It doesn't take a genius to send some men over, have them trained as pilots, and tell them to fly a plane into a building.nuclear_cookout
None of the four airplanes were intercepted by fighter jets. But NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) intercepts planes all the time, according to a NORAD spokesman. If they hear about it in time, anyway. It's strange how NORAD didn't hear about any of the four planes until it was too late. On September 15, 2001, the Boston Globe reported. Marine Corp Major Mike Snyder, spokesman for NORAD, as saying, "We scramble aircraft to respond to any aircraft that we consider a potential threat. The hijacked aircraft were normal, scheduled commercial aircraft on approved flight plans and we only had 10 minutes prior notice to the first attack, which unfortunately was not enough notice." So they scramble hundreds of times per year (Popular Mechanics is dead wrong in their claim that this never happens), and they missed four times in one day.
Follow the money. Ask yourself: who stood to gain? Who had the motive, means, and opportunity? Al Qaeda? Motive and opportunity, perhaps, but not the means to bring down the largest buildings in the world. Even jet planes can't do that-the towers were built to withstand multiple collisions with Boeing 707 jets. Coincidentally (?) a report written by Bush advisers over 10 years ago for the infamous Project for a New American Century seems to recommend a national disaster as a way to advance its militant agenda: "[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event-like a new Pearl Harbor." [page 51, emphasis mine]
Immediately before September 11, some unidentified investors shorted the stock of United Airlines and American Airlines. The person or persons have never been identified (and no one seems to know why). Snopes.com, the famous urban legend debunking site, reports the details of these transactions. Snopes goes on to (curiously) conclude that this was pure coincidence, based on a US government organization's assertions. Despite the facts like these:
But it was during the final few trading days (the market closes on weekends) that the most unusual variances in activity occurred. Bloomberg data showed that on 6 September 2001, the Thursday before that black Tuesday, put-option volume in UAL stock was nearly 100 times higher than normal: 2,000 options versus 27 on the previous day.
On 6 and 7 September 2001, the Chicago Board Options Exchange handled 4,744 put options for United Airlines' stock, translating into 474,000 shares, compared with just 396 call options, or 39,600 shares. On a day that the put-to-call ratio would normally have been expected to be roughly 1:1 (no negative news stories about United had broken), it was instead 12:1.
On 10 September 2001, another uneventful news day, American Airlines' option volume was 4,516 puts and 748 calls, a ratio of 6:1 on yet another day when by rights these options should have been trading even. No other airline stocks were affected; only United and American were shorted in this fashion.
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