jgoins: While I see your point about the difficulty of making a decision whether to drop an airplane full of passengers -- =although some argue that the Pennsylvania crash was the result of a missle= -- that was not the question.

As Beast reiterates, the fighters weren't even in the air tailing the hijacked jets like they should have been in the first place.
If that is true, then something important happened to prevent sending fighters up per standard proceedure. My jury is out as to why, pending more and better evidence.