Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 19:38:31 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org> Cc: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, JacobRhoden <jrhoden@unimelb.edu.au>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: WTC Payoff [11 september] (was Re: oh my god the nasa shuttle blewup) Message-ID: <3E3F35B7.1A94A309@mindspring.com> References: <20030203183710.N63914-100000@pogo.caustic.org>
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"f.johan.beisser" wrote: > On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Terry Lambert wrote: > > Except that the media coverage didn't have and causative value. > > An event that "looks good on camera" only works as well as your > > ability to associate yourself with the event, so that the media > > spotlight is on you/your issue/whatever. > > assuming you WANT the association. if you don't want, or don't care, and > just want to create confusion and general fear, which seems to be one of > the main objectives of the al Qaeda... Then throw everyone out of work. That's a much better way to get that across: cause an economic depression. Not knowing where your next meal is coming from is a great spur to confusion and general fear. > > If they had called in and claimed credit, or told us what we > > should stop doing to avoid it happening again, or what we should > > do that we weren't doing, to avoid it happening again, then I > > might agree with you. > > i'm not so sure. i grew up with various bomb threats and attempted > bombings while in germany. many times, it was simply motivated by a > dislike of americans. > > terrorism doesn't always have an aboveboard objective, or even one you'd > really agree with as being rational. No, but it always has an objective. There is always an economic balance for the perceived cost of the act. You can usually deduce from the actual effect (or the intended effect) what the objective was. The WTC cost them time, training, and dedicated personnel which could have been used for other purposes. The reason it was done was that it was perceived to have the highest cost/benefit ratio of the available options for action. > > So what was the payoff? > > Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt would be payoff enough. instead of looking at > the immidiate payoff, look at the long term. this wasn't something done > for financial gain, not directly. The payoff in an economic sense, not the payoff in a financial sense. As in a payoff whose value equals or exceeds the cost. We know what it cost them; the question is what did they expect to gain from it that they valued. The obvious answer is "to damage the U.S. economically, thereby making it less able to carry out foreign policy", but it's not the only possible one; the point is, there *is* an answer. > if you are at war, you don't think directly in terms of financial gain. No, you think in terms of winning. If it's a real war, and not a play war, and you are fighting for your survival against an implacable foe, then if you are smart, you think in terms of destroying your opponent utterly, and plowing salt into his fields, so that he can never threaten you again. Ever. You are William Tecumseh Sherman. You use every weapon in your arsenal, without hesitation. > the WTC attacks were guerrilla warfare. inexpensive, fast, and not > repeatable. They are perfectly repeatable, at least in terms of using some civilian commercial aircraft as weapons. It will merely cost slightly more to repeat it, next time, than it cost them this time, and that's only if they wish to repeat it in a relatively short time frame. As a military act, destroying one shuttle in such a way as to cause the other three to be grounded indefinitely would be up there, if you planned to act in an area within a time window sufficient that the existing in-place assets were useless, and you wanted to prevent that lack being remedied, for example. For something like *that*, you wouldn't claim credit, because claiming credit would unpin the other resources, and the distal target was the pinned resources, and the proximal target was just a means. Not claiming credit for the WTC was just plain dumb, given that the FUD of whether or not the event was accidental, was just not there, with it being a coordinated attack with more than one participant. If just one plane had hit one target, you would never have known it was even a hijacking, and not a nutso pilot, which could have grounded planes for a *lot* longer, while everyone wondered why he snapped, and how he was able to keep people out of the cockpit long enough to do the job, and whether or not other pilots were at similar risk of snapping or "copycat" acts. Now *that's* FUD. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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