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Senator Dayton: NORAD Lied About 9/11
(Senator Mark Dayton's remarks of July 31, 2004)
[NOTE: Mark Dayton has become the first U.S. senator to challenge the rush to consensus that "The 9/11 Commission Report" settles the open questions of Sept. 11, 2001. . . . In hearings last Friday, Sen. Dayton (D-MN) raised an obvious point: if the timeline of air defense response as promoted in the Kean Commission's best-selling book is correct, then the timeline presented repeatedly by NORAD during the last two years was completely wrong. Yet now no one at NORAD is willing to comment on their own timeline! . . . When the official story of 9/11 can be changed repeatedly without anyone ever being held accountable, we have no right to ever again expect honest government. Please read the following story and do your part to support Sen. Dayton for highlighting the contradiction, and to encourage the media to follow up.]

The original story was delivered by Gen. Richard Myers, the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11. Just two days after the events, Myers appeared before the Senate for hearings, scheduled many weeks earlier, to consider his appointment as the nation's supreme military officer. Myers told the Senate that no fighter jets were scrambled to intercept any of the 9/11 flights until after the Pentagon was struck. . . . The Pentagon attack occurred at 9:38 a.m., a full 1 hour 20 minutes after the first of the 9/11 flights was diverted from its designated flight path. . . . Myers's statement to the Senate was incredible, given the standard U.S. air defense protocols for dealing with errant instrument flights (including off-course passenger planes). In place many years before Sept. 11, these procedures are automatic and require no special order. Within minutes after a flight ceases to respond to ground control, the FAA is expected to alert NORAD - which scrambles jet fighters to intercept the errant flight for reconnaissance purposes. These are supposed to be airborne within 10 minutes of the problem arising. . . . This routine was activated on at least 67 occasions in the year prior to Sept. 11, 2001. Exceptional as the events of 9/11 proved to be, the procedures should have also been activated automatically within minutes of each flight diversion on that day. . . . A partial timeline of U.S. air defense response published on Sept. 18, 2001 presented the times at which NORAD was alerted about each flight diversion by the FAA. In its statement, NORAD claimed to have responded to the alerts by scrambling two squads of interceptors. These, however, never reached any of their targets in time to intercept, let alone prepare for a possible shootdown. . . . As late as May 2003, General Arnold of NORAD, sitting alongside Gen. Myers, presented a slightly revised version of NORAD's Sept. 2001 timeline, in testimony to the Kean Commission. . . . The NORAD timeline indicated that during the crisis hours of 9/11, the FAA became increasingly slower in delivering alerts to NORAD. This seemed to shift the blame for the failed response to the FAA. . . . The FAA, however, disputed Gen. Arnold's testimony with a statement of May 21, 2003. The FAA claimed that regardless of the official notification times claimed by NORAD, phone bridges were established immediately after the initial attack (at 8:46). NORAD was informed in real time throughout of all developments, including about the plane that ultimately hit the Pentagon, the FAA said. . . . the Commission outlined a chronology that completely ditched the timeline that NORAD had upheld for two years. It also effectively placed almost all of the blame for delayed air defense response on the FAA. . . . Gens. Arnold and Myers, who testified to the Commission that same morning, were not held to account for having presented an entirely wrong timeline. Instead, they simply thanked the Kean Commission for clearing up the confusion. In return, one commissioner made a point of telling the generals they were not to blame; after all, it was all the FAA's fault! . . . A group of FAA officials who testified in the subsequent, final session stuck by their old defense that they had in fact provided adequate and timely information to NORAD via the phone bridges. As the hearings concluded, they still disputed both timelines: the old one from NORAD, and the new one from the Kean Commission. . . . Now that the Kean Commission has published the new timeline in its final report, these contradictions must not be simply swept under the rug. Either the Kean Commission is wrong, or else NORAD was pushing a flawed timeline for more than two years. Either way, the FAA story still differs from both. . . . There can be no excuses. Those responsible for dispensing false information must be held accountable, or else nothing in the behavior of government is likely ever to improve. . . . During the hearing, Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 commission, that, based on the commission's report, a NORAD chronology made public a week after the attacks was grossly misleading. The chronology said the FAA notified the military's emergency air command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still airborne. Dayton cited commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD about three of the planes until after they had crashed. . . . And, he said, a squadron of NORAD fighter planes that was scrambled was sent east over the Atlantic Ocean and was 150 miles from Washington, D.C., when the third plane struck the Pentagon -- "farther than they were before they took off." . . . Dayton said NORAD officials "lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people." He told Kean and Hamilton that if the commission's report is correct, President Bush "should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD ... betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth."

[We encourage you all to write and call Sen. Dayton's office to offer your support:]
Senator Mark Dayton (D-MN)
United States Senate
346 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C.

posted by LoZo 3:45 PM