Do you also blame every police officer for failing to stop every murder, due to the police not being at the exact right place at the exact right time, knowing exactly what is about to happen, who is going to be the murderer, who is going to be the murdered, and the technique/weapon that is used to commit the crime? Because based on your reasoning, you should.
Edited to add:
The reason this argument bothers me so is that I'm not some great big fanboy of NORAD. But rather because the actual reasoning that goes behind blaming NORAD seems rather poor and includes a lack of understanding in regards to how we know things. If we then use hindsight to judge, we must be careful about the knowledge we have now, and our past and present assumptions. Sometimes these judgeents can make sense, sometime they don't. This is one of those cases.
9/11 was such a vastly different event in the history of the US, it seems quite unfair to blame NORAD for not predicting how things turned out. An argument that blames NORAD (imo) seems to blame NORAD because they were not omniscience and omnipotent.
We're looking back at a historical event where we have an incredible amount of information about exactly what happened. How could we assume that NORAD would have planes flying to cover NYC and Washington DC, two very important cities in the US. Do we also know exactly what their targets in those two large cities are going to be? That's a rather ridiculous argument.
This is especially true, because almost no one had used Airliners as guided missiles before. (And the reason that Flight 93 is so special, it shows that once the passengers were made aware of how the plane was no longer a traditional hijacking, they may have forced the terrorists to crash the plane without greater casualties.)
How do you stop these events? Let's assume that we know the hijackers were going to target those two cities, (and those 3 buildings) but couldn't the hijackers have targeted two other cities that didn't have air cover (and again, the fighters had de facto permission to shoot down hijacked civilian airliners). Do we give air cover to every minor city in the entire US? Do we put SAM sites in every US downtown? Let's just militarize the entire US, it wouldn't be the first time we had "Fortress America."
We can't always look back at an event knowing what we know now and judge it based on our knowledge at this moment versus knowledge at that moment. (This could quickly descend into a philosophical argument about knowledge, epistemology, etc., but I'm not going there.) But I will say that when analyzing things such as this, we have to be careful about our own assumptions and how we have learned the things we know, and then apply those to a historical event.
I don't blame NORAD for not predicting 9/11. I blame them for not having planes close enough to be useful.
There's a difference. NORAD assumed they would always get early warning of an attack, and there weren't even enough operational fighters to do anything about it. Both of those things were bad assumptions.
Edited to add:
The reason this argument bothers me so is that I'm not some great big fanboy of NORAD. But rather because the actual reasoning that goes behind blaming NORAD seems rather poor and includes a lack of understanding in regards to how we know things. If we then use hindsight to judge, we must be careful about the knowledge we have now, and our past and present assumptions. Sometimes these judgeents can make sense, sometime they don't. This is one of those cases.
9/11 was such a vastly different event in the history of the US, it seems quite unfair to blame NORAD for not predicting how things turned out. An argument that blames NORAD (imo) seems to blame NORAD because they were not omniscience and omnipotent.
We're looking back at a historical event where we have an incredible amount of information about exactly what happened. How could we assume that NORAD would have planes flying to cover NYC and Washington DC, two very important cities in the US. Do we also know exactly what their targets in those two large cities are going to be? That's a rather ridiculous argument.
This is especially true, because almost no one had used Airliners as guided missiles before. (And the reason that Flight 93 is so special, it shows that once the passengers were made aware of how the plane was no longer a traditional hijacking, they may have forced the terrorists to crash the plane without greater casualties.)
How do you stop these events? Let's assume that we know the hijackers were going to target those two cities, (and those 3 buildings) but couldn't the hijackers have targeted two other cities that didn't have air cover (and again, the fighters had de facto permission to shoot down hijacked civilian airliners). Do we give air cover to every minor city in the entire US? Do we put SAM sites in every US downtown? Let's just militarize the entire US, it wouldn't be the first time we had "Fortress America."
We can't always look back at an event knowing what we know now and judge it based on our knowledge at this moment versus knowledge at that moment. (This could quickly descend into a philosophical argument about knowledge, epistemology, etc., but I'm not going there.) But I will say that when analyzing things such as this, we have to be careful about our own assumptions and how we have learned the things we know, and then apply those to a historical event.
And that's all I'll say about that.