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#31
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"Blue" wrote in message ...
I have heard that most if not all of the heavies now flying have special equipment in them to thwart hijacking. The equipment that I am referring to is not just an autopilot which is standard but additional mechanical devices to completely remove control from the cockpit making it possible to take control away from the flight officers and giving that control to an outside pilot which could be in a following aircraft or at an airport or anywhere. It's a moot question. There's no need for such a setup now. Cockpit doors have been reinforced, pilots won't open it even if everyone's being killed in back, heavies with large fuel loads probably have an air marshall aboard. In short, it's doubtful that another 9/11 can take place in the same way as before, at least with passenger airliners. |
#32
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ShoarmaBoy wrote in message . 34...
This is true for normal military aircraft where they use it already. But i don't think this is going to be inserted in real life boeing 737NG's or other commercial airliners because this also is a system that can be hijacked. If they break into the control room. Also than you should be able to hack the system if it's a remote system to be able to be controled from the ground... Never thought of that? Tom (Boeing 737NG command officer) Let's not forget that it also requires fewer men - instead of breaking into three cockpits, you can break into one control room for three planes (and likly nore planes than that). That's the sort of logical gap that obviously eluded Blue, along with his devoted acceptance of conspiracy theories that at least border on libel. |
#33
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My, my. this thread just won't die! And now I have a hated adversary to
boot. On topic, I have been on top of the World Trade Center and was surprised by the many planes in the air surrounding it. The planes would have to have been flown by a following plane. Also, the Pennslyvania plane was followed by an unmarked Gulfstream jet such as Cheney uses. Also, when JFK took over the CIA presented him with a plan eerily like the one used for 911 including a plane switch of a CIA lookalike for a civilian plane which would be remotely flown over Cuba and destroyed there to incite American lemmings into supporting a war with little guy Cuba who had just kicked George Bush SR's ass with his hair-brained Bay of Pigs invasion . JFK , crossed him up by refusing to support the mess. To the plan for a false downing of an American passenger jet he did the unthinkable, he sent RFK to the military chest beaters where he announced: " My big brother says for you guys to stick your kill Cuber plans up your asses." There had been several of them. (or words to that effect.) The principal operator there, Bush Sr, not only didn't forgive that he was arrested on the RR overpass with the Rep "plumbers" and instantly released by the Texas mounted police. Then the false attack scenario was carried out by LBJ in 1964 with the Gulf Of Tonkin incident that everyone agrees was faked by him to get us into Viet Nam where JFK had just announced that ALL Americans would be removed from VN by xmas 1963. LBJ managed to kill some 55,000 innocent Americans there in a hopeless civil war intervention that had nothing to do with the spread of communism. LBJ tried it again in 1967 in "conspiracy" with our "allies" in Israel with the USS Liberty off the coast of Egypt which was to inflame Americans into supporting a war against Egypt. The attempt was a failure only because of the complete incompetancy of our "allies" in Israel who were simply unable to sink the unarmed and unarmored converted Liberty ship. And speaking of asses, Mr Rottenberg who has apparently been secretly tracking me as part of a conspiracy, would you like to add something here? "rottenberg" wrote in message om... ShoarmaBoy wrote in message . 34... This is true for normal military aircraft where they use it already. But i don't think this is going to be inserted in real life boeing 737NG's or other commercial airliners because this also is a system that can be hijacked. If they break into the control room. Also than you should be able to hack the system if it's a remote system to be able to be controled from the ground... Never thought of that? Tom (Boeing 737NG command officer) Let's not forget that it also requires fewer men - instead of breaking into three cockpits, you can break into one control room for three planes (and likly nore planes than that). That's the sort of logical gap that obviously eluded Blue, along with his devoted acceptance of conspiracy theories that at least border on libel. |
#34
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"Blue" wrote in message ...
My, my. this thread just won't die! And now I have a hated adversary to boot. "Hated adversary" isn't that a bit grandiose, I mean even compared to your prior conspiracy ravings? I guess then you can't pigeonhole those who disagree with you as a bunch of reactionaries looking for hated enemies. On topic, I have been on top of the World Trade Center and was surprised by the many planes in the air surrounding it. The planes would have to have been flown by a following plane. Also, the Pennslyvania plane was followed by an unmarked Gulfstream jet such as Cheney uses. This is so weird. I remember being on top of the WTC also once and also noticing lots of airplanes looking really close. Okay that was about 25 years ago. But then, in 1996-98 I was working at 40 Wall Street, only a few blocks away from WTC, and I saw what looked like a lot of low-flying planes again. I even saw one that looked exactly like one of the airplanes that flew into the towers same two wings, two engines, even the exact same markings (silver body, red & blue stripes). WTF, if NYC wasn't close to a major commercial aviation corridor, I'd go completely bonkers!! Oh, and what do you mean that the "planes would have to have been flown by a following plane"? How do we know that the Pennsylvania plane was followed by a Gulfstream? And what difference does that make anyway? Speilberg is supposed to use a Gulfstream. Lots of rich types have Gulfstreams. Sid Lumet used a Gulfstream in "Sabrina" now are we gonna blame Julia Ormond for 9/11? Also, when JFK took over the CIA presented him with a plan eerily like the one used for 911 including a plane switch of a CIA lookalike for a civilian plane which would be remotely flown over Cuba and destroyed there to incite American lemmings into supporting a war with little guy Cuba who had just kicked George Bush SR's ass with his hair-brained Bay of Pigs invasion . More theories? I'm not even sure what sense that makes a plane exploding over Cuba to incite Americans? Why would a plane exploding over Cuba get Americans to support a war against Cuba? Maybe you meant to say a Cuban plane to fly past Cuba and explode in Miami. That's more plausible but is there any proof or even any evidence that the CIA actually had such an idea? Even if they had, what does that really prove? The idea of crashing planes into buildings or ships or fabricating acts of military aggression isn't an original idea. I've been flying Cessnas on PCs since 1987, routinely trying to fly between the towers on MS Flight Simulator. Sometimes I did it right, sometimes I didn't. (although I stopped after 9/11) I now suppose you'll accuse me of working "for the company". In any event, the idea that we were waiting for the right spark and had to fake one is nonsense when the Soviets missiled Cuba up in '62, the point was to prevent war at all costs, including an invasion of Cuba. JFK , crossed him up by refusing to support the mess. To the plan for a false downing of an American passenger jet he did the unthinkable, he sent RFK to the military chest beaters where he announced: " My big brother says for you guys to stick your kill Cuber plans up your asses." That's funny, I would have assumed that he'd send McNamara, the guy he actually kept around to run the military. There had been several of them. (or words to that effect.) The effect being to make RFK sound like a man who spoke English as a second langugae. I mean seriously.... The principal operator there, Bush Sr, not only didn't forgive that he was arrested on the RR overpass with the Rep "plumbers" and instantly released by the Texas mounted police. Then the false attack scenario was carried out by LBJ in 1964 with the Gulf Of Tonkin incident that everyone agrees was faked by him to get us into Viet Nam where JFK had just announced that ALL Americans would be removed from VN by xmas 1963. LBJ managed to kill some 55,000 innocent Americans there in a hopeless civil war intervention that had nothing to do with the spread of communism. So now it's LBJ? I thought it was the CIA or Bush Sr.? McNamara stood by LBJ when it came to pushing the Tonkin incident as one of preemptive attack by North VN, and near unanimity by a US congress sealed the deal. Where's the CIA? This is the problem I have with conspiracy theorists - basically a conspiracy theory gives you no tools to fight against the evil they purport to reveal - they only tell you who to hate and why. Arabs, Jews, Liberals, conservatives, LBJ, RFK etc. At least a decent conspiracy theorist can do a better job of it. I thought this was about the CIA, then against Bush - now its against another president, from the other party, who ran on a different agenda. Just who are you talking about here? LBJ tried it again in 1967 in "conspiracy" with our "allies" in Israel with the USS Liberty off the coast of Egypt which was to inflame Americans into supporting a war against Egypt. The attempt was a failure only because of the complete incompetancy of our "allies" in Israel who were simply unable to sink the unarmed and unarmored converted Liberty ship. Incompetency of the Israelis? Needed to inflame support for Israel? I must be an idiot the Liberty incident has been one of the thorniest issues of Israeli-American relations, yet one the Israelis claimed to have carried out in fact. I've neevr seen any indication that they ever tried to fob the attack on the Egyptians. Perhaps they hit the Liberty because they feared the Americans would leak intel to the other side by accident (or deliberately as was done in the Iran-Iraq war). But a frame-up? Never. Even if the Israelis, (AFAIK, never took out a target like a ship) sunk the Liberty and convinced the world that the Isreali-marked planes and ships used in the attack were actually Egyptian what would be the point? Israel wasn't South VN. LBJ didn't have to bottle up the Suez with carrier battle groups, or commit hundreds of thousands of troops. There was no need to manipulate world opinion, let alone American opinion that was desperate enough to risk the ire of American by killing Americans. For their faults, Israeli forces were not ARVN. It took little to drum up sympathy for one nation surrounded by Soviet aligned enemies, and the support the Israelis needed could have been done covertly so why the idea of subterfuge, in a plan that could have wrecked Israel's standing with America and the rest of the world? And what sort of support would the Israelis have gotten had they pulled it off and shifted blame to the Egyptians (they have since accepted the blame, though to what degree is admittedly debateable, as is the sufficiency of redress)? The very next year saw the capture and brutal treatment of the crew of the Pueblo. @0 years later saw the attack against the Stark. Yet The Pueblos seizure saw no new war against DPRK, and relations with Iraq remained stable until the invasion of Kuwait, years after the Stark. And speaking of asses, Mr Rottenberg who has apparently been secretly tracking me as part of a conspiracy, would you like to add something here? I didn't say anything about asses. I think we can safely say that this thread has degenerated into... Oh ****, what the hell. Yeah you got me. The above is just a load of bull****. It turns out that I'm really the acting DDCI of the NSA. I'm the guy responsible for keeping you conspiracy theorists busy by releasing useless and meaningless documents with strategic redactions. Life is boring here in Area-51, and playing mind-tag with you guys is the only entertainment we get, aside from making alien babes take off their clothes and dancing for us, then dissecting them the morning after. The problem is that we all have our deep-dark secrets. Mine actually stemmed from my role as the undisclosed producer for a movie called "Hangar 18" with Robert Vaughn. You may remember "Hangar 18" as that flick which made it uncool to believe in Alien conspiracies. It was actually intended to preempt a more plausible picture starring Roy Scheider and Gene Hackman, and make it so uncool that it would take decades before anybody could bring any semblance of respectability to the UFO-conspiracy community. Here's a quick flash for you "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" people out there yeah I know most of you were happy enough to Link Robert Vaughn to Christopher Lee ("Starship Invasions"), and Lee to Sean Astin (LotR) who was in "Whitewater Summer" with Bacon; It turns out that one of the alien corpses was actually none other than Mark Metcalf, that's right, Lt. Niedermayer himself from "Animal House". During the autopsy scene, one the scientists are supposed to get into this long philosophical discussion about the advanced alien species, and I was pretty lazy when it came to scripting this scene (I figured they could ad-lib there way through it) so it took forever to get. It was like on the 9th take, and Metcalf is starting to get really ****ed off. So this female scientist is saying something like "why have they crossed the gulf of space to set foot on our world?" What profound message have they brought for mankind?" (See why it took forever to shoot this scene? The cast and crew laughed themselves silly we were going to hire some telekenitics from Honduras so they could run the cameras without being in the same room, and also because they we didn't think they could laugh if they couldn't understand the dialog.) Anyway, brilliant-but-sensitive female scientist (who cried whenever the rest of us laughed at her) goes into her bit about the profound alien message thing, ans crews it up..again. I yell "cut" and Metcalf jumps off this slab-thing that he's on and goes totally postal (and this was before we even knew what that meant). "YOU WANT A MESSAGE? YOU WANT A ****ING MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED ****ING CIVILIZATION!?!? HERE'S YOUR ****ING MESSAGE: YOU'RE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK!!! NOW DROP DOWN AND GIVE ME ****ING 20!!!" Anyway the female scientist is floored, and we're laughing so hard, we don't notice that she's having this total break down right there in front of us. We found out years later that she got on "Dynasty" based on her ability to loser her mind, a talent we believe she perfected on our set. So I guess her story had a happy ending, until Dynasty was cancelled, the story was sad again. Anyway, the problem was that we couldn't come up with a good ending. Scientists find the aliens, and politicians don't want anything found. The ending had to be plausible enough so that UFO conspiracy theorists would think that they could convince Americans as to its truth, yet too stupid for anybody to really believe. Nobody thought it possible, and it turns out that it wasn't. What we didn't understand at the time, was that conspiracy theorists can believe/doubt anything they want. But we still wanted a good ending. So there I was, on the "red eye" Jennifer 737 out of Groom Lake, heading out to Vegas, hoping free drinks on the strip would loosen me up. I hadn't a case writer's block this bad since I script-doctored for Hal Holbrook in "Capricorn One" earlier that year. You know what the brilliance of "Capricorn One" was we hired Hal Holbrook. This guy could ad-lib in ****ing Shakespeare; he could out ad-lib Mamet, and this was before anybody even knew who Mamet was. Kris Kraft doesn't even give the guy a script just tells him what point he wants Holbrook to get across. Remember "Capricorn One" - it was this edgy movie about how Holbrook fakes this mission to mars that James Brolin, OJ and that guy from "Law & Order" were supposed to fly. Kraft asks him to give this speech to James Brolin and OJ Simpson about how tired America is of the space race, and that nobody thought the dream was worth the cost. We weren't expecting anything major, and Kraft didn't even stay on the set to watch it (he gave us some bull**** excuse joke about that he had to run and sabotage a Soviet launch man that Kraft was such a crack-up; Goldin was nowhere near as funny; you ever wonder why the "Law & Order" guy is so much snappier in this movie than he is on that show? Kris Kraft!!). So Holbrook gets the idea for this speech, and goes ballistic. We think he's mad at us, but then we realize he;s in character, so we keep the cameras rolling. "The program costs too much? The ****ing program costs too much!?! **** you assholes you don't know what a dream costs!!" and he garnishes it with this great anecdote about Apollo 17, how when networks preempted a re-run of "Lucy" for the -17 landing, people complained "I could understand if it was a new episode, but this was a re-run!!" Anyway, there I am on this Jennifer 737 nursing a Harley's Bristol Cream when I notice this guy across the aisle giving me the eye. Then I remembered that kid we brought in to add a dash of realism to the alien autopsy sequence for "Hangar-18" (here was a guy who knew what a blown apart bodylooked like on any planet; I think he was also a consultant on "Quincy"). I hadn't even met the guy, but everybody knew Osama Bin Laden by reputation. Now, since it was my decision to bring the guy back from Afghanistan, I figured I owed the guy a well-done. Turns out the guy is fascinating, and funny as hell. After Jennifer sets down, we spend the next 18 hours schmoozing at the airport bar. How cool was he? We had to be the only guys in Vegas paying for their own drinks that's how hard it was to get out of that bar. Then we come to my problem. At this, a moment of silence, then he looks off at this fully loaded Eastern 727 and asks me what would happen if that plane came down anything but softly, and anywhere but a runway. And I go that it would cause two things boom & yauch!! More to the point, why would an airplane just happen to "land" on Hangar-18? He shakes his head obviously I had missed the point. He reminds me that, engaging the Soviets, he studied the history of their hardware, and reminded me of the 1973 Paris air show, where the Tupolev SST disintegrated in the air, but not high enough to avoid killing anybody on the ground. The point is that people were killed on the ground because they were near a huge agglomeration of airplanes. He was surprised that stuff like this didn't happen more often. And it didn't have to be next to an airport just nearby. I don't remember if airlines had deregulated by then, but the point was that air traffic was expected to sky rocket in the next few years no matter how far away you were from an airport (even a moderately sized one) you'd have a dozen jumbos daisy-wheeling over your house. But even before then, Hangar-18 itself was on an air force base it was a ****ing hangar for crissakes (okay, so maybe Osama didn't say "crissakes", but the rest of what he said was err.. to that effect). So I get out of that bar and head on the next Jennifer flight out. Problem solved but I had to get out of Vegas, or the idea would just die. And Vegas could wait, I mean, the MGM Grand wasn't just going to ****ing vanish, was it? So there it was Robert Vaughn decides to destroy Hangar-18 by crashing an airplane into it. Airplanes crash all the time, and sometimes they even crash on airports says one of my characters. 1980 comes and goes, the film is a flop, The Scheider/Hackman movie never comes together, Spielberg totally re-writes "E.T." to omit more than the bare display of the government in action on UFO's (and any suggestion that it was covert). In other words, mission accomplished. A few years down the line, the Russians start dropping rulers like flies. Something big is in the offing, some of us even start to question whether the Soviets are gonna last to see the 75th anniversary of the revolution. Problem is that they talk tough and because of that, the administration starts talking about stripping civilian intel to pay for a six hundred ship fleet, and for a bunch of new wings of airplanes, some of which didn't even exist yet. Remembering my shmooze with OBL, I head out to Langley one day and give the boss what I know. The next war will rely on "unconventional warfare" by which I meant terrorism but enhanced. We already knew that terrorists liked to hijack planes, and that they also knew liked to drive semtex-loaded vans into things. We also knew that we could engineer a spectacular air disaster (we had that botched controlled crash of the Boeing 720 on film). So if hijackers liked to blow things up, why did they go to so much trouble to keep from blowing up airplanes they hijacked. Were they afraid that people would give in to their demands before they had a chance to blow up the planes? Were they afraid of losing a cause to fight for? Airline crews are like bank tellers both are (were) trained to be very cooperative in emergency situations. So why were hijackers so careful about the planes they hijacked? Simply combining the idea of a suicide hijack was part of that American impulse to synthesize and create the same spirit of invention that created high-concept movies and peanutbutter cups. Not to say that I thought it represented an American virtue to actually carry out the attack, onviously it was an evil thing to do. Only that it felt great that I could conceive such a thing possible, and perhaps forestall it. So I gave my pitch to Casey, and he was not enthused. He did give me the benefit of the doubt was this an attack that might be carried out against the Russians (by which he meant was this something we should do?) or a "canned goods" plan (by which he meant, an attack we'd carry out against ourselves and frame others for.)? I told him that I thought this was neither an attack that might actually be made against us by bona-fide enemies. Here he lost it what enemies? The Reds had 180 divisions against us, and god knew how many nuclear-equipped aircraft. Who would believe the Reds would do something like that when they've got firepower against us. I guessed that he was thinking I meant a simulated attack against us), so I reiterated that this would be a genuine attack, by genuine enemies, but he discounted this as well. In The Company, we broke the enemies down to several groups liberal media, the Soviets and their backers, and the so-called the "Maverick enzyme" (allies in name who would backstab us). Due to jurisdictional constraints, drug cartels were deliberately excluded.) There wasn't going to be an attack, simulated or actual. Terrorists liked to hit us on foreign soil, and let the media have its way with us at home (they had jurisdictional constraints of their own). The Russians don't need terrorism they've got 180 ****ing divisions. Man, I didn't know that an old guy could yell "****ing!!" like that, but Casey did no wonder he was DCI. The Russisns wouldn't need to hit us as long as they were as strong as they were, and that wouldn't change for a century. Even if, by some miracle, the WarPac just evaporated, who would hit us on our own soil? The last person who would try that would be some stateless organization (again, interpreting my plan as being one undertaken by us to frame others), and a third world country would never want to consider giving us the right to go in and completely kick their asses. We didn't even go into Cuba after Angola or Grenda. A major attack like the one I considered would be nuts for another country to undertake they had us by the balls wherever our flag flew (embassies, garrisons, ports), they'd never need to hit us on our soil. Even stateless organizations like ones we backed in Afghanistan kept things "far from home" (AFAIK, he was right on this one I couldn't think of a single op Bin Laden took on definite Russian or just plain Soviet soil). The disappearance of the Soviets wouldn't make it any more feasible or likely that such an op would go forward now we wouldn't have the Russians breathing down our necks. I tried playing a trump card by combining the two circumstances that Casey had considered in isolation what if the Soviets disappeared and we wanted to undertake such a mission to justify some US military ops. Casey looked at me long and hard, then he asked me against what sort of people we'd be framing for the mass murder of maybe a couple hundred Americans. I knew that we wouldn't be framing a single country there have to be easier and cheaper ways to mobilize America, like the threat of harm (always scarier than the harm itself), the possibility that its weapons aren't as 3rd world as their plumbing, or simply the idea that they were arab. In our circles, the arabs were always "soft sell". Instead, I went with the idea that a huge, yet shadowy organization, tied to no single country, with operations everywhere and operatives from anywhere. That way, we could justify going everywhere. At this, Casey turned beet red I thought his head was gonna fly off. But he kept his voice cool. "Mr. Rottenberg (and he didn't even put the accent on "rotten" like everybody else does) the point of covert operations of the sort you describe wouldn't give us the license to invade anywhere we liked, it would pretty much nail us to the wall unless we hit every country on the planet, and no matter what country we hit, there would always be some joker running around saying we'd hit the wrong one. We'd be tied down with our soldiers getting "Montezuma's Revenge" in **** holes no one cares about, and don't matter that much to our global interests. Where are the resources supposed to come from, Mr. Rottenberg. Oh that's right, the Soviets are gonna vanish. Okay, Soviets are gonna vanish, and we're gonna find ourselves with a ton of free troops and toys ready to go wherever we want them to. Oh, except that once those Soviets vanish, you're gonna have a ton of crazy congressman thinking that we can save money by cutting troop levels. Even if we turned this into some multi-national chase for guys with fake passports and wire cutters, nobody would be able to justify the spending needed to keep our forces to the same level we do today [again, this was during the cold war]. We could dredge up those horror stories about the "Islamic Bomb" but that wouldn't require the sort of mass-murder you suggest, and if we ever decided that we wanted (or needed) to concentrate our forces against any one nation, we'd be stuck, because we'd by then committed ourselves to a war against guys who aren't part of any nation." The problem with stateless organizations is that they aren't really all that stateless if they don't have the majority of the populace and the government in their pockets, they've got the right ministers ready to do their bidding and the craven remainder of the government who's afraid to question them. Yet, despite the camps, the refuge and the other forms of open and enthusiastic support, we dare not go against these sovereign backers of the stateless because the rest of the world claims them as innocent. Surprisingly, I agree. I'm big on the idea that not everybody must receive their punishment in this world a higher plane and a higher power are more effective for revealing sin and inflicting the just reward for it. Nevertheless, as Mr. Casey adroitly put it (now playing with the "rotten" to wild abandon) no idiot would dream up the idea of a stateless enemy if they could avoid it, when doing so would create a large, insulated class of terrorist sympathizers. It was impossible to shake him of this idea, especially since he was devoted to the idea that the Russians were forever. Year later, after the wall fell, and Casey fell, and 9/11 fell, I gave the CIA my goodbyes, and hoped to strike it rich in Hollywood like such famed Company vets as John Demme, David Lynch and both "Spikes" (Lee & Jonze). However, I was to find my dreams dashed by the men whose experience on "Hangar 18" I made a living hell. "Ad lib this, you stupid ****ing rotten-moron!!" Spielberg yelled. Now Steve is the main man in tinsel town and how do I go against that firepower. For the second time in my life, the conspirator has to wonder, how does he survive the conniving of others? Yeah you got me. The above is just a load of bull****. It turns out that I'm really the acting DDCI of the NSA. I'm the guy responsible for keeping you conspiracy theorists busy by releasing useless and meaningless documents with strategic redactions. Life is boring here in Area-51, and playing mind-tag with you guys is the only entertainment we get, aside from making alien babes take off their clothes and dancing for us, then dissecting them the morning after. The problem is that we all have our deep-dark secrets. Mine actually stemmed from my role is as the undisclosed producer for a movie called "Hangar 18" with Robert Vaughn. You may remember "Hangar 18" as that flick which made it uncool to believe in Alien conspiracies. It was actually intended to preempt a more plausible picture starring Roy Scheider and Gene Hackman, and make it so uncool that it would take decades before anybody could bring any semblance of respectability to the UFO-conspiracy community. Here's a quick flash for you "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" people out there yeah I know most of you were happy enough to Link Robert Vaughn to Christopher Lee ("Starship Invasions"), and Lee to Sean Astin (LotR) who was in "Whitewater Summer" with Bacon; It turns out that one of the alien corpses was actually none other than Mark Metcalf, that's right, Lt. Niedermayer himself from "Animal House". During the autopsy scene, one the scientists are supposed to get into this long philosophical discussion about the advanced alien species, and I was pretty lazy when it came to scripting this scene (I figured they could ad-lib there way through it) so it took forever to get. It was like on the 9th take, and Metcalf is starting to get really ****ed off. So this female scientist is saying something like "why have they crossed the gulf of space to set foot on our world?" What profound message have they brought for mankind?" (See why it took forever to shoot this scene? The cast and crew laughed themselves silly we were going to hire some telekenitics from Honduras so they could run the cameras without being in the same room, and also because they we didn't think they could laugh if they couldn't understand the dialog.) Anyway, brilliant-but-sensitive female scientist (who cried whenever the rest of us laughed at her) goes into her bit about the profound alien message thing, and Metcalf jumps off this slab-thing that he's on and goes totally postal (and this was before we even knew what the phrase meant). "YOU WANT A MESSAGE? YOU WANT A ****ING MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED ****ING CIVILIZATION!?!? HERE'S YOUR ****ING MESSAGE: YOU'RE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK!!! NOW DROP DOWN AND GIVE ME ****ING 20!!!" Anyway the female scientist is floored, and we're laughing so hard, we don't notice that she's having this total seizure right there in front of us. We found out years later that she got on "Dynasty" based on her ability to loser her mind, a talent we believe she perfected on our set. So I guess her story had a happy ending, until Dynasty was cancelled, the story was sad again. Anyway, the problem was that we couldn't come up with a good ending. Scientists find the aliens, and politicians don't want anything found. The ending had to be plausible enough so that UFO conspiracy theorists would think that they could convince Americans as to its truth, yet too stupid for anybody to really believe. Nobody thought it possible, and it turns out that it wasn't. What we didn't understand at the time, was that conspiracy theorists can believe/doubt anything they want. But we still wanted a good ending. So there I was, on the "red eye" Jennifer 737 out of Groom Lake, heading out to Vegas, hoping free drinks on the strip would loosen me up. I hadn't a case writer's block since I script doctored for Hal Holbrook in "Capricorn One" earlier that year. You know what the brilliance of "Capricorn One" was we hired Hal Holbrook. This guy could ad-lib in ****ing Shakespeare; he could out ad-lib Mamet, and this was before anybody even knew who Mamet was. Kris Kraft doesn't even give the guy a script just tells him what point he wants Holbrook to get across. Kraft asks him to give this speech to James Brolin and OJ Simpson about how tired America is of the space race, and that nobody thought the dream was worth the cost. We weren't expecting anything major, and Kraft didn't even stay on the set to watch it (he gave us some bull**** excuse joke about that he had to run and sabotage a Soviet launch man that Kraft was such a crack-up; Goldin was nowhere near as funny). So Holbrook gets the idea for this speech, and goes ballistic "The program costs too much? The ****ing program costs too much!?! **** you assholes you don't know what a dream costs!!" and he garnioshes it with this great anecdote about Apollo 17, how when they preempted a re-run of "Lucy" for the landing, people complained "I could understand if it was a new episode, but this was a re-run!!" Anyway, there I am on this flight nursing a Harley's Bristol Cream when I notice this guy across the aisle giving me the eye. Then I remembered that kid we brought in to add a dash of realism to the alien autopsy sequence for "Hangar-18". I hadn't even met the guy, but everybody knew Osama Bin Laden by reputation. Now, since it was my decision to bring the guy back from Afghanistan, I figured I owed the guy a well-done. Turns out the guy is fascinating. After Jennifer sets down, we spend the next 18 hours schmoozing at the airport bar. How cool was he? We had to be the only guys in Vegas paying for their own drinks that's how hard it was to get out of that bar. Then we come to my problem. At this, a moment of silence, then he looks off at this fully loaded Eastern 727 and asks me what would happen if that plane came down anything but softly, and anywhere but a runway. And I go that it would cause two things boom & yauch!! More to the point, why would an airplane just happen to "land" on Hangar-18? He shakes his head obviously I had missed the point. He reminds me that, engaging the Soviets, he studied the history of their hardware, and reminded me of the 1973 Paris air show, where the Tupolev SST disintegrated in the air, but not high enough to avoid killing anybody on the ground. The point is that people were killed on the ground because they were near a huge agglomeration of airplanes. He was surprised that stuff like this didn't happen more often. And it didn't have to be next to an airport just nearby. I don't remember if airlines had deregulated by then, but the point was that air traffic was expected to sky rocket in the next few years no matter how far away you were from an airport (even a moderately sized one) you'd have a dozen jumbos daisy-wheeling over your house. But even before then, Hangar-18 itself was on an air force base it was a ****ing hangar for crissakes (okay, so maybe Osama didn't say "crissakes", but the rest of what he said was err.. to that effect). So I get out of that bar and head on the next Jennifer flight out. Problem solved but I had to get out of Vegas, or the idea would just die. And Vegas could wait, I mean, the MGM Grand wasn't just going to ****ing vanish, was it? So there it was Robert Vaughn decides to destroy Hangar-18 by crashing an airplane into it. Airplanes crash all the time, and sometimes they even crash on airports says one of my characters. 1980 comes and goes, the film is a flop, The Scheider/Hackman movie never comes together, Spielberg totally re-writes "E.T." to omit more than the bare display of the government in action on UFO's (and any suggestion that it was covert). In other words, mission accomplished. A few years down the line, the Russians start dropping rulers like flies. Something big is in the offing, some of us even start to question whether the Soviets are gonna last to see the 75th anniversary of the revolution. Problem is that they talk tough and because of that, the administration starts talking about stripping civilian intel to pay for a six hundred ship fleet, and for a bunch of new wings of airplanes, some of which didn't even exist yet. Remembering my shmooze with OBL, I head out to Langley one day and give the boss what I know. The next war will rely on "unconventional warfare" by which I meant terrorism but enhanced. We already knew that terrorists liked to hijack planes, and that they also knew liked to drive semtex-loaded vans into things. We also knew that we could engineer a spectacular air disaster (we had that botched controlled crash of the Boeing 720 on film). So if hijackers liked to blow things up, why did they go to so much trouble to keep from blowing up airplanes they hijacked. Were they afraid that people would give in to their demands before they had a chance to blow up the planes? Were they afraid of losing a cause to fight for? Airline crews are like bank tellers both are (were) trained to be very cooperative in emergency situations. So why were hijackers so careful about the planes they hijacked? Simply combining the idea of a suicide hijack was part of that American impulse to synthesize and create the same spirit of invention that created high-concept movies and peanutbutter cups. Not to say that I thought it represented an American virtue to actually carry out the attack, onviously it was an evil thing to do. Only that it felt great that I could conceive such a thing possible, and perhaps forestall it. So I gave my pitch to Casey, and he was not enthused. He did give me the benefit of the doubt was this an attack that might be carried out against the Russians (by which he meant was this something we should do?) or a "canned goods" plan (by which he meant, an attack we'd carry out against ourselves and frame others for.)? I told him that I thought this was neither an attack that might actually be made against us by bona-fide enemies. Here he lost it what enemies? The Reds had 180 divisions against us, and god knew how many nuclear-equipped aircraft. Who would believe the Reds would do something like that when they've got firepower against us. I guessed that he was thinking I meant a simulated attack against us), so I reiterated that this would be a genuine attack, by genuine enemies, but he discounted this as well. In The Company, we broke the enemies down to several groups liberal media, the Soviets and their backers, and the so-called the "Maverick enzyme" (allies in name who would backstab us). Due to jurisdictional constraints, drug cartels were deliberately excluded.) There wasn't going to be an attack, simulated or actual. Terrorists liked to hit us on foreign soil, and let the media have its way with us at home (they had jurisdictional constraints of their own). The Russians don't need terrorism they've got 180 ****ing divisions. Man, I didn't know that an old guy could yell "****ing!!" like that, but Casey did no wonder he was DCI. The Russisns wouldn't need to hit us as long as they were as strong as they were, and that wouldn't change for a century. Even if, by some miracle, the WarPac just evaporated, who would hit us on our own soil? The last person who would try that would be some stateless organization (again, interpreting my plan as being one undertaken by us to frame others), and a third world country would never want to consider giving us the right to go in and completely kick their asses. We didn't even go into Cuba after Angola or Grenda. A major attack like the one I considered would be nuts for another country to undertake they had us by the balls wherever our flag flew (embassies, garrisons, ports), they'd never need to hit us on our soil. Even stateless organizations like ones we backed in Afghanistan kept things "far from home" (AFAIK, he was right on this one I couldn't think of a single op Bin Laden took on definite Russian or just plain Soviet soil). The disappearance of the Soviets wouldn't make it any more feasible or likely that such an op would go forward now we wouldn't have the Russians breathing down our necks. I tried playing a trump card by combining the two circumstances that Casey had considered in isolation what if the Soviets disappeared and we wanted to undertake such a mission to justify some US military ops. Casey looked at me long and hard, then he asked me against what sort of people we'd be framing for the mass murder of maybe a couple hundred Americans. I knew that we wouldn't be framing a single country there have to be easier and cheaper ways to mobilize America, like the threat of harm (always scarier than the harm itself), the possibility that its weapons aren't as 3rd world as their plumbing, or simply the idea that they were arab. In our circles, the arabs were always "soft sell". Instead, I went with the idea that a huge, yet shadowy organization, tied to no single country, with operations everywhere and operatives from anywhere. That way, we could justify going everywhere. At this, Casey turned beet red I thought his head was gonna fly off. But he kept his voice cool. "Mr. Rottenberg (and he didn't even put the accent on "rotten" like everybody else does) the point of covert operations of the sort you describe wouldn't give us the license to invade anywhere we liked, it would pretty much nail us to the wall unless we hit every country on the planet, and no matter what country we hit, there would always be some joker running around saying we'd hit the wrong one. We'd be tied down with our soldiers getting "Montezuma's Revenge" in **** holes no one cares about, and don't matter that much to our global interests. Where are the resources supposed to come from, Mr. Rottenberg. Oh that's right, the Soviets are gonna vanish. Okay, Soviets are gonna vanish, and we're gonna find ourselves with a ton of free troops and toys ready to go wherever we want them to. Oh, except that once those Soviets vanish, you're gonna have a ton of crazy congressman thinking that we can save money by cutting troop levels. Even if we turned this into some multi-national chase for guys with fake passports and wire cutters, nobody would be able to justify the spending needed to keep our forces to the same level we do today [again, this was during the cold war]. We could dredge up those horror stories about the "Islamic Bomb" but that wouldn't require the sort of mass-murder you suggest, and if we ever decided that we wanted (or needed) to concentrate our forces against any one nation, we'd be stuck, because we'd by then committed ourselves to a war against guys who aren't part of any nation." The problem with stateless organizations is that they aren't really all that stateless if they don't have the majority of the populace and the government in their pockets, they've got the right ministers ready to do their bidding and the craven remainder of the government who's afraid to question them. Yet, despite the camps, the refuge and the other forms of open and enthusiastic support, we dare not go against these sovereign backers of the stateless because the rest of the world claims them as innocent. Surprisingly, I agree. I'm big on the idea that not everybody must receive their punishment in this world a higher plane and a higher power are more effective for revealing sin and inflicting the just reward for it. Nevertheless, as Mr. Casey adroitly put it (now playing with the "rotten" to wild abandon) no idiot would dream up the idea of a stateless enemy if they could avoid it, when doing so would create a large, insulated class of terrorist sympathizers. It was impossible to shake him of this idea, especially since he was devoted to the idea that the Russians were forever. Year later, after the wall fell, and Casey fell, and 9/11 fell, I gave the CIA my goodbyes, and hoped to strike it rich in Hollywood like such famed Company vets as John Demme, David Lynch and both "Spikes" (Lee & Jonze). However, I was to find my dreams dashed by the men whose experience on "Hangar 18" I made a living hell. "Ad lib this, you stupid ****ing rotten-moron!!" Spielberg yelled. Now Steve is the main man in tinsel town and how do I go against that firepower. For the second time in my life, the conspirator has to wonder, how does he survive the conniving of others? "rottenberg" wrote in message om... ShoarmaBoy wrote in message . 34... This is true for normal military aircraft where they use it already. But i don't think this is going to be inserted in real life boeing 737NG's or other commercial airliners because this also is a system that can be hijacked. If they break into the control room. Also than you should be able to hack the system if it's a remote system to be able to be controled from the ground... Never thought of that? Tom (Boeing 737NG command officer) Let's not forget that it also requires fewer men - instead of breaking into three cockpits, you can break into one control room for three planes (and likly nore planes than that). That's the sort of logical gap that obviously eluded Blue, along with his devoted acceptance of conspiracy theories that at least border on libel. |
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ROFL...
You know this is going to wind up getting sent all over the internet as proof of the "conspiracy"... You ought to go ahead and send a copy to snopes.com so they can get ahead of the game! grin "rottenberg" wrote in message om... "Blue" wrote in message ... My, my. this thread just won't die! And now I have a hated adversary to boot. "Hated adversary" - isn't that a bit grandiose, I mean even compared to your prior conspiracy ravings? I guess then you can't pigeonhole those who disagree with you as a bunch of reactionaries looking for hated enemies. On topic, I have been on top of the World Trade Center and was surprised by the many planes in the air surrounding it. The planes would have to have been flown by a following plane. Also, the Pennslyvania plane was followed by an unmarked Gulfstream jet such as Cheney uses. This is so weird. I remember being on top of the WTC also once and also noticing lots of airplanes looking really close. Okay that was about 25 years ago. But then, in 1996-98 I was working at 40 Wall Street, only a few blocks away from WTC, and I saw what looked like a lot of low-flying planes again. I even saw one that looked exactly like one of the airplanes that flew into the towers - same two wings, two engines, even the exact same markings (silver body, red & blue stripes). WTF, if NYC wasn't close to a major commercial aviation corridor, I'd go completely bonkers!! Oh, and what do you mean that the "planes would have to have been flown by a following plane"? How do we know that the Pennsylvania plane was followed by a Gulfstream? And what difference does that make anyway? Speilberg is supposed to use a Gulfstream. Lots of rich types have Gulfstreams. Sid Lumet used a Gulfstream in "Sabrina" - now are we gonna blame Julia Ormond for 9/11? Also, when JFK took over the CIA presented him with a plan eerily like the one used for 911 including a plane switch of a CIA lookalike for a civilian plane which would be remotely flown over Cuba and destroyed there to incite American lemmings into supporting a war with little guy Cuba who had just kicked George Bush SR's ass with his hair-brained Bay of Pigs invasion . More theories? I'm not even sure what sense that makes - a plane exploding over Cuba to incite Americans? Why would a plane exploding over Cuba get Americans to support a war against Cuba? Maybe you meant to say a Cuban plane to fly past Cuba and explode in Miami. That's more plausible - but is there any proof or even any evidence that the CIA actually had such an idea? Even if they had, what does that really prove? The idea of crashing planes into buildings or ships or fabricating acts of military aggression isn't an original idea. I've been flying Cessnas on PCs since 1987, routinely trying to fly between the towers on MS Flight Simulator. Sometimes I did it right, sometimes I didn't. (although I stopped after 9/11) I now suppose you'll accuse me of working "for the company". In any event, the idea that we were waiting for the right spark and had to fake one is nonsense - when the Soviets missiled Cuba up in '62, the point was to prevent war at all costs, including an invasion of Cuba. JFK , crossed him up by refusing to support the mess. To the plan for a false downing of an American passenger jet he did the unthinkable, he sent RFK to the military chest beaters where he announced: " My big brother says for you guys to stick your kill Cuber plans up your asses." That's funny, I would have assumed that he'd send McNamara, the guy he actually kept around to run the military. There had been several of them. (or words to that effect.) The effect being to make RFK sound like a man who spoke English as a second langugae. I mean seriously.... The principal operator there, Bush Sr, not only didn't forgive that he was arrested on the RR overpass with the Rep "plumbers" and instantly released by the Texas mounted police. Then the false attack scenario was carried out by LBJ in 1964 with the Gulf Of Tonkin incident that everyone agrees was faked by him to get us into Viet Nam where JFK had just announced that ALL Americans would be removed from VN by xmas 1963. LBJ managed to kill some 55,000 innocent Americans there in a hopeless civil war intervention that had nothing to do with the spread of communism. So now it's LBJ? I thought it was the CIA or Bush Sr.? McNamara stood by LBJ when it came to pushing the Tonkin incident as one of preemptive attack by North VN, and near unanimity by a US congress sealed the deal. Where's the CIA? This is the problem I have with conspiracy theorists - basically a conspiracy theory gives you no tools to fight against the evil they purport to reveal - they only tell you who to hate and why. Arabs, Jews, Liberals, conservatives, LBJ, RFK etc. At least a decent conspiracy theorist can do a better job of it. I thought this was about the CIA, then against Bush - now its against another president, from the other party, who ran on a different agenda. Just who are you talking about here? LBJ tried it again in 1967 in "conspiracy" with our "allies" in Israel with the USS Liberty off the coast of Egypt which was to inflame Americans into supporting a war against Egypt. The attempt was a failure only because of the complete incompetancy of our "allies" in Israel who were simply unable to sink the unarmed and unarmored converted Liberty ship. Incompetency of the Israelis? Needed to inflame support for Israel? I must be an idiot - the Liberty incident has been one of the thorniest issues of Israeli-American relations, yet one the Israelis claimed to have carried out in fact. I've neevr seen any indication that they ever tried to fob the attack on the Egyptians. Perhaps they hit the Liberty because they feared the Americans would leak intel to the other side by accident (or deliberately as was done in the Iran-Iraq war). But a frame-up? Never. Even if the Israelis, (AFAIK, never took out a target like a ship) sunk the Liberty and convinced the world that the Isreali-marked planes and ships used in the attack were actually Egyptian - what would be the point? Israel wasn't South VN. LBJ didn't have to bottle up the Suez with carrier battle groups, or commit hundreds of thousands of troops. There was no need to manipulate world opinion, let alone American opinion that was desperate enough to risk the ire of American by killing Americans. For their faults, Israeli forces were not ARVN. It took little to drum up sympathy for one nation surrounded by Soviet aligned enemies, and the support the Israelis needed could have been done covertly - so why the idea of subterfuge, in a plan that could have wrecked Israel's standing with America and the rest of the world? And what sort of support would the Israelis have gotten had they pulled it off and shifted blame to the Egyptians (they have since accepted the blame, though to what degree is admittedly debateable, as is the sufficiency of redress)? The very next year saw the capture and brutal treatment of the crew of the Pueblo. @0 years later saw the attack against the Stark. Yet The Pueblos seizure saw no new war against DPRK, and relations with Iraq remained stable until the invasion of Kuwait, years after the Stark. And speaking of asses, Mr Rottenberg who has apparently been secretly tracking me as part of a conspiracy, would you like to add something here? I didn't say anything about asses. I think we can safely say that this thread has degenerated into... Oh ****, what the hell. Yeah - you got me. The above is just a load of bull****. It turns out that I'm really the acting DDCI of the NSA. I'm the guy responsible for keeping you conspiracy theorists busy by releasing useless and meaningless documents with strategic redactions. Life is boring here in Area-51, and playing mind-tag with you guys is the only entertainment we get, aside from making alien babes take off their clothes and dancing for us, then dissecting them the morning after. The problem is that we all have our deep-dark secrets. Mine actually stemmed from my role as the undisclosed producer for a movie called "Hangar 18" with Robert Vaughn. You may remember "Hangar 18" as that flick which made it uncool to believe in Alien conspiracies. It was actually intended to preempt a more plausible picture starring Roy Scheider and Gene Hackman, and make it so uncool that it would take decades before anybody could bring any semblance of respectability to the UFO-conspiracy community. Here's a quick flash for you "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" people out there - yeah I know most of you were happy enough to Link Robert Vaughn to Christopher Lee ("Starship Invasions"), and Lee to Sean Astin (LotR) who was in "Whitewater Summer" with Bacon; It turns out that one of the alien corpses was actually none other than Mark Metcalf, that's right, Lt. Niedermayer himself from "Animal House". During the autopsy scene, one the scientists are supposed to get into this long philosophical discussion about the advanced alien species, and I was pretty lazy when it came to scripting this scene (I figured they could ad-lib there way through it) so it took forever to get. It was like on the 9th take, and Metcalf is starting to get really ****ed off. So this female scientist is saying something like "why have they crossed the gulf of space to set foot on our world?" What profound message have they brought for mankind?" (See why it took forever to shoot this scene? The cast and crew laughed themselves silly - we were going to hire some telekenitics from Honduras so they could run the cameras without being in the same room, and also because they we didn't think they could laugh if they couldn't understand the dialog.) Anyway, brilliant-but-sensitive female scientist (who cried whenever the rest of us laughed at her) goes into her bit about the profound alien message thing, ans crews it up..again. I yell "cut" and Metcalf jumps off this slab-thing that he's on and goes totally postal (and this was before we even knew what that meant). "YOU WANT A MESSAGE? YOU WANT A ****ING MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED ****ING CIVILIZATION!?!? HERE'S YOUR ****ING MESSAGE: YOU'RE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK!!! NOW DROP DOWN AND GIVE ME ****ING 20!!!" Anyway the female scientist is floored, and we're laughing so hard, we don't notice that she's having this total break down right there in front of us. We found out years later that she got on "Dynasty" based on her ability to loser her mind, a talent we believe she perfected on our set. So I guess her story had a happy ending, until Dynasty was cancelled, the story was sad again. Anyway, the problem was that we couldn't come up with a good ending. Scientists find the aliens, and politicians don't want anything found. The ending had to be plausible enough so that UFO conspiracy theorists would think that they could convince Americans as to its truth, yet too stupid for anybody to really believe. Nobody thought it possible, and it turns out that it wasn't. What we didn't understand at the time, was that conspiracy theorists can believe/doubt anything they want. But we still wanted a good ending. So there I was, on the "red eye" Jennifer 737 out of Groom Lake, heading out to Vegas, hoping free drinks on the strip would loosen me up. I hadn't a case writer's block this bad since I script-doctored for Hal Holbrook in "Capricorn One" earlier that year. You know what the brilliance of "Capricorn One" was - we hired Hal Holbrook. This guy could ad-lib in ****ing Shakespeare; he could out ad-lib Mamet, and this was before anybody even knew who Mamet was. Kris Kraft doesn't even give the guy a script - just tells him what point he wants Holbrook to get across. Remember "Capricorn One" - it was this edgy movie about how Holbrook fakes this mission to mars that James Brolin, OJ and that guy from "Law & Order" were supposed to fly. Kraft asks him to give this speech to James Brolin and OJ Simpson about how tired America is of the space race, and that nobody thought the dream was worth the cost. We weren't expecting anything major, and Kraft didn't even stay on the set to watch it (he gave us some bull**** excuse joke about that he had to run and sabotage a Soviet launch - man that Kraft was such a crack-up; Goldin was nowhere near as funny; you ever wonder why the "Law & Order" guy is so much snappier in this movie than he is on that show? Kris Kraft!!). So Holbrook gets the idea for this speech, and goes ballistic. We think he's mad at us, but then we realize he;s in character, so we keep the cameras rolling. "The program costs too much? The ****ing program costs too much!?! **** you assholes - you don't know what a dream costs!!" and he garnishes it with this great anecdote about Apollo 17, how when networks preempted a re-run of "Lucy" for the -17 landing, people complained "I could understand if it was a new episode, but this was a re-run!!" Anyway, there I am on this Jennifer 737 nursing a Harley's Bristol Cream when I notice this guy across the aisle giving me the eye. Then I remembered that kid we brought in to add a dash of realism to the alien autopsy sequence for "Hangar-18" (here was a guy who knew what a blown apart bodylooked like on any planet; I think he was also a consultant on "Quincy"). I hadn't even met the guy, but everybody knew Osama Bin Laden by reputation. Now, since it was my decision to bring the guy back from Afghanistan, I figured I owed the guy a well-done. Turns out the guy is fascinating, and funny as hell. After Jennifer sets down, we spend the next 18 hours schmoozing at the airport bar. How cool was he? We had to be the only guys in Vegas paying for their own drinks - that's how hard it was to get out of that bar. Then we come to my problem. At this, a moment of silence, then he looks off at this fully loaded Eastern 727 and asks me what would happen if that plane came down anything but softly, and anywhere but a runway. And I go that it would cause two things - boom & yauch!! More to the point, why would an airplane just happen to "land" on Hangar-18? He shakes his head - obviously I had missed the point. He reminds me that, engaging the Soviets, he studied the history of their hardware, and reminded me of the 1973 Paris air show, where the Tupolev SST disintegrated in the air, but not high enough to avoid killing anybody on the ground. The point is that people were killed on the ground because they were near a huge agglomeration of airplanes. He was surprised that stuff like this didn't happen more often. And it didn't have to be next to an airport - just nearby. I don't remember if airlines had deregulated by then, but the point was that air traffic was expected to sky rocket in the next few years - no matter how far away you were from an airport (even a moderately sized one) - you'd have a dozen jumbos daisy-wheeling over your house. But even before then, Hangar-18 itself was on an air force base - it was a ****ing hangar for crissakes (okay, so maybe Osama didn't say "crissakes", but the rest of what he said was.err.. to that effect). So I get out of that bar and head on the next Jennifer flight out. Problem solved - but I had to get out of Vegas, or the idea would just die. And Vegas could wait, I mean, the MGM Grand wasn't just going to ****ing vanish, was it? So there it was - Robert Vaughn decides to destroy Hangar-18 by crashing an airplane into it. Airplanes crash all the time, and sometimes they even crash on airports - says one of my characters. 1980 comes and goes, the film is a flop, The Scheider/Hackman movie never comes together, Spielberg totally re-writes "E.T." to omit more than the bare display of the government in action on UFO's (and any suggestion that it was covert). In other words, mission accomplished. A few years down the line, the Russians start dropping rulers like flies. Something big is in the offing, some of us even start to question whether the Soviets are gonna last to see the 75th anniversary of the revolution. Problem is that they talk tough - and because of that, the administration starts talking about stripping civilian intel to pay for a six hundred ship fleet, and for a bunch of new wings of airplanes, some of which didn't even exist yet. Remembering my shmooze with OBL, I head out to Langley one day and give the boss what I know. The next war will rely on "unconventional warfare" - by which I meant terrorism but enhanced. We already knew that terrorists liked to hijack planes, and that they also knew liked to drive semtex-loaded vans into things. We also knew that we could engineer a spectacular air disaster (we had that botched controlled crash of the Boeing 720 on film). So if hijackers liked to blow things up, why did they go to so much trouble to keep from blowing up airplanes they hijacked. Were they afraid that people would give in to their demands before they had a chance to blow up the planes? Were they afraid of losing a cause to fight for? Airline crews are like bank tellers - both are (were) trained to be very cooperative in emergency situations. So why were hijackers so careful about the planes they hijacked? Simply combining the idea of a suicide hijack was part of that American impulse to synthesize and create - the same spirit of invention that created high-concept movies and peanutbutter cups. Not to say that I thought it represented an American virtue to actually carry out the attack, onviously it was an evil thing to do. Only that it felt great that I could conceive such a thing possible, and perhaps forestall it. So I gave my pitch to Casey, and he was not enthused. He did give me the benefit of the doubt - was this an attack that might be carried out against the Russians (by which he meant - was this something we should do?) or a "canned goods" plan (by which he meant, an attack we'd carry out against ourselves and frame others for.)? I told him that I thought this was neither - an attack that might actually be made against us by bona-fide enemies. Here he lost it - what enemies? The Reds had 180 divisions against us, and god knew how many nuclear-equipped aircraft. Who would believe the Reds would do something like that when they've got firepower against us. I guessed that he was thinking I meant a simulated attack against us), so I reiterated that this would be a genuine attack, by genuine enemies, but he discounted this as well. In The Company, we broke the enemies down to several groups - liberal media, the Soviets and their backers, and the so-called the "Maverick enzyme" (allies in name who would backstab us). Due to jurisdictional constraints, drug cartels were deliberately excluded.) There wasn't going to be an attack, simulated or actual. Terrorists liked to hit us on foreign soil, and let the media have its way with us at home (they had jurisdictional constraints of their own). The Russians don't need terrorism - they've got 180 ****ing divisions. Man, I didn't know that an old guy could yell "****ing!!" like that, but Casey did - no wonder he was DCI. The Russisns wouldn't need to hit us as long as they were as strong as they were, and that wouldn't change for a century. Even if, by some miracle, the WarPac just evaporated, who would hit us on our own soil? The last person who would try that would be some stateless organization (again, interpreting my plan as being one undertaken by us to frame others), and a third world country would never want to consider giving us the right to go in and completely kick their asses. We didn't even go into Cuba after Angola or Grenda. A major attack like the one I considered would be nuts for another country to undertake - they had us by the balls wherever our flag flew (embassies, garrisons, ports), they'd never need to hit us on our soil. Even stateless organizations like ones we backed in Afghanistan kept things "far from home" (AFAIK, he was right on this one - I couldn't think of a single op Bin Laden took on definite Russian or just plain Soviet soil). The disappearance of the Soviets wouldn't make it any more feasible or likely that such an op would go forward - now we wouldn't have the Russians breathing down our necks. I tried playing a trump card by combining the two circumstances that Casey had considered in isolation - what if the Soviets disappeared and we wanted to undertake such a mission to justify some US military ops. Casey looked at me long and hard, then he asked me against what sort of people we'd be framing for the mass murder of maybe a couple hundred Americans. I knew that we wouldn't be framing a single country - there have to be easier and cheaper ways to mobilize America, like the threat of harm (always scarier than the harm itself), the possibility that its weapons aren't as 3rd world as their plumbing, or simply the idea that they were arab. In our circles, the arabs were always "soft sell". Instead, I went with the idea that a huge, yet shadowy organization, tied to no single country, with operations everywhere and operatives from anywhere. That way, we could justify going everywhere. At this, Casey turned beet red - I thought his head was gonna fly off. But he kept his voice cool. "Mr. Rottenberg (and he didn't even put the accent on "rotten" like everybody else does) the point of covert operations of the sort you describe wouldn't give us the license to invade anywhere we liked, it would pretty much nail us to the wall unless we hit every country on the planet, and no matter what country we hit, there would always be some joker running around saying we'd hit the wrong one. We'd be tied down with our soldiers getting "Montezuma's Revenge" in **** holes no one cares about, and don't matter that much to our global interests. Where are the resources supposed to come from, Mr. Rottenberg. Oh that's right, the Soviets are gonna vanish. Okay, Soviets are gonna vanish, and we're gonna find ourselves with a ton of free troops and toys ready to go wherever we want them to. Oh, except that once those Soviets vanish, you're gonna have a ton of crazy congressman thinking that we can save money by cutting troop levels. Even if we turned this into some multi-national chase for guys with fake passports and wire cutters, nobody would be able to justify the spending needed to keep our forces to the same level we do today [again, this was during the cold war]. We could dredge up those horror stories about the "Islamic Bomb" but that wouldn't require the sort of mass-murder you suggest, and if we ever decided that we wanted (or needed) to concentrate our forces against any one nation, we'd be stuck, because we'd by then committed ourselves to a war against guys who aren't part of any nation." The problem with stateless organizations is that they aren't really all that stateless - if they don't have the majority of the populace and the government in their pockets, they've got the right ministers ready to do their bidding and the craven remainder of the government who's afraid to question them. Yet, despite the camps, the refuge and the other forms of open and enthusiastic support, we dare not go against these sovereign backers of the stateless because the rest of the world claims them as innocent. Surprisingly, I agree. I'm big on the idea that not everybody must receive their punishment in this world - a higher plane and a higher power are more effective for revealing sin and inflicting the just reward for it. Nevertheless, as Mr. Casey adroitly put it (now playing with the "rotten" to wild abandon) no idiot would dream up the idea of a stateless enemy if they could avoid it, when doing so would create a large, insulated class of terrorist sympathizers. It was impossible to shake him of this idea, especially since he was devoted to the idea that the Russians were forever. Year later, after the wall fell, and Casey fell, and 9/11 fell, I gave the CIA my goodbyes, and hoped to strike it rich in Hollywood like such famed Company vets as John Demme, David Lynch and both "Spikes" (Lee & Jonze). However, I was to find my dreams dashed by the men whose experience on "Hangar 18" I made a living hell. "Ad lib this, you stupid ****ing rotten-moron!!" Spielberg yelled. Now Steve is the main man in tinsel town - and how do I go against that firepower. For the second time in my life, the conspirator has to wonder, how does he survive the conniving of others? Yeah - you got me. The above is just a load of bull****. It turns out that I'm really the acting DDCI of the NSA. I'm the guy responsible for keeping you conspiracy theorists busy by releasing useless and meaningless documents with strategic redactions. Life is boring here in Area-51, and playing mind-tag with you guys is the only entertainment we get, aside from making alien babes take off their clothes and dancing for us, then dissecting them the morning after. The problem is that we all have our deep-dark secrets. Mine actually stemmed from my role is as the undisclosed producer for a movie called "Hangar 18" with Robert Vaughn. You may remember "Hangar 18" as that flick which made it uncool to believe in Alien conspiracies. It was actually intended to preempt a more plausible picture starring Roy Scheider and Gene Hackman, and make it so uncool that it would take decades before anybody could bring any semblance of respectability to the UFO-conspiracy community. Here's a quick flash for you "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" people out there - yeah I know most of you were happy enough to Link Robert Vaughn to Christopher Lee ("Starship Invasions"), and Lee to Sean Astin (LotR) who was in "Whitewater Summer" with Bacon; It turns out that one of the alien corpses was actually none other than Mark Metcalf, that's right, Lt. Niedermayer himself from "Animal House". During the autopsy scene, one the scientists are supposed to get into this long philosophical discussion about the advanced alien species, and I was pretty lazy when it came to scripting this scene (I figured they could ad-lib there way through it) so it took forever to get. It was like on the 9th take, and Metcalf is starting to get really ****ed off. So this female scientist is saying something like "why have they crossed the gulf of space to set foot on our world?" What profound message have they brought for mankind?" (See why it took forever to shoot this scene? The cast and crew laughed themselves silly - we were going to hire some telekenitics from Honduras so they could run the cameras without being in the same room, and also because they we didn't think they could laugh if they couldn't understand the dialog.) Anyway, brilliant-but-sensitive female scientist (who cried whenever the rest of us laughed at her) goes into her bit about the profound alien message thing, and Metcalf jumps off this slab-thing that he's on and goes totally postal (and this was before we even knew what the phrase meant). "YOU WANT A MESSAGE? YOU WANT A ****ING MESSAGE FROM AN ADVANCED ****ING CIVILIZATION!?!? HERE'S YOUR ****ING MESSAGE: YOU'RE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK!!! NOW DROP DOWN AND GIVE ME ****ING 20!!!" Anyway the female scientist is floored, and we're laughing so hard, we don't notice that she's having this total seizure right there in front of us. We found out years later that she got on "Dynasty" based on her ability to loser her mind, a talent we believe she perfected on our set. So I guess her story had a happy ending, until Dynasty was cancelled, the story was sad again. Anyway, the problem was that we couldn't come up with a good ending. Scientists find the aliens, and politicians don't want anything found. The ending had to be plausible enough so that UFO conspiracy theorists would think that they could convince Americans as to its truth, yet too stupid for anybody to really believe. Nobody thought it possible, and it turns out that it wasn't. What we didn't understand at the time, was that conspiracy theorists can believe/doubt anything they want. But we still wanted a good ending. So there I was, on the "red eye" Jennifer 737 out of Groom Lake, heading out to Vegas, hoping free drinks on the strip would loosen me up. I hadn't a case writer's block since I script doctored for Hal Holbrook in "Capricorn One" earlier that year. You know what the brilliance of "Capricorn One" was - we hired Hal Holbrook. This guy could ad-lib in ****ing Shakespeare; he could out ad-lib Mamet, and this was before anybody even knew who Mamet was. Kris Kraft doesn't even give the guy a script - just tells him what point he wants Holbrook to get across. Kraft asks him to give this speech to James Brolin and OJ Simpson about how tired America is of the space race, and that nobody thought the dream was worth the cost. We weren't expecting anything major, and Kraft didn't even stay on the set to watch it (he gave us some bull**** excuse joke about that he had to run and sabotage a Soviet launch - man that Kraft was such a crack-up; Goldin was nowhere near as funny). So Holbrook gets the idea for this speech, and goes ballistic - "The program costs too much? The ****ing program costs too much!?! **** you assholes - you don't know what a dream costs!!" and he garnioshes it with this great anecdote about Apollo 17, how when they preempted a re-run of "Lucy" for the landing, people complained "I could understand if it was a new episode, but this was a re-run!!" Anyway, there I am on this flight nursing a Harley's Bristol Cream when I notice this guy across the aisle giving me the eye. Then I remembered that kid we brought in to add a dash of realism to the alien autopsy sequence for "Hangar-18". I hadn't even met the guy, but everybody knew Osama Bin Laden by reputation. Now, since it was my decision to bring the guy back from Afghanistan, I figured I owed the guy a well-done. Turns out the guy is fascinating. After Jennifer sets down, we spend the next 18 hours schmoozing at the airport bar. How cool was he? We had to be the only guys in Vegas paying for their own drinks - that's how hard it was to get out of that bar. Then we come to my problem. At this, a moment of silence, then he looks off at this fully loaded Eastern 727 and asks me what would happen if that plane came down anything but softly, and anywhere but a runway. And I go that it would cause two things - boom & yauch!! More to the point, why would an airplane just happen to "land" on Hangar-18? He shakes his head - obviously I had missed the point. He reminds me that, engaging the Soviets, he studied the history of their hardware, and reminded me of the 1973 Paris air show, where the Tupolev SST disintegrated in the air, but not high enough to avoid killing anybody on the ground. The point is that people were killed on the ground because they were near a huge agglomeration of airplanes. He was surprised that stuff like this didn't happen more often. And it didn't have to be next to an airport - just nearby. I don't remember if airlines had deregulated by then, but the point was that air traffic was expected to sky rocket in the next few years - no matter how far away you were from an airport (even a moderately sized one) - you'd have a dozen jumbos daisy-wheeling over your house. But even before then, Hangar-18 itself was on an air force base - it was a ****ing hangar for crissakes (okay, so maybe Osama didn't say "crissakes", but the rest of what he said was.err.. to that effect). So I get out of that bar and head on the next Jennifer flight out. Problem solved - but I had to get out of Vegas, or the idea would just die. And Vegas could wait, I mean, the MGM Grand wasn't just going to ****ing vanish, was it? So there it was - Robert Vaughn decides to destroy Hangar-18 by crashing an airplane into it. Airplanes crash all the time, and sometimes they even crash on airports - says one of my characters. 1980 comes and goes, the film is a flop, The Scheider/Hackman movie never comes together, Spielberg totally re-writes "E.T." to omit more than the bare display of the government in action on UFO's (and any suggestion that it was covert). In other words, mission accomplished. A few years down the line, the Russians start dropping rulers like flies. Something big is in the offing, some of us even start to question whether the Soviets are gonna last to see the 75th anniversary of the revolution. Problem is that they talk tough - and because of that, the administration starts talking about stripping civilian intel to pay for a six hundred ship fleet, and for a bunch of new wings of airplanes, some of which didn't even exist yet. Remembering my shmooze with OBL, I head out to Langley one day and give the boss what I know. The next war will rely on "unconventional warfare" - by which I meant terrorism but enhanced. We already knew that terrorists liked to hijack planes, and that they also knew liked to drive semtex-loaded vans into things. We also knew that we could engineer a spectacular air disaster (we had that botched controlled crash of the Boeing 720 on film). So if hijackers liked to blow things up, why did they go to so much trouble to keep from blowing up airplanes they hijacked. Were they afraid that people would give in to their demands before they had a chance to blow up the planes? Were they afraid of losing a cause to fight for? Airline crews are like bank tellers - both are (were) trained to be very cooperative in emergency situations. So why were hijackers so careful about the planes they hijacked? Simply combining the idea of a suicide hijack was part of that American impulse to synthesize and create - the same spirit of invention that created high-concept movies and peanutbutter cups. Not to say that I thought it represented an American virtue to actually carry out the attack, onviously it was an evil thing to do. Only that it felt great that I could conceive such a thing possible, and perhaps forestall it. So I gave my pitch to Casey, and he was not enthused. He did give me the benefit of the doubt - was this an attack that might be carried out against the Russians (by which he meant - was this something we should do?) or a "canned goods" plan (by which he meant, an attack we'd carry out against ourselves and frame others for.)? I told him that I thought this was neither - an attack that might actually be made against us by bona-fide enemies. Here he lost it - what enemies? The Reds had 180 divisions against us, and god knew how many nuclear-equipped aircraft. Who would believe the Reds would do something like that when they've got firepower against us. I guessed that he was thinking I meant a simulated attack against us), so I reiterated that this would be a genuine attack, by genuine enemies, but he discounted this as well. In The Company, we broke the enemies down to several groups - liberal media, the Soviets and their backers, and the so-called the "Maverick enzyme" (allies in name who would backstab us). Due to jurisdictional constraints, drug cartels were deliberately excluded.) There wasn't going to be an attack, simulated or actual. Terrorists liked to hit us on foreign soil, and let the media have its way with us at home (they had jurisdictional constraints of their own). The Russians don't need terrorism - they've got 180 ****ing divisions. Man, I didn't know that an old guy could yell "****ing!!" like that, but Casey did - no wonder he was DCI. The Russisns wouldn't need to hit us as long as they were as strong as they were, and that wouldn't change for a century. Even if, by some miracle, the WarPac just evaporated, who would hit us on our own soil? The last person who would try that would be some stateless organization (again, interpreting my plan as being one undertaken by us to frame others), and a third world country would never want to consider giving us the right to go in and completely kick their asses. We didn't even go into Cuba after Angola or Grenda. A major attack like the one I considered would be nuts for another country to undertake - they had us by the balls wherever our flag flew (embassies, garrisons, ports), they'd never need to hit us on our soil. Even stateless organizations like ones we backed in Afghanistan kept things "far from home" (AFAIK, he was right on this one - I couldn't think of a single op Bin Laden took on definite Russian or just plain Soviet soil). The disappearance of the Soviets wouldn't make it any more feasible or likely that such an op would go forward - now we wouldn't have the Russians breathing down our necks. I tried playing a trump card by combining the two circumstances that Casey had considered in isolation - what if the Soviets disappeared and we wanted to undertake such a mission to justify some US military ops. Casey looked at me long and hard, then he asked me against what sort of people we'd be framing for the mass murder of maybe a couple hundred Americans. I knew that we wouldn't be framing a single country - there have to be easier and cheaper ways to mobilize America, like the threat of harm (always scarier than the harm itself), the possibility that its weapons aren't as 3rd world as their plumbing, or simply the idea that they were arab. In our circles, the arabs were always "soft sell". Instead, I went with the idea that a huge, yet shadowy organization, tied to no single country, with operations everywhere and operatives from anywhere. That way, we could justify going everywhere. At this, Casey turned beet red - I thought his head was gonna fly off. But he kept his voice cool. "Mr. Rottenberg (and he didn't even put the accent on "rotten" like everybody else does) the point of covert operations of the sort you describe wouldn't give us the license to invade anywhere we liked, it would pretty much nail us to the wall unless we hit every country on the planet, and no matter what country we hit, there would always be some joker running around saying we'd hit the wrong one. We'd be tied down with our soldiers getting "Montezuma's Revenge" in **** holes no one cares about, and don't matter that much to our global interests. Where are the resources supposed to come from, Mr. Rottenberg. Oh that's right, the Soviets are gonna vanish. Okay, Soviets are gonna vanish, and we're gonna find ourselves with a ton of free troops and toys ready to go wherever we want them to. Oh, except that once those Soviets vanish, you're gonna have a ton of crazy congressman thinking that we can save money by cutting troop levels. Even if we turned this into some multi-national chase for guys with fake passports and wire cutters, nobody would be able to justify the spending needed to keep our forces to the same level we do today [again, this was during the cold war]. We could dredge up those horror stories about the "Islamic Bomb" but that wouldn't require the sort of mass-murder you suggest, and if we ever decided that we wanted (or needed) to concentrate our forces against any one nation, we'd be stuck, because we'd by then committed ourselves to a war against guys who aren't part of any nation." The problem with stateless organizations is that they aren't really all that stateless - if they don't have the majority of the populace and the government in their pockets, they've got the right ministers ready to do their bidding and the craven remainder of the government who's afraid to question them. Yet, despite the camps, the refuge and the other forms of open and enthusiastic support, we dare not go against these sovereign backers of the stateless because the rest of the world claims them as innocent. Surprisingly, I agree. I'm big on the idea that not everybody must receive their punishment in this world - a higher plane and a higher power are more effective for revealing sin and inflicting the just reward for it. Nevertheless, as Mr. Casey adroitly put it (now playing with the "rotten" to wild abandon) no idiot would dream up the idea of a stateless enemy if they could avoid it, when doing so would create a large, insulated class of terrorist sympathizers. It was impossible to shake him of this idea, especially since he was devoted to the idea that the Russians were forever. Year later, after the wall fell, and Casey fell, and 9/11 fell, I gave the CIA my goodbyes, and hoped to strike it rich in Hollywood like such famed Company vets as John Demme, David Lynch and both "Spikes" (Lee & Jonze). However, I was to find my dreams dashed by the men whose experience on "Hangar 18" I made a living hell. "Ad lib this, you stupid ****ing rotten-moron!!" Spielberg yelled. Now Steve is the main man in tinsel town - and how do I go against that firepower. For the second time in my life, the conspirator has to wonder, how does he survive the conniving of others? "rottenberg" wrote in message om... ShoarmaBoy wrote in message . 34... This is true for normal military aircraft where they use it already. But i don't think this is going to be inserted in real life boeing 737NG's or other commercial airliners because this also is a system that can be hijacked. If they break into the control room. Also than you should be able to hack the system if it's a remote system to be able to be controled from the ground... Never thought of that? Tom (Boeing 737NG command officer) Let's not forget that it also requires fewer men - instead of breaking into three cockpits, you can break into one control room for three planes (and likly nore planes than that). That's the sort of logical gap that obviously eluded Blue, along with his devoted acceptance of conspiracy theories that at least border on libel. |
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