Originally Posted by BusterPorn

Shooting down a plane is always the last resort and there are consequences that affect 1000s of people if there were a bio weapon on board. There is no solution that is currently available to prevent such a thing from happening. It boils down to the worse of two evils. IF the plane is shot down and in doing so the bio weapon becomes dispersed is that worse than letting it continue on to Washington DC and dispersing the weapon as was intended by the terrorist on board.

You seem to be missing the point that if the plane had weapons on board that is an act of war against the United States. It would be nice to say that 100% of the time we could stop terrorists from attacking us before there was a threat to anyone but no country has ever been able to do that. In this case the plane did not have weapons aboard and responded to fighter jets alerting it with flares and was escorted to an airport in Frederick, MD.