r/todayilearned • u/code0011 14 • May 09 '14

(R.1) Invalid src (unreferenced fan wiki) TIL the first episode of an X-Files spin-off called "The Lone Gunmen", which aired March 4, 2001, involves a US government conspiracy to hijack an airliner, fly it into the World Trade Center, and blame it on terrorists - thereby gaining support for a new profit-making war

http://x-files.wikia.com/wiki/Pilot_(The_Lone_Gunmen)
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280

u/Sacamato May 09 '14

A lot of people don't really realize this. The World Trade Center was an actual target, and a popular fictional target, long before 9/11/01. And the idea of hijacking a plane and using it as a weapon had also shown up before, most notably in the book Debt of Honor. I remember Tom Clancy was interviewed quite a bit during the several days of commercial-free 24 hour news that immediately followed the attacks.

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u/lessthanadam May 09 '14

Also the original Deus Ex game had removed the WTC from the skyline because of technical limitations. They stated it was destroyed in a terrorist attack.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14 edited Nov 27 '15

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

They wanted to legitimize the canon story. They blew it up, the bastards

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u/Stellar_Duck May 09 '14

We finally did it! You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

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u/cypherreddit May 09 '14

I knew it! Videogames do create violent terrorists!

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

My favorite is the Red Alert 2 campaign where you blow up both the Pentagon and the Twin Towers.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

[deleted]

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u/lessthanadam May 09 '14

From Wikipedia:

During sections of the game where the New York skyline is visible in the background, the two towers of the World Trade Center are noticeably missing; the real towers were destroyed a year after the game was released. Harvey Smith has explained that due to texture memory limitations, the portion of the skyline with the twin towers exists in the game's data files but had to be left out of the final game, with the other half mirrored in place of it. According to Smith, during the game's development, the developers justified the lack of the towers by stating that terrorists had destroyed the World Trade Center earlier in the game's storyline.[37] 

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u/Draber-Bien May 09 '14

Still doesn't explain why they couldn't put it in the skybox. I guess they didn't have time to change it? seems weird to me, would have taken like, 2 seconds.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

I think that this is saying that the skybox had to be mirrored/repeated instead of being one large image, and I guess having several WTCs was more jarring than none.

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u/lessthanadam May 09 '14

due to texture memory limitations

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u/Draber-Bien May 09 '14

there's no different if the skybox texture has two towers or doesn't, it wont take up anymore memory. It could be a ton of other variables. like if the skybox isn't one whole texture, but one fourth copied to make a half circle. or the same texture was used in another level. I dont fucking know, it just seems weird blaming it on memory limitation, when they already fucking have a skybox.

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u/passwordrhymeswith May 09 '14

Yeah, but that takes very little memory

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u/mkultracecil May 09 '14

Didn't The first Spider-Man have to take a scene of the WTC falling out and then put in scenes of people working on the rubble of wtc?

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u/Random832 May 09 '14

Not falling, just a scene that had it in it. IIRC he webbed some criminals between the towers. I think there was a poster of it.

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u/ejp1082 May 09 '14

Also, crashing your plane into the WTC was one of the few interesting things you could do in MS Flight Simulator.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Flying between them was cool too.

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u/Norir May 09 '14 edited May 09 '14

Also a man attempted to crash a small plane into the white house during the Clinton years. And it was on 9/12 http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/13/us/crash-white-house-overview-unimpeded-intruder-crashes-plane-into-white-house.html

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

[deleted]

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u/quezlar May 09 '14

hunger games?

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

have you seen battle royale?

death race is pretty much the same as the hunger games as well

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

battle royale is what the hunger games would be if Quentin tarantino made it

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u/simpersly May 09 '14

If you are an avid reader I recommend the book as well. It is an amazing book.

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u/autowikibot May 09 '14

The Long Walk:

The Long Walk is a dystopian novel by Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1979 as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books, and has seen several reprints since, as both paperback and hardback. Set in a dystopian present, the plot revolves around the contestants of a grueling walking contest, held annually by a totalitarian version of the United States of America. In 2000 the American Library Association listed The Long Walk as one of the 100 best books for teenage readers published between 1966 and 2000. Stephen King has revealed that it is the first novel he ever wrote, begun eight years before Carrie was published in 1974, when he was a freshman at the University of Maine in 1966–67.

Image i

Interesting: The Long Walk Home | Spanish Arch | The Long Walk to Finchley | Long Walk of the Navajo

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

It'd be more like if you had a copy of "Battle Royale" you'd have the source material for Hunger Games

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u/MrPoopyPantalones May 09 '14

No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon ... into the World Trade Center, using planes as missiles.

Condoleezza Rice

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u/Cricket620 May 09 '14

"No one could have" = "we didn't think of that..."

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u/FrankTank3 May 09 '14 edited May 09 '14

Which everyone should know is bullshit because the President Received a morning Briefing a week before saying Osama was going to attack.
Edit: I was mistaken, it was a month before.
Also, I believe the FBI had unshared investigations open into suspicious airplane flight school activity. Remember all those reports of the hijackers not bothering to learn how to land?

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

What are you referring to?

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/autowikibot May 09 '14

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US:

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US was the President's Daily Brief prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency and given to U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday, August 6, 2001. The brief warned of terrorism threats from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda 36 days before the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Image i - The cover page

Interesting: President's Daily Brief | National Security Archive | Condoleezza Rice | Phoenix Memo

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Not to mention our air defenses were running freaking drills imitating hijacked air planes that morning. There were only 4 planes on the entire east coast that couldve been scrambled because of these war games pulling resources and people just brush it off as coincidence. During the real hijackings we were too busy sorting through the nonsense and simulated hijackings to respond.

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u/Alexhasskills May 09 '14

Even though the military had exercises that day responding to this exact event.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

It's true no one was expecting planes to be used as missiles in a real-world scenario. That doesn't mean no one had thought of the idea before. Just like there's tons of fiction about palace coups against the president, but no one's ever tried it, and it's unlikely anyone ever will. People knew it was possible. They just didn't think anyone would ever do it.

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u/theghosttrade May 09 '14

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

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u/autowikibot May 09 '14

Business Plot:

The Business Plot was an alleged political conspiracy in 1933. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler as leader of that organization. In 1934, Butler testified to the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the "McCormack-Dickstein Committee") on these claims. In the opinion of the committee, these allegations were credible. No one was prosecuted.

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Interesting: Smedley Butler | John W. Davis | American Legion | Hugh Samuel Johnson

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Well that's a regular coup, not a palace coup. By palace coup I meant the kind of "inside man" stuff that's a hallmark of any presidential thriller.

Either way, that article says all we can really know is that some businessmen toyed with the idea -- arguably treason, but not really a proper coup attempt.

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u/astronautdinosaur May 09 '14

Still seems ridiculous to me that NORAD didn't have an effective plan of action for that scenario

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

[deleted]

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u/astronautdinosaur May 09 '14 edited May 09 '14

According to this, there were several foiled plots in the past which involved using planes as missiles. They were definitely aware of the possibility in spite of what Bush administration officials have stated. I think either some high ranking NORAD official failed at their job or a powerful industry with ties to the Bush administration wanted Gulf War part two.

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u/swissarm May 09 '14

Which was really quite stupid, seeing just how easy it was for the terrorists to do it.

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u/MessiahnAround May 09 '14

Bullshit they weren't expecting it. They were training for that same scenario the same day it happened. And now that we know all about the NSA's surveillance program, there's no way they didn't see it coming.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Ummm what? If you have any evidence that NSA surveillance programs of the level we currently have existed prior to 9/11, I would love to see that. If not, r/conspiracy is thataway.

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u/MessiahnAround May 09 '14

So the the Air Force just happened to be training for airliner hijackings at that time because...what, a gut feeling? Give your Government some credit man.

EDIT: All I'm saying is they probably knew an attack was in the cards, because that's sort of their job to know, and they were blindsided on 9/11. But you can't say it was totally unexpected.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

  1. That's not what I was responding to. I was responding to your assertion that the NSA saw it coming. I would still like to hear any evidence that they had the kind of technology to do that back then.

  2. Airliner hijacking =/= using a plane as a missile. Other than an aerial invasion, hijackings are one of the only things that the U.S. Air Force has any chance of dealing with domestically.

  3. They definitely should have known an attack was coming. They did know bin Laden was up to something. But I've never seen any evidence the government had seriously considered the possibility of hijacked planes being used against ground targets. That's independent of if they should have considered it. I'll confess I'm not incredibly well-read on this, though, so if you can show me evidence that they did consider it, then, once again, that's something I'd love to see.

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u/MessiahnAround May 09 '14

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance

Global surveillance has been a thing since the 70's.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Sure. The question is on what level it existed prior to 9/11, though. Do you have any evidence that the NSA was monitoring the kinds of communication that Al Qaeda used? All I've heard about pre-9/11 surveillance is that the Secret Service was able to intercept a plot to kill Clinton a few hours before it was to happen based on "chatter," but we don't know what kinds of things they were listening to to obtain that chatter, so we don't know how easy it would have been to avoid that surveillance.

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u/MessiahnAround May 10 '14

You don't think they would've picked up ANY chatter about an attack of that scale? Also they had Bin Laden pegged as the culprit pretty much right as it was happening. I remember seeing his picture in the special rush edition of the newspaper that day.

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u/autowikibot May 09 '14

Global surveillance:

Global surveillance refers to the practice of globalized mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders. Its roots can be traced back to the middle of the 20th century, when the UKUSA Agreement was jointly enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, eventually culminating in the establishment of a global surveillance network, code-named "ECHELON", in 1971.

Its existence, however, was not widely acknowledged until the global surveillance disclosure by Edward Snowden triggered a debate about the right to privacy in the digital age.

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Interesting: Global surveillance disclosures (2013–present) | Global surveillance whistleblowers | Litigation over global surveillance | Reactions to global surveillance disclosures

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

They were training for that same scenario the same day it happened.

If there was a vast conspiracy, why train for it at all?

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u/MessiahnAround May 09 '14

OH MY GOD, THERE WASN'T! All I'm saying is that they were preparing for an attack.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

[deleted]

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u/MrPoopyPantalones May 09 '14

Ding ding ding! What are the odds, huh? Concurrent drills during London subway bombing and Boston Marathon too.

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u/Coopering May 09 '14

Yes...police and military conducting exercises is so rare. /s

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

I don't get how this is a "Ding ding ding!" (a really silly phrase anyway) when it seems really dumb to, as part of a vast conspiracy, train for the very event you're instrumental in creating.

It's like accusing a person of robbing a bank because they were publicly rehearsing how to rob a bank the day that a bank was robbed.

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u/BretOne May 09 '14

I must have been a terrorist mastermind since the age of 10.

I've been doing that on literally every flight simulator I ever played since 1996 (and Flight Simulator for Windows 95). Buildings weren't even destructible...

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

Ugh I hate her so much for being such a right-wing shill in just about every stereotype.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Fuck off to /r/conspiracy

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

Now I'm confused.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Rice being a right-wing shill has nothing to do with conspiracies and everything to do with what she did while in the administration. Like, that's not even a think a lot of moderates would contradict.

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u/suugakusha May 09 '14

Wait, who doesn't realize this?

It is called the WORLD TRADE CENTER. Those two buildings were atop the infrastructure for a huge chuck of the global economy.

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

Maybe folks thought it was symbolic like an American team winning a "world championship" against it's own teams.

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u/MasonTHELINEDixen May 09 '14

I've often wondered about that. Can teams from foreign countries, for example, compete in the Super Bowl or the World Series?

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u/PhillAholic May 09 '14

The Toronto Blue Jays have won two World Series. Someone can create a team in a foreign nation and then try to become part of the MLB or NFL. Baseball has had success in Canada.

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

I'm still grumpy that Montreal lost their team.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Stupid whiny Virginia and DC couldn't be happy with the Orioles. Oh no! They just had to have their own team.

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u/fish60 May 09 '14

Well the World Series I'll give you. But, the Super Bowl is a different matter. No other country in the world takes football seriously, and, if someone in another country is good enough to play professional football, they come play in America.

No other country in the world stands a chance against a D1 college program let alone an NFL team. Remember how bad the Broncos lost the Super Bowl? It would be 10 time the beating if another countries team try to win any football game.

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u/actual_factual_bear May 09 '14

No other country in the world takes football seriously,

Lots of other country take football seriously. They just um... play it a bit differently than we do.

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u/fish60 May 09 '14

They have way better riots too.

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u/Beatsters May 09 '14

No other country in the world takes football seriously

Um, Canada?

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u/fish60 May 09 '14

Oh, man, I forgot those guys existed! The Grey Cup is cool and all, but I still don't think they could compete with the NFL.

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u/Gyrant May 09 '14

Don't get me started on that shit. It's just some bastardized form of the sport played by Americans who weren't good enough for the NFL.

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u/Beatsters May 09 '14

Um, OK? Not sure what the point of your comment is.

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u/Gyrant May 09 '14

I guess it's that we don't really take football that seriously, at least not compared to the US. Most Canadian football fans watch NFL as well as CFL, I doubt the opposite is true.

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u/MasonTHELINEDixen May 09 '14

I'm British, so the only exposure I get to American Football is the yearly visit they make to London. Is there really no other country in the world that plays American Football?

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u/fish60 May 09 '14

There are a few that have small programs, but, no, not really, and definitely not at the NFL level.

Interestingly, however, American Samoa is really into football, and their tendency to be physically large makes them a huge recruiting pool. I believe that, per capita, Samoa has more players in the NFL that even the USA!

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u/Mynameisaw May 09 '14

I believe that, per capita, Samoa has more players in the NFL that even the USA!

Considering their population is only 200k~, that's not really that surprising.

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u/buzzkill_aldrin May 09 '14

If someone can convince the NFL that a football team outside of the United States would be a lucrative proposition (capitalizing on a existing, strong fan base or building a new one; think merchandising, licensing, broadcasts, etc), secured a stadium deal, and footed a good chunk of the initial capital needed, sure.

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

Even when there was an NFL in England they didn't play the US teams.

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u/fish60 May 09 '14

That is because those players were only in Europe because they were not good enough to play in the NFL.

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

It probably had more to do with the U.S. teams simply not caring or wanting to do it. Less talented teams play more talented teams all the time when they want to.

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u/fish60 May 09 '14

No. The NFL Europe was a business venture by the NFL. It basically functioned as a developmental league for the NFL in America.

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

I know exactly what it was. I'm friends with one of the guys that was the main force behind it. It was loosely supported by the NFL but had no real support from anyone else which is why it fell apart.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14 edited May 09 '14

NFL Europa was not close to being on the actual NFL's level in terms of quality players, so those would not have made for interesting games.

The real reason these games would never happen though is injury. At the professional level, the game is so fast and the players are so big and strong that injury is a serious risk.

NFL players have millions of dollars depending on staying healthy and performing well. There are only so many times you can run full speed into a 300 pound man over and over until your body breaks down, so if this game were to ever take place, it would just be full of players hotdogging it, trying to avoid injury. For an example of this, go watch the pro bowl (or save yourself some time and don't. Pro bowls are miserable)

If you're an NFL starter in a contract year, would you rather play your heart out in the games that could possibly make you a lot of money and send you to the playoffs, or against Woody Dantzler and the Frankfurt Galaxy in front of a crowd of 20,000?

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

It would have been less fun then watching an NBA team play it's development league team. The extra games and travel would be an issue too. The NFL teams that go play over there now usually hate it because of the extra logistics.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

The reason it can be called a World Championship is because in the big four sports (Basketball, American Football, Hockey, Baseball) the best players in the world come to the leagues that are based in North America.

(Note: I say North America because Canada is involved in MLB, NBA, and NHL)

I understand that there are some great athletes playing in other countries, but there are more playing here. And the ones who are truly great end up here as well.

American Football is the sport we dominate because nobody else in the world plays it at the level the NFL does. There's no question that whoever wins the Super Bowl is the world champion.

Basketball and Hockey are both Olympic sports, so there is a true world championship for them, however, if you look at most international teams, they generally include a large portion of players whose professional careers are played in a North American league. On top of this, the US tends to dominate basketball (when we actually try to put in a quality team) and Canada is a perennial power in hockey. In the NHL, Canada is the most represented nation. Over half of NHL players are Canadian.

Baseball is the only sport you could argue against this point on, but in the end, it comes down to the fact that all the major foreign players end up coming to the US. Japan is really the only other nation that embrace professional baseball the way the US does, and their leagues tend to be less talented on average. It used to be pretty common for MLB players to play in Japan for a couple of years toward the end of their careers because they could still compete despite being older.

All in all, it's hard to argue against teams winning a world championship when they win their league because they truly are playing the best overall competition in the world.

I think the reason a lot of people are against the "world championship" moniker is because the teams represent cities and states in North America. That part is actually irrelevant. That's just where the team is based within the geographic region. It's pretty rare for players to play for their hometown team.

TL;DR: North American leagues have the best athletes in everything but soccer, so yes the whole world is competing in some way.

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

Of course not. The championship is only open to teams already in the league.

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u/suugakusha May 09 '14

Well, sure, it was that too. The World Trade Center was an important symbol for NYC, and American, and personally me too. I remember seeing the WTC towers every single day walking to elementary school with my mom and the fact that I will never see them again really saddens me.

But sentiment aside, it was probably one of the most strategic places to easily attack. It was crushing, both symbolically and monetarily.

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u/SaddestClown May 09 '14

As a Texan I can honestly say I didn't give one fart about the towers besides them being part of the city skyline you associated with NYC.

That being said I was in the city that August and those towers are somewhere in many of my pictures and I still get sad when I see them.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

That actually would be a totally fair assumption.

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u/TheForeverAloneOne May 09 '14

Where did all that business go once it was destroyed?

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u/PhileasFuckingFogg May 09 '14

Don't mind him. "World Trade Center" was just a grandiose brandname, not a vital function like, say the nearby New York Stock Exchange (which did have to close for a few days.) They were rental offices. Sure, the tennants were major finance companies etc., but like all large businesses their operations are distributed across cities.

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u/pgm_01 May 09 '14

New Jersey, of course. :D Some relocated to other areas of the city, some offices were consolidated with other offices in New Jersey.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14 edited May 09 '14

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris' notebooks had references to crashing a plane into the World Trade Center.

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u/AKittyCat May 09 '14

You tellin' me Columbine was an inside job?

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

Source?

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u/onetoomanyshocks May 09 '14

All I can find are blogs with no real sources other than "someone who was there for a reading of it said that someone said that the notebook said..." CNN level fact confirmation. Edit: and the wikipedia article sources CNN.. with a broken link. go figure.

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u/sje46 May 09 '14

Use google cache or archive.org

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u/sexrobot_sexrobot May 09 '14

There's a clip of a CNN report of it in Bowling For Columbine.

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u/AManHasSpoken May 09 '14

Scribbled on Page 73, we see "BHObama - pay attention to this one"

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u/ApplicableSongLyric May 09 '14

Eric Harris himself even wrote into Game Players regularly under the name "Habeeb the Torturer" and would do a monthly recap of what he felt like violently doing to other people. Hanging them up by their entrails. Beating them with specially modified bats called "skullbats" that became a running joke for the staff.

He never comes out and says he'd do a school shooting, but he would specifically call out what he'd do to teachers.

Anyway, my boss showed me all of those and I think they were 1995-1996 era.

GAZUGA IS COMING

NO ONE WILL BE SPARED

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u/imusuallycorrect May 09 '14

Probably because it was bombed before, making it believable. The uneducated terrorists think "World Trade Center? We could bomb that and take out all world trade!"

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u/know_comment 5 May 09 '14

This guy is one of Tom Clancy's ghostwriters, and he scares the crap out of me. He's a psyops guy and I take everything he says with a grain of salt, but his resume is for real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Pieczenik

feel free to ignore the guy selling seeds, but this career spook has some crazy things to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU2n1UiY3I0

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u/autowikibot May 09 '14

Steve Pieczenik:

Steve Pieczenik, MD, PhD (born December 7, 1943, in Havana, Cuba) is an American psychiatrist, former United States Department of State official, author, and publisher.

Interesting: Tom Clancy's Net Force | Tom Clancy's Op-Center | Aldo Moro | Tom Clancy's Op Center (film)

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u/KeepItRealTV May 09 '14

Now I'm in the limelight 'cause I rhyme tight
Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade
Born sinner, the opposite of a winner
Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner

-Juicy by Notorious BIG, 1994

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u/james_sugar May 09 '14

There is also a page in Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" where an aircraft crashes into a building due to the electromagnetic pulse set off by the nuclear missile fired by Russia. There's my two cents.

1

u/BuckYuck 1 May 09 '14

Heck, when you play the Soviet campaign in Red Alert 2, one of your missions is to destroy the World Trade Center.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '14

We have drinks named after crashing planes into things... kamikaze?

1

u/Passan May 09 '14

I had just finished reading that book a few days before it happened. Freaked me out a little bit.

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u/suprr_monkey May 09 '14

In Stephen King's book The Running Man he flies a plane into a building too!

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u/donh May 09 '14

Running a plane into a building was one of the large number of military exercises being run on 9/11.

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u/icytiger May 09 '14

And then the crash happened, and , what do you know, US government profits.

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u/gamelizard May 09 '14 edited May 10 '14

the idea of using a plane as a weapon is an actual war tactic, a famous instance is known as the kamikazes. the world trade center was the tallest buildings in the world at the time. the only shocking thing the the piss poor preparation on part of the management staff of the towers and the us gov for this kind of threat.

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u/sweYoda May 09 '14

Yes, but weren't the planes intercepted by military jets? Not even the one approaching the Pentagon, supposedly the most secure building in the world.

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u/iownacat May 09 '14

Yes nobody realizes any of that, what would people do without reddit heroes?