collecting / compiling / commenting on similar veins for a while.

There's Robert Ewashuck's paging philosophy (Google SRE):

Pages [alerts] should be urgent, important, actionable, and real. They should represent either ongoing or imminent problems with your service. Err on the side of removing noisy alerts – over-monitoring is a harder problem to solve than under-monitoring....

(The list continues.)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/199PqyG3UsyXlwieHaqbGiWVa...

I've come up with a hierarchy of failures (or alternatively: success kill chain) in problem resolution, starting with "being aware there's a problem":

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc...

There's the Japanese awareness and response following the bombing of Hiroshima. Short version: the first indication of the 9:15 am attack was a cessation of all communications. Military command wasn't aware of the scope of damage until an overflight was arranged, in early afternoon, and didn't know the actual cause until told by the US the next day.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf9yc/on_disa...

The missile strike on the HMS Sheffield during the Falklands War played out similarly:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ab25z/on_disa...

In many large-scale natural disasters, an ominous sign is no reports, especially from outlying areas.

Initial responses to disasters often follow early stages of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief model: obliviousness, denial, sometimes anger. My sense is that grief is another form of major world-model collapse: that some reality that has been internalised and is often a sense of identity is shown to be wrong or inoperative.

Again: it's not that catastrophes and disasters are similar to grief, it's that grief responses are a response to catastrophes and disasters.

And finally, a quote from a ... modern Cupertino ... mystic, Adyashanti:

Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=IZ5LECwss0AC&pg=PT126&dq="...

There's a lot of meat in that, I think.

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

#48

Post by c22 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #17
dredmorbius wrote: post #2

This is a phenomenal oral history of the events, learning of, and response to the events of 9/11. If an emergency is a circumstance in which ongoing realities are emergent and aren't predictable based on previous experience or world-models, this is a phenomenal example of those dynamics. Commander Anthony Barnes: That first hour was mass confusion because there was so much erroneous information. It was hard to tell w…

If an emergency is a circumstance in which ongoing realities are emergent and aren't predictable based on previous experience or world-models, this is a phenomenal example of those dynamics I like this characterization somewhat, though I think there needs to be a [perceived danger] variable not accounted for. Perhaps: An emergency is a circumstance in which realities are perceived as existentially dangerous and aren'…

I agree, otherwise the OP is just describing Burning Man.

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

#49

Post by tru3_power »

Noctem wrote: post #33
sopooneo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to piggy-back on this about a certain way information may not add up. I live in Boston, and so do my siblings. We all worked downtown. On the day of the marathon bombing, I immediately called my sister on her cell phone to see if she was okay. Someone that was not my sister picked up, then immediatly hung up after I said who I was looking for. I was immediately terrified. What if my sister had been hurt, dr…

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.

Yea seriously. Seems like something that could potentially be abused to intercept calls.
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