There are people claiming the Bush administration would have caused the 9/11 attacks. When I first heard it my reaction was:
No, they are not that evil.
The Bush administration has definitely done some unsavoury things. But killing almost 3,000 of their own country’s inhabitants? When I was told more details it only become more unlikely. When I saw the Bush administration I never saw the superhuman competence which such ideas presupposes. I saw completely normal human incompetence.
The 9/11 attacks were the result of a real conspiracy. Small, leaky, error-capable conspiracies are fully humanly possible. The total number of involved may have been less than two dozen. Osama bin Laden was neither the crude Bedouin which the stereotype has made him into. His dad may have grown up under such conditions. However, Mohamad bin Laden got rich by running a construction firm. His son Osama was born rich and got a high education. Unfortunately he was also jealous on his half-brothers. Something driving him to an almost cult-like fanaticism.
In the same way Mohamed Atta was a trained pilot. Hani Hanjour, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi had got basic pilot training. The manoeuvres of all four have been recreated by amateurs using flight simulators. So they were not as impossible as some has imagined. The hardest would have been keeping control over crew and passengers. Which succeeded in three cases out of four. The fourth plane crashed on a field in Pennsylvania. I think it was intended for the Capitol which would be relatively easy to hit.
The Pentagon is the world’s largest office building. (The world’s largest building by volume is the one where the planes were built.) Hitting it in any direction has probably not been too hard. When the plane hit the Pentagon both its wings fell off. This is why the hole in the building was smaller than the airplane. This started a fire which contributed to a small part of the building collapsing. Adjacent parts were damaged but did not collapse.
The Twin Towers were built to withstand someone flowing into them by accident. This would have meant low speed and almost empty tanks. These airplanes came in full throttle with almost full tanks. Moreover they weighted 1/5 more than a similar airplane had done when the Twin Towers were built. When the planes hit the buildings the fireproofing of the load-bearing pillars were torn off. Jet fuel and combustible furnishings were set fire by the crashes too. The load-bearing pillars were heated up until they lost their strength. These pillars could no longer support the overlying floors. This stared a chain reaction which made the buildings collapse.
Nearly five hours after the North Tower an additional skyscraper collapsed. It stood across the street from the Twin Towers’ block. When the North Tower fell it was hit by burning parts. This made the additional building catch fire too. Because of deficiencies in its sprinkler system the fire could not so easily be extinguished. Attempts made by fire-fighters turned out to be insufficient. Load-bearing parts were weakened by the heat from the fires. Eventually it also collapsed.
The motives for the attacks were basically misdirected revenge. Al-Qaeda revenged on the population for their government’s foreign policy. Religious fanaticism can explain how someone can act so absurdly. There was not any plan at all to start war with the US. The war on terror (a phase I found worn-out in weeks) was the Bush administration’s panicked overreaction. It came to be waged so incompetently it instead increased the risk of new terrorist attacks. A consequence no-one involved had predicted.
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