But..but..but , we could never have imagined that "hijackers"...

[NecessaryOnslaught]

would use a passenger jet as a weapon.


Washington, D.C., Nov. 3, 2000 — The fire and smoke from the downed passenger aircraft billows from the Pentagon courtyard. Defense Protective Services Police seal the crash sight. Army medics, nurses and doctors scramble to organize aid. An Arlington Fire Department chief dispatches his equipment to the affected areas.

Don Abbott, of Command Emergency Response Training, walks over to the Pentagon and extinguishes the flames. The Pentagon was a model and the "plane crash" was a simulated one.

The Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise, as the crash was called, was just one of several scenarios that emergency response teams were exposed to Oct. 24-26 in the Office of the Secretaries of Defense conference room.

"This is important so that we're better prepared," Brown said. "This is to work out the bugs. Hopefully it will never happen, but this way we're prepared."

http://www.mdw.army.mil/news/Contingency_Planning.html






NORAD had drills of jets as weapons
By Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.
One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States. In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon — but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say.

NORAD, in a written statement, confirmed that such hijacking exercises occurred. It said the scenarios outlined were regional drills, not regularly scheduled continent-wide exercises.

"Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft," the statement said. "These exercises tested track detection and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.htm

[Marvelous_Smarty]

1. In the end,

Someone has to decide IF IT WILL HAPPEN. A lot of things are possible. Hey, here is one, a suitcase nuke could be set under the bridge at the NY Marathon and detonated when it is crammed with thousands of runners. I sure someone has thought of this and wrote a paper on it. Yes it COULD happen, but it is not very plausible.

There are thousands of what ifs out there.

[Th1onein]

4. Bullshit, Marvelous Smarty! It WAS happening! Bush sat there!

NORAD did NOTHING. There were LOTS of failures on 9/11 and that first plane hitting that first tower was just the beginning. WHY did they have so much time to stop the others and still they did NOTHING?

Bullshit, they wanted it to happen and they let it happen. ON PURPOSE!

[Demonaut]

6. After the USS Vicennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner

My photolab unit on the USS Constellation had to print up hundreds of pictures of types of aircraft that could be used on our battle group as suicide bombers, WE KNEW in 1988 the what could happen.

[Lerkfish]

7. the point is....

condiment rice claims the concept of a plane flying into a building was unheard of or not imagined before 9/11.
this just shows how full of crap anything she says, is.
several possibilities:

1. she's lying
2. she's full of crap
3. she's completely incompetent.
4. She's kept out of the loop, while Cheney, rumsfeld, et al actually run the whole show.

come to think of it none of those are mutually exclusive.

[thebigidea]

9. Hopefully we don't have folks like you working on counterterrorism.

[boxster]

2. Have these people ever heard of Pearl Harbor?

That's my first thought every time one of these idiots gets on TV and says that they couldn't ever imagine that a plane would be used as a weapon.

It's not as if the use of planes as weapons is a new tactic!

[lapfog_1]

3. Jesuz H. I'm tired of that

the freepers and neocons favorite fiction writer, super pro military
Tom Clancy, wrote about using an airliner in a suicide mission to
decapitate the US government in Executive Orders (or, how do I get
an low level non political CIA agent - because politicians are the
enemy - to be President of the US? plot)... and all of the goddam
freepers and wingnuts read this, so they ALL imagined it, right
along with Tom.

[BattyDem]

5. They should have talked to their pal Rupert Murdoch ...

because someone at Fox definitely imagined it. They even imagined the target!

take a look

[leftist.]

8. While they were busy "never imagining" it ...

The Columbine kids did, and tried to pull it off;
'Millennium' did, and filmed it as you mention (great show, btw; grab the new Season 1 DVD!!!);
Two times (I think) someone imagined it when Clinton was in office and tried to pull it off;
Algerian terrorists definitely imagined it when they were going to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower.

I seriously wish they'd quit with that line. It's just way too phony at this point.

[unblock]

10. this is flagrant pandering to the stunned masses

of course it's stunning to the average american. everyone has heard of hijackings, but no one thinks it would happen to them. and everyone knows people try to low up buildings, but again, no one thinks it would happen to them. and maybe it's surprising that someone combined the two ideas, using a hijacked plane as a bomb to blow up a building.

surprising to the average joe, that is.

but we pay the military billions and billions of dollars to protect us from terrorists, hijackers, and bombs. which part of this am i to believe is forgiveably surprising to the people who we pay so much money to think of such things?

sorry, but any military that lets its own headquarters get bombed without putting up a fight after 4 planes are hijacked it NOT worthy of a blanket pass. somebody should have resigned of embarrassment, and if not, shrub should have fired SOMEBODY, if only for show.

as i've said before, his failure to fire someone is very compelling evidence of lihop/mihop.

[gatorboy]

11. They forgot that Bin Laden had planned this in June of 2001?

Gee and they had a story on it too!

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=bin+laden+plots+bush+hit&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=9g8ap9%24gsj%241%40sshuraab-i-1.production.compuserve.com&rnum=2

<snip>
June 13, 2001 -- International security forces are working furiously to thwart a plot by Saudi terror master Osama bin Laden to assassinate President Bush and other world leaders at a major economic summit next month.Italian officials say they've been warned by German intelligence services that bin Laden is secretly financing neo-Nazi skinhead groups throughout Europe to commit acts of violence during the summit, sources told The Post.

The attack could also come from the sky in the form of a bizarre James Bond-style strike by remote-control airplanes packed with plastic explosives, Germany's largest newspaper reported yesterday.

The planes would fly into the compound where Bush and the heads of state of major European powers will be meeting at the July 20 G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, the Bild newspaper reported.
<snip>

Gosh! That sounds like a planes being used as weapons plot to me! How come this wasn't brought up in the report?