"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
...


It is a little early, but if I may hazard a guess, it looks like this,
like most other major disasters, will be more a failure of imagination
than anything else. It looks like most of the containment stuff worked
through the earthquake, but nobody imagined what might happen if a
Tsunami hit at the same time. Disaster planners and generals both tend
to fight the last war and may be late making needed adjustments to this
one.

Good point, and it's why those smart guys working for gazillion-dollar
companies are supposed to be able to think outside the box, especially when
the weaknesses in a particular reactor design had been aired since the
1970s.

No one imagined, pre-9/11 what might happen if hijackers decided
to do something other than fly to Havana.

Actually lots of people imagined that, Tom Clancy among others. That the
military had at least thought about shooting down civilian airliners being
used as weapons would indicate it wasn't an unforeseen scenario.

In article ,
"DGDevin" wrote:


No one imagined, pre-9/11 what might happen if hijackers decided
to do something other than fly to Havana.

Actually lots of people imagined that, Tom Clancy among others. That the
military had at least thought about shooting down civilian airliners being
used as weapons would indicate it wasn't an unforeseen scenario.

Did you actually read Debt of Honor? It's the pilot not the passengers.
It is one person, the co-pilot is killed prior to takeoff. The pilot has
a personal grudge and was not done for religious or other reasons. There
is only one plane involved. But hey, beyond that it is exactly the same!

--
"Even I realized that money was to politicians what the ecalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter and something to crap on."
---PJ O'Rourke

"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
...

No one imagined, pre-9/11 what might happen if hijackers decided
to do something other than fly to Havana.

Actually lots of people imagined that, Tom Clancy among others. That the
military had at least thought about shooting down civilian airliners
being
used as weapons would indicate it wasn't an unforeseen scenario.

Did you actually read Debt of Honor?

I did, had a couple of conversations with the author after he wrote it too.

It's the pilot not the passengers.
It is one person, the co-pilot is killed prior to takeoff. The pilot has
a personal grudge and was not done for religious or other reasons. There
is only one plane involved.

So what? How does that alter the fact that not only that author but people
in government and law enforcement had foreseen the possibility of hijacked
airliners being used as weapons?

But hey, beyond that it is exactly the same!

What? Who said it was exactly the same? You said nobody had imagined that
hijackers might use airliners as something other than a way to take
hostages, and clearly people had imagined exactly that and I gave you a
widely-known example. You didn't specify that nobody had foreseen that
multiple aircraft would be hijacked to be flown into office buildings and
govt. buildings on one day, so your demand that only such a detailed warning
would mean anything is rather odd.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...re-usatcov.htm

Administration, agencies failed to connect the dots

By John Diamond and Kathy Kiely, USA TODAY

A few short phrases in a top-secret intelligence summary given to President
Bush at his Texas ranch in August 2001 have eroded the notion that the White
House had no prior warning of the Sept. 11 attacks and threatened to
undermine the president on Capitol Hill. The briefing, which warned that
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization might try to hijack U.S. airliners,
wasn't the first such alert. Administration officials disclosed Thursday
that the CIA warned Bush as early as last May that al-Qaeda might hijack
planes as part of its campaign against the United States.

In isolation, the few terse lines in the loose-leaf briefing book Bush read
at his Crawford ranch Aug. 6 might not prove anything. The White House spent
much of the day Thursday struggling, amid a flurry of second-guessing, to
show how one vague warning fell far short of the kind of specific alert that
could have thwarted the terror of Sept. 11.

But word of the Bush briefing follows a series of disclosures indicating
that the government had substantial information pointing to a coming
assault. Official Washington is still reeling over news that an FBI agent in
Phoenix specifically warned superiors about suspicious Arabs in Arizona
flight schools and urged a nationwide check of other flight schools two
months before the terrorist attacks.

Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., called the first paragraph of the FBI agent's memo
"heart-stopping." A month after the memo was written, Zaccarias Moussouai, a
French-Moroccan attending a flight school in Minnesota, was detained by
federal authorities. The arrest came 10 days after Bush's briefing and
prompted an FBI agent to speculate in case notes that Moussouai might be
training for a suicide hijacking mission at the World Trade Center.
[snip]

"DGDevin" wrote in message
stuff snipped

No one imagined, pre-9/11 what might happen if hijackers decided
to do something other than fly to Havana.

Actually lots of people imagined that, Tom Clancy among others. That the
military had at least thought about shooting down civilian airliners being
used as weapons would indicate it wasn't an unforeseen scenario.

The Israelis knew it was a threat twenty years ago when they required El Al
lock the pilot's cabin. US pilots protested vehemently when the FAA
suggested the same until 9/11, when they switched 180 degrees and now wanted
locked doors AND guns.

--
Bobby G.