The front page of the New York Times, exactly 25 years ago:
Some excerpts, not in quote style for readability (modern correction: the Langley-based F-16s arrived in D.C. closer to 22 minutes after the Pentagon impact):
The forces or ideas that transformed Mr. Atta are not clear. What is clear, however, is that two years ago his habits began to change. He requested a prayer room at the university for himself and 20 other Arab students. He grew a beard. He listed himself at the university under a different family name, el-Amirals.
Mr. Atta, who was registered in Germany as a native of the United Arab Emirates but appears on other documents as an Egyptian, was for most of his years in Germany an apparently secular man. Then ”something changed in him,” said one of his teachers, Alptekin Ozdemir, a Turk who has lectured at the university for 15 years and helps advise the foreign students there. Perhaps 40 to 50 of them are Arabs, out of a student body of 3,600.
Rescue workers in lower Manhattan carried body bags from piles of wreckage to refrigerated trucks. One worker said he had found the remains of people strapped into what seemed to be airplane seats. Another reported finding the body of a flight attendant, her hands bound.
But despite elaborate plans that link civilian and military efforts to control the nation’s airspace in defense of the country, and despite two other jetliners’ having already hit the World Trade Center in New York, the fighter planes that scrambled into protective orbits around Washington did not arrive until 15 minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
Phil, why is it that most perpetrators of this kind of terrorism are like this? Upper-crust well-educated westernized secularized Muslims. How is it that they suddenly decide the truth is a way of life from the 6th century and it’s time to blow up and kill innocent people?
Have you seen the old photos of Bin Laden? He was completely secularized. He learned English in Oxford, had two girls on each arm. What pushes a man like this, the son of a billionaire, to grow a long beard and start living in a cave?
This is similar to the well-educated leaders of the Russian Revolution;
it gave them a sense of purpose.
Anon: I think “Education is wasted” has the right general idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden
says that his billionaire dad was “married 22 times and al-Attas was his tenth wife. Osama was the 17th of Muhammad’s approximately 52 children”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_bin_Ladin says that the dad was born “poor and uneducated”.
When your dad is a self-made billionaire and you’re one of his 52 children what are you going to do that is significant? I’ve talked to people in Silicon Valley who say that the children of the extremely successful are often without motivation or purpose because they know that nothing they do has a realistic chance of being significant compared to what their father did. They know that they can’t earn more money in a month than their parents will spend on a single night of vacation or even just dinner.
A newer gootube video noted there was no capability to send an armed F-16 over the CONUS so the fighter planes that scrambled into the protective orbits had kimikaze pilots. 1 would ram the cockpit & the other would ram the tail. Could imagine if flight 93 regained control, they would have had to get on the radio & divert or they would still have been rammed.
lion: Are you sure about this? There were three fully armed F-16s over D.C. from Langley (“In testimony to the 9/11 Commission, NORAD commander Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold described the alert fighters as carrying both radar-guided and heat-seeking missiles as well as guns”). Two additional F-16s from Andrews AFB’s DC National Guard took off with somewhere between 210 rounds of 20mm ammo and 1022 cannon rounds (two pilots; two stories; 1022 is a fully loaded cannon).
https://heatherpenney.com/fighter-pilot-recalls-suicide-mission-to-protect-the-nation-on-9-11 seems to be the source of the kamikaze story. It is unclear why two F-16s couldn’t fly formation on a B757 and blast the engines with cannon shells from a short distance behind. Maybe the National Guard pilots believed that they couldn’t do this with somewhere between 20% and 100% ammo load, but it is unclear why ramming would be their first strategy. That would be like a Marine at the Battle of Peleliu saying “I knew that I couldn’t kill an enemy with the 15 rounds of ammo in my M-1 Carbine so I chucked it onto the coral without trying it and, instead, planned to head-butt any Jap who got close to me.” (sorry for the pejorative, but “Jap” was the kindest term, I think, used by any Marine at Peleliu)
The ANG F-16s without missiles (but stocked with what would seemingly be enough ammo to fight an unarmed slow-as-molasses airliner) took off 39 minutes after United Flight 93 had crashed and, therefore, whatever strategies had been formulated couldn’t have become relevant.