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12/15/2005:

"The 9/11 Commission's Incredible Tales"

Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93

...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 a 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 29,000 feet in only 2.5 minutes, after which they can then fly over 1800 miles per hour (140). (All page numbers given parenthetically in the text are to David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions). 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 spokesperson, NORAD can scramble fighter jets "within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States" (140). These statements were, to be sure, made after 9/11, so we might suspect that they reflect 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" (141).

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 hijacking, losing both the radio and the transponder signal, at 8:15. This means 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.
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