UBL is George Washington

[Bill Stewart]

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 at 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 at pobox.com