Simply put, the reason the 9-11 attacks worked is the audacity of the plan, and the simple fact that doing something like this (crashing planes into a major structure like the WTC) was, in a word, unthinkable. Prior to 9-11, few people believed that groups like this were capable of this kind of thing. And certainly not here in the USA. We as a nation thought we were safe. We have always felt safe, as our enemies are far away, and didn't have the resources to reach us. During the cold war, all we worried about was getting nuked. After the iron curtain fell, most Americand developed a pie in the sky "no one can touch us here" attitude.
That's the mindset of the country prior to 9-11. Get that into your head when evaluating actions and reactions at the time.
A lot of you folks are pretty young. You don't clearly remember the 30 years prior to 9-11. You really need to understand that period of our history before you go spouting off about actions and reactions.
Here's something to else to consider. Prior to 9-11, the government & media, time and time and time again drilled into people's heads, if you are kidnapped by terrorists or hijackers, cooperate. They won't hurt you if they get what they want. People believed this, and 99 times out of 100 it was true.
9-11 changed that. You could never hijack a plane with a box cutter, knife or pistol easily now. The passengers and crew would kill you.
Sun Tzu said in the Art of War " An enemy with nothing to lose will fight to death to win". The implication being that you never want to create an enemy who has "nothing to lose". And you never want to face such an enemy.
And this is what Al Queda inadvertently created in the American populace by engaging in the 9-11 attacks. It's what makes some of these new rules about what you can and can't carry on a plane so ludicrious. If you tried to hijack a plane with me on it, I'd tear your throat out with my teeth if I had to, regardless of what weapon you held, and I know I'm not alone. Why, because now a passenger on a hijacked plane has nothing to lose...
As for arguments about jet fuel and all that nonsense, please remember the WTC was not a giant empty shell. It was filled with offices, paper, computers, plastics, cubicles, carpet, wiring, and sadly people... This is FUEL people. Fuel for a blazing inferno ignited by the plane crash, and then there's the plane's associated fuel load as well. A fire 1000 feet above the ground in high cross winds in an enclosed structure with gaping holes in the side and MASSIVE structural damage that the building was not meant to withstand. Remember these were not aircraft cruising along that just happend to hit the building. These were planes that were running their engines at full takeoff power, they were pushing these things as hard as they could when they crashed them into these buildings. Engineers design (especially prior to 9-11)around accidents, not intentional disasters. Remember, this was unthinkable.
Also, can you imagine the crosswinds at the top of that building? Remember it's a wind tunnel up there. Those floors were blast furnaces after that impact. Running wild with an almost unlimited amount of fuel. It's a recipie for disaster. Steel weakens when it's hot. It didn't take much for those top levels to come down on the others.
People want to feel safe. People want to be sure "nothing like this can ever happen again...". And it's my opinion that this is what motivates many of you when it comes to this consipiracy stuff. If you allow yourself to admit that this event is truly a random act of terrorisim, you won't feel safe. You'll have to face that fact that it can happen again. And to face the other horribile fact that it probably will happen again, from a direction we didn't expect. How we live with that fact is the true measure of what we are. So far, I'm not very encouraged by our reactions.
We (both our soicety collectively, and our politicians) have allowed this event to change the way we value the freedom we have. We've used this event as an excuse to restrict liberty in the name of security. When it comes to many of the anti-terror policies and laws being foisted upon us, the cure may be more deadly than the disease.
Ben Franklin once said, "They, that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." I'll be sorry to see this proven true in my time.
I want you to stop and pause to consider the fact that governments have been by far the primary and most lethal instruments of terror in the history of mankind.
Men like Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and a list of other dictators have proven to be the absolute most effective terrorists. But you need the total control of a dictator to use government as a tool of terror. And every day that passes, we hand a little more of that "total control" over to the government.
I don't think that 9-11 was a government plot to do us all in.
I do however think that we are now creating the very monster that you guys are railing against. As we allow government to take away our rights under the guise of "homeland security", we slowly create something that none of us can live with.
If you folks put 1/2 as much effort into electing a government that actually values liberty as you do into chasing down these nutty theories, we'd be living a lot closer to utopia.
