#911Truth WTFact #12: The NORAD Drills And What Happened To Our Fighter Jets

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Did you miss the introduction to this year’s campaign?

After read­ing about the far­ci­cal nature of the 9/11 Com­mis­sion report in WTFact #49, it should be more appar­ent how disin­gen­u­ous the effort of the com­mis­sion was. No mat­ter what your thoughts on the events of 9/11, one of the most notable unan­swered ques­tions cen­ters around the mas­sive mil­i­tary drills tak­ing place prior to and on Sep­tem­ber 11^th. The oft repeated theme dur­ing the benign inves­ti­ga­tion was whether the exer­cises impacted the abil­ity to respond to the cri­sis. NORAD, North Amer­i­can Aero­space Defense Com­mand, is a joint orga­ni­za­tion of Canada and the United States that pro­vides aero­space warn­ing, air sov­er­eignty, and defense.

The war games being con­ducted on the morn­ing of 9/11 were using many of the fighter jets that would have oth­er­wise been avail­able at air bases through­out the North­east. Some of the war games involved remark­ably sim­i­lar sce­nar­ios of air­lin­ers being flown into build­ings. The odds that a real event should occur the exact same day of a sim­i­lar drill or exer­cise are 1-in who knows how many zeros.

This is a list of the exer­cises hap­pen­ing that day.

Global Guardian — annual command-level exer­cise orga­nized by United States Strate­gic Com­mand in coöper­a­tion with Space Com­mand and NORAD.
Vig­i­lant Guardian — semi­an­nual NORAD exer­cise that had been run­ning in con­junc­tion with Global Guardian for sev­eral days and which pos­tu­lated a bomber attack from the for­mer Soviet Union.
Crown Vig­i­lance — Air Com­bat Com­mand
Apollo Guardian — Space Command
Amal­gam War­rior, also going on, was related to Vig­i­lant Guardian but there no known specifics.

Coin­ci­den­tally, the Russ­ian 37^th Air Army was also con­duct­ing its own major bomber exer­cises across the Arc­tic and Atlantic.

Oper­a­tion Tri­pod, sched­uled for Sept. 12, was set up to “test the plan to dis­trib­ute antibi­otics to the entire city pop­u­la­tion dur­ing a bioter­ror­ism attack”. Richard Sheirer, direc­tor of the New York City mayor’s Office of Emer­gency Man­age­ment (OEM), had hired “over 1,000 Police Acad­emy cadets and Fire Depart­ment trainees to play ter­ri­fied civil­ians afflicted with var­i­ous med­ical con­di­tions, aller­gies, and panic attacks.” Var­i­ous indi­vid­u­als were invited to watch, includ­ing Mayor Rudolph Giu­liani, the police and fire com­mis­sion­ers, and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the FBI and the Fed­eral Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency (FEMA). This exer­cise didn’t nec­es­sar­ily detract from mea­sures related to hijacked planes, but they didn’t have far to go to help out with the real emer­gency that hap­pened.

The Vig­i­lant Guardian exer­cise def­i­nitely caused some con­fu­sion that day which was ref­er­enced most famously in chap­ter 1, foot­note 116 of the 9/11 Com­mis­sion Report. After ini­tial FAA noti­fi­ca­tion of the hijacked planes, the NEADS oper­a­tor responded “Is this real world or exer­cise? FAA responds “No, this is not an exer­cise, not a test”. This is one of the more fre­quently heard clips of NORAD’s aware­ness.

More curi­ously, the stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures for deal­ing with hijacked air­lin­ers that had pro­tected this country’s air­space for decades, were not fol­lowed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 because ear­lier in the year, on May 31, Sec­re­tary of State Don­ald Rums­feld made sweep­ing changes which, among other things, required his prior autho­riza­tion before mil­i­tary fighter jets could be scram­bled to inter­cept threats.

In the first few days after 9/11, the mil­i­tary admit­ted that NORAD did not act until after the strike on the Pen­ta­gon at 9:38, although it was at 8:15 that morn­ing that Flight 11 was known to be in trou­ble. Inter­cep­tions usu­ally occur within 15 min­utes, but on 9/11, 80+ min­utes elapsed before any fight­ers were even air­borne.

The stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures on inter­cept­ing planes had worked flaw­lessly 100 or more times a year, why change them then?

Sub­se­quently, when the NORAD record­ings were released and ana­lyzed, NORAD, the 9/11 com­mis­sion and the FAA were attempt­ing was to divert atten­tion from the high plau­si­bil­ity of a mil­i­tary stand down order, but the tapes con­firmed the FAA did notify NORAD.

This Infowars arti­cle high­lights the decep­tion that the 10 mem­ber com­mis­sion said they received from the Pen­ta­gon orig­i­nally reported by the Wash­ing­ton Post.

In August 2006, the Wash­ing­ton Post reported, “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.”

The report revealed how the 10-member com­mis­sion deeply sus­pected decep­tion to the point where they con­sid­ered refer­ring the mat­ter to the Jus­tice Depart­ment for crim­i­nal investigation.

From the same arti­cle, there’s quotes from Thomas Kean and James Farmer respec­tively, show­ing the panel was chas­ing it’s tail and they knew it.

“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.”

Farmer him­self is quoted in the Post arti­cle, stat­ing, “I was shocked at how dif­fer­ent the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent story from what had been told to us and the pub­lic for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.”

If we’re to believe the 9/11 Report that the 19 fabled hijack­ers really pulled this off, they either got real lucky or had help to land on a day when most of the resources assigned to hijack­ings were unavail­able. That has to make you won­der.

Here is another prime exam­ple from 9/11 Blog­ger of how the com­mit­tee wasted America’s time and hid the truth, in this case by plac­ing a lot of blame on the FAA.

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.

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. He revealed for the first time that NORAD was alerted about the hijack­ing of Flight 93, which crashed in Penn­syl­va­nia, at 9:16 a.m., a full 47 min­utes before the claimed crash time at 10:03. But he stuck to the story about the other flights; in the case of AA77 which hit the Pen­ta­gon, the alert sup­pos­edly arrived at 9:24 am.

The FAA 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.

Thus for more than a year the FAA has been in open dis­pute with NORAD on the issue of who informed whom and when about the Sept. 11 hijack­ings; unfor­tu­nately, this has never become the major media story it deserves to be.

The Kean Com­mis­sion itself inter­vened in June 2004. In a staff state­ment deliv­ered at its final set of hear­ings (“Impro­vis­ing a Home­land Defense”), 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 a year ear­lier. 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.

The dis­crep­an­cies are read­ily appar­ent to any­one pay­ing atten­tion. With all these activ­i­ties tak­ing place, it’s easy to see that beyond the con­fu­sion, the sheer dis­tance most of these air­craft were from their nor­mal areas cre­ated large areas of unmanned air­space which is per­fect if you don’t want any inter­fer­ence or wit­nesses to sus­pi­cious plane behav­ior and flight paths. The fact that these dis­crep­an­cies did not raise more con­cern should put this in more con­text.

To gain more clar­ity, watch any one of the videos below

CBS News


Keith Olber­mann


USA Today and other “main­stream” arti­cles pointed out by Alex Jones


The exer­cises explained by Loose Change


The 47 min film “9/11 Inter­cepted“