Although anti-aircraft missiles sited to protect the White House (and presumably the Pentagon) have existed for years, there was no effort to try to bring down the Boeing 757 that slammed into the Pentagon. As further details emerged Thursday, that seemed even more remarkable: The terrorist pilots twice circled the capital before flying down the Mall past the White House and turning across the Potomac to crash into the Pentagon.

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Hadn't seen this reported before..Certainly a tough decision to shoot down an airliner over a city....

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001

Answers

As Kahn said in a star trek movie:

"We are all one happy fleet."

I imagine the gunner was thinking that he would be in a lot of trouble if he shot a US commercial plane that was making an emergency landing in the Potomac. I mean, what else would that plane be doing there?

If there was a gunner....

-- Anonymous, September 15, 2001

There's a report on this in the NYTimes, to which I am not and will not be a subscriber. If you want to read the rest, you'll have to subscribe yourself. The following was nicked from Lucianne.

Pentagon Tracked Deadly Jet but Found No Way to Stop It

The New York Times, by MATTHEW L. WALD WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — During the hour or so that American Airlines Flight 77 was under the control of hijackers, up to the moment it struck the west side of the Pentagon, military officials in a command center on the east side of the building were urgently talking to law enforcement and air traffic control officials about what to do. 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. Even if they had been there sooner, it is not clear what they would have done to thwart the attack. The Federal Aviation Administration has officially refused to discuss its procedures or the sequence of events on Tuesday morning, saying these are part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's inquiry. But controllers in New England knew about 8:20 a.m. that American Airlines Flight 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, had probably been hijacked..... Networks Plan to Resume Programming

-- Anonymous, September 15, 2001