TEN YEARS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11: HOW DID THEY DO IT?

What a long September it’s been.

Now, unless you’ve been asleep in a coma or living in an isolated cave in Kakadu National Park, Australia; you will have realised that this September has been the tenth anniversary of the 2001 September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

And what is September 11 all about?

It’s about an ageing Saudi Muslim Fundamentalist (well, actually he's apparently dead now but no-one can be absolutely sure about that) living in a dusty mountain cave in the nowhere space of Afghanistan high above the European sponsored Poppy Fields who has an idea.

But before we discuss his idea, let’s examine the man himself.

This guy (his name is something like Iswana Bin Lazinabout) has more money than a Bacon farmer in Tel Aviv, but he chooses to live in poverty. He’s in constant Renal failure – his kidney’s are dying and the only thing keeping them going is the free and exclusive medical treatment he receives at the American taxpayer’s expense. His family has made their fortune selling oil and camel rides to Christians but this guy loathes Christians (yes, you don’t have to be a white American to be a Red Neck loser). Finally, he is obsessed with global activism but rejects the tools required to achieve it (he has no cell phone, no computer, no ipod and no carrier pigeons).

But he does have a gun though, a pretty mean looking AK47 assault rifle – but he lives in such isolation that he has no-one or nothing to fire it at.

So, in short… this guy appears to be about as intelligent and inspirational as Michael ‘The Situation’ Sarrantino from the TV series Jersey Shore.

Anyway, despite his multiple shortcomings, this guy wants to plan and co-ordinate a major terrorist attack on the USA using an army of young martyrs, four large commercial airliners, some plastic box-cutter knives, and an unpublished Robert Ludlum manuscript.

He begins his plan by sending out a call for volunteers. No-one is sure how he does this given his lack of technological tools – but I reckon he called upon the integrity and reliability of local Taliban Heroin traffickers and asked them to pass a note.

Anyway, our friend (Bin Lazinabout or whatever his actual name is – I’m not a God-damned historian you know!) manages to gather a small group of volunteers who are eager to end their lives for no obvious personal or professional gain (but then, they did come from various substandard Islamic college campuses across the Middle East so a lack of any personal or professional ambition is hardly surprising).

In the next phase of the plan, following Bin Lazinabout’s instructions (passed across Asia and Europe in a hand written note carried by well-focused God-fearing Taliban drug dealers and sex slave traders) the small group of volunteers converge on the USA by travelling ‘in-cognito’ (that means acting like Matt Damon as they pass through various Airport customs’ terminals) and they independently set up house for the next two years in multi-cultural communities such as Ohio, Idaho and Illinois.

And during this time, our volunteers all head off to local Hicksville flying schools where they attempt to learn to fly little two-seater Cessna airplanes. And as surprising as it may seem, no-one ever questions their motives even though; a) they were totally incompetent fliers from the outset and never really demonstrated an improvement over time, and b) none of them had any interest in learning the most critical aspect of flying – how to land your plane safely.

Now the next part of the plan is the most complex and the most difficult to co-ordinate – especially when communication is reliant on passing a hand written note taken from a small cave in Afghanistan, through Iraq and into Israel, by boat across to Europe, ferry to the UK, plane to Canada and then by car across to Michigan where it is placed into an envelope and handed over to the US Postal Service for final delivery. The complexity of the system ensures secrecy and the inclusion of the US Postal Service ensures reliability.

Anyway, upon receipt of their instructions, the volunteers now come together, book various flights to New York and Washington, spend a drunken night engaged with various prostitutes at a local public bar, leave a mass-accumulation of incriminating documentation in their flats, hotels and rental cars, and head for their local airport boarding lounge where they sit amongst other waiting passengers and pray loudly about their impending appointment with Allah. But despite all this, what you have to admire in the lead-up to the main event is the way that these young men managed to totally avoid drawing any attention to themselves.

Soon after, they are all called to board their Boeing-sized planes which they soon hijack using little plastic box-cutter knives and loud voices, and with the precision and finesse of a Thunderbird International Rescue 'Virgil' puppet, they manage to fly those planes into specifically pre-determined targets by performing highly complex aerial manoeuvres that could have only been learned through their mediocre experiences at Cessna flight training school (as we have since learned that even the most experienced US Airforce trained fighter pilots would not have been able to orchestrate some of these manoeuvres if given the same situation).

So in short; September 11 is the result of an isolated and immobile fundamentalist lunatic living on the edge of nowhere in an area that has no radio or satellite reception who, without the use of any electronic or communication device, is able to co-ordinate a group of totally incompetent malfuncts onto four commercial airliners where, without any substantive piloting skills whatsoever, they manage to fly three out of the four with pin-point accuracy into strategically selected targets on different sides of the US continent.

And this is achieved right under the nose of the most sophisticated defence and intelligence systems in the world????

Yes, I can buy that…

Can you?

Actually, I’m not really sure what I think… And usually I’m right

DON'T SIT BESIDE ME PART II: WHY I STILL HATE FLYING

Before another person asks; yes, taking a commercial flight home after a couple of long-winded days of corporate meetings still makes me shit rhubarb into hard marbles. I mean, what was likely going to change about that? No matter what happens on these flights, the passenger beside me will always be a kuckleheaded Rembrandt, the cutsie wootsie Stewardess will always flap her arms to remind me that it is actually possible that we could crash into the ocean and die, and somehow, the God-damned mineral water will always end up in my lap.

In fact, since my 18 July 2011 post nothing has eventuated that is likely to change any part of my perspective about flying. And here's why:

In my 18 July post you will remember my description of how the Stewardess liked to flap her arms about like some manic butterfly as she described how, when we did crash into the ocean, those safety doors would open up and allow the cabin to flood, thereby ensuring that anyone who survived the initial impact could now drown in a cold and silent darkness. Well they haven’t changed this. On every flight you still have to listen to the same perpetual drone that this so-called ‘critical’ message has become.

And you just know that everything they tell you is a lie. I mean, take their reference to the famous ‘brace’ position on the emergency card located in the seat pocket in front of you. This is how they want you to sit should the plane begin a spiralled plummet towards its earthly demise.

…“Not that a crash is likely”, they assure you. “Our planes are regularly maintained to the minimum specifications of safety as required by law, serviced weekly by the lowest possible tenderer using labour sourced from somewhere in Botswana.”…

I’m sorry Miss Sweetie in the designer-labelled flying cap, but your reassurances do not bring me any comfort. On the contrary, only an idiot still believes that the so-called ‘brace’ position is likely to be advantageous when you hit the side of a mountain at 375 kilometres an hour. It doesn’t matter how you sit, a high velocity splat is still a high velocity splat – and the only way anyone is ever going to recover your body after that is with a flat bevelled shovel and a bucket.

The truth is that the ‘brace’ position was originally conceived as a means by which we could best preserve our dental records for identification once our remains had been scooped up and taken back to the on-site morgue for forensic analysis. Using dental records, the forensic pathologist could determine that these were the remains of the occupant of seat 7C, although at some stage they were joined by bits of those sitting in seats 12A and 4D.

Of course the ‘bright sparks’ amongst you are about to ask “why would they still ask us to take the brace position then? After all, they don’t need to use dental records these days, we’ve got DNA”.

True. But as I said, dental records were the reason the position was conceived. The reason they kept using it even as science progressed (meaning that the scoop in the bucket could now be positively identified as passengers in seats 7C, both 12A and 12 B, and 4D), was that it helped stop cabin panic.

In other words, while passengers still believed that the ‘brace’ position offered them some ever-so-slight hope of survival, they’d adopt it and remain relatively calm (at least, as calm as one can be as they plummet to their inevitable doom). Without that slim reckoning of hope, the slightest sense of trouble would result in absolute chaos – and the last thing you need at 11,000 feet during an engine failure is a confined cabin-space full of panic-mad passengers crawling all over each other screaming “We’re all gonna die! We’re all gonna die!”

Better to have people dying in a calm way. I mean, when your relatives come to pay respects to your remains-in-a-bucket, they can be comforted by the Airline's media and risk spokesperson with messages like “At least they died with dignity”.

I’m sorry, but “splat” and “dignity” appear in opposite ends of my dictionary thank you very much.

Anyway, that’s what I think… and usually I’m right.