In the spirit of the thread - although an admitted deviation from the specific items listed in the OP: We've all noticed that many conspiracy fantasists pushed the notion of antiaircraft missle emplacements existing at the Pentagon; most of us here are familiar with April Gallop and the fantasist charge that she's proof of the existence of SAM defenses there. What continues to be missed is how those are supposed to work in such cluttered airspace without accidentally shooting down legitimate air traffic; Reagan International is very close by, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that the normal landing approaches of those airliners comes rather close to the Pentagon anyway, and any deviations that did occur would not be obvious until it was too late to do anything. So (ignoring the lack of physical evidence for such emplacements) given the practical problems with such a deployment, it's a wonder that fantasists continue to insist on their presence pre-9/11; they seem to ignore that procedure is every bit as important as material existence (at least in my dealings with governmental bureaucracies), and the lack of a practical procedure for identifying deviant aircraft in time to do anything about it would preclude the emplacement of the defenses to begin with.
At any rate, that's my own take on that specific part of the topic. As an attempt to strengthen up the argument (or see if it should be dismissed) I offer up that last submission for critique: ".. the lack of practical procedure for identifying deviant aircraft in time... would preclude the emplacement of the defenses to begin with". Any pilots or individuals in the airline industry (or military) have any judgements/commentary/critiques of that statement? I base it on the fact that deviations from normal flightpaths to suicide-ram buildings in the DC area would only be noticeable for a short period of time - on the order of seconds - and it's just not possible to conclusively identify those aircraft, let alone their intents (damaged controlls? pilot inattention? etc...) in the timeframe allotted and still maintain a reasonable certainty that those craft and the pilots' intents have been correctly identified; it seems more likely that any air defense plan would depend on distance and time rather than local defenses, and the existence of the Air National Guard to me is evidence in favor of that. Is that a reasonable statement? And also, does anyone have any quantifications for my points i.e. the distance between normal flightpaths and the Pentagon, White House, Capitol Hill, etc., and what those distances would translate into timewise for planes travelling at approach speeds?
Or at the very least say would should be thrown in jail once the "truth" comes out.
