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Originally Posted by Plan9
How did you arrive at the conclusion that those who slammed planes into the WTC and Pentagon were looking to reduce their bodycount? Because of the time the planes impacted? Because that side of the Pentagon was largely uninhabited due to renovation? Please explain, I'm totally lost here.
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Pretty much, yeah. I mean, not
reduce their body count, but rather that their body count was nowhere near as important to them as the symbolic and shock value of their targets.
Now: you tell me that the time of day of the attacks had some other explanation, I'm all ears. I'm just trying to think from where THEY might have been thinking from choosing that time. If you say they didn't have all that much choice in the matter, well I'm listening.
I also think that "terrorism" (or guerilla war, as it used to be called) has changed a lot since 9/11 and our hamfisted reaction to it, and it might well be about body count these days.
To be clear--I've never really articulated this, even for myself, before this thread. So I'm thinking this through myself. I don't have a real strong attachment to the conclusion I'm coming to at all, I just think we'd do well to think like those who attack us.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Plan9
You can't call me a "textbook righty."
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No indeedy. It wasn't the disagreement that prompted me to namecalling. I'm actually interested in other opinions about this. It was the lack of thinking.
---------- Post added at 07:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:16 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Derwood
second, I don't believe the goal of the terrorists was to minimize the death toll OR to kill as many people as possible. It's goal was to destroy three symbolic buildings; the WTC (commerce), the Pentagon (military) and the White House (political). The third was "sabotaged" by the passengers on board.
in other words, the death toll (large or small) wasn't the first consideration in the orchestration of the attacks
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Yes, now add to that the fact that they chose a daytime hour when relatively few people would be in the building. Doesn't that add up to, they went for the shock and symbol impact, and did so in a way that would kill the LEAST people?
As I said above, "We got off light, we were lucky, it was a coincidence"... these just don't satisfy me as answers to this question.
I mean, they had to pick a time, didn't they? Why did they pick that one? The conclusion I can come to is, they didn't want (from their point of view) unnecessarily large loss of life.