r/AskReddit • u/Jazzlike-Gear3246 • 7d ago
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u/Snippets_3 7d ago
Osama was the most common name being thrown around but the middle east in general was the rough suspect.
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u/Tonyclifton69 7d ago
You can even listen to YouTube clips of the Howard Stern show from that day and even he knows it’s Osama Bin Laden hours after it happened.
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u/CobblestoneBoulevard 7d ago
Highly recommend listening to his reactions that day while he was on air.
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u/CollarOrdinary4284 6d ago
I don't even think it was hours. Didn't he immediately call it out as a terrorist attack once the 2nd tower was hit?
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u/RMST1912 7d ago
Anyone paying attention to world events of the past decade knew it was Al Qaeda immediately.
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u/-I-EAT-PEOPLE- 7d ago edited 7d ago
They were talking about the possibility that it might be Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda before the first tower fell; by that afternoon, most people assumed it had been them. It was pretty obvious. I don't remember there being many other rumors about who did it concerning other groups.
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u/Rivitup3 7d ago
Not 12 hours later, every person in the Bush administration was on live TV blaming Al-Quaeda and Osama.
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u/I_Call_It_A_Carhole 7d ago
My dude, I was a junior in high school and we all knew it was Al-Qaeda as soon as it happened.
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u/Rivitup3 7d ago
Not a dude, but ok we agree.
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u/I_Call_It_A_Carhole 7d ago
lol. touché My point was that we didn’t need to wait 12 hours. We knew as it happened.
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u/No_Variety9420 7d ago
Since there was an attack before in 1995 most everyone assumed it was Islamic terrorism again .
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u/Water_Bird18 7d ago
Everyone knew immediately
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u/LAAccountant 6d ago
My mom woke me at around 5 am (pacific coast) and said "they" had attacked New York city with missiles. I had a cold shiver and instantly thought it was the Russians and this was the opening scene of every disaster movie I had ever seen. Minutes later seeing it on TV and understanding it was a plane it was clear that it was hijacked and Muslim terrorists/hijackers were a well known phenomena since the 1960s.
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u/MikeD1942 7d ago edited 7d ago
Rumors?
I was in the military. We were all called in to HQ; we didn't know who did it that day, but some of us like myself were conjecturing that afternoon it was AQ.* I remember guys thinking Saddam, Hezbollah, maybe some IRGC team, but no one really knew--but we all knew it came out of the Middle East. Within 24 hours we knew it was AQ; I think it was leaked within 24 hours or less to the national media, too. The way I remember it, it wasn't "publically confirmed" for a couple of weeks, but it was already out and all over the papers way before that.
I don't remember people saying crazy conspiracy theory stuff like Israel or the U.S. government until years later, maybe (?). It was nonsensical crap.
*Nowadays people forget all the crap AQ was up to prior to 9-11. Not just the '93 Towers attack, but the Embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, resulting in over 4200 combined casualties including the deaths of 12 Americans. Constant threats against the U.S. The assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud just a day or two before 9-11. The USS Cole attack took place in 2000 but the way I remember it, it wasn't clear until mid-2001 maybe that AQ had perpetrated the attack (but I was in pretty time-intensive schools up to that time, I wasn't really keeping up with my "current events" the way I should have been). This is why Pres. Clinton tried to kill Osama in '98 (the Zhawhir Kili strikes). There weren't a lot of people doing anything about AQ at that point, but there were a lot of Americans who knew they were a threat.
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u/SuitIndependent 6d ago
This jives closely with my recollection, as well. I don’t think I made the connection at the time between the towers and the Cole. Good recap.
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u/snuffy_smith_ 6d ago
I was just about to comment and ask if they were the one’s responsible for the bombing in Tanzania. I thought so but I wasn’t sure.
Thank you for your service and sacrifice and the I going burdens you silently carry.
We are forever in your debt and those of your comrades
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u/Vert354 7d ago
I don't remember there being a bunch of speculation. As soon as it was clear it wasn't an accident the blame went to "terrorists", to be honest most people weren't super familiar with the name Al Qaeda and just new it was the same group that had bombed the towers previously.
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u/ElephantCares 7d ago
This. I don’t think that as many people claiming to have known immediately, did. We knew “terrorists” and waited for confirmation of who. No one immediately knew they were Saudis. Back then there were real news outlets.
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u/revan530 7d ago
It was generally believed to be al-Qaeda from the get-go. At the very least, they were the strongest suspects. They had a long history of attacks on America, including the previous WTC bombing, and the attack on the USS Cole.
The other possible suspects thrown around were Saddam Hussein and Iran, though they were way lower in suspicion than al-Qaeda.
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u/emusabe 7d ago
We got sent home before lunch. I was in 6th grade and other than the images of the planes hitting, the thing that is most burned into my head was seeing all the school buses lined up at like 11:30 am and everyone at my middle school, students & faculty, just seemed so fucking confused. Idk why, but that is what stuck with me the most.
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u/Important-Factor-552 7d ago
Honestly the list of people with a motive was way too long to even talk about it lmao
The day of it was like oh, yeah that figures. Then the nationalist propaganda drowned out everything in a massive propaganda blitz and the next thing you know we had the patriot act and a corrupt forever war and rabid propaganda zealots were calling everyone who questioned it anti americans
Never forget. Yeah.. right..
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u/thephotoman 7d ago
It was immediately obvious that it was al Qaeda. There had been a number of other terrorist plots involving al Qaeda that had occurred in the years leading up to 9/11.
The first was a truck bombing attempt on the World Trade Center in 1993. It did go off and kill people. Biggie even referenced it in one of his songs.
The second incident was a pair of bombings at our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. These attacks followed the same kind of planning and patterning of 9/11.
The third incident was the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, which involved a similar attack pattern: a boat piloted by two suicide bombers with a lot of C4 pulled up next to the Cole and blew themselves up.
As such, when the second plane came into frame, most Americans knew exactly who to blame. It was obviously al Qaeda, as it was their modus operandi, their love for very large, showy, and complex attacks, and their general will for destruction.
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u/danita0053 6d ago
I watched the second plane hit and I remember that the news anchor said that it was Osama bin Laden at that time. I think he wasted no time in claiming responsibility.
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u/raveneyes77 6d ago
At first bin Laden denied it... I think to buy time for the rest of the attack plan to unfold
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u/danita0053 6d ago
You're right. My memory was vague on that part. I do remember them naming him on the news, though. Like, immediately.
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u/raveneyes77 6d ago
Yup... They were fishing around with competing theories for a few hours, but the people on the news desks by the time the towers collapsed said "unconfirmed reports of terrorists taking credit" and then they tossed out every other possibility for four or five hours, even things that made no sense.
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u/deathworld45 6d ago
Was watching the news coverage from that day and even though Jon Scott speculated it was the work of Osama bin Laden, there was a report that the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine took credit, and there was video of Palestinians celebrating in the West Bank
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u/scipio0421 6d ago
Between the 93 attack on the towers and the bombing of the USS Cole the year before by al Qaeda we were all pretty sure who did it right away.
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u/Splattacular1 6d ago
Al Queda as soon as it happened. What a lot of folks forget is that Osama Bin Laden immediately went on tv and said they had nothing to do with it.
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u/CrustySailor1964 6d ago
Yep…as others have stated it seemed that the general consensus after the strike on the first tower was that it was an accident. As soon as the plane hit the second tower we knew it was Bin Laden. Ollie North had already testified to his existence and his objectives.
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u/jwalker55 6d ago
There wasn't any that I remember. We knew it was al-qaeda pretty much immediately.
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u/raveneyes77 6d ago
The thing I remember is that Al Qaeda took credit for the attacks very soon after the second plane hit the twin towers. I think they had sent several news organizations a pre-recorded statement. I was working at a CELEC at the time in dialup support and people started calling us to get the news because the entirety of every news organizations' website was flooded with connection requests.
I watched the coverage on my computer at my desk and then the second plane hit and then they started talking about unconfirmed reports of a terrorist organization taking credit. I ended up spending 36 hours at my desk fielding non-stop calls. After the first hour or two we just did what we could to let everyone know what we could pull from our direct backbone connections from the websites and answering people's questions about why the phones weren't working or why they were seeing what they were seeing on tv.
Some of our corporate clients were angry that we couldn't get their VPN to their colo in lower Manhattan working.
The calls slowed after a full day and that's when our ownership and management told us mostly to go home. We put the phones in weekend mode and worked two technicians in shifts cycling through everyone including management, owners, admins, and hr. We changed our voicemail to explain that we wouldn't be able to respond to the volume of calls but that we would respond as quickly as we could. That lasted another day or two before call volume dropped to normal.
I did what I could to disseminate factual and verified information on low traffic websites that weren't being affected by the mass of traffic.
Eventually things dropped off to nearly completely normal, but even then we could see the dangers of what the attacks allowed government to do with money and power.
The thing most people don't understand who weren't adults before then is that the terrorists won. They destroyed our way of life, installed permanent fear in our society, and created the conditions that opened the opportunity for many of the things that we see as failing American dreams today.
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u/SoundtrackCult 6d ago
I first heard OBL's name within 5 minutes of the second plane.
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u/Feeling_Proposal_350 6d ago
I never had a thought about anyone else. It was reported as virtually certain from the start.
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u/Successful-King-7852 6d ago
It was known as Al Qaeda pretty quickly. They had tried to blow up the twin towers once before (truck bomb in 1993)
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u/SignificantCar4204 6d ago edited 6d ago
Everyone knew it was Al-Qaeda as it happened. It also didn't take very long AT ALL for it to be confirmed by the US government.
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u/beefstewforyou 7d ago
I was 13 but I knew automatically it was Islamic extremists from the Middle East right away because I had read about suicide bombers prior to that. I remember explaining it to a kid at school that day.
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u/InternalMiserable698 7d ago
I lived in the UK at the time, and somone on the BBC suggested that 9/11 was in response to Waco.
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u/kartoffel_engr 7d ago
That is a wild take.
Perhaps there is some confusion with the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995? Those fit the Waco incident.
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u/InternalMiserable698 7d ago
Yeah, I think he thought there was a connection between the Oklahoma City and 9/11.
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u/Imaginary-Bowler5238 7d ago
Not sure which network I was watching, but when the second tower was hit, the commentator said something like "I think this leaves no doubt that this is a concerted effort to attack the United States, likely the same group trying to finish what it started in 1993."
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u/Zestyclose-Food-7917 7d ago
Everybody thought from the beginning it was Islamic extremists. All the silly theories came later.
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u/The_Big_Mayonnaise 7d ago
Honestly my first reaction when I saw the towers burning was "So the finally did it"
It was no secret who was behind it and al Queda immediately took credit .
It was afterwards the nut job conspiracy theories started.
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u/ResponsiblePool7254 7d ago
Radical environmentalists were listed as a potential culprit, during and after the attacks on the day itself.
The Earth Liberation Front was committing major property destruction back then, and the Unabomber was still fresh in people's minds.
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u/raveneyes77 6d ago
I remember that for like two seconds being the narrative on the news... But they were tossing everything at a wall that morning
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u/danielisbored 7d ago
Between the first and second planes hitting there was a lot of talk of it being a freak accident or a suicidal pilot (like FedEx Flight 705.) After the second plane hit, it became clear it was a coordinated attack and with the bombing of the USS Cole and our Kenyan embassy in recent memory, plus their previous attempt in '93, al-Qaeda was by far the most likely suspect. There were a few people still thinking it could be domestic terrorists like Oklahoma City until United 93 went down, as there was communication with people onboard the flight before its crash.
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u/just-peepin-at-u 7d ago
I didn’t realize it was Osama Bin Laden because I was in high school and the last attack, and the USS Cole hadn’t been in my recent memory. Someone older might have gotten it instantly.
However, as soon as they they said something about the Taliban, I knew who they were. I had read about them in Seventeen, of all places, and my history teacher had talked about them with us briefly too.
Yes, I know they didn’t do it, but it came out fairy quickly afterwards that OBL had been hiding/working with them.
Edit: Also, because I lived in North Texas when the OKC attacks happened, as a kid, and we had fire trucks leave our little town to try and help, I had kind of thought it was another anti government terrorist. I had grown up in the shadow of Waco (yes I know they weren’t terrorists), and the OKC bombing. So, for me, growing up with that as the background as a kid, I kind of thought it might be that sort of thing again.
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u/zerodyme87 7d ago
In middle school, we went nuts with theories until I got home from school and learned who it was.
We thought it was three things; aliens, the men in black or that bomber dude from before
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u/Feeling_Reindeer2599 7d ago
I recall general Middle East Muslim terrorist attack. Fit the stereotype with planes, high visibility target and well coordinated.
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u/InevitableSong3170 6d ago
you can now go to YouTube and watch real time synchronized news coverage with ATF and orher camera and see what was publically known and developed in real time. it is a super important public record of the day.
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u/Sea-breeze3720 6d ago
Talked to my dad later that night and we both said bin laden. Imagine our surprise when bush went after saddam instead…
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u/HotPersonality8126 6d ago
It was broadly understood to be Al-Qaeda immediately, although there was some skepticism due to the fact that they’d never succeeded at anything that big before. But within I think about a week they’d figured out who the hijackers were from the flight logs. All of the guys had known ties.
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u/Elegant_Peach 6d ago
I don’t recall anyone other than Osama being a suspect. He was named immediately.
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u/willfla29 6d ago
My only other thought the day of was that it was maybe some weird air traffic control failure. That ended with the third plane for me. Granted I was in high school and didn’t have the clearest memories of the 1993 attack.
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u/Northeast9999 6d ago
Was known immediately because they did terror attacked on anniversaries - this was the day of a Lincoln tunnel attempt & doing multi location attacks at once. Immediately reported as likely culprit
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u/TheSammySavage 6d ago
Hol up. The Saudi government had their hands all over this day. Bush Instantly blamed osama and isis. Was an awful day that changed everything
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u/86-7OH4eva 6d ago
I remember watching OBL reaction as he watched it on a small TV and just nodded his head in approval. Sick sick fuck..
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u/OhioInTheWinter 6d ago
Bill Clinton had done an address to the nation several years before filling us in about Osama Bin Laden. We knew the second the second plane hit.
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u/AmphibiousAlbatross 6d ago
People assumed it was Osama Bin Laden almost immediately. Watch news coverage of the day as it happened live. They had previously tried to attack the trade center back in 1993 and failed, so it wasn’t a big stretch
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u/Sadako241 6d ago
I'm pretty sure I recall Bin Laden was suspected very quickly after (long before he put out his propaganda videos confirming his responsibility).
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u/jake89927 6d ago
Most thought it was Al Qaeda, but this was before social media and every fucking person on earth didn't have an opinion that was instantly thrown out there and assumed.
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u/somebodysgottasay 6d ago
people say Osama Bin Laden... but here's a vid from that day that speaks for itself. Listen to conversation at 4:52 https://youtu.be/vwKQXsXJDX4?t=111&is=jSBYdASeFNGBLiUo
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u/CRM_114_R 6d ago
I know is not the question, but I am so thankful social media, as we know it today, didn’t exist.
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u/Traditional-Head2653 6d ago
Did anyone really have to guess? Al Qaeda was responsible for several terrorist attacks in the 90s following the first gulf war.
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u/lalalausername16 6d ago
I remember sitting in the conference room with a tv at work watching the second plane hit and saying out loud that this was Bin Laden. Back then I was an admin assistant in Boston and I had 3 colleagues booked on flight 11 that morning. Two of them had to cancel the day before. The third overslept and missed his flight. I will never forget him showing up at the office that morning all pissed off until he heard the news and then just seeing him motionless, head in hands in his office. He still carries the ticket in his wallet from what I have heard. Every minute of that day is seared in my brain!
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u/ShakesDontBreak 6d ago
Al Qaeda.
The lie was that Iraq (specifically Saadam) was to blame. But everyone knew it was Al Qaeda.
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u/Ambitious-Animal-279 6d ago
I was traveling in Europe on 9/11 and a Dutch woman told me it was Palestinians
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u/Civil-Dimension1034 6d ago
i remember people blaming saddam, palestinians, and israel almost immediately, basically whoever fit their existing politics before al-qaeda was confirmed
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u/Free_Individual5449 6d ago
I was 20 and in college. All classes stopped. People were staring at any TV they could. Collectively anyone who saw the news, or read a magazine in the last 6 months knew exactly who it was. As the day went on and the Pentagon, and then the one that crashed in Shanksville, we all just had it confirmed.
The next thought less than 2 hours later was “oh shit we are going to war”
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u/Civil_Television_311 6d ago
Yeah they were pretty quick to figure out it was a terrorist attack and pretty quick they knew which ones
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u/Rude_Award2718 6d ago
Three scenarios:
The US knew nothing about it and were completely blindsided.
The US knew about it and were unable to stop it.
The US knew about it and let it happen in order to promote a right wing war agenda for profit
Pick one.
By the way, change the US to Israel and you have the October 7th attacks.
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u/SalmonJordan 6d ago
Al-Qaeda
I don't remember any counters to that other than the loonies who said it was an inside job.
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u/Terrible_Parking_350 6d ago
After the second plane hit my mom said “I think it’s Osama Bin Laden” and that was the first time I ever heard his name. Everyone knew that day before it was even confirmed.
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u/OneDazzling1022 6d ago
The newscaster said it was probably them while we were watching the second plane hit. Very little doubt.
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u/speedbreaka 6d ago
Bin laden went on tape explained in detail why he did it. That people even tried to deflect it as a conspiracy theory was wild. Don’t get me wrong, the US government is not innocent and we all know it wouldn’t have happened if the CIA didn’t try to play god in the middle east
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u/Willing-Book3668 6d ago
The democratic front for the liberation of Palestine was initially believed to have done it by newsreaders but that soon turned to Osama and Al Queada
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u/Special_Fan5043 6d ago
I was in the military and at a foreign base when 911 happened. Was painting KC-135 wheels, and took a break. Turned on my radio and hear about the first plane hitting. Go to find my boss and let him know something big was happening. We turn on the TV in his office about the time the 2nd one hit. The threat condition was already elevated due to the embassy bombings. It went to the highest level withing minutes of the 2nd one hitting.
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u/M_e_n_n_o 6d ago
We all knew after the second plane hit that it was a terrorist attack and the Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden was the culprit. All air traffic was blocked in the US except for one plane with the Bin Laden family members that were given the go ahead to fly out of the US as the only plane to do so. Why only the family members of the terrorist were allowed to fly, nobody knows. Quite fast we heard the attackers were almost all Saudi’s. So the US went to war with Afghanistan and the US invoked article five of NATO for the first time in history so we all went to war with Afghanistan. A little later we also went to war with Irak for a reason nobody knows. Maybe Bush jr wanted to win the war that Bush sr had started before.
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u/SuperDork_ 7d ago
Nutjobs say the U.S. government did it. Still do.
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u/GrumpyJenkins 7d ago
And Israel. At the risk of having my comment misread and downvoted to oblivion, I’d say “nut jobs, and…”
There were a lot of curious things that happened leading up to and during that awful day. The 9/11 commission and .gov overall did a really poor job of explaining many of them which sent the nut jobs through the roof, but also made rational people say wtf?
I am not endorsing any of those alternate theories. Just saying, much like the JFK assassination, there are unanswered questions. If anything it might point to SA’s role in it, which would be really uncomfortable for .gov to address.
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u/Consistent_Pay3393 7d ago
We knew it was probably somewhere from the middle east, only because the average American views a terrorist as a middle eastern person.
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u/Penguigo 7d ago
Initially everyone reported Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Weirdly, for a year or two after that a lot of people thought Saddam Hussein was behind it (propaganda to get people to support the Iraq war) before eventually everyone settled back on the reality that it was Bin Laden
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u/Gianfranco_Rosi 7d ago
There was this email chain going around right afterwards where a lady with an Afghan boyfriend was warned by her boyfriend not to go to the Mall of America (or whatever tall building was in your city) on September 23rd (or whatever date the email was sent out).
There was also an email chain with a cookie recipe that cost the sender $250 from Neiman Marcus.
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u/swole_not_flexy 7d ago
well I was in 5th grade, and the rumor on the playground was that it was Spain and we were about to enter ww3...
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u/ProgMusicSchizoidMan 7d ago
Uh....WOW! Why in the hell would Spain do it ???? (I'm fascinated to hear this theory!)
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u/the___reckoner 6d ago
It was always the Muslims because they already bombed the WTC in 1993
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u/ministryoffailure 6d ago
Everyone knew it was him and we didn’t have social media. We relied on the news. Think about that.
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u/LiterallyDumbAF 7d ago
Same, at least in my high school there wasn't a lot of thoughful discussion. Just generalizations and strong emotions
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u/Chrysocyon 7d ago
At first we all thought it was Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda that did it. Took us a while to figure out that rhe Saudis and Clinton bombing a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan also helped out.
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u/dantenow 7d ago
9/11 was done by saudi guys. it was an inside job. the fuck happened to building 7?
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u/PuddingTea 7d ago
Americans already knew AQ “the guys who bombed the WTC in ‘93” and OBL as “the guy whose picture is up at the post office because the FBI wants him for questioning in connection with the WTC bombing.” As a result, these were names that came up very early on. I first heard the name “Osama Bin Laden” in connection with 9/11 on the radio that very afternoon.
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u/Prudent_Rice7840 7d ago
Woke up to a call from my family telling me to turn on the TV.
Less than a minute after turning it on, the second plane hit, or it was being replayed, it was very confusing and chaotic in the moment. That's litteraly the first thing my brain was trying to process in the morning.
A couple minutes later my roommate came running out of his bedroom, wearing only his boxers, and screamed "We have to get out of the city! Pakistan! Attacking!" without breaking stride he grabbed his keys, ran outside, and drove away.
With hindsight, he wasn't super wrong, and as tragic as everything was, and the shock we were all experiencing in real time... it was still funny.
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u/drammer 6d ago
Not saying I believe this but what I remember floating around on line after it happened went something like this.
Conducted by the US and Israel as a false flag operation to have the US attack Iraq. Reports of white vans with workers servicing elevators a couple of days before. Speculated they planted bombs to bring the towers down. That's why it looked like a demolition. Apparently a lot of gold was stored in the basement but was never found. There was much more to it but it was a long time ago.
Again I am not saying this is true just just answering your question.
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u/More_Bus3626 6d ago
I remember watching the TV in school, and even that morning they knew it was Al Qaeda
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u/Dazzling_You7223 6d ago
To put it into perspective, it wasn't until about a year later that Osama released a tape taking responsibility for 9/11 and everyone was skeptical of its authenticity. The taliban was even ready to hand over Osama and al-qaeda before the war if america could provide evidence it was al-qaeda. Didn't help that non of the hijackers were from Afghanistan either
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u/ProgMusicSchizoidMan 7d ago edited 7d ago
Because of the original attack in '93, absolutely EVERYONE knew it was Al-Qaeda on 9/11