Michael Hey

On September 11, 2001, at 8:14 AM, American Airlines flight number 11 missed a clearance; the pilot failed to climb despite being ordered to do so. Controller Pete Zalewski quickly realized that the plane had gone NORDO – radio contact had been lost – making further communication with the pilot impossible. Failing to re-establish contact, Zalewski alerted his superior John Schipanni. At 8:21 the transponder signal was also lost; the plane strayed way off course and Schipanni was on the phone with the command structure at NEADS, the North Eastern Defense Sector of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command).
NEADS did what it is mandated to do, which is to scramble aircraft to track down the errant airliner. By 8:27, two F15’s from Otis Air Force base, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, were approaching the eastern tip of Long Island at “full blower” (1,800 mph). Meanwhile, AA 11 found itself just south of Albany, still 19 minutes away from One World Trade Center.
Unfortunately, this is not a description of what actually happened, but rather an illustration of how easy it ought to have been for the US military to intercept AA 11 long before it reached Manhattan. According to Robin Hordon, a former air traffic controller out of Boston Center, the intercept might have occurred around 8:34 AM, perhaps over the Hudson River, near Poughkeepsie, NY. “The interceptors would have seen trouble in the cockpit... They would have taken steps to take control of AA 11 and lead it to a nearby airport... They would have noticed that AA 11 was not responding... They would have armed their weapons and waited for instructions...” Hordon notes.
Hordon is clear that the pilots would only have waited so long. “Seeing what was about to happen… they would have shot AA 11 out of the sky a few miles north of WTC 1... and prayed for the people on the ground,” he says.
Actually, Otis fighters were not ordered to go after AA 11 until 8:46 AM, at which point the doomed aircraft was already crashing into the North Tower. Another six minutes were lost before Duff (Lt. Colonel Timothy Duffy) and Nasty (Major Daniel Nash) finally took to the air at 8:52 AM, a full 38 minutes after AA 11 first showed signs of trouble, and 10 minutes past the point when controllers became aware of a second in-flight emergency. Having failed to catch AA 11, how did Nasty and Duff also manage to miss United Airlines 175, given the additional 17 minutes it took for this flight to reach New York?
UA 175 veered off course at 8:42 AM and changed its transponder signal at 8:47 AM. How long, realistically, would controllers, who were aware that a plane had just crashed into the North Tower, delay before alerting the military of this second hijacking? If the military is to be believed, they waited until 9:03, coinciding with the horrifying moment that millions of us witnessed live: Flight 175 plunging into the South Tower, erupting into a massive fireball.

The military has denied allegations of gross dereliction of duty. No commanders at NORAD have been demoted, or even reprimanded, for their failure to protect the US on September 11, 2001. In charge of the military that day was Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard B. Myers. Myers was sitting in for Army General Henry Shelton, who was on a transatlantic flight. Two days after the attack, Myers was promoted to become the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
According to investigative journalist Will Thomas, speaking at the 2007 9/11 Truth Conference in Vancouver, “Some would call [Myers’ actions that day] treason.” By his own account, which he later modified, Myers ignored a report that a plane had gone into the World Trade Center, chose to attend a meeting with senator Max Cleland and received no further briefings until 37 minutes later, when the Pentagon had already been hit. On September 11, 2001, the nation’s highest ranking military officer made no discernible contribution to safeguarding his country, either during or immediately after the event. Two days later, he failed to recall even the most basic details of the botched operation. For this, G.W. Bush chose to award Myers with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
A better explanation than incompetence is that the military was not trying very hard to prevent the attacks from succeeding. This is what is meant by the term “stand-down” – the allegation that while lower ranking members of the military did all they could have done to mitigate disaster, there were key, top-level individuals who deliberately sabotaged the operation.
The two Otis fighters, for example, launching as late as they did, should still have arrived in New York City before UA 175. According to the 9/11 Commission report, what happened instead is that these planes did not head towards New York at all, but were somehow directed to fly out over the Atlantic Ocean, eventually turning up over NYC at 9:25 AM. In other words, it took them a full hour and 11 minutes from the moment of the first in-flight emergency to arrive at the scene. This falls short of the usual NORAD standard, which is to be “… in a position to kill within five minutes.”
If it can be proven that a stand-down did indeed occur, it is also clear that powerful forces within the American political establishment are complicit in the attacks themselves; 9/11 was an inside job. To understand why this is actually the most reasonable scenario, one must do what very few people have yet to do: take a close look at the latest official explanation. By now, there are at least three conflicting official military accounts of these events. For the purpose of this article, all quoted times reflect the latest official timeline, which is least damning to the military.
Consider Major General Larry Arnold’s testimony at a 9/11 Commission hearing on May 23, 2003. According to Arnold, commanding general of NORAD’s continental region, two fighters from Langley Airforce base in Virginia were scrambled in response to the hijacking of United Airlines 93. But Arnold now asserts that the military did not learn of this hijacking until after the plane had already crashed! With respect to the same flight, the military had claimed that it was prepared to shoot down the plane, in accordance with a shoot down order given by Vice President Dick Cheney. But the revised account asserts that Cheney himself did not become aware of the hijacking until 10:02 AM, one minute before the plane crashed, and did not issue the shoot down order until after the crash.
These and other examples of false testimony given before the 9/11 Commission can be found in David Ray Griffin’s latest meticulously referenced book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking. Dr. Griffin, author of five books on 9/11, notes that these revised timelines also imply that “virtually the entire account given by NORAD on September 18, 2001, which served as the official story from that date until the issuance of The 9/11 Commission Report in July 2004, was false.”
Before reaching a conclusion as to whether or not the military’s current account, which places the blame entirely on the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), is even remotely plausible, it is important to note that, by recanting their earlier testimony, Larry Arnold and Colonel Alan Scott (working closely with Arnold) appear to be guilty of perjury. It raises the question as to why Arnold and Scott would have chosen to concoct a story that opens the military to charges of treason when the simple truth would have absolved them of such charges.
Their revised account alleges that the FAA failed repeatedly, with respect to four separate in-flight emergencies in one morning, to alert NEADS that something was wrong. It is noteworthy that, as was the case with the military, no one at the FAA has been fired or found guilty of any kind of negligence in this matter. On the contrary, there has been much praise for the FAA’s performance that day, for the unprecedented feat of landing 4,500 aircraft in a span of roughly two and a half hours.
The military could and should have intercepted the first two hijacked airliners. But the problem of the mounting delays between when the problems surfaced, and such time that something was done in response, is compounded in the cases of the later hijackings by virtue of the fact that both the FAA and the military were by now aware that “America was under attack.”
Consider American Airlines 77, the flight which allegedly crashed into the Pentagon. It veered off course, lost its transponder signal and radar target and was lost to positive radar identification at 8:54 AM. The military is asking us to believe that they were not notified of this occurrence until 40 minutes later!
How did this flight, piloted by Hani Hanjour who was refused rental of a Cessna because he couldn’t control it, penetrate what is arguably the world’s most closely guarded airspace? Why were no interceptors deployed from Andrews Air Force base, which sits less than 30 kilometres from the Pentagon?
One person who has argued convincingly that there had to have been an “institutional stand-down” is Robin Hordon. He believes that this stand-down was instituted through a series of subtle changes in how DoD (Department of Defense) protocols were to be interpreted and subsequently applied. These changes went into effect in June of 2001, shortly after the “election” of G. W. Bush, when military scrambles mysteriously ceased. Over the previous 10-year span, there had been a total of 1,500 scrambles, an average of 12 a month. Between September 2000 and June 2001, there were 67 documented scrambles, but in those three months leading up to September 11, 2001, there were no documented scrambles at all.
What changed? According to Hordon’s analysis, a key point is the sudden shift in emphasis, away from the commonly used “in-flight emergency protocol,” towards the rarely invoked “hijacking protocol.” At the Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference, Hordon explained the effect of this “sophisticated slight of written hand” in great detail.
Those demanding hard evidence, in the form of a document or a memo, are missing the point. Hordon himself predicts that we “… will never find a military operative or a set of words that will expose a clear stand-down order for 9/11.” But regardless of how the architects of this stand-down managed to cover their tracks, the military’s failure to show up on 9/11 is in itself irrefutable proof of a stand-down. As Hordon and others have openly wondered, once it was clear that “America was under attack,” would it not have made sense for a national defense emergency to be declared, with all military assets taking to the air to protect America’s cities? No such precautions were deemed necessary and even Air Force One, when it finally left Sarasota, Florida, at 9:55 AM with the president on board, received no military escort.
The American people pay dearly to live in the most heavily guarded country in the world. Half the US budget is now spent on defense. US military spending is nearly equal to that of all other nations combined. Yet the day this awesome defensive capability was tested, the military failed spectacularly to protect its own people. The attack came not in the form of a high speed cruise missile, but rather four sluggish airliners, three of which hit their targets with incredible accuracy. Should citizens not have the right to wonder what went wrong?
The real mystery is why we have chosen to let the US military and its civilian task masters get away with this inexcusable failure. Anyone who has yet to examine the official account should read Debunking 9/11 Debunking or William Thomas’ latest book Days of Deception: Ground Zero and Beyond, which examines the stand-down in great detail.

If we truly deserve democracy, we must accept our responsibility to demand answers, where answers are called for, and to cry foul when the explanation given fails to make sense. Thomas crystallized the most pertinent question this way: “Why were interceptors launched late, from remote bases, flying in the wrong direction at speeds slower than the airliners they were chasing?” A follow up question might be, “Why were planes that were already in the air, well within striking distance, ordered back to their bases at supersonic speed?”
The military’s refusal to answer these basic questions implies guilt.
Corporate, mainstream media continues to insist, absurdly, that there must be some kind of benign explanation for all this – an explanation it has failed to provide. It is important to note that we’re not asking the media to speculate who was responsible for 9/11. It would be sufficient if reporters started by merely revealing the facts. For example, to date, most people are unaware of the existence of “Phantom Flight 11.” While the military failed to scramble jets in response to actual hijackings, it did manage to send its Langley fighters after a ghost plane.
Many of us are unaware that there were no less than 12 military exercises taking place that day, including one that postulated aircraft smashing into buildings. The historian webster Griffin Tarpley, who explained at the conference how these exercises made the stand-down possible, believes that there were as many as 25 military drills that directly contributed to the 9/11 operation. Of all these exercises, only one – Vigilant Guardian – is mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report.
A May 2001 special directive of the president had placed Cheney in charge of all US defense drills. “If you’re looking to charge someone with treason, you should start [with Cheney],” Thomas suggests, as Cheney was personally responsible for ensuring maximum confusion and chaos on September 11, 2001.
There is one other special directive, of which there have been quite a few lately, that too many of us are not aware of. On May 4 of this year, Bush signed NSPD 51, his own version of Hitler’s article 48. The directive will grant Bush and Cheney dictatorial powers on the very next terror pretext. The relevance of this ominous directive, parts of which are so secret that no one is allowed to see them “for security reasons,” cannot be overstated. It is something to consider, for those who mistakenly believe that 9/11 is past, or that it does not concern them.
On September 11, 2001, the US military let America down. What is less clear to some is that by failing to hold the military accountable for its failure, we have let ourselves down as well. Thankfully, it is never too late for justice or for truth to find the light of day. William Thomas concluded his speech with an urgent call to action, “We’ve had the stand-down. Now it’s time to stand up.”

Suggested websites:
Paul Thompson’s exhaustive Terror Timeline: http://cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=911_project
Vancouver 9/11 Truth Society: www.v911truth.org
William Thomas: www.willthomas.net

Sept. 16 - 9/11 Hero William Rodriguez Speaks Out: The last man out of the WTC tells his personal story, 7:30 PM, Maritime Labour Centre, 1880 Triumph St., Vancouver. Tickets: $10/$8 at www.v911truth.org
Also visit www.9-11hero.com

Michael Hey is a freelance writer and filmmaker living in Vancouver.