this is ridiculous!!!!Follow

The people pointing the fingers at the pd and fd IMHO are bush supporters. We all know the bush family dates back w/ ties w/ the bin laden family. Further more, had america not been soo busy paying attention to which cigar Monica Lewinsky was really puffing on, we'd have Osama behind bars long ago as he was found responsible for the WTC attack in 94.

Further more, the Bush administration is the WORST administration in this nation's history when it comes to covering stuff up. At least when the other presidents said something didn't exist or didn't happen, they sounded confident and certain. Bush looks like he's just reading a teleprompter and pushing the "I believe button". People wonder what it'd be like if we had a chimp in office, and I think someone might have made a joke movie of it... truth of the matter is, that time is now. Bush is not a president, he is a puppet. Everyone else is calling the shots, bush is just showing up to deliever their message.

Amung some of those horrible cover-ups is the 9/11 incident. Speculations state that the administration knew of the possible attacks before it happened and did nothing for preventative measures. Of course any administration would have to deny this simply so they don't look incompetant and irreputable. However, when they finally did disclose all the documentation for it, I believe there were at least 20 some odd pages that were completely blacked out and unledgible... why?

Oh, and for the most current evidence to support the fact bush is just a politician's monkey, look at the latest incidences in the Iraqi prison camps. The troops are (or at least were) acting far out of line, and the president had no idea??? Who's in control of our army then? Apparently Bush, nor Rumsfeld (err I think I misspelt that) had control over that situation... and frankly, it reminds me of the russian's in "Sum of all Fears" where as the dictator (yes, dictator) had no control over acts that their own military were doing upon the enemy country.

Make no mistake, I see nothing good coming from this war. I see high gas prices, geurilla warfare, troops acting out of line and loosing respect of americans nation wide. Unfortunately, I don't see an end to that just yet until Korea steps in and we enter a new cold war. Kinda funny eh? It'll be like vietnam then the cold war all over again. I guess history does repeat itself... Its just unfortunate that it is the hypocritical US that is now trying to dictate the world, where as before it was the US that would put a stop to dictators trying to control the world. But hey, its ok for the US cause we're hypocritical. :)

I don't know how much of a factor this may have been on 9/11, but there has been an ongoing fued between the NYPD and FDNY about who get's to be in charge during big emergencies. There have been numerous instances over the years in which both departments responded to an emergency and gone about their business without ever communicating with the other department operating only feet away.

I haven't heard it mentioned in the news yet, but knowing as many city cops and firemen as I do, and having heard both sides of the matter, I can't believe that it didn't affect things.

There is a disagreement between the NYPD and FDNY over who has control over situations. But, it didn't matter much in this instance (FDNY had more control than NYPD, NYPD had control over the masses outside, FDNY had control over in the towers themselves.)

What went wrong was the poor equipment of the FDNY (and NYPD). I don't know if anyone has seen the tape of the two French brothers who were actually there, shadowing a rookie firefighter? When the call came in, they were both there. One actually IN the building with the firefighters, the other on the streets. Their videos are the source of most of what images we HAVE seen about that day.

The firefighters had no way of being able to communicate. And it isn't really their fault. They can only do so much. If they don't have the funding to buy equipment, they can't get the equipment to use.

Besides - the equipment used is normally acceptable for a NORMAL situation, which 9/11 was not. The radios weren't meant to really work in quite that situation.

(My mother is a NYPD, my father is a retired FDNY. My father was down there that day helping out. My mother was thankfully not selected to go down there and was kept in the precinct. The squad from her precint actually got buried in debris, everyone survived from her precinct, but they still got buried alive for a while. My father had to run from the second tower falling, and was one of the first ones there and was down there througout it all. So... I know a little bit (not a lot, but a little) of the subject.)

My Dad! Shameless Family Bragging here!

Edited, Thu May 20 11:16:58 2004 by Kiatrix

There is also the fact that even after the first plane hit, they didn't tell people to get out now. Reports from survivors are saying that an announcement came over that unless people wanted to leave, they didn't have to. Though, more people survived from the South tower than the North because people there started to leave when the first tower was hit.

Personally, if a plane hit my building, I don't care if they thought they had it under control or not, I'm out of there. Time to take a day off and reflect on life and never flying again. :P

I'm of two minds on the issue. Blame needs to go to the terrorists. But attention needs to also be paid to where things went wrong on our side to ensure that it never happens again. It's not so much a need to find scapegoats, as it is a need to find what didn't work. The radios, Clinton's gutting of the Humint resources we had available, Bush failing to take some of the intel into account, the intel service, immigration, etc. These things need to be fixed without turning the U.S. into a police state. if a commission upsetting a few people to get that done is what it takes, then I am all for it.

Kia,

Cheers for your dad.

After all this time, reading stories about people bringing themsleves to the limit of life and death for the sole purpose of helping people makes me all watery eysed and mushy..

/cheer to you and your dad.. you deserve to brag.

Figured I'd add something to this. The Towers were designed to survive an impact from a commercial jet. However, the assumption was that it would be an accidental impact (like the B-17 that hit the Empire State building). There's several key points to remember:

Jet liners weren't as large back when they designed the building. The jets that hit the WTC towers were about 20% more massive then what they had accounted for.

The assumption was that a plane that got lost in fog or something, would likely be traveling slowly, not at near top speed.

There was no assumption that an accidental crash would involve jets with nearly full fuel tanks. A plane is extremely unlikely to get lost taking off from NY, go around in a circle with a full fuel tank, and hit the WTC. The scenario that was planned for was a commercial plane arriving in NY, going off course and hitting one of the towers. In that case, the fuel tanks would be low, since airlines only put just a bit more fuel in a plane then what it would take to get to where they are going (less weight means more money saved).


Those three factors were quite reasonable assumptions to make in 1971, when the towers were constructed. There's some argument over whether it's possible to make a building that tall that could have survived the impact of large commercial jets flying at near full speed with full fuel tanks.

While the architect has admitted full "fault" for the buildings not surviving the impact, I don't think anyone has tried to make a case that he could have built them in a way that would have allowed them to survive. The conditions of those hits were just too extreme.

perhaps if we could forsee the future, we could have been better prepared.
i know that while i got up that morning, drove to PT, played football, and was on my way home, i never thought that something like that would have happened. you are ready for the moment most often, not for the future. those people who risked their lives...and lost their lives did the best they could in a situation that nobody could have ever predicted would or could happen.
hindsight is 20/20. if i knew then what i knew now...
you cannot possibly (i don't mean you personaly, just as a general statement) hold anyone (with the exception of OSB and his crew of course) responsible for how many people lost their lives that day.
if we had done this, if we had done that, maybe if...you can if & maybe all day long. it still hapened. they are not coming back. all we can do is learn form it, build on it, and remember...