9/11 - a conspiracy?

It's been kind of quiet in Cosmos lately, therefore this topic :)

What really happened on 9/11?

Where 4 years ago you had hundreds of conspiracy theories (some involving the government, some involving aliens, and some involving genetically modified cows), today the "conspiracy theorists" are unified. The last one to publicly support those "conspiracy theories": Dr. Rober M. Bowman. Others include:

- Ralph Nader
- Edward L. Peck, former US Ambassador and Chief of Mission to Iraq, former Deputy Director to the White House Task Force on Terrorism
- Morton Goulder, Deputy Secretary for Intelligence and Warning under Nixon, Ford, and Carter
- Morgan Reynolds, Former Chief Economist under President Bush
- Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Sect. of Treasury under Pres. Reagan
- Cynthia McKinney, U.S. Congresswoman
- Philip J. Berg, Esquire, former deputy attorney general, Pennsylvania
- John Buchanan, author, candidate for the Republican Party Presidential nomination, 2004
- Michael Meacher, UK Minister of Environment (1997 - 2003)
- Catherine Austin Fitts, Ass. Sect. of Housing For President Bush
- Alexander von Bulow, former German Minister

There are hundreds more... Here are some of them - they are not what you would think "conspiracists" are like.

Anyway: some facts to get you started:

- The Register has a nice live article on what was going on that day: reports of up to eight hijacked airplanes.
EIGHT? Yes, at least. Why? Because the United States was carrying out wargames that day. No big deal? Maybe not... were it not that the scenario was "flying planes hijacked by terrorists into big buildings"... so on 9/11 you have 3 "real" hijacked planes, and a bunch of "fake" hijacked planes participating in wargames. Is that a coincidence? Who knows... It's convenient, though. Without the confusion of the wargames, all "real" hijacked planes would have been shot down ... but air traffic personnel didn't know what was going on... they thought it was all an exercise... until they watched a tower go down on CNN, of course. And even after seeing it, they couldn't tell which planes had been really hijacked, and which planes were part of the exercise...

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles...gamescover.htm - Alex Jones

http://www.prisonplanet.com/911.html for the entire collection of articles. Feel free to pick one of them and prove him wrong...

Enjoy! :D

You must be really bored.
:cool:

We will never know the whole truth...because even they don't know the whole truth...all we will ever know for sure is that three planes got hijacked, two went into the towers and one was taken by the passengers and forced to crash before reaching it's ' probable ' destination...
we don't even know who was really responsible...you could theorize it was perpetrated by anyone really...wouldn't be the first time people were sacrificed for the cause of going to war...unlikely, but still probable...
pearl harbor was claimed to been allowed to happened on purpose to draw America into the war...the theory is Churchill knew a week before it happened and chose not to warn the US...Bush senior was long suggested as the person behind the assasination of JFK when he worked for the CIA...
when i was a kid the schools taught an ice age destroyed the dinosaurs, now it's a meteor...Christopher Columbus discovered America, now he didn't...
the only thing we know for sure is that we are alive...






and that's still open for debate ;)

Eg ;)

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all we will ever know for sure is that three planes got hijacked, two went into the towers and one was taken by the passengers and forced to crash before reaching it's ' probable ' destination...

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How soon we forget...... and hence why history never seems to be "fixed"...

The Pentagon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi TS,

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How soon we forget...... and hence why history never seems to be "fixed"...

The Pentagon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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I remembered, but I forgot to include it :eek: :D

Eg ;)

You prove my point....

There were _four_ aircraft that day... not three.... The one you forgot hit the pentagon.... *SIGH*

Hi TS,

See edit above :D Sorry, it's 5am and I got to get up in two hours to get the kids ready for school...brains a little fuzzy :D Ignore previous post as the ramblings of lack of much needed sleep.

Eg ;)

sorry eg. The pearl harbour conspiracy was that Roosevelt knew but did noting about it. And as for the dinosaurs they died out in the cold spell following the metor strike. Also everyone knew that Christopher Columbus didn't discover America. They just needed someone to blame it on.
tigershark isn't that one part of the conspiracy? Did a plane hit the pentagon or not?
True things must be slow in Comos.

Hi Muracu,

Yes,,,the Roosevelt theory was another twist to the several theories out there...Roosevelt also secretly supported the war by shipping arms across Canadian borders prior to US involvement...and the cold spell you're refering to is another theory, the one the schools here were teaching last was that the meteor caused not a cold spell but caused a sun blackout of sorts that killed the food supply which resulted in the dinosaurs dying of starvation, the eventual resulting ice age apparently happened long after they were dead...and there was one school book i remember proposing the theory that the ancient sailing Phoeneions actually discovered America and those furs etc they always claimed came from Gaul was a code word for America, etc...

which supports my original contention...they don't know really know anything for a fact...history like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. ;) We start with a basic knowledge ( eg. the dinosaurs did exist ) and then everything else is theory/belief/supposition etc...packaged to appear as fact...until they change their mind and decide to propose different facts ;)

Eg ;)

Sooooo.... anybody got anything to say about the wargames that day? Shall we just write it off as a coincidence (the government's explanation)?

Personally

I have always believed there was some conspiracy behind the 911 attacks to give Bush a reason to increase the US presence in the middle east.

Its all about the oil...

MLF

If it was all about the oil we'd be drilling ANWAR already....

Hi Neg,

If you want to take the worst case senerio...Bush knew and let it happen so he'd have an excuse to invade Afghanistan to go after Bin Laden ( which was still very much a touchy and strategic area to Russians...their Cuba...American soldiers on their doorstep ), essentially he needed a ' really good excuse ' in order to get the Russians to back off and accept the invasion, anything less than a direct attack upon the US wouldn't do it...and when Bin Laden escaped he set his sights on Iraq.

Best of the worst case senerios...Bush, the CIA, the FBI, etc...are morons and had no clue what was about to transpire.

Eg ;)

EDIT: and sorry MLF but I agree with TS it wasn't about oil ( and re-construction )...although it has come to that now...the contracts have and are being bidded on...
it is about legacy...every President wants to leave a legacy...something big and dramatic like the fall of the wall...Bin Laden was supposed to be it for Bush, the capture and conviction/death of the infamous terrorist...he settled for Saddam.

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Bin Laden was supposed to be it for Bush.

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This is another thing that makes me laff my ass off... Everyone makes like finding Bin Laden should be easy. But they don't stop and think that he is an unknown place, in a foreign country, in probably some of the most inhospitable terrain around, surrounded for many miles by people who support him and hate the west, people that also hate their own national government etc. etc. etc.

Then let's look at another terrorist manhunt... The Atlanta Olympic Games bomber... Hmmm... He was in the USA... He was in North Carolina... We knew which county he was in... The locals were "friendly", The locals didn't hate their government any more than anyone else in the country... Yet it took seven years to catch him....

Ohhhh Yeah... Getting OBL should be a piece of cake..... :rolleyes:

TS,

That's my point...if it was easy it wouldn't leave much of a legacy would it ? !

Eg ;)

If I were OBL I'd be living in a hotel within eyeshot of the white house watching CNN...it's the last place they'd look. ;)

He still has a couple of years....

Go George, Go George, Go George....

Can you imagine the look on the faces of the damn libs if we do capture him... I wouldn't get off the floor for a week!!!!! :D

Thanks, eg. Those two scenario's are exactly what Alex Jones and thousands of others have been researching for the last 4.5 years. The "official" research was "concluded" with the 9/11 report - Jones, who spent 50 times more time and money on his research than the "official" team, time after time comes to the conclusion that the government (or at least some people within the government) must have known what was about to happen and let it happen (maybe even facilitated the happenings).
Any other day, those planes would have been shot down before they could even point their nose towards the WTC towers... but not on 9/11.

That leaves Clinton with the "dress"..... :D

Well I would bet dollars to donuts that our friendly "ally" Pakistan do indeed know where this pike hangs out, if you think Pakistan is all about bending over backwards to help out the unbeliever's, well that's another conspiracy theory..

As for 9/11, I think unfortuantely it was a comedy of errors (bad choice of words I know), the average joe, does not know what goes into the planning of major exercises, it is a huge undertaking, and involves thousands of personnell, the fact that the CIA and the FBI were involved doesn't surprise me either, as most of this exercise was about counter terrorism. They have all sorts of future scenarios on the drawing board and what is entailed to counter them.

As for a conspiracy, I cannot believe so many people involved would be able to keep their mouths shut for this long if that was the case, because there are so many book deals on the horizon or a job like what Ollie North has, nobody is a crook anymore fur christ's sake....

The fact that the US dropped the ball on the 2nd and 3rd plane is shameful to say the least, after the 1st one went into the Tower, everyone should have been scrambled.

And speaking of terrorists, and hunting them down, I believe the FBI knew about McVeigh long before he blew up that building in Oklahoma, they used to hang out with these militia's for crying out loud, who weren't afraid to show their "Anti Gov't" stance...

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Any other day, those planes would have been shot down before they could even point their nose towards the WTC towers... but not on 9/11

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They might be post 9/11 but not pre... Pre 9/11 CAP's, (Combat Air Patrols), were rarely sufficient to cover the entire USA and were often unarmed. They were simply there as a prescense because any aircraft being approached by the would comply with any orders given... Now they are armed and dangerous.

Another thing people haven't really had reported to them since the day of 9/11 _but_ that was reported that day and has been dropped ever since is the little remembered fact that the wreckage of flight 93 was spread along a 10-20 mile track... Pieces were found in a lake miles from the "impact" point. I said that day and I'll stick to my story that the biggest cover up on that day and since is the fact that they shot it down. But they decided that since there was evidence that the passengers were going to try to take the plane back it was politically expedient to make heros out of the passengers and to not mention the fact that the aircraft was, in fact, shot down. A wreckage pattern that runs along a long track is indicative of the fact that the aircraft was breaking up in the air... The story we get is that it was flown into the ground... Inconsistent with the original reporting and an easy thing to just "drop" for the "good" of all involved.

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Any other day, those planes would have been shot down before they could even point their nose towards the WTC towers... but not on 9/11.

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Any plane, especially commercial liners, flying that low and off-course should have been shot down well before they ever got there...these were not large 900 seat commercial airliners...( factitious> ) a police chopper and a M-16 probably could have taken them down.

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TigerShark
They might be post 9/11 but not pre... Pre 9/11 CAP's, (Combat Air Patrols), were rarely sufficient to cover the entire USA and were often unarmed. They were simply there as a prescense because any aircraft being approached by the would comply with any orders given... Now they are armed and dangerous.

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Check out this article. The calculations are particularly interesting.

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They might be post 9/11 but not pre... Pre 9/11 CAP's, (Combat Air Patrols), were rarely sufficient to cover the entire USA and were often unarmed. They were simply there as a prescense because any aircraft being approached by the would comply with any orders given... Now they are armed and dangerous.

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Quite so, the UK certainly wasn't geared up for it.

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Any plane, especially commercial liners, flying that low and off-course should have been shot down well before they ever got there...these were not large 900 seat commercial airliners...a helicopter and a M-16 probably could have taken them down.

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Not really, they are still quite large and capable of 500Mph, which is way more than a helicopter. Anyway you have several problems.

Shoot an airliner down over a major city and you just move the nasty accident to a different spot marked "X" It then becomes an act of government rather than an act of terrorism..............that is a lose/lose situation.

Initially, your suspicion would be that the aircraft was in some sort of catastrophic trouble so you would tend to stay clear.

If you have a variety of "fake" radar targets in all sorts of strange places, these "real" aircraft could easily pass unnoticed. The idea of an exercise is realism, so nobody in a position to do anything probably knew what was going on, until it was far too late.

Again, it is not standard practice to carry out military intercept exercises over built up areas in peacetime. It is too dangerous.

Also, we knew about Bali, we knew about Madrid and we knew about London. Problem was we didn't know exactly what and by whom, and without that information you can't really do very much about it?...............we couldn't stop the bombings.

:)

If there's one thing we've learned about governments over the years is that they are capable of anything...and equally adept at covering it up....or...equally adept at mudding the waters enough with inconsistant information that only theories can survive...

for the good of the public...of course :D

I prefer to believe the latter theory that they are morons and messed up...because the alternative is so twisted ( like when they infected towns with syphilis to study the effects ) that it is beyond reasonable comprehension.

Eg ;)

EDIT: All good points nihil! but I was being a little tongue-in-cheek about the helicopter :D

Oh Neg....

I won't bother to point out how many times the author uses the phrase "We assume"... If the article is based on so many assumptions then it can hardly be seen as anything other than a "conspiracy" type article which is kind of confirmed by the final paragraph.

The author also shows a distinct lack of understanding of aircraft operation and capabilities. (Remember, I was aircrew... So I can see quite a few flaws in his "calculations").

Some facts:-

1. In peacetime aircraft are maintained on an alert status. This means the aircraft is sat in a hangar, often as much as a mile from the end of the active runway, with the pilot in the ready room. The aircraft will be hooked up to ground power and possibly ground hydraulics and the pilot will have completed all pre-start checks and the systems will be ready for immediate start.

2. There is an immediate readiness stance for interceptors but this is only used in wartime and the aircraft are still in the hanger or in a holding area and the only difference is that the pilot is in the cockpit and the aircraft might be closer to the active runway.

3. The act of "scrambling" an aircraft on alert is the actual act of ordering it to take off. It is not the moment of take off.

4. Upon receiving the "scramble" the pilot is required to complete dressing, (helmet, tighten web straps and other pieces of equipment), and get to the aircraft. Add 1 minute or more. A single jet engine takes over a minute to bring up to idle speed. A pair can take as long as two minutes. F-15's have a pair of engines. Add 30 seconds for post start checks. Add another couple of minutes for ground taxi to the end of the active runway. Add 30 seconds for pre-takeoff checks... Those minutes are adding up already aren't they.

5. Aircraft take off into the wind and fly a partial circuit if they have to vector in the opposite direction. The faster the aircraft the longer that circuit becomes. The longer the circuit the more time it takes to come onto heading.

6. Aircraft set to intercept do not intercept at ground or low level. They climb to give them an altitude advantage. As fast as fighters are they aren't very fast in a climb. In fact there is only one military aircraft ever that has been able to climb rapidly at the speed of sound, (the English Electric Lightning which could do Mach 1.0 vertically but is now out of service). F-15's are very large aircraft and are not really very fast in a climb. Add two or three minutes to get to cruising altitude.

7. There are things called "Avoid Areas". Depending upon the nature of the object being avoided they may be utterly madatory, (Nuclear power stations etc), which means that a direct track to target may be impossible.

8. Your article states that the F-15's were 70 miles out. They would already be seeing numerous potential targets on their long range radars and would be slowing down and attempting to identify the precise target amongst the numerous targets they can see. You don't go flying in to a civilian airliner intercept at mach 1.5 and just lose off a couple of heat seekers. They have very specific procedure for target identification and a series of steps they would have to carry out before _asking for permission_ to even arm their weapons.

9. Had they been on target in time those procedures, requiring high level permission from NORAD to take the shot, would have almost certainly meant that the airliners would have hit their target anyway. They certainly would have done almost as much damage if they were shot down over central New York City.

See... It's real easy for the author to write an article with utter ignorance for the things that must take place to get military jets into the sky and vectored to target. It's even easier when he is writing for an audience that is similarly blissfully unaware of the procedures and issues. While it might seem all very plausible to his audience his assumptions do not stand up under scrutiny.

As to NORAD _not_ "explaining" themselves... That would kind of tell the whole world where the weak point is wouldn't it... Thus future terrorist operations can be based around the timings involved to help ensure success.

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I prefer to believe the latter theory that they are morons and messed up.

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Yes I am inclined to blame incompetence and lack of communication.

I do not see any discrepancy in it taking 15 minutes between air traffic controllers warning eachother and someone letting the Air Force know. The controllers' first job is to stop aircraft bashing into eachother..............you then have to wait for someone more senior to pass the information on to the military.

The speed is exactly what I would expect over a populated area at 1000ft or less, unless you want to break every pane of glass in the neighbourhood with the sonic boom. :eek:

Anyway, air combat takes place at slower speeds..................at Mach 1.5 the things would tend to go a considerable distance in a straight line.......................not what you want when intercepting an airliner.

Errr, you can shoot them down with a helicopter, but you need a good approach to make up for the chopper's much slower speed. The air to air missiles will do 3,500Mph or so..............you just have to get the shot in.

;)

What about the possibility that the terrorist's intel was better then the CIA's or FBI's and thanks to an agent or turncoat, knew the planning stages for these exercises and used that date to make their move, knowing that with all of the confusion, the information being passed back and forth would be corrupted, let's face it, this all started after the Iran/Contra crap, when Billy Boy hamstrung the CIA, and cut their budgets to just about coffee and donuts.

The CIA had no one on the ground, during these years that were able to infiltrate these organisations (Taliban), after aiding Osama in his little war with the ruskies, the CIA were pulled out, so in essence they lost track of OBL. After all Bill had the opportunity to catch/kill this idiot and let him slip.


Also because of the petty little politics each organisation plays, no one talks to each other??? why?? you have the DEA, ATF, FBI, CIA and NSA all basically doing the same thing, you have the FBI in foreign countries keeping tabs on undesireables as well as the CIA, also the DEA are involved with foreign countries in the fight against drugs, arn't they having a problem now in Afghanistan with the poppies, too much bureaucracy....too much red tape....too much FUD....

Like nihil say's incompetance and a lack of communication.....

Tiger...

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1. In peacetime aircraft are maintained on an alert status. This means the aircraft is sat in a hangar, often as much as a mile from the end of the active runway, with the pilot in the ready room. The aircraft will be hooked up to ground power and possibly ground hydraulics and the pilot will have completed all pre-start checks and the systems will be ready for immediate start.

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I won't argue with that. Fact is that they got the word at 8.46 AM and they TOOK OFF at 8.52 AM. It's not about those six minutes, it's about what happened AFTER 8.52 AM.

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2. There is an immediate readiness stance for interceptors but this is only used in wartime and the aircraft are still in the hanger or in a holding area and the only difference is that the pilot is in the cockpit and the aircraft might be closer to the active runway.

3. The act of "scrambling" an aircraft on alert is the actual act of ordering it to take off. It is not the moment of take off.

4. Upon receiving the "scramble" the pilot is required to complete dressing, (helmet, tighten web straps and other pieces of equipment), and get to the aircraft. Add 1 minute or more. A single jet engine takes over a minute to bring up to idle speed. A pair can take as long as two minutes. F-15's have a pair of engines. Add 30 seconds for post start checks. Add another couple of minutes for ground taxi to the end of the active runway. Add 30 seconds for pre-takeoff checks... Those minutes are adding up already aren't they.

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Did you miss the part that said they TOOK OFF at 8.52 AM? I really don't care how long it takes for them to get ready (but apparently it was 6 minutes). They TOOK OFF at 8.52 AM.

They had 10 minutes to fly, and General Myers said they were flying at 1.5Mach. If that would have been true, they would have gotten there ahead of the hijacked planes - simple as that. They took 10 minutes, though, to fly a mere 80 or so miles... a Cessna can do that.

The sad reality of all of this, is we won't see most if any of these documents for at least 50yrs, and they can be extended, depending on National Interests, so if most of what NORAD was doing on that day is classified, then we won't see the paperwork or transmissions/transcripts, unless they somehow get leaked out.(for the right amount of green).

LOL...

You're just going to ignore points 5 through 9 then... They don't count? Your article utterly disregards time to climb and makes it's calculations linearly. Your article assumes a direct track can be flown. Your article assumes that the aircraft will travel at mach 1.5 all the way to the target. Your article makes a bunch of assumptions that I refute in those points... But that wouldn't make the article as good a read would it? :p

Some Cessna!

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They took 10 minutes, though, to fly a mere 80 or so miles... a Cessna can do that.

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That is about 480Mph :)

An Air Force general?..................how would he know at what speed they were travelling...........you would be lucky if he knew when it was raining :D

Does the expression "3,000+ people killled OMG, my boys must have been doing Mach 1.5" sound plausible?

We were not at war, so I am pretty sure the guys would have followed regulations?

General Arnold testified that Colonel Duffy (one of the F-15 pilots) "elected to hit the afterburner and to speed up his way towards New York" at around 8.57 AM (5 minutes after he took off). He only did so because Arnold was watching CNN and saw the footage of the plane crashing into the first tower. Why not earlier? They had gotten a call from the FAA 10 minutes before that - why did Duffy wait to turn on his afterburner until they watched CNN?)... When the second crash occured (at 9.02) he was still 8 minutes away according to Arnold - We know that Duffy flew at Mach 1.5 for roughly 5 minutes (from 8.57 when he hit the afterburner until 9.02 when the second crash occured), in a straight line to New York. 1,000 MPH for 5 minutes = 83 miles. In 8 minutes (Arnold said he was 8 minutes away), at 1,000 MPH, you can fly 133 miles. 133 miles + 83 miles = 216 miles, which is 70 miles MORE than the distance from Otis to the WTC towers. Where did that 70 miles go?

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Afterburner – A device in the back of high-performance jet engines that injects fuel into the hot exhaust. The resulting explosive burn greatly increases the thrust the engine creates, but uses very large amounts of fuel. Even modern fighters like the F-15 and F-16 can only carry enough fuel to go at maximum afterburner for a few minutes. The T-38 can only fly at full afterburner for about a minute, so discipline and fuel usage awareness are paramount to the military pilot.

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Duh... More energy out = more energy in....

This _is_ rocket science you know... :D

And how much does one of those jets cost? They should just give the air force bicycles... or zeppelins... Obviously, those million-dollar jets are of no use. Give every pilot a Cannondale and a rocket launcher, and the air force would be more effective than it was back then... and probably still is.

Ok... Let's run with your idea of how it should have been done....

According to you he should have taken off on full afterburner and vector to target at full afterburner passing by the target at mach 1.5 losing off all his missiles as he goes. The result would be a large aicraft packed with fuel crashing in central New York City killing quite a lot of people.....

But the by-product would be a second very large aircraft, (go stand by an F-15 Eagle), coming down somewhere in built up New Jersey and doing a whole bunch more damage. The pilot may never be able to fly again after ejection because pilots are only allowed 2, (I believe though it may be three), ejections in their career _or_ if they lose 1/2" in height due to the compression of the spine.

Neg. In war the military has pretty much free reign to do as it pleases and it does so. In peacetime the regulations that aircrew sign as having read _every_ month, and are therefore expected to abide by, are huge. I used to have to sign for GASO's, (Group Air Staff Orders), which was a three inch thick book, Wing Standing Orders, (another 1 1/2"), Station Standing Orders, (1" thick), Squadron Standing Orders, (1/2" thick), Avoid Areas, (they had to be checked and updated on the maps for location, diameter and altitude and there were several hundred in southern England), Engineering Standing Orders and a bunch of other crap I can't remember. These were signed for _monthly_ as having been read and understood. Screw up and the first thing they did was check your signature and start asking questions about the regulations as the pertain to what you screwed up. Many a promising career has been brought to a premature conclusion due to an insignificant error that was compounded by a lack of knowledge of the pertaining regulations.

Yes, these are very expensive, highly technical "toys"... Hell, my crappy helicopter was worth about 2 million pounds, these baby go for many millions more than that depending upon model/role. But they have limitations. The most obvious of which is the amount of fuel they can carry and the rate at which you can use it and still land back at base with the required minimum fuel remaining in your tanks.

It's not all as simple as getting into your car and driving to MacDonalds....

Okay what was that conspiracy thing again......? oh yeah something about how the Ark was sunk by U754 during the first Biblical War, and it was supposed to be carrying the lost gold of the incas, was that it, I couldn't tell what with all of the areonautical stuff going on...posit: if the planes were carrying armed conventional nukes, would shooting them down have made any difference.

Too much information to process, for these jocks, even if they were to scramble in time, the intelligence was too faulty to give them a clear idea as to what the target should be, so trying to pin it down to mere minutes as a sunday afternoon couch quarterback is mute.

Have any of you with the exception of TS and nihil been in an environment where all hell is breaking loose and no one knows who is giving what order's to who, it's bedlam, and as I see it, with all of the different agencies being involved, you have a recipe for disaster, one of the reasons they hold these sort of exercises, to iron out the problems, to streamline chain of command type functions.

I still believe it was all a mass confusion I cannot believe the administration would willingly allow this to occur, I mean for one thing if I were President of the US and my aides told me of this, or my chiefs of staff had told me this exercise was in the works (which I am sure dubya knew about the exercise) then I sure as sh*t would not allow myself to be filmed in public on the morning it was happening, say in an elementary school, I mean dubya is dumb, but he aint that dumb... ;)

You know. I was watching the news live on 9/11. Even on the radio, I heard a total of 8 aircrafts were hijacked. Some international and some local. This could explain why our military jets were heading in wrong directions. Remember the transponders were off. You have 4-8 aircraft with hostages...gotta bargain.

An F-15A...................Some National Air Guard dinosaur from 1972? :D

I don't think that we were dealing with "Top Gun" candidates here?

If you want to check them out try here: http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/f-15.htm

We (RAF) only use regular pilots for this sort of job. We even have a squadron in the republic of Eire ;)

I don't know who's right and who's wrong.

What I do know is that there were screw ups. Do I, who despise Bush and think he's the worst president in history, actually think that he "let" this happen? No. What I think is that he inherited a system full of flaws where none of the government agencies talked to each other, and no one knew what was happening. I think it's possible that no one had any real idea what was going on, including the pilots who were scrambled that morning. I think that even having the little bit of information that was known at the time fed to them, they probably didn't actually believe what happened was going to happen...who would? The pilots that day had never been involved in a direct attack on the US. I was watching it happen on TV, and I didn't believe what I was seeing. Add to that the fact that they knew whatever it was that was happening involved aircraft full of American citizens, and I'm sure there was some hemming and hawing over what to do. It's so easy to forget that before 9/11, none of us could even conceive of 9/11. We think of things the way they are now, we feel like none of this should have been able to happen, that the military must have screwed up, the government must have screwed up...yes, all of that probably did happen. But what none of the conspiracists seem to consider is that it could have been plain simple human error. It wasn't a big conspiracy, it was fear, and compassion for the people on the planes, and confusion, and miscommunication.

That's what I believe, and until it's proven otherwise, I refuse to believe that Americans let this happen to other Americans intentionally.

People also forgot this. Before 9/11...people were questioning the effective roles of the CIA and FBI. Back then they couldn't track a janitor going through their offices. Also before Bush picked on Muslims for failures, Bush raid every airport to deport immigrants. Ironic how this resurfaces when Bush and his buddies are being spied on with the same laws they attempting to cram you with. Don't forget about bombs placed in transport buses and offices that never exploded.

Only reason why we are still fighting terrorism instead of picking on Iran and North Korea was because we needed an ememy we could 0wn. Interesting that the reporters were in the right spot and distance when shock&awe was broadcast on national tv. The enemy took care of that hotel later on. Ironic that our spies never knew Iran was cocky because they have technology that can spot a stealth aircraft when we thought our slht didn't stink. Now they have torpedoes and missles that can sink everything our Navy has. Sure you can deploy fuel guzzling jets to take them out but remember Iran is also hinting on using suicide bombers. In those countries, outsiders and political prisoners would love a chance to regain their honor to reunite with the finest in the country.

They are not going to kill Saddam and or his buddies until the truth behind the invasion surfaces with facts. This is why he can bad mouth a judge and the judge quits. You try to do the same, they would had lethal injected to you to death.

Hi debs,

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That's what I believe, and until it's proven otherwise, I refuse to believe that Americans let this happen to other Americans intentionally.

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We all wish that, and hope that was the case...as I said the alternative is worse ;)

But the fact remains history has bore out that governments do commit heinous unconscienceable crimes on their own people and American governments are not an exception.

Eg ;)