The planes were prevented from scrambling! The planes were prevented from scrambling! ...Oh, wait. The planes were scrambled too soon! The planes were scrambled too soon!
Kamikaze: F-16 pilots planned to ram Flight 93
When the pilots of the 121st Fighter Squadron of the D.C. Air National Guard got the order to intercept Flight 93, the hijacked jet speeding toward the nation's capital, they figured there was a decent chance they would not come back alive.
That's because the F-16 jets they were rushing to get airborne were largely unarmed, recalls one of the pilots, then-Lt. Heather Penney, leaving them one option to take out the wayward plane: a kamikaze mission.
"We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We would be ramming the aircraft, because we didn’t have weapons on board to be able to shoot the airplane down," Penney told C-SPAN.
If only the mainstream media would pay attention. Story on MSNBC.
Blogger Paul Schreyer made a positively exhausting attempt to demonstrate that the United States Air Force “stood down” on 9/11. Sound familiar?
Given the vast quantity of 9/11 denier absurdity out there I usually give their videos until the first big bogus claim, and then I tune out (of course, this tends to mean tuning out after the first claim, period – but so far it doesn’t look like I’ve missed any shockers). I had some extra time today, so I gave it its first two.
You know precisely where it’s going from the start. It builds a cast of characters – in this case, a sort of caricature of the U.S. military’s chain of command, with Bush at the top and some of the staff at NEADS at the bottom – and begins with the claim that “the top of this chain of command was empty on 9/11” – this is false. President Bush spent the morning doing what all presidents are always doing – photo ops. What does it even mean to “stay out of the loop of military orders,” as the speaker intones? Let’s think of a counterfactual: how much weirder would it have been if the President was actually giving military orders on 9/11? That’s something that essentially never happens, and when it does, it makes headlines.
The barely grammatically coherent second claim falsely reads:
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld abandoned his post and was not available for his air defense subordinates during the attack.
Marr tried to “obstruct” the process. Right. Let’s see what he means.
Two fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base, 300 km northeast of New York, were alarmed [?] and sat in their jets ready to start their engines at around 8:42, even before any hijacked plane had hit the World Trade Center towers.
But than [sic] they had to wait.
Colonel Marr, who could have ordered them to take off immediately, chose not to do that. He made an unnecessary phone call with his boss, General Arnold, instead. In effect the order to take off was delayed for a crucial 3 to 4 minutes.
Without that delay the pilots could have intercepted the second hijacked plane, which crashed at 9:03.
Doesn’t this bullshit sound familiar? Haven’t 9/11 deniers made very similar claims before? Oh yes – just like the ones refuted years ago in Popular Mechanics’ great little books.
Claim: "It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately intercept off-course planes that do not respond to communications from air traffic controllers," says the Web site oilempire.us. "When the Air Force 'scrambles' a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes."
9/11 deniers must be absolutely fucking exhausted by now. They’ve been making the same demonstrably false claims since 2003, and still have to pretend to each other that this shit isn’t already out there.