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.

Lying Beleaguer...

AKA Brian Good:

Senator Mark Dayton already accused NORAD of lying, and Commissioners Kean and Hamilton wrote in their book that NORAD's shifting stories so angered them that they considered referring the matter for a Justice Dept. investigation.

But you'll never get the debunkers to admit it. You can quote the book and the news article and they'll just claim you're lying and taking stuff out of context.

I bring up the NORAD lies 3:00 into the debate with Jon Gold. The NORAD lies come up again at about 7:30 and at 8:30 I say "I think it's unconscionable the way that they lied to the commissioners and that was something they should have considered referring for criminal indictment."

Just call him Brian (Not So) Good (with the Truth).

9-11 Commission Counsel Farmer Interviewed by Brad Friedman

I cannot recommend this interview highly enough. Farmer overstates, certainly, the earth-shattering revelations in his new book, although it does sound like it is a good book on the commission and on the attacks.

Among other things, Farmer states the following, about 15:15 into the interview:

"Well, let me just say that I think the [9-11 Commission] report is extremely accurate and sets forth the facts of 9-11, and actually we did point out in the report the discrepancies between the accounts that we were given and what we actually found."

He also blames 9-11 on the parties responsible (Al Qaeda and the hijackers); inside the government he blames bureaucracy as the reason the plot was not uncovered beforehand.

You know how the Troofers like to say that nobody was disciplined or reprimanded? Farmer says (24:40) that one Department of Transportation employee (an FAA controller) was disciplined for "failing to be forthcoming with us." But again Farmer highlights that the problems occurred systemically and were largely due to bureaucratic inertia.

Friedman cherry picks a few of the question on the petition Van Jones signed and asks them of Farmer (25:20). This section is particularly highly recommended, as Farmer's answers are probably the same ones I would give.

The Troofers are already claiming that Farmer lied when he said he saw the tapes of the Pentagon crash. If you listen carefully, he says he saw the Citgo gas station tape, but that he did not see a plane crash into the Pentagon; for that he references the eyewitnesses.

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.