This was news to me, but not entirely surprising. I guess this is another problem for the claim, for which Condi Rice has become famous, that no one could picture anyone using planes as weapons. Apparently someone in the Pentagon could imagine it:
NORAD had drills of jets as weapons USA Today 04/18/04
In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.
One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States. In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon — but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say.
Aside from the electoral politics, it does raise the question: if NORAD had wargamed for this, was their response on 9/11 really the best they should have done?
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