DLR'sCock
06-17-2004, 11:20 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/politics/16panel.html
Panel Investigating 9/11 Attacks
Cites Confusion in Air Defense
By Philip Shenon
New York Times
Wednesday 16 June 2004
Washington - The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks has found that the Pentagon's domestic air-defense command was disastrously unprepared for a major terrorist strike on American soil and was slow and confused in its response to the hijackings that morning, according to officials who have read a draft report of the commission's findings.
The officials said the draft had been circulated in recent days among commission members and at the Pentagon in preparation for public release of the report at a hearing on Thursday.
[In Spain on Tuesday, a judge ordered 15 people to stand trial in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.]
The 9/11 commission draft summarized the response of the military, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies with this passage:
"On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen. What ensued was a hurried attempt to create an improvised defense by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced."
The report, they said, suggests - though it does not say explicitly - that a more organized response by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, might have allowed fighter pilots to reach one jetliner and shoot it down before it flew into the Pentagon, more than 50 minutes after the first of the hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.
Instead, the report finds, an emergency order from Vice President Dick Cheney authorizing the hijacked planes to be shot down did not reach pilots until the last of the four commandeered jetliners had crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania, after a struggle between terrorists and passengers aboard that plane.
A spokesman for Norad, which is based in Colorado, had no immediate comment on accounts of the report. Norad's commander, Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are to testify before the commission at the Thursday hearing, along with former officials of the F.A.A., which has been harshly criticized by the commission in the past.
Commission officials said that Norad and the F.A.A. believed that elements of the criticism in the draft report were wrong or exaggerated, and that they were pressing for last-minute corrections. The 10-member bipartisan commission, which is in the final weeks of its investigation, has repeatedly tangled with the air-defense command and the aviation agency, and issued subpoenas to both last year in trying to gather documents and testimony.
The commission's public hearings this week - Wednesday on Al Qaeda and the development of the Sept. 11 plot, Thursday on the chronology of that morning and how Norad, the F.A.A. and other agencies responded to the attacks - are the last the panel is scheduled to hold before it delivers a final, all-encompassing report late next month.
Thomas H. Kean, the commission's chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview Tuesday that the hearings this week would "close the circle" on the inquiry and alter the public's understanding of exactly what happened on Sept. 11 and of the plotting of Qaeda terrorists in the months before.
While Mr. Kean said he could not disclose in advance what exactly the commission had learned, other panel officials said the hearings this week would depict widespread chaos within the federal government on the day of the attacks, offering extensive new evidence of how the White House, the Pentagon and federal emergency response agencies were slow to react.
Members of the commission, they said, are expected to question witnesses about hesitation among White House aides on the morning of the attacks, why President Bush was allowed to remain in a meeting with Florida schoolchildren for several minutes after it became clear that a terrorist attack was under way and why he was then taken on a perplexing, hopscotch series of flights on Air Force One that created the appearance of chaos among the nation's leaders.
"There was a lot of chaos," Mr. Kean said. "We'll go over what the president did, what the vice president did, what was going on in the PEOC - the whole story." PEOC is the acronym for the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a White House bunker where Mr. Cheney and senior aides were sheltered in the hours after the attacks.
Mr. Kean said that in a closed meeting on Tuesday, the panel began to debate the report's final recommendations in earnest, including proposals for a sweeping overhaul of the nation's intelligence agencies. He said he remained optimistic that the commission could produce a unanimous report.
Commission officials have made clear in the past that the report will offer blistering criticism of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other intelligence and counterterrorism agencies for failures before Sept. 11. Some members have suggested that the commission may want to recommend the creation of domestic intelligence-gathering agencies separate from the F.B.I., similar to Britain's MI-5.
The intelligence overhaul "is probably the most complex and the most difficult" of the issues under consideration by the panel, Mr. Kean said. "But yes, I'm optimistic. Even with 10 very independent-minded people, this is not impossible."
Spanish Judge Orders 9/11 Trial
Reuters
Madrid - A Spanish judge has ordered 15 people suspected of being Al Qaeda members to face trial on charges including mass murder for the Sept. 11 attacks, court documents showed Tuesday.
The judge, Baltasar Garzón, has been investigating Islamist militants since 1996, ordering his first arrests in November 2001 in a bid to smash an alleged Qaeda cell in Spain.
Judicial sources said the trial of the 15 suspects could begin in about a year. Fourteen of them are in jail while one, a Syrian-born Spanish journalist for Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, has been freed on bail for medical reasons.
Judge Garzón has charged and issued international arrest warrants for 16 others suspected of being members the of the network. He has also issued a warrant for Osama bin Laden.
The suspects to face trial include Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, alias Abu Dahdah, whom Judge Garzón accuses of taking part in organizing the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. He has charged Mr. Dahdah with 3,000 murders.
Also to face trial is Taysir Alony, the Al Jazeera reporter, who is best known for interviewing Mr. bin Laden shortly after the attacks.
Mr. Alony is charged with providing money and information to al Qaeda operatives and recruiting fighters for the group.
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Panel Investigating 9/11 Attacks
Cites Confusion in Air Defense
By Philip Shenon
New York Times
Wednesday 16 June 2004
Washington - The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks has found that the Pentagon's domestic air-defense command was disastrously unprepared for a major terrorist strike on American soil and was slow and confused in its response to the hijackings that morning, according to officials who have read a draft report of the commission's findings.
The officials said the draft had been circulated in recent days among commission members and at the Pentagon in preparation for public release of the report at a hearing on Thursday.
[In Spain on Tuesday, a judge ordered 15 people to stand trial in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.]
The 9/11 commission draft summarized the response of the military, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies with this passage:
"On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen. What ensued was a hurried attempt to create an improvised defense by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced."
The report, they said, suggests - though it does not say explicitly - that a more organized response by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, might have allowed fighter pilots to reach one jetliner and shoot it down before it flew into the Pentagon, more than 50 minutes after the first of the hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.
Instead, the report finds, an emergency order from Vice President Dick Cheney authorizing the hijacked planes to be shot down did not reach pilots until the last of the four commandeered jetliners had crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania, after a struggle between terrorists and passengers aboard that plane.
A spokesman for Norad, which is based in Colorado, had no immediate comment on accounts of the report. Norad's commander, Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are to testify before the commission at the Thursday hearing, along with former officials of the F.A.A., which has been harshly criticized by the commission in the past.
Commission officials said that Norad and the F.A.A. believed that elements of the criticism in the draft report were wrong or exaggerated, and that they were pressing for last-minute corrections. The 10-member bipartisan commission, which is in the final weeks of its investigation, has repeatedly tangled with the air-defense command and the aviation agency, and issued subpoenas to both last year in trying to gather documents and testimony.
The commission's public hearings this week - Wednesday on Al Qaeda and the development of the Sept. 11 plot, Thursday on the chronology of that morning and how Norad, the F.A.A. and other agencies responded to the attacks - are the last the panel is scheduled to hold before it delivers a final, all-encompassing report late next month.
Thomas H. Kean, the commission's chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview Tuesday that the hearings this week would "close the circle" on the inquiry and alter the public's understanding of exactly what happened on Sept. 11 and of the plotting of Qaeda terrorists in the months before.
While Mr. Kean said he could not disclose in advance what exactly the commission had learned, other panel officials said the hearings this week would depict widespread chaos within the federal government on the day of the attacks, offering extensive new evidence of how the White House, the Pentagon and federal emergency response agencies were slow to react.
Members of the commission, they said, are expected to question witnesses about hesitation among White House aides on the morning of the attacks, why President Bush was allowed to remain in a meeting with Florida schoolchildren for several minutes after it became clear that a terrorist attack was under way and why he was then taken on a perplexing, hopscotch series of flights on Air Force One that created the appearance of chaos among the nation's leaders.
"There was a lot of chaos," Mr. Kean said. "We'll go over what the president did, what the vice president did, what was going on in the PEOC - the whole story." PEOC is the acronym for the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a White House bunker where Mr. Cheney and senior aides were sheltered in the hours after the attacks.
Mr. Kean said that in a closed meeting on Tuesday, the panel began to debate the report's final recommendations in earnest, including proposals for a sweeping overhaul of the nation's intelligence agencies. He said he remained optimistic that the commission could produce a unanimous report.
Commission officials have made clear in the past that the report will offer blistering criticism of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other intelligence and counterterrorism agencies for failures before Sept. 11. Some members have suggested that the commission may want to recommend the creation of domestic intelligence-gathering agencies separate from the F.B.I., similar to Britain's MI-5.
The intelligence overhaul "is probably the most complex and the most difficult" of the issues under consideration by the panel, Mr. Kean said. "But yes, I'm optimistic. Even with 10 very independent-minded people, this is not impossible."
Spanish Judge Orders 9/11 Trial
Reuters
Madrid - A Spanish judge has ordered 15 people suspected of being Al Qaeda members to face trial on charges including mass murder for the Sept. 11 attacks, court documents showed Tuesday.
The judge, Baltasar Garzón, has been investigating Islamist militants since 1996, ordering his first arrests in November 2001 in a bid to smash an alleged Qaeda cell in Spain.
Judicial sources said the trial of the 15 suspects could begin in about a year. Fourteen of them are in jail while one, a Syrian-born Spanish journalist for Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, has been freed on bail for medical reasons.
Judge Garzón has charged and issued international arrest warrants for 16 others suspected of being members the of the network. He has also issued a warrant for Osama bin Laden.
The suspects to face trial include Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, alias Abu Dahdah, whom Judge Garzón accuses of taking part in organizing the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. He has charged Mr. Dahdah with 3,000 murders.
Also to face trial is Taysir Alony, the Al Jazeera reporter, who is best known for interviewing Mr. bin Laden shortly after the attacks.
Mr. Alony is charged with providing money and information to al Qaeda operatives and recruiting fighters for the group.
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