One of the issues I mentioned in that post is that Sibel refers to the "targeting four or five major cities" - as we know, only two cities were hit on 911, and i wondered what happened to the rest of the plan.
It's not obvious whether Sibel was one of the translators who overheard this information, but we do know that one of them was Behrooz Sarshar. His language specialty is apparently Farsi (one of the languages that Sibel speaks), but it isn't clear whether he speaks other languages.
Some familiar with Sarshar's briefings last month say the tip cited major cities with skyscrapers, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. (link)FWIW, the "Liberty Tower" thing that Bush recently mentioned apparently wasn't instigated until after 911 - so it's not clear whether this was the same plot.
(see more here, here here and here)
My main interest, however, is why terrorists would want blueprints and details of the construction materials and whatnot. It's true that osama would probably have access to engineers and the like - but what could they learn from the building plans? The WTC and other buildings proudly advertised (beforehand) that they were built to withstand an impact with a airliner.
Miguel notes that "It's also possible the FBI itself didn't know why someone wanted the blueprints, but the request for such diagrams should have set off alarm bells."
I agree that this information needn't have necessarily set off alarm bells for the FBI - although 1) this was only 3 months after the FBI heard that Osama was hoping to hit skyscrapers with planes 'in a few months' and 2) the FBI was wiretapping people about whom they presumably had cause to suspect they were up to no good. But putting all that aside, my question is still relevant, even in retrospect - why did the terrorists want specific details about building composites?
By all acounts, the pilots could hardly fly, so they couldnt have been trying to pinpoint a single weak spot like Luke Skywalker trying to blow up the Death Star. And the absolute destruction of the buildings was apparently mostly an afterthought - they were asking for the blueprints in July and August - long after the plan was put into place, and only weeks before the actual attack.
Many have argued before that the WTC towers were actually brought down by explosives (all three of them) - this 'news' that they wanted the blueprints seems to support that theory - but even if it doesn't, I'm still intrigued by the motivation...
I'll leave it there for the mo' - except to add a couple of quotes from Sibel:
"I came forward because criminal activities are taking place – have been taking place – some of them since 1997. Some of these activities are 100 percent related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States"and
"...the reason I went to the Congress and to the 9/11 Commission had to do with criminal activities and the criminal activities I provided information on had a lot to do with 9/11."
criminals criminals criminals.
this whole 'clash of cultures' thing is largely nonsense - although there are certain criminals who have been successful in trying to generate incite global culture wars. But the global culture war thing is created out of cloth - in the same way that the am.domestic 'culture wars' have been ginned up outta nothing. (i think the same thing has occured in iraq - to the point that it is now self-sustaining)
5 comments:
Lukery,
In the 9/11 Commission report, it is stated that the original 9/11 operation (called the "planes operation') was intended to target several cities, not just D.C. and NY. According to the report, Bin Laden made the executive decision to tone down the operation. However, I do not remember when Bin Laden decided to narrow the focus to just two cities. It seems like it would have been well before these blueprints were sent.
Get it all down while you can, Lukery. This from Arctic Beacon:
[snip]
Recently, the discussion to illegally gag the alternative press came up at a Feb. 6 U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), told Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez that the administration has the "duty to pursue Fifth Column movements."
Sen. Graham, who volunteered to work with the administration to draft guidelines to suppress the "dissident press," went on to tell Gonzalez:
"I stand by this President's ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements and I don't think you need a warrant to do that Graham added."
In response, Gonzales said: "Senator, the President already said we'd be happy to listen to your ideas."
This may just be mere coincidence, but isn't it interesting that Dukestir bribers' (Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes) core businesses (ADCS and MZM) were document conversion software shops (especially blueprints). They were supposedly making an intelligence database of public buildings. I'm not exactly sure when the projects began, but that would be an interesting facet in this enigma.
thnx everyone
oldschool - yeah - i'm not *convinced* that there were explosives, but the argument for it seems to be reasonably strong at face value - not least wtc7 (fwiw, xymphora thinks the explosives thing is nonsense).
re Hopsicker, i dont really follow hiw work closely - but the fact that 'some' (i think hopsicker is stretching when he says atta was there) of the hijackers were on one of the boats is another of those pesky coincidences...
miguel - thnx - i wasnt aware of that detail. i'm amazed that they are trying to peddle the Liberty Tower story as something that was instigated after 911. i can accept that OBL decided to town down the operation, but then to try to pull the same stunt just months afterwards seems kinda silly.
viget - that is kinda interesting. Wilkes' main gig seems to have been the totally gratuitous Panama Canal boondoggle (i think in 1999) - but perhaps you are onto something. the other interesting part of the Duke story is that Kontogiannis was involved in visa fraud in greece(?) but got off virtually scott-free. Kontogiannis also went on that trip to Saudi Arabia with the Duke and ziyad abduljawad for no apparent reason...
damian - yeah - i have no doubt they'll try to shut down the 'internet' somehow - and they'll probably start with Blogger. fwiw, if Blogger goes down, my backup is at wotisitgood4.blogdrive.com
It's not appropriate to list all the evidence supporting the bombs in the buildings theory of 911, but a couple of points here:
(1) The official NIST report on the twin tower collapes was based on a computer simulation where quite severe input values had to be used in order to obtain an outcome where one or more floors started to collapse (their preferred hypothesis). NIST then stopped analysing what happened to the buildings after that. They did not examine the full collapse sequence.
From their final report:
"The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the "probable collapse sequence," although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached..." (NIST, 2005, p. 80, fn. 12)
(2) NIST themselves admitted there was no evidence that any of the metal samples they examined had reached temperatures above 600 ºC. (NIST, 2005, pp. 176-177). Yet workers were pulling metal pieces out of the wreckage weeks later that were not only glowing hot, but dripping liquid metal. These temperatures were way above the NIST figure and could only be explained by the presence of a fuel other than jet fuel or building combustibles.
This is the basic argument for controlled demolitions.
It's all spelled out by Prof. Steven Jones. See also
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