NORAD, Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney

You've no doubt read this WP bombshell:

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate...

"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."

So what went on with NORAD that day? Vanity Fair gives us the closest look we have yet received. I do not consider it the full story (and some consider it pure spin), but we need every scrap of info we can get. Here's a bit that lept out at me:

For the NEADS crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings—some real, some phantom—that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening. At one point, in the span of a single mad minute, one hears Nasypany struggling to parse reports of four separate hijackings at once. What emerges from the barrage of what Nasypany dubs "bad poop" flying at his troops from all directions is a picture of remarkable composure.

"Bad poop" about phantom hijackings was all over the media on 9/11. Has anyone done any research as to just how those stories began?

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

For an interesting brief response to the VF article, go here and scroll down to Paul Thompson's take (response 11). Everyone reading the new VF article should keep in mind this revelation published in the New York Observer:

What’s more, the decades-old procedure for a quick response by the nation’s air defense had been changed in June of 2001. Now, instead of NORAD’s military commanders being able to issue the command to launch fighter jets, approval had to be sought from the civilian Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. This change is extremely significant, because Mr. Rumsfeld claims to have been "out of the loop" nearly the entire morning of 9/11. He isn’t on the record as having given any orders that morning.

Concentration of power means that the actions of only a few can engineer events.

This section of the VF article will surely make the greatest impression:

In his bunker under the White House, Vice President Cheney was not notified about United 93 until 10:02—only one minute before the airliner impacted the ground. Yet it was with dark bravado that the vice president and others in the Bush administration would later recount sober deliberations about the prospect of shooting down United 93. "Very, very tough decision, and the president understood the magnitude of that decision," Bush's then chief of staff, Andrew Card, told ABC News.

Cheney echoed, "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before." And it wasn't on 9/11, either.

President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which—though no one knew it at the time—was 15 minutes after the attack was over.

Is there one reason why Bush could not have granted that authority while in that classroom -- or earlier, since he knew of the first strike before the reading of "My Pet Goat" began?

He did not say "Fight back" until the fight was over. If Clinton had done precisely the same thing, the right would have spun endless conspiracy stories.