Reply #54: From The Layout Of The System, Sir

[The Magistrate]

It does seem a pretty obvious place to strike. The people assigned to defend will see the same vulberabilities those who seek to strike will, and make their plans and run their drills accordingly. The fact that, say, an in-house team of security people for an internet provider writes up an appreciation of a flaw in routines that some hacker produces a virus to exploit at about that time could hardly be taken to demonstrate collusion by the in-house team; for that, real evidence of contact and exchange of information would be required. Drills of various sorts go on every day, and the mere oddity of a juxtaposition is insufficient to demonstrate anything but the inherent strangeness of this world here below, in my view.

It seems worth noting, too, that the C.I.A. exercise you reference did not involve any of the buildings actually struck. What is somewhat signifigant about it, and a similar drill at some point involving the Pentagon, is that they render obviously false a great deal of official bleating at the time that "no one could have anticipated planes being used like that." Not only had a great many people speculated on just that method of attack, some of them were clearly security officials.