PANEL SAYS CHAOS IN ADMINISTRATION WAS WIDE ON 9/11

[BurtWorm]

A little tumble down memory lane...

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30612FB3C5D0C7B8DDDAF0894DC404482


June 18, 2004
THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE OVERVIEW;
By PHILIP SHENON AND CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
Offering an extraordinary window into the government's chaotic response on Sept. 11, 2001, the commission investigating the terrorist attacks detailed on Thursday a series of communications breakdowns at the White House and the Pentagon that were so severe that military commanders did not tell fighter pilots that they had been given the authority by Vice President Dick Cheney to shoot down hijacked planes.

The commission showed that White House communication systems were so close to collapse in the hours after the attack that President Bush, who was visiting a Florida elementary school that morning, could not obtain an open line to Mr. Cheney at the White House and had to resort to a cellphone to reach him.

In the commission's final public hearing after an 18-month investigation, members said that Mr. Bush had complained to them in his recent interview that the communications problems continued after he boarded Air Force One.

A staff report released at the hearing provided new details about the confusion that enveloped the White House, the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration. It found that Mr. Cheney did not issue a shoot-down order -- on Mr. Bush's behalf -- until after 10 a.m., more than an hour after Mr. Bush had been told by his chief of staff that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and that ''America is under attack.''

After the hearing, White House spokesmen rejected any suggestion that the response on Sept. 11 had been any more confused than would have been expected after a major terrorist attack, and they continued to question the findings of a staff report issued Wednesday by the commission that said there did not appear to have been a ''collaborative relationship'' between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

In justifying the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney cited what they called longstanding ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And on Thursday, they both repeated the assertion. Mr. Bush said there had been ''numerous contacts'' between Al Qaeda and Mr. Hussein, while Mr. Cheney said ''there was clearly a relationship'' between the two.

[BurtWorm]

1. ''That's very, very disturbing,'' said Mr. Kean (enabler of P29/11)

After the hearing, the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, said there was ''great chaos'' within the government on the morning of Sept. 11. ''This is a story of a lot of problems, and shame on us if we don't learn from them,'' Mr. Kean said.

He suggested that the military's faults went far beyond a failure of planning and strategy and that the events of Sept. 11 posed a more fundamental question about its willingness to follow a chain of command that begins with the president.

''That's very, very disturbing,'' said Mr. Kean, whose commission is expected to recommend a sweeping overhaul of the structure of the nation's intelligence community and of the government's emergency-response systems. ''When the president of the United States gives a shoot-down order, and the pilots who are supposed to carry it out do not get that order, then that's about as serious as it gets as far as the defense of this country goes.''

The staff report found that the extraordinary order allowing fighter pilots to shoot down passenger planes was issued by Mr. Cheney at the White House shortly after 10:10 a.m., minutes after a telephone conversation with Mr. Bush from Florida in which the president is said to have approved the decision.

According to notes of the call cited by the commission, Mr. Bush told the vice president: ''Sounds like we have a minor war going on here. I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war.''

But the commission's investigators found that while the shoot-down order had been relayed to the Pentagon, it had not been shared by Norad commanders with fighter pilots then in the skies over New York and Washington.

[BurtWorm]

2. "The president, it said, 'felt he should project strength and calm'"

...

Their report found that one commander did not pass along the order ''because he was unaware of its ramifications,'' while two other officers said ''they were unsure how pilots would, or should, proceed with this guidance.''

''In short,'' the report said, ''while leaders in Washington believed the fighters circling above them had been instructed to 'take out' hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed'' to the pilots were to try to locate the hijacked planes.

The confusion of that morning was so great, the report found, that Mr. Cheney told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a teleconference at 10:39 that he had received information that two of the hijacked planes had already been brought down on his order. ''It's my understanding that they've already taken a couple of aircraft out,'' he said.

The report also provides an explanation of one of the lingering mysteries of Mr. Bush's actions on the day of the attacks: why he remained in a meeting with pupils at the Florida elementary school for between five and seven minutes after he was interrupted in the classroom by his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., and told that the major terrorist attack was under way.

According to the report, Mr. Bush told commission members in his interview with the panel this spring that his ''instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis.'' The president, it said, ''felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening.''

[file83]

3. In-other-words, the Bush Admin was a 3-ring Circus on 9/11 - wonderful...

IMPEACH THE MOTHERFUCKER ALREADY!!!

[w4rma]

4. Actually Bush didnt give the order until about 15 minutes after the last

plane had gone down. Cheney doesn't have the authorization for that kind of order.

…
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.
…
http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/060801fege01

[BurtWorm]

5. kick