To Condi: July 1945: Aircraft hits Empire State Bldg; many dead

[grasswire]

New York Times, Sunday July 29, 1945

BOMBER HITS EMPIRE STATE BUILDING, SETTING IT AFIRE AT THE 79TH FLOOR; 13 DEAD, 26 HURT; WIDE AREA ROCKED.

"Horror-stricken occupants of the building, alarmed by the roar of the engines, ran to the windows just in time to see the plane loom out of the gray mists that swathed the upper floors of the world's tallest office building. The plane was banked at an angle of about 15 degrees as it swung in a curve out of the northeast.

It crashed with a terrifying impact midway along the north or Thirty-fourth Street wall of the building. Its wings were sheared off by the impact, but the motors and fuselage ripped a hole eighteeen feet wide and twenty feet high in the outer wall of the seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors of the structure.

Brilliant orange flames shot as high as the observatory on the eighty-sixth floor of the building, 1050 feet above Fifth Avenue, as the gasoline tanks of the plane exploded. For a moment watchers in the street below saw the tower clearly illumined by the glare. Then it disappeared again in gray murk and the smoke of the burning plane.

One of the plane's two motors hurtled clear across the seventy-eighth floor, tore a hole in the south wall of the building, and plummeted to the roof of the twelve-story office building at 10 West Thirty-thirs Street . . . a propeller was imbedded in the wall of the Empire STate Building, the other motor and part of the landing gear crashed into an elevator shaft . . . the steel girder at the seventy-ninth floor level was bent inward eighteen inches by the shock . . . cascading torrents of flaming gasoline poured through . . . ran down stairwells . . . "

Okay, okay. It was a U.S. plane -- a bomber -- trying to make a landing in murk. Not terrorism. But shouldn't this have been part of the background as far as civil precautions are concerned? I never knew it until today. Condi, planes can be crashed into buildings.

[HawkerHurricane]

1. Heck, I've known that for years...

the plane was a USAAF B-25 "Mitchell" medium bomber, made famous by the 'Dolittle Raid' on Tokyo in 1942. 5 of the dead were the aircraft's crew.

"We never dreamed that they would use aircraft as weapons." - Chester Nimitz, 1945, refering to the KamiKazes.

Admiral Nimitz had a excuse. Condi Rice did not.

[zaj]

2. I think this is more important...

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/22jul20041140/w...

On Page 275 of the 9/11 report:

There was substantial disagreement between Minneapolis agents and FBI headquarters as to what Moussaoui was planning to do. In one conversation between a Minneapolis supervisor and a headquarters agent, the latter complained that Minneapolis’s FISA request was couched in a manner intended to get people “spun up.”The supervisor replied that was precisely his intent. He said he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” The headquarters agent replied that this was not going to happen and that they did not know if Moussaoui was a terrorist.

[opihimoimoi]

3. This is what happens when amatuers are put into place just to

insert color the window dressing...Rice clearly was in over her head.

Simply put, the terrorists out thought the Bush Team in every way.

Or, the Bush Team were and still is ... a bunch of misfits posing as Leaders of this Nation.... and, like Rice, also in over their collective Heads. Team Bush is reduced to a Joke.

[whistle]

6. I agree to a certain extent that Condi Rice was over her head....

...but not because she is a person of color.

She was in over her head because she was another element on Bush's cabinet whose background was completely from the oil industry (executive board at Chevron) whose position was that of "Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, commonly referred to as the National Security Adviser". Her entire scholarly career was rendered totally obsolete when the Soviet Union disintegrated during the late 1980's and early 1990's <see link>.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/ricebio.html

I can not find anywhere on the internet where Dr. Condoleezza Rice endeavored to upgrade her expertise in foreign affairs to keep up with the changing world of the 21st Century. Like many other Americans, I believe the job she had qualified herself to do over a 30 year distinguished career in the acedemic world for national politics could have been outsourced overseas.

The person best suited as National Security Adviser to George W Bush should have been someone with fresh insights and understanding about what the real external and internal threats were to the security of the United States. Like so many other aspects of the job, George W Bush just really blew it as a competent leader who was able to pick the right people as his advisers so that he could implement a total vision for America. In contrast, John Kerry will make a great president in this regard.

[opihimoimoi]

8. YUP George W gave the World a good lesson in Leadership::::

How to appoint the Wrong People for the Wrong Job at the Wrong time/

BushCo Blew it. Team Bush Blew the Whole Enchalada.

Rice should go back to teaching or whatever....she did not do enough to stave off the terrorists and her excuses were Lame.

[fishface]

4. They already knew it because President Stupid was housed

on a ship at the Genoa summit in July of 2001 in response to a threat of a plane being used to attack them.

Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit
Plot: Officials there took seriously a report that terrorists would try to crash a plane to kill Bush and other leaders.

, From a Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON -- U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July that Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations, officials said Wednesday.

Italian officials took the reports seriously enough to prompt extraordinary precautions during the July summit of the Group of 8 nations, including closing the airspace over Genoa and stationing antiaircraft guns at the city's airport.

But a U.S. official said that American counter-terrorism experts considered the warning "unsubstantiated."

In either case, the reports suggest that Western governments were aware that terrorists might one day use a hijacked airplane as a suicide weapon--as they did Sept. 11 in attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The Genoa warning was disclosed last week by Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini. In remarks on a television talk show reported by the Italian news agency ANSA, Fini said: "Many people were ironic about the Italian secret services. But in fact they got the information that there was the possibility of an attack against the U.S. president using an airliner. That's why we closed the airspace and installed the missiles. Those who made cracks should now think a little."

An attack on the summit would have endangered not only President Bush, but also British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and others.

In an interview published Sept. 21 in the French newspaper Le Figaro, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said his government provided information to the United States about possible attacks on the Genoa summit by Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden. "There was a question of an airplane stuffed with explosives. As a result, precautions were taken."

White House aides refused to comment on the reports. "We just don't talk about security arrangements," spokeswoman Anna Perez said.

But a U.S. official outside the White House said the Genoa reports were received and discounted.

"There were some press reports citing what we subsequently determined was unsubstantiated information," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In any case, the possibility of suicide hijackings has been known to U.S. counter-terrorism officials for several years.

On Christmas Eve 1994, Algerian terrorists hijacked an Air France Airbus and planned to blow it up over the Eiffel Tower in Paris. French troops stormed the plane as it was refueling in Marseilles and killed the hijackers.

The hijackers' organization, the Armed Islamic Group, is now believed to be part of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

In 1996, a terrorist captured in Manila told Philippine police that Al Qaeda planned to hijack 11 U.S. airliners simultaneously and to fly a plane into CIA headquarters near Washington.

[Moderator]

7. fishface

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
copyrighted news source
and provide a link to
the source.


Thank you.

DU Moderator

[grasswire]

9. there is no link to the source.

I keyed in the text from a book. Typed it in by hand. I don't know how there could be a link to a story published in the NYT in 1945!

[grasswire]

10. and.....

I did only post four paragraphs.

[fishface]

13. My apologies..

I had the story but no link and I got carried away with trying to make President Stupid look..well.. stupid.. But on a happy note.. I've managed to get an honorable mention on a wingnutz cesspool website for starting to post here!! ( I seem to have pissed a bunch of them off and they've never gotten over it. ) LMAO

[ronabop]

5. Her imagination sucks...

... hence, the failure of imagination. Or of input. Or her possible hatred of Kurt Russel movies.

1981, "Escape from new york". Terrorists capture a large plane (Air force one, no less) and use it as a guided missle, and crash it into a New York skyscraper.

-Bop

[Wind Dancer]

11. More info on "lack of imagination"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[leftist.]

14. Exactly!

I fucking *believe* them when they say that they never imagined the threat. These douchebags are Lightweights, smart enough only to imagine a world where the US is King Of Oil!

I seriously bet the first thought that popped into their heads (and maybe what Bush was even thinking while he was crapping himself in that Kindergarten classroom) was 'How can we use this to our advantage?'.

Fuck "Condi" and the oil tanker she floated in on. I want my towers back.

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. Numerous times, Condi has admitted her ignorance

The irony of this is that she is supposed to be the head of US INTELLIGENCE. The NSA and her staff are supposed to be the ones who take all the information from all the other agencies and put the pieces together. Condi's main, number one job is to connect the dots. Yet, she can't even find time to read the briefs or her briefs. I guess she's too busy trying to keep W under control.