NORAD's "Lies" Explained?

I have been perusing the blog of Miles Kara, a 9-11 Commission staffer. To be honest, it is a humbling experience, because it shows the vast amount of knowledge the Commission accumulated compared to the small amount that even I, who know the subject matter well, have managed to grasp. It's sort of like the difference between going to a movie and being on the set of a movie while it is being filmed.

Miles covers the NORAD "lies" here, and it's eye-opening to say the least.

There was one critical and two other serious mistakes in the timeline. The critical error was the 9:24 time for AA77. The accurate NEADS log information was: “American Airlines No. N334AA hijacked.” N334AA is the tail number for AA11, not AA77, a basic fact apparently never checked by any NORAD, CONR, or NEADS staff officer with either American Airlines or FAA.

The 8:43 time for UA175, was impossible and never explained in any document or during any interview conducted by the Commission staff. It was most likely a NORAD misunderstanding of information from FAA. That is the approximate time that UA175 was hijacked, a fact only known post facto.

So, the 9:24 time for Flight 77 is actually a time for what I call "Phantom Flight 11". For awhile NORAD and the FAA thought that Flight 11 was not the plane that hit the North Tower, and that it was still en route to Washington DC. This error becomes compounded:

On the day after the hearing Colonel Scott sent an e-mail to Colonel Marr, with a copy to the Commission staff, stating that it became easier to explain the Langley fighter scramble in terms of UA93 than AA77. It is clear from that email that neither Scott nor Marr, whose staff supported Scott, took the time to listen to the tapes or look at the actual transcripts. The NEADS staff, and Colonel Scott, had sufficient data available to them to find the rebirth of AA11 misinformation and the real reason for the Langley scramble. If they found it they did lie. If they did not they could not tell the truth. They could not solve their Sudoku puzzle.

Hence the erroneous assertion that the military found out about Flight 93 long before they did.

Lindorff Pans the Conspiracy Mongers

We've criticized Dave Lindorff in the past for promoting the conspiracy theories but he seems to have come to his senses:

What I am saying is that the grander conspiracies being concocted in the more fevered brains of some people on the Left do not hold up under careful and critical inspection. The biggest failings they share are two: first of all, conspiracies as grand as multi-state election thefts via electronic fraud, and the carrying out of a two-front, high-casualty mass terrorist act on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, require the cooperation of such large numbers of people that leaks, turncoats, informants and simple screw-ups are inevitable; and secondly, this administration in particular has shown itself to be phenomenally inept, intellectually stunted, and tactically clueless.

Lindorff still claims to have sources that tell him that the FBI recovered the black boxes from Flights 11 and 175, as he told Jon Gold recently:



Okay, so somebody lied to him, I suppose, because the government really has no reason to deny having those black boxes. But it is always good to see folks climbing back off the ledge.

Brother of Pilot of Flight 11 to Run for Senate

John Ogonowski may have been one of the very first to die in the terrorist attacks on 9-11. His brother Jim is running for the Senate as a Republican against John Kerry in Massachusetts.

The official policy of this blog is to be non-partisan. I will note that Ogonowski seems very unlikely to dethrone John Kerry in Massachusetts in a presidential election year. Massachusetts typically goes 60% for the Democrat in the presidential sweepstakes, and that means that fully 1/6 of those people would have to cross over and vote against Kerry after casting their ballots for Barack or Hillary.

Call me crazy, but I doubt Jon Gold is going to be rooting for this 9-11 family member.

Phantom Flight 11

I mentioned the other day that the FAA and the military both thought that American Airlines Flight 11 was still airborne well after the North Tower was struck and that there were concerns that it was headed to Washington, and that this was what an Air Force officer was referring to when he said "We chased many phantoms that day" and that it did not refer to "insertions" onto the radar screens of air traffic controllers.

Jason Bermas, on his show yesterday (mostly devoted to trashing our criticisms of Final Cut) claimed that the Air Force was chasing a real blip on the screen. Not true.

The plane's course, had it continued south past New York in the direction it was flying before it dipped below radar coverage, would have had it headed on a straight course toward D.C. This was all controllers were going on; they were never tracking an actual plane on the radar after losing American 11 near Manhattan, but if it had been flying low enough, the plane could have gone undetected. "After talking to a supervisor, I made the call and said [American 11] is still in the air, and it's probably somewhere over New Jersey or Delaware heading for Washington, D.C.," Scoggins told me.

Bolding added for emphasis.

Jason also talked a lot about what we didn't mention, like the fact that two of the hijackers lived with an FBI informant in 2000. Jason, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the things you actually got right. That Khalid al-Midhar and another hijacker lived with an FBI informant is well-established. We could talk a lot about the missed opportunities, and the fact that al-Midhar was not put on a terrorist watch list until after he was in the country, even though the CIA knew he attended a terrorist meeting in 2000. Nobody is denying that mistakes were made; that one in particular was costly.

Interview with Boston Center Air Traffic Controller

No, not with Robin Hordon, who was last an ATC 26 years ago. It's an interview with a guy who was at Boston Center on 9-11-01, when the hijackings took place. It makes for fascinating reading, especially with the NORAD tapes being released this week as well. Kudos to Ref and Cheap Shot for putting this together; highly recommended!

Gibbering Idiots

Sometimes I just despair at the stuff that the crackpot brigade considers evidence. Somebody discovered that American Airlines had edited its own Wikipedia page! Ooga booga! And more important it was a change in the entry regarding Flights 11 and 77 on 9-11-01. I'm not sure whether the change was to or from the following:

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack: American Airlines flight 77, a Boeing 757, and American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767. Although these flights were daily departures before and a month after September 11, 2001. Neither flight 11 nor 77 were scheduled on September 11, 2001. The records kept by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov/gis/) do not list either flight that day.

The bold portion is what has changed. Again, I'm not sure whether the person at American who made the changes added or deleted that bit, but it doesn't matter, because it fits the conspiracy theory either way. If an American employee added that part, he's a bold whistle-blower, while if he deleted it, he's involved in the coverup.

The underlying claim, that neither Flight 11 nor Flight 77 was scheduled that day, is, of course, absurd. This is what we refer to as the "Sacred List" fallacy. There are many, many lists around and inevitably one will be found that does not seem to mention something involving 9-11. This then becomes the Sacred List that the plotters either forgot to revise or did not revise because it was illegal to do so (since the plotters are happy to murder 3,000 people but wouldn't tamper with a list somewhere).

I cannot locate the list the Wikipedia entry mentions because there are dozens of databases at the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the claim on this one doesn't cite which database. I'd suspect it's one used to calculate something like percentage of on-time arrivals, where of course it would not be accurate to include these four flights. Indeed, many databases exclude parts of 9-11 for these very reasons. For example,

Table 12. Air Carrier Occurrences Involving Illegal Acts (Sabotage, Suicide, or Terrorism), 1986 through 2006

Note

Other than the persons aboard aircraft who were killed, fatalities resulting from the September 11, 2001 terrorist acts are excluded from this table.

Table 5. Accidents, Fatalities, and Rates, 1987 through 2006, for U.S. Air Carriers Operating Under 14 CFR 121, Scheduled and Nonscheduled Service (Airlines)

Years followed by the symbol * are those in which an illegal act was responsible for an occurrence in this category. These acts, such as suicide, sabotage and terrorism are included in the totals for accidents and fatalities but are excluded for the purpose of accident rate computation. Table 12 contains a list of illegal act occurrences involving US air carriers for the period covered by this table. Other than the persons aboard aircraft who were killed, fatalities resulting from the September 11, 2001 terrorist act are excluded from this table.