Saturday, June 19, 2004

 

9-11-01: A Tragedy of Errors

THIS is where the real scandal lies: Even if you were a rabid Bush supporter, the 9-11 timeline the Commission has put together should give you pause. Every single thing that could go wrong, did go wrong that morning, it seems. "Shoot-down" authorization didn't seem to be made until all the planes had crashed, and in any event, was never communicated to the fighter pilots. Radio contact between the FAA and NORAD indicates disbelief that this wasn't a drill, and repeated confusion over where, and how many, planes had been hijacked. Fighter pilots, once finally scrambled, searched the skies over Boston, in vain, looking for the "phantom" Flight 11, which had already been the first to crash into the Towers. A second set of fighters were scrambled from Andrews AFB, evidently "outside the military chain of command" entirely. Ever see a dog chase its tail?

Bushco, on the morning of 9-11, flunked the most basic test of a national government, the one role even the most rightwing conservative must concede it irreducibly has: Defending us against foreign attack. If this timeline proves essentially correct, we've got MUCH bigger problems on our hands than whether Cheney got Bush's OK first for the "shootdown" order, whether Rummy was "out of the loop," etc. Al Qaeda's diabolically brilliant ju-jitsu move showed that when it comes to protecting us against a catastrophic attack (set into motion by fewer than two dozen men with nothing more than boxcutters), we can't even walk and chew gum at the same time.

posted by Michael 12:14 AM