9/11 Conundrums: A Critique of the 9/11 Commission Report

By Andrew Mills

It was August 2003 and my wife and I were vacationing for a week in Cape May, New Jersey. I had just finishing reading an excellent book by Michael Lerner on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and there were still two days left with nothing left to read. She suggested I buy a book at the local bookstore. What I came up with was The Shadow Government - 9-11 and State Terror by Len Bracken, which sounded pretty far-fetched and was, as it turned out, filled with conspiracy theories. But because the book was mildly interesting, I filled the spare moments in the remaining days reading it. The main conspiracy theory the book described was that the Administration had either allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur, or had actually helped to engineer them. Outrageous. How could, how would, any public officials ever, ever, for whatever reason, allow, or facilitate, an attack to occur against their own citizens? It's just plain unthinkable. In spite of my skepticism, though, I did at least bring the book home, where I relegated it to the lower shelf of my bookcase. The conspiracy theory was just too far-fetched to waste any more time on. I promptly forgot it, and filled by life once again with work and family.

Many weeks later in the fall, I received an email from a friend of mine. She forwarded a detailed exposition of a theory, not unlike the thesis of The Shadow Government. The writer was a Ph.D. professor from Kent State University and he quoted numerous sources and identified circumstantial evidence that at the least cast doubts on the official stories about 9/11. I began to take this theory a little more seriously, partly because the writer quoted so many sources, and partly because, well, he was a Ph.D. and a Ph.D. would not purposely expound a theory that upon examination could make him the laughing stock among his peers, or would he? Anyway, that was my reasoning.

One of the sources of information on 9/11 most strongly recommended by the professor from Kent State University was a book called War on Freedom by Nafeez Ahmed of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, located in the United Kingdom. I ordered the book, and after a thorough read, I came away wondering how serious the government had been in trying to protect us on that fateful day. The book, and the analysis it presented, was about as objective as any work I've seen, on any topic. Apart from raising serious questions about the official story, blessed by the media, the book pointed out that the Administration had a motive, the means, and the opportunity to let 9/11 happen. The only question was how could any government do such a horrific thing to its own people? This was difficult to swallow. Nevertheless, I pressed on. I read David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor, where I found even more questions about the official story of 9/11.

All the while, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States was busy investigating the tragedy, with a woefully inadequate budget and an approaching deadline. I had hopes that the Commission would probe into the kind of questions that Ahmed, Griffin and some family members of the victims of 9/11 had raised. I even wrote to the Commission urging them to look at some of these issues, e.g., the slow response of our fighters to intercept the hijacked airliners and the foreknowledge of the intelligence agencies of Al Qaeda's intention to strike America in the late summer of 2001.

When the 9/11 Commission's report came out last summer, I went to Barnes & Noble to get my copy. As many have remarked, the report reads well, but by reading straight through it I found it difficult to keep track of how each important issue was dealt with. The report had no index, and I began to feel that a good index would be valuable in assessing which issues the report covered well and which it didn't.

So over a few weeks I created my own index, by applying the 'find' feature to the pdf version of the report, taking as the key words the many people, actions and policies that appeared, from my reading, to be crucial to an understanding of those events. I decided to make it an annotated index, wherein the important occurrences of each word or phrase in the report would be quoted or paraphrased, and I would also include questions or conclusions of my own about the Commission's coverage of the topic involved.

What I found was that the report on the one hand omitted important facts and issues and on the other failed to draw critical conclusions from some of the important issues it did consider. In the course of creating the index, I came to realize the importance of establishing a new, truly independent commission to identify all the parties responsible for the 9/11 attacks, including possibly those government departments and agencies that failed in catastrophic ways to prevent or head-off the attacks.

It is relevant to note that many commission members had conflicts of interest with respect to 9/11 and the Commission's investigation of the government agencies charged with protecting the American people that day. Not the least of these relate to Philip Zelikow, Staff Director for the Commission, who played a major role in deciding which issues received attention, and which didn't. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Philip Zelikow has had close ties to Condoleezza Rice and other senior officials in the Bush Administration. He wrote a book with Ms. Rice in 1995, and was on the Bush Administration's transition team for the National Security Council. Moreover, Zelikow had been serving as a member of President Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board since 2001.

I discovered several serious omissions in the report and instances of inadequate coverage with respect to the following issues: (1) Failure to intercept hijacked airliners; (2) Conflicting air-defense timelines: (3) Mode of collapse of the Twin Towers; (4) Nature and cause of the collapse of WTC Building 7; (5) Documentation and analysis of wreckage at attack/crash sites; (6) Failures of the Intelligence agencies and the State Department; and (7) Prior recent history of the US and Afghanistan. These will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

The 9/11 Commission Report failed to adequately address the reasons for the belated and ineffective pursuit of the hijacked airliners by Air Force or Air National Guard fighters on 9/11. No mention was made of the standard operating procedures (SOP) of the FAA in effect prior to June 2001, which required the immediate scrambling of fighters to follow or intercept any aircraft that deviated from its flight plan and was out of communication with air traffic controllers. In June 2001, a new directive (CJCSI 3510.01A) was issued requiring the approval of the Secretary of Defense in each instance before fighters could be scrambled.

No mention was made of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction (CJCSI) 3510.01A, issued on June 1, 2001. This directive lays out a significantly longer line of communication and approvals required to intercept hijacked aircraft than before, extending all the way to the Secretary of Defense and only then to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The report did not mention that this new protocol superseded the earlier SOP's, nor did the report explore the possible reasons for issuing this new directive, just three months before the 9/11 attacks.

Without mentioning the CJCSI 3510.01A directive by name, or noting that this protocol was put into place only in June 2001, the report describes without comment (on pages 17?18) the lengthy procedure that the new protocol (CJCSI 3510.01A) specified to obtain approval for scrambling fighters to intercept hijacked airplanes, as follows:

The FAA headquarters had a hijack coordinator who was the director of the FAA Office of Civil Aviation or his/her designate. If a hijack was confirmed, he/she would contact the Pentagon's National Military Command Center (NMCC) to ask for a military escort aircraft to follow the flight. The NMCC would seek approval from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to provide military assistance. If approval was given by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the orders would be transmitted to NORAD to implement. The protocols did not contemplate an intercept, but the scrambled fighters would be vectored to a position five miles directly behind the hijacked aircraft to monitor the aircraft's path.

The report did not question why the Secretary of Defense did not authorize the timely scrambling of fighters, as he was in his office in the Pentagon at the time of the hijackings. Did the field FAA officials fail to contact the FAA hijack coordinator in time? Did the FAA hijack coordinator fail to contact the NMCC in time? Did the NMCC fail to contact the Secretary of Defense in time? The report does not address these questions in any clear coherent manner.

Once NORAD did scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airliners, why were they scrambled from air bases distant from New York City and D.C.--Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod and Langley Air Base in southern Virginia? McGuire Air Force Base fighters could have been scrambled to intercept UA Flight 175 and Andrews Air Force Base fighters could have been scrambled to intercept AA Flight 77. The report didn't attempt to answer this question, and no reference at all is made to McGuire Air Force Base.

Andrews Air Base was mentioned just once, in the following way:

"These fighters, part of the 113th Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard, launched out of Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, in response to information passed to them by the Secret Service. The first of the Andrews fighters was airborne at 10:38. General David Wherley-the commander of the 113th Wing-reached out to the Secret Service after hearing secondhand reports that it wanted fighters airborne. A Secret Service agent had a phone in each ear, one connected to Wherley and the other to a fellow agent at the White House, relaying instructions that the White House agent said he was getting from the Vice President. The guidance for Wherley was to send up the aircraft with orders to protect the White House and take out any aircraft that threatened the Capitol."

The fighters from Andrews Air Force Base were scrambled outside the military chain of command. The report states that the military didn't even know about the scrambling of these fighters. The report fails to ask the important question that if the Secret Service could order fighters to scramble from Andrews Air Base, why is it that the military were unable or unwilling to so, and at a much earlier time?

Air Force combat exercises were carried out, as planned, on 9/11. The report skirted the issue of these exercises. According to the report, on 9/11/01 NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, "Vigilant Guardian," which apparently postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union. The report fails to assert that the exercises did in fact take place, and it fails to ask why they were scheduled for that day and who scheduled them. No apparent effort was made by the 9/11 Commission to investigate the nature and timing of these scheduled exercises, and in exactly what ways the exercises impacted the response to the hijackings.

The Commission's report presented a timeline of air-defense response that differs radically from all the previous official accounts. The original account given two days after the attacks was presented by General Richard Myers, the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11. He appeared on September 13, 2001 before the Senate for hearings, scheduled many weeks earlier, to consider his promotion to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During the hearing Myers told the Senate that no fighter jets were scrambled to intercept any of the 9/11 flights until after the Pentagon was struck, which occurred at 9:38 AM.

On September 18, 2001, General Ralph Eberhart, commanding officer of NORAD, presented another timeline, in which he stated that NORAD had scrambled two squads of fighters prior to the crash of United Airlines Flight 175 into the south tower of the World Trade Center (WTC). NORAD stuck to this second version of the timeline of events, with minor revisions. And in a handsome four-color book entitled Air War over America, commissioned by NORAD and written by Leslie Filson, a historian hired by the Air Force, NORAD's version of the events on 9/11 is described in some detail. The book implies that NORAD had in fact received timely warnings from the FAA to which NORAD had responded.

But another timeline was adopted by the Commission, one which conflicts significantly from NORAD's timeline, and which effectively places almost all the blame for the delayed air defense response on the FAA. This new timeline was presented in June 2004 in a statement by the commission staff. Throughout their testimony before the Commission, on the other hand, FAA officials maintained that they had in fact provided adequate and timely information to NORAD via phone bridges. In developing their own timeline, the Commission chose to ignore almost all previous testimony and submissions from NORAD and the FAA. It would seem they felt a need to make the FAA a scapegoat for the lack of fighter response on 9/11.

One thing I thought was strange: the report was silent about the mechanism of the collapse of the twin towers. Reference was made to the North Tower beginning "its pancake collapse," which is consistent with the truss-theory explanation presented by MIT Professor Thomas Eagar in a Nova presentation by PBS on April 20, 2002. The truss theory attempts to explain the failure of all of the trusses on a given floor in quick succession: According to this theory, once the angle clips started to fail in one area, it put extra load on other angle clips, and then it sort of "unzipped" around the building on that floor in a matter of seconds. This led to the joists on one or two of the most heavily burned floors giving way and the outer box columns beginning to bow outward. Then, according to this theory, the floors above them also fell. An article by Thomas Eagar and Christopher Musso explaining this theory appeared in an issue of the Journal of Minerals, Metals and Materials Society in the fall of 2001.

However, experts disagree. It has been pointed out that the fires in the two towers were not long lasting, nor did they result in extreme heat. Prior to September 11th, no steel framed building had ever undergone total collapse due to any cause or combination of causes other than controlled demolition or severe earthquakes. According to Hyman Brown, a University of Colorado civil engineering professor and the World Trade Center's construction manager, WTC Buildings 1 and 2 were designed to survive an impact and resulting fires from a collision by the largest commercial aircraft at the time, a Boeing 707-340. The Boeing 767-200 airliners used on 9-11 were only slightly larger than Boeing 707s.

In any case, the Commission didn't seek any detailed technical explanations from the engineering community. The official theories explaining how the twin towers collapsed do not address the question of how the south tower could have collapsed 29 minutes before the north tower when UA Flight 175 collided into the south tower 17 minutes after AA Flight 11's collision into the north tower. Neither do these theories explain how the south tower could have collapsed at all given that Flight 175 didn't collide with the south tower head-on but crashed into the southeast corner of the tower.

Moreover, the official theories fail to explain the observed horizontal propulsion of dust particles at distances two to three times the width of the towers at the time of the collapses. Given all this, it would have been appropriate for the 9/11 Commission to commission the development of an engineering model to explore the several possible modes of failure of the structural members of the Twin Towers on 9/11. The Commission did not undertake this.

The report omitted any discussion of the structural design of the twin towers, including the fact, as mentioned above, that the towers were designed to withstand an impact from a fully-loaded Boeing 707 aircraft. Each tower was supported by 240 exterior steel columns and 47 steel columns in the center (core columns). The floors were grids of steel. At each floor, steel trusses (beams) were connected from every other exterior column to the core columns. Another set of steel trusses were placed perpendicular to the first set and fixed in an identical fashion. Diagonal steel braces connected the ends of the trusses to the remaining exterior columns. At each floor, the grid of horizontal steel beams supported a corrugated steel deck, which in turn was filled with four inches of concrete. The design provided considerable redundancy with safety factors equaling or exceeding codes for skyscrapers. (See Eric Hufschmid's Painful Questions.)

The report mentioned that seismic observations provided estimates of the time of the crash of Flight 93. However, the Commission made no effort to identify, and obtain a detailed scientific explanation of, seismic records that might have shed light on the collisions and explosions that took place at the World Trade Center that day. Seismic records for that day are available from the Palisades NY seismic station operated by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and located 21 miles north of the World Trade Center. The record indicates the possibility that strong seismic spikes occurred at the beginning of the collapses, before the falling debris struck the earth. The Commission failed to even seek out such information.

The report inexplicably omitted any mention of the mysterious total collapse of Building WTC 7 at the World Trade Center in the late afternoon of 9/11/01. The report did mention the fact that the Office of Emergency Management's (OEM) was located on the 23rd floor of WTC 7. And it noted that at 9:30 AM on that day a senior OEM official ordered the evacuation of the facility after a Secret Service agent advised him that additional commercial planes had not been accounted for. But the fact that the report completely failed to mention, and discuss the causes of, the collapse of WTC 7 is strange and incredible.

The Commission's report contained no reference to the wreckage of the four airplanes. Neither is there any mention of building remains or rubble. The only reference to the words 'wreckage' or 'remains' was in relation to the asbestos content of the dust from the Twin Towers. Thus, the Commission seemed to accept without comment the fact that the rubble and steel fragments from the Twin Towers, and the airplane wreckage from Flight 77 at the Pentagon, were removed and disposed of without any expert examination. (Available photographs of the crash scene at the Pentagon reveal no evidence of parts that could be associated with the remains of a Boeing 757 airplane.) The report, thus, failed to mention that none of the wreckage/rubble underwent the thoroughgoing forensic investigation that would have assisted in understanding the nature of the crashes and subsequent building collapses.

Numerous failures of the intelligence agencies with respect to the 9/11 attacks have been documented in the major media. The report's position was that there was an inherent lack of effective coordination among the several agencies due to structural problems and possible 'turf' wars, and that this was the primary cause for the intelligence failures.

The report made reference to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General's interview with Coleen Rowley of the Minneapolis FBI field office. But there was not a word in the report about the major intelligence failures within the FBI that Coleen Rowley pointed out in her statements. Among these, there was the primary failure of FBI headquarters officials to take any action on urgent messages from FBI field offices concerning, among other things, the flight training being taken by some of the hijackers. The report's failure to explore and seek some explanation for FBI headquarters' inattention to documented urgent field communications is inexplicable.

The report described how the DOJ and the FBI routinely failed to inform the INS of terrorist threats or watchlists. Yet the Commission did not condemn the FBI or the DOJ for this failure of inter-agency communication. Rather it avoided the whole question of the possibility that had the INS obtained and utilized the watchlists, it could have successfully prevented at least a few of the hijackers from entering the country.

The report noted that "Visa Express" was set up by the State Department in Saudi Arabia starting in June 2001. This was the procedure that permitted Saudi travel agencies to complete US visa application forms, which were frequently given only perfunctory review by US consular officials before the visas were approved. Prior to its initiation, all visa applicants had to be processed directly by US consular staff, including evaluation of each applicant's history and security status. The Commission simply reported, and apparently accepted, the explanation given by the Administration that the program was initiated as a security measure "in order to keep long lines of foreigners from vulnerable embassy spaces." But if these Saudi applicants posed a danger to the embassy space, by permitting these same people to obtain visas through the lax procedures under Visa Express, the same Saudis could become a danger to all of America. The Commission raised no questions about the program, and evidenced no concern that the Visa Express program may have allowed as many as five of the 19 hijackers to enter the country.

The report gave no indication that the Commission reviewed the several versions of passenger lists for the four flights that emerged after the attacks. The report provided no descriptions of the several lists, gave no mention of what names were used on the flights by the hijackers, and inexplicably failed to provide the number of passengers on each flight.

No mention was made in the report of the negotiations that took place between the US (including oil corporations, such as UNOCAL) and the Taliban beginning in 1997 to urge the Taliban to allow the construction of gas and oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea region through Afghanistan. As the Taliban are reported to have become uncooperative in the negotiations by early 2001, one can understand the possibility that invading and controlling that country could have had its attraction to people in oil business. (See the first two chapters of Nafeez Ahmed's War on Freedom.)

The report mentioned that in June 2001 President Bush issued a directive directing Secretary Rumsfeld to develop contingency plans to attack Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan. In her testimony to the Commission, Condoleezza Rice stated, "the military didn't particularly want this mission." Since the military had been performing bombing raids on both Iraq and Afghanistan, their lack of enthusiasm for this mission was probably because it involved using ground troops in a country that had never before been conquered successfully by a foreign power. The report did not discuss the significance of possible pre-9/11 plans to invade Afghanistan. The commissioners apparently didn't examine the possibility that the goal of planning to invade Afghanistan might have been as much, or more, to assure the construction of the pipeline as to neutralize al Qaeda.

Overall then, I found several critical deficiencies of the 9/11 Commission report. And when important clues were found, the Commission in most cases failed to fit the clues together in a way that would have naturally led to additional lines of investigation.

I was still struggling with the issue of how a government could allow an attack upon its own people to occur. It certainly isn't what my friends or I would ever do. But then I read the New York Times book review of The Torture Papers edited by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel, which is a new compendium of government memos and reports chronicling the road to Abu Ghraib and its aftermath. As stated in the review, the book provides "a damning paper trail that reveals, in uninflected bureaucratic prose, the roots that those terrible images had in decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration--decisions that started the torture snowball rolling down the slippery slope of precedent by asserting that the United States need not abide by the Geneva Conventions in its war on terror." Yes the tortured people were Iraqis, and not Americans, but the Administration's policy is beginning to reveal their values regarding human rights and human life. Those values do not seem to include a consistent respect for human rights, including the right to life.

Could it be that the policy makers in the Administration value human life only as long as it serves their agenda? Can any life be dispensed with (American or Iraqi) if it is for the greater 'good' of achieving American hegemony in the world, and particularly control over the oil in the Middle East? The means don't seem to matter, it is the prize at the end. Cheney, Rumsfeld and friends may be justifying all this by saying to themselves and ultimately to us: "Americans, this is all for your own good. We are securing dependable oil supplies for you."

The 9/11 Commission Report may have been a first step in evaluating the events of 9/11, or it may have been only a smokescreen. But in any event, one must conclude that it's important that a new truly independent commission be created to investigate the concerns noted above. When approximately 3,000 Americans were killed in atrocious crimes on 9/11, only $15 million was allocated by the Administration and Congress for the investigation. But when only a handful of people were killed in the Columbia shuttle crash, $50 million dollars were provided for that investigation. Perhaps our leaders in Washington need to revisit their priorities. Americans have a right to an in-depth independent investigation of all the events related to 9/11.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Nafeez, 2002, The War on Freedom - How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001, Tree of Life Publications, Joshua Tree, California.

Griffin, David Ray, 2004, The New Pearl Harbor - Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, Olive Branch Press, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Hufschmid, Eric, 2002, Painful Questions - An Analysis of the September 11th Attack, Endpoint Software, Goleta, CA.

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 2004, The 9/11 Commission Report, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.

Ruppert, Michael, 2004, Crossing the Rubicon - The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada.