The front page of the New York Times, exactly 25 years ago:
Some excerpts, not in quote style for readability (modern correction: the Langley-based F-16s arrived in D.C. closer to 22 minutes after the Pentagon impact):
The forces or ideas that transformed Mr. Atta are not clear. What is clear, however, is that two years ago his habits began to change. He requested a prayer room at the university for himself and 20 other Arab students. He grew a beard. He listed himself at the university under a different family name, el-Amirals.
Mr. Atta, who was registered in Germany as a native of the United Arab Emirates but appears on other documents as an Egyptian, was for most of his years in Germany an apparently secular man. Then ”something changed in him,” said one of his teachers, Alptekin Ozdemir, a Turk who has lectured at the university for 15 years and helps advise the foreign students there. Perhaps 40 to 50 of them are Arabs, out of a student body of 3,600.
Rescue workers in lower Manhattan carried body bags from piles of wreckage to refrigerated trucks. One worker said he had found the remains of people strapped into what seemed to be airplane seats. Another reported finding the body of a flight attendant, her hands bound.
But despite elaborate plans that link civilian and military efforts to control the nation’s airspace in defense of the country, and despite two other jetliners’ having already hit the World Trade Center in New York, the fighter planes that scrambled into protective orbits around Washington did not arrive until 15 minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
Phil, why is it that most perpetrators of this kind of terrorism are like this? Upper-crust well-educated westernized secularized Muslims. How is it that they suddenly decide the truth is a way of life from the 6th century and it’s time to blow up and kill innocent people?
Have you seen the old photos of Bin Laden? He was completely secularized. He learned English in Oxford, had two girls on each arm. What pushes a man like this, the son of a billionaire, to grow a long beard and start living in a cave?
A newer gootube video noted there was no capability to send an armed F-16 over the CONUS so the fighter planes that scrambled into the protective orbits had kimikaze pilots. 1 would ram the cockpit & the other would ram the tail. Could imagine if flight 93 regained control, they would have had to get on the radio & divert or they would still have been rammed.