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 Sen Mark Dayton charged Friday the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the American Aerospace Defense Command NORAD have covered up catastrophic failures that left the nation vulnerable during the Sept 11th hijackings.
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NORAD hid 9/11 failures WASHINGTON, D.C. - Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., charged on July 31 that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) have covered up "catastrophic failures" that left the nation vulnerable during the Sept. 11 hijackings. "For almost three years now, NORAD officials and FAA officials have been able to hide their critical failures that left this country defenseless during two of the worst hours in our history," Dayton declared during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing. During the hearing, Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 commission, that, based on the commission's report, a NORAD chronology made public a week after the attacks was grossly misleading. The chronology said the FAA notified the military's emergency air command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still airborne. Dayton cited commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD about three of the planes until after they had crashed. And, he said, a squadron of NORAD fighter planes that was scrambled was sent east over the Atlantic Ocean and was 150 miles from Washington, D.C., when the third plane struck the Pentagon - "farther than they were before they took off." Dayton said NORAD officials "lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people." He told Kean and Hamilton that if the commission's report is correct, President Bush "should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD ... betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth." Asked about Dayton's allegation, a spokesman for Colorado Springs-based NORAD said, "We stand on our testimony to the commission" and declined to discuss the 2001 chronology. Erin Utzinger, a spokeswoman for Dayton, said the senator "assumes the FAA knew of NORAD's coverup." In the weeks ahead, we will be presenting a complete treatment of the old NORAD timeline and of "The Emperor's New Timeline" as spelled out in the Kean Commission report. This will be part of a series exposing the many Omissions of the Commission.
The
“squadron” ordered to fly out over the Atlantic instead of easily
intercepting Fl77 before it reached the Pentagon was actually a two
plane section of ready alert F-16s, launched late from Langley Virginia
and vectored out over the Atlantic – away from the Pentagon. As
documented in my audio book, Stand Down: Why America’s Air Defenses
Failed on Sept. 11, the pair of F-15s launched late out of Cape Cod
could have intercepted the second airliners before it struck the Tower
Two at the World Trade Center. But instead of flying at 1875 miles per
hour or two-and-a-half times the speed of sound, both fighters flew at a
leisurely 500 mph – slower than the airliners they were supposedly
“pursuing”. Neither the 911 Commission nor Senator Dayton has asked who ordered both pairs of interceptors to fly so slowly. Or why. Nor have 911 coverup commissioners asked why these ready alert fighters were vectored away from targets under threat from incoming hijacked airliners as deadly as cruise missiles. Nor has anyone questioned why the two “ready alert” jets sitting armed and fueled at Andrews Air Force Base were never launched to protect the Pentagon, just 12 miles away. The acknowledged fact that air force jets already in the air that morning flying routine exercises were not diverted to intercept America’s attackers was simply shrugged off. When will someone ask why America’s air defenses were stood down on Sept. 11? More on the Sept. 11 Stand Down Transcript of
Sen. Dayton's remarks on NORAD “ It is a profoundly disturbing report because…of the utter failure to defend them [American citizens] by their federal government, by their leaders, and the institutions that were entrusted to do so and because of serious discrepancies between the facts that you've set forth and what was told to the American people, to members of Congress, and to your own Commission by those, some of those authorities. ”According to your report the first of the four airliner hijackings occurred on September 11th at 8:14 Eastern time. At 10:03 AM, almost two hours later, an hour and forty-nine minutes to be exact, the fourth and last plane crashed before reaching its intended target…During those entire 109 minutes to my reading of this report this country and its citizens were completely undefended. According to your findings, FAA authorities failed to the inform military command, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, about three of the four hijackings until after the planes had crashed into their targets at the second World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the ground in Penn Sylvia... [When the] plane struck the second World Trade tower…] It was five more minutes before NORAD's mission commander learned about that explosion; which was five minutes after thousands - probably millions - of Americans saw it on live television. By this time the third plane's transponder was off; communication had been severed, yet it was fifteen minutes before the flight controller decided to notify the regional FAA center which in turn did not inform FAA headquarters for another fifteen minutes. So at that point 9:25 AM FAA's National Command Center knew that there were two hijacked planes that had crashed into the two World Trade Centers, and a third plane had stopped communicating and disappeared from its primary radar - yet no one in FAA headquarters asked for military assistance with that plane either. NORAD was unaware that the plane had even been hijacked until after it crashed into the Pentagon at 9:34. This is just unbelievable negligence. It doesn't matter if we spend $550 billion annually on our national defense, if we reorganize our intelligence or if we restructure congressional oversight if people don't pick up the phone to call one another. The NORAD mission commander ordered his only three other planes on alert in Virginia to scramble and fly north to Baltimore. Minutes later when he was told that a plane was approaching Washington he learned that the planes were flying East over the Atlantic Ocean away from Baltimore and Washington so that when the third plane struck the Pentagon NORAD's fighters were 150 miles away, farther than they were before they took off. …at 9:46AM the FAA Command Center updated FAA headquarters that United Flight 93 was "29 minutes out of Washington, D.C." Three minutes later your document records this following conversation between the Command Center and FAA headquarters: Command center - 'Uh, do we want to, uh, think about scrambling aircraft?' FAA headquarters - 'Oh God, I don't know.' Command center - 'Uh, that's a decision somebody's going to have to make probably in the next 10 minutes.' FAA headquarters - 'Uh, yeah, you know, everybody just left the room."
Yet one week after 9/11, in response to initial reports that the military failed to defend our domestic airspace during the hijacks NORAD issued an official chronology that stated that the FAA notified NORAD of the second hijacking at 8:43. Wrong, FAA notified NORAD of the third hijacking at 9:24, according to your report. Wrong, FAA notified NORAD of the fourth hijacking at an unspecified time and that prior to the crash in Pennsylvania Langley F-16 combat air patrol planes were in place, remaining in place, to protect Washington, D.C. All untrue. [In May 2003] NORAD officials stated that at 9:16 they had received the hijack notification of United Flight 93 from the FAA. That hijacking did not occur until 9:28; there was a routine cockpit transmission recovered at 9:27. NORAD officials stated also that at 9:24 they received notice of the hijacking of the third plane, American flight 77, also untrue according to your report; which states that NORAD was never notified that flight was hijacked. NORAD officials testified that they scrambled the Langley, Virginia fighters to respond to those two hijackings…yet taped recordings of both NORAD and FAA both reportedly documented that the order to scramble was a response to an inaccurate FAA report that American Flight 11 had not hit the first World Trade tower and was headed to Washington. That erroneous alert was transmitted by the FAA at 9:24AM, thirty-eight minutes after that airplane had exploded into the World Trade tower. Yet NORAD's public chronology of 9/18/01 and their Commission testimony 20 months later covered up those truths. They lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 Commission to create a false impression of competence, communication, coordination and protection of the American people. And we can set up all the oversight possible at great additional cost to the American taxpayers and it won't be worth an Enron pension if the people responsible lie to us; if they take the records and doctor them into falsehoods, and if they get away with it. For almost three years now NORAD officials and FAA officials have been able to hide their critical failures that left this country defenseless during two of the worst hours in our history. …on January 27th 2002, the Washington Post's Dan Balls and Bob Woodward authored an insider's retrospective on top administration officials' actions on 9/11 and thereafter. They reported that very shortly after the Pentagon was struck at 9:34 quote “Pentagon officials ordered up the airborne command post used only in national emergencies; they sent up combat air patrol in the Washington area and a fighter escort for Air Force One.” Secretary Rumsfeld was portrayed as "taking up his post at the National Military Command Center." And all that reportedly occurred before 9:55AM. Right thereafter "Bush then talked to Rumsfeld to clarify the procedures military pilots should follow before firing on attack planes. With Bush's approval Rumsfeld passed the order down the chain of command." …however, according to your commission, President Bush spoke to Secretary Rumsfeld for the first time that morning shortly after 10AM. Based on White House notes and Ari Fleischer notes of the conversation the Commission's report states that it was a brief call in which the subject of the shootdown authority was not discussed.
COMMENTARY by
Kyle F. Hence Mark Dayton has become the first U.S. senator to challenge the establishment consensus that "The 9/11 Commission Report" settles the open questions of Sept. 11, 2001. Democrat Dayton is a member of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. In hearings held on July 31, the senator from Minnesota raised an obvious point: if the timeline of air defense response as promoted in the Kean Commission's best-selling book is correct, then the timeline presented repeatedly by NORAD during the last two years was completely wrong. When the official story of 9/11 can be changed repeatedly without anyone ever being held accountable, we have no right to ever again expect honest government. Please read the following story and do your part to support Sen. Dayton for highlighting the contradiction, and to encourage the media to follow up. Evolution of the Official Story: Gen. Richard Myers, the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11. Just two days after the events, Myers appeared before the Senate for hearings, scheduled many weeks earlier, to consider his appointment as the nation's supreme military officer. Myers told the Senate that no fighter jets were scrambled to intercept any of the 9/11 flights until after the Pentagon was struck. The Pentagon attack occurred at 9:38 a.m., a full 1 hour 20 minutes after the first of the 9/11 flights was diverted from its designated flight path. Myers's statement to the Senate was incredible, given the standard U.S. air defense protocols for dealing with off-course airliners that disregard rigid instrument flight plan reporting procedures. In place for decades before Sept. 11, these automatic intercept procedures require no special order from superiors. Within minutes after a flight ceases to respond to ground control, the FAA is required to alert NORAD. American air defenses are - which scrambles jet fighters to intercept the errant flight for reconnaissance purposes. These are supposed to be airborne within 16 minutes of notification from the FAA or military radar operators. This routine was activated on at least 67 occasions in the year prior to Sept. 11, 2001. In May 2003, General Arnold of NORAD, sitting alongside Gen. Myers before the Kean Commission, presented a revised version of NORAD's Sept. 2001 timeline. Testifying, Gen. Arnold shifted the blame for the failed air force response to the FAA. But the FAA disputed Gen. Arnold's testimony. In its own statement, issued on May 21, 2003, the FAA insisted that regardless of the “official” notification times claimed by NORAD, phone bridges were established immediately after the initial attack at 8:46. Throughout all subsequent events, NORAD was kept informed in real time, added the FAA. For more than a year, the FAA has been in open dispute with NORAD on who informed whom and when about the Sept. 11 hijackings. In a June 2004 staff statement, the Kean Commission delivered at its final chronology - completely disregarding the timeline NORAD had presented for two years. The commission effectively placed almost all of the blame for the air force’s fatally delayed air defense response on the FAA. Instead of being held to account like the scapegoated army and navy commanders at an earlier facilitated attack at Pearl Harbor, Gen. Myers, his commanding officer, Gen. Eberhart, and FAA official Ben Sliney have all been promoted since Black Tuesday. This is the simple point that Sen. Mark Dayton raised at the Senate hearings into the 9/11 Commission report. Now that it has accepted the Kean Commission findings, NORAD must explain its old timeline - and anyone responsible for pushing it, whether intentionally or not, must be held accountable. Special Thanks to www.911citizenswatch.org and www.911truth.org |
