9/11/70 and 9/11/01

On September 6, 1970, several planes were hijacked ( El Al Flight 219, TWA Flight 74, Swissair Flight 100, Pan Am Flight 93, and BOAC Flight 775 ) and hundreds of hostages were taken. ( Video footage )

" TWA Flight 74 from Frankfurt am Main and Swissair Flight 100 from Zürich-Kloten Airport landed at Zerqa, also known as Dawson's Field, a remote desert airstrip in Jordan formerly used as a British Royal Air Force base.

The hijacking of El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam was foiled; hijacker Patrick Arguello was shot to death and his partner Leila Khaled was subdued and turned over to British authorities in London. Two hijackers prevented from joining the El Al flight instead hijacked Pan Am Flight 93, a Boeing 747, diverting the large plane to Beirut and then Cairo rather than the small Jordanian field.


A fifth plane, BOAC Flight 775 from Bahrain, was hijacked on September 9 by a PFLP sympathizer and brought to Dawson's Field in order to pressure the British to free Khaled. "

On September 7, 1970, the hijackers held a press conference for 60 members of the media who had made their way to what was being called "Revolution Airport." About 125 hostages were transferred to Amman, while the American, Israeli, Swiss, and West German citizens were held on the planes. Jewish passengers were also held. Passenger Rivke Berkowitz of New York, interviewed in 2006, recalled "the hijackers went around asking people their religion, and I said I was Jewish." Another Jewish hostage, 16-year-old Barbara Mensch, was told she was "a political prisoner."


Meanwhile, back at home, President Nixon had ordered a bombing.

" In the United States, President Richard Nixon met with his advisors on September 8 and ordered United States Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to bomb the PFLP positions in Jordan. Laird refused on the pretext that the weather was unfavorable, and the idea was dropped. "


The hostages were released on September 11, but planes were symbolically blown up on September 12.

" While the majority of the 310 hostages were transferred to Amman and freed on September 11, the PFLP segregated the flight crews and Jewish passengers, keeping 56 hostages in custody, and on September 12 they used explosives to destroy the empty planes in front of the international media. "


The events of September, 1970 are not only symbolic, but perhaps also symbolically analogous to the events of September 11, 2001.


" Today the commanders who planned and carried out the attack resist comparison to the terrorists who masterminded the events of September 11, 2001: members of the P.F.L.P. were not religious extremists, but secular Marxist Leninists. And of the almost 600 passengers taken hostage, none were killed. And yet more than three decades later, it is clear that a connection exists between the two seminal events, that September 6, 1970 gave birth to a new era of terrorism. "



The Rand Corporation has categorized terrorist attacks as such: tactical, strategic, symbolic and opportunistic. In other words, where there is a date frame of precise similarity and a tactic that involves hijacking, one might be inclined to conlude that an analog exists.

There was also an effort to stop the attack by those the hijackers referred to, rhetorically, as " imperialist agents. " Whether or not that may have exacerbated the situation tactically, is debatable. It may have led to hostages being taken. Of course there were also hostage crises in 1976 and 1979, the latter of which involved Americans and which occurred in the context of the Iranian Revolution. The hostages were later released to President Reagan within 48 hours of his assuming the Presidency in 1981. But the Iran-Contra scandal was still to come.



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The Richard M. Nixon Library Birthplace, Nixon Papers, 1970. Retrieved on 2006-05-05., PDF transcript "Statement announcing a program to deal with Airplane hijacking" September 11, 1970.