Quote:
Originally Posted by MediaGuy
I think the fact that most of the jet fighters who were supposed to be on stand by to protect US airspace were gone on exercises is significant and had an impact on military response.
I think the re-organization of the chain of command by Dick Cheney in June three months earlier had an effect on military response on that day.
How in any reasonable sense can you say that the lack of military response that day had zero impact on anything that happened that day?
The fighters weren't there even 24 minutes later when it was all confirmed, the commanders weren't there, their delegates weren't there to act on their behalf...
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You fail to understand how the military works.
If my local fire department is on a training exercise, they still respond to a fire. They don't just say "We're busy". They always leave enough forces in place to handle real emergencies. In the same respect, when NORAD does a drill, it doesn't mean that all of NORAD goes offline. They take people offline and out of the chain of command to run such drills.
In fact, NORAD had two drills that day - and because there was so many people on duty, once they discovered a real emergency, they were staffed at twice their normal level.
However, NORAD can't really do dick about civilian airliners. Nor can our military. That's like calling the US Marines because someone robbed a bank. Short of shooting them down, there's nothing they can do.
At the same time, you have to understand the mass confusion going on that day. The FAA wasn't sure what planes were hijacked and which planes were still airborne, no less direct the military to them.
From wikipedia, oddly enough, the
9/11 conspiracy theories page:
According to The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, a book about the attacks published in 2011, the longest warning NORAD received of the hijackings was some eight minutes for American Airlines Flight 11, the first flight hijacked. The FAA alerted NORAD to the hijacked Flight 175 at just about the same time it was crashing into the World Trade Center's South Tower. The FAA notified NORAD of the missing ? not hijacked ? Flight 77 three minutes before it struck the Pentagon. NORAD received no warning of the hijack of United Flight 93 until three minutes after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.
And again, this is typical of the "so called truth movement" - saying our military was ordered to stand down, when the truth is more like the FAA was unable to tell anyone what was happening.