Sept. 11 panel portrays a chaotic US response

WASHINGTON -- F-16 fighter pilots sent to circle the nation's capital on the morning of the 2001 terrorist attacks never learned that Vice President Dick Cheney had authorized them to shoot down hijacked planes -- an order given after all four planes had crashed -- the Sept. 11 commission disclosed yesterday in a report that portrayed a chaotic response by federal officials who were caught off guard.

The commission said President Bush, in Florida at the time, was frustrated by difficulties reaching the White House emergency command bunker. He resorted to an unsecured cellphone to talk with officials who could tell him what was happening as his motorcade raced -- at first, in the wrong direction -- from an elementary school back to Air Force One, where communication problems continued.

At the Federal Aviation Administration, high-ranking officials dithered instead of immediately informing the military about the hijackings and failed to send out a nationwide cockpit security alert requested by the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is charged with putting out a book-length report on what went wrong that day and recommendations to fix remaining problems by next month. In its last preliminary report yesterday, the panel's investigators reconstructed the actions by federal officials that morning with a common theme:

Both military and civilian aviation agencies, said staff director Philip Zelikow, ''were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet."

The FAA gave the military just nine minutes' notice that American Airlines Flight 11 had been hijacked before it struck the World Trade Center. That was the most notice the military received for any of the four flights, the report said.

Indeed, the military would never have been told about hijacking had not staff at the FAA's Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center, situated in Nashua, called the military directly as soon as the second plane hit the World Trade Center, rather than waiting for FAA headquarters to make that call, as the rules required.

Testifying after the commission staff report, Air Force General Ralph Eberhart, who commands the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told the commission that the military could have shot down all four of the airliners if it had been informed of the hijackings as soon as the FAA learned of them. He added that this problem has been fixed.

But later testimony by Benedict Sliney, the FAA's operations manager for New York radar approach control, cast doubt upon whether the nation's air defenses have been fixed. Sliney said that a few weeks ago, while he was on duty, an unidentified plane showed upon radar headed for New York.

He spent the next several minutes talking to the military and his superiors at the FAA about whether he had the authority to ask for fighter jets to be scrambled. By the time they all decided he did, the plane, which turned out to be a harmless but unscheduled private flight, had passed Manhattan.

After the hearing, Commission chairman Thomas H. Kean called that situation ''totally unacceptable."

''You had a decision-maker two or three weeks ago who didn't know he had the power to make a decision and was asking all over the place on the phone 'who has the power to make this decision?' " Kean said.

The commission also disclosed that, contrary to prior public accounts of that morning by government officials, the fighter jets above Washington were not scrambled to defend the city against American Airlines Flight 77, which would hit the Pentagon, or United Air Lines Flight 93, which would soon crash in a Pennsylvania field after passengers rebelled.

Instead, the fighters had been ordered to fly to Baltimore to intercept Flight 11, which had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, because of a false report that this flight was headed to Washington.

The staff report noted that this account differs from public testimony by military officials last year.

''This response to a phantom aircraft, American 11, is not recounted in a single public timeline or statement issued by FAA or DOD," it said.

''Instead, since 9/11, the scramble of the Langley fighters has been described as a response to the reported hijacking of American 77 or United 93, or some combination of the two. This inaccurate account created the appearance that the Langley scramble was a logical response to an actual hijacked aircraft."

Asked by Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste why he had not disclosed that picture during earlier testimony, retired Air Force Major General Larry Arnold said that he had not remembered the exact sequence correctly until the commission staff unearthed a tape that ''helped us reconstruct what was going on."

The report went on to defend the actions of the military against questions about why it did not manage to intercept the final hijacked aircraft, saying that an accurate portrayal of the events demonstrated that the military did not delay and that the false version had ''overstated the FAA's ability to provide the military timely and useful information that morning."

At 9:49 a.m., for example, 13 minutes after the FAA's Cleveland Center had suggested scrambling military fighters to intercept the hijacked Flight 93, a taped exchange between FAA officials show that the agency's command center was still waiting for headquarters to decide whether to do so:

FAA command center: ''Uh, do we want to think about, uh, scrambling the aircraft?"

FAA headquarters: ''Uh, God, I don't know."

Command center: ''Uh, that's a decision somebody's gonna have to make probably in the next 10 minutes."

Headquarters: ''Uh, you know, everybody just left the room."

The FAA finally told the military about Flight 93 at 10:07 a.m., four minutes after it crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside.

The staff report also described the uncertainty around Cheney's authorization for fighter jets to shoot down any further hijacked planes, an order that he gave between 10:10 and 10:15 a.m. in the bunker under the White House in response to a report that Flight 93 was getting close. Officials did not know that it had crashed.

After a moment of silence, the report states, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton suggested that Cheney call Bush to confirm the order, because he had ''not heard any prior conversation on the subject with the president."

Cheney told the commission that he had called Bush about 10 minutes before and gotten the authorization, shortly after he entered the bunker. But the investigators found ''no documentary evidence for this call, although the relevant sources are incomplete."

The report also noted that the vice president's wife, Lynne Cheney, and his chief of staff, Lewis ''Scooter" Libby, who were sitting nearby and taking notes, had not noted a call between Bush and Cheney immediately after Cheney entered the room.

Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, did recall hearing Cheney inform the president that the fighters were up and then say: ''Sir, they're going to want to know what to do." Then she recalled him saying, ''Yes sir." The commission said it believed this call would have taken place ''sometime before 10:10 or 10:15."

The report says Cheney is logged as calling Bush aboard Air Force One at 10:18 a.m. for a two-minute call to obtain a confirmation of the engage order.

Cheney's order was sent to the commanders of the fighter jets at 10:31. However, they did not relay it to the pilots, because they were ''unsure how the pilots would, or should, proceed with this guidance." Thus, the pilots still thought they were only to identify the type of aircraft coming in and tail it.

The report suggests a reason for the hesitation to implement the order to shoot down a passenger aircraft full of Americans: ''In most cases, the chain of command in authorizing the use of force runs from the president to the secretary of defense and from the secretary to the combatant commander."

This level of confusion, the commission suggests, underscores the heroism of the passengers of Flight 93. Without their uprising, the investigators estimated, that jet would have arrived over Washington between 10:13 and 10:23, before the shoot-down authorization was sent.

Military officials ''have maintained that they would have intercepted and shot down United 93," the report said. ''We are not so sure. We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93. Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved the US Capitol or the White House from destruction."