Politics 03 Aug 2006 11:01 am
Who NEADS The Truth?
A recent Vanity Fair article brings to light some troublingly fascinating 9/11 recordings culled from ancient reel-to-reel recorders at hte Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) airbase in Rome, New York. The Pentagon released them to Vanity Fair after much deliberation. Kos at Daily Kos lays it out nicely in a post yesterday: “Cheney lied about issuing 9-11 command”, highlighting the political angle.
The Vanity Fair article goes into great detail about the ongoing NEADS chatter throughout the 100 minutes of the actual attack. The article provides written and audio transcripts of the critical parts, and portrays a situation much different than was commonly reported:
For the NEADS crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings—some real, some phantom—that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening.
Although American Airlines flight 11 was later identified as the first plane to hit, the airline conservatively refused to admit it:
“When we phoned United [after the second tower was hit], they confirmed that United 175 was down, and I think they confirmed that within two or three minutes,” Scoggins, the go-to guy at Boston Center for all things military, later told me. “With American Airlines, we could never confirm if it was down or not, so that left doubt in our minds.” … The problem, Scoggins told me later, was that American Airlines refused to confirm for several hours that its plane had hit the tower. This lack of confirmation caused uncertainty that would be compounded in a very big way as the attack continued. (Though airlines have their own means of monitoring the location of their planes and communicating with their pilots, they routinely go into information lockdown in a crisis.)
As a result, NEADS’ remaining two fighter jets were scrambled to chase after this phantom flight 11. Coincidentally, seconds later a third highjacking was revealed (United 93), followed twelve minutes later by a fourth (American 77, which ultimately hit the Pentagon). Meanwhile, NEADS was busy reacting to the false intelligence that American 11 is still on the prowl. The information chaos was worse because NEADS was relying on antique green-blip radar, which was completely unable to locate American 11 earlier when it was first reported highjacked. Also, vague, anachronistic rules about handling modern highjacking cases slowed down the flow of crucial details:
A former senior executive at the F.A.A., speaking to me on the condition that I not identify him by name, tried to explain. “Our whole procedures prior to 9/11 were that you turned everything [regarding a hijacking] over to the F.B.I.,” he said, reiterating that hijackers had never actually flown airplanes; it was expected that they’d land and make demands. “There were absolutely no shootdown protocols at all. The F.A.A. had nothing to do with whether they were going to shoot anybody down. We had no protocols or rules of engagement.”
This info slowdown led to a disturbingly slow reaction from the Administration:
President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which —- though no one knew it at the time -— was 15 minutes after the attack was over.
Let’s hope things have gotten better over the past half-decade. Until then, we can amuse ourselves with little green men and outlandish, yet hard-to-dismiss conspiracy theories.
