This is my recollection - they have repeatedly stated it was unthinkable when the DoD were clearly thinking long and hard about the very scenario and the very targets. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that someone is lying.
After all the invective hurled at Clinton by the usual suspects for trivial crap I continue to be astounded by their reluctance to see this tragedy as anything other than an unforseen Act of God like a sudden earthquake.
“Butts, I want butts!” should be the cry. Scenario and targets two years before the event, the knowledge that these fanatics wanted to hit the USA using aircraft, etc etc and nothing was done.
Damnation - if this had happened in the UK and these facts came out (not that they probably would given the lack of openness in the UK compared to the US) then at the very least there would be a ministerial head on a platter.
“Your department was running precise threat scenarios of airliners crashing into Parliament and you did nothing? What do you mean you didn’t know? Letter of resignation by the end of the day please.”
You must have a different definition of the word “minutes” than the rest of us, rjung. Flight 93 did not hit it’s target. The three targets that the planes hit were from 8:46 am to 9:38 am according to your numbers above. This is less than an hour, it is 42 minutes. So, the statement that “those planes all hit their targets within minutes of each other” stands.
So, in the 36 minutes between the second tower being hit and the pentagon being hit, you expect the government to be able to deploy defenses everywhere in the country, determine if a civilian airliner is a threat, and make the decision to shoot down said civilian airliner before it can crash into the pentagon? I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect this.
Well, I’ve never seen “within a few minutes” stretched to indicate “timespan more than five minutes,” if that’s what you mean.
“A few” =!= 30 to 40
As RTFirefly has already pointed out, by 8:43am, NORAD was already tracking three hijacked airliners who were making U-turns back to NYC and Washington DC. Surely expecting some kind of heightened alert and military response at that point wouldn’t be unreasonable, don’t you think? Especially since there were 35 airbases within range, armed and on full alert that morning…
By the standards of the cold war, 35 to 40 minutes is half of freakin forever! Did everyone just go on vacation after the Russkies detargeted their missiles?
You forget that we have no idea how those defences/retaliations would have worked if the Russkies had launched during the Cold War. Thankfully, they were never used in a real case …
Yeah, but not because of any action taken by the White House.
I really think you’re stretching things to say that by “within minutes”, you meant 36 minutes.
It’s abso-fucking-lutely reasonable. What the hell are we spending billions of dollars on the military for if they’re not ready to take action when needed? What’s the point of having supersonic fighter jets if you’re gonna sit around for a half hour with your thumb up your butt going: “Gee whiz, ya’ think we should go after that hijacked plane?”
And if they had of shot those planes down (something I find highly unlikely, given the standard government reaction time, the decision process by ANY politician to decide to shoot down a plane load of citizens OVER major metropolitian areas, the time it would take to arm and prep the fighters, etc), you’d now be complaining that Bush went off half cocked before really knowing the situation and was just reacting without thinking. And you know what? I’d be agreeing with you. And if one of those pilots would have made a mistake and taken out a plane that wasn’t in fact hijacked, or if they have of shot one down but it had of crashed into say Northern Virginia or elsewhere in New York, as is most likely to have happened if you’ve ever BEEN to Washington DC and the Pentagon or to New York, then your howls would be long and loud about how stupid Bush was, that he should have thought with his brain instead of his dick, that he should have taken the time to assess the situation, etc etc.
This is total freakin’ nonsense. The most likely scenario is that at least the first plane would have made it to the WTC, no matter what we did. NOBODY except the lunatic fringe would have faulted Bush or the military for shooting down the remaining planes. Even IF a non-hijacked plane were shot down, as the details of the plot came to light, people on both left and right would forgive. (In fact, it would take several days to learn of the mistake in any case.)
snort Ya, I’m seeing a lot of ‘forgiveness’ from the left for actions Bush has taken. Nearly as much ‘forgiveness’ as I recall the right gave to Clinton, if memory serves. You are right…it IS total freaking nonsense, but the total freaking nonsense was in the post just after mine.
Had Bush basically thrown caution to the wind, picked up his trusty rusty direct link to NORAD, ordered planes into the sky while striking a proper militant pose, with the intent to shoot down anything that even looked suspicious (unless you are telling me they KNEW, for a fact, exactly which planes had been hijacked with enough time to intercept and shoot them down), and if the military could have actually sent out the orders to scramble the fighters, prep and arm them (unless you are under the delusion that prior to 9/11 we had fighters jets sitting on the runways, armed and ready to go with pilots in ready rooms poised to take off), and get them into the air AND direct them to exactly where the hijacked planes were, all that would have been acomplished is that possibly the second WTC jet MIGHT have been intercepted and shot down…over Manhattan. PERHAPS the jet targetted on the Pentagon COULD have been intercepted and shot down…over freaking Northern Virgina for gods sake! And most likely the plane that crashed in Penn would have been intercepted and shot down over farm land…as opposed to its crashing on its own over farm land.
So, using your trust rusty hindsight-o-meter and second guessing the president you might have been the proud owner of a larger body count! Way to go! I’m SURE the calm and collected left and right would have showered you with kudos for taking such drastic measure, even if you also accidently shot down a plane with no hijackers on board that happened to stray off its flight path and who was on a frequency that the fighter pilots were unaware or had myriad other problems…over say Boston or maybe Chicago. They are very forgiving people I’ve seen, and highly reasonable about mistakes Bush makes… :rolleyes:
OK. I’m sure someone will correct me if I am wrong, but…none of the scenarios run by the various agencies had hijacked planes being used as missles. Clancy’s book didn’t either. All scenarios thought that the planes used would be obtained by some other means. So Norad tracking three hijackings still doesn’t indicate that these planes are now on suicide runs. For all they knew, Al-Queda could have been running a massive kidnapping for ransom, or some other stunt. I don’t think it is unreasonable for a civilian government to take longer than 36 minutes to decide whether or not to shoot down civilian airliners, full of American citizens, over highly populated American soil. Even if all agencies had been sharing scenarios, it would have taken at least that long to get everybody talking to each other. The end of the Cold War took the entire system off of “hair trigger.”
Did you read the OP? “In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.”
Even ignoring that, the idea that “using airliner as weapons” =!= “hijacking” doesn’t make sense. It’s easier to hijack an airplane that’s already flying and send it crashing into a target than to steal an airliner, take it into the air (from what airport?), and then send it crashing into a target.
If this was out of the blue, sure. But given that the White House had received a series of PDBs about the danger of terrorists hijacking airliners to be used as weapons – and, again, the recent example of the G8 summit in Italy a month before – the total lack of any kind of response is mystifying.
I sit corrected. Yes, rjung, I had missed that part of the OP. i still think it highly unlikely that you could have gotten any effective interdiction in the timeframe allowed. Plus, what do you tell the pilots involved? “Go shoot down a civilian airliner” won’t cut it. Now, after the fact, it wouldn’t cause a problem. Then…I’m not so sure. Even under direct orders, I think more than a few intercept pilots would have balked at the mission, or required written orders first. There just wasn’t enough time to act efficiently.
Correction: actions not taken. That’s the whole point, which seems to elude you. Defense requires a certain level of action, not just sitting by passively. I know it’s impossible for you to believe, with those thick partisan blinders, but I would have the EXACT same questions had this occurred under Clinton’s watch.
I deeply resent your implication that I, or most others on the left, would have faulted the admin if planes had been shot down, especially after the first one hit the WTC (which as I said was all but unstopable). You chastise me for my “hindsight” while engaging in empty speculation. You don’t know what I would have thought, or the majority of other Americans, if things had gone down differently. Point of fact: for a long time I believed Flight 93 had been shot down. I’m still not entirely convinced it wasn’t. But you know what? If it’s true I don’t have any problem with that. Most of my friends (almost all Dems) I talked to about it didn’t either.
They SHOULD have been, given the threat assessments, increasing level of “chatter,” and evidence Al Qaeda was planning to hijack planes. And please don’t tell me this would have “cost to much.” We’re spending billions on Star Wars, after all.
Let me just get this straight, do you really think having a plane shot down over the sprawling suburbs of NoVa would have been worse than having it hit the Pentagon? Possibly Congress or the White House? Do you really think the American public would not have understood and accepted this trade-off? Man, I thought I was cynical.
Wow… Count the hypotheticals in that paragraph. You may recall another plane that went down in a dense, NY suburban area, not long after 9/11. Rockaway Beach, IIRC. I don’t recall a very high body count on the ground, OR a lot of finger-pointing, even though almost everyone suspected terrorism at first. Sorry you have so little faith in the American public.
Let me see if I have this right Ace_Face…you expect me to believe that you and ‘the left’ would have blithely forgiven Bush for running off half cocked and shooting down plane loads full of American citizens (men, women, children) over densely populated areas like New York and Northern Virginia (and ya, I can think of LOTS of places that a large jet air craft loaded with fuel could have come down and killed a hell of a lot of people in either of those places) also packed with innocent men, women and children? And this from the same yammering crowd that is busting on Bush for taking…36 whole minutes to assess the situation before going off half cocked?
Well, if you would have forgiven him for doing that you are a better person than me…I sure wouldn’t have. Because right now we’d be wondering if those other 2 or 3 (or however many we eventually shot down) planes REALLY had hijackers on them at all, and maybe it was just one plane that AQ was unleashing into the WTC, and why couldn’t Bush have just thought for a change instead of reacting with little or no information, and isn’t he a dirty heartless bastard for killing all those hundreds of American Citizens when there probably was no real need, and blah blah blah blah blah. Sorry Ace_Face…I’m not buying it. Resent away. I don’t think that Bush could do anything to make the likes of guys like rjung happy with him OR in a forgiving mood except die…messily.
And if only you had of been there in your time machine to tell them what was coming! Ace_Face, even Clintons folks admit that they didn’t have a clue that all this was coming down. Did we know the terrorists were active? Yup, we sure did. Did we know they were operating in the freaking US? Not a clue. If anything we were prepared for another embassy bombing in some easy to access country, another night club bombing, maybe even another attack on one of our ships. We simply had no clue that we were going to be attacked in this way. Or are you under the impression that jet fighters were on continuous standby, armed and preped, with pilots at the ready during Clintons day and Bush decided to stand them all down??
Ya…I do. You really think its better to condemn one set of innocent civilians to death on the CHANCE you MIGHT be right, when things are happening fast, the information is sketchy or non-existant, and no one is really sure what all is going on? Or, let me ask you this…do you REALLY think Clinton or Gore would have done one thing different, would have ordered US fighters to engage and destroy planes full of US citizens?? This is of course disreguarding the very real possibility that those fighter jets would have not disreguarded their orders anyway and refused to shoot down planes full of innocent men, women and children on the say so of their superior officers who THINK they MIGHT be a threat. I don’t know about you, but were I the pilot and had a passenger plane full of MY fellow citizens in my sites I’d be doing some serious thinking…
You are absolutely correct sir. Mr Bush doesn’t make mistakes. His fuckups go above and beyond anything remotely resembling ‘mistakes’. However, IMHO, 9/11 and what he did or didn’t do that day wasn’t one of them.
Yes, I expect you to believe it. As I said (twice now) this necessarily would have occurred after the first (maybe second as well, that would have been tight) plane hit the WTC. From this point forward it is very easy to explain to the American people the necessity of taking drastic action. So we’re talking two-three shoot downs, maybe one more due to confusion.
You know, they do have a protocol in these situations. You ID the plane, try to make visual contact with the cockpit, wiggle your wings. A normal, non-hijacked plane will respond to these signals right away. I don’t know were you’re coming up with this “half-cocked” stuff. I am NOT saying you fly around shooting everything in the air. Also, and I’ll come back to this point, if the pilot decides NOT to fire on a hijacked plane due to safety concerns, that again is completely forgivable – my point is they weren’t even in a position to make the call.
Again, your projecting your own viewpoints on others. I disagree completely. The plot would have been unraveled and explained to the public, which happened in any case. Remember how fast they had the names and photos of all the hijackers? That wouldn’t be enough to convince you? Again, you’re more cynical than I…
Have you been paying attention to the news? Ever heard of the millennium plot? The PDB called “Bin Laden determined to strike in US,” which warned of hijackings and surveillance of buildings in NY?
Umm, again, I said they SHOULD have been. Given the warnings. Given the fact that the highest counterterrorism official in the country thought we should have gone to battle stations. If the threat level, as detailed in the August PDB (particularly about hijackings) was as high in Clinton’s last years as it was during the summer of 2001, than yes, he should have done the same thing as well. Do you have evidence that it was?
And now back to my point above. YOU said that we’d all “now be complaining that Bush went off half cocked” if planes were shot down. I disagree, and find that to be a scurrilous, unverifiable charge. HOWEVER, this does not mean I necessarily advocate shooting down the planes. The thing that bothers me, and a lot of people I think, is not that the planes weren’t shot down – a tough call to make under any circumstance – it’s that our fighters weren’t even in a position to make the call.
This is my whole criticism of the Bush admin here: passivity before 9/11, passivity during 9/11, AND passivity after 9/11, in terms of finding out what went wrong and showing any shred of accountability.
Let me put this a simpler way:
A. A policeman hears of a robbery in progress over his scanner. He runs to the scene, draws his gun, but does not fire because of the crowd nearby. The robber gets away.
B. A policeman hears of a robbery in progress over his scanner. He does nothing for the next 36 minutes. The robber gets away.
Which do you really think better describes the Bush admin response? Which policeman is in more danger of losing his job (assuming he DOESN’T work for the Bush admin)? Which will have more public sympathy?
You know, xtisme, now that I’ve gone out for a bit of fresh air, I should say I don’t mean to come across so harsh to you in particular. I’m just increasingly fed up with this “no mistakes”/no accountability/no responsibility administration…