Re: UBL is George Washington
"And this was a prime target. Financial disruption from *just* the tower collapses was significant across the economy as a whole: lost records, insurance claims, lawsuits, etc., exacted a very substantial loss against their enemy." That was nothing compared to the real damage, which I've heard few people point out. There was a telecom CO in (I think) #4 World Trade Center, and falling debris took the giant Verizon CO across the street on West Street offline for almost a week. The result was that Wall Street was basically cut off for several days...the effect of that dwarfs all the other stuff. (Although I wonder...Pipar Jaffrey was pretty much wiped out. Even if the records survived, they lost so much manpower that might have actually had a small but worldwide impact.) Of course, I truly doubt OBL & his posse realized this when they targeted the WTC (and the fact that they continue to pretty much ignore relatively ungarded COs shows they still don't realize this). If they took out a few key COs downtown one morning the effect on the economy would be significant.
From: "J.A. Terranson" <measl@mfn.org> To: Justin <justin-cypherpunks@soze.net> CC: cypherpunks@minder.net Subject: Re: UBL is George Washington Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 18:59:22 -0500 (CDT)
On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Justin wrote:
On 2004-07-06T11:28:41-0700, Eric Cordian wrote:
Sunder wrote:
Right, WTC as a target doesn't make any strategic sense.
Doesn't hitting a world financial center impede the funding of imperialism?
Empirically, I don't think so. Since September 11th, funding to the military and security industries have increased substantially through DHS and military contracts. It may be that the only way out is through, and that the only way to be free from Western Imperialism is to cause it to strangle itself.
Precisely. They are doing to us what we did to the soviets: they making us spend ourselves right out of existence.
In the short term, however, terrorists have not succeeded in getting our imperialist policies changed.
9/11 with Dubya at the helm can have only one result.
Dubya at the helm can have only 1 result. 9/11 was just his cover.
If you apply the same standards the US uses to classify dual use infrastructure, and organizations "linked to" the enemy, I think the WTC is pretty high on the target list.
Yep. Even ignoring specific entities that officed in the WTC, it was an effective target. When a government is in debt 70%+ of the GDP (2002 - $10.4T), there's little distinction between private financial targets and government targets.
And this was a prime target. Financial disruption from *just* the tower collapses was significant across the economy as a whole: lost records, insurance claims, lawsuits, etc., exacted a very substantial loss against their enemy.
The US bombed water treatment plants, electrical facilities, and bridges in Iraq. Certainly not military targets either.
Each democratic government likes to flood the logos with the notion that it only attacks military targets; it convinces citizens that their government is humane, and helps to pacify the non-interventionists.
In practice, intelligence is never accurate. Hitting only military targets, even if that were the goal which is clearly not the case -- is not possible.
Nonetheless, the military *does* consider places like WTC to be legitimate *military* targets.
-- Yours,
J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org
"...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them."
Osama Bin Laden
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"Tyler Durden" <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> writes:
If they took out a few key COs downtown one morning the effect on the economy would be significant.
It depends on what your goal is. As someone else on this list pointed out, terrorism is just another form of PR. If OBL took out (say) that huge AT&T CO in the center of Manhattan (the skyscraper that looks like something out of a SF film), every cellphone user in the country who's had any dealings with AT&T would help him pack the explosives. Sure, there'd be some economic damage, but Joe Sixpack would barely notice, and certainly wouldn't care. OTOH the WTC had enough significance and enough lives involved that everyone had to sit up and take notice. He knew exactly what target to hit to create the biggest mess (I offer the results in the last two years as proof). Peter.
Somebody wrote
WTC doesn't make sense as a target
Everybody I knew was _much_ more upset about the WTC than the Pentagon. As one friend put it "I don't care about the Pentagon." Now, partly that's because of the shock of the buildings collapsing, which seemed much more dramatic than the Pentagon getting an edge dented. And it's partly because 3000 people died, and 30,000 _could_ have died, but a lot of it's because attacking New York City is attacking American society, which was tremendously damaging to morale, while attacking the Pentagon is attacking the military, who spend their time attacking other people so all's fair. And the Feds planting anthrax in the Senate building and other places to keep us even more scared about terrorism so we'd be obedient really did make things worse.
"Tyler Durden" <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> writes:
If they took out a few key COs downtown one morning the effect on the economy would be significant.
The effects on American business were dramatic, but for the telecommunications industry the big problems weren't the COs, they were the year-long disappearance of the travel industry (which uses huge amounts of high-value call center calls) and the general decline in the economy, and trashing business in Wall Street, plus it was kicking us while were were down because the dot-com crash and the related crash in the telecom industry were already going on. The loss of the CO capacity was somewhat balanced by the fact that nobody was allowed anywhere near that area to work. The Verizon CO was much more of a problem than the AT&T one, partly because it had lots of access lines, while we mostly had a smaller number of larger trunks that are easier to reroute, plus fiber access rings which were mostly diverse, plus all the now-dead access lines from the Verizon POP. Industry did respond with a huge amount of diversification - taking out a CO today would cause much less damage, plus the huge increase in telecommuting means that offices are usually a less critical resource. At 07:42 PM 7/6/2004, Peter Gutmann wrote:
If OBL took out (say) that huge AT&T CO in the center of Manhattan (the skyscraper that looks like something out of a SF film),
Do you mean the building that looks like antique furniture? That's just office space, and I think we'd sold it by then. Or does one of the actual POPs have old microwave dishes on the roof?
every cellphone user in the country who's had any dealings with AT&T would help him pack the explosives.
Sigh. We've sold off AT&T Wireless as a business and still nobody realizes it... I think they were still relatively popular back then, though they had real problems around New York City keeping up with rapidly-growing demand. But yeah, the best thing about them these days is that Cingular's buying them, so my stock has zoomed up to almost half what I paid for it instead of 10-20%. ---- Bill Stewart bill.stewart@pobox.com
participants (3)
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Bill Stewart -
pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz -
Tyler Durden