First off, I don't give a whole lot of credit to the "Pentagon crash was faked" story either (though where IS the plane?), and don't really care much about whether Bush personally knew in advance or not (though I find it a little shocking that he would continue to talk about education when he knew that a hijacked plane flew into the WTC).

>Do you realize how many planes are in the air at any given time?

A lot, I know, but EVERY SINGLE ONE is tracked by air traffic control. And every commercial flight files a flight plan in advance. And if it deviates from the plan, it's contacted. And if it doesn't respond, it's intercepted. It's standard operating procedure. It's how mid-air collisions are avoided.

I don't think Israel "planned" the attack either, but I strongly suspect they didn't help avoid it, and it sounds more like an issue of provocation, anyway -- the Fox News link above shows that the Israeli firms providing phone taps to law enforcement have been abusing their tapping abilities, and the hypothesis that the Israeli government has been blackmailing the US government into aid is not so far-fetched. (See Clinton, Lewinsky, and "Mega": http://www.shmoo.com/mail/cypherpunks/mar99/msg00044.html ) And, of course, when a major power is providing substantial aid to one of your enemies, that major power becomes your enemy as well.

In the game "Civilization", there's this thing called "war weariness", which is most pronounced under a democracy. Basically, your people get tired of fighting a war when you declare it, and start rioting and such. BUT -- they don't get tired so quickly when some other nation declared war on you. So if you have a democracy, and you want to start attacking somebody else, you provoke that nation surreptitiously. Then they declare war on you (often with an attack), and you can fight quite a bit with your country's support.

It just seems a bit too real.

Alex