THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE - Kean & Hamilton Explain U.S. Military Failure to Intercept Flight 77

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THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE

Kean & Hamilton Explain U.S. Military Failure to Intercept Flight 77

Posted by Time for change in September 11
Sun Sep 24th 2006, 10:39 PM

In "Without Precedent" the co-chairs of the 9-11 Commission attempt to justify their whitewash of an investigation into the 9-11 attacks on our country. Their incredibly absurd explanations read like a science fiction movie made for idiots

“Without Precedent – The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission”, written by the two co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, is in their words “the compelling inside story of how the … 9/11 Commission managed to succeed against all odds in producing a report that made clear what went wrong and why.”

In this post I describe the authors’ attempts to justify just one of their major findings – a finding that to many people, including me, is the most incredible of the whole incredible story of 9/11. That is the explanation of how the most expensive, powerful, and technologically advanced military that the world has ever known failed to prevent an attack on its capital city despite what appeared to be plenty of time to prevent it. For clarity, my editorial comments in response to various statements by the authors are in red.

“Without Precedent” – an explanation of the general approach of the 9/11 Commission

Kean sets the stage for the drama, thereby explaining the title of the book, in the Prologue:

President Bush said he would meet with us for as long as we wanted and that he would answer any questions … After the first few exchanges, I realized the magnitude of what was happening: ten independent citizens sitting in the White House and asking questions of the president and vice-president about a national catastrophe. It was without precedent…. This was precisely how democracy is supposed to work.

Huh? What part of that description was “without precedent”? Perhaps Kean was referring to Bush answering questions without a prepared script.

The authors then devote much of the early chapters of the book to explaining (or justifying, depending on how one looks at it) the methods of their investigation. Included in these explanations are descriptions of their extensive efforts to ensure that the investigation was cordial and not “partisan”, and a statement that a fundamental purpose of their investigation was NOT “to point fingers”. Noting that many of the victims’ families were not happy about the decision not to “point fingers”, the authors explain, “We would be unyielding and comprehensive in uncovering facts, but our purpose was not to assign blame to individuals for 9/11.”

I can imagine the outrage if a state prosecutor announced that the purpose of an investigation into an unsolved inner city murder was “not to point fingers or assign blame”. But this investigation was different. The people responsible for preventing terrorist attacks on the United States were in general highly educated and wealthy government officials – certainly not the type of persons deserving of having fingers pointed at them, notwithstanding the need for “producing a report that made clear what went wrong and why.”

In line with the intended cordiality of their investigation, the authors provide extensive discussions on how they decided that they would issue subpoenas only in extraordinary circumstances. And this is followed later by an explanation as to why they decided NOT to issue subpoenas to the White House. Major considerations in making that decision were that issuing subpoenas to the White House “would have led half the country … to question our motives”, and “We were investigating a national catastrophe, not a White House transgression”. In other words it was decided before the investigation even began that the White House was not guilty of any “transgressions”.

Prelude to an explanation as to how the U.S. military failed to intercept Flight 77

The authors’ explanation of this central event occurs in Chapter 12 of their fourteen chapter book. But prior to getting into the details of the main event they do some preparing of their readers.

In Chapter 4 the authors broach the fact that, despite their great reluctance to use their subpoena power they had to make an exception when it came to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). They don’t go into much detail at that point, rather they simply make it clear that both the FAA and NORAD provided so much false information to the Commission that it became apparent to them that neither agency could be trusted to cooperate without the pressure of a subpoena. The importance of establishing the unreliability of the FAA and NORAD would become evident later in the book, when it became clear that the FAA and NORAD version of events suggested purposeful failure to prevent the attack on the Pentagon by Flight 77.

Throughout the book the authors make snide comments about “conspiracy theorists”. Then, right before their attempt to explain why our military failed to get a fighter plane up in the air to intercept Flight 77 they get real heavy with dark warnings about “conspiracy theorists”. They begin by harking back to the Kennedy assassination:

Many people have reasonable questions about how Lee Harvey Oswald could have acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy; a smaller subset of conspiracy theorists propagate outrageous notions: Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA or by some shadowy secret society of the rich and powerful…

In other words, reasonable people may wonder about conspiracy theories, but it’s “outrageous” to think that the CIA or rich and powerful men might be involved in a dark conspiracy. I guess Kean and Hamilton think that assassinations of presidents are more likely to be carried out by crazy people acting alone than by the rich and powerful, and that it’s outrageous to think otherwise.

Getting back to the subject at hand, the authors continue:

September 11 has generated its own share of conspiracy theorists… We often confronted questions about one conspiracy theory or another.

Then there were the more irrational theories. Did the U.S. government have foreknowledge of the attacks: Did the military issue a “stand-down” order on 9/11 to allow the attacks to take place? Did a missile hit the Pentagon instead of a plane?...

A brief time-line for the events involving Flight 77

In order to understand how the 9/11 Commission attempted to explain this most controversial issue we must first look at a general time line of the relevant events. The following is a brief time line taken right from the 9/11 Commission Report itself, with one very important exception, which is posted in blue for emphasis:

8:20 – Flight 77 leaves Dulles Airport in Washington D.C., headed West.
8:54 – Plane goes off flight plan
8:56 – Transponder is turned off, and flight is then lost FAA controllers
8:56 to 9:32 – Plane “traveled undetected for 36 minutes on a course heading due east, for Washington, D.C.”
9:24 – NORAD is notified by FAA of the missing plane (According to FAA the notification occurred earlier).
9:24 – NORAD gives order to scramble fighter jets for Langley AFB.
9:30 – Fighter jets from Langley become airborne.
9:37 – Pentagon is struck.

The one controversial part of this time line is crucial to an understanding of the whole controversy. If the notification of NORAD by the FAA really did occur at 9:24, as NORAD claimed in a press release on September 18th, and as they testified to at the 9/11 hearings twenty months later, then the question arises as to why NORAD didn’t immediately give an order to scramble planes to intercept Flight 77 (Yes, I know, it appears from the above time line that that is exactly what happened), since there was still plenty of time to do so. Indeed, since standard operating procedure would require that action, and since that would be the course of action expected of a military intent on preventing an attack on its capital city, the failure of the U.S. military to intercept Flight 77 is the major reason why many people believe that a “stand down” order was given by the U.S. military to prevent such an action, and why those people therefore believe that the U.S. military was complicit in the attacks.

Kean and Hamilton’s explanation

Here is what Kean and Hamilton have to say about this in their book:

Yet our staff determined that there was no notification to NORAD that American 77 was a hijacking before the crash time at 9:37; instead, at 9:34, there was notification that American 77 was lost ….

These inaccurate notification times explained in part the military’s puzzling account of its own actions on 9/11… At 9:24, NORAD scrambled air force jets from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, directing them to fly east over the Atlantic Ocean… NORAD claimed that the Langley jets were scrambled in pursuit of United 93 and American 77. Yet that was impossible. At 9:24, NORAD had not yet been notified that American 77 had been hijacked…

So why were air force jets scrambled from Langley at 9:24? … Our staff found that the people at NEADS had been told that American 11 had turned and was headed south toward Washington, when in fact American 11 had already crashed into the World Trade Center. The air force jets from Langley were thus pursuing a phantom aircraft – American 11, not United 93 or American 77.

Get it? In order to explain why NORAD gave an order to scramble jets from Langley at 9:24 (immediately after being notified of the missing Flight 77, according to NORAD) and why planes were up in the air by 9:30, and yet made no attempt intercept Flight 77, Kean and Hamilton claim that NORAD was responding NOT to notification of Flight 77 heading to Washington from the west, but rather to a phantom plane coming from the north. And furthermore, to make the point that those planes were nowhere in the vicinity by the time that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37, they claim that NORAD mistakenly ordered the planes to fly east over the Atlantic Ocean.

Several problems with Kean and Hamilton’s account

In order assess the accuracy of Kean and Hamilton’s account, as described above, one should consider all of the following:

1) First, believing the Kean/Hamilton account requires us to believe that the FAA personnel were so incompetent on that day that they couldn’t follow standard operating procedures. The 9/11 Commission says that the FAA first noted Flight 77 going off course at 8:54 (8:46 according to the FAA) and the transponder going off at 8:56. That should have given our military all the time in the world to protect our capital had the FAA notified them.

2) There is a memo from an FAA employee, Laura Brown, to the 9/11 Commission, which states that a phone bridge was established between NORAD and FAA within minutes of the first strike, and that the FAA shared information continuously with NORAD about all flights of interest during this teleconference, including Flight 77.

3) Richard Clarke describes another teleconference which included the White House and the FAA Administrator Jane Garvey, also initiated long before 9:24. (The 9/11 Commission report claimed (based on logs) that Clarke’s teleconference didn’t begin until after Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, but Clarke’s account is so clear on this matter that he would have had to have been lying if the 9/11 Commission claim is correct.)

4) As noted above, NORAD’s claim that they were notified of Flight 77 at 9:24 was initially made in a press release, and then repeated in testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Furthermore, as Kean and Hamilton note in their book, even after the 9/11 Commission issued their revised time lines NORAD officials “insisted that their original timelines had been correct”. Why would NORAD officials be insistent on this point if it weren’t true (or if they had been notified even earlier, as maintained by FAA), given that the later time takes them off the hook for their inaction? If FAA’s version of an earlier notification is correct it makes sense that NORAD might want to claim a later notification. But why claim an earlier notification if they wanted to protect themselves?

5) But even if the FAA was totally negligent in its duty to warn NORAD of the hijacking of Flight 77, shouldn’t the military have sent up fighter jets anyhow, given that they knew that our country was under attack for almost an hour before the Pentagon was hit?

6) And even if they didn’t get a plane up in the air long before they did, shouldn’t they have been watching closely and have been able to track Flight 77 heading for Washington D.C. (IF indeed that flight did head for Washington D.C.) long before it hit the Pentagon at 9:37?

7) It seems incredible that, of the four hijacked flights on September 11th, the only one which elicited a timely scramble order was a phantom plane (Flight 11, which had already crashed into the World Trade Center building in New York, according to the 9/11 Commission.)

8) It also seems incredible that the FAA mistakenly would have ordered the pilots from Langley AFB to fly east over the Atlantic Ocean, whether they were responding to Flight 77 coming from the west or Flight 11 coming from the north.

9) Supporting evidence for the theory that orders were given to prohibit any military response to Flight 77 comes from testimony before the 9/11 Commission of Norman Minetta, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, regarding a meeting he was having with Dick Cheney shortly before the Pentagon was hit. Here is Mineta’s account:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, “of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”

Conclusion

Kean and Hamilton devote much discussion to warning about conspiracy theories, at times blaming the abundance of conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 on inaccurate information put out by the FAA and NORAD, and at other times blaming it on psychological weaknesses of unbalanced individuals. Thus, they imply that one important reason for writing their book is to address that problem:

We established core principles for our inquiry in part to avoid the kinds of conspiracy theorizing that have followed in the wake of other inquiries. So we decided to be open and transparent so that people could see how we reached our conclusions about 9/11…. If, in the course of our inquiry, we could address or knock down a particular conspiracy theory, we did so.

Therefore, one would suppose that they would have tried to address the issues raised by perhaps the best known and well regarded of the so-called conspiracy theorists, David Ray Griffin, in his book, “The 9/11 Commission Report, Omissions and Distortions”. Griffin raised all the issues that I have raised in this post, and more, in considerably more detail than I have. And yet, Kean and Hamilton’s book not only fails to answer any of Griffin’s points regarding Flight 77, but they don’t even acknowledge them.

Thus, far from clarifying or strengthening the 9/11 Commission’s claims regarding Flight 77, it seems to me that “Without Precedent” emphasizes the weaknesses of its claims.

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The Unfulfilled Promise

The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals

Time for change

Notwithstanding the lofty sentiments and purpose of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the reality of the United States of America did not then – and never has – lived up to its ideal. Our nation remains today a long way from fulfilling the promise implied by those ideals. Yet, our Declaration was a great start, and it has long shone as a beacon of hope for people all over the world.

Throughout our history, while many have striven to close the gap between our highest ideals and the reality of our nation, others have focused on the accumulation of private wealth and power, at the expense of everyone else. In recent decades the latter have gained much ground, leading to increasing imperialism abroad and deteriorating democracy at home, characterized by routine (and legal) bribery of our public officials, the fusion of government and private corporate interests (corporatocracy), a corrupt election system largely in the hands of private corporations, a corporate controlled communications media, and the widespread acceptance of Executive Branch secrecy, routinely justified with little if any questioning, by the magic words “national security”. All of this is rapidly turning our country from the democracy proclaimed at our founding into a plutocracy (government by the wealthy and for the wealthy). The result is the most obscene wealth gap our country has ever known, the highest imprisonment rate in the world, rampant militarism, routine flaunting of international law, the least efficient health care system in the developed world, a pending environmental catastrophe that threatens to destroy the life sustaining forces of our planet, and myriad other problems that threaten to destroy our nation and tyrannize our people.

My new book, The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream – The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals, explores the roots and consequences of the demise of our democracy, and why most Americans have been unable to understand this process or even become aware of it. A good understanding of why and how we have deviated so greatly from the ideals of our nation is the first and necessary step towards getting back on the right track and revitalizing our society.

The book is currently being sold in electronic PDF format and can be purchased at http://www.unfulfilledpromise.com/Buy-the-... for $3.99. It will also soon be available in Amazon Kindle format. DU members who cannot afford to buy the book but would like to read it can pm me with your e-mail address, and I will send you a free PDF copy.

I’ve previously posted on DU a slightly earlier version of the introduction to the book, which is also posted at my site. Here is the Table of Contents, followed by a brief description of the three parts of the book:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Acknowledgements
Prologue – What is Wrong with the United States of America?

Part I – Root Causes of the Impending Demise of American Democracy
Chapter 1 – Legalized Bribery
Chapter 2 – Human Psychological Factors
Chapter 3 – Corporatocracy
Chapter 4 – Corporate Control of Media
Chapter 5 – Corrupt Election System
Chapter 6 – Government Secrecy
Chapter 7 – American Exceptionalism

Part II – A Sampling of Imperialist Actions
Chapter 8 – Slavery and its Legacy
Chapter 9 – Early U.S. Imperialism
Chapter 10 – U.S. Imperialism in Cold War
Chapter 11 – Iraq War and Occupation
Chapter 12 – Afghanistan War

Part III – Consequences
Chapter 13 – Election of George W. Bush
Chapter 14 – War and Imperialism
Chapter 15 – Class Warfare
Chapter 16 – Predator Financial Class
Chapter 17 – Shock Therapy
Chapter 18 – Contempt for Int. Law
Chapter 19 – The “War on Drugs”
Chapter 20 – Climate Change
Chapter 21 – “War on Terror”
Chapter 22 – Health Care
Chapter 23 – Unaccountable government
Chapter 24 – Response to 9/11 Attacks
Epilogue

PART I – Root Causes of the Impending Demise of American Democracy

It is somewhat difficult to separate the causes of our problems from their consequences, since they combine to form a long chain of cause leading to consequence, leading to more consequences, etcetera. Nevertheless, it seems worth while to identify the root causes of our problems, those that occur early in the chain and lead to so many of the tragic consequences we see today. The only chance we have of reversing the demise of our democracy is through addressing and attacking its root causes.

At the top of the list is the systematic bribery of public officials by the powerful corporations (Chapter 1) whom our government is charged with regulating in the public interest. Instead of calling it bribery, we call it “campaign contributions”, but what we call it isn’t as important as what it is. It is hard to fathom how democracy can survive when such a practice is legal and condoned.

Working in tandem with our system of legalized bribery is the nature of the people who inhabit our country. That is not to say that Americans are inherently substantially different than any other people. Human beings are imperfect, and that is probably a major reason why in a world where civilization began more than five millennia ago, the oldest written national framework of government in the world today – the Constitution of the United States of America – is only a little more than two and a quarter centuries old. Chapter 2 explores the roles of basic human needs, authoritarianism, psychological defense mechanisms used to prevent us from perceiving reality as it is rather than as we’d like it to be, and corrupted ideologies in causing us to passively accept the accumulation of power in the hands of ambitious and ruthless individuals who care about little else than expanding their own wealth and power.

When bribery of public officials is tolerated as an inevitable aspect of public life, government inevitably grows close to the wealthy interests that shower it with money in return for legislative and other favors. A malevolent symbiosis grows between the state and corporate power, resulting in rule by an oligarchy that is highly detrimental to the lives of ordinary people (Chapter 3). Using their accumulated wealth and power to manipulate our legislative process, the oligarchy grabs for more and more control of the communications media (Chapter 4) that are used to control the information available to and shape the attitudes of our nation’s people, in pursuit of their own narrow interests.

Since the 1980s an orchestrated campaign has been underway to demonize “big government”, thereby paving the way for private corporate control over more and more functions that were previously deemed intrinsic functions of government. Among those functions is the running of public elections (Chapter 5) – the function that symbolizes democracy perhaps more than any other single function. Consequently, the purging of selected registered voters from our computerized voter rolls has become a routine recurring event throughout much of our country, and without a doubt determined the results of the 2000 – and probably 2004 as well – presidential election. Just as bad, more and more of the counting of votes in our public elections have been turned over to private corporations, which count our votes using electronic machines using secret software to produce vote counts that cannot be verified by anyone.

Bribery, the fusion of government and private interest, fake and biased news, and corrupt elections are not things that government and its corporate allies want us to know about. Consequently, they construct walls of secrecy (Chapter 6) to keep us from obtaining information that sheds light on their activities. The perfect phrase for facilitating this is “national security”. When our government tells us that the “national security” requires that certain things be kept secret from us, the understanding is that to question such a pronouncement is unpatriotic, and to actually attempt to obtain the “secret” information may be treasonous.

But indefinitely maintaining secrets from the American people can be very difficult, because at least some people want to know what their government is up to. So in addition to the formal mechanisms of secrecy, informal mechanisms are constructed (Chapter 7) to keep vital information away from us. One of the primary methods for doing this is to make certain sensitive subjects taboo – that is, to create the widespread belief that discussion of these topics is so outside the bounds of acceptable human discourse that anyone who discusses them should be shunned by society, or worse. The most common issue that falls into this category is any discussion that sheds light on the disparity between American ideals and the reality of life in our country today.

PART II – A Sampling of Imperialist Actions in U.S. History

Notwithstanding the fact that our founding document says that “all men are created equal” and speaks of the inalienable rights of humankind, the United States has throughout its history partaken of massive exploitation of other peoples.

It is estimated that at the time of our birth, 18% of our population was black slaves. In our expansion westwards during the late 18th and 19th centuries, we decimated the original inhabitants of our continent, and often treated them with great cruelty. In 1846 we manufactured an excuse for war with our neighbor Mexico, in which we continued to expand our country westwards and southwards. In 1893 we began our overseas imperialism with the conquest of Hawaii. Our overseas expansion was greatly accelerated in 1898 with our participation in the Spanish-American War, which led to our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. With our arrival at world superpower status at the end of World War II, we began the Cold War, which led to and served as a rationalization for covert and/or direct military actions against myriad foreign nations over the next 46 years. With the September 11, 2001 attacks on our country, we declared a perpetual “War on Terror”, which served and continues to serve as an excuse to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, nations that posed no threat to us. We do not know when or if this perpetual war will ever end. We don’t know how many additional imperial conquests it will lead to.

Most Americans don’t think much about all this. Many of these actions are done in secrecy, and the American people don’t find out about them until many years later – or we never find out about them at all. Those that we do know about are spun into the most favorable light, to make them seem benign or even noble.

But these actions come at great costs: in the lives of our soldiers; in the ruined lives of the peoples of the victim countries; in trillions of dollars cost to our people and their future generations; in our international reputation; in anti-American hatred leading to terrorism; and, to our democracy itself. For how can a nation claim to believe in the inalienable rights of humankind specified in its founding document, while making a mockery of that belief in the way it treats other peoples? For that reason alone it is worth while to take a brief look at our long history of imperialist actions.

PART III – Consequences

In the Prologue I give a brief account of what I see as some of the worst and tragic consequences of the root causes that I discuss in Part I – to enable the reader to see where this book is heading. When elections of our public officials are for sale to the highest bidder… when our public officials are so addicted to the “campaign contributions” of their wealthiest constituents that they develop a symbiotic relationship with them… when our communications media are owned and controlled by an oligarchy of wealthy elites… when our citizenry lack the ability to differentiate propaganda from reality… when we allow machines provided by private corporations to count our votes using secret electronic software… then we should expect that the consequences will not be pretty or comfortable for the vast majority of our citizens.

In Part III, I explore those consequences in much greater detail, in the hope that the reader will agree with me that these are very serious problems, and that they must be successfully addressed if our country is ever to fulfill the promise of its ideals, or even make progress in that direction. When enough Americans recognize our problems as problems, stripped of the gloss and spin put on them by our oligarchy, they will rise up and do something about them. Until then there will be no progress, and we are very likely to head in the direction of all the former empires of our planet, ending in chaos, widespread catastrophe, suffering, and ignominy.

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