This came up this week. I think it's quite important and shows why the 9/11 Commission believes its story of the day of 9/11 (I don't by the way).

Late October 2003: 9/11 Commission’s Tour of NEADS Facility Suspended Over Discrepancies

Several months into its investigation, the 9/11 Commission is already dissatisfied with the Department of Defense (see July 8, 2003). When its staff take a tour of a Northeast Air Defense Sector facility in Rome, New York, which helped coordinate the air defense on the day of 9/11, the staff enter the operations room, which has “more than twenty banks of operators: some weapons controllers and some flight controllers.” The staff find that the operators’ conversations are always tape-recorded, but the tapes for 9/11 have not yet been sent to the commission and, according to Commission Chairman Tom Kean and Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton, “there were also discrepancies between things NORAD was telling [the commission] about their performance on the morning of September—things that the agency had stated publicly after 9/11—and the story told by the limited tapes and documents the commission had received.” Upon learning of the existence of the tapes, team leader John Farmer immediately suspends the tour and the interviews and flies to meet Kean in New Jersey. The commission subsequently subpoenas NORAD for the tapes (see October-November 2003), but, according to Kean and Hamilton, this means that “the staff had lost so much time that our hearing on the 9/11 story in the skies was postponed for months. Indeed, the delays from NORAD and the FAA made it highly unlikely that the team could complete its work as scheduled.” [Kean and Hamilton, 2006, pp. 85-88] Chapter 1 of the commission’s final report will draw heavily on the tapes. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 1-46] However, the commission does not make the same effort with all day of 9/11 recordings. For example, it does not even find out which person(s) from the Department of Defense participated in a White House video conference chaired by counter-terrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke during the attacks. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 36]

Entity Tags: Thomas Kean, Lee Hamilton, Northeast Air Defense Sector, John Farmer, 9/11 Commission

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