When the paranoia you and Henry enjoy so much settles down, read this. It seems people ARE looking at these questions. Now hopefully they won't do a Warren Commission rush to judgement and will instead have someone like Feynman (from the Challenger investigation, which NASA would have been perfectly happy to bury) on them to lead them in the right direction.
9/11 Panel Set to Detail Flaws in Air Defenses
By PHILIP SHENON
Published: April 25, 2004
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North American Aerospace Defense Command
Airlines and Airplanes
ASHINGTON, April 24 — The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is expected to offer sharp criticism of the Pentagon's domestic air-defense command in the panel's final report and will suggest that quicker military action on that morning might have prevented a hijacked passenger jet from crashing into the Pentagon itself, according to commission officials.
The performance of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, and its failure to protect Washington and New York City from attack on Sept. 11 will be a focus of the remaining public hearings of the 10-member commission, which is in the final weeks of its investigation.
Commission officials said interim reports that were expected to be released at the hearings would suggest that Norad had enough time on Sept. 11 to launch jet fighters that could have intercepted — and possibly shot down — American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., more than 50 minutes after the first hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center in New York. A total of 184 people died in the Pentagon attack, including the 59 dead aboard the hijacked plane.
The commission is trying to establish a detailed timeline of how and when military pilots reporting to Norad were informed on Sept. 11 that President Bush had given the extraordinary order that allowed them to shoot down passenger planes.
Norad officers have said previously that they did not learn of the order until about 10:10 a.m., a few minutes after the last of the four hijacked jets had crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania. But White House officials have suggested that the order was made earlier in the morning and should have been communicated immediately to pilots.
The commission has repeatedly complained that Norad, a joint American-Canadian military command created at the height of the cold war in 1958 to defend airspace over North America from Soviet missiles and bombers, has been uncooperative in the commission's investigation.
In November, the commission issued a subpoena to the Pentagon after learning that a variety of pertinent documents, tapes and other evidence from Norad had not been turned over to the panel. The only other federal agency subpoenaed by the commission was the Federal Aviation Administration, which is under scrutiny by the panel for air-safety lapses related to its communications with Norad on Sept. 11.
A spokesman for Norad's headquarters in Colorado Springs, Lt. Col. Roberto Garza, insisted that Norad had fully cooperated with the commission, although he said he could not discuss issues that are now before the panel. "If we speak, we speak to the commission," he said.
Senior military commanders have said previously that Norad may have been slow to act on Sept. 11 because of the command's traditional cold- war-era focus on threats that originated from outside the United States, not on a terrorist strike carried out within American borders. They noted that, before Sept. 11, fighter pilots had no authority to shoot down a passenger plane.
But their defense of Norad's actions became more difficult this month with the disclosure that Norad planners had specifically weighed the possibility well before Sept. 11 that passenger planes might be used as missiles against domestic targets.
The disclosure came in the form a newly unearthed 2001 memo showing that in April of that year, Norad considered an exercise in which military commanders would weigh how to respond to an attack in which terrorists flew a hijacked plane into the Pentagon, precisely what happened five months later.
The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview that Norad's actions would be closely scrutinized at hearings next month in New York City, which will focus on the government's emergency response system, and at a final round of public hearings in Washington in June.
"Even with our subpoenas, Norad has been slow to act on our document requests, and that's why we haven't talked particularly about Norad in our earlier hearings," he said. "Now we will."
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