Lt. Heather "Lucky" Penney, a female combat pilot... was sent up into the air on 9/11 in a plane that wasn't armed with weapons, with the instructions to find and bring down Flight 93 before it could get to Washington - with her plane. She was to ram it, crash into it, and if she was lucky, she might have time to eject.

Via Andrew Sullivan

“There was no doubt before” ((that bin Laden was dead)), “but now there is no doubt,”

-- Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, demonstrating once again that a course in logic is not a pre-requisite for being a US Senator, after seeing pictures of Osama Bin Laden's body.

"It is not comfortable to come to work knowing full well that my hands will be feeling another man’s private parts, their butt, their inner thigh. Even worse is having to try and feel inside the flab rolls of obese passengers and we seem to get a lot of obese passengers!"

-- TSA Agent, via Andrew Sullivan

To see how radical our establishment consensus in this area has become... look at the Terrorism policies of what had previously been the most right-wing administration in America's history: the Reagan administration... Terrorism by Islamic radicals had been a greater problem in the 1980s than it is now. There was the 1983 bombing of our Marine ( Read more... )

Two F-16s under the direction of the North American Aerospace Defense Command were scrambled today after the pilot of an AirTran flight from Atlanta to San Francisco reported an unruly passenger on board...

An intoxicated passenger who was disruptive had locked himself in a bathroom, according to John McGinely, assistant director of the Colorado ( Read more... )

Two fighter jets under NORAD command were scrambled to intercept a Hawaiian airlines plane and escort it back to Portland after

an uncooperative passenger made threatening remarks and refused to store his carry-on bag

Keoni Wagner, a Hawaiian airlines spokesperson said

the airline was "surprised" by the response.

-- HonoluluadvertiserThe only ( Read more... )

"It is now clear to us that there are bits and pieces of information that were in the possession of the U.S. government in advance . . . that, had they been assessed and correlated, could have led to a much broader picture and allowed us to disrupt the attack... Or certainly to know much more about the alleged attacker in such a way as to ensure ( Read more... )

From what I understand, the system didn't fail. The system was never designed to catch someone carrying what this guy was carrying, despite Napoliatano's claims ( Read more... )