I gotta step in here. Do you really, honestly, think that the US didn't know about 9/11? They'd been warned by four foreign intelligence agencies that "muslem extremists [would] hijack planes and use them to collide with high-priority American civilian targets". When the first plane stopped responding, the FAA sat on its ass for no reason, for half an hour. Then they lazily notified NORAD. They did the same. Then, after that half hour, NORAD inexplicably scrambles F-14s based several hundred kliks away, while they have F-14s standing by close to New York for that exact purpose. Then the first plane collides with the WTC. Up to that point, we can chalk it all up to incompetence and laziness, I suppose.
But then the second plane stops responding. And lo and behold, FAA waits half an hour. The NORAD waits half an hour. And then, AGAIN, the wrong F-14s are scrambled. I don't know, but that all reads "let's make a token effort so they can't say we let it happen" to me.
I'm not saying the US made the plans for 9/11, but you can damn well better believe that they knew about it, and realized the opportunity it presented.
Karen, do you
honestly fucking believe that the United States Government,
especially with George Dubya Bush at its helm (or rather, being puppeteered at its helm) are above sacrificing their own people to justify war? Did you forget that one memo from the US Chief of Staff where he bounces the idea off the government to have a US airliner shot down by a plane striped in Cuban colours? If you think your government would blink about sacrificing you, or the people you care about for their own gain, then that's just naive.
I would also like to add that seeing you jump on the point-and-laugh bandwagon was something I didn't expect. I'd expect Max or NoLordy to make childish jokes about that sort of thing, mainly because they make jokes about everything and don't mean harm. But why are you joining in? That "me-too" attitude is petty and cruel, and completely unfitting you. You know how vulnerable Lesa is to this kind of thing, and you know she doesn't deserve that from you. I'm not saying this to berate you or anything, I'm saying it because I know you're better than this, Karen.
As for Lesa's post, I'm not sure I've seen enough evidence to actually believe that this is caused by human technology, but I sure as Hell wouldn't be surprised it it was. I'm not some follower of tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, but if you think governments think twice about using new, untested technology with danger to their own people, then you're fooling yourself.
However, Kevin is right about this:
If you feel you have a serious matter to present, then present it seriously and provide facts. And expect people to be childish about it. And please don't take Max or NoLordy seriously. It's all in good fun, right guys?
And yeah, like replicated says, you're getting positive responses too, more than negative ones, so recognize those too, and don't stare yourself blind on the howlers.
Being aware of intelligence about the probability of something happening then doing nothing about it is criminal, true, but that doesn't mean they purposefully let two planes attack the WTC.
Is it conceivable that it happened? Well, yes, but it's also conceivable that aliens exist.
People need to understand that the US government is not some giant machine that plots about a New World Order or some such nonsense, no matter how many times you show me that stupid George Bush, Sr. speech years ago taken out of context. I know it's easy to believe the hype, but it's simply not true and ridiculous because it's foreign to people here.
NORAD is not ONE ENTITY. It is a network of sectors in Ithaca New York, Panama City Florida, California, and McChord AFB in Tacoma Washington, as well as a Canadian sector in Alberta and Elmendorf AFB, Alaska. We all plug our feed into Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Having worked for NORAD, I can tell you that there is nothing flying over the US that they don't know about, but that doesn't mean they have information on every single plane available all the time. Local agencies would be much more informed. They aren't omniscient; they are a deterrent. Lots of planes deviate from flight plans every single day and it is not impervious to human error.
F-14s were not used; F-15Cs and F-16s were. F-14s have been obsolete for years. The F-14 is a Navy jet, not Air Force.
Secondly, you need to understand the mission difference between Air Force Active Duty, Air Force Reserve, and Air National Guard units and what each one entails. The jets you're talking about as they were "so close" (I assume you're talking about 1st AF HQ and the jets in ACC, or Air Combat Command in Langley) is an active duty USAF base. Active duty units stationed stateside are typically not on alert...Air Guard and Reserve is typically on alert and are stationed at Guard and Reserve bases. The active duty commands, ACC or Air Combat Command, PACAF or Pacific Air Forces, and USAFE or US Air Force in Europe all have different missions, with only deployed units acting on alert. Our jets here are not on alert; YOUR jets are on alert. We're there to provide backup, not to be your first line of defense. The same is true in the US with active duty units stationed there. They have other missions and are usually tasked with training for combat missions abroad, not defense...that's what Air Guard and Air Reserve units are mainly for, which is why they were further away.
Do you realize how long it takes to spin-up a jet and get it ready? Hours. There are some that are always there and ready in case but the pilots aren't necessarily on alert. In the Guard units, the PILOTS are on different alerts, and they range from 3 hours to 15 minutes. The shorter alerts are typically in times of war. We weren't at war at the time.
Third, the dominant air-to-air fighter in the world is STILL the F-15C. Langley has F-15s, but they are active duty and not on alert. Other Guard units in the tri-state area have 16s, which have both air-to-air and air-to-ground capability, but the air-to-air capability is much more limited in respect to that of the F-15C. The 16s don't have nearly the same radar capability or standoff capability F-15s have, nor do they have the same "legs" as we call them, which is range. F-15s can get there faster, launch from much further away, and stay up there longer. F-16s are of course used for air defense but only in the absence of F-15 Eagles. THIS is why it took them so long to get on-station, even though Vipers (16s) were in the air as well.
The fact that they scrambled the wrong units is buffoonery on the part of command, not some government conspiracy to delay the scramble order. People fuck up and in the military they fuck up A LOT, whether people want to believe it or not.
I was talking to a friend who's an OSI agent the other day...OSI is Office of Special Investigation, or basically the FBI/CIA of the Air Force...they do counter-terrorism, special operations, etc. He mentioned something profound that often gets overlooked by the world, especially Americans. He said, "It's not that the US military is so good at what it does, it's simply that everyone else sucks so badly at it." It's something I've been saying for years. Again, people think that the US is some giant, perfect machine and that its military operates with uncanny precision. This couldn't be further from the truth. It's just that in comparison to the rest of the world, we simply appear that way.
To put it simply, someone dropped the ball. There is no conspiracy, there is no pretext to war by allowing 9/11 to happen. SOMEONE SIMPLY FUCKED UP. I've seen it happen at all levels of command, from a unit commander to CENTCOM. Hell, THE EXACT SAME THING happened in Alaska when I was there. Two Russian Bears flew right off the west coast of Alaska for the first time in a decade, and the pilots were HALF AN HOUR late scrambling. Everyone involved was disciplined and I think some were even fired. People screw up all the time, and it just so happened that they picked a bad day to screw up on 9/11. Procedures weren't followed and miscommunication and I'm sure complacency played a factor as well, not conspiracy.
You simply don't understand just how big the US military is and how delicate these things are and how they can go wrong in a second. Drawing a line from political malfeasance, knowing it exists everywhere and in every country, and then taking that and somehow reaching the illogical conclusion that because one or two people made a stupid suggestion automatically indicates that the entire government and military were colluding to murder innocent people to start a war is, well, beyond ridiculous.
Military commanders don't need government officials to approve their actions. This is the cornerstone of American and British (and western, for that matter) military policy; it's called
centralized command/de-centralized execution. Politicians make policy and the military carries out that policy. As long as we're not talking nuclear launch codes or invasion, the President stays out of it. Leon Panetta ordered the strike on Bin Laden, and the SeALs were operating under CIA command. Only after were the politicians informed of what happened.
I know it's easy to give in to all this anti-Americanism abroad and these outlandish and outrageous claims against the US, but you simply have to realize that if you aren't familiar with how things work, you simply JUST DON'T KNOW. Sadly, many people see this lack of knowledge and they then formulate theories based on haphazard data they get from the internet, and they just get more and more outlandish and ridiculous as time goes on, and before you know it, we've got aliens in Area-51, we're spraying weather-controlling agents into the atmosphere, and 9/11 was an inside job.
That doesn't mean that the government has everyone's benefit at the forefront of their mind...quite the opposite, actually. But that doesn't mean they'd let the WTC buildings be destroyed for a simple false flag operation. They've been doing false flags for years abroad and, to be honest, Americans are much more gullible than the rest of the world and take much less to convince. Such drastic measures as purposefully letting people blow up the WTC would be simply shooting themselves in the foot.