I don't think a bureaucracy, by nature, can have the kind of wild imagination that is required to pull off a 9-11. Nothing to gain, everything to lose. This is not like shooting the Arch Duke Ferdinand...or blowing up the USS Maine. And, it's less than a zero-sum game if you consider the (global) stock market losses, travel industry losses, and the cost of the response, in terms of cash, lives, and national debt. IMO the flash prior to impact could have been from the shock wave that precedes any airliner approaching mach1--any pilots out there who can better describe this? Tankers feel this when refueling--don't know the exact term.

Finally, why would OBL take credit for it? He had this little Lord of the Flys thing going on in Afghanistan and he just got too cocky. Don't forget--Lockerbie, the Marine Barracks in Lebanon, the Nairobi? Embassy Bombings, etc. These are precursor events. What about the 1996 WTC bombing? Conspiracy? No, van full of explosives. I've seen the apartments in Delray Beach where the hijackers lived during flight school. Those are real. The conspiracy if any, lies in what our government knew in the 1990s and failed to visualize in terms of a growing threat.

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