15 years after 9/11/2001

[Mightyqueen801]

Originally Posted by bklynkenny

I kept walking north as well, even though I lived in Brooklyn. Didn't even try to figure out how to get home until i got up to Chelsea Piers. There were boats heading into NJ from there, so perhaps id go to my aunt's in Bergen County. Ultimately I decided to keep going north...perhaps cross the East River at 59th Street into Queens and head back to south Brooklyn from there. Ended up going to my fathers shop in Midtown and took the subway back home that evening across the Manhattan Bridge.

I stopped at Chelsea Piers and briefly considered stealing a boat.

[ContrarianEcon]

Originally Posted by car54

They also could have done what Israel did decades ago....strengthen the cockpit doors. The hijackers may have killed some passengers but they wouldn't have been able to take over the planes. But I suppose the airline bean counters wanted to save a few bucks.

I was at my desk in the Pentagon on 9-11, 5th Floor, Tenth Corridor (other side of the building). I'm not currently in the area, or I would be visiting the memorial tomorrow.

9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Both moved the emotions of the nation and both were easily preventable.


We didn't take commonsense precautions. I think they wanted the patriot act more than they wanted to stop the attack and to movie the emotions to tolerate a more invasive government.

[lvmensch]

Originally Posted by ContrarianEcon

9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Both moved the emotions of the nation and both were easily preventable.


We didn't take commonsense precautions. I think they wanted the patriot act more than they wanted to stop the attack and to movie the emotions to tolerate a more invasive government.

The problem was old and had little to do with the administration at that time. In the late 60s it was decided by the powers that be that it was better to cooperate than to resist hijackers. Before then the standard was to resist if possible. All regimes from then to 9/11 agreed. The concept of course was known including a berserk suicide by a 747 pilot into the white house. And as the recent German affair shows there is really no way to prevent that.

However after 93 the technique will never work again unless they manage to get on board well armed. And even then they may have problems penetrating the cockpit.

So basically that problem is fixed. The other stuff is all pretty much window dressing or sktuff the spooks wanted to do but were not allowed.

[Pruzhany]

Originally Posted by lvmensch

The problem was old and had little to do with the administration at that time. In the late 60s it was decided by the powers that be that it was better to cooperate than to resist hijackers. Before then the standard was to resist if possible. All regimes from then to 9/11 agreed. The concept of course was known including a berserk suicide by a 747 pilot into the white house. And as the recent German affair shows there is really no way to prevent that.

However after 93 the technique will never work again unless they manage to get on board well armed. And even then they may have problems penetrating the cockpit.

So basically that problem is fixed. The other stuff is all pretty much window dressing or stuff the spooks wanted to do but were not allowed.

I'm guessing you don't fly business/first class. The problem is not fixed on large airliners. When a pilot has to go to the bathroom, the aisle(s) is blocked with a food cart, the door is opened and sometimes not closed while he's at the bathroom. On long haul flights with two sets of pilots they do the same thing. If they wanted to really address they issue, they should replace the curtain with a steel sliding door. Yet as of a few days ago on a plane I was on on a major airliner it's still a food cart blocking the aisles.

[ContrarianEcon]

Originally Posted by lvmensch

The problem was old and had little to do with the administration at that time. In the late 60s it was decided by the powers that be that it was better to cooperate than to resist hijackers. Before then the standard was to resist if possible. All regimes from then to 9/11 agreed. The concept of course was known including a berserk suicide by a 747 pilot into the white house. And as the recent German affair shows there is really no way to prevent that.

However after 93 the technique will never work again unless they manage to get on board well armed. And even then they may have problems penetrating the cockpit.

So basically that problem is fixed. The other stuff is all pretty much window dressing or sktuff the spooks wanted to do but were not allowed.

Part yes and part no. The infrastructure and compliance with hijackers was old, what was on the then current administration was the political environment in the enforcement bureaucracies. When I was a kid my dad said he was 7 reporting steps away from the president.


At the start of the GW administration the anti terrorist task force whatever that had been set up under Bill Clinton, when from reporting at the cabinet level to the deputy cabinet level. And by 9/11 the first meeting hadn't happened.


So if my dad went from 7 reporting steps away from the president to 8 reporting steps and something came across his desk he would think the president doesn't want to know about this and send it back down for more work.


The flip side of this is that if the president met with and had a press conference with the two steps down person in my reporting chain and something came across my desk I'd figure he wanted to know and so expedite work on it.


Highly preventable. Lack of doing so reflected the political agenda of the president.