the September 11 attacks

New York Press The Bunker Scrambled Messages by George Szamuely THERE remains one question to ask about Sept. 11. What happened?

We know the story. Terrorists hijacked four passenger jets. At 8:45 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston smashes into the World Trade Center’s north tower. At 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston smashes into the south tower. At 9:40 a.m., AA Flight 77 from Dulles hits the Pentagon. At 10:10 a.m., United Flight 93 from Newark crashes in Shanksville, PA. Yet the most amazing feature of the U.S. government’s response to these events was the almost complete absence of it.

Jared Israel on his website www.tenc.net has blazed a trail with fascinating and meticulous research. Initial reports suggested that no aircraft were scrambled to intercept or shoot down the hijacked jets. Two days later Air Force Gen. Richard B.

Myers , current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee: “When it became clear what the threat was, we did scramble fighter aircraft, AWACs, radar aircraft and tanker aircraft to begin to establish orbits in case other aircraft showed up in the FAA system that were hijackedThat order, to the best of my knowledge, was after the Pentagon was struck.” Marine Corps Maj.

Mike Snyder , a spokesman for NORAD, echoed Myers in a Sept. 15 Boston Globe story, which stated: “[T]he command did not immediately scramble any fighters even though it was alerted to a hijacking 10 minutes before the first plane”¦slammed into the first World Trade Center towerThe spokesman said the fighters remained on the ground until after the Pentagon was hit…”

U.S. inaction was all the more astonishing because the same story had Snyder admitting that “fighters routinely intercept aircraft.” So why were no fighters dispatched to intercept planes on an extraordinary day like Sept. 11?

Within days the story changed and it turned out that two F-15 fighters had in fact been scrambled from Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod, MA. Whether this took place before or after the first tower was struck is not clear. In any case it was too late to make a difference. When the second tower was hit the fighters were still 70 miles from Manhattan.

We also learned that two F-16 fighters had been scrambled from Langley Air Force Base to try to intercept Flight 77, but they also arrived too late. In fact, they only took off from Langley two minutes before the Boeing 757 smashed into the Pentagon. THERE are a number of problems with this story. In the first place, 45 minutes had elapsed from the time the air traffic controllers lost contact with Flight 77 and its crash into the Pentagon.

On Sept. 15 The New York Times reported: “Flight 77″¦would have been visible on the F.A.A.’s radar system as it reversed course in the Midwest”¦to fly