Chez Chesler

The 9/11 Commission has been in the news. There's confusion as to if and when Dick Cheney ordered fighter planes to shoot down the jetliners, and an implication that if Boston Center had called the military sooner, they could have shot down the planes before they hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now, having seen what the damage the planes did, we think that might have been the right choice. Suppose all four planes had been shot out of the sky? Lacking the ability to prove what would have happened, what would be the fallout from our killing several hundred of our own civilians? Nevermind the ethical question. I'm also thinking that the hijackers were able to do what they did in the "sterile" environment because they had knives. (I've heard allegations from Ms. Lemack that they had more.) So box cutters are banned from the "sterile" area now, and knitting needles and scissors and nail files. Suppose the next band of hijackers are Ninjas. Instead of killing flight attendants by slitting their throats, they are killing them by breaking their necks or other forms of unarmed hand-to-hand combat. Isn't the system equally vulnerable? Or if the system is not vulnerable because pilots wouldn't fall for that again, cockpit doors are reinforced, and so forth, why bother banning knitting needs and scissors and nail files?