From the Archives: The Pentagon's Big Cover-Up in the Sky

(This Story of the Day was originally posted on August 2, 2006. It's another one of those damning findings about the Bush administration that the mainstream media dropped down the memory hole. As the White House and Republicans continue to tout national security as their strength - a patently false assertion based on their record and one the mainstream media refuses to challenge - I thought it timely to dig this up.)

Did the Pentagon cover up the 9/11 incompetence of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)? It sure looks that way. Today's Vanity Fair online exclusive pieces together the actions that morning of those who were charged to protect our skies. The article's author, Michael Bronner, includes chronological tapes allowing you to listen in on the absolute chaos and cluelessness that engulfed NORAD that morning.

Bronner writes:

It was into this airspace that violence descended on 9/11, and from the NEADS [Northeast Air Defense Sector, the regional headquarters for NORAD] operations floor that what turned out to be the sum total of America's military response during those critical 100-some minutes of the attack—scrambling four armed fighter jets and one unarmed training plane—emanated.

...

Through the heat of the attack the wheels of what were, perhaps, some of the more modern pieces of equipment in the room—four Dictaphone multi-channel reel-to-reel tape recorders mounted on a rack in a corner of the operations floor—spun impassively, recording every radio channel, with time stamps.

...

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. At one point, in the span of a single mad minute, one hears Nasypany [the facility's mission-crew commander] struggling to parse reports of four separate hijackings at once.

...

"The real story is actually better than the one we told," a NORAD general admitted to 9/11-commission staffers when confronted with evidence from the tapes that contradicted his original testimony. And so it seems.

This Vanity Fair exclusive ties in well with new revelations that some members of the 9/11 commission believed the Pentagon was indeed intentionally misleading the panel. From today's Washington Post:

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

Ah, but what did this whitewashing commission wind up doing?

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

How disingenuous is the 9/11 commission's search for truth? Apparently, about a notch above OJ's:

"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."

Did someone forget to tell Kean the very purpose of his relatively useless commission was to untie those "loose ends"?

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center

...

"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true."

But what's the likelihood of the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments prosecuting criminal referrals? This about sums it up:

John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.

"My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don't know," Lehman said. "But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn't seem to make sense to me."

Unbelievable. The purported task of the 9/11 commission was to pinpoint what happened that day, unearth entrenched incompetence and recommend remedies to ensure our country is better prepared for future attacks. Unfortunately, in the corrupt Bush administration, after endless bluster about how protecting our citizens is its number one priority - used to justify the war in Iraq, torture, secret prisons, unlimited presidential power, daily deaths and maimings of our troops, and massive foreign civilian casualties - the truth of the matter remains, as it has since the days before the towers even fell (see August 6th memo), that national security is of little importance to the Bushites. Rather, it has always been about money and power.

Make no mistake about it, these bloodthirsty bandits and their coffers - no matter what happens in Iraq, or any other part of the world they've touched - have already achieved their goals. All one needs to do is look at the record profits of Halliburton, its subsidiary companies and big oil.

A recent Ward Sutton cartoon depicted Bush and Cheney celebrating July 4th under a gaudy banner that read, "Mi$$ion Accomplished!" It was the perfect summation of the Bush presidency. A reckless, ruthless money grab.

As Orwell said, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Though all of this can be overwhelming, can make you feel helpless and hopeless, this kind of constant struggle is crucial now more than ever. The Bush administration's greed appears insatiable, inured to the cost in human life. Please read this whole Vanity Fair story (you don't want to miss listening to these tapes). Then ask yourself why the mainstream media still largely acts as though this flagrantly criminal administration deserves the benefit of the doubt. On any issue.

9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes, by Michael Bronner
Vanity Fair