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Where Was The Air Force?
By Ted Rall
U Express
Tuesday 30 March 2004
NEW YORK - George W. Bush, writes former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke,
"failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from Al Qaeda despite
repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious
yet insufficient steps after the attacks." That incendiary charge, coupled
with his apologetic testimony before the commission investigating the attacks,
has reignited a long-simmering debate: What did Bush know when and how quickly
should he have done something about it?
But both the 9/11 commission and liberal opponents of the Bush Administration
are focusing on the wrong question. Nothing has surfaced from the 2001 "summer
of threat" beyond a bunch of vague they're-up-to-something caveats. The
specific details intelligence agencies would have needed to stop the attacks
before they happened--potential hijackers' names, dates and times, targets--were
maddeningly elusive.
The really big unanswered question of September 11, 2001 is this: Once it became
obvious that at least four passenger jets had been hijacked--at one point that
Tuesday morning, Clarke says the FAA (news - web sites) thought it had as many
as "eleven aircraft off course or out of communications"--why didn't
our government intercept them?
To their credit, the Bushies quickly sussed out what was going on. "Well,
now we know who we're dealing with," Clarke recalls remarking when he heard
that United Flight 175 had smashed into the second World Trade Center tower.
That was at 9:03 am. American 77 hit the Pentagon (news - web sites) and United
93 went down over Pennsylvania 40 and 67 minutes later, respectively.
On a flight from Bishkek to Tehran on dilapidated Kyrgyzstan Airlines a few
years ago, the pilot announced that the landing gear on my friend's Tupolev
154 wouldn't deploy. Tehran refused permission to crash-land the Soviet-era
plane at its newly renovated airport. Five minutes later, my pal recalls, fighter
jets appeared on each side of the crippled plane to escort it out of Iranian
airspace. (It landed safely back in Bishkek.) Why didn't we respond to our crisis
in the air on 9/11 with the same efficiency as Iran, a third world country hobbled
by international trade sanctions?
The notion of a hijacked passenger jet meandering over the northeastern United
States, unmolested for more than an hour before blasting away a chunk of the
Pentagon, should appall anyone whose taxes contributed to the quarter of a trillion
dollars spent on defense that year. And if you stop and think about it, there
was actually two hours in which something could have been done.
Fifteen minutes after taking off from Boston at 7:58 am, American Airlines
flight attendant Madeline Sweeney telephoned a flight services manager back
at Logan airport to report that two of her colleagues had been stabbed and a
passenger had had his throat cut by Middle Eastern men. "This flight has
been hijacked," she concluded, maintaining her professional composure as
Los Angeles-bound Flight 11 veered south toward Manhattan. Meanwhile, up in
the cockpit, the pilot was frantically clicking his transmission button to tell
air traffic controllers what was happening.
They figured it out at 8:13 am. The drama would end nearly two hours later
with the crash in Pennsylvania. There was ample time for the airline to notify
federal authorities and for the latter to order the Air Force to begin intercepting
unresponsive or off-course planes--but slow-witted bureaucrats and years of
doing domestic defense on the cheap whittled away precious minutes.
The North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) claims that it received FAA notification
by 8:40 am, a dismaying 27 minutes after air traffic controllers determined
that hijackings were in progress. According to the New York Times, only a dozen
planes, all belonging to the weekend warriors of the Air National Guard, were
assigned to protect the continental United States on the morning of 9/11. And
not a single one was in the air.
The Air Force waited six minutes before responding to NORAD with a "scramble
order," the pilot needed another six minutes to get the first F-15 aloft
and 17 more minutes were required to fly at Mach 0.9 from Otis air base in Cape
Cod to New York City. The second hijacked plane had already hit when the Guardsman
arrived over Ground Zero. The FAA notified NORAD about the Pentagon-bound plane
at 9:24 pm and the Pennsylvania flight even later (the exact time remains unavailable).
The time needed to scramble planes and travel from distant bases ate up the
advance warning.
It's unreasonable to expect the government to have anticipated 9/11. Once it
began, however, previously established safeguards ought to have been deployed
by fast-thinking officials to mitigate the damage. Surface-to-air missiles ought
to have protected the Pentagon from the incoming flight. A policy of keeping
Air Force fighters aloft 24 hours a day could have allowed the shoot-down of
the second New York-bound plane, saving hundreds at the second tower and possibly
those who died at the Pentagon. And, rather than leave entire states undefended
by air bases, spreading military facilities evenly throughout U.S. territory
would have shrunk response time to a bare minimum. Bush and his cabinet members
should explain why they didn't take such common-sense precautions to defend
us before 9/11--and what they're waiting for now.
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