Latest revision as of 10:23, 3 February 2010
Central to the claim of a 9/11 [Stand Down] is the idea that the hijacked planes should have been intercepted, because similar procedures are carried out frequently and intercept times are very short. How short, exactly? Authors like David Ray Griffin and Nafeez Ahmed have presented arguments to say they should be in the range of 10 or 20 minutes, and we'll consider their evidence here.
Payne Stewart
In "The War On Freedom" Nafeez Ahmed used the Payne Stewart case as an example of a "routine air response":
However, Ahmed has misread the NTSB report. The relevant part is here:
"At 0933:38 EDT (6 minutes and 20 seconds after N47BA acknowledged the previous clearance), the controller instructed N47BA to change radio frequencies and contact another Jacksonville ARTCC controller. The controller received no response from N47BA. The controller called the flight five more times over the next 4 1/2 minutes but received no response.
About 0952 CDT,7 a USAF F-16 test pilot from the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base (AFB), Florida, was vectored to within 8 nm of N47BA. About 0954 CDT, at a range of 2,000 feet from the accident airplane and an altitude of about 46,400 feet, the test pilot made two radio calls to N47BA but did not receive a response".
www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/2000/AAB0001.htm
Read it carefully and you'll notice a change of time zone, from Eastern to Central time. CDT is one hour on from EDT, so contact was regarded as lost at around 09:38, and the fighter didn't get to within 2000 feet of Stewart’s jet until 10:54. That's roughly 76 minutes from the controllers realising there’s a problem, to intercept taking place: this does not support the case for rapid intercepts. Read more on this page.
ATCC Controllers Read Binder
Nafeez Ahmed's War on Freedom contained another paragraph where a very quick intercept time estimate was provided: "10 or so minutes".
Indeed, “The U.S. military has their own radar network …(NORAD). They are tied into the FAA computer in order to get information on incoming flights.” If a target is discovered “without flight plan information,” or in violation of the same, “they will call on the ‘shout’ line to the appropriate [Air Traffic Control] Center sector for an ID.” If the Center sector “has no datablock or other information on it, the military will usually scramble an intercept flight. Essentially always they turn out to be private pilots… not talking to anybody, who stray too far outside the boundary, then get picked up on their way back in. But, procedures are procedures, and they will likely find two F-18s on their tail within 10 or so minutes.”303 The NMCC can thus tap into radar stations to monitor emergencies and hijackings, as occurred during Payne Stewart’s flight when “officers on the Joint Chiefs were monitoring the Learjet on radar screens inside the Pentagon’s National
Military Command Center.”
The War On Freedom, Nafeez Ahmed
The same passage was quoted favourably in Mike Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon" (see here), a very similar version appear in Ahmed's later "War on Truth", and David Ray Griffin has made several references to this document:
...a 1998 document warning pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behaviour "will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes."
Page 140-141, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, David Ray Griffin
With so much backing from these heavyweight researchers, you might assume this reference would be very reliable indeed.
But you'd be wrong.
Let's begin with a look at the full paragraph from the document in question. We've emphasised some of the parts that Ahmed didn't think worth passing on to his readers:
This paragraph is clearly referring to intercepts of planes coming from overseas, not internal US flights as on 9/11, yet Ahmed has chosen to remove any sign of that from his retelling. That's very deceptive, but there's another problem that's even worse.
While Griffin describes this source as an "Air Traffic Control" document, and Ahmed quotes from its pages as though they have authority, it's not actually a Government release at all. The paragraph comes, in fact, from a guide produced by Xavius Software for users of their simulation program ATCC (Air Traffic Control Center). Although this is described as a "fully realistic simulation of actual traffic flows, radar sectors, ATC procedures, and rader equipment currently used throughout the U.S. Designed by a real controller, ATCC is ideal for pilots [and] controller trainees”, so the authors feel able to say "it's not just an addictive game", a game is what it is, costing (according to that page) a mere $12, and not an official document in any sense. As you can tell from the qualification at the bottom of the page:
This document clearly carries less authority than Griffin and Ahmed want to admit, then, perhaps why they kept its true origins buried in the footnotes of their books. And this is yet another examaple of why you really can't take what you read for granted, even here. Reading footnotes carefully, ensuring you have the references you need, then checking them in-depth are all essential steps in separating the facts from the spin.
Of course the fact that the quote comes from a game manual doesn't necessarily make it incorrect. However, it is referring to a different situation than was faced on 9/11, and is considering only the military response time, not the FAA. As such it cannot be considered as a definitive source on what a 9/11-type intercept time should actually have been.
NORAD spokespersons
In The New Pearl Harbor David Ray Griffin quoted NORAD "spokespersons" as saying intercepts took only minutes:
...at 8:14, the loss of radio contact [with Flight 11] alone would have led the flight controller to begin emergency procedures. The loss of the transponder signal would have made the situation doubly suspect. The controller, after finding that it was impossible to re-establish radio contact, would have immediately contacted the National Military Command Center (NMCC) in the Pentagon and its North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which would have immediately had jets sent up — "scrambled" — from the nearest military airport. According to spokespersons for NORAD, from the time the FAA senses that something is wrong, "it takes about one minute" for it to contact NORAD, and then NORAD can scramble fighters "within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States." [footnote 4] "According to the US Air Forces own website," reports Nafeez Ahmed, an F-15 routinely "goes from 'scramble order' to 29,000 feet in only 2.5 minutes" and then can fly at 1,850 nmph (nautical miles per hour). >5 If normal procedures had been followed, accordingly, Flight 11 would have been intercepted by 8:24, and certainly no later than 8:30, 16 minutes before it, in the actual course of events, crashed into the WTC.
The New Pearl Harbour, David Ray Griffin
Griffin tells us here what the flight controller should have done. Or so he claims. In reality it takes time to figure out there's a problem, though, and controllers aren't going to call NEADS straight away, as this TIME article makes clear:
Still, when the controller accepts there's a problem we do at least have the NORAD statements to explain the speed of response. This all seems very damning, until you spot the footnote attached to this claim. Which, it turns out, is quite important:
4. Congressional testimony by NORAD'S commander, General Ralph E. Eberhart, made in October 2002, and Slate magazine, January 16, 2002, both quoted in Thompson, "September 11," introductory material. Although both statements were preceded by "now," suggesting a speed-up in procedure since 9/11, there seems to be no evidence that response times were different prior to that date. That should, in any case, be easy enough for investigators to determine.
The New Pearl Harbor, David Ray Griffin
While the body copy plainly implies the NORAD statements related to standard procedure on 9/11, the footnote appears much less certain. We learn that the statements occurred after 9/11, not before, and were preceded by "now". Which before Griffin edited it out, did indeed suggest "a speed-up in procedure".
This is hardly the message you'd take from the version readers will encounter first, but Griffin suggests that's okay, because "there seems to be no evidence that response times were different prior to that date". Really? How has Dr Griffin looked for that evidence? There are certainly other reports that suggest the procedures had changed:
Military Jets 7 Times as Busy as Before Sept. 11
H E R N D O N, Va., Aug. 13 — The military sent fighter jets to chase suspicious aircraft 462 times between Sept. 11 and June, nearly seven times as often as the 67 scrambles from the same period a year earlier.
More frequent scrambles are also faster in the tense new environment because the North American Aerospace Defense Command communicates better with the Federal Aviation Administration.
On Sept. 11, flight controllers suspected around 8:25 a.m. ET that American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston's Logan Airport had been hijacked, but NORAD wasn't notified until 8:40 a.m. — six minutes before the plane struck the World Trade Center in New York City.
Today, NORAD would know instantly of a suspected hijacking, officials said Monday.
"NORAD is now linked up telephonically 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so anything that's an anomaly or a suspected anomaly that's found in the system, NORAD knows about it as quickly as we do," said David Canoles, FAA's manager of air traffic evaluations and investigations.
At a NORAD operations center in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, Colo., a noncommissioned officer listens to conversations on the FAA network from all over the United States, said Maj. Douglas Martin, NORAD spokesman.
"If he hears anything that indicates difficulty in the skies, we begin the staff work to scramble," Martin said. Before Sept. 11, the FAA had to telephone NORAD about any possible hijackings...
ABCNews Source
Griffin didn’t have to go looking for new articles, though. Simply checking the original sources would have helped.
The Slate article uses the NORAD statements in this paragraph, for instance:
It's made clear in this piece that NORAD are talking about improvements in their standard procedure. And while the author points out that some things haven't changed, this doesn't help Griffin's argument, in fact it makes it worse: the Charles Bishop case shows that even post-9/11, fighters wouldn't necessarily arrive as quickly as you might hope.
And Eberhart? He made his statement in October 2001, not 2002. Here's some context to the comment that was later used by Griffin and others (our emphasis):
LEVIN:
Thank you.
General Eberhart, there's been some confusion about the sequence of events on September 11 that maybe you can clear up for us. The time line that we've been given is that at 8:55 on September 11, American Airlines flight 77 began turning east, away from its intended course. And at 9:10, flight 77 was detected by the FAA radar over West Virginia heading east. That was after the two planes had struck the World Trade Center towers.
Then 15 minutes later, at 9:25, the FAA notified NORAD that flight 77 was headed toward Washington. Was that the first notification -- the 9:25 notification -- that NORAD or the DOD had that flight 77 was probably being hijacked? And if it was, do you know why it took 15 minutes for the FAA to notify NORAD?
EBERHART:
Sir, there is one minor difference. I show it as 9:24 that we were notified, and that's the first notification that we received. I do not know, sir, why it took that amount of time for FAA. I hate to say it, but you'll have to ask FAA.
LEVIN:
And do you know if that was the first notification to the DOD?
EBERHART:
Yes, sir. That's the first documented notification that we have.
LEVIN:
Either NORAD or any other component of the DOD?
EBERHART:
Yes, sir.
LEVIN:
If you could -- for the record, I have a number of other questions relative to that issue which should be clarified, and I'm going to ask you those questions for the record to clear that up. We should get -- it seems to me we all should have a very precise not only timetable, but a precise indication as to why other agencies, entities were not notified by FAA, if they weren't.
Perhaps you could make that inquiry for us, or we'll ask the FAA directly if you prefer; and also as to what notification was considered to the buildings in Washington once the concept was clear that this plane was headed toward Washington. But we'll save those for the record.
Senator Warner?
WARNER:
Mr. Chairman, you asked of our distinguished witness a very important question. I'm going to deviate from my planned opening here to say I guess I'm a little bit stunned that you don't know why that delay occurred. I would have thought by now all of you in this chain would have gone back, rehearsed these things, figured out what happened, what went wrong so that we ensure it won't happen again. If it was that significant delay and you can't tell us why, how do we leave with an assurance that you and you subordinates have taken steps so that it won't happen again?
EBERHART:
Sir, I assure you that we have, and we practice this daily now, and now it takes about one minute from the time that FAA sees some sort of discrepancy on their radar scope or detects a discrepancy in terms of their communication before they notify NORAD. So that certainly has been fixed.
I think at that time, the FAA was still thinking that if they saw a problem it was a problem that was a result of a mechanical failure or some sort of crew deviation. They weren't thinking hijacking. Today, the first thing they think is hijacking, and we respond accordingly.
WARNER:
So working with the FAA, NORAD had not rehearsed the possibilities of an aircraft being seized for some terrorist activity?
EBERHART:
Sir, FAA is charged with the primary responsibility in terms of hijacking in the United States of America. We are charged with assisting FAA once they ask for our assistance. As you know, the last hijacking of a commercial aircraft in the United States of America was 1991. So although we practice this, day in and day out, the FAA sees on their scopes scores of problems that are a result of mechanical problems, switch errors, pilot errors, et cetera, and that that's what they think when they see this.
Although we have exercised this, we have practiced it, in most cases it's a hijacking like most of the hijackings, all of the hijackings I'm aware of, where we have plenty of time to react, we get on the wing, and we follow this airplane to where it lands and then the negotiations start. We were not thinking a missile -- an airborne missile that was going to be used as a target -- a manned missile if you will.
And in most cases when we practice this, regrettably we practiced it -- the origin of this flight was from overseas and we did not have the time-distance problems that we had on that morning. We had plenty of time to react. We were notified that for sure there was a hijacking and we were notified that they were holding a gun to the pilot's head and telling him to fly toward New York City or Washington, D.C. So that's how we had practiced this, sir.
I certainly wish we had practiced it differently, but I really think that, for sure in the first two instances, and probably in the third, the time and distance would not have allowed us to get an airplane to the right place at the right time.
http://www.public-action.com/911/eberhart-testimony.html
The core exchange in bold makes it clear that the "about one minute" claim is a new situation, an old problem that has been fixed. It could still be argued that Eberhart's word isn't direct evidence and more proof is required, but that doesn't give Griffin the right to use his words quite so blatantly out of context.
In fairness, Dr Griffin’s subsequent use of these quotes has been more up-front. This is from a Match 2006 lecture, for example:
He’s still inexplicably suggesting that we only need “suspect that they reflect a post-9/11 speed-up in procedures”, trying to introduce doubt, when it’s entirely clear from Eberhart’s statement that is exactly what he meant. But at least listeners now had more information.
And in "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions", he adds the rider:
"For the sake of accuracy, however, I need to point out that Eberhart's statement was preceded by the word "now", so he was saying that it now takes the FAA only about a minute to contact NORAD and that now NORAD can scramble jets to anywhere in the USA within a matter of minutes. Eberhart was thereby implying that procedures had been speeded up after 9/11. But if this is true, it could easily be supported by comparing NORAD response times for interceptions prior to 9/11 with those afterward.
I know of no such comparison. The 9/11 Commission Report does not mention any comparison and reflects no probing about any such speed-up of procedures. My own assumption is that no such change was made. One piece of support for such a belief is a 1998 document warning pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behaviour "will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes."
The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions
This is nothing more than an argument from ignorance: because Dr Griffin is personally unaware of sufficient evidence to support the idea of a post-9/11 intercept speedup, he's assuming that no such speedup took place. He's also then assuming that the post-9/11 talk of intercepts now occurring in minutes is correct, which seems odd (apparently he requires no supporting evidence here). And he's therefore assuming that this performance also applied before 9/11, even though there's no evidence for that, either. (At least, none beyond the quote from a PC game document that he tags onto the end.)
This construct may convince Dr Griffin, but we find it feeble in the extreme. The reality is that, as we've shown above, there are articles that support Eberhart. Take the quote that "now 100 fighter jets stand on constant alert as opposed to 14 in North America prior to Sept. 11", for instance - that couldn't fail to improve intercept speeds. You can say those and related statistics may be false, if you like, but you can't use your ignorance of the data to claim something else altogether. The simple fact is that these NORAD quotes unambiguously referred to the situation post-9/11, and Dr Griffin presents nothing tangible whatsoever to justify saying they applied before then.
killing things
In Debunking 9/11 Debunking, David Ray Griffin gives us the following quote as partial support of his claim that "any hijacked airliners would have been intercepted within 10 minutes or so".
However, anecdotal evidence in a story promoting how good the pilots are may not be entirely reliable. Consider this, from the same article:
Are we to believe that Herring could be woken up, get dressed, run down two flights of stairs, get to his plane, take off, then catch a target perhaps 100 miles away and heading away from him, and always in "five minutes or less"?
Quick math tells us that if the fighter were to average 800 miles an hour, for instance (good if he's not using afterburner), then that would be 13.333 (recurring) miles every minute. If we allow two minutes between being alerted and getting to the plane, then the additional three minutes would enable the fighter to travel at most 40 miles to reach his target, and realistically it would be much less (he must locate the target first and is most unlikely to be flying in a straight line).
It seems to us that "five minutes or less" isn't in any sense a guarantee, then. And this is hardly surprising, as NORAD fighters were reported to be on 15-minute alert: that's up to 15 minutes between a scramble order and becoming airborne, not reaching the intercept target.
This report also differs from 9/11 in another factor: it relates to intercepts from overseas.
The Southeast Air Defense Sector, located at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, mobilizes the fighters whenever a mysterious blip shows up on radar that can’t be identified. The sector’s radar arrays sweep 60 to 120 miles across the Atlantic, Caribbean, Florida Straits and Gulf of Mexico. If a plane penetrates the U.S. air defense identification zone and tracking technicians can’t get a read on who it is, and why it’s there, the sector sounds the alarm at Homestead.
And the "five minutes or less" time appears to be told from the point of view of the pilot, so we assume he's starting the clock at the point when he's alerted. But in the context of 9/11, it's also important to include the time it takes the FAA to realise a plane has been hijacked and escalate that to their hijack coordinator, then how long it takes him to inform NORAD, then how long it takes the military to issue a scramble order to a particular base. In the Payne Stewart case it took 10 minutes to accept that contact had been lost with a plane; another 11 minutes to alert the military; another 13 minutes before the scramble order was issued. That's 34 minutes to add on to whatever time it takes the pilot to get off the ground, locate and reach his target. Even if this was, say, twice as long as normal (something asserted by no-one at the time) this in no way supports Dr Griffin's claim that "any hijacked airliners would have been intercepted within 10 minutes or so".