AL QAEDA'S D.C. DEATH JET PLOT

[LARED]

http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/44359.htm

January 3, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - An al Qaeda terror team has been plotting to hijack Washington-bound British Airways Flight 223 and crash it into the nation's capital, officials said yesterday.

The frightening - and specific - intelligence is one factor behind the recent rash of airline cancellations, including Flight 223 again yesterday.

.....

In the past, al Qaeda has gone back to hit targets that they failed to adequately strike the first time - such as the World Trade Center.

FBI officials believe the United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 was heading for the Capitol and some experts think the plane that hit the Pentagon was originally intended to strike the White House but overflew the target.


It never made sense to me that they would try and hit the WH, as it is small and almost surrounded by taller buildings.

[RUexperienced]

1. You won't get any replies to a thread like this

that shows the feds did something right about stopping a terror threat.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. How close were they do actually doing it?

I know that several flights were cancelled because the names on the passenger list matched those of people with al Qaeda links. Also know that none of those people detained turned out to be terrorists-one was a child, another an old lady.

If the FBI knew it would be this particular flight, why not let all the passengers board and then go through and find the would-be hijackers before the plane got off the ground?

[RH]

8. "why not"?

Same reason as that for so much of the crap around here.

Sensational indulgence wins over cold logic most of the time.

[FreakinDJ]

3. Its all bull shit

Cleaning up the mess after the fact

[Bolo Boffin]

4. I've always heard that the Pentagon and the Capitol were the two targets

I've lost the link that talked about this, though.

[RH]

6. I never saw anything but conjecture.

No evidence of any Washington target having been determined before the day.

No prior threat.

Nothing said by any hijacker nor any hostage to indicate any particular target.

Not even any circumstantial data to demonstrate the trajectory has yet been shown to test the theory.

[Robb]

10. Anapolis, actually.

Following 93's path (looking at the FlightExplorer data) it looked an awful lot like it would overfly the naval academy. For what it's worth. :shrug:

[Bolo Boffin]

12. Here's an article from CBS about it.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/12/attack/main529066.shtml

CBS News Correpsondent Jim Stewart reports U.S. intelligence officials have seen and heard the Al-Jazeera tapes. They believe them to be authentic, and they say they appear to contain a level of detail about the Sept. 11 attacks that has never been reported before.

For example, in the interviews the al Qaeda officials claim that planning for the attack started in "early 1999" and that hijacker ringleader Mohammed Atta was first summoned to Afghanistan for his initial instructions in the summer of 1999.

Officials also claim that:

*Atta corresponded with al Qaeda operative Bin-al-shibh in Germany over the Internet. Writing in German, Atta pretended to be a student writing his girlfriend "Jenny."

*Al Qaeda had codewords for the targets it selected: The World Trade Center was the "Faculty of Town Planning." The Pentagon was the "Faculty of Fine Arts" and Congress - the target that escaped - was the "Faculty of Law."

*On his last call to Germany, Atta alerted his friend Bin-al-shibh that a date for the attack had been selected, using the code words "Two sticks, a dash and a cake with a stick down," meaning 11/9 or September 11.


*And, of particular interest to U.S. investigators, the terrorists claim to have sent "four surveillance teams" to the United States to scout targets before Atta and the hijacker pilots arrived in the summer of 2000.

Al-Jazeera said the tape allegedly containing the voice of bin Laden was filmed in the eastern Afghan town of Kandahar, but didn't say when the male voice attributed to bin Laden was recorded or how it obtained the tape.

[LARED]

14. Interesting

I wonder if the notion that the WH was a target is WH spin or just sloppy journalism?

[Bolo Boffin]

16. I think that comes down to the fog of the day

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/2020/2020_011024_atc_feature.html

At the Dulles tower, O'Brien saw the TV pictures from New York and headed back to her post to help other planes quickly land.

"We started moving the planes as quickly as we could," she says. "Then I noticed the aircraft. It was an unidentified plane to the southwest of Dulles, moving at a very high rate of speed … I had literally a blip and nothing more."

O'Brien asked the controller sitting next to her, Tom Howell, if he saw it too.

"I said, 'Oh my God, it looks like he's headed to the White House,'" recalls Howell. "I was yelling … 'We've got a target headed right for the White House!'"

At a speed of about 500 miles an hour, the plane was headed straight for what is known as P-56, protected air space 56, which covers the White House and the Capitol.

"The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane," says O'Brien. "You don't fly a 757 in that manner. It's unsafe."

The plane was between 12 and 14 miles away, says O'Brien, "and it was just a countdown. Ten miles west. Nine miles west … Our supervisor picked up our line to the White House and started relaying to them the information, we have an unidentified very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, 8 miles west."

The plane (Flight 77) was moving toward P-56. You can see how the White House would interpret the ATC supervisor's message as the plane targeting the White House. Certainly the WH was vunerable. But the plane flew on, banked down around the Pentagon, and crashed into Wedge 1.

[RH]

17. But

the plane flew on, banked down around the Pentagon, and crashed ..."?

I am not so sure.

What convinces you that "banked down around" was the case?

I have not yet heard of any positive contemporaneous identification of the circling aircraft, eyeballed from the ground, as being a B757 (as opposed to a B757 well enough seen approaching low over Columbia Pike from the south west).

And why would the given ABC news report completely fail to mention the star witness, the other O'Brien, the one flying the military C130? To the best of my knowledge he was the only source to positively identify the object albeit that he has since claimed to have lost sight of it during the alleged U-turn!

The ultimate proof of the moot trajectory is presumably within the recovered "black box" the technical content of which we are not yet privy to.

Worrying or what?

[Bolo Boffin]

21. Some eyewitness accounts

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blflight77w.htm

Now you don't dispute the plane coming in from the southwest, as described by USA Today editor Joel Sucherman:

"USAToday.com Editor Joel Sucherman saw it all: an American Airlines jetliner fly left to right across his field of vision as he commuted to work Tuesday morning. It was highly unusual. The large plane was 20 feet off the ground and a mere 50 to 75 yards from his windshield. Two seconds later and before he could see if the landing gear was down or any of the horror-struck faces inside, the plane slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon 100 yards away. 'My first thought was he's not going to make it across the river to National Airport. But whoever was flying the plane made no attempt to change direction,' Sucherman said. 'It was coming in at a high rate of speed, but not at a steep angle—almost like a heat-seeking missile was locked onto its target and staying dead on course.'"
- "Journalist Witnesses Pentagon Crash." eWeek.com, 13 Sep 2001

We know that the ATC watched the plane on their radar turn around and descend out of view. You're questioning, as I understand it, whether the plane on the radar was this American Airlines jet that crashed into the Pentagon.

That AA jet could not have been anything else but the plane on the radar. The ATCs were watching the radar, so if it were a different plane, the AA jet must have flown under the radar to crash into the Pentagon. This would have been reported. Many people live around that area, and many work in the area. We would have had scads of witnesses who saw the AA jet flying so low to the ground, especially in the minutes following the WTC crashes. There's no story of a AA jet anywhere but right around the Pentagon. The ATCs had a plane that flew in from the north, banked around while descending, and never reappeared. The eyewitnesses saw an AA jet crash into the Pentagon from the southwest. These are the same plane.

Furthermore:

I thought that day when Flight 77 and its Dulles/LAX route were announced that a fellow researcher and dear friend had died because she rides that flight all the time as an airline attendant for American. As fate would have it she was home caring for her dying father that day and survived. But her friends did not. She was taken, with other attendants and ground crews who had worked that route into the crash site to view the wreckage. She clearly recognized parts of the plane she had ridden in hundreds of times and identified items. She was also shown autopsy photos and forensic evidence photos which included a severed arm. From the bracelet on the arm she knew it was the remains of her best friend at work.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/f77FoF.html

The pieces of Flight 77 were pulled from the wreckage, along with the mortal remains of her passengers and crew.

Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

[RH]

25. No, we do not

"know" that the ATC watched the plane on their radar.

We know that ATC watched an unidentified blip that they'd at first thought was a military aircraft. Perhaps therefore it was.

There were indeed scads of witnesses who saw the AA jet flying so low to the ground, at "treetop height" and at some considerable distance from the Pentagon, over Arlington Village. That is exaclty my concern. It makes no sense to me that the plane would dive from a few thousand feet in order then to continue at tree top height for a few miles, thus out of sight of the Pentagon, the alleged target!

And if it did perform such a maneuver then those who doubt that the flying skills of an inexperienced pilot would be up to the task begin to have a point.

The "Furthermore:" fails to follow my argument. I do not dispute that Flight 77 hot the Pentagon, The evidence for that is abundant.

As I had said before the lack is rather of any evidence to prove that the alleged U turn was performed by the same object. I want at least to see some detailed advice as to how ATC relate themselves to the progress of military aircraft. The possibility that the blip they saw was something other than a civilian airliner was their own conjecture, not mine, and as such it deserves some intelligent respect.

[Bolo Boffin]

26. The ATC assumed a military plane...

...based on the speed of the blip. There's no ATC in that room that thinks they were looking at anything other than Flight 77 now. That's clear from the O'Brien interview.

http://poly.union.rpi.edu/article_view.php3?view=793&part=1

The plane would have appeared on radar screens as an unidentified blip, called a "primary target"—something commonly seen by controllers when an aircraft doesn’t have a transponder or is a military aircraft flying with its transponder turned off. But the airspace around Dulles, Washington Reagan National Airport and much of Washington is designated "class B" airspace, meaning no one is supposed to fly there without a working transponder and permission from a controller.

The sources said Dulles controllers noticed a fast-moving primary target in their airspace east-southeast of the airport, where it shouldn’t be, headed directly toward the restricted airspace around the White House.

But as they watched, the plane began turning to the right away from the White House, circling a full 270 degrees to the right and approaching the Pentagon from the southwest. It then dropped below radar level, disappearing from the controllers’ screens, shortly before hitting the Pentagon about 9:30 am, less than an hour after two other aircraft hit the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

The timing of the primary target was in agreement with the PT being Flight 77. It was flying in the correct trajectory (from SW) to be Flight 77. It's Flight 77.

[RH]

28. The moot case

was that a plane, Flight 77, banked down around.

"The ATC assumed a military plane..." shows only that a plane banked down around, but not necessarily the same object.

Are we therefore to surmise that you know of no evidence to positively identify the aircraft in question? As yet the identification would appear to be entirely conjectural.

Why did the detailed reports of the ATC activity completely fail to mention a military plane that was indeed in the vicinity?

The C130 said to have already taken off from Andrews Air Base was not only in the vicinity, it somwhow managed to find its way down to the very place that the B757 hit the Pentagon and closely behinfd the B757 that hit the Pentagon albeit that the pilot of the C130 later said that he'd lost sight of his alleged B757 in the mean time.

He must at least have performed a dive turn similar to that seen on ATC radar and how therefore did he know so exactly where to go?

[LARED]

24. I think the 'fog of the day' played a big role

in many things that happened that day. Whenever people (even intelligent well trained people) are forced into unusual and complex situations they will almost alway make mistakes. Sometimes small and inconsequential but oftentimes they make devastating mistakes.

A wonderful book that catalogs in scientific detail just how bad we are at decison making can be found here The Logic of Failure

[RH]

29. "Fog"?

What I saw from here came across is bright clear color.

In view of a hugely lucrative market for sensational stimulation that's what they get, loud and clear.

If they were to afford as much in terms of respect for scrupulous responsibility maybe then they'd get a serving to match.

Supply and demand.

:argh:

[LARED]

31. Re: Fog

My use of the term fog was meant to imply that there was a lot of very unusual goings on that day. Things were happening and decisions were being made based on situations that no one had ever experienced before. Hence the decision makers most likely implemented poor decisions, because in situations like 9/11, it is difficult to see the big picture while you're in the midsts of the storm.

So they were operating in a 'fog' not to mention they were under intense pressure.

[RH]

32. The bigger picture

was pretty much as clear immediately as it has ever been since, perhaps more so. The live TV coverage that I saw included speculation to the effect that the Towers would fall before they did. It also included immediate speculation from ordinary pundits to the effect that Bin Laden and Co. were involved.

The CIA never had to climb any mountain to get that across. They fell down a hole, more a case of no decisions rather than poor decisions. More a case of being frozen by shock.

Endless details have since come up to show who should have done what but who, off hand and at the time, would have been reasonably familiar with the full propriety, hence any future legal ramifications of ordering to shoot down a civilian airliner?

That sort of rabbit caught in the headlights inadequacy is a permanent feature. It never happens in the movies but in the real World it happens every day.

All in all what the hole whole thing teaches me is that the downfall of America will arise not so much from any outside interference but rather from overstretching its own expectation.

:nuke:

[RH]

15. Thanks for that. but

please mind that the whole point of using a code word is that the true meaning is only initmated by word of mouth in private, to thus facilitate a less private form of communication subsequently, but with no possibility of anything to be proved against you except by conjecture or by betrayal.

From way back I have some experience of this sort of thing. I had friends who served time for conspiracy (illicit drug dealing). They were guility enough but only convicted because of planted evidence and a personal betrayal.

[Bolo Boffin]

22. Right. No explanation is given...

...on why they believe the phrase "Faculty of Law" to mean the Capital, or (a better example) "Faculty of Town Planning" to mean the WTC. Perhaps they got that information from interregations, I don't know.

[demodewd]

5. Crock

Sounds like a massive crock of intelligence misinformation.

[RH]

7. The White House had already been hit

on September 11th

1994

http://www.geocities.com/roboplanes/cessna.html

[Bertha Venation]

9. it would've been easy to hit the WH

(I'm going on the hypothesis that it was ever a target)

All they'd've had to do is come in from the south, over the Mall, and miss the National Phallus. (There's practically a direct and clear line from National Airport to the WH.)

The buildings surrounding the WH are not that tall, and no building in DC is allowed to be any taller than the Washington Monument.

[Bolo Boffin]

11. The path to the Capital building is even easier.

It's clearly visible, and since the Pentagon had already been hit, the cameras would have been out searching the sky. Imagine all the video of Flight 93 barreling down the Mall and taking out the Rotunda. That was the money shot Al Qaeda was after, that they didn't get because the passengers fought back (and/or other possibilities).

[LARED]

13. I agree the WH is a pretty easy target

if you come at from the south over the mall. But I think that hitting the WH any other way is quite a task. Even though the building around the WH are not that tall, they are very close. A very steep angle of attack would be needed to get over the buildings and impact the WH. A step angle would make it a far more difficult target to hit.

[demodewd]

18. re: easy target

How about diving into the middle of the Pentagon ..into the A ring?

[Bolo Boffin]

19. I agree that aiming for the center of the Pentagon

is the easier target than the side. Perhaps that's what our pilot was doing and got the side instead of the middle. Who's to say?

[demodewd]

20. Haniboy

Yeah..its understandable that Haniboy screwed that up...after all that carousing around the night before...he was probably just lucky to keep the plane from touching the ground. :dem:

[LARED]

23. Hitting the A ring?

or center would be easier than hitting the WH and harder than hitting the side of the Penatgon. IMHO.

[leftofthedial]

27. "It never made sense . . ."

besides, why would they try to kill the boss? Plus, he wasn't even home.

[HarryLime]

30. Sounds like Al CIA-Duh again

"An al Qaeda terror team..."

Read: a CIA/Mossad proxy terror team...