9/11 Air Response: What's wrong with this picture?

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The official 9/11 story contends that 9/11 Command and Control decided that it was a better military strategy to keep three fighters circling DC than to send one of them to intercept the only confirmed hijacked plane in the air between 9:40 and 10:06 EDT that was (supposedly) still flying unescorted over Pennsylvania more than a hour after the 2nd WTC tower was hit.

Assuming that the official story is correct and that only three fighters total were available 45 minutes after the second terrorist plane hit the WTC (which already strains credulity to absurd limits in and of itself), what we are weighing here is:

1) The infinitesimal probability that two fighters couldn't manage to protect DC's airspace by themselves against whatever UNCONFIRMED attacks might arise in the 20-30 minutes it would take for the third fighter to down Flight 93 and return to DC.

Worst case: An evacuated low-rise building (and all the important ones were being evacuated by 10:00 AM) is destroyed if and only if two F-16 fighters somehow need a third to stop a passenger jet that somehow becomes a threat within the next 30 minutes out-of-the-blue.

Best case: You have to bring down Flight 93 over a highly populated area.

vs.

2) The completely unknown probability that Flight 93 might decide to target a skyscraper in a city other than DC or, worse yet, a nuclear plant.

Worst case: Thousands of Americans die and millions get radiation poisoning while three fighters circle a few empty buildings.

Best case: You get to bring down Flight 93, THE ONLY KNOWN, CONFIRMED AND ASSUMED SUICIDAL HIJACK, over a largely unpopulated area--limiting casualties to those on the plane and possibly allowing you to cover up the whole thing.

This isn't a case of 20/20 hindsight. This is no more than 20/300 foresight. From the 1970s on, interception by fighter jet has been THE standard operating procedure for any suspected hijacking. But here we have a confirmed hijacked plane (variously reported as being confirmed sometime between 9:16 and 9:30) more than a hour into a confirmed terrorist attack, and somehow it's supposed to require some brilliant insight on the part of some ineffectual bureaucracy to arrive at the same patently obvious decision that each and every person reading this forum would have made (if they'd just be honest about it).

I'm sorry, but we all know the US military just ain't quite that damn incompetent. Maybe incompetent enough to account for Flight 77, although that's ridiculously unlikely enough to fathom. But to believe the official story about Flight 93 is to equate Command and Control with Comedy Central. I mean, if ramming a plane directly into the Pentagon didn't get the US military to spring into decisive action, I have to wonder what in the world possibly could. This is like saying cops get a confirmed sighting of a rampaging mass murderer and they decide it's more important to keep protecting the donut shop than it is to pursue the suspect because:

a) hey, anybody could turn into a murderer at any time

and

b) well, the murderer is basically headed in this direction, so who knows, maybe he's hungry and is coming to the donut shop soon--so why go to the trouble of leaving to find him when this donut shop so obviously needs our protection?

Here is the obvious conclusion that any objective, informed individual will form simply and directly from the preponderance of the evidence the public has been offered about Flight 93. There are only four possibilities, ranked from most to least believable:

1) Flight 93 was helped down by one or more of the fighters dispatched to intercept it.

2) Command and Control decided to use another weapon to deal with Flight 93 rather than a fighter jet and somehow had this other weapon in range by 10:00 EDT.

3) At least one weaponed military plane was shadowing Flight 93 when it miraculously exploded in some manner--shedding charred bolt-sized pieces of sheet metal (and probably a large swatch of fuselage and large piece of one engine among other parts). Then it miraculously crashed just minutes before it would have reached a densely populated area over which it could not have been brought down without the significant risk of far more numerous casualties.

4) Command and Control was at least partially complicit in the attacks.

after the WTC was attacked and they knew two more planes were hijacked. It is the most egregious and bizarre failure on 9/11 that they didn't have fighters up protecting the capitol. Senator Mark Dayton actually dared to question the NORAD reponse over DC on 9/11 and shortly thereafter his office get a terror threat and he had to close shop. And now he's decided not to run for re-election.

As far as flight 93, I think possibilities 2, 3 and 4 are all true and part of the answer-- especially number 4.