U.S. Military Response During The September 11 Attacks - NORAD Timeline

NORAD Timeline

On September 18, 2001, NORAD issued a press release containing a timeline of the events of the September 11, including when they were contacted by the FAA. This page has been removed, but a copy can be found at archive.org. However, in 2004, the 9/11 Commission, after listening to tapes of communications, found that this timeline was incorrect. The NORAD timeline had served as the official account of the military response, and appeared in the book Air War over America, and was given in testimony to the 9/11 Commission by NORAD's General Larry Arnold and Colonel Alan Scott in 2003.

The Washington Post reported in its August 3, 2006 edition that:

"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.
Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said."

In their 2007 book, Without Precedent, 9/11 Commission chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote that 9/11 conspiracy theories had grown primarily because of problems in the previous story about the planes:

"If the military had had the amount of time they said they had... and had scrambled their jets, it was hard to figure out how they had failed to shoot down at least one of the planes... In this way, the FAA's and NORAD's inaccurate reporting after 9/11 created the opportunity for people to construct a series of conspiracy theories that persist to this day." "The tapes recordings... from the day were extremely important - they provided a real-time record of what was happening that enabled our staff to relive the day, instead of relying solely on people's memory or their hurried notes of what took place."

The NORAD timeline showed that the FAA had notified NORAD earlier than the taped evidence indicated, and the 9/11 Commission Report faulted the FAA for not contacting NORAD quickly enough. The NORAD timeline showed notification of the hijacking of Flight 175 at 8:43, while the tapes show NORAD was notified after Flight 175 hit the South Tower at 9:03.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, at approximately 8:32 the FAA's Herndon Command Center established a teleconference between Boston, New York, and Cleveland Centers so that Boston Center could help the others understand what was happening. Controllers at the Boston Center knew American Airlines Flight 11, which departed at 7:59 a.m. ET from Boston for its flight to Los Angeles, was hijacked 30 minutes before it crashed. They tracked it to New York on their radar scopes. 'I watched the target of American 11 the whole way down,' said Boston controller Mark Hodgkins. Several Boston controllers tracked American 11 for its entire flight.

The FAA mistakenly thought Flight 11 was still possibly airborne, in part because American Airlines would not confirm for 2 hours that they had lost all contact with Flight 11. The NORAD timeline showed that the fighters scrambled from Langley at 9:24 were in response to a 9:21 FAA report of the hijacking of Flight 77; NORAD never mentioned phantom Flight 11.

United Airlines confirmed loss of Flight 175 within minutes to the FAA. A NORAD General and a Colonel testified that they were notified about the hijacking of Flight 93, and had fighters in position to shoot it down if necessary, and had received the order from Dick Cheney to do so, if necessary.

In October 2003, the 9/11 Commission issued a subpoena to the FAA to turn over documents after the Commission's investigators determined that material had been withheld. A tape was made of oral statements of New York air traffic controllers, intended to be used as an aid in their making written statements, then destroyed. A quality assurance manager at the FAA's New York Center denied the staff access to the tape and later destroyed it. Its existence came to light in 2003 interviews with FAA staff. The Commission subpoenaed the tape and other records from the FAA on Oct. 16, 2003. In November 2003, the Commission issued a subpoena to NORAD; its second subpoena issued to a federal agency for failure to turn over documents.

In July 2004, the 9/11 commission made referrals to the Inspectors General of both the US Department of Transportation and the Defense Department to further investigate whether witnesses had lied.

Commission staff believes there is sufficient evidence that the false statements made to the commission were deliberately false.

The DoD Inspector General's report was released to the New York Times in August 2006 under a FOIA request. According to the report, military officials were exonerated of intentionally misleading the 9/11 Commission in their testimony. A summary of the report called for more steps to improve the Defense Department's ability to investigate "a future significant air event," including more effective event logging methods

The US Transportation Department’s Inspector General’s investigation report was released on August 31, 2006. FAA personnel were also exonerated of knowingly misleading the 9/11 Commission.