JackRiddler wrote:It's a long story. My very first thought, seeing the Towers on fire on live TV, was that this was a Reichstag Fire event, as, in fact, I had been expecting since the selection of the Bush. In fact, I had been anticipating since the 1980s that the day would come when the US would have to stage a war on itself to justify the endless global war.
But damn it, it was in New York, something obvious that I should have also expected! And that hurt, and I was worried about my family. Other thoughts in those moments were that there will be war and war and war, and a total surveillance state, and much every-day paranoia, and a financial crash. At least 1000 foreign brown people would have to die for every person killed in this attack, because Americans were going to go bug nuts about it and not want to know anything about the even worse sufferings that their government had perpetrated on others. In general they would be angry, they would desire revenge on the foreigners, and they would never question their own goodness.
...
I kept a journal starting a couple of hours after the collapse, which can be read here:
http://www.911truth.org/osamas/diary.html
Then I got pretty nearly the drunkest of my life.
...
Nevertheless, as the weeks went by, the preponderance of the available evidence as I saw it spoke a certain way...
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I had an eerily similar reaction. I kept a journal too, but it's on paper. The way I dealt with cognitive dissonance was to write down what I saw and heard in the hopes I'd have evidence that the news was just a cover story.
We heard the sorties fly off from Andrews AFB to shoot down Flight 93. There were two. We watched local news describe the Pentagon truck bombing (that's how it was first reported). I never believed the official story.
Here's another limited hangout:
http://news.yahoo.com/f-16-pilot-ready- ... 38786.html
F-16 pilot was ready to ram hijacked plane on 9/11
By Dan De Luce | AFP – 21 hrs ago
An F-16 pilot who scrambled on 9/11 to prevent another attack on the US capital says she was prepared to ram her plane into a hijacked aircraft -- as there was no time to arm her plane with missiles.
Amid fears another hijacked airliner was barreling towards Washington, Heather Penney, then a lieutenant in the Washington DC National Guard, was one of two pilots ordered to take off without delay, she said in a recent interview.
The threat of an attack on US soil was seen as such a remote possibility at the time that the 121st fighter squadron at Andrews Air Force base outside Washington had no fully-armed fighter jets on standby.
With only 105 lead-nosed bullets on board, Penney and Colonel Marc Sasseville took to the skies, while two other F-16s waited to be armed with heat-seeking AIM-9 missiles, Penney told C-SPAN television this week.
The pilots had orders from the White House to take out any plane that refused to heed warnings and land, so the two pilots agreed on their plan.
"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 said.
As they were putting on their flight gear, "Sass looked at me and said, 'I'll ram the cockpit.'
"And I had made the decision that I would take the tail off the aircraft," she said.
Penney said she "knew if I took off the tail of the aircraft, that it would essentially go straight down and so the pattern of debris would be minimized."
She said she thought about possibly ejecting just before impact.
"I would essentially be a kamikaze and ram my aircraft into the tail of the aircraft. I gave some thought to, you know, would I have time to eject?"
But the young pilot was concerned about failing to hit the target.
"I mean you only got one chance, you don't want to eject and have missed, right? "
When she took the plane down the runway, she said she believed it be the last take-off of her life.
In the end, Flight 93 never reached Washington, as passengers assaulted the hijackers in the cockpit and the plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
But the F-16 pilots did not learn of the aircraft's fate until later that day, said Penney, now a major.
"The people on Flight 93 were heroes, but they were going to die no matter what," she said. "My concern was how do I minimize collateral damage on the ground."
Later that afternoon, Penney helped escort Air Force One, with former president George W. Bush on board, back to Andrews Air Force base.
A few years later, she flew missions in the Iraq war, hunting for SCUD missiles and backing up special operations forces.
Penney was among the first wave of female fighter pilots and she has since stopped flying full-time. The mother of two girls, she now works as a corporate executive, according to the Washington Post.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Penney said she was absorbed with the urgent job at hand and had no time for emotions.
"It wasn't so much that I kept my emotions in check. It was that they didn't even exist," she said.
"There was significant adrelaine. It was really just, dear God please don't let me screw up."
