Numb even after all these years.

...Vin

I still cant believe this happened. A catastrophic failure from the government.

3 minutes ago, BerlinBaddy said:

I still cant believe this happened. A catastrophic failure from the government.

ya'll still believe the government didn't know? even scientist and physicist explained multiple times theres no way for the towers to be brought down only by simply being hit by planes

they allowed it to happen knowing the qaeda plans from day one, search about the 4 dancing men on a rooftop filming the towers celebrating the attack while its happening.

21 minutes ago, Vin said:

...Vin

I completely understand why 9/11 is painful to remember, and I don't want to diminish the innocent lives that were lost that day. I just also think it's important to remember that the response to 9/11 went on to cost hundreds of thousands of innocent lives across the Middle East and surrounding regions. Brown University's Costs of War project estimates that more than 432,000 civilians were killed directly in post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan.

To me, remembering those lives doesn't take anything away from the people who died on 9/11. If anything, it means trying to hold innocent human life to the same value wherever it was lost.

oop

Edited September 11Sep 11 by Fav

Even though I'm British and was 8 at the time, I remember where I was and what I was doing like it was yesterday.

RIP to every single person who lost their lives, and my heartfelt sympathies to anyone who lost someone they loved, and in particular to the survivors, who are almost certainly still affected by this horror to this very day.

such a sad event

Edited September 11Sep 11 by Pendulum

I didn't know about Donna Summer living near ground zero when the attacks happened and believing it led to her lung cancer wtfff omggg </3

25 years since twin tower demolition and Epstein class knowing this would happen in advance

I remember clearly watching this live as a kid, glued to TV, I got goosebumps looking at it now

But I will never ever in a million years believe that it was not a planned "inside job"

It is impossible towers would collapsed the way they did. Passports of the terrorists survive the explosion of the plane and magically found on a street in all the debris and dust the same day, just hours after the collapse? Come on ...

Edited September 11Sep 11 by mike_int

21 minutes ago, mike_int said:

I remember clearly watching this live as a kid, glued to TV, I got goosebumps looking at it now

But I will never ever in a million years believe that it was not a plannec "inside job"

It is impossible towers would collapsed the way they did. Passports of the terrorists survive the explosion of the plane and magically found on a street in all the debris and dust the same day, just hours after the collapse? Come on ...

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. There's way too many holes and fishy stuff in the official story/report. From everything to the Saudi Arabia connection, to the U.S. governments reaction, from people being able to make phone calls from airplanes with cellphones in 2001 (something I can't even do in 2026 ffs), from the way the towers collapsed (especially the North Tower) just….odd. All around odd.

At absolute best case scenario, the most believable thing that's "least bad" is that the Government knew it was gonna happen, and allowed it to happen to get the public's support for their broader military intervention in the Middle East.

At worst case scenario, you can say they did the whole thing themselves, from controlling how the towers collapsed, and everything in between. The official story is wildly inconsistent with too many flaws and too many inconsistencies

18 minutes ago, Bears01 said:

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. There's way too many holes and fishy stuff in the official story/report. From everything to the Saudi Arabia connection, to the U.S. governments reaction, from people being able to make phone calls from airplanes with cellphones in 2001 (something I can't even do in 2026 ffs), from the way the towers collapsed (especially the North Tower) just….odd. All around odd.

At absolute best case scenario, the most believable thing that's "least bad" is that the Government knew it was gonna happen, and allowed it to happen to get the public's support for their broader military intervention in the Middle East.

At worst case scenario, you can say they did the whole thing themselves, from controlling how the towers collapsed, and everything in between. The official story is wildly inconsistent with too many flaws and too many inconsistencies

Don't forget tower 7 which wasn't hit but randomly collapsed in demolition style

Jokes aside, it's insane to think about how national propagandization was valued ahead of helping those in the surrounding areas who were affected by the horrid air quality at the time and the fact that the current government would've went the same direction for an event that happened 1 day before it's 24th anniversary had it not been for the memeification of the whole incident

Edited September 11Sep 11 by Billionaire

This website has literally become Q-anon. It's so discouraging to see how badly the internet has melted people's brains. At first it was just conservatives, but now it's literally everyone. Crazy **** already posted and upvoted in this thread. Mirror image behavior to insane conservatives.

OT: RIP to everyone who lost their lives on this day and because of the horrific response from the American government. THAT is not a conspiracy theory.

Not the conspiracy theories in here Next thing you know, someone will say the plane that hit the pentagon was a cruise missile

There's no need to be cynical in here. RIP to all the innocent lives lost. What absolute terror these people, both on the planes and in the towers, had to go through til the end is absolutely unfathomable.

my very first memory is watching the news of the 9/11 attack with my mom while I was playing with toys in front of tv

If you believe conspiracy theories about this, or are tempted to go down those ridiculous and harmful rabbit holes, I suggest reading this and the top comment. Of course I could point you to dozens of official journalistic sources debunking these claims, but I think this response lays it out beautifully. I will also post the entire exchange in a spoiler.

Question:
Did US intelligence really just fail to "connect the dots" regarding 9/11, or is that a myth?

The 9/11 attacks are often referred to as one of the US's greatest intelligence failures, but over the years I've heard a bunch of different versions of what exactly went wrong.

The version I'd always heard was basically that all the pieces were there to be assembled, but the lack of interdepartmental communication in US intelligence meant that no one put everything together in time. Like, the CIA was aware of an imminent Al Qaeda attack, and the FBI was tracking the eventual hijackers as suspicious individuals in the US, but since there was no communication between departments, no one ever connected the dots that these men were about commit an attack. A tragedy that exposed a critical flaw in US intelligence, but ultimately not the fault of any individual. No one could have done anything.

In more recent years, though, I've increasingly heard that this is essentially a myth, or at least an exaggeration designed to protect the government. The new version I've heard is that the failure wasn't one of intelligence, but one of action. Intelligence had been assembled, people had been briefed, and the action could reasonably have been taken, but no one bothered. To be clear, I'm not saying that the Bush or the government or whoever specifically knew that planes were going to be flown into buildings that day and chose to let it happen, but rather that reasonable actions could have been taken that would have prevented the attacks, but weren't taken due to arrogance, negligence, other priorities taking precedence, etc.

According to this version of the story, after the attacks, the executive branch/intelligence services reviewed what they knew and realized "oh ****, we probably could have stopped this if we weren't idiots" and then kind of spun a tale about "actually the intelligence was never properly assembled, nobody was in a position to know, there was nothing we could have done" to cover their own asses. The idea being that confessing to poor internal management is an easier pill to swallow than poor decision making. "Our departments didn't communicate, creating an intelligence blind spot" is less personally damning than "there were specific people who could have made different decisions or paid more attention that could have stopped this."

Which of these is more accurate? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle?

Answer:

Finally a question that is relevant to my work and academic pursuits. Awesome.

The version I'd always heard was basically that all the pieces were there to be assembled, but the lack of interdepartmental communication in US intelligence meant that no one put everything together in time. Like, the CIA was aware of an imminent Al Qaeda attack, and the FBI was tracking the eventual hijackers as suspicious individuals in the US, but since there was no communication between departments, no one ever connected the dots that these men were about commit an attack. A tragedy that exposed a critical flaw in US intelligence, but ultimately not the fault of any individual. No one could have done anything.

You could write a book about ever single point in this paragraph. But it's actually a bit better to step back and talk about Intelligence a broader sense first.

Intelligence is a profession that deals with incomplete information, and has to infer meaning from that incomplete information. Intelligence analysis is more like poker, where you do not know the strength of your opponents position, than chess, which is a game of complete information. In poker, you might assess that your opponent has a strong hand, and assess it as likely that they are beating you. You subsequently fold, and never know if you were right or wrong.

This is the intelligence problem. If a military intelligence analyst assesses that the enemy armoured column is going to take a right turn at the junction, and your commander deploys engineers to create roadblocks and minefields along that line of advance, you never really know if the enemy intended to turn right and changed their mind when their recon elements found the minefield. Was this an intelligence success? Or was it a waste of mines and obstacles? You might never know. Your commander will never know either, and in fact, the commander might resent your assessment when the enemy turns left instead, forgetting that our actions can impact the actions of the enemy.

Intelligence tends to make probabilistic forecasts. If you ask me whether a nuclear war is going to be dropped in the next 12 months, I might assess it as a 1% chance. If a nuclear bomb is dropped in the next 12 months, am I wrong, since I said there was a 99% chance that wouldn't happen? Or was it really a genuinely low risk outcome that happened to have finally occurred. If I ran that simulation another 99 times, would all the other times result in no nuclear bomb?

In more recent years, though, I've increasingly heard that this is essentially a myth, or at least an exaggeration designed to protect the government. The new version I've heard is that the failure wasn't one of intelligence, but one of action. Intelligence had been assembled, people had been briefed, and the action could reasonably have been taken, but no one bothered. To be clear, I'm not saying that the Bush or the government or whoever specifically knew that planes were going to be flown into buildings that day and chose to let it happen, but rather that reasonable actions could have been taken that would have prevented the attacks, but weren't taken due to arrogance, negligence, other priorities taking precedence, etc.

In the specific case of 9/11, we might be tempted (and in fact, nearly all the publicly available reviews state something to this effect) to say that it was "obvious" in hindsight. And that if only the right report made it to the right desk, everything would have been alright. But this isn't really how intelligence works.

The idea that a terrorist attack might occur by a given group could probably be easily communicated. And the assessment could even result in a reasonably high likelihood (e.g. there is a 60% chance that this group funded by Osama Bin Laden will attempt a terrorist attack in the next 12 months). But each time you add an "and" to the statement, mathematically speaking, that likelihood has to decrease in value (e.g. AND this group will attempt to access planes, AND this group will successfully gain entry to the cockpit, AND this group will fly them into a building AND this building will be a WTC tower). The probability of that assessment being correct is so incredibly low, in the context of incomplete information, that that assessment would likely have never, ever been actioned.

Let me put it another way. Following the best tool for making accurate intelligence assessments ever devised, you have to do two things: gain context (or a baseline assessment) for a particular event to occur, then add or subtract the likelihood given your specific circumstance. For example, if a criminal intelligence analyst is assessing whether a burglar recently released from prison will offend again, they should look at two broad questions:

• What is the ratio of burglars who are released from prison who go on to offend again? (Check your state's criminal database from the last 10 years, say it's 65% of them)

• What specific details about our particular burglar increase or decrease this likelihood? (e.g. he has earned a bachelors degree while in prison, will go home to live with his middle-class, supportive parents, his wife gave birth while he was in prison - all these factors might make him less likely to offend again)

• Combine these two very different assessments into one: Your baseline assessment should be 65%, but due to the circumstances of the criminal we are talking about, we consider it half as likely as the average burglar to repeat offend: e.g. we assess him to have a 32.5% chance of committing another offence upon release.

When we attempt to do this for 9/11, it all falls apart into extreme low likelihoods. To start with, intelligence agencies need to identify that Osama Bin Laden is planning to conduct an attack. This would have been presented probabilistically: e.g. "There is a 90% chance OBL is planning an attack on American soil." Then they would have had to determine the type of attack. Consider that virtually every other terrorist attack of this type, including the previous attempt on the WTC, had all been bombs. The assessment would have been something like "There is an 85% chance that, if an attack was to occur, it will be a bomb." Then, the assessment would have continuously become more and more narrow as these intelligence analysts try to pick out targets (there is a 60% chance the terrorists will target the WTC, or a similar high profile building") the timeframe (40% chance in the next 12 months), etc, etc, etc.

Through the probabilities, you end up with an assessment that gets continuously smaller and smaller (90% + 85% + 60% + 40% + X% + Y%) etc.

Without the benefit of the worlds most high profile post-hoc investigation into a terrorist attack, in real time, there is absolutely no way that this type of assessment gets onto a decisionmaker's desk with anything near the likelihood that would be actionable.

Yes, there was definitely suspicious people, doing suspicious things, and it looked like these guys might be intending to conduct a terrorist attack. But there was no baseline for any analysts to work with at the time. When we assessed the burglar's likelihood to conduct another burglary post-release, we had a data-rich environment of other burglars to assess our man against. But every single other hijacking worth mentioning had involved ransoms and hostage situations. Were there indicators that the 9/11 hijackers had other plans? Yes, but these are not binary questions in the intelligence field - you can't simply read suggestive intelligence reports and flick the probability to 100%. That would have the CIA assessing tens of thousands of suspicious people, ever year, as "100% going to do something really bad."

9/11 was a black swan. To the people in the relevant analytical teams who looked at these problems, they definitely thought something was amiss. Could they feasibly have managed intelligence better to get a better idea of the likelihood they were dealing with? Possibly, but there wasn't a genuine smoking gun that was available to these analysts at the time.

Even if these analysts had predicted with a high degree of confidence that something like this was going to occur, the nature of black swans is always extremely hard to communicate cross-discipline. For example, all of the experts on pandemics had been saying for years that something like COVID-19 was "a matter of time" (it was not a black swan to domain-experts), but it absolutely was a black swan to a coffee shop owner, whose whole livelihood was unknowingly dependent upon a pandemic never happening.

Similar to an intelligence report landing on the desk of an FBI investigator from the intelligence team. Without a clear, smoking gun, in the form of an email or phone intercept, this kind of assessment would have seriously failed to register as reasonable or feasible.

29 minutes ago, DevilsRollTheDice said:

This website has literally become Q-anon. It's so discouraging to see how badly the internet has melted people's brains. At first it was just conservatives, but now it's literally everyone. Crazy **** already posted and upvoted in this thread. Mirror image behavior to insane conservatives.

OT: RIP to everyone who lost their lives on this day and because of the horrific response from the American government. THAT is not a conspiracy theory.

its not a conspiracy theory, you seem very close minded if you wanna believe a narrative thats been told to you, we have many whistleblowers, backed up by evidence and science, but you seem so brainwashed to the point of no return so i don't blame you, argue with the wall please.

its a tragic event nonetheless and RIP to everyone who lost their lives because of what happened in 9/11 and post 9/11

29 minutes ago, DevilsRollTheDice said:

If you believe conspiracy theories about this, or are tempted to go down those ridiculous and harmful rabbit holes, I suggest reading this and the top comment. Of course I could point you to dozens of official journalistic sources debunking these claims, but I think this response lays it out beautifully. I will also post the entire exchange in a spoiler.

Question:
Did US intelligence really just fail to "connect the dots" regarding 9/11, or is that a myth?

The 9/11 attacks are often referred to as one of the US's greatest intelligence failures, but over the years I've heard a bunch of different versions of what exactly went wrong.

The version I'd always heard was basically that all the pieces were there to be assembled, but the lack of interdepartmental communication in US intelligence meant that no one put everything together in time. Like, the CIA was aware of an imminent Al Qaeda attack, and the FBI was tracking the eventual hijackers as suspicious individuals in the US, but since there was no communication between departments, no one ever connected the dots that these men were about commit an attack. A tragedy that exposed a critical flaw in US intelligence, but ultimately not the fault of any individual. No one could have done anything.

In more recent years, though, I've increasingly heard that this is essentially a myth, or at least an exaggeration designed to protect the government. The new version I've heard is that the failure wasn't one of intelligence, but one of action. Intelligence had been assembled, people had been briefed, and the action could reasonably have been taken, but no one bothered. To be clear, I'm not saying that the Bush or the government or whoever specifically knew that planes were going to be flown into buildings that day and chose to let it happen, but rather that reasonable actions could have been taken that would have prevented the attacks, but weren't taken due to arrogance, negligence, other priorities taking precedence, etc.

According to this version of the story, after the attacks, the executive branch/intelligence services reviewed what they knew and realized "oh ****, we probably could have stopped this if we weren't idiots" and then kind of spun a tale about "actually the intelligence was never properly assembled, nobody was in a position to know, there was nothing we could have done" to cover their own asses. The idea being that confessing to poor internal management is an easier pill to swallow than poor decision making. "Our departments didn't communicate, creating an intelligence blind spot" is less personally damning than "there were specific people who could have made different decisions or paid more attention that could have stopped this."

Which of these is more accurate? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle?

Answer:

Finally a question that is relevant to my work and academic pursuits. Awesome.

You could write a book about ever single point in this paragraph. But it's actually a bit better to step back and talk about Intelligence a broader sense first.

Intelligence is a profession that deals with incomplete information, and has to infer meaning from that incomplete information. Intelligence analysis is more like poker, where you do not know the strength of your opponents position, than chess, which is a game of complete information. In poker, you might assess that your opponent has a strong hand, and assess it as likely that they are beating you. You subsequently fold, and never know if you were right or wrong.

This is the intelligence problem. If a military intelligence analyst assesses that the enemy armoured column is going to take a right turn at the junction, and your commander deploys engineers to create roadblocks and minefields along that line of advance, you never really know if the enemy intended to turn right and changed their mind when their recon elements found the minefield. Was this an intelligence success? Or was it a waste of mines and obstacles? You might never know. Your commander will never know either, and in fact, the commander might resent your assessment when the enemy turns left instead, forgetting that our actions can impact the actions of the enemy.

Intelligence tends to make probabilistic forecasts. If you ask me whether a nuclear war is going to be dropped in the next 12 months, I might assess it as a 1% chance. If a nuclear bomb is dropped in the next 12 months, am I wrong, since I said there was a 99% chance that wouldn't happen? Or was it really a genuinely low risk outcome that happened to have finally occurred. If I ran that simulation another 99 times, would all the other times result in no nuclear bomb?

In the specific case of 9/11, we might be tempted (and in fact, nearly all the publicly available reviews state something to this effect) to say that it was "obvious" in hindsight. And that if only the right report made it to the right desk, everything would have been alright. But this isn't really how intelligence works.

The idea that a terrorist attack might occur by a given group could probably be easily communicated. And the assessment could even result in a reasonably high likelihood (e.g. there is a 60% chance that this group funded by Osama Bin Laden will attempt a terrorist attack in the next 12 months). But each time you add an "and" to the statement, mathematically speaking, that likelihood has to decrease in value (e.g. AND this group will attempt to access planes, AND this group will successfully gain entry to the cockpit, AND this group will fly them into a building AND this building will be a WTC tower). The probability of that assessment being correct is so incredibly low, in the context of incomplete information, that that assessment would likely have never, ever been actioned.

Let me put it another way. Following the best tool for making accurate intelligence assessments ever devised, you have to do two things: gain context (or a baseline assessment) for a particular event to occur, then add or subtract the likelihood given your specific circumstance. For example, if a criminal intelligence analyst is assessing whether a burglar recently released from prison will offend again, they should look at two broad questions:

• What is the ratio of burglars who are released from prison who go on to offend again? (Check your state's criminal database from the last 10 years, say it's 65% of them)

• What specific details about our particular burglar increase or decrease this likelihood? (e.g. he has earned a bachelors degree while in prison, will go home to live with his middle-class, supportive parents, his wife gave birth while he was in prison - all these factors might make him less likely to offend again)

• Combine these two very different assessments into one: Your baseline assessment should be 65%, but due to the circumstances of the criminal we are talking about, we consider it half as likely as the average burglar to repeat offend: e.g. we assess him to have a 32.5% chance of committing another offence upon release.

When we attempt to do this for 9/11, it all falls apart into extreme low likelihoods. To start with, intelligence agencies need to identify that Osama Bin Laden is planning to conduct an attack. This would have been presented probabilistically: e.g. "There is a 90% chance OBL is planning an attack on American soil." Then they would have had to determine the type of attack. Consider that virtually every other terrorist attack of this type, including the previous attempt on the WTC, had all been bombs. The assessment would have been something like "There is an 85% chance that, if an attack was to occur, it will be a bomb." Then, the assessment would have continuously become more and more narrow as these intelligence analysts try to pick out targets (there is a 60% chance the terrorists will target the WTC, or a similar high profile building") the timeframe (40% chance in the next 12 months), etc, etc, etc.

Through the probabilities, you end up with an assessment that gets continuously smaller and smaller (90% + 85% + 60% + 40% + X% + Y%) etc.

Without the benefit of the worlds most high profile post-hoc investigation into a terrorist attack, in real time, there is absolutely no way that this type of assessment gets onto a decisionmaker's desk with anything near the likelihood that would be actionable.

Yes, there was definitely suspicious people, doing suspicious things, and it looked like these guys might be intending to conduct a terrorist attack. But there was no baseline for any analysts to work with at the time. When we assessed the burglar's likelihood to conduct another burglary post-release, we had a data-rich environment of other burglars to assess our man against. But every single other hijacking worth mentioning had involved ransoms and hostage situations. Were there indicators that the 9/11 hijackers had other plans? Yes, but these are not binary questions in the intelligence field - you can't simply read suggestive intelligence reports and flick the probability to 100%. That would have the CIA assessing tens of thousands of suspicious people, ever year, as "100% going to do something really bad."

9/11 was a black swan. To the people in the relevant analytical teams who looked at these problems, they definitely thought something was amiss. Could they feasibly have managed intelligence better to get a better idea of the likelihood they were dealing with? Possibly, but there wasn't a genuine smoking gun that was available to these analysts at the time.

Even if these analysts had predicted with a high degree of confidence that something like this was going to occur, the nature of black swans is always extremely hard to communicate cross-discipline. For example, all of the experts on pandemics had been saying for years that something like COVID-19 was "a matter of time" (it was not a black swan to domain-experts), but it absolutely was a black swan to a coffee shop owner, whose whole livelihood was unknowingly dependent upon a pandemic never happening.

Similar to an intelligence report landing on the desk of an FBI investigator from the intelligence team. Without a clear, smoking gun, in the form of an email or phone intercept, this kind of assessment would have seriously failed to register as reasonable or feasible.

before you claim such things and shout conspiracy theories here some evidence for u

1) A PLANE HIT THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING IN1945 and caused huge damage and fire same to the one happening in 9/11 yet it stood it ground

2) and this from ABC, theres no way no one knew