If you haven't noticed it already elsewhere, you should check out this list of twenty questions about 9/11 posed in the Philadelphia Daily News on Thursday.
Some of the questions focus on what the Bush Administration knew in advance of the attacks. One asks who was taking aggressive short positions against United Airlines' stock prior to the attacks. It never occurred to me before that, rather than being the terrorists, it could have been someone in or related to the U.S. intelligence community, trading on information that there would be a hijacking of a United airliner.
A disturbing theme that has come out recently, and which one of the questions addresses, is Pakistan's role in the attacks and in running al Qaeda generally. It may very well be that Pakistani intelligence officers were involved in planning the attack. That possibility is mind boggling, but rational given the politics of the country.
The questions also contain the crux of the theory that Bush was aided and abetted the attack. In addition to the signs that there was some U.S. government foreknowledge, Bush continued to read with some school children after finding out the attack was deliberate and NORAD failed to do anything meaningful to intercept the airliners. (Arguably, the question whether the hijackers had guns falls into this category, too - perhaps they had help from the U.S. getting weapons on board.) I find this theory a little too much, but it has some merit. Just because Bush knows it's a deliberate attack doesn't mean he should jump right up and run out of the room, necessarily. It takes time to get things together to move in a secure way from that point back to Air Force One, and so maybe he had to sit tight until his security detail was ready. On the other hand, if I were a Secret Service agent, and I knew terrorists were crashing planes into buildings, I would want the President moving. What did the Secret Service know and when did they know it?
On the NORAD angle, I think that's probably just institutional incompetence. The threat they are trained to meet is the foreign or unidentified aircraft crossing into our territory from outside, not the hijacking of a a domestic aircraft. This isn't the Battle of Britain, with pilots sleeping fully dressed waiting for someone to scream, "Scramble!" Air Force officers are just people, and you can't reasonably think they should have known that a hijacking would end as a suicide mission, and that they should be rocketing in the air to shoot down a U.S. passenger jet.
Overall, like many conspiracy theories, you need too many people to cooperate to make the conspiracy work. Intelligence officers of all stripes would have had to know and be in on the plot. Security people at the airports would have had to be clued in so as not to stop the hijackers. Then NORAD's chain of command would have to agree, too. It's just ludicrous to think that all those people could agree that the best thing to happen would be the deaths of potentially 50,000 people, and the destruction of the World Trade Center, Pentagon and the White House.
As a side note, I noticed again recently the idea floating around that a missile, not a jet, hit the Pentagon. This is "proved" by the fact that the security camera focusing on the impact point did not show the plane, just a fireball. Let me lay that one to rest right now. My oldest and dearest friend was an eyewitness to the Pentagon attack. She was driving to work in D.C. on the highway and watched the plane cross over the highway in front of her, hit and explode. She still has nightmares about the fireball. It really happened.
Recent Comments