Posted on 09/13/2001 4:22:44 AM PDT by Common Tator
The concept that the recent attack on the United States required a powerful government and huge assets is just not true. Just a few minutes thought should convince anyone of that fact.
First, it seems that it took somewhere between 12 and 16 people to kill thousands. The early reports said 3 to 5 people per plane. At five each that makes 20 people to do it. Twenty people is a fairly small organization. It may have only been 12.
Secondly, 4 of them had to be pilots. Every pilot both commercial and private, has to learn the air traffic control system. The training is available in the United States for less than 50,000 dollars. It would cost about 200 grand to train 4 commercial pilots. We train pilots from all over the world.
If the 16 or 20 people are committed and don't talk to others, it is next to impossible to find out what they have planned to do before they do it. If the 20 people are determined to do it, and understand that telling someone else will very likely get them caught, they are not likely to talk to anyone. Surely the reports over open phone and internet lines would not detail actual reports in the open. People have been using innocent words to convey evil messages for centuries. Even if we had perfect system that listened to every phone conversation in the US we still could not find out. There is no way to inflitrate an organizaton you don't know exists. And if 20 people don't tell anyone else there is no way to know.
Most groups that are caught have a member or two who is really not committed to killing people. When they find the organization they belong to is actually going to kill innocent people, they go to the law. There is little chance of any these terrorist types turning others in.
We are looking at a budget of perhaps 4 or 5 hundred thousand dollars. That seems like a lot, but it is really very cheap. It is the budget of a small service company with 15 employees. There are tons of people who hate the US with a lot more money than a half million dollars. There are hundreds of thousands of such people in the world. They attract no attention.
As to flying an airliner, I have been told it is not all that hard. I am a pilot but not an airline pilot. I have little doubt that a person trained in a smaller plane could fly an airliner. He might not be able to land it, but he could certainly control it in the air well enough to hit a big building. It is like driving a pickup truck compared to a tractor-trailer. I could not back a huge truck into a small space, but I could crash it into a building with little problem.
How about the concept? The fact is, planes are not defended against attackers. We defend against getting weapons on board a plane. But almost anything can be used as a weapon. So planes are a perfect target of opportunity. We have a system that is based on keeping weapons out out of planes. We don't keep bad guys out, we try to keep his weapons out. We fail to understand that a weapon is anything that can be used as a weapon. People can be killed with a short piece of fishing line and a two ball point pens. Some of these guys apparently killed with razor blades. But physcial weapons are not required. Trained fighters can easliy kill with their bare hands, especially if their victims are unarmed.
Can you imagine four guys literally breaking the necks of stewardesses? Then breaking the down the door to the cockpit and then killing the pilots with nothing but bare hands? I can. How will our government stop them with xrays and strip searches, and parking limits? Seven or eight killers per plane could do this with only their bare hands as weapons. Are we going to amputate the bare hands of all passengers?
The only solution has to be a crew armed and trained with weapons used to kill people who try to high jack a plane. There has to be a high probability the attackers will die with out harming anyone else. People give their lives for causes, but not if the attempt is certain to fail.
There is zero chance that eliminating all weapons on planes will work. As long as killers have hands all weapons cannot be kept off planes.
Fixing the barn door after the horse has escaped is not where the next attack will likely come from. Put yourself in the position of the criminal minds behind this. If their goal is to cripple the people and the economy of the United States how and where would they attack next? Do they have what it takes to attack again? Will they likely be using small numbers of people and lots of creativity? Will they likely use our own stuff to attack us? Would attacking using a different method cause us more disruption and panic?
Will there even be further attacks? I don't know. But an answer to that they could do, has me quaking in my boots.
Our Katie Couric-Peter Jennings style approach to civilian defense seems to me, to be doomed to failure. I pray that I am wrong. I fear I am not.
Today, even an armed hijacker would be killed by the passengers.
A passenger on the plane that hit the pentagon told her husband in the cell phone call that the pilots had been replaced. The passengers and crew were huddled together in the back of the plane. The first thought would have had to have been why did they replace the pilots? The only answer was that the regular pilots would not do what the high jackers wanted done. That is a pretty clear answer. She asked her husband what to tell the pilots what to do. It was obvious that she and they did not understand the significance of that act. Very few men even if they did understood was was coming down would have overcome their fear and attacked the highjackers. It is obvious the those on board that plane were not thinking clearly. That is just human nature. Few humans can overcome fear on their own. Most need lots of training to do so.
Apparently two or three brave men on the plane that went down it PA understood what it meant. Perhaps they had heard what happened 40 minutes earlier in New York. They took action and I believe saved many lives. Such men are indeed a rare and wonderful breed. They are warriors at heart. We owe them and their families. Their families should be taken care of. We,as a society owe them. They were men who used their fear to act in the cause of others. The Katie Couric's and Peter Jennings of the world hate them.
It was Rudyard Kippling who wrote about how the warriors are treated in peace time, and the change in attitude when danger rears its ugly head. We can only hope we have a few warriors left. We are going to need them.
When I was in the army 40 years ago I was taught that only 3 out of 10 men would stick their head up from a fox hole to fire their weapons. They said the experience in Korea proved only 3 out of 10 would kill to save their own life. For many years the army spent 100's of millions to show that if everyone fired their weapons the enemy could not break throught. Yet in Korea the Chinese nearly always broke through our defensive positions.
Do you really think we are stronger today? Most people will do nothing to defend themselves. The terrorists were well aware of that fact. They told the pilots to do what they said and they would not be hurt. It is natural for people to believe that to be true. I would bet you 3/4 of the women on board would have begged the men that were with them to do nothing to upset the highjackers.
It is the nature of human beings. Our defense has to be designed with that in mind.
I've also questioned the conclusions most are making that it would have taken "years" to plan this. I'd say a month or so, tops. All it takes is perusing the airline schedules, which could actually be done on the internet. Knowledge of the building plans would help: hitting them at just the "right" (or to our way of looking at it, wrong) spot would assure maximum damage. And they already knew airline security was worse than lax--darned near nil.
I disagree. If they thought airline security was "lax" or "nil", they would have brought guns or at least real knives. The only kinds of airline security that would have deterred these murderers are strip searches along with the words "bend over please, this won't hurt much, and thank you for flying our airline". Is that what we want? And even then, they would have just chosen another method.
I can no longer pass a flight physical, so I sold my plane. But new it cost about 250 thousand. It was a single engine just like the one JFK Jr. had. His was red mine was green. I don't know what it costs to rent one but my costs to operate it were well over a hundred dollars an hour. It takes 200 flight hours to get a commercial license. Flying less than 200 hours a year cost me over 20 grand. I doubt if a school with student insurance fees, could rent it for much less. And while instructor pay is not great, it is not chicken feed either. Both flight and ground instruction are required.
They may have been just quoting the fee for the instruction. They used to do that a lot. Then you find out the plane rental is exra.
But I agree with you on the time frame. It is not that hard or that complex to pull off.
The key is always knowing what questions to ask. How can I knock the world trade center down? Truck bomb? Too hard to do. How about a plane? A WW 2 bomber did not take the empire state down but it made a big whole. How much more plane would it take to knock a building down? Hmm a 757 nearly full of fuel should do it if it was going 600 instead of 150 miles an hour. Well how could we do that? Hijack them and replace the pilots......What floor should be hit, where do we get the pilots... Deciding what day and time should about do it.
This was not hard to do. And the chances fo inflitrating such a group is very small. First you have to know it exists. You could look for years and never find them.
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