Now I know there have been plenty of conspiracy theories on how the government and Pentagon were giving orders to the fighters to shoot down passenger airlines during 9/11. And when you read the transcripts from Vanity Fair, there is the impression that the NORAD officers were certainly grappling with this issue as the conflicting and contradictory information flowed in regarding the hijackings. But they never fired on any civilian airlines. They restrained themselves and did their jobs the best that they can under the most taxing circumstances.
There is another comment I want to make regarding these transcripts in the Vanity Fair article. Looking through them, I certainly realize that NORAD, the entire U.S. military and government were completely caught with their pants down on 9/11. I mean who--with the exception of Tom Clancy--would have expected hijackers to take their jet airplanes and slam them into buildings? And, knowing that everyone in the military and government reads Tom Clancy, they certainly would have scoffed at the notion of hijacked airlines slamming into buildings as being too absurd for even fiction. Guess what--fiction became fact. And the folks in NORAD were certainly confronted with a situation that they were never trained for.
Some additional comments....I should also say, after looking at the article again, that perhaps the conspiracy theorists were partially right in that the Pentagon is engaged in some form of cover up in the aftermath of 9/11. However this cover up wouldn't be due to cold, calculating military officials ordering the shooting down of civilian aircraft in the beginning phases of the "Great War on Terrorism," but rather a bungling CYA style cover up to protect either top military, or senior Pentagon and Bush administration officials from their own ignorance or incompetence in the early stages of this attack. Consider this little quote from the Vanity Fair story:
In the chronology presented to the 9/11 commission, Colonel Scott put the time NORAD was first notified about United 93 at 9:16 a.m., from which time, he said, commanders tracked the flight closely. (It crashed at 10:03 a.m.) If it had indeed been necessary to "take lives in the air" with United 93, or any incoming flight to Washington, the two armed fighters from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia would have been the ones called upon to carry out the shootdown. In Colonel Scott's account, those jets were given the order to launch at 9:24, within seconds of NEADS's receiving the F.A.A.'s report of the possible hijacking of American 77, the plane that would ultimately hit the Pentagon. This time line suggests the system was starting to work: the F.A.A. reports a hijacking, and the military reacts instantaneously. Launching after the report of American 77 would, in theory, have put the fighters in the air and in position over Washington in plenty of time to react to United 93.
In testimony a few minutes later, however, General Arnold added an unexpected twist: "We launched the aircraft out of Langley to put them over top of Washington, D.C., not in response to American Airlines 77, but really to put them in position in case United 93 were to head that way."
How strange, John Azzarello, a former prosecutor and one of the commission's staff members, thought. "I remember being at the hearing in '03 and wondering why they didn't seem to have their stories straight. That struck me as odd."
The ears of another staff member, Miles Kara, perked up as well. "I said to myself, That's not right," the retired colonel, a former army intelligence officer, told me. Kara had seen the radar re-creations of the fighters' routes. "We knew something was odd, but we didn't have enough specificity to know how odd."
As the tapes reveal in stark detail, parts of Scott's and Arnold's testimony were misleading, and others simply false. At 9:16 a.m., when Arnold and Marr had supposedly begun their tracking of United 93, the plane had not yet been hijacked. In fact, NEADS wouldn't get word about United 93 for another 51 minutes. And while NORAD commanders did, indeed, order the Langley fighters to scramble at 9:24, as Scott and Arnold testified, it was not in response to the hijacking of American 77 or United 93. Rather, they were chasing a ghost. NEADS was entering the most chaotic period of the morning.
It is amazing that there are higher-up people in the Pentagon and Bush administration who feel that they have to either lie, or intentionally downplay the chaos and miscommunication that occurred in NORAD on that day. If anything, the truth of the matter is that the NORAD folks, and the officials in the U.S. government, were completely caught unprepared for this style of a terror attack. The folks at NORAD still did the best they could under the circumstances. However, this downplaying of certain events by the Pentagon and Bush administration simply reinforces the notion that the Bush White House and Pentagon are still hiding the truth from the American people, thus fueling even more conspiracy theories.
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