Agitator on Sept 11th 2002

Radley Balko opined on the WTC tragedy one year after. One of the best thoughts on this subject I've read.


An interesting thought occurred to me. It was reported that U.S. fighter jets were a mere eight minutes from the planes when they hit the WTC. My thought: what if they had made it? What if they had intercepted them? Then what? Shoot them down? Imagine the world reaction. Bush would’ve had to have convinced the world that these planes were hijacked, that they had been commandeered by terrorists, and that these terrorists were ready and capable of flying a an unwieldy passenger liner into a skyscraper. No one would’ve believed him. Lawsuits would’ve flown. Conspiracies would have peppered the newspapers. Can you imagine? Two U.S. military planes shoot down two unarmed passenger planes, raining fire, metal and civilians down onto the whole of New York. Perhaps the third plane may have hit the Pentagon, bolstering the case. But what if they’d shot that one down, too? Who’d have believed such an unlikely scenario? Perhaps the investigation would’ve uncovered what we now know – that the hijackers had pilot training. Would that have helped? Could a civilian with six months of flight training under his belt have navigated a passenger jet into so precise a target? Who’d buy such a story? Historical what-ifs have long been the subject of academic fancy. The sad answer is that once those men boarded those planes, once those planes took flight, there was likely no stopping them. Once the back wheels separated from earth, those bastards likely bubbled with glee. Because in their fucked up mythology, once those planes separated from earth, a door opened for them to heaven.