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WTC 911 2020 - 19 years on.

Then there was the cargo plane that crashed in a residential suburb near one of the NY airports a couple of weeks later. The young lad in my house was shaking his head at that one, saying "if this turns out to be Islamist related, the Muslims in America are going to be massacred".


Wasn't a cargo flight, was a passenger one, crashed in Queens killing 260 people on board and 5 on the ground. November 2001.
 
I think that I'm getting it confused with Timothy Macveigh. For some reason I thought that he had tried to blow up the WTC as well
 
I think there was a light aircraft crashing into a skyscraper incident not that long before, so assumed it was something like that from the first mention.

I only left the place I was working at the time four years ago, and I’d never deleted all the emails with my ex partner discussing what was happening as it unfolded. There was a mental sense of panic, talk of there being twenty odd planes unaccounted for at one point, nobody knew what the scale of what was going on.
 
I watched a documentary a few years on the WTC collapse, and the man's family were distraught at the thought of him effectively committing suicide as they are devout Catholics iirc.

wasn’t him though was it. There was a big obstacle that the victims had in dealing with those that jumped, ie did they commit suicide or was it so un-fucking-bearable that they had no choice. Semantics really, but I can say that from the safety of never having gone through any of this .
 
what confuses me is that neither were carried out by white nationalists


Okay yes. And this illustrates why it's necessary to clarify posts. With links if necessary. Or at least go back and check what we remember before posting.

Mea culpa

So to clarify my first response to freakydave :
Even if it wasn't white power terrorists, the way I remember it, all the various bomb incidents, including the one in Oklahoma, and the one that was thwarted, were part of the ongoing discussion.
 
Okay yes. And this illustrates why it's necessary to clarify posts. With links if necessary. Or at least go back and check what we remember before posting.

Mea culpa

So to clarify my first response to freakydave :
Even if it wasn't white power terrorists, the way I remember it, all the various bomb incidents, including the one in Oklahoma, and the one that was thwarted, were part of the ongoing discussion.

I sort of remember it making all of the other terrorism seemed irrelevant. There were quite a few bombings in the 90s but this one was just something else altogether
 
seems so. oklahoma city a great distance from the eastern seaboard of new england tho.
That's why it was pretty clear from the start that it wasn't "American crazies" to use my friend's line - it happened in New York fucking city baby, greatest fucking city in the world.
 
From the terrorists point of view it was a success, a complex operation, three of the 4 planes made it to their targets. It depended on their having perpetrators who could learn how to fly the aircraft and were prepared to die themselves in the attack. You have to give them credit for an audacious plan against which the west at the time had little defence.
 
From the terrorists point of view it was a success, a complex operation, three of the 4 planes made it to their targets. It depended on their having perpetrators who could learn how to fly the aircraft and were prepared to die themselves in the attack. You have to give them credit for an audacious plan against which the west at the time had little defence.
oh yeh in terms of planning and training they did really well, you have to recognise that. bloody massacres don't just make themselves you know
 
Mrs E #1 had gone into hospital the day before, and I'd spent a miserable morning arguing with psychiatric nurses who wanted to discharge her back home. I can't remember what I did after that, but I was probably just mooching unhappily around wondering what the fuck was going on.

Around 5, I got in the car to go to hospital to visit her: I always had the radio on to Radio 4 in the car, and there was all this dramatic live coverage stuff, which I assumed was some kind of radio play. In the 15 minutes it took me to get to the hospital, the awful truth began to unfold. But I didn't much feel like dropping that bombshell on Jenny, so I had to kind of "park" it until I came out again. Then I went home, switched on the TV, and caught up with it. The whole thing seemed both unreal, and something of a metaphor for the catastrophe my life had become...I suppose, if nothing else, it gave me a bit of perspective.
 
However, while they won that attack, ultimately they lost the war that followed so perhaps not so clever.
 
However, while they won that attack, ultimately they lost the war that followed so perhaps not so clever.
:facepalm:

have the past 19 years utterly passed you by? whatever makes you think they have lost? how stands the middle east today, is it at peace? do you think the trillions of dollars spaffed against the wall have given america victory? they're in peace talks with the taliban. isis threatens to revive its fortunes. al qaeda is far larger than it was in 2001. some fucking victory.
 
You have a point, I agree.

They managed to get America to engage in Afghanistan, something the British and Russians could have warned the US against, they lost Bin Laden, but as you say, their struggle continues.
 
I think it's simplistic to say they've won because 'the war' is ongoing - they have lost things they considered to be invaluable (safe havens, sympathetic/blind-eye states, funding, any kind of long standing, senior leadership) and have been pushed out of a number of temporal territories with astonishing losses of fighters and commanders.

They now spend far more time managing/attempting to manage their own security than they do prosecuting their wars. That is very different to how they were operating in the summer of 2001.

We haven't won - we're still conducting counter IS/others ops in Iraq and Syria, we've been supporting the French op in Mali for years with airlift, helicopters, and UAV's, we're sending a very crunchy battlegroup to the UN operation in Mali because of IS's success in the Sahel - but they've not won either: safe havens are hard to find, they are beset with enemies, the fear and effect of penetration agents has had, and continues to have, a toxic and paralysing impact on morale and effectiveness, and any leaders that appear have a terrifyingly short life expectancy which causes huge organisational and political churn, paralysis and infighting.
 
oh yeh in terms of planning and training they did really well, you have to recognise that. bloody massacres don't just make themselves you know

yet I seemed to waste an inordinate amount of time arguing with Americans on the internet that were adamant that the attackers were stupid and cowardly. They weren’t. Never really got that psychology of having to try so hard to elevate yourself above attackers like this. They were cunts, yes, but not idiots.
 
I think it's simplistic to say they've won because 'the war' is ongoing - they have lost things they considered to be invaluable (safe havens, sympathetic/blind-eye states, funding, any kind of long standing, senior leadership) and have been pushed out of a number of temporal territories with astonishing losses of fighters and commanders.

They now spend far more time managing/attempting to manage their own security than they do prosecuting their wars. That is very different to how they were operating in the summer of 2001.

We haven't won - we're still conducting counter IS/others ops in Iraq and Syria, we've been supporting the French op in Mali for years with airlift, helicopters, and UAV's, we're sending a very crunchy battlegroup to the UN operation in Mali because of IS's success in the Sahel - but they've not won either: safe havens are hard to find, they are beset with enemies, the fear and effect of penetration agents has had, and continues to have, a toxic and paralysing impact on morale and effectiveness, and any leaders that appear have a terrifyingly short life expectancy which causes huge organisational and political churn, paralysis and infighting.
yeh but insurgents win by existing while states win by eradicating the insurgents or coming to terms with them. as for safe havens i don't doubt that parts of afghanistan will be friendly territory to some jihadi groups - as will parts of pakistan and other countries. isis still have large sums of money available to them and despite their vaunted defeat they're not yet done for. and by forcing the us and other western powers to spend huge sums of money i don't think you'll see another intervention like those in iraq and afghanistan for many, many years to come. the west has been weakened by these unforced errors and 19 years on the state of afghanistan doesn't see the western objectives laid out in the autumn of 2001 yet achieved.
 
i was at dsei and then i went and got very very drunk

"Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) is an arms fair held every two years in London Docklands, which is attended by both arms company representatives and military delegations from around the world."

:hmm::D
 
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