THE COMMISSION'S TREATMENT OF UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 175
More FAA Incompetence
The Commission claims that NORAD did not intercept this flight because the FAA never reported its hijacking until after it crashed. According to the Commission, the FAA flight controller did not even notify a manager until 8:55. This manager then called the FAA Command Center at Herndon, saying: "[The situation is] escalating . . . big time. We need to get the military involved." But no one at Herndon, we are told, called the military or even FAA headquarters. As a result, NORAD did not learn about the hijacking of Flight 175 until 9:03, when it was crashing into the WTC's south tower (175).
Contradicting Earlier Reports
One problem with this story is that such incompetence by FAA officials is not believable. An even more serious problem is that this story is contradicted by many prior reports.
One of these is NORAD's own previous timeline. As we saw earlier, NORAD had maintained since September 18, 2001, that it had been notified about Flight 175 at 8:43. If that was not true, as the Commission now claims, NORAD must have been either lying or confused when it put out its timeline one week after 9/11. And it is hard to believe that it could have been confused so soon after the event. So it must have been lying. But that would suggest that it had an ugly truth to conceal. The Commission, being unable to embrace either of the possible explanations, simply tells us that NORAD's previous statement was incorrect, but without giving us any explanation as to how this could be.
The Commission's claim that the military did not know about Flight 175 until it crashed is also contradicted by a report involving Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD's headquarters in Colorado. According to a story in the Toronto Star, Jellinek was on the phone with NEADS as he watched Flight 175 crash into the south tower. He then asked NEADS: "Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with?"--to which NEADS said yes (176).
Two Problematic Teleconferences
Still another problem with the Commission's new story is that there appear to have been two teleconferences during which FAA officials would have talked to the military about Flight 175. I have already mentioned the teleconference initiated by the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. The 9/11 Commission claims, to be sure, that this teleconference did not begin until 9:29 (186-88), long after Flight 175 had crashed into the south tower. But this late starting time is contradicted by Richard Clarke (188). It is also contradicted by Laura Brown of the FAA, who said that it started at about 8:20. Although Brown later, perhaps under pressure from superiors, changed the starting time to 8:45 (187), this was still early enough for discussions of Flight 175 to have occurred.
There was also a teleconference initiated by the FAA. According to the 9/11 Commission, this teleconference was set up at 9:20 (205). On May 22, 2003, however, Laura Brown sent to the Commission a memo headed: "FAA communications with NORAD on September 11, 2001."10 The memo, which used the term "phone bridges" instead of "teleconference," began: "Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges." Since the attack on the north tower was at 8:47, "within minutes" would mean that this teleconference began about 8:50, a full half hour earlier than the Commission claims. The memo made clear, moreover, that the teleconference included both NORAD and the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. During this teleconference, Brown's memo said:
The FAA shared real-time information . . . about the . . . loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest. (253)
And by 8:50, everyone agrees, Flight 175 was a "flight of interest"--everyone except, of course, the 9/11 Commission, which claims that FAA headquarters had not yet learned about it. Laura Brown's memo, in any case, was read into the Commission's record on May 23, 2003.11 But when the Commission published its final report, it simply pretended that this memo did not exist. Only through this pretense could the Commission claim that the FAA's teleconferences did not begin until 9:20.
For several reasons, therefore, it appears that the Commission's claim that the military was not notified about Flight 175 until after it struck the south tower is a lie from beginning to end. I turn now to the Commission's treatment of Flight 77 and the attack on the Pentagon.
THE COMMISSION'S TREATMENT OF AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77 AND THE ATTACK ON THE PENTAGON
As we saw earlier, if the FAA told NORAD about Flight 77 at 9:24, as NORAD's timeline of September 18 said, NEADS should have had fighter jets over Washington well before 9:38, when the Pentagon was struck. The 9/11 Commission's solution to this problem was to tell another new tale, according to which the FAA never told NORAD about Flight 77.
One inconvenient fact was that General Larry Arnold, the head of NORAD's US Continental region, had, in open testimony to the Commission in 2003, repeated NORAD's statement that it had been notified about this hijacking at 9:24. Other NORAD officials, moreover, had testified that fighters at Langley had been scrambled in response to this notification. The Commission handled this problem by simply saying that these statements by Arnold and the other NORAD officials were "incorrect" (192). The Commission again did not explain why NORAD officials had made incorrect statements. But it said that those statements were "unfortunate" because they "made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond" (192). The Commission's task was to convince us that this was not true.
More FAA Incompetence
Basic to the Commission's new story about Flight 77 is another tale of incredible incompetence by FAA officials. This tale goes like this: At 8:54, the FAA controller in Indianapolis, after seeing Flight 77 go off course, lost its transponder signal and even its radar track. Rather than reporting the flight as possibly hijacked, however, he assumed that it had crashed. Evidently it did not occur to him that a possible crash should be reported. In any case, he later, after hearing about the other hijackings, came to suspect that Flight 77 may also have been hijacked. He then shared this suspicion with Herndon, which in turn shared it with FAA headquarters. But no one, we are told, called the military. The result, the Commission says, is that "NEADS never received notice that American 77 was hijacked" (192).
Explaining the Langley Scramble: Phantom Flight 11
But even if we could believe this implausible tale, there is still the problem of why F-16s at Langley Air Force Base were airborne at 9:30. FAA incompetence again comes to the rescue. At 9:21--35 minutes after Flight 11 had crashed into the World Trade Center--some technician at NEADS, we are told, heard from some FAA controller in Boston that Flight 11 was still in the air and was heading towards Washington. This NEADS technician then notified the NEADS Mission Crew Commander, who issued a scramble order to Langley. So, the Commission claims, the Langley jets were scrambled in response to "a phantom aircraft," not to "an actual hijacked aircraft" (193). This new story, however, is riddled with problems.
One problem is simply that phantom Flight 11 had never before been mentioned. As the Commission itself says, this story about phantom Flight 11 "was not recounted in a single public timeline or statement issued by the FAA or Department of Defense" (196). It was, for example, not in NORAD'S official report, Air War Over America, the foreword for which was written by General Larry Arnold.12
General Arnold's ignorance of phantom Flight 11 was, in fact, an occasion for public humiliation. The 9/11 Commission, at a hearing in June of 2004, berated him for not remembering that the Langley jets had really been scrambled in response to phantom Flight 11, not in response to a warning about Flight 77. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste began a lengthy grilling by asking: "General Arnold. Why did no one mention the false report received from the FAA that Flight 11 was heading south during your initial appearance before the 9/11 Commission back in May of last year?" After an embarrassing exchange, Ben-Veniste stuck the knife in even further, asking:
General, is it not a fact that the failure to call our attention to the . . . the notion of a phantom Flight 11 continuing from New York City south . . . skewed the official Air Force report, . . . which does not contain any information about the fact that . . . you had not received notification that Flight 77 had been hijacked? . . . [S]urely by May of last year, when you testified before this commission, you knew those facts. (197).
In Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen says: "It is a poor memory that remembers only backwards." One must wonder if General Arnold felt that he was being criticized for not remembering the future--that is, for not "remembering" a story that had been invented only after he had given his testimony. Arnold, in any case, simply replied that he "didn't recall those facts in May of last year."
But if those alleged facts were real facts, that reply would be beyond belief. According to the Commission's new story, NORAD, under Arnold's command, failed to scramble fighter jets in response to Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93. The one time it scrambled fighters, it did so in response to a false report. Surely that would have been the biggest embarrassment of Arnold's professional life. And yet 20 months later, he "didn't recall those facts."
A second problem is that there is no way for this story about phantom Flight 11 to be verified. The Commission says that the truth of this story "is clear . . . from taped conversations at FAA centers; contemporaneous logs compiled at NEADS, Continental Region headquarters, and NORAD; and other records" (193-94). But when we look in the notes at the back of The 9/11 Commission Report, we find no references for any of these records; we simply have to take the Commission's word. The sole reference is to a NEADS audiofile, on which someone at the FAA's Boston Center allegedly tells someone at NEADS: "I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air, and it's . . . heading towards Washington" (194). The Commission claims to have discovered this audiofile. Again, however, we simply have to take the Commission's word. We cannot obtain this audiofile. And there is no mention of any tests, carried out by an independent agency, to verify that this audiofile, if it exists, really dates from 9/11, rather than having been created later, after someone decided that the story about phantom Flight 11 was needed.
But could not reporters interview the people at NEADS and the FAA who had this conversation? No, because the Commission says, nonchalantly: "We have been unable to identify the source of this mistaken FAA information" (194). This disclaimer is difficult to believe. It is now very easy to identify people from recordings of their voices. And yet the Commission was supposedly not able to discover the identity of either the individual at Boston who made the mistake or the NEADS technician who received and passed on this misinformation.
Another implausible element is the very idea that someone at Boston would have concluded that Flight 11 was still airborne. According to stories immediately after 9/11, flight controllers at Boston said that they never lost sight of Flight 11. Flight controller Mark Hodgkins later said: "I watched the target of American 11 the whole way down" (194) If so, everyone at the Boston Center would have known this. How could anything on a radar screen have convinced anyone at the Boston Center, 35 minutes later, that Flight 11 was still aloft?
Still another implausible element in the story is the idea that the Mission Commander at NEADS, having received this implausible report from a technician, would have been so confident of its truth that he would have immediately ordered Langley to scramble F-16s.13
This entire story about phantom Flight 11 is the Commission's attempt to explain why, if the US military had not been notified about Flight 77, a scramble order was issued to Langley at 9:24, which resulted in F-16s taking off at 9:30. As we have seen, every element in this story is implausible.
Why Were the Langley F-16s So Far from Washington?
Equally implausible is the Commission's explanation as to why, if the F-16s were airborne at 9:30, they were not close enough to Washington to protect the Pentagon at 9:38. To answer this question, the Commission once again calls on FAA incompetence.
The F-16s, we are told, were supposed to go to Baltimore, to intercept (phantom) Flight 11 before it reached Washington. But the FAA controller, along with the lead pilot, thought the orders were for the F-16s to go "east over the ocean," so at 9:38, when the Pentagon was struck, "[t]he Langley fighters were about 150 miles away" (201). Has there ever been, since the days of the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, such a comedy of errors? This explanation, in any case, is not believable. By the time of the scramble order, it was clear that the threat was from hijacked airliners, not from abroad. My six-year-old grandson would have known to double-check the order before sending the fighters out to sea.
End Part IV