>>Either that, or the decades of old boys appointing other old boys into various places, paying each others campaigns and generally taking care that loyalty overrides competency and that skimming overrides efficiency, have eventually produced such levels of dysfunctionality that 9/11 caught the system with its pants down... as down they usually are.
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>>So we have a choice between criminal plot and criminal negligence.
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>One of the things nagging me from the start was that 3 planes hit their target and a fourth one crash landed - and it became known that the passengers were the one responsible for aborting a fourth crash.
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>Where was the air force ? The explanation was that they could see/watch something coming to the US, but had never considered to watch their own air space. Such an explanation must be true in my book, or one of the retired guys would babble about "we could at least find xxx planes in 198x" - it is ridiculous, it is probably true.
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The movie "United 93" is highly recommended. It covers the history of that flight on 9/11 in considerable detail and avoids most of the cliches of Hollywood movies. Most of the cast are unknown or little known, including some who were actual pilots, FAA workers, etc. on that day. Air traffic controllers first had to recognize there was a problem, then identify which of the hundreds of planes in flight might also be hijacked, then try to do something about it. The military was involved as well but they faced the same issues. And coordination between the FAA and the military was poor. Plus the President's approval was needed to shoot down a commercial aircraft.

Please do not take that last sentence as a blast at President Bush. Of all the things I blame him for, 9/11 is not one of them. It was an unprecedented event that felt surreal even as it was happening. My wife called at around 9 in the morning, Central time, about an hour after the WTC was hit, and said turn on the news. I did and spent most of the next 18 hours or so watching CNN. The one exception was rushing over to Emily's school to try to ward off a field trip to downtown Chicago. With the scope of the attacks still unclear I didn't want her and her classmates to be any closer to a major urban center than they had to be. Several other parents had the same thought and the trip had already been cancelled by the time I got there.