July 4, 2011

Implement the Standard Protocol or Improvise a Defense?

Deviation from protocol determined the outcome of the 9/11 attacks.

The Commander of NORAD attested to the adequacy of the standard procedures by stating that all four hijacked planes could have been intercepted had those procedures been followed.

The 9/11 Commission concluded that, “On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen.” This claim substituted for an explanation as to why the attacks succeeded. The Commission did not explain why the standard protocols were not implemented.

On June 17, 2004 at the Commission’s last public hearing, the Commission’s Executive Director, Philip Zelikow, read, Improvising a Homeland Defense (Staff Statement No. 17), into the record. Its concluding sentences are:

NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] and the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an

unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet.

Yet USA Today, just two months earlier on April 19, 2004, stated that NORAD had trained for just such events – hijacked airliners crashing into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon.

Even more compelling evidence of NORAD having been trained to meet such threats was a 9/11 Commission document entitled, “NORAD Exercises – Hijack Summary,” which revealed that the Northeast Air Defense Sector of NORAD had conducted a hijacking exercise just two days prior to 9/11/2001.

The scenario, a part of the Vigilant Guardian I exercise, was for a DC-10 hijacked by “Terrorists with explosives who plan to detonate them over NYC.”

The drill was held on September 9, 2001. [An independent citizen found this document among those Commission’s records, which first became available in 2009 at the U.S. National Archives.]

Shortly after Mr. Zelikow read the Commission’s conclusion that the FAA and NORAD were unprepared, NORAD Commander, General Ralph Eberhart, was questioned, at the same hearing, by Commissioner James Thompson.