[Resolute 14]

Ahh hell, I'll bite.

Originally Posted by Lanny_MacDonald

* Why was the Pentagon attacked where it was? The Pentagon had been under-going renovations in that wing for months. A highly organized attack like this would have known this and would have selected a more appropriate area for attack. It was well known that the "brains" in the Pentagon were on the other side of the building. Attacking this area made no sense.

* Why would the terrorists decide to attack this side when it took an incredibly difficult maneuver to get the plane to hit this side in the manner it did? The easiest attack angle would have been straight on and would have generated the most damage in the place where the most important targets were residing.

I suppose it is possible that the point of impact was accidental. It is possible that the hijackers were too busy praising Allah to properly orient their plane for the most damage. If, as you suggest, the hijackers were "barely able to fly a cessna", why would it be so hard to assume they missed the side of the building they were aiming for?

There is also the fact that the Pentagon is a uniform pentagon. They might have just gotten their bearings confused and simply hit the wrong side.

* Why attack the Pentagon at all? The Pentagon has five missile defense batteries in case of attacks to Washington. These defense batteries, and many more like them around Washington, account for the extremely narrow traffic corridor for commercial flights. Amazingly these defense systems all failed on this day, long after the WTC was struck. Why?

You answered your own question earlier. The attacks were supposed to be aimed at the financial, military and governmental hearts of the US.

The logical argument for the failure of the missile batteries is that those in command had not yet given any orders to shoot down a commuter plane in the 40 or so minutes since the WTC was struck. As we saw with Katrina, the Bush administration isnt exactly quick to respond to national emergencies.

* If creating death and destruction were the reason behind the attacks, why would the hijackers just not fly the planes into a nuclear reactor? The planes all flew close to reactors (the second plane flew directly over a reactor on the way to New York IIRC) so why not just crash the planes into these reactors and kill hundreds of thousands and make the north east uninhabitable for a few thousand years?

Possibly becuase the terrorist leaders are smart enough that what would effectively be a nuclear attack would be returned in kind? All leaders are more than willing to send their subjects out to die, but they usually arent so quick to do so themselves. If this scenario came to pass, much of Afghanistan would be a parking lot today.

Lots of unexplained questions all around. That's what makes this subject so interesting and so controversial. People refuse to think that the government would dare allow or conspire to let these events unfold, but they readily accept that a group of 19 hijackers who were barely capable of flying cessnas were capable of pulling off this devious plan. Coming up with the plan is one thing, but execution is another.

And we have seen with the invasion of Iraq and the response to Katrina that the Bush administration isn't all that competent either. I suspect few people believe this conspiracy theory because it is much easier to believe that people with minimal flight training can fly a jet liner in a straight line for a short time than it is to believe that the US government would attack itself.

To the best of my knowledge, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the US government was responsible for these attacks (aside from its foreign policy). Certantly there is a ton of misinformation and propaganda that emerged as the result of 9-11, but that alone is not enough to make this conspiracy theory believable. Once again, the why does not mesh with the how.