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Wow. This just keeps getting better and better...

Again, we are all STILL waiting for your official source in regards to your previous statement that no air cover was in the air for several hours after the 9/11 attacks.

For that matter, what is your official source to back up your statement that fighters are scrambled within 5-10 minutes of a hijacking (prior to 9/11)? Even if that were true, unless a civilian airliner has direct contact with the US military, there would obviously be a large delay from the time a hijacking is reported to the time the information is relayed to the appropriate air intercept squadron. Even if interceptors were trailing the two hijacked aircraft to NYC, there would have been no indication AT THAT TIME to shoot them down.

As you may or may not understand, the intercept protocols have changed since 9/11. Before the attacks, the protocols had been relaxed during the Clinton administration.

Gee, if your contentions are correct, then somehow the 'non-partisan' 9/11 commission must have totally and completely missed that one. As did the media.

AGAIN, I ask you, were those two F-16's on afterburner that I saw peeling overhead that morning at about 9:20am just a figment of my imagination? I will answer it for you. They were real. They were heading south, most likely to establish a CAP over one of the cities here in the Northeast. Make no mistake about it -- any additional hijacked aircraft would indeed have been shot down that day if absolutely required. That is a decision that I hope that no interceptor pilot ever needs to make.

Again, we are all STILL waiting for your official source in regards to your previous statement that no air cover was in the air for several hours after the 9/11 attacks.

There was 1 hour and 53 minutes between the first notification that flight 11 was off course and not responding and the time that flight 93 crashed.

For that matter, what is your official source to back up your statement that fighters are scrambled within 5-10 minutes of a hijacking (prior to 9/11)?

A former Pentagon air traffic controller says "All those years ago when I was at the Pentagon, this wouldn't have happened. ATC Radar images were (and are) available in the understructures of the Pentagon, and any commercial flight within 300 miles of D. C. that made an abrupt course change toward Washington, or turned off their transponder and refused to communicate with ATC, would have been intercepted at supersonic speeds within minutes by fighters out of Andrews AFB. Why there were no fighters from Andrews AFB up baffles me. If we could get fighters notified, scrambled, and airborne within about 6 minutes from Andrews AFB then, we could now."

Before the attacks, the protocols had been relaxed during the Clinton administration.

I'm happy to place the blame on the Clinton administration. But the fact is that one way or another our defense was not ready to defend us when an actual attack occurred.

AGAIN, I ask you, were those two F-16's on afterburner that I saw peeling overhead that morning at about 9:20am just a figment of my imagination? I will answer it for you.

I already posted answers to that question twice.