9/11 Tape Features Top Bush and DoD Officials

9/11 Tape Features Top Bush and DoD Officials

Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Monday, Sept. 8, 2003

Shortly after two fuel-laden passenger jets smashed into the upper floors of the two World Trade Center towers, a third plowed into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field, top members of the Bush team, including at times Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, participated in an hours-long conference call discussing the attacks.

That call, known as an "air threat conference call," was tape recorded, and members of the independent commission now probing the events surrounding 9/11 want to see the full transcript of the recording.

So far, writes USA Today, they haven't been able to pry it loose, although they have been promised that once the White House, which got the transcript Aug. 6, clears the 200-page document, it will be handed over to them.

According to USA Today, included among those who participated in the call along with Cheney and Rumsfeld were senior officials of the National Security Council (NSC), The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD).

Pentagon officials familiar with the matter told USA Today that the call was broadcast over a loudspeaker inside the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, where Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers were operating. The entire call was recorded and has been transcribed.

The White House has been examining the transcript to be sure release will not violate executive privilege - a step needed, since Cheney was a participant.

Commission members want the document in the hope that it will clear up some questions concerning administration actions on that horrendous day.

Among them:

Why did NORAD have to depend on the FAA for tracking data on four heavily fuel-laden jets that had been hijacked by terrorists? NORAD, which tracks activity outside U.S. airspace but not within it, even had to rely on the FAA to track U.S. military jets inside U.S. airspace, officials told USA Today.

Why did it take the FAA 14 minutes to tell NORAD that American Airlines Flight 77, which was supposed to be headed for Los Angeles, was way off course in West Virginia, had been hijacked and was headed back toward Washington? If alerted immediately instead of 14 minutes later, could the military have scrambled fighters to intercept the plane and prevent it from slamming into the Pentagon?

Could the transcript shed any light on how the military responded to President Bush's unprecedented order, issued moments after the Pentagon was hit, to shoot down any hijacked planes, or the FAA order to ground all domestic flights? The commission wants to know if the military had done advance planning to cope with such orders.

"There are unanswered questions," Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, a partisan Democrat, told USA Today, adding that he wanted to know whether Bush's order to shoot down hijacked planes "had been rehearsed for, whether it had been prepared for, and what measures were in place to protect the Capitol," toward which USA Today reports Flight 77 is thought to have been originally headed.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration
Homeland/Civil Defense
War on Terrorism

Editor's note:
Get FREE traffic to your Web site INSTANTLY! Click here now!