To: <> Subject: [OPE-L:5946] Re: Re: war Reply-To: ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu Sender: owner-ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Ian Hunt wrote: > I think, incidentally, that the attack brought death and > destruction on a far greater scale than the attackers ever > imagined - if the engineers and architects who built the WTC were > surprised at its collapse, then no doubt those behind the attack > would probably have been surprised too. Possibly, but is this observation of any significance? Flying a couple of large airliners into densely populated office towers is an act calculated to cause maximal horror and carnage. Maybe the carnage exceeded "optimistic" expectations. So far as our judgement of the action is concerned, so what? Allin Cottrell. one thing (among many) that has been bothering me is the number of the people on the planes. each plane seems to have had only about 50 passengers. i am wondering whether the terrorists made reservations for about half the seats and then cancelled them at the last moment. Of course they would have done this not to minimize the carnage but to make the planes easier to take over...at which they had horrifying success. If this is in fact what transpired, it's chilling that the FAA does not have red lights start flashing whenever so many reservations are cancelled at the last minute . Of course i am speculating that the terrorists may have organized to make so cancellations to make the planes tractable to hijacking...it's a "factoid" that is circulating among employees at cisco systems. at any rate, nina totenberg on national public radio said a few days ago that the lapses that will soon be revealed will send chills up peoples' spines. Rakesh ps there was a knife attack on a half indian-half hispanic software engineer in the south of market district in san francisco. his australian coworker heroically intervened and absorbed the deepest cuts. just as troubling is that sf chronicle buried the story of the attack by these four white tough guys who announced that they don't like arabs in the local section of the newspaper while it seems that local tv did not pick up the story at all. i have a deep foreboding sense that all of us brown people with "foreign" names have had our futures mutilated by this trajedy...though we will be shunned by those who do not even intend and know better than to do so.
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