Norman Ornstein's Doomsday Scenario

Atlantic, The, June, 2003 by Michelle Cottle

Call him the Cassandra of Capitol Hill. For nearly two years Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has been running around Washington auguring doom and calling on lawmakers to ponder a horrific question: What would have happened if United Flight 93, brought down in the fields of southwestern Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, had departed Newark on time? "We know that United 93 crashed in Pennsylvania only because it left forty minutes late," Ornstein says; otherwise its passengers would not have learned that their hijackers were on a suicide mission, and so would have had little incentive to risk storming the cockpit.

Rather than roaring to earth near the town of Shanksville, Flight 93 would have continued south to Washington, where the...

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