Declaration of Union of Peoples of the Earth

PLANETIZATION and the Human Union

See also: 9/11 and the American Empire:  How Should Religious People Respond?  

 Dr David Ray Griffin's other articles, and his address in New York for a call to action

Book Review: Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 by Dr. David Ray Griffin

David Griffin Replies to NY Times "Conspiracy Theories 101"

The Destruction of the World Trade Center:  Why the Official Account Cannot Be True.
David Ray Griffin Authorized Version (with references & notes) 

Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93:  The 9/11 Commission's Incredible Tales
David Ray Griffin

At the end of 2004, I published The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Shortly before that book appeared, I delivered a lecture in Santa Rosa, California, in which I set out to summarize its major points. (That lecture is now available in both print and DVD form.) Unfortunately, The 9/11 Commission Report itself contains so many omissions and distortions that I was able to summarize only the first half of my book in that lecture. The present lecture summarizes the second half of the book, which deals with the Commission's explanation as to why the US military was unable to intercept any of the hijacked airplanes.

This explanation was provided in the first chapter of The 9/11 Commission Report. Although that chapter is only 45 pages long, the issues involved in it are so complex that my analysis of it required six chapters. One of the complexities is the fact that the 9/11 Commission's account of why the military could not intercept the hijacked airliners is the third of three different official accounts we have been given. To understand why three versions of this story have been deemed necessary, we need to review the standard operating procedures that are supposed to prevent hijacked airliners from causing the kinds of damage that occurred on 9/11.

Standard Operating Procedures
Standard operating procedures dictate that if an FAA flight controller notices anything that suggests a possible hijacking--if radio contact is lost, if the plane's transponder goes off, or if the plane deviates from its flight plan---the controller is to contact a superior. If the problem cannot be fixed quickly—-within about a minute---the superior is to ask NORAD---the North American Aerospace Defense Command---to scramble jet fighters to find out what is going on. NORAD then issues the scramble order to the nearest air force base with fighters on alert. On 9/11, all the hijacked airliners occurred in NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector, which is known as NEADS. So all the scramble orders would have come from NEADS.

 
The jet fighters at the disposal of NEADS could respond very quickly: According to the US Air Force website, F-15s can go from “scramble order” to 29000 feet in only 2.5 minutes. They can then fly at 1800 miles per hour. Therefore--according to General Ralph Eberhart, the head of NORAD---after the FAA senses that something is wrong, “it takes about one minute” for it to contact NORAD, after which, according to a NORAD spokesperson, NORAD can scramble fighter jets “within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States.” These statements were, to be sure, made after 9/11, so we might suspect that they reflected a post-9/11 speed-up in procedures. But an Air Traffic Control document put out in 1998 warned pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behavior “will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes.”

The First Version of the Official Story
On 9/11, however, that did not happen. Why not? Where was the military? The military's first answer was given immediately after 9/11 by General Richard Myers, then the Acting Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Mike Snyder, a spokesman for NORAD. They both said, independently, that no military jets were sent up until after the strike on the Pentagon. That strike occurred at 9:38, and yet American Airlines Flight 11 had shown two of the standard signs of a hijacking, losing both the radio and the transponder signal, at 8:15. That meant that procedures that usually result in an interception within “10 or so minutes” had not been carried out in 80 or so minutes.

That enormous delay suggested that a stand-down order, canceling standard procedures, must have been given. Some people started raising this possibility.

The Second Version of the Official Story
Very quickly, a new story appeared. On Friday, September 14, CBS News said: “contrary to early reports, US Air Force jets did get into the air on Tuesday while the attacks were under way,” although they arrived too late to prevent the attacks. This second story was then made official on September 18, when NORAD produced a timeline stating the times it was notified about the hijackings followed by the times at which fighters were scrambled. The implicit message of the timeline was that the failure was due entirely to the FAA, because in each case it notified the military so late that interceptions were impossible.

Not quite everyone, however, accepted that conclusion. Some early members of the 9/11 truth movement, doing the math, showed that NORAD's new timeline did not get it off the hook. With regard to the first flight: Even if we accept NORAD's claim that NEADS was not notified about Flight 11 until 8:40 (which would mean that the FAA had waited 20 minutes after it saw danger signs before it made the call), NORAD's implicit claim that it could not have prevented the first attack on the WTC is problematic. If fighters had immediately been scrambled from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, they could have intercepted Flight 11 before 8:47, which is when the north tower of the WTC was struck.

NORAD, to be sure, had a built-in answer to that question. It claimed that McGuire had no fighters on alert, so that NEADS had to give the scramble order to Otis Air Force Base in Cape Cod. Critics argued that this claim is probably false, for reasons to be discussed later.

Even less plausible, the critics said, was NORAD's claim that NEADS did not have time to prevent the second attack. According to NORAD's timeline, NEADS had been notified about United Airlines Flight 175 at 8:43, 20 minutes before the south tower was struck. The F-15s originally ordered to go after Flight 11 were now to go after Flight 175. The scramble order, NORAD said, was given at 8:46. In light of the military's own statement that F-15s can go from scramble order to 29,000 feet in 2.5 minutes, the F-15s, even if they had to come from Otis, would have been streaking towards Manhattan by 8:49. So they could easily have gotten there before 9:03, when the south tower was struck. NORAD said, however, that it took the fighters six minutes just to get airborne. Critics said that it looked as if at least a slow-down order had been issued.

Critics also pointed out that even if the F-15s did not take off, as NORAD said, until 8:52, they still could have gotten to Manhattan in time to prevent the second attack, assuming that they were going full speed. And, according to one of the pilots, they were. Lt. Col. Timothy Duffy said they went “full-blower all the way.” And yet, according to NORAD's timeline, when the south tower was hit at 9:03, the F-15s were still 71 miles away. Doing the math showed that the fighters could not have been going even half-blower. It still looked like a stand-down order, or at least a slow-down order, had been issued.

The same problem existed with respect to NORAD's explanation of its failure to protect the Pentagon. NORAD again blamed the FAA, saying that although the FAA knew about the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77 before 9:00, it did not notify NEADS until 9:24, too late for NEADS to respond.
Again, doing the math showed that this explanation did not work. NORAD claimed that it issued the scramble order immediately, at 9:24. The attack on the Pentagon did not occur until 14 minutes later, at 9:38. That would have been more than enough time for jet fighters to get there from Andrews Air Force Base, which is only a few miles away. Why, then, did NORAD not prevent the attack?

Part of NORAD's answer was that no fighters were on alert at Andrews, so that NEADS had to give the scramble order to Langley Air Force Base, which is about 130 miles away. Also, it again took the pilots 6 minutes to get airborne, so they did not get away until 9:30.

However, even if those explanations are accepted, the scrambled F-16s, critics pointed out, could go 1500 miles per hour, so they could have reached Washington a couple of minutes before the Pentagon was struck. According to NORAD, however, they were still 105 miles away. That would mean that the F-16s were going less than 200 miles per hour, which would not even be one-quarter blower.

In all three cases, therefore, NORAD's attempt to put all the blame on the FAA failed. Critics were able to show, especially with regard to the second and third flights, that NORAD's new story still implied that a stand-down order must have been issued. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the 9/11 Commission came up with a third story, which is not subject to the same objections.

The main question, however, is still the same: Is it true? One reason to suspect that it is not true is the very fact that it is the third story we have been given. When suspects in a criminal case keep changing their story, we assume that they must be trying to conceal the truth. But an even more serious problem with the Commission's new story is that many of its elements are contradicted by credible evidence or are otherwise implausible. I will show this by examining the Commission's treatment of each flight, beginning with Flight 11.


The Commission's Treatment of American Airlines Flight 11

A Picture of FAA Incompetence
As we saw, flight controllers are supposed to react quickly if they see any one of the three standard signs of a hijacking. But Flight 11 hit the Trifecta, showing all three signs, and yet no one at the Boston FAA Center, we are told, took any action for some time. Eventually, Boston, having heard hijackers giving orders, called the FAA Command Center in Herndon. Herndon then called FAA headquarters in Washington, but no one there, we are told, called the military. Finally, the FAA center in Boston called NEADS directly at 8:38 (20).

To accept this story, we would have to believe that although the FAA should have notified the military about Flight 11 within a minute of seeing the danger signals at 8:15, the FAA personnel at Boston, Herndon, and Washington were all so incompetent that 23 minutes passed before the military was notified. We would then need to reconcile this picture of top-to-bottom dereliction of duty, which contributed to thousands of deaths, with the fact that no FAA personnel were fired.

An 8-Minute Phone Call
The next implausible element in the story involves Colonel Robert Marr, the commander at NEADS. As we saw earlier, if he had had planes scrambled immediately, even from Otis, they might have prevented the first attack on the World Trade Center. And yet, we are told, he called down to Florida to General Larry Arnold, the head of NORAD's US Continental Region, to get authorization to have planes scrambled, and this phone call took 8 minutes.

Besides the fact that this would be an extraordinarily long phone call in an emergency situation, this call was not even necessary. The Commission would have us believe that Marr had to get approval from superiors. But the very document from the Department of Defense that it cites indicates that anyone in the military chain of command, upon receiving “verbal requests from civil authorities for support in an . . . emergency may . . . immediately respond.” Colonel Marr, therefore, could have responded on his own.

Evidence of Earlier Notification
But this tale of an 8-minute phone call is probably not to be the biggest lie in the Commission's story about Flight 11. That award seems to belong to the claim that although the FAA saw signs of a hijacking at 8:15, the military was not notified until 8:38. Laura Brown, the FAA's Deputy in Public Affair reportedly said that the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon had set up an air threat teleconference that morning at about 8:20. If these two sources are correct, it would seem that the military knew about Flight 11's erratic behavior shortly after 8:15, which suggests that the FAA had followed standard procedures.

I turn now to the Commission's treatment of Flight 175.

The Commission's Treatment of United Airlines Flight 175

More FAA Incompetence
The Commission claims that NORAD did not intercept this flight because the FAA never reported its hijacking until after it crashed. According to the Commission, the FAA flight controller did not even notify a manager until 8:55. This manager then called the FAA Command Center at Herndon, saying: “[The situation is] escalating . . . big time. We need to get the military involved.” But no one at Herndon, we are told, called the military or even FAA headquarters. As a result, NORAD did not learn about the hijacking of this Flight until 9:03, when it was crashing into the WTC's south tower (22-23).

Contradicting Earlier Reports
One problem with this story is that such incompetence by FAA officials is not believable. An even more serious problem is that this story is contradicted by many prior reports.

One of these is NORAD's own previous timeline. As we saw earlier, NORAD had maintained since September 18, 2001, that it had been notified about Flight 175 at 8:43. If that was not true, as the Commission now claims, NORAD must have been either lying or confused when it put out its timeline one week after 9/11. And it is hard to believe that it could have been confused so soon after the event. So it must have been lying. But that would suggest that it had an ugly truth to conceal. The Commission, being unable to embrace either of the possible explanations, simply tells us that NORAD's previous statement was incorrect, but without giving us any explanation as to how this could be.

The Commission's claim that the military did not know about Flight 175 until it crashed is also contradicted by a report involving Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD's headquarters in Colorado. According to a story in the Toronto Star, Jellinek, who was on the phone with NEADS as he watched Flight 175 crash into the south tower, asked NEADS: “Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with?”--to which NEADS said yes.

Two Problematic Teleconferences
Still another problem with the Commission's new story is that there appear to have been two teleconferences during which FAA officials would have talked to the military about Flight 175. I have already mentioned the teleconference initiated by the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. The 9/11 Commission claims, to be sure, that this teleconference did not begin until 9:29 (186-88), long after Flight 175 had crashed into the south tower. But this late starting time is contradicted by Richard Clarke in Against All Enemies. It is also contradicted by Laura Brown of the FAA, who reportedly said that it started at about 8:20. Although Brown later, perhaps under pressure from superiors, changed the starting time to 8:45, this was still early enough for discussions of Flight 175 to have occurred.

There was also a teleconference initiated by the FAA. According to the 9/11 Commission, this teleconference was set up at “about 9:20” (36). On May 22, 2003, however, Laura Brown sent to the Commission a memo headed: “FAA communications with NORAD on September 11, 2001.” The memo, which used the term “phone bridges” instead of “teleconference,” began: “Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges . . . .” Since the attack on the north tower was at 8:47, “within minutes” would mean that this teleconference began about 8:50, a full half hour earlier than the Commission claims. The memo made clear, moreover, that the teleconference included both NORAD and the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. During this teleconference, Brown's memo said:

The FAA shared real-time information . . . about the . . . loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest.
And by 8:50, everyone agrees, Flight 175 was a “flight of interest”---everyone except, of course, the 9/11 Commission, which claims that FAA headquarters had not yet learned about it. Laura Brown's memo, in any case, was read into the Commission's record on May 23, 2003. But when the Commission published its final report, it simply pretended that this memo did not exist. Only through this pretense could the Commission claim that the FAA's teleconferences did not begin until 9:20.

For several reasons, therefore, it appears that the Commission's claim that the military was not notified about Flight 175 until after it struck the south tower is a lie from beginning to end. I turn now to the Commission's treatment of Flight 77 and the attack on the Pentagon.


The Commission's Treatment of American Airlines Flight 77 and the Attack on the Pentagon

As we saw earlier, if the FAA told NORAD about Flight 77 at 9:24, as NORAD's timeline of September 18 said, NEADS should have had fighter jets over Washington before 9:38, when the Pentagon was struck. The 9/11 Commission's solution to this problem was to tell another new tale, according to which the FAA never told NORAD about Flight 77.

One inconvenient fact was that General Larry Arnold, the head of NORAD's US Continental region, had, in open testimony to the Commission in 2003, repeated NORAD's statement that it had been notified about the hijacking at 9:24. Other NORAD officials, moreover, had testified that fighters at Langley had been scrambled in response to this notification. The Commission handled this problem by simply saying that these statements by Arnold and the other NORAD officials were “incorrect” (34). The Commission again did not explain why NORAD officials had made incorrect statements. But it said that those statements were “unfortunate” because they “made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond” (34). The Commission's task was to convince us that this was not true.

More FAA Incompetence
Basic to the Commission's new story about Flight 77 is another tale of incredible incompetence by FAA officials. This tale goes like this: At 8:54, the FAA controller in Indianapolis, after seeing Flight 77 go off course, lost its transponder signal and even its radar track. Rather than reporting the flight as possibly hijacked, however, he assumed that it had crashed. Evidently it did not occur to him that a possible crash should be reported. In any case, he later, after hearing about the other hijackings, came to suspect that Flight 77 may have also been hijacked. He then shared this suspicion with Herndon, which in turn shared it with FAA headquarters. But no one, we are told, called the military. The result, the Commission says, is that “NEADS never received notice that American 77 was hijacked” (34).

Explaining the Langley Scramble: Phantom Flight 11
But even if we could believe this implausible tale, there is still the problem of why F-16s at Langley Air Force Base were airborne at 9:30. FAA incompetence again comes to the rescue. At 9:21---35 minutes after Flight 11 had crashed into the World Trade Center---some technician at NEADS, we are told, heard from some FAA controller in Boston that Flight 11 was still in the air and was heading towards Washington. This NEADS technician then notified the NEADS Mission Crew Commander, who issued a scramble order to Langley. So, the Commission claims, the Langley jets were scrambled in response to “a phantom aircraft,” not to “an actual hijacked aircraft.” (34) This new story, however, is riddled with problems.

One problem is simply that this idea had never before been mentioned. As the Commission itself says, it “was not recounted in a single public timeline or statement issued by the FAA or Department of Defense” (34). It was, for example, not in NORAD'S official report, Air War Over America, the foreword for which was written by General Larry Arnold.

General Arnold's ignorance of phantom Flight 11 was, in fact, an occasion for public humiliation. The 9/11 Commission, at a hearing in June of 2004, berated him for not “remembering” that the Langley jets had really been scrambled in response to phantom Flight 11, not in response to a warning about Flight 77. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste began a lengthy grilling by asking: “General Arnold. Why did no one mention the false report received from the FAA that Flight 11 was heading south during your initial appearance before the 9/11 Commission back in May of last year?” After an embarrassing exchange, Ben-Veniste stuck the knife in even further, asking:

General, is it not a fact that the failure to call our attention to the . . . the notion of a phantom Flight 11 continuing from New York City south . . . skewed the official Air Force report, . . . which does not contain any information about the fact that . . . you had not received notification that Flight 77 had been hijacked? . . . [S]urely by May of last year, when you testified before this commission, you knew those facts.
In Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen says: “It is a poor memory that remembers only backwards.” One must wonder if General Arnold felt that he was being criticized for not remembering the future---that is, for not “remembering” a story that had been invented only after he had given his testimony. Arnold, in any case, simply replied that he “didn't recall those facts in May of last year.”

But if those alleged facts were real facts, that reply would be beyond belief. According to the Commission's new story, NORAD, under Arnold's command, failed to scramble fighter jets in response to Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93. The one time it scrambled fighters, it did so in response to a false report. Surely that would have been the biggest embarrassment of Arnold's professional life. And yet 20 months later, he supposedly “didn't recall those facts.”

A second problem is that there is no way for this story about phantom Flight 11 to be verified. The Commission says that the truth of this story “is clear . . . from taped conversations at FAA centers; contemporaneous logs compiled at NEADS, Continental Region headquarters, and NORAD; and other records” (34). But when we look in the notes at the back of The 9/11 Commission Report, we find no references for any of these records; we simply have to take the Commission's word. The sole reference is to a NEADS audiofile, on which someone at the FAA's Boston Center allegedly tells someone at NEADS: “I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air, and it's . . . heading towards Washington” (26). The Commission claims to have discovered this audiofile. Again, however, we simply have to take the Commission's word. We cannot obtain this audiofile. And there is no mention of any tests, carried out by an independent agency, to verify that this audiofile really dates from 9/11, rather than having been created later, after someone decided that the story about phantom Flight 11 was needed.

But could not reporters interview the people at NEADS and the FAA who had this conversation? No, because the Commission says, nonchalantly: “We have been unable to identify the source of this mistaken FAA information” (26). This disclaimer is difficult to believe. It is now very easy to identify people from recordings of their voices. And yet the Commission was supposedly not able to discover the identity of either the individual at Boston who made the mistake or the NEADS technician who received and passed on this misinformation.

Another implausible element is the very idea that someone at Boston would have concluded that Flight 11 was still airborne. According to stories immediately after 9/11, flight controllers at Boston said that they never lost sight of Flight 11. Flight controller Mark Hodgkins later said: “I watched the target of American 11 the whole way down.” If so, everyone at the Boston Center would have known this. How could anything on a radar screen have convinced anyone at the Boston Center, 35 minutes later, that Flight 11 was still aloft?
Still another implausible element in the story is the idea that the Mission Commander at NEADS, having received this implausible report from a technician, would have been so confident of its truth that he would have immediately ordered Langley to scramble F-16s.

This entire story about phantom Flight 11 is the Commission's attempt to explain why, if the US military had not been notified about Flight 77, a scramble order was issued to Langley at 9:24, which resulted in F-16s taking off at 9:30. As we have seen, every element in this story is implausible.

Why Were the Langley F-16s So Far from Washington?
Equally implausible is the Commission's explanation as to why, if the F-16s were airborne at 9:30, they were not close enough to Washington to protect the Pentagon at 9:38. To answer this question, the Commission once again calls on FAA incompetence.

The F-16s, we are told, were supposed to go to Baltimore, to intercept (phantom) Flight 11 before it reached Washington. But the FAA controller, along with the lead pilot, thought the orders were for the F-16s to go “east over the ocean,” so at 9:38, when the Pentagon was struck, “[t]he Langley fighters were about 150 miles away” (27). Has there ever been, since the days of the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, such a comedy of errors? This explanation, in any case, is not believable. By the time of the scramble order, it was clear that the threat was from hijacked airliners, not from abroad. My six-year-old grandson would have known to double-check the order before sending the fighters out to sea.

The Military's Alleged Ignorance about Flight 77
Even more problematic is the Commission's claim that Pentagon officials were in the dark about the hijacking of Flight 77.

That claim is flatly contradicted by Laura Brown's memo. Having said that the FAA had established its teleconference with military officials “within minutes” of the first strike, she said that the FAA shared “real-time information” about “all the flights of interest, including Flight 77.” Moreover, explicitly taking issue with NORAD's claim that it knew nothing about Flight 77 until 9:24, she said:

NORAD logs indicate that the FAA made formal notification about American Flight 77 at 9:24 a.m., but information about the flight was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges before the formal notification.

This statement about informal notification was known by the Commission. Richard Ben-Veniste, after reading Laura Brown's memo into the record, said: “So no