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Perl Trade and Cimmaron's responses are textbook righty rhetoric, with absolutely zero thinking done from the perspective of the attackers. "They hate people and don't value life" is too shallow a level of thinking (if you can even call it that) to engage with, so I'm not going to bother.
As usual though, Dunedan makes interesting points. I can see "minimize casualties" isn't really quite what I meant to say. I guess I'm saying, it's not that they wanted ZERO casualties. I think they saw mass death as critical to making their point. But there's a difference between 3k and 30k victims.
The question you're answering is "why 9am instead of 2 in the morning?", but that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, "why 9am instead of 2 in the afternoon?" Given the attack could have been a WHOLE lot worse in terms of lost life, and assuming the hijackers and/or their planners are no dummies, why DIDN'T they pick the time that would give them the most devastating body-count? "We were lucky" isn't a satisfying answer to this question, for me.
You could get a team onto a quartet of planes out of Logan and JFK literally any hour of the day or night, if you don't care where they're going or what airline they are. Getting on planes at that hour meant, even back then, getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to check in and go through what was then known as security. It's not like it was a convenient hour for them. So why'd they pick it? They could have picked any time. Why 9am?
I know that attributing to the 9/11 hijackers and planners any sort of thought for their victims completely short-circuits the synapses of many Americans. But I have to think they picked that time because they felt there would be enough casualties at that hour, and didn't feel the need to cause any more than enough.
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