More Fog about the Fog of War
I feel like I’m watching a ping pong game being played over this giant monster, about to raise its head and knock over the entire ping pong table.
On Wednesday, the WaPo broke the news (a mere two years old now) that the 9/11 Commission strongly suspected that Pentagon officials lied about their actions on 9/11.
Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concludedthat the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to misleadthe commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog ofevents on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.
Suspicionof wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secretmeeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring thematter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, accordingto several commission sources. Staff members and some commissionersthought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable causeto believe that military and aviation officials violated the law bymaking false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping tohide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.
Perhaps that scoop was tied to the imminent publication of a much more extensive Vanity Fair article, based on the tapes from NORAD. Perhaps both scoops are tied to the imminent publication of a book by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, which will describe the discrepancy.
The tapes, the author of the Vanity Fair article, Michael Bronner, says, make NORAD look pretty good.
EW — from the 911 Commission Report is it very clear that Cheney did issue orders for a shoot-down, the problem is he issued those orders totally outside the chain of command.
(I use the Barnes and Noble edition of the report — costs a dollar more, but it has a good index.)
Page 43 — 10:39 phone call between Cheney and Rumsfeld.
(Cheney)â€There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of Aircraft approaching Washington — a couple were confirmed Hijack. And Persuant to the President’s instructions, I gave authorization for them to be taken out.†â€Hello?â€
(Rummy)â€Yes I understand. Who did you give that direction to?â€
(Cheney) â€It was passed from here through the [operations] center at the White House [shelter].
(Rummy)â€OK, let me ask the question here, Has that direction been transmitted to the Aircraft?â€
(Cheney) â€Yes it hasâ€
(Rummy) â€So we have got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at this time.â€
(Cheney) â€That is Correct. It is my understanding they have already taken a couple of aircraft out.â€
(Rummy) â€We can’t confirm that, we are told one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that did it.â€
Now what actually happened as the Commission makes clear is that Cheney issued orders through the Secret Service to the 113 National Guard at Andrews to put up their assets with shoot down orders — but he did not go through the Chain of Command to do this. NEADS, NORAD and the Pentagon Command Center had no knowledge of Cheney’s orders to the National Guard outside the chain of command. (Secret Service making cell phone calls is not the chain of command.) And of course they did not know that the NG fighters had authorized the pilot to decide if something was threatening the White House and the Capitol from the cockpit and shoot if he thought so.
My own take on what some see as just lies, is that the lies were part of a cover-up of the total failure of the chain of command that morning.
I’ve heard Walter Mondale talk about this in some detail. Two days before Carter and Mondale took over in 1977, they spent several hours learning in detail about the chain of command, and the protocal for giving orders. In otherwords, How to send the Missiles flying to wipe out the Soviet Union in an hour or so. They actually rehearsed. Damn serious business and everyone had to know their role.
What happened on 911 is that they all failed their appointed roles in the chain of command. First, the Secret Service should have made Bushie scoot to his limo and back to his plane and the communications shack. Instead, Bush did a mini press conference with the kids at the school before leaving for the plane. Second, Rumsfeld did nothing in particular in response to the first two WTC hits — when the Pentagon was hit, he went into the parking lot to survey the damage and give first aid. His proper and appointed place was in the seat next to Meyers in the National Command Center, and he didn’t actually get there till about 10:30 when he claimed he was just getting â€situational awarenessâ€.
The best communications at the White House were in the Situation Room, which, sadly, is not hardened. So they stuck Cheney in the basement bunker, and left Richard Clarke in charge of the Situation Room. Condi, Scooter and Bolten went with Cheney. Clarke had Audio and Video com with all the relevant parts of Government — but Lynn Cheney kept hanging up the open line Clarke was trying to retain with the Bunker.
In fact, it was the Marx Brothers as the head of the Chain of Command.
My guess (and it is just a guess) is that after the end of the cold war they stopped putting new Presidents and their immediate staff through the kind of paces Mondale describes when he and Carter took over in 1977. But you know, that does not excuse, because both Rumsfeld and Cheney were on Gerald Ford’s staff, and they would have known the drill. I bet they figured little bushie would not respond well to being â€told†what the roles were and how a commander in chief is supposed to execute, so they never drilled him.
Yea — I suspect the military underlings were asked to tell some lies and spin some stuff so as not to allow anyone to cut into the mustard and comprehend that the chain of command went haywire that morning. But that’s what happened, and that is what we can understand from the NORAD tapes plus a close reading of about ten pages of the 911 report plus associated footnotes.
What a weird story. Why’d you slip Minetta in the timeline, how does he fit in? (I say slipped because it felt like you’re being crafty, putting the detail in for a secret reason you’re smiling about. Well, I like to smile too.)
Wow. Great summary, Sara. Glad I stopped by today.
SaltIn
Because we’re still waiting on the DOT IG report (regarding the FAA lies). I don’t know that there is a connection. But there really was no good reason for Mineta’s retirement, other than he was just tired. Let’s just see whether DOT IG gets something out before Kean’s book on the 15th.
Sara
I totally agree with your description (though it was a Lt. Colonel who relayed the order from Cheney), but you’re talking about a slightly different issue than I am.
The reason the 9/11 Commission believes that the NORAD folks lied is so that they could claim to have acted quickly enough to take down one of the four planes. They basically claimed they were responding 10 minutes before they were. If both their story and Dick’s story were true, they, collectively, would have effectively launched an attack before the passengers brought 93 down. Note that Cheney and Bush testified after this discrepancy would have been cleared up, in April 2004, after Arnold’s, Marr’s, and Nasypany’s interviews (and presumably after 9/11 got the tapes after subpoenaing them).
Note that, the first tale NORAD told, they said the fighter pilots did have shoot-down orders, which is another discrepancy from the later testimony.
The later mobilizaiton of Cheney’s â€weighty†decision to give shoot-down orders only makes sense if it could have done some good.
Also note, the big discrepancy between Bush and Cheney is resolved at 10:20, when Bolten makes Dick call Bush to reconfirm shoot-down authority.
Yet another example that this is the Cheney administration. They just did a little spin here to cover the fact that there has never been any internal dissent on that point.
David Swanson made a really interesting comment to me after the Charlottesville, VA impeachment teach-in. It was essentially this: all the key stories surrounding 9/11, the NSA spying, torture in Guantanamo, everything, have â€broken†in the papers of record only at the last second before books revealing the same information hit the shelves. And it’s not necessarily a situation wherein reporters get advance copies and then reveal what they read. Rather, just as often, it’s the reporters themselves who have written the books, after having their stories buried for months or even years by their editors. The only way to get a blockbuster published in the papers these days is for the reporters to threaten to rob their papers of the prestige of breaking it elsewhere.
Nice work, EW and Sara. It’s too bad that the Keystone cops weren’t revealed to be that way before the first Tuesday of November, 2004. But since, as observed, Rummy and Shotgun Dick did know the drill, at least at one point in their lives, all this gives a slight boost to the LIHOP theory. I am not convinced of that theory, but the opportunism of Bush & Co. in jumping on the event to boost schemes of overseas action aleady formulated does make one wonder.
Kagro X, that is interesting. Perhaps in these days of rapid computer-to-publication vanity press, reporters with crucial buried stories should just threaten to go with a you-publish-it operations (who can turn out best-sellers with the right material) in hopes of putting their editors behind the eight-ball: publish my story or get scooped by my book. Not as much clout as having Random House put its imprimatur on your words, but perhaps enough to do the job.
And kudos to you ew and sara for your explanations.
All the more reason to check in regularly with ‘conspiracy theorist’ bloggers and journalists.
Their claims are typically not capable of conclusive proof because the perps are capable of acting covertly. But they proceed from the useful assumption that the SCLM version of events is frequently false. They provide possible alternative hypotheses, valuable in themselves, and in support of which they report facts and reveal relationships which are often informative and don’t otherwise reach the light of day
You know, I think it important to distinguish between classic conspiracy (a small secret plan to accomplish something illegal, with the members of the conspiracy assigning themselves specific roles) and the more general phenonema we refer to as â€seperate Agenda.†In any operation players can have various versions of the agenda without in any way being engaged in a conspiracy. It falls to the historian or analyst to surface these agendas as one interprets the intent and meaning behind specific behavior of key players.
For instance, I always interpret Karen Hughes acts as â€making GWB look good and competent†no matter what the act. Since that is her first and only charge in most cases — she is hardly a policy wonk — you can assume whatever she does is about that, and her influence on others is similarly pitched. Bush was not really much of a player on 911 — but she used available material to try to make him central. You can follow that agenda.
You can read Richard Clarke’s description of events on the morning of 911 knowing he probably has far more detail that he is permitted to publish at this juncture, and ask the question — what is his agenda? I think the guy is compulsive about being technically competent which is why he was in the WH in the first place, and it was what he could sell on the outside if and when he left. Thus when he expresses irritation or more with one of the principals, I would suggest the first cause is because he views them as technically incompetent, or getting in his way being competent. As I read his first chapter I get that message about Lynn Cheney, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Condi, Meyers, Ashcroft, Freeh, and others. On the competence side he places Powell, Armitage, Bolten and most of the members of his own staff. You can then run events through this screen — by Clarke’s criteria, a competent technical actor, etc. It certainly isn’t foolproof, but it does get at something less than conspiracy, more approaching the notion of agenda.
I agree that conspiracy theory is interesting reading, but in too many cases authors fasten themselves on one or several points and stay there, unwilling to contextualize or potentially re-interpret meaning of these points in the larger picture. And all too often they present a story that is so vast, involves so many people with different interests it is impossible they could keep the conspiracy secret even if they tried. A successful conspiracy is one that remains invisable to all but the few initiates. It is my, what I call, Rube Goldberg criteria. The secret gets out if you have too many levers and springs.
On 911 we simply have too much evidence that some in the Governing Circle decided they wanted to use the al-Qaeda attacks as a cause for making war on Iraq. We have Wes Clark’s observations that as of about noon that day, he was getting multiple messages from both in and out of the military sources that Iraq was to blame. He was doing commentary on CNN that day, and they wanted to seed that message. Clark didn’t use it because they offered no evidence. We have Richard Clarke’s observations about how within a few hours many fingers, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Cheney — and later in the day, Bush — were pointing at Iraq. We have the Rummy quote â€Sweep it all up about SH†— a few hours after the attacks. We have Meyers complaint that there was nothing to bomb in Afghanistan. We have Powell’s comment to Clarke after the first Iraq conversations had been put down — â€It is not over†meaning the Iraq thing would be back again and again. I call this an agenda and not a conspiracy.