UQ Wire: A Guide To The 9/11 Cover-up (3)

CONTENTS:
1. The Total Failure Of the Kean Commission
2. Bush, Rice and the Genoa Warning
3. Before the Kean Commission
4. Appendix: What Do We Know About September 11th?
5. Credit Notes

“I had no idea hijacked airliners would be used as weapons.”

So said Rumsfeld, in his opening remarks to the Kean Commission on March 23, 2004. His final statement on the topic while under oath was, “I plead ignorance.”

Former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke’s testimony, one day later, was interesting, but amounted to little more than a distraction. There were more cameras on Clarke than on anyone else during the two-day national broadcast of the commission hearings. In reality, his testimony was nowhere near as interesting as the joint appearance by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Myers the day before. I do not question Clarke’s sincerity at this time, just the timing, which he did not choose. His book was released at a time chosen by the White House, and the testimony depended on the book. He had finished it well over 6 months before, but it was held up by the White House security clearance. As a result, the book came out on the eve of Rumsfeld's sworn testimony to the 9/11 Commission. Very clever if intentional, because it distracted everyone from two issues completely ignored by the commissioners, and overshadowed by Clarke and his book when they questioned Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

ISSUE #1 – On the morning of September 11, 2001, NORAD was running war games involving the scenario of hijacked airliners, while the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) was running a drill for the scenario of an errant aircraft crashing into a government building, at the exact same time as an identical scenario was perpetrated in reality. The Air Force was in day two of annual drills testing all of its systems to respond to various threats. What role, if any, did Secretary Rumsfeld, Undersecretary Wolfowitz, and acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers play in any war game scenario on the morning of September 11, 2001? What briefings did they receive about these wargames before, during, and after the morning in question?

ISSUE #2 – On October 24, 2000, a mass casualty ( M A S C A L ) emergency drill was conducted to test the P e n t a g o n ’ s response to an airliner crashing into its headquarters. In the situation room, a model plane was set aflame within a scale model of the building, while emergency crews were dispatched to various places around the real building to test their response times. A military web site later published news of the exercise, with pictures. What did then Defense Secretary William Cohen tell his successor, Rumsfeld, about this drill during the transition process from the Clinton to Bush administrations?

Now how is it possible these two questions were “overlooked”?

Cover-Up Commission – Skillful Delusion

Richard Ben-Veniste grilled Rumsfeld on the well-known threat of aircraft being used as weapons. In his long list of precedents for hijacked aircraft and attempted kamikaze attacks, Ben-Veniste conveniently left out the Oct 24, 2000 drill directly involving the Pentagon. (It should be noted that Ben- Veniste was Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Senate-appointed lawyer during Whitewater, as well as the attorney for Barry Seal, who use to fly cocaine from Honduras up to the Contra supply base at Mena, Arkansas while Bill Clinton was governor.)

Of extreme interest was CIA adviser Jamie Gorelick’s question to Rumsfeld, following on Ben-Veniste’s line of questioning. She recalled being in a room with Wolfowitz, planning for the possibility of terrorists hijacking an airliner and crashing it into the Olympics. She found it incomprehensible that the possibility of this happening at the Pentagon had never occurred to either Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld.

But Gorelick also mentioned nothing about the October 24, 2000 drill at the Pentagon itself. She went on to ask specific questions about when an order to authorize fighter pilots to shoot down aircraft was issued on the morning of September 11. Rumsfeld complicated and confused the question by shifting the focus to later in the day and describing how the events of the day modified the rules of engagement. General Myers clarified by stating that, to the best of his recollection, the shoot-down order was communicated directly to the pilots shortly after the president issued it. (This was in contradiction to his testimony before the Senate of 9/13/01 - see p. 12)

GORELICK: Was it your understanding that the NORAD pilots who were circling over Washington D.C. that morning had indeed received a shoot-down order?

RUMSFELD: When I arrived in the command center, one of the first things I heard, and I was with you, was that the order had been given and that the pilots—correction, not the pilots necessarily, but the command had been given the instructions that their pilots could, in fact, use their weapons to shoot down commercial airliners filled with our people in the event that the aircraft appeared to be behaving in a threatening way and an unresponsive way.

GORELICK: Now, you make a distinction there between the command and the pilots. Was it your understanding that the pilots had received that order?

RUMSFELD: I’m trying to get in time because...

MYERS: Well, I think—my understanding, I've talked to General Eberhart, commander now [sic] of NORAD, and I think he’s briefed the staff. And I think what he told the staff, what he told me, as I recall, was that the pilots did—at the appropriate point when the authority to engage civilian airliners was given, that the pilots knew that fairly quickly. I mean, it went down through the chain of command. (...)

RUMSFELD: (...) The reason I am hesitant is because we went through two or three iterations of the rules of engagement. And in the end, we ended up delegating that authority to, at the lowest level, I believe, to two stars.

MYERS: Right.

RUMSFELD: And the pilot would then describe the situation to that level. To the extent that level had time, they would come up to General Eberhart. To the extent Eberhart had time, he would come up to me. And to the extent I had time, I might talk to the president, which in fact, I did do on several occasions during the remainder of the day with respect to international flights heading to this country that were squawking “hijack.”

GORELICK: I’m just trying to understand whether it is your understanding that the NORAD pilots themselves, who were circling over Washington, as you referred to in your statement, whether they knew that they had authority to shoot down a plane (...)

RUMSFELD: I do not know what they thought. In fact, I haven’t talked to any of the pilots that were up there. I certainly was immediately concerned that we did know what they thought they could do. At first glance this seems like semantics, but in the context of what was really happening that day it may be quite significant. Whether or not a pilot has a shoot-down order directly communicated to him is of the highest significance given the fact that the pilot may not have known if he was still in one of the war games scheduled for that day.

Officials at NORAD have said that when the hijackings first occurred, they initially thought it was part of the Vigilant Guardian drills running that morning. Despite some confusion, once Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m., everyone should have known this was not a test. However, this is still an assumption, because we do not know what the fighter jocks in the air at the time knew and did not know. We do not know the full extent of the orders they received, and it has never been explained why scrambled fighters were unable to intercept any of the hijacked airliners.

Scrambling aircraft simply means providing an Air Force escort to survey the situation. This has nothing to do with shooting down an aircraft. Such scrambling procedures occurred 67 times in the year prior to 9/11. The concept of this simple standard operating procedure failing from 8:28 a.m., when Flight 11 made an unplanned 100 degree turn to the south, until 9:38 a.m., when the Pentagon was struck, is inconceivable without a military order. Such an order, or multiple orders causing ‘confusion’, may have been scripted into the war game scenarios that morning. We do not know if this is the case, and it seems the Kean Commission doesn’t want to know, either. It is possible that information regarding the war games running on the morning of 9/11 has been classified and cannot be discussed in public hearings. Considering the fact that the information provided here is open source and has been published by the likes of Jane’s Defense Weekly and the Associated Press, classifying the subject as a whole does not in any way help national security. If we do not face what really happened that morning, our national security is truly in jeopardy.

What was Rumsfeld doing on September 11?

In the past, Rumsfeld has gone on record saying that on the morning of September 11, he was in the Pentagon giving a lecture to members of Congress. He warned them to “expect the unexpected” with future terrorist attacks. Shortly thereafter, he was handed a note stating that the North Tower had been struck. Soon after that, he was told the second tower was hit. Rumsfeld claimed he continued with his lecture until the Pentagon was struck, at 9:38.

This makes absolutely no sense. If the Secretary of Defense is lecturing to a Congressional delegation about the danger of surprise terrorist attacks, and if in the middle of that he is told two planes have hit both World Trade Center towers, it is beyond belief that he continues his presentation without reacting to the ‘unexpected’ terrorist attack. The fact that not one member of the Kean Commission chose to scrutinize Rumsfeld’s well-known statements speaks volumes.

Willful Reckless Wanton or Treason?

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a non-profit organization founded in 1997 by prominent Republican leaders, called for a transformation of America to exercise military total spectrum dominance and unchallenged worldwide hegemony. The PNAC program, in a nutshell: America’s military must rule out even the possibility of a serious global or regional challenger anywhere in the world. The regime of Saddam Hussein must be toppled immediately, by U.S. force if necessary. And the entire Middle East must be reordered according to an American plan.

PNAC’s most important study notes that selling this plan to the American people will likely take a long time, “absent some catastrophic catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” (PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses (1997), p.51)

A catalyzing catastrophe did come, and since September 11 the policies that PNAC promoted have been put in place by PNAC’s own members. They occupy nearly all of the key positions in the Bush administration national security apparatus. Paul Wolfowitz, who was under oath alongside Rumsfeld at the March 23 testimony, signed on to the PNAC document which specifically referred to a “new Pearl Harbor” in a favorable light (in September 2000).

Donald Rumsfeld was a signatory to the PNAC mission statement, along with administration stalwarts Dick Cheney, John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich and Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as Jeb Bush. For all of them, the Project for a New American Century amounts to a kind of public oath. The mission statement and the entire PNAC plan were published on the web at newamericancentury. org, years before the Bush administration came to power.

Since all of this information is open source, how is it that the commission managed to entirely ignore it when they questioned Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Myers?

****** SIDEBAR ******

Curious Evidence

The State Department in September 2001 promised a paper to prove the guilt of Bin Laden. It was never published. Why? British premier Tony Blair instead provided a weak circumstantial case in his White Paper a few weeks later. The State Department did, however, provide a misleading translation to make it appear that Bin Laden (or someone who looks like him) confessed to 9/11 in a November 2001 video, which was found under suspicious circumstances in Afghanistan. (ARD-TV, Germany)

Meanwhile, the FBI announced one of the flight hijacker s passports was discovered in the Ground Zero rubble, on September 11 itself. A search of a Florida motel room where two hijackers stayed two weeks earlier yielded incriminating documents that they forgot there, and which had not been found by the cleaning personnel. These are only two examples of the investigators incredible lucky streak.

Yet how do these stories square with the admission, seven months later, by FBI Director Robert Mueller that, In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot." (San Francisco speech, 4/19/2002)

****** SIDEBAR ENDS ******

“I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

–Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002

Late 1980s, throughout the 1990s:

The idea of using hijacked planes as weapons against buildings becomes common. There are attempted kamikaze attacks involving hijacked planes in Israel (1986), Turkey (1993) and France (1994). A suicide Cessna pilot hits the White House on Sept. 12, 1994. Tom Clancy publishes a novel in which the villain crashes an airliner into the Capitol (1994). Pentagon scenario planners bring up the possibility of a kamikaze-hijacking in a variety of reports (twice in 1993; 1999; 2000).

Mid-1990s:

News reports and trial cases reveal that Ramzi Yussef (convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) devised “Project Bojinka,” a plot including the idea of crashing hijacked airliners into American targets. Foreign and U.S. intelligence and defense agencies issue warnings and devise defense scenarios relating to the possibility that something like “Project Bojinka” can be attempted anywhere, at any time.

October 2000:

The Department of Defense responds competently to these developments, by rehearsing a MASCAL (mass casualty) exercise based on the scenario of a plane crashing into the Pentagon. The live exercise of Oct. 24, 2000 involves rescue crews directed from a command center. A paper plane is set aflame within a scale model of the building. A military news-site later publishes an article about it.

NOTE: The Pentagon is known to be ringed with anti-aircraft batteries.

March 2001:

In the pilot episode of a short-lived TV series, “The Lone Gunmen,” the heroes narrowly avert the crashing of a remote-hijacked passenger plane into the WTC North Tower. This shows that even TV writers are speculating that someone could crash a hijacked plane into the Twin Towers.

April 2001:

According to news stories of 4/13/04, the Defense Department considers holding yet another live exercise to rehearse for the contingency of a hijacked plane crashing into the Pentagon.

June 2001:

The mass media warn that Osama Bin Laden is preparing to strike again. Sources report he has new and outlandish “Hollywood” ideas, like crashing a plane loaded with explosives into George W. Bush’s hotel at the July 2001 Summit of G-8 nations in Genoa, Italy. TIME Magazine: “According to German intelligence sources, the plot involved Bin Laden paying German neo-Nazis to fly remote controlled model aircraft packed with Semtex into the conference hall and blow the leaders of the industrialized world to smithereens. (Paging Jerry Bruckheimer…)” TIME also writes, “If Bin Laden didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”

July 3, 2001:

Bush biographer Jim Hatfield picks up on the “Genoa Warning.” In an article for Online Journal, he jokes: “Why would Osama want to kill his business partner?” He exposes a few facts about the Bush-Bin Ladin family business connections (The Carlyle Group) and about the CIA’s historic relationship with Al-Qaeda. Hatfield guesses that the CIA itself is spreading the Genoa rumor, in an effort to pump up Bush's sagging popularity. (July 18, 2001: Jim Hatfield’s death in Arkansas ruled a suicide.)

July 20, 2001:

G-8 Summit opens. Italy, citing the air-attack warnings, closes Genoa International Airport and installs anti-aircraft batteries around the G- 8 Summit locations. The U.S. Secret Service is apparently not satisfied. For safety, Bush and his entourage spend at least one night on a U.S. aircraft carrier. On the same night, Putin, Schroeder and Chirac carouse with Blair on an Adriatic cruise ship.

Meanwhile, Genoa is under martial law. Italian federal stormtroops in Darth Vader costumes enclose entire neighborhoods with milelong, barbed-wire fences. Hooded undercover agents roam in the guise of “black-bloc” protesters. They start riots and then retreat behind federal Italian police lines. This is filmed from helicopters by the local police of Genoa, who object to the extreme measures. One protester is shot dead. (ARD-TV, Germany)

August 6, 2001:

Bush receives a memorandum from CIA Director George Tenet entitled, “BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S.” This “Presidential Daily Briefing” or PDB warns of potential terrorist hijackings in U.S. airspace. The PDB later becomes the object of a tug of war between the White House and the Kean Commission.

September 11, 2001:

Early in the morning, the U.S. military begins air defense and mass casualty wargames. So far, we know definitely of:

1) a NORAD exercise known as “Vigilant Guardian,” which included hijacking simulations and possibly involved the projection of false blips onto military radar screens; and

2) an air-crash fire-drill at the National Reconaissance Office near Washington, four miles from Dulles Airport. The NRO is the headquarters of the U.S. satellite surveillance system, which is run jointly by the CIA and Pentagon.

Suddenly, the wargames are interrupted by word that a passenger plane from Logan Airport really has been hijacked. When the news arrives at a nearby airbase, the first question is: “Is this part of the exercise?” (Aviation Weekly, September 2002)

September 27, 2001:

The LA Times reports on the “Genoa Warning.” Now Italian sources claim they developed the intelligence themselves. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak also says he warned Bush that Bin Laden wanted to launch a kamikaze attack on the G-8 Summit. How did news of the plot circulate among the intelligence agencies of several countries?

May 15, 2002:

The White House admits the existence of the August 6 PDB. The New York Post headlines the news: “Bush Knew.” The next day, Condoleeza Rice proclaims that “no one could have imagined” planes would be used as weapons. She says the warnings to Bush related only to “traditional hijackings,” not kamikaze attacks.

March and April, 2004:

In testimony to the Kean Commission, both Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice once again insist that no one could have imagined hijacked planes would be used as weapons against buildings. Meanwhile, the White House finally gives in and publishes 1 1/2 pages (out of 11 total) of the August 6, 2001 PDB. What does the rest say?

April 13, 2004:

At an evening press conference, Bush connects the “Genoa Warning” (kamikaze attacks) to the Presidential Daily Briefing of Aug. 6th, 2001 (domestic hijackings).

“And I asked for the briefing [the PDB],” he says. “And the reason I did is because there had been a lot of threat intelligence from overseas. And so, I – part of it had to do with the Genoa G-8 conference that I was going to attend. And I asked at that point in time, let's make sure we are paying attention here at home, as well. And that's what triggered the report.”

Could “no one have imagined”? Perhaps inadvertantly, Bush has exposed his own national security adviser and his Secretary of Defense as liars.

Pakistan’s powerful Interservices Intelligence Agency (ISI), which in the 1990s created and trained the Taliban, maintains close ties to U.S. intelligence. By treaty, the ISI chief is approved by the CIA. On September 11, that was Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad. He was in Washington when the attacks occurred, on a visit since September 4 to meet with his counterpart at the CIA, George Tenet, and other officials. The Wall Street Journal later reported that ISI provided financing to the alleged 9/11 hijackers. Indian intelligence sources said Ahmad directly approved a wire of $100,000 to Mohamed Atta. On the morning of September 11, Ahmad was at the Capitol, meeting with the heads of the Congressional intelligence committees, Sen. Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss. At the insistence of the FBI, Ahmad was fired from his post a month later, as the Pakistani cabinet was reshuffled on the eve of the U.S. offensive in Afghanistan. Graham and Goss went on to lead the 2002 Congressional joint inquiry of 9/11. Their final, 800-page report makes no mention of Pakistan in any context. Shouldn’t they—and Tenet—at least explain what they were doing with Ahmad?

The Hush Money Fund:

“The victims fund was not created in a spirit of compassion,” September 11 family leader Beverly Eckert wrote in USA Today (12/19/03). “Rather, it was a tacit acknowledgement by Congress that it tampered with our civil justice system in an unprecedented way. Lawmakers capped the liability of the airlines at the behest of lobbyists who descended on Washington while the September 11 fires still smoldered.” Compensation for victim families under the government fund is similar to that normally gained in other sudden-death cases, but one condition is unprecedented: those who file for awards, which average $1.8 million per death, must forego litigation against U.S. companies or government agencies. At least 50 families are known to have therefore refused the fund presided over by Kenneth Feinberg, among them Eckert. “Litigation has many facets,” she says. “It’s a fact-finding mechanism, through discovery and depositions. This is not about vengeance. I certainly do want people to be held accountable... The Commission unfortunately has taken a very kid-gloves approach to their fact-finding. A courtroom is a battleground, and that's what we need to get to the bottom of everything.”

Poisoning New York:

“The collapse of the Twin Towers and the underground fire emitted the largest concentration ever measured in the U.S. of nanosize, extremely toxic submicroscopic metals and superfine particles,” says geoscientist Leuren Moret (University of Berkeley). But New Yorkers will remember that in the days after 9/11, EPA chief Christie Whitman felt confident enough to announce that no special precautions were required to protect against the dust cloud engulfing the city. A new study by the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine environmental program now details serious health consequences for rescue workers and babies born to expectant mothers exposed to the smoke. This comes as no surprise to the many thousands of New Yorkers suffering from persistent “Ground Zero cough.” Why did Whitman rush to give obviously premature and reckless reassurances?

Disposing of Ground Zero:

Michael Manning is the editor of Fire Engineering, the nation’s oldest and most important firefighter's magazine. He published a blistering January 2002 editorial criticizing the disposal of evidence at Ground Zero, in violation of regulations that required a full forensic reconstruction of the tower collapse mechanics. Debris was not kept at the Staten Island landfill, but shipped straight to scrap recyclers in China and India. As a result, scientists today theorize about the collapse, but they have lost most of the physical evidence they need to figure out what actually happened. (In a bizarre twist, photographers were arrested even for taking unauthorized photos of the Ground Zero site during the clean-up.) Wasn't Ground Zero a crime scene? One former cop, Frank Serpico, had this to say: “The mayor of New York, TIME Magazine’s [2001] Man of the Year, ordered thousands of tons of WTC steel sold and melted down before a proper investigation of the greatest crime scene the country ever witnessed could be conducted. Something foul smelling about that.”

Stonewalling:

When the anthrax attacks began in October 2001, the FBI pulled most of the agents working on the 9/11 investigation. Months later, Dick Cheney informed the “anthraxed” Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, that a “shadow government” with no Congressional input had been activated on September 11—and was still in operation. In January 2002, Cheney and Bush pressured Daschle to delay a Congressional investigation of September 11. That March, Rep. Cynthia McKinney was castigated merely for asking who may have known what in advance of 9/11. The administration’s refusal to give any information about 9/11 began to crack in May, when the White House admitted receiving an advance warning about domestic hijackings. That story was buried in a sudden avalanche of FBI terror warnings originating from an Al- Qaeda prisoner at Guantanomo, Abu Zubaydah. (He later confessed he was getting many of his ideas from the film, “Godzilla.”)

The Congressional Joint Inquiry:

Finally, in the spring of 2002, the Congressional intelligence committees set out to conduct a joint inquiry of September 11. They hired an executive director, former CIA official Brit Snider, who was fired after undisclosed conflicts behind the scenes. In the summer of 2002, the FBI (a subject of the investigation) made an unprecedented demand that senators on the panel take lie-detector tests to trace a leak that was said to have angered Dick Cheney. It later turned out that the leak originated with Cheney's office. However, by then it was apparently no longer worth investigating. (John Prados, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, As with the later 9/11 Commission, the public hearings avoided most of the actual questions of September 11, and concentrated on homeland security. One exception was the testimony of New Jersey widow Kristen Breitweiser which was ignored. (see “The Kean Commission and the September 11th Families”, p. 2) In the end, the inquiry submitted an 800- page report (December 2002). It was published six months later, with one-quarter blacked out—including an entire 28-page chapter and a glossary item. (!) An appendix by several senators noted that only the committee chairs actually had access to any significant evidence during the inquiry. As for Graham, he told the Washington Post that the most important facts about Sept. 11—which he implied involved complicity by more than one U.S. ally—had yet to be revealed. “But maybe it will all come out in 30 years,” Graham said.

Recommended article: John Prados, “Slow-Walked and Stonewalled,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, Mar/Apr 2003

9/11/01

Notes: FAA: Federal Aviation Administration; NORAD: North American Air Defense Command. All times AM Eastern Standard Time (EST).

5:53 Portland Airport surveillance image taken of men identified as Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, boarding a flight to Boston for transfer to Flight 11.

7:59 American Airlines Flight 11 (AA11) cleared for takeoff from Logan Airport.

8:13-8:20 FAA, Boston ground control aware that AA11 has been diverted, presumably hijacked.

8:14 United Airlines Flight 175 (UA175) cleared for takeoff from Logan Airport.

8:20 American Airlines Flight 77 (AA77) cleared for takeoff from Dulles International Airport.

8:21 AA11 flight attendants Amy Sweeney and Betty Ong call American Airlines to alert that their plane has been hijacked.

8:31 FAA, Boston ground control, informs NORAD that AA11 has been diverted, according to Lt. Colonel Dawne Deskins (ABC News, 9/11/02).

8:40 FAA Boston ground control informs NORAD that AA11 has been diverted, according to official NORAD timeline (NORAD, 9/18/01).

8:42 UA175 known to be diverted, presumed hijacked, transponder turned off (NYT, 10/16/01). Reports that transponder was actually changed to different, tracked signal (WP, 9/17/01).

8:42 United Airlines Flight 93 (UA93) cleared for takeoff from Newark Airport, after 41-minute delay.

8:43 FAA informs NORAD that UA175 has been diverted, according to NORAD (9/18/01).

8:46:26 World Trade Center Building 1 (WTC 1), the North Tower, is struck (AA11).

After 8:46 Open phone line established between White House, Secret Service, FAA and NORAD (FAA, 5/21/03; Cheney on NBC, 9/16/01).

8:46 AA77 goes severely off course over West Virginia, returns to course after about five minutes (according to published flight routes). Ground-control contact continues. This has never been explained.

8:50 Last known ground control contact to AA77.

8:52 Two interceptor jets scrambled from Otis Air Force Base (AFB), Massachussetts, on a heading to New York (NORAD, 9/18/01).

8:56 AA77 transponder turned off. Just prior, flight diverted from route over Kentucky/Ohio border and heads back toward Washington. Reports conflict: AA77 is lost to radar, reappears later over Washington DC; or AA77 is lost for a few minutes, then located and tracked all the way back to DC.

8:55 George W. Bush informed of first crash and thinks, “That's one lousy pilot.” (Source: Bush)

9:02:54 World Trade Center Building 2 (WTC 2), the South Tower, is struck (UA175).

9:05 In Florida, Bush is informed of second crash and reportedly told: “America is under attack.”

9:16 FAA notifies NORAD of presumed UA93 hijacking (FAA; no NORAD statement).

9:24 FAA notifies NORAD of AA77 diversion, according to NORAD (9/18/01).

9:25 From AA77, Barbara Olsen calls Theodore Olsen to report hijacking (Miami Herald, 9/14/01).

9:30 Two interceptor jets scrambled from Langley AFB, Virginia, on a heading to Washington (NORAD, 9/18/01).

9:30 “Fast-moving primary target” (AA77) enters Washington airspace, on heading for White House (FAA).

9:31 Bush delivers brief address to the nation, live from Florida school.

9:38 The Pentagon is struck (AA77), on the side just renovated to reinforce against terror attacks. Soon after, jet fighters are scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base, 10 miles away (CBS, 9/14/01).

9:55 From White House, Cheney orders U.S. Air Force fighters to "engage" incoming UA93 (WP, 1/27/02).

9:59 WTC 2 collapses.

10:03 UA93 crashes in Pennsylvania, according to NORAD (9/18/01).

10:06 UA93 crashes in Pennsylvania, according to U.S. Army seismic study. NOTE: Last 3 minutes of UA93 flight transcript, played to families in 2002, were blank or missing.

10:22 Media report car bomb at State Department. Later called false.

10:29 WTC 1 collapses. Approximately 3,000 people are dead.

10:37 Authorities report plane crash in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

after 10:00 New York orders evacuation of Lower Manhattan. State of alert in New York and Washington DC. Evacuations of all federal buildings in United States. Further (false) reports of plane crashes and hijackings, including in Colorado, Camp David, and crash sites in Pennsylvania and at Ohio/Kentucky border. Further (false) reports of attacks in Washington. Bush flies to Louisiana and Nebraska before returning to Washington. U.S. closes borders. Florida declares statewide emergency. Cape Canaveral, Disneyworld shut down. All sports and entertainment events cancelled. Callers from Jordan take credit for attacks on behalf of “Japanese Red Army,” Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. Latter two organizations issue denials of involvement. Reuters footage of a Palestinian grandmother said to be celebrating attacks in a West Bank street is played around the world. Bomb threats cause evacuation of Frankfurt Stock Exchange and grounding of all flights in Saudi Arabia. By evening, Osama bin Laden is identified as prime suspect. Bush speaks to nation.

4:25 pm WTC 7 reported on fire.

5:21 pm WTC 7 collapses.

NOTES: First unplanned collapse of a steel skyscraper in history not due to plane crash. WTC 7 owner: Silverstein Properties. Mortgage owner: Blackstone Group. Tenants: Securities and Exchange Commission, CIA, Defense Dept., Treasury Dept., Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM).

Post 9/11

9/13/01 Senate confirmation hearings for Gen. Myers as Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. Myers says, “to the best of my knowledge,” no order was given to scramble interceptor planes until after the Pentagon was hit (9:38). NOTE: Elsewhere, Myers stated he went into a Capitol Hill meeting with Sen. Cleland right after the first crash, and only heard later that this was not accident—only moments before he was told that the Pentagon had been hit.

9/16/01 On “Meet the Press,” Cheney reveals that FAA, NORAD and other services maintained a joint line of communication on the morning Sept. 11. He also says, "The toughest decision was this question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft."

NOTE: Interception of errant aircraft (not shootdown) is a standard operating procedure, historically not requiring an order from the upper chain of command.

9/18/01 NORAD releases timeline detailing when it received errant aircraft alerts from FAAand issued interception orders. Timeline shows interceptor planes were scrambled before 9:38, contradicting Myers’s testimony to Senate. NOTE: Timeline indicates FAAtook up to 27 minutes to inform NORAD of the AA11 diversion; as little as one minute to inform NORAD of the UA175 diversion; and at least 34 minutes to inform NORAD of the AA77 diversion. No times are specified for UA93.

5/21/03 FAA issues statement on “FAA Communications with NORAD On September 11, 2001” as a “clarification” to the Kean Commission: “Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges that included FAA field facilities, the FAA Command Center, FAA headquarters, DOD, the Secret Service, and other government agencies. The US Air Force liaison to the FAA immediately joined the FAA headquarters phone bridge and established contact with NORAD on a separate line. The FAA shared real-time information on the phone bridges about the unfolding events, including information about loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unautho rized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest, including Flight 77. Other parties on the phone bridges, in turn, shared information about actions they were taking. NORAD logs indicate that the FAA made formal notification about American Flight 77 at 9:24 a.m., but information about the flight was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges before the formal notification.”

NOTE: Transcripts of the above communications are known to exist.

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