Wednesday, April 14, 2004

It's driving me crazy

as I listen to the 9/11 Commission hearings, with all its bureaucratic bullshit and blame and so forth, grandstanding by the questioners, evasion and equivocation by the answerers. Astounding lack of focus and fact-gathering. I hope the staff that drafts the eventual report, due out in late July, will spend some energy on this burning question:
During the near two-hour gap between when the first airplane hit a tower in NYC and the last plane hit the Pentagon, what precisely was going on inside the government to take steps to prevent the latter. If I had a loved one die in the Pentagon, I'd sure as hell want to know why that plane wasn't stopped. For all of the attention on the failure to discover the plot before it was launched, how about the failure to stop it once it was well underway?
I keep remembering that five-minute gap when the President was talking to school kids as the airplane banked and turned toward the Pentagon, with almost thirty minutes left to go before impact and with the knowledge that two planes had already been used as missles. And, if it must be said, the Pentagon, and Washington D.C. at least, were obvious targets, even more obvious than the twin towers (although with the earlier attack on it, maybe not.)

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