by James Ridgeway, The Village Voice
Aug. 2, 2004
At long last, one member of the U.S. Senate has spoken out about the 9-11 report. Last Friday, during a Governmental Affairs committee meeting, Mark Dayton, a Democrat from Minnesota, directly attacked the government for distorting facts and covering up what happened that day. [See transcript, below.] Highlights of his narrative:
. Referring to the period between the first hijacking, at 8:14 a.m. and the crash of the fourth plane, at 10:03 a.m., Dayton said: "During those entire 109 minutes, to my reading of this report, this country and its citizens were completely undefended."
. "According to [the 9-11 Commission's] findings, FAA authorities failed to 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 Pennsylvania, which was not their target. NORAD then scrambled one of only two sets of fighter planes on alert in the entire eastern third of the country, one in Massachusetts and one in Virginia, but it didn't know where to send them -- because the hijackers had turned off the plane's transponder so NORAD couldn't locate them on their radar, and they were still looking for it when it exploded into its target at 8:46 a.m."
. "The second hijacking began, according to [the commission's] report, one minute later. NORAD wasn't notified until the same minute the same 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 of Americans saw it on live television. By this time, the third plane's transponder was off. Communication had been severed, yet it was 15 minutes before the flight controller decided to notify the regional FAA center, which in turn did not inform FAA headquarters for another 15 minutes."
. At 9:25 a.m. on September 11, Dayton said, "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."
. "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."
. "By then, FAA's command center had learned of the fourth hijacking and called FAA headquarters, specifically asking that they contact the military, at 9:36 a.m. At 9:46 a.m., the FAA command center updated FAA headquarters that United flight 93 was '29 minutes out of Washington, D.C.' Three minutes later, [the commission's] 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.'
The Village Voice
Transcript of Sen. Dayton's remarks on NORAD
Transcribed by Kyle Hence, 9/11 Citizens' Watch
Highlighting added by Unknown News
July 31, 2004
Thank you Madame Chairman, and I, I also want to commend you for holding this hearing in quick response to the 9/11 Commission's Report. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Co-chairman, I want to say again to you that we are all indebted to you, to the other eight members of the Commission and the staff for this critically important work that you have provided the nation.
It is a profoundly disturbing report because it chronicles in excruciating detail the terrible attack against our homeland, the despicable murder of so many American citizens and the horrible destruction to countless other lives and liberties throughout this nation.
And 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.
There's way too much to cover here but I will begin.
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, the U.S. Capitol, because of the incredible heroism of its passengers, including Minnesota native Thomas Burnett Jr. During those entire 109 minutes to my reading of this report this country and its citizens were completely undefended.
Yes, it was a surprise attack. It was unprecedented. Yes, it exposed serious flaws and as you noted our imagination, our policies, capabilities and our management designs but what I find much more shocking and alarming were the repeated and catastrophic failures of the leaders of the leaders in charge, and the other people responsible, to do their jobs.
To follow established procedures.
To follow direct orders from civilian and military commanders.
And then they failed to tell us the truth later.
It doesn't matter whether they were Republicans, Democrats or neither, it matters what they did or did not do. 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 Pennsylvania which was not their target.
The direct FAA notification of the military regarding the first plane twenty-three minutes after it was hijacked and only nine minutes before it struck the first World Trade Tower.
NORAD then scrambled one of only two sets of fighter planes on alert in the entire eastern third of the country, one in Massachusetts and one in Virginia but it didn't know where to send them; because the hijackers has turned off the plane's transponder so NORAD couldn't locate them on their radar and they still looking for it when it exploded into its target at 8:46AM.
The second hijacking began, according to your report, one minute later. NORAD wasn't notified until the same minute the same 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. If we're not told if somebody needs a new radar system and doesn't stall it when it's provided. And this was not an occasional human or failure. This is nothing but human error and failure to follow established procedures and to use common sense.
Unfortunately, the chronicle is not over. 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.
By then FAA's Command Center had learned of the fourth hijacking and called FAA Headquarters specifically asking that they contact the military at 9:36AM and 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."
At 10:03 United Flight 93 crashed into the Pennsylvania farm soil and nobody from the FAA headquarters had contacted the military. NORAD didn't know that this fourth plane was hijacked until after it crashed 35 minutes later. The fighter planes that reached Washington seven minutes after that crash they were told by the Mission Commander, "negative clearance to shoot the aircraft" over the Nation's Capitol.
Yet one week, 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 public testimony before your 9/11 Commission in May of 2003 NORAD officials stated, I assume under oath [Editor's note: They were NOT under oath], 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.
And in that testimony before you 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.
And I believe that President Bush must call them, those responsible for those representations to account. [clapping in gallery] If the Commission's accounts are correct, he should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD or anywhere else who betrayed the public trust by not telling us the truth.
And then he should clear up a few discrepancies of his own.
Four months after September 11th 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."
This was supposedly taking place, according to that article, before the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03. Looks very impressive. The President acting swiftly and decisively; giving orders to the Secretary of Defense and on down the chain of command, combat air patrol planes are patrolling Washington directed by an airborne command post all before 10:03AM. 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.
The Commission then states that the Secretary of Defense did not join the NMCC's [air threat] conference call until just before 10:30AM. The Secretary of Defense himself told the Commission he was just gaining situation awareness when he spoke with the Vice-President at 10:39AM. That transcript is on page 23, page 43. My time is out, but it reflects the Vice-President's honest mistaken belief that he had been given an order, after talking with the President, to shoot down any plane that would not divert, yet incredibly, the NORAD commander --
[Senator Collins interrupts:] The Senator's time has expired.
[Senator Dayton continues:] I am just going to finish this if I may.
Yet incredibly the NORAD commander did not pass that order to the fighter planes because he was "unsure how the pilots would or should proceed with this guidance." As you say Mr. Chairman, 'the situation is urgent' but we don't get protected in those circumstances but it's even worse when it's covered-up.
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There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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Commentary:
I'll just say this:
If you give 1/3 of a tinker's damn about what happened to 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, read Senator Dayton's statements.
He's asking questions which must be asked, but aren't supposed to be, and will never be answered...
=Annie= |
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In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.
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On Sept. 10, Newsweek has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.
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At his press conference yesterday, President Bush was asked about charges that he had received warnings prior to the September 11th attacks that a terrorist incident was imminent.
He answered that even asking such a question was "an absurd insinuation."
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Seven months after telling Congress he would do so, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has yet to provide the names of agency officials responsible for one of the most glaring intelligence mistakes leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to congressional and agency officials.
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The United States allowed members of Osama bin Laden's family to jet out of the US in the immediate aftermath of September 11, even as American airspace was closed.
Former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke said the Bush administration sanctioned the repatriation of about 140 high-ranking Saudi Arabians, including relatives of the al-Qaida chief.
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The fact that top officials, at a time of extraordinary crisis and public anxiety, lied to protect the president's image has immense implications. If, within 24 hours of the terror attacks, the White House was giving out disinformation to deceive the American public and world opinion, then none of the claims made by the government from September 11 to the present can be taken for good coin.
If Bush lied about his activities on the day of the attacks, why should anyone assume he has not lied about the government's investigation, the identity of the perpetrators, the motives and aims of US war preparations, and the intent and scope of expanded police powers demanded by his administration to wiretap, search and seize, and detain suspects?
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The 9/11 investigation was originally given a budget of $3-million, later increased to $12-million. Some reports say the budget is now $14-million.
By comparison, when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during its descent in February 2003, $50-million was budgeted for an investigation, which began about an hour and a half after the disaster.
Another $305-million was spent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), searching for shuttle debris.
The investigation into the shuttle accident began publicly releasing its findings within several weeks, and concluded its work with an exhaustive report about six months later.
Even the Warren Commission, the U.S. government's widely-disbelieved investigation of Pres. Kennedy's 1963 assassination, was budgeted at $5.5-million -- in 1963 funds.
Adjusted for inflation, that's more than $32-million in 2003 dollars.
You might think it would cost substantially more to thoroughly investigate a complicated event -- nineteen foreign hijackers commandeering four passenger jets and obliterating the World Trade Center, damaging the Pentagon, and killing thousands of Americans -- than to investigate the shooting of the president in a parade.
The Bush Administration seems to disagree. They think it should cost substantially less.
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CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq -- even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.
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"We've been fighting for nearly 21 months -- fighting the administration, the White House," says Monica Gabrielle.
Her husband, Richard, an insurance broker who worked for Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's Tower 2, died during the attacks. "As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off and ignored at every stop of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything."
Another 9/11 family advocate -- a former Bush supporter who requested anonymity -- was more blunt: "Bush has done everything in his power to squelch this [9/11] commission and prevent it from happening."
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President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN.
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Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored? Is it luck when 15 visas are awarded based on incomplete forms? Is it luck when Airline Security screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray? Is it luck when Emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis?
To me luck is something that happens once. When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.
If at some point we don't look to hold the individuals accountable for not doing their jobs properly then how can we ever expect for terrorists not to get lucky again?
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Why did the US military, with the most powerful arsenal in world history, fail to prevent or at least try to stop a series of hijackings and crashes that went on for nearly two hours?
Where was the Air Force?
If President Bush and his cabinet were not, at this very moment, still trying to censor, suppress and delay the publication of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, if there had been honest disclosure and straight stories from the beginning, perhaps all these "dark questions," as the Post puts it, would never have arisen.
The great majority of people, sickened and overwhelmed by the horror of the attacks, unquestioningly accepts the White House version.
Many thousands, however, are patiently stitching together the documented evidence and noting the huge holes in the fabric of that official story.
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September 11 was the most traumatic incident in recent American history. Three thousand people died in New York, billions in property was destroyed, the national economy tanked and Americans' sense of security was shattered. The men responsible for the attacks are still at large and openly threaten to attack us again.
Yet the commission's budget is only $3 million, a pittance compared to the $100 million that was wasted getting to the bottom of Bill Clinton's Whitewater investment and his extramarital affairs.
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For any other crime, from shoplifting to serial killers, suspects are assumed innocent until proven guilty. For this crime -- the murder of thousands -- President Bush announced who was guilty almost immediately, and America went to war.
Bin Laden and al-Qaida are terrorists and murderers; there's ample evidence of that. But so long as the evidence comnnecting them to September 11 remains classified, too secret for citizens to see, every mention of bin Laden and al-Qaida as the masterminds of Sept. 11 is, essentially, taking the Bush administration at its word.
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One day before two American Airlines jets were hijacked and crashed, for example, 1,535 contracts changed hands on options that let investors profit if AMR stock falls below $30 per share before Oct. 20. That was almost five times the total number of those October $30 put options traded before Sept. 10, according to Bloomberg data. AMR shares fell $11.70 today to $18.
Those 1,535 contracts were worth $1.6 million at today's closing price compared with $337,700 at the end of trading on Sept. 10, according to Bloomberg data. A contract represents options for 100 shares.
Similarly, October $30 put options for UAL soared, with 2,000 contracts traded on Sept. 6, three trading days before the attack. A total of 27 contracts had traded previously.
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A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qaida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".
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You know, in a courtroom, when a witness is shown to be clearly lying about one detail, it calls that witness's entire testimony into doubt.
If it worked that way with presidents, we'd have ample grounds to doubt everything the Bush administration has told us about September 11, 2001.
After all; every newspaper and television account is directly or indirectly based in large part upon what the Bush administration has announced -- that they had no prior warning, that they knew immediately Osama bin Laden was to blame, that exactly 19 hijackers were aboard those four planes, that each hijacker has been posthumously identified, etc.
So our shared public perception of what happened on September 11, and why it happened, is really built on just one assumption, universally agreed: That the Bush administration is comprised of honest people, telling the truth.
But I don't see any evidence to support such an allegation.
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At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said in a report today.
That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
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German politicians and police are blaming U.S. officials for this week's release of Mounir el-Motassadeq, the only man convicted in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States, pending a retrial.
Klaus Buss, the interior minister in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, said Thursday in a radio interview that U.S. officials had refused to allow terror suspect Ramzi Binalshibh to appear before the court in Germany and thus had “provided the essential cause“ for the Moroccan's release.
And the president of Germany's police union, Konrad Freiberg, said the United States' failure to share intelligence was the main reason for the Hamburg court's decision to release Motassadeq on Wednesday.
He also called the decision a significant setback in the fight against terror.
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