(Murphy's Law Rules My Life, ep. 100,000,003, approximately.)
Last Fall, my new and much liked LG Octane phone disappeared. Whether I lost it or someone found it before it was lost, I don't know. All was not lost - my son's older LG phone, an eNV3, was still in the house. I called Verizon Wireless and had the Octane bricked and the other phone reactivated with my number. All went well until a few days ago when I needed to know the phone's serial number. I had to remove the battery to see it. When I went to put the battery back it wouldn't go into place properly. On a second attempt, a tiny spring in a tiny notch fell out. The notch was one of the places where the battery tabs insert. Now by tiny I mean tiny. The whole thing was about 4mm long when compressed in the notch. I couldn't find it. The battery did go back into place without it and seemed to stay well enough until this morning when I picked the phone up and it fell out. Nor will it stay anymore. I thought, "Hey, let me try the Verizon Store! Maybe they can help me." The only thing they could do was look for a similar phone in their junk drawer to cannibalize. "I'm guessing it's more than a year old," said one of the guys. They said a corporate-owned store wouldn't be able to help me either, and had the nerve to suggest buying a new phone! Right, spend maybe $150 on a new phone because of a 4mm spring that probably costs ten cents per kilogram. Good thinking, Verizon Store guy. I may be older than the guys in the store, but I am not so old that I can't tell anymore when someone is acting like a dick. I'm more than a year old too, but I am not ready to be replaced by a newer model just yet, either.
There is nothing remotely related on the Verizon Wireless website. The 'contact us' link on the LG site gave me a popup that told me I was not authorized to use it and demanded an authorization number and a password - clearly another example of intelligent design. After hunting around I did find an email contact link that worked, and I am now waiting for a reply.
All this for a spring the size of a penpoint.
I hate you, Verizon and LG.
UPDATE: I have now heard from LG support. They have offered to have me send in the phone to be repaired out of warranty for the "low" price of between 40 and 100 dollars, not including shipping fees. In my response, I asked to be pointed to the assembly plant or the original supplier of the springs. I don't think I will ever buy another LG product again and I advise you who are reading this to beware of such crappy design and such contemptuous service.
MORE: If I were stupid enough to send in my phone, I would have to have it deactivated and use my even older phone until it was returned. When it would be returned, I would have to call to have it reactivated. What's practically the first thing they ask? "What's the serial number?"
Really, there is no reason that you shouldn't be able to remove and replace the battery easily as often as you feel the need. My old RAZR had the micro SD card under the battery; never had a problem.
EVEN MORE: LG customer service finally deigned to tell me that they don't send out "internal parts". I asked for either an exception or another source for this tiny cheap spring - no answer. I sent a letter to the chairman and CEO of LG. I can't wait to see what happens.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Logic-Testing the 9/11 “Truthers”
Much evidence has been presented on both sides of the conspiracy claims surrounding 9/11. I don’t believe in the conspiracy myself due to the sheer unlikelihood of the whole thing. People with more technical knowledge than I possess have argued endlessly about nanothermite and acceleration rates of debris. Let's test the logical implications of some of the conspiracy claims.
Claim: The Israelis were behind the 9/11 attacks.
Logic: What did the Israelis have to gain from staging such an attack? The United States has been the most powerful nation in the world for over half a century, and has been Israel’s most important and steadfast ally for most of that time. Could Israel possibly have gained any more support from the US than it already gets? Would any country as embattled and endangered as Israel is, and has long been, risk losing the staunch support of the most powerful nation on Earth for at least a couple of generations, alienating the world’s largest and most prosperous Jewish community in the process? Does this question really need an answer?
Claim: Four thousand Israeli citizens (or Jews in some versions) were warned of the WTC attacks and stayed home from work that day.
Logic: This claim started to appear in newspapers in the Arab world just days after the attacks. It is clearly aimed at, and possibly propagated by, people with no firsthand knowledge of Americans, American Jews, Israelis, American cities, American employers or America. I cannot think of any way that someone could identify four thousand Jews at their work sites in a major city and then approach them without giving away the plot and I cannot imagine how then some among those four thousand Jews would comply with such mysterious instructions without any of them immediately proceeding to call friends and coworkers, including non-Jews, or law enforcement or other government agencies, or friends in the same, to tell them about this weird approach or even recalling this strange contact after the fact. It’s just too ridiculous for anyone to buy into for one second. It’s beneath contempt; it shows searing contempt for the people it's aimed at.
Claim: The government of the United States was behind the attacks.
Logic: Again, what is to be gained? The usual justification is that the Bush administration was seeking to gain support for a war against Iraq or for some unspecified gain in the Middle East. Some claim it was to gain support for legislation to give the government sweeping new powers of investigation and detention. Okay, Bush was looking for an excuse to attack Iraq from at least the first days of his administration. Why, then, did they not bother to manufacture evidence linking the attacks directly to Iraq instead of going through the whole WMD dog-and-pony show? Why didn’t they manufacture evidence that they could have stopped the whole thing if only they had had more sweeping police powers before the attack? It’s so little gain for so much effort.
Then there is the whole question of risk. Launching such an attack would easily meet the definition of high treason. If there were trials, conviction would result in death sentences for the top plotters and life sentences for the next tier or two. They would be impoverished by their legal costs. Their families would be hard-pressed to find places to live remote enough or obscure enough to avoid the ignominy that would fall on them, ignominy that would follow them for generations. Their political party, associates and supporters would desert them and their ideology in droves. Even trials with acquittals or strong evidence that did not result in indictments would subject them to devastating suspicion and scorn. What people as well-situated in American society as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the others would risk all that to get a law passed or to promote a war against a second-rate crippled state when they already held the levers of power?
If somehow plotters so clever as to successfully manage such a huge plot did so for such paltry reasons, why do it on US soil? With American forces all over the Persian Gulf and such a committed ally as Saudi Arabia right there, with a prying press and public so far away, why not do it right there in the Gulf? If a super-secret covert force staged an operation out of an American base in the Gulf no one would blink twice and the evidence could easily be stage-managed, especially with the help of the autocratic Saudi state.
Claim: A cruise missile was used to strike the Pentagon rather than a hijacked airliner.
Logic: A cruise missile is a large piece of property and is hard to move around in a subtle manner. It also costs millions of dollars and contains secret, or at least, classified, technology. They are therefore tempting targets for sabotage and espionage. They are certainly kept in some form of secure storage. They must also be subject to audit controls. A commanding officer and his subordinates who could not account for every cruise missile held by their unit would be in serious trouble that would likely end their careers and possibly result in criminal charges. It could be answered that a few cruise missiles could have been bought on a covert basis and hidden in cost overruns, but it would not have been hidden from everyone. Covert operations have always been tempting sources of extra income for covert operators, and I have to believe that somewhere in Washington is an office full of accountants and auditors with top-secret clearances who try to make sure that covert funds are not being spent on covert luxury vacation homes furnished with covert mistresses. The audit trail would not be cut off, just pushed back a little farther into the underbrush.
Cruise missiles can be launched from ships, aircraft and land-based launchers. Ground-launch units were never operational; that capacity only existed for testing purposes. No matter where they are launched from, some things must surely take place when they are used. Cruise missiles are basically subsonic unmanned jet aircraft, in effect flying bombs not unlike the V1 of World War II, with a range of about 1,500 miles. A technical crew must go over it to put in a state of readiness. The engine, electrical system, guidance computer and sensors and the warhead all have to be checked before launch. Cruise missiles also have to be fueled up shortly before launch and can only be held in readiness for a relatively short time. The launch officer would certainly want to obtain a weather report in the launch area and all the way to the target to avoid sending the missile through an unexpected thunderstorm or tornado that could disrupt the mission. There would have to be some way to make sure no aircraft were in the vicinity, maybe a check with a flight controller. All this is even more critical when it is being launched as part of a super-secret conspiracy. Nothing makes for a giant arrow flashing “Conspiracy This Way!” than a cruise missile taking off and smacking into an airliner, falling into a suburban Virginia parking lot or smashing into the Pentagon and failing to explode.
The 1,500-mile range means that any launch against Washington would have to take place in the Eastern United States, off the Atlantic Coast or in the Gulf of Mexico; the area from Bermuda to the Caribbean is far too crowded with ships and planes for adequate secrecy.
A submarine launch is probably the most difficult to hide. There is no place to hide an extra cruise missile aboard a sub, and the captain is ultimately accountable for every last one aboard at the end of the cruise. To make sure that any launch would not be accidentally observed the sub would have to come to at least periscope depth to conduct a visual and radar sweep. Russian submarines still operate in US coastal waters so precautions would have to be taken to make sure one was not in the vicinity (or any other ships or planes). Subs are dangerous places to handle jet engines and explosive warheads. One error can sink a very valuable vessel and cost the lives of several hundred sailors. There would have to be strict protocols in place for a launch and the entire crew would have to be placed on alert, not just the crewmen responsible for the launch itself. It would not be much less strict aboard a surface vessel. In addition, the launch of a cruise missile involves bright engine flames and loud noises. The entire crew of the ship therefore become witnesses; on a typical warship equipped for launch that might mean as many as three hundred sailors.
An air launch is no more likely to be kept secret than a seaborne launch. Air-launched cruise missiles are no longer in service with the US Air Force, but may have been in 2001. They were withdrawn because they were primarily used to carry nuclear warheads, so have been put away due to nuclear weapons limitation treaties. They could be launched from three types of strategic bomber: the B-52, B-1 and B-2. Launching a bomber with an armed cruise missile is not an event that would go unnoticed at any operational airbase. The missile would have to be withdrawn from the armory with some kind of convincing orders, which might be double-checked if anything looked suspect. Having a conventional warhead fitted would be remembered. There must be airbases out West where a bomber taking off is unlikely to be witnessed or arouse suspicion among the locals, but the bomber would have had to be withdrawn from its regular unit, which would be noticed and recorded even for a covert mission. Still, dozens, possibly hundreds, of people would have to be aware that a bomber with a live cruise missile was launched on 9/11 and it would not be hard to find out that it landed without one.
Any cruise missile fired at Washington would have to pass over densely populated areas for at least part of its course. Typically, a cruise missile flies at low altitude, at “treetop” height and civil aviation speeds. If so, it would probably be spotted by hundreds or thousands of people, some of whom would be likely to recognize it for what it was. At higher altitudes the likelihood of being spotted on air traffic control radar and seen from aircraft would be more than zero. In any case, the risk of collision in the heavily-used air corridors of the Middle Atlantic states would be significant.
It seems hard to believe that careful plotters would want to expose their operations to hundreds of military personnel and civilian witnesses or risk failure that would inevitably lead back to them.
Claim: Donald Rumsfeld was a part of the alleged conspiracy.
Logic: It is well-known and undisputed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when it was hit. His presence there raises serious issues with any conspiracy hypothesis. Assuming he was in on the plot raises one set of questions and assuming he was not raises another and even more difficult range of questions.
If there was a plot, it would be hard to assume that he was not in on it. It is much easier to pervert significant military assets into serving a massive plot if the Secretary of Defense is one of the plotters. On the other hand, would he really have hung around the Pentagon to be endangered by a missile or aircraft strike? Things can go wrong when deadly craft are flung around the skies and if some unforeseen event caused the plane to swerve or the missile to go off-target by no more than a couple of hundred yards, if that, it could just as easily have landed on the Secretary’s desk. It also seems unlikely on the face of things that he would have consented to have his own department targeted. Besides, if the plan was to promote some sort of military action, it is not good planning to risk destroying your supreme military headquarters and your top defense manager along with it. Rumsfeld has been around Bush and Cheney for decades. He would know how devious they could be, and if he hadn’t noticed before, he surely would have figured it out when the plot was hatched. I don’t know how far he would have trusted them if they told him it was crucial for him to be at the Pentagon and that there was no real danger involved; besides he could always call up someone in the Pentagon to find out just how accurate a cruise missile really is.
If Rumsfeld was not a party to the conspiracy or was and was not warned about the site and timing of the attack, then there is every likelihood he would have tumbled to it soon enough. He was at the crash (or missile) impact site, and if there were cruise missile debris he might have seen it for himself; if not, his technical experts would have given him the evidence soon enough. If he suspected military involvement he would certainly have demanded answers and he would have gotten them: the Secretary of Defense commands a small army of military and civilian investigators, inspectors, scientists and auditors as well as a real army, navy and air force and has a large number of senior military officers at his disposal, people who are used to not only demanding answers, but compelling them. The Defense Department also carries a lot of weight with other departments and agencies. Defense has huge resources in money, personnel, technology and logistics and provides essential services to many other parts of the Federal government; few of those agencies would be in a position to stonewall a Secretary of Defense once he was on the warpath. Any Secretary of Defense is bound to be a Washington insider to a large degree and Rumsfeld is very much one. This means that he has lots of friends and debtors in all branches of government. Once he got a hint that there was a conspiracy and that it had endangered him and his agency, there would be no calling him off. If he chose to go public, he would be holding convincing evidence. If he chose to keep it to himself it would have taken a bribe of awesome size to keep him silent, and probably not in money because he was already rich. Nor would threats have deterred him easily, not with all the resources at his command to keep him and his family safe.
So we are left with Rumsfeld the conspirator recklessly endangering himself and risking the safety of his department, or Rumsfeld left out in the cold and mighty unhappy to have been at the bull’s-eye, commanding his formidable power to root out and smash the conspiracy. Neither one seems to be particularly likely.
Claim: A plane from US Customs was involved in the downing of Flight 93, or alternatively in the attack on the Pentagon.
Logic: The aircraft used by the Customs Service are essentially business jets. They are not fighter planes. They are not fast enough to make good interceptors, even of a big airliner. They lack the hardpoints used to carry missiles or guns and they lack the high-powered radars and sophisticated fire control systems of fighter aircraft. They are not built to carry heavy missiles or gun pods. If one could have been retrofitted to carry and use weapons, that means that somewhere out there is a crew of aircraft engineers and technicians who could blow the whole plot open. The pilot would have to have recently left military service as a fighter pilot, since any other kind of pilot would lack the necessary skills and training.
If one had been fitted for weapons, what kind of weapons would have been used? A radar-guided missile is unlikely, because it calls for the aircraft to be fitted with a good-sized radar for detecting the target and guiding the missile in. These radars are not lying around like spare truck axles. They are expensive and contain classified technology that some other countries would love to get hold of. That means a potential audit trail. So, let us say a heat-seeking missile instead. There is still an audit trail that might point to the missiles being removed from inventory, but with over a hundred thousand Sidewinders having been produced, one might go astray without being tracked. The plane would still have to be fitted with launching rails, fire-control equipment and the equipment that sounds a tone in the pilot’s headset when the missiles have locked on to a potential target. Heat-seekers have been known to fail spectacularly in combat, so let us say two would be fitted for contingencies. These missiles are over nine feet long and two of them on the average business jet would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Anyone seeing it might be expected to recognize what he saw. Then there is the question of what happens if one missile (or even both) fail to strike the target. A nine-foot missile lying around in a pasture would certainly draw notice and if it exploded on contact wouldn’t be much less conspicuous. The finder would most likely call the police, who would be likely to bring in the fire department and local press and curiosity seekers would soon follow. With a hijacked plane in the vicinity, and especially a crashed one, this would be hard for the conspirators to cover up or wave away.
So, let us say it carried a gun pod instead of a missile. This gun pod would also have to come from military inventory. A gunsight would have to have been fitted. A radar gunsight raises the same issues as any other military equipment that might have been fitted. Maybe an old electro-optical gunsight from the World War Two era could have been fitted, but aerial gunnery is a demanding skill even with the best technology available today, and would require extensive expert training and considerable practice to ensure hitting a target reliably, even one as big as an airliner. In addition, the search for debris could hardly avoid turning up some of the hundred or more twenty-millimeter cannon shells that would be left around the area. These are substantial in size. No one would mistake them for shells from a deer rifle.
Some conspiracy theorists have another claim involving a Customs Service aircraft: that one was used to vector the cruise missile or remotely controlled aircraft that struck the Pentagon. The issues of fitting the necessary equipment to the plane and getting a pilot with the necessary skills apply here too.
What both claims also fail to address is: where did this Customs plane fly out of and return to? Customs (now ICE) aircraft are used to patrol near the Mexican border, in the Gulf of Mexico and over the waters around Florida and Puerto Rico. It would be noticed if there were one flying out of, or even to, the Northeast. Flying a heavily-armed business jet could not safely be done out of the civil or military airports that such aircraft typically fly out of and the plotters would probably be reluctant to send such a plane on a flight of hundreds of miles. The Middle Atlantic states are crowded and there are not many suitable locations for a secret airfield, fewer where the takeoff and landing of an armed civil aircraft would pass without risk of notice. Someone would have to preflight and fuel the plane. Some crew with the requisite skills would have to prepare the weaponry or other equipment. Someone would have to clear the plane for takeoff and square its presence with air traffic controllers.
While not impossible for determined conspirators with vast resources, it poses lots of unnecessary risks that could be avoided by simpler and more direct means.
Claim: NORAD was ordered to stand down on 9/11.
Logic: The North American Aerospace Defense Command is charged, like its name implies, with the air defense of North America, meaning the USA and Canada. The deputy commander always comes from the Canadian Forces, and there are always several hundred Canadian Forces personnel staffing the various sites across the USA and Canada. To issue a blanket stand-down order would mean that all these Canadians would have to have been aware of it. None of them would have any particular reason to be loyal to the Bush administration. Even if they didn’t shout out what they knew on the CBC or in "The Globe and Mail", at least some of them would have reported it up the chain of command. The Canadian prime minister would then have faced the choice of either making it public and bringing down the US government, or keeping it quiet. There would only be one possible incentive to keep it quiet: blackmail (Suggestions that the PM, or anyone else, is a lizard from another planet can be dismissed as too addled to seriously consider.). He wouldn’t have gone and enriched himself because that would be too conspicuous and even if he did, he would still want to bolster himself politically by wringing major concessions from the US. As a foreign head of state he could insulate himself from most kinds of revenge that the plotters could dish out. Canada is the largest trading partner of, and a major oil supplier to, the USA, so American economic threats would go nowhere. So where are the major economic, military or political concessions that the US would have had to make? Is it necessary to point out that they never occurred?
Claim: The Israelis were behind the 9/11 attacks.
Logic: What did the Israelis have to gain from staging such an attack? The United States has been the most powerful nation in the world for over half a century, and has been Israel’s most important and steadfast ally for most of that time. Could Israel possibly have gained any more support from the US than it already gets? Would any country as embattled and endangered as Israel is, and has long been, risk losing the staunch support of the most powerful nation on Earth for at least a couple of generations, alienating the world’s largest and most prosperous Jewish community in the process? Does this question really need an answer?
Claim: Four thousand Israeli citizens (or Jews in some versions) were warned of the WTC attacks and stayed home from work that day.
Logic: This claim started to appear in newspapers in the Arab world just days after the attacks. It is clearly aimed at, and possibly propagated by, people with no firsthand knowledge of Americans, American Jews, Israelis, American cities, American employers or America. I cannot think of any way that someone could identify four thousand Jews at their work sites in a major city and then approach them without giving away the plot and I cannot imagine how then some among those four thousand Jews would comply with such mysterious instructions without any of them immediately proceeding to call friends and coworkers, including non-Jews, or law enforcement or other government agencies, or friends in the same, to tell them about this weird approach or even recalling this strange contact after the fact. It’s just too ridiculous for anyone to buy into for one second. It’s beneath contempt; it shows searing contempt for the people it's aimed at.
Claim: The government of the United States was behind the attacks.
Logic: Again, what is to be gained? The usual justification is that the Bush administration was seeking to gain support for a war against Iraq or for some unspecified gain in the Middle East. Some claim it was to gain support for legislation to give the government sweeping new powers of investigation and detention. Okay, Bush was looking for an excuse to attack Iraq from at least the first days of his administration. Why, then, did they not bother to manufacture evidence linking the attacks directly to Iraq instead of going through the whole WMD dog-and-pony show? Why didn’t they manufacture evidence that they could have stopped the whole thing if only they had had more sweeping police powers before the attack? It’s so little gain for so much effort.
Then there is the whole question of risk. Launching such an attack would easily meet the definition of high treason. If there were trials, conviction would result in death sentences for the top plotters and life sentences for the next tier or two. They would be impoverished by their legal costs. Their families would be hard-pressed to find places to live remote enough or obscure enough to avoid the ignominy that would fall on them, ignominy that would follow them for generations. Their political party, associates and supporters would desert them and their ideology in droves. Even trials with acquittals or strong evidence that did not result in indictments would subject them to devastating suspicion and scorn. What people as well-situated in American society as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the others would risk all that to get a law passed or to promote a war against a second-rate crippled state when they already held the levers of power?
If somehow plotters so clever as to successfully manage such a huge plot did so for such paltry reasons, why do it on US soil? With American forces all over the Persian Gulf and such a committed ally as Saudi Arabia right there, with a prying press and public so far away, why not do it right there in the Gulf? If a super-secret covert force staged an operation out of an American base in the Gulf no one would blink twice and the evidence could easily be stage-managed, especially with the help of the autocratic Saudi state.
Claim: A cruise missile was used to strike the Pentagon rather than a hijacked airliner.
Logic: A cruise missile is a large piece of property and is hard to move around in a subtle manner. It also costs millions of dollars and contains secret, or at least, classified, technology. They are therefore tempting targets for sabotage and espionage. They are certainly kept in some form of secure storage. They must also be subject to audit controls. A commanding officer and his subordinates who could not account for every cruise missile held by their unit would be in serious trouble that would likely end their careers and possibly result in criminal charges. It could be answered that a few cruise missiles could have been bought on a covert basis and hidden in cost overruns, but it would not have been hidden from everyone. Covert operations have always been tempting sources of extra income for covert operators, and I have to believe that somewhere in Washington is an office full of accountants and auditors with top-secret clearances who try to make sure that covert funds are not being spent on covert luxury vacation homes furnished with covert mistresses. The audit trail would not be cut off, just pushed back a little farther into the underbrush.
Cruise missiles can be launched from ships, aircraft and land-based launchers. Ground-launch units were never operational; that capacity only existed for testing purposes. No matter where they are launched from, some things must surely take place when they are used. Cruise missiles are basically subsonic unmanned jet aircraft, in effect flying bombs not unlike the V1 of World War II, with a range of about 1,500 miles. A technical crew must go over it to put in a state of readiness. The engine, electrical system, guidance computer and sensors and the warhead all have to be checked before launch. Cruise missiles also have to be fueled up shortly before launch and can only be held in readiness for a relatively short time. The launch officer would certainly want to obtain a weather report in the launch area and all the way to the target to avoid sending the missile through an unexpected thunderstorm or tornado that could disrupt the mission. There would have to be some way to make sure no aircraft were in the vicinity, maybe a check with a flight controller. All this is even more critical when it is being launched as part of a super-secret conspiracy. Nothing makes for a giant arrow flashing “Conspiracy This Way!” than a cruise missile taking off and smacking into an airliner, falling into a suburban Virginia parking lot or smashing into the Pentagon and failing to explode.
The 1,500-mile range means that any launch against Washington would have to take place in the Eastern United States, off the Atlantic Coast or in the Gulf of Mexico; the area from Bermuda to the Caribbean is far too crowded with ships and planes for adequate secrecy.
A submarine launch is probably the most difficult to hide. There is no place to hide an extra cruise missile aboard a sub, and the captain is ultimately accountable for every last one aboard at the end of the cruise. To make sure that any launch would not be accidentally observed the sub would have to come to at least periscope depth to conduct a visual and radar sweep. Russian submarines still operate in US coastal waters so precautions would have to be taken to make sure one was not in the vicinity (or any other ships or planes). Subs are dangerous places to handle jet engines and explosive warheads. One error can sink a very valuable vessel and cost the lives of several hundred sailors. There would have to be strict protocols in place for a launch and the entire crew would have to be placed on alert, not just the crewmen responsible for the launch itself. It would not be much less strict aboard a surface vessel. In addition, the launch of a cruise missile involves bright engine flames and loud noises. The entire crew of the ship therefore become witnesses; on a typical warship equipped for launch that might mean as many as three hundred sailors.
An air launch is no more likely to be kept secret than a seaborne launch. Air-launched cruise missiles are no longer in service with the US Air Force, but may have been in 2001. They were withdrawn because they were primarily used to carry nuclear warheads, so have been put away due to nuclear weapons limitation treaties. They could be launched from three types of strategic bomber: the B-52, B-1 and B-2. Launching a bomber with an armed cruise missile is not an event that would go unnoticed at any operational airbase. The missile would have to be withdrawn from the armory with some kind of convincing orders, which might be double-checked if anything looked suspect. Having a conventional warhead fitted would be remembered. There must be airbases out West where a bomber taking off is unlikely to be witnessed or arouse suspicion among the locals, but the bomber would have had to be withdrawn from its regular unit, which would be noticed and recorded even for a covert mission. Still, dozens, possibly hundreds, of people would have to be aware that a bomber with a live cruise missile was launched on 9/11 and it would not be hard to find out that it landed without one.
Any cruise missile fired at Washington would have to pass over densely populated areas for at least part of its course. Typically, a cruise missile flies at low altitude, at “treetop” height and civil aviation speeds. If so, it would probably be spotted by hundreds or thousands of people, some of whom would be likely to recognize it for what it was. At higher altitudes the likelihood of being spotted on air traffic control radar and seen from aircraft would be more than zero. In any case, the risk of collision in the heavily-used air corridors of the Middle Atlantic states would be significant.
It seems hard to believe that careful plotters would want to expose their operations to hundreds of military personnel and civilian witnesses or risk failure that would inevitably lead back to them.
Claim: Donald Rumsfeld was a part of the alleged conspiracy.
Logic: It is well-known and undisputed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when it was hit. His presence there raises serious issues with any conspiracy hypothesis. Assuming he was in on the plot raises one set of questions and assuming he was not raises another and even more difficult range of questions.
If there was a plot, it would be hard to assume that he was not in on it. It is much easier to pervert significant military assets into serving a massive plot if the Secretary of Defense is one of the plotters. On the other hand, would he really have hung around the Pentagon to be endangered by a missile or aircraft strike? Things can go wrong when deadly craft are flung around the skies and if some unforeseen event caused the plane to swerve or the missile to go off-target by no more than a couple of hundred yards, if that, it could just as easily have landed on the Secretary’s desk. It also seems unlikely on the face of things that he would have consented to have his own department targeted. Besides, if the plan was to promote some sort of military action, it is not good planning to risk destroying your supreme military headquarters and your top defense manager along with it. Rumsfeld has been around Bush and Cheney for decades. He would know how devious they could be, and if he hadn’t noticed before, he surely would have figured it out when the plot was hatched. I don’t know how far he would have trusted them if they told him it was crucial for him to be at the Pentagon and that there was no real danger involved; besides he could always call up someone in the Pentagon to find out just how accurate a cruise missile really is.
If Rumsfeld was not a party to the conspiracy or was and was not warned about the site and timing of the attack, then there is every likelihood he would have tumbled to it soon enough. He was at the crash (or missile) impact site, and if there were cruise missile debris he might have seen it for himself; if not, his technical experts would have given him the evidence soon enough. If he suspected military involvement he would certainly have demanded answers and he would have gotten them: the Secretary of Defense commands a small army of military and civilian investigators, inspectors, scientists and auditors as well as a real army, navy and air force and has a large number of senior military officers at his disposal, people who are used to not only demanding answers, but compelling them. The Defense Department also carries a lot of weight with other departments and agencies. Defense has huge resources in money, personnel, technology and logistics and provides essential services to many other parts of the Federal government; few of those agencies would be in a position to stonewall a Secretary of Defense once he was on the warpath. Any Secretary of Defense is bound to be a Washington insider to a large degree and Rumsfeld is very much one. This means that he has lots of friends and debtors in all branches of government. Once he got a hint that there was a conspiracy and that it had endangered him and his agency, there would be no calling him off. If he chose to go public, he would be holding convincing evidence. If he chose to keep it to himself it would have taken a bribe of awesome size to keep him silent, and probably not in money because he was already rich. Nor would threats have deterred him easily, not with all the resources at his command to keep him and his family safe.
So we are left with Rumsfeld the conspirator recklessly endangering himself and risking the safety of his department, or Rumsfeld left out in the cold and mighty unhappy to have been at the bull’s-eye, commanding his formidable power to root out and smash the conspiracy. Neither one seems to be particularly likely.
Claim: A plane from US Customs was involved in the downing of Flight 93, or alternatively in the attack on the Pentagon.
Logic: The aircraft used by the Customs Service are essentially business jets. They are not fighter planes. They are not fast enough to make good interceptors, even of a big airliner. They lack the hardpoints used to carry missiles or guns and they lack the high-powered radars and sophisticated fire control systems of fighter aircraft. They are not built to carry heavy missiles or gun pods. If one could have been retrofitted to carry and use weapons, that means that somewhere out there is a crew of aircraft engineers and technicians who could blow the whole plot open. The pilot would have to have recently left military service as a fighter pilot, since any other kind of pilot would lack the necessary skills and training.
If one had been fitted for weapons, what kind of weapons would have been used? A radar-guided missile is unlikely, because it calls for the aircraft to be fitted with a good-sized radar for detecting the target and guiding the missile in. These radars are not lying around like spare truck axles. They are expensive and contain classified technology that some other countries would love to get hold of. That means a potential audit trail. So, let us say a heat-seeking missile instead. There is still an audit trail that might point to the missiles being removed from inventory, but with over a hundred thousand Sidewinders having been produced, one might go astray without being tracked. The plane would still have to be fitted with launching rails, fire-control equipment and the equipment that sounds a tone in the pilot’s headset when the missiles have locked on to a potential target. Heat-seekers have been known to fail spectacularly in combat, so let us say two would be fitted for contingencies. These missiles are over nine feet long and two of them on the average business jet would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Anyone seeing it might be expected to recognize what he saw. Then there is the question of what happens if one missile (or even both) fail to strike the target. A nine-foot missile lying around in a pasture would certainly draw notice and if it exploded on contact wouldn’t be much less conspicuous. The finder would most likely call the police, who would be likely to bring in the fire department and local press and curiosity seekers would soon follow. With a hijacked plane in the vicinity, and especially a crashed one, this would be hard for the conspirators to cover up or wave away.
So, let us say it carried a gun pod instead of a missile. This gun pod would also have to come from military inventory. A gunsight would have to have been fitted. A radar gunsight raises the same issues as any other military equipment that might have been fitted. Maybe an old electro-optical gunsight from the World War Two era could have been fitted, but aerial gunnery is a demanding skill even with the best technology available today, and would require extensive expert training and considerable practice to ensure hitting a target reliably, even one as big as an airliner. In addition, the search for debris could hardly avoid turning up some of the hundred or more twenty-millimeter cannon shells that would be left around the area. These are substantial in size. No one would mistake them for shells from a deer rifle.
Some conspiracy theorists have another claim involving a Customs Service aircraft: that one was used to vector the cruise missile or remotely controlled aircraft that struck the Pentagon. The issues of fitting the necessary equipment to the plane and getting a pilot with the necessary skills apply here too.
What both claims also fail to address is: where did this Customs plane fly out of and return to? Customs (now ICE) aircraft are used to patrol near the Mexican border, in the Gulf of Mexico and over the waters around Florida and Puerto Rico. It would be noticed if there were one flying out of, or even to, the Northeast. Flying a heavily-armed business jet could not safely be done out of the civil or military airports that such aircraft typically fly out of and the plotters would probably be reluctant to send such a plane on a flight of hundreds of miles. The Middle Atlantic states are crowded and there are not many suitable locations for a secret airfield, fewer where the takeoff and landing of an armed civil aircraft would pass without risk of notice. Someone would have to preflight and fuel the plane. Some crew with the requisite skills would have to prepare the weaponry or other equipment. Someone would have to clear the plane for takeoff and square its presence with air traffic controllers.
While not impossible for determined conspirators with vast resources, it poses lots of unnecessary risks that could be avoided by simpler and more direct means.
Claim: NORAD was ordered to stand down on 9/11.
Logic: The North American Aerospace Defense Command is charged, like its name implies, with the air defense of North America, meaning the USA and Canada. The deputy commander always comes from the Canadian Forces, and there are always several hundred Canadian Forces personnel staffing the various sites across the USA and Canada. To issue a blanket stand-down order would mean that all these Canadians would have to have been aware of it. None of them would have any particular reason to be loyal to the Bush administration. Even if they didn’t shout out what they knew on the CBC or in "The Globe and Mail", at least some of them would have reported it up the chain of command. The Canadian prime minister would then have faced the choice of either making it public and bringing down the US government, or keeping it quiet. There would only be one possible incentive to keep it quiet: blackmail (Suggestions that the PM, or anyone else, is a lizard from another planet can be dismissed as too addled to seriously consider.). He wouldn’t have gone and enriched himself because that would be too conspicuous and even if he did, he would still want to bolster himself politically by wringing major concessions from the US. As a foreign head of state he could insulate himself from most kinds of revenge that the plotters could dish out. Canada is the largest trading partner of, and a major oil supplier to, the USA, so American economic threats would go nowhere. So where are the major economic, military or political concessions that the US would have had to make? Is it necessary to point out that they never occurred?
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