Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [OT] the poetry of donald rumsfeld

[Miles Bader]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2004 at 02:14:01AM +0100, Robin Farine wrote:
> What I find more suspicious for instance is why no fighter came to
> intercept the planes?  I thought that any point in the US can be reached by
> a fighter in about 15 minutes.
                                                                                
I don't know what the technical figure is (15 minutes flight time is a few
hundred miles), but it probably isn't that relevant.
                                                                                
It seems much more likely that no one was looking for this particular
scenario to happen, or at least didn't consider it a serious enough
possibility to make the serious investments that would be required to
detect the situation, make the decision to do something (_quickly_), and
have the equipment/personnel prepared to go (_quickly_).  Perhaps the
pilots/planes are already in place to go after russian bombers or
something, but even with all the hardware in place, it's a very hard
problem:  any detection/decision-making mechanism that's fast enough to
actually respond in time is probably going to make mistakes and end up
shooting down innocent airliners-in-trouble too (maybe that's even more
likely than shooting down a terrorist!).  Unlike russian bombers, a
terrorist threat is pretty ill-defined.
From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>
Date: 20 Mar 2004 11:04:59 +0900
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> For some reason, I just had the impression that not much effort was
> invested to prevent this disaster because some people could somehow
> benefit from it.

Oh, that's silly (and the stuff that conspiracy theories are made of)...

-Miles
-- 
"1971 pickup truck; will trade for guns"