9-11 panel faults air defenses

By The Washington Post

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A painstaking recreation of the faltering and confused response by military and aviation officials on Sept. 11 also shows that fighter jets never had a chance to intercept any of the doomed airliners, in part because they had been sent to intercept a plane, American Airlines 11, that had already crashed into the World Trade Center.

The jets also would probably not have been able to stop the last airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, from barreling into the White House or U.S. Capitol if it had not crashed in Pennsylvania, according to the report.

"We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93," the report's authors wrote, referring to an apparent insurrection that foiled the hijackers' plans. "Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction."

The stark conclusions come as part of the last interim report to be issued by the staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which is racing to complete a final book-length report by the end of next month. The 10-member bipartisan panel will hear its last public testimony from military and aviation officials today.

Among the new information contained in the latest report is a detailed reconstruction of the reactions of President Bush, Cheney and other top government leaders that morning, including a recitation of a call between the two at 9:45 a.m. after the Pentagon had been hit.

"Sounds like we have a minor war going on here," Bush tells Cheney, according to notes of the call. "I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war.... Somebody's going to pay."

The report also documents a succession of mistakes, wrong assumptions and puzzling errors made on the morning of Sept. 11 by air defense and aviation employees, who often did not communicate with each other when they should have and frequently seemed unsure of how to respond to the unprecedented assault by the al-Qaida terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.

Panel investigators also tersely conclude that authorities with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) repeatedly misinformed the commission in testimony last fall about its scrambling of fighters from Langley Air Force Base. NORAD officials indicated at the time that the jets were responding to either United 93 or American Airlines 77, which struck the Pentagon.

In fact, they were chasing "a phantom aircraft," American 11, which had already struck the Twin Towers, the panel found.

Air defense agencies "were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001," the report concludes.
 
"They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet."

The new account essentially shifts the terms of the debate about air-defense response that day, because it indicates that none of the jetliners could likely be intercepted given the time available. But the report also suggests that time to respond might have been lengthened if the status of the flights had been communicated more quickly to and among military and Federal Aviation Administration officials.

Commission investigators, based on private interviews with both Bush and Cheney and other witnesses, reported that a telephone conversation occurred between the two leaders shortly before 10:10 a.m. or 10:15 a.m. in which Bush authorized Cheney to order jet pilots to shoot down hostile aircraft.

Within a few minutes, Cheney issued the first shoot-down order, based on reports from the Secret Service of an aircraft — United 93 — headed toward Washington. But the reports were based on trajectory estimates; Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m. The vice president issued a similar order at around 10:30 a.m. in response to another report of a hijacked plane.

"Eventually," the report notes, "the shelter received word that the alleged hijacker five miles away had been a Medevac helicopter."

Cheney's general shoot-down orders were issued to NORAD at 10:31 a.m., but clear instructions were never passed along to pilots in the air.

"In short," the report says, "while leaders in Washington believed the fighters circling above them had been instructed to 'take out' hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed to the Langley pilots were to 'ID type and tail.' "

The Langley pilots were also never told why they were scrambled or that hijacked commercial airliners were a threat, the commission's staff found.