Reply #25: "The first plane [...] could have been [...] anything"

[ljm2002]

No, it could not. The FAA already knew there were 3 other hijacked planes in the air. NORAD knew or should have known. Our military chain of command knew or should have known.

Rumsfeld had ordered in June that he (the Secretary of Defense) be the only person who could order jets scrambled to intercept hijacked airplanes. Then lo and behold, in the event, he is "unavailable". Mysteriously, he can't be reached by cell phone, even though he's just going through a normal morning in his usual place of work -- but no sirree, the Secretary of Defense just can't be reached when a national emergency is underway. Neither can Myers (head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) be reached. And gosh, no one can figure out how to contact the President, who is also the military Commander in Chief and the only person who can order shootdowns.

How hard is it to grasp: *you* or *I* might have assumed that the first plane was some random act, because *you* or *I* could not have known of the other hijackings. But we pay billions of dollars a year to maintain the world's largest most sophisticated military machine which is supposed to be able to defend us -- and what we got that morning was bureaucratic bungling to a degree that, if one were to put it in a novel, it would be rejected as implausible. And that's the *best* spin you can put on it... Some of us believe it goes deeper than that. But I'll be the first to acknowledge I have no way to prove my darker suspicions. Therefore I have to be content to point out mere criminal dereliction of duty -- which I think is already proven, in spades.