The newly discovered tapes are potentially significant evidence related to the U.S. government’s response to the September 11 attacks. Of most immediate importance to the commission: when precisely was the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) notified that the country was under a terrorist attack? Investigators want to know whether the Bush White House and the U.S. military could have acted more quickly to–at a minimum–intercept American Airlines Flight 77, the hijacked aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon at 9:38 a.m., after both World Trade Center towers had been hit In hearings and public statements, NORAD and the FAA have given what commission officials describe as incomplete and at times conflicting answers. At a hearing last May, Maj. Gen. Craig McKinley, commander of NORAD’s Continental United States Region, said the Pentagon agency–which is responsible for the nation’s air defenses–had gotten “official” notification from the FAA that American Airlines Flight 77 had been hijacked at 9:24 a.m., 22 minutes after the second plane hit the World Trade towers. This led to a NORAD directive to scramble F–16 jets from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to attempt to intercept the aircraft–an order that came too late to prevent the Pentagon crash just a few minutes later. But commission officials said they recently discovered in the course of interviews with FAA staff that agency officials knew that Flight 77 was off course earlier than that and that there may have been “informal” notice to NORAD; there were even agency tapes of conversations to that effect. Other material, including radar records and internal FAA interview reports and analyses, could also fill in gaps in the time line. What especially angered the commissioners, sources said, was that the FAA had previously indicated that such tapes and records didn’t exist and that it had already turned over all relevant material that the commission needed to do its job.
Greg Martin, an FAA spokesman, said the agency had been “very responsive and cooperative” to the agency’s requests for evidence, turning over large volumes of material. But he acknowledged that the FAA’s chief counsel, Andrew Steinberg, had just discovered the existence of “supplemental and complementary” material that had not been turned over. Taking exception to the commission’s lambasting of the FAA, Martin said: “There is what we consider a reasonable explanation. As soon as the materials came to light, they came to light to us.” The NORAD–FAA issue has resonated within a blossoming cottage industry of 9/11 conspiracy theorists–particularly those who have postulated that the conflicting accounts suggest the White House had prior knowledge of the attacks. While giving no credence to the more conspiratorial claims, the commission has been highly interested in compiling a precise time line of the events of September 11 and examining closely how various branches of the U.S. government responded–an exercise panel officials believe is important in identifying potential weaknesses in emergency preparedness. Already, the commission has identified major weaknesses: at the time of the attacks, NORAD satellites were aimed only at detecting hostile aircraft outside U.S. borders; the Pentagon agency relied on FAA radars for detecting hostile action within the country. There are also larger questions about how the Bush White House responded. Investigators want to know why, for example, the FAA wasn’t already on alert for a possible hijacking plot and why there was no policy in place that allowed a military response to a domestic hijacking–even after multiple warnings about such a possibility had been given to President Bush and other senior officials during the summer of 2001. Top White House officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and briefly President Bush, participated in an “air–threat conference call” on the morning of September 11–but an order giving the military authority to shoot down hijacked aircraft didn’t come until after the Pentagon crash. Steven Push, whose wife died on American Airlines Flight 77 and who has served as a spokesman for many of the 9/11 families, said he didn’t see a “deep, dark” conspiracy in the FAA’s failure to turn over the tapes and other records to the commission. “What I do see is a cover–up by the FAA to prevent the public from knowing how badly they screwed up that day,” says Push. Had the FAA and NORAD acted more quickly, and decisively, “it’s possible the people in the Pentagon could have been saved.”
