(I shudder to think what i will find if i look into JFK assination theories)

Thank you very much for your kind comments. Should a publisher or literary agent be interested, I'd be happy to write a book, although I must admit I have no particular qualifications on the subject (not that that's ever stopped conspiracy theorists, of course). Most of my writing on this topic is an attempt to synthesize various points made by others more knowledgeable than I, particularly the structural engineers who have explained in detail how the Twin Towers fell and the sequence of events at the Pentagon. I also have to praise the 9/11 Myths website, whose author I don't know, for putting together the most thorough refutation of 9/11 conspiracy theories I've come across anywhere.

Meanwhile, I will henceforth provide the link to your site whenever disputing with those under the spell of these theories. Thanks so much for taking on this effort.

I would also put forward that it is probably easier to intercept a single private jet on a relatively uneventful day over the Southern States than to intercept, in the best case scenario, 3 passenger aircraft (assuming interceptions only begin after the initial plane hit the WTC) out of the several hundreds/thousands of aircraft that routinely fly over the North Eastern seaboard on a given day. That's assuming they could even pinpoint the actual planes in distress from all the dozens (if not more) of potential hijackings from planes that either had minor radio problems or made suspicious (but on a regular day routine) course corrections to take advantage of favourable tailwinds/avoid weather systems/etc.

And Ebonmuse, I have to congratulate you on what is by far the most clear, concise and detailed debunking of 9/11 conspiarcy theories I have seen thus far. Great work.

In summary, there are very logical explanations for the elay in getting aircraft to intercept the 9/11 aircraft.

Simple incompetence is not sufficient to explain why none of the aircraft were INTERCEPTED. The procedures are very clear and are designed to operate in confusing situations. Radio failure happens everyday somewhere in the world as do interceptions. The people involved did not have to make life and death decisions to order an interception as interception does not imply shooting down the aircraft. Something that may have got in the way was an order that all interceptions be approved by the Secretary of Defence instead of local commanders.

"CJCSI 3610.01A, dated June 1, 2001, required that all requests for asistance in hijackings be approved by the Secretary of Defense. It had an exception for emergencies that would seem to give commanders in the field autonomy in ordering intercepts."

The people that got a fighter on the wingtip of Payne Stewart's plane had similar time and managed to do it. If you turn off the SSR transponder of an airliner to try to conceal it this has no effect on the primary return if the radar is a primary radar with SSR. The aircraft would have stood out on the fighters primary, look down shoot down, radar as a blip without a squawk code and be easily seen if they had been in the air. To conceal the plane properly the SSR transponder should have been left on to merge with the other planes in the corridor.

Even a totally incompetant controller can pass an intercept order. So where was the incompetance? Was it the FAA that did not contact NORAD or was it NORAD that did not respond quickly enough. Nothing in the reports of the 9/11 commission or anything else answer these questions satisfactorily.

However, as far as I can see you don't address the simplest (but perhaps hardest to prove) conspiracy theory - that what we all saw on 9/11 was exactly as it seemed... but that elements within the US government were aware to some degree of what was going to happen and allowed it to go ahead.

That's true, I don't address that. As I said in part I, it wasn't my purpose to argue against such hypotheses, though I think they're probably false. As you say, this type of hypothesis is much more difficult to prove or disprove, but I rely on the old adage: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." I'm no fan of the Bush administration (to put it mildly), but even I have difficulty believing they could see such a horrifying attack coming and deliberately look the other way. Although numerous dispersed elements of law enforcement agencies did detect different hints of the attack in advance, there was a systemic failure to connect the dots.

Again I am not the worst conspiracy theory person my main thing is that the planes should have been intercepted.

I agree, they should have been. That does not mean that a conspiracy theory is needed to explain why they were not. As above, simple incompetence is more than sufficient to explain why the hijacked airliners were not shot down. Consider the mass chaos and confusion among the air traffic control agencies on that day, an apparent lack of anything like central coordination, and certainly not least, the understandable reluctance of anyone in authority to order a military plane to fire on a commercial aircraft containing civilians. As it's been said, hindsight is 20/20, and we shouldn't forget that the decision that we've had months to mull over, with all the relevant information available to us, was a decision that people on that day had only a short time to make with a lot less information.

If the coordination between NORAD and the FAA had worked as it had on countless other occasions there would have been fighters in formation with Flight 11, and the others, 20 or 30 minutes before their respective impacts. You do not need foreknowledge of the event to prompt a routine response to a missed radio call - something that happens all the time in aviation. Radios fail for many reasons and there are clear published and promulgated procedures known to airline and military pilots the world over to cope with this eventuality.

Again your government needs to explain why the system broke down so badly on this one occasion something that it also has failed to do. It also need to release the flight recorder information from all the flights to at least the NTSB. If the FAA are truly this incompetant how do they manage one of the busiest air corridors in the world the North East of the USA as well as they do? If your Air Force is this incompetant how did they co-ordinate the enormous logistics of 100 or 200 strike missions per day involving over 2000 aircraft in Desert Storm?

There is something terribly wrong that these airliners were not intercepted to see what was going on. The terrible decision then could then have been made to shoot down the aircraft well out from their final destinations. 9/11 could have been prevented or minimised just with normal routine aviation procedures being followed - why wasn't it?

However, as far as I can see you don't address the simplest (but perhaps hardest to prove) conspiracy theory - that what we all saw on 9/11 was exactly as it seemed (three passenger planes crashed into buildings causing them to collapse, another brought down through the intervention of its passengers before it reached its target, without any need for missiles or bombs or fighters or mysteriously vanishing passengers) but that elements within the US government were aware to some degree of what was going to happen and allowed it to go ahead.

It's not nearly as exciting (or unlikely) as the Bush administration actually planning and carrying out the hopelessly complicated operations suggested by the more extravagant conspiracy theories. It would though be much easier.

The official view is that, although a great deal of information was available, it was either disregarded or not properly understood. A combination of widespread incompetence and poor communications is blamed. There's a spectrum of involvement from complete ignorance via accidentally looking the other way on to wilfully looking the other way and through to complete control. You've obviously examined a lot of the evidence. On your current view, where on the spectrum would you put the government (or rather, some elements within government)?