You know Wolfgang and SharonA, when you have no facts to refute something, and instead turn to disparaging the person who is the source of the facts, it doesn't do much to bolster your own point of view in the discussion.

The point I raised was that there is a pretty big gap in time between the first hi-jacking and the last plane crash. About two hours. F16 fighter jets can fly many miles in a matter of minutes, and the attacks all happened within a couple hundred miles of one another. Now, I know it was a sleepy sort of a Monday morning, but c'mon. An F16 at top speed can fly from NY to DC in under a half hour. So where was the US Air Force?

Or is someone suggesting that our intelligence agencies and the US military is NOT monitoring air traffic controllers on the East Coast of the US? At all?

Wouldn't that be something worth investigating if it wasn't being done prior to 9/11? Wouldn't it be worth investigating to find out why no military jet aircraft capable of shooting down an airliner was able to get to the scene? Aren't those just the sorts of questions the American public should be asking of it's government now, instead of rolling over, and sending more money and materials into Afghanistan without question? When other countries (Canada) have announced they are pulling out of the war effort, but giving no reason for it?

Or was the 9/11 attack just the sort of opportunity the Bush administration, in their zeal to "reclaim the executive powers of the presidency", was seeking to undermine and overthrow our democratic institutions without anyone being able to challenge them, due to the president's wartime popularity?

There has been an extraordinary amount of censorship and silencing of critics in the US, which we have not witnessed since the McCarthy era. The price of democracy is daily citizenship. And I emphasize daily. While most Americans don't believe it necessary (much less tolerable) to fight against some of their leaders strong tendencies toward totalitarianism, other citizens at least know that there is no country or state in history that hasn't been confronted with just these sorts of conflicts with the leaders. The old cliche about absolute power corrupting absolutely certainly applies to the current circumstances the US finds itself in.

Very few US citizens believe that THEIR civil liberties will be suspended in the name of national security. I say, let's investigate the 9/11 attacks openly and forthrightly, as we should. Let us open up the process of examining the current administration's policies to the same scrutiny we have historically used for other administrations to get to the bottom of 9/11, and what may well have been a corporate conspiracy to fix the energy markets. Then we'll see how many civil liberties we have when Dick Cheney's boys fight back to keep the veil of secrecy over what they are doing. Or not doing in the case of 9/11.