Shaphan

An Iraqi 9/11

On Sunday, Coalition forces in Iraq killed about 250-450 'cult members', at the behest of the Iraqi government.  We, the British, contributed to the massacre, which, in relative-population terms, was equivalent to an Iraqi 9/11.

American Apache attack helicopters and F-16s, as well as British fighter jets, flew low over the farms where the enemy had set up its encampments and attacked, dropping 500-pound bombs on the encampments. [NYT]

Women and children are believed to have lived and died at the encampment.  Reports yesterday suggested the leader, who was believed to be a herald of the Imam Mahdi, had been killed along with this followers - but the NYT is not so sure.

Iraqi officials said Monday that they had killed the leader of the militia in the weekend fighting, identifying him as a man who went by the name Ahmed Hassan al-Yamani, but whose real name was Diyah Abdul Zahraa Khadom.  However, a Shiite cleric who has had contact with the group said the real leader was Ahmad bin al-Hassan al-Basri.  The cleric said he believed that Mr. Basri was alive and probably hiding near Karbala.

I would have thought that, when faced with an apocalyptic cult, the last strategy to try would be to wreak apocalyptic violence upon its followers - it sort of reinforces the beliefs of the survivors.  In addition, targeting religious groups, such as the Soldiers of Heaven, is considered genocide under international law.   I'm lost for words.

What PDB stands for

I thought, you thought, we all thought that the letters PDB stood for 'President's Daily Brief', or 'Presidential Daily Briefing', or something like that.  Well, I was watching Tony Snow's White House press briefing today, as one does, and he expanded PDB to "Presidential Decision Brief". 

Q  But, Tony -- and this is my last question -- I understand you keep talking about the Clinton administration, but let's talk about August 6, 2001, this administration, this PDB.  Let's talk about why it was not placed at a high level. Why not?

MR. SNOW:  It's a presidential decision brief, for heaven's sake, it goes before the President.  What higher level do you have?

I thought it might be a slip of the tongue but Googled it nevertheless [here].  I found only two pages - first, chapter 2 of a risible anti-Iran 'book', and, second, a recruitment notice from the Defense Intelligence Agency (or was it from SAIC?).  The extract Google found was this:

Find Senior Intelligence Writer jobs at Dice.com

Our candidates will assist senior DIA analyst in writing reports, articles, or other papers as required up to the standard of a Presidential Decision Brief. ...

And, when I accessed the webpage less than an hour ago, those words were in the advertisement (as they had to be, for me to have found the page).  But, now, they have disappeared from the text.

Title: Senior Intelligence Writer

Skills: Writer, analyst, Program Manager, Manager

Date: 10-1-2006

Location: Arlington, VA Area code: 703 Tax term: FULLTIME Pay rate: Competitive Length: FULLTIME Position ID: 66413 Dice ID: saicbot

Job description: The Space and Geospatial Intelligence Business Unit has a current opening for two Senior Intelligence writers to support the Counter Narco Trafficking Division of DIA.  These are full time positions and are located in Crystal City.  We do not envision much travel with these positions. We require candidates who have written for the Presidential Daily Brief.  They will write for the Brief and also assist senior DIA analyst in writing reports, articles, or other papers as required.  A background in Counter Narcotics Intelligence is desired but not required.  Our successful candidates will have a minimum of a Bachelors Degree although graduate education is highly desired. Also desired is graduation from a Senior Intelligence Community writing course.  These candidates must have at least eight years experience in the National Intelligence Community at the Senior Military (O-5/O-6, GS-14/15/SES, or Senior contracting position) and must demonstrate their ability to write by sharing examples of their writing.  The successful candidate will interview with the SAIC Program Manager and with Senior Staff at DIA.  The candidates must have unsurpassed ability to communicate clearly and concisely in oral and written English.

That they would scrub the phrase 'Presidential Decision Brief' so soon after Tony Snow's words went public leads me to wonder if we weren't all wrong about what PDBs were.  And, if so, if the August 6th, 2001, PDB, titled 'Bin Laden determined to strike in US', required a decision from the president, what decision did he make?

Sheer spin

An LA Times columnist, Robert Sheer, comments on the release of the 9/11 Commission Staff Report.  However, instead of actually reading the Staff Report, Sheer appears only to have read the NY Times article about it, which was biased against the FAA (and thus, in the context of 9/11, pro-NORAD).  This despite him having noted: "For the last three years, administration apologists have tried to make the FAA the scapegoat for the 9/11 attacks."  Sheer, unfortunately, helps perpetuate the scapegoating, even though his primary target seems to be Condi Rice.

According to Sheer:

The warnings provided by intelligence agencies to the FAA were far clearer and more specific than suggested by Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission when she reluctantly conceded the existence of a presidential briefing that warned of impending Al Qaeda attacks.  Rice had dismissed those warnings as "historical," but according to the newly released section of the 9/11 report, an astonishing 52 of the 105 daily intelligence briefings received by the FAA -- and available to Rice -- before the Sept. 11 attacks made specific reference to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Condi Rice, of course, used "historical" to refer to the president's daily briefings (especially the 6th August, 2001 PDB), not to the FAA's daily intelligence briefings.  And the 105 briefings were not received by the FAA - they were generated, and disseminated, by the FAA's own security branch.

One of the FAA's liaisons to the intelligence committee told the Commission that he sensed, particularly in June and July 2001, that "something was going to happen" that summer.  Most of the community, he said, was looking for the event to occur abroad.

Much of this threat information was contained in the daily intelligence summaries produced by FAA's security branch for the agency's leaders.  The summaries were based on reporting it received from the US intelligence community and other sources.  Among the 105 summaries issued between April 1, 2001, and September 10, 2001, almost half mentioned Bin Ladin, al Qaeda, or both, mostly in regard to overseas threats.

Of the 52 summaries mentioning Bin Ladin or al Qaeda, 5 mentioned hijacking a a capability al Qaeda was training for or possessed.  Two mentioned suicide operations, but not connected to a threat to aviation.  One of the summaries, which will be discussed later, mentioned air defense measures being undertaken in Genoa, Italy, for the G-8 summit to protect the event from possible air attack by terrorists (including their use of an explosives-laden aircraft as a weapon. [p.55, 9/11 Commission Staff Report]

So the FAA was pretty clued up about the gathering threat, even if, with hindsight, it didn't adequately raise security levels.  But what was NORAD doing over the same period, when the intelligence "system was blinking red", to ensure that its systems were prepared for a Genoa-type event? 

9/11 Staff Report and NORAD

The press coverage of the recently released 9/11 Commission Staff Report has focused on the 52 warnings the FAA sent out to airlines and airports in the months prior to 9/11.  Instead of reporting this as the FAA disseminating prescient information to its clients, this Associated Press article, for example, implies the FAA didn't act upon the intelligence it received.   Similarly, the National Security Archive, which got the report declassified under the FOIA, headlined its page: "9/11 Commission Staff Report on FAA Failings Published on Web".  I sense a NORAD or White House spin.

The declassified (and redacted) Staff Report is in two parts.  Part One concerns the chronology of the hijacks and the FAA's and NORAD's responses on 9/11;  Part Two relates how well or badly the two agencies had prepared for such an attack.   The Report adds some details, especially in the footnotes, that were airbrushed out of the published report. 

Here are some extracts from Part One.  The questions concern American Airlines 77, which hit the Pentagon, and United Airlines 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania).

FLIGHT 77

Footnote 282:
Noteworthy for its omission in this account is the claimed 9:24 A.M. FAA notification to the military that Flight 77 was hijacked.  In the official NORAD timeline of 9/11 (released September 18, 2001), and as presented to the Commission in May 2003, NORAD claimed to have received notification that Flight 77 was a hijacked aircraft at 9:24 A.M.  NORAD officials also indicated that the fighters at Langley Air Force Base were immediately scrambled to meet the threat posed by Flight 77.  Retired General Larry Arnold (CONR Commander on 9/11) amplified, and confused, the issue in testimony before the Commission, stating:

9:24 was the first time that we had been advised of American 77 as a possible hijacked airplane.  Our focus - you have got to remember that there's a lot of other things going on simultaneously here - was on United 93, which was being pointed out very aggressively I might say by the FAA...  We were advised [American 77] was possibly hijacked.  And we had launched almost simultaneously with that, we launched the aircraft out of Langley to put them in position in case United 93 were to head that way.

Based on its review of tapes, transcripts and other records obtained under subpoena, as corroborated by witness interviews at NEADS, the Commission can state unequivocally that the 9:24 A.M. notification time was not accurate.  The 9:24 notification was inaccurately derived from a handwritten log maintained by the staff working for the Mission Crew Commander (the operational commander on watch) at NEADS.  Called the "MCC/T Log", it was the principal log of events kept at NEADS on 9/11.  At 9:24 A.M., the log records: "American Airlines #N334AA hijacked."  This tail number refers not to Flight 77 but to Flight 11, the first hijacked aircraft.  The subpoenaed tapes confirm that this time corresponds to the receipt of the tail number information on Flight 11 and to reports that Flight 11 was still airborne and headed towards Washington, DC.

General Arnold's testimony is even weirder than the Report allows - he said that at 9:24 NEADS' focus was on Flight UA93, but UA93 wasn't hijacked until 9:28.  But if Arnold were telling the truth, NORAD/NEADS had been tracking Flight 93 before the alleged hijackers had left their seats.

From the main text:

9:36 AM  The FAA's Boston Center - which had learned of an unidentified primary radar target tracking eastbound via an FAA conference call line - called NEADS and relayed the report of the aircraft closing in on Washington.  The aircraft had still not been linked to the missing Flight 77.  Boston Center told NEADS: "Latest report. Aircraft VFR [Visual Flight Rules] six miles southest of the White House...Six, southwest. Six, southwest of the White House, deviating away."   This startling news prompted the Mission Crew Commander at NEADS to order "AFIO" (Authorization for Interceptor Operations), which entailed taking immediate control of the Langley fighters from the FAA.  He then ordered the fighters to proceed directly towards Washington DC:  "Okay, we're going to turn it up ... crank it up ... Run them to the White House".

Shortly after 9:36 AM, the Mission Crew Commander at NEADS discovered, to his surprise, that the Langley fighters were not headed north as the scramble order had instructed, but east over the sea. His response was emotional: "I don't care how many windows you break," he said, "Damn it...Okay. Push them back." [footnote 287]

9:37:46 AM, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. [...]  The Langley fighters were 150 miles away

At approximately 10:00 A.M., the Langley fighters established a Combat Air Patrol over Washington DC.

A long footnote [287] then seeks to explain how, half an hour after the second plane had hit the WTC, the interceptor planes ordered to scramble from Langley and head north ("Scramble on a heading of 010 flight level 290") instead followed normal procedure and headed east out to sea ("090 for 60") and away from Washington.  I question the given explanation on two grounds:  first, NEADS says it needed a fixed distance to the target in order to scramble the interceptor planes, but enemy planes in the air are never static targets with predictable destinations;  second, all hell was breaking loose in New York and elsewhere, and things get surreal at Langley AFB:

Third, both the lead Langley pilot and the FAA's Norfolk TRACON facility - which was briefly controlling the aircraft once it departed the Langley AFB airspace - assumed the flight plan instruction to go "090 for 60" was newer guidance that superseded the original scramble order instructions.  In fact, shortly after the fighters got airborne, the lead Langley pilot was asked by Norfolk TRACON in what direction he wanted to head.  After a brief discussion between the lead plot (identified as "Quit 25") and Norfolk TRACON, it was mutually decided that the fighters would follow the flight plan guidance.  Put simply, the Langley pilots received flight direction guidance from both the scramble order and the Langley AFB departure flight plans, and continued on the latter heading for several minutes until a direction and destination was provided.

America is under attack and they choose to disregard the scramble order and instead head east over the ocean, miles away from Washington DC.  I ask you.

FLIGHT 93

Footnote 389
The military did not receive notice at 9:16 A.M. that Flight 93 was hijacked, as was reported to the Commission in May 2003 by NORAD.  At 9:16 A.M., the NEADS "MCC/T Log" records: "United tail #N612UA/75 SOB/."   The tail number in the log belonged to Flight 175, not Flight 93.  A corresponding conversation [?] on recorded conversations on the NEADS floor confirms that at 9:16 A.M., NEADS was receiving (from an FAA facility) confirmation of the tail number of Flight 175.

The "MCC/T Log" was also mentioned in Footnote 282.  (I wonder if the Commissioners subpoenaed it.)  The written MCC/T Log again contradicts the NORAD officials' testimony.  So either NORAD officials were confused, or they lied when they said that that they knew from 9:16 that UA93 was hijacked and were tracking it, or the MCC/T Log was altered post facto, before the Commissioners saw it, to remove evidence of NEADS knowing about, and tracking, UA93 from 9:16 onwards.

Footnote 391
The timing of the Mission Crew Commander's instruction on ROE [Rules of Engagement] also belies various NORAD officials' public recounting of their awareness of and response to Flight 93.  "Air War over America" [published 2003], for instance, the 1st Air Force's official history of the response to the 9/11 attacks, offers the following accounts by two of the key NORAD participants:

(Colonel Robert Marr, NEADS Commander):

With all available alert fighters in the air, Marr and his crew were still faced with United Flight 93. The plane was headed west, so controllers began looking for any other fighter jets that might be nearby.  'I'm thinking Chicago is the target and know that Selfridge Air National Guard Base (Mich.) has F-16s in the air. We contacted them so they could head 93 off at the pass. The idea is to get in there, close in on him and convince him to turn. ... As UA Flight 93 was going out, we received the clearance to kill if need be.  In fact, General Arnold's words almost verbatim were:  "We will take lives in the air to save lives on the ground."

(General Larry Arnold, CONR Commander):

...we watched the 93 track as it meandered around the Ohio-Pennsylvania area and started to turn south toward DC.  By now the Pentagon has been hit and we have aircraft in orbit...  They are now orbiting over Washington, DC, and have been for a while.  As United 93 headed toward DC, the desire is to move the fighters toward that aircraft.

The record demonstrates, however, that no one at any level in NORAD (or DOD) ever "watched the 93 track" start to turn south towards Washington DC.  In fact, the military never saw Flight 93 at all.   The Selfridge base was contacted by NEADS not regarding Flight 93, but in response to another commercial aircraft in the area that was reported hijacked (Delta Flight 1989, which ultimately was resolved as not hijacked).  Most important, NORAD certainly never "received the clearance to kill if need be" on Flight 93.

It is not possible to reconcile Col Marr's and Gen Arnold's memories with the 9/11 Commission's findings.  Because Marr and Arnold corroborate each others' memories of tracking UA93, I tend to believe them as against the MCC/T Log, which was handwritten and thus could be rewritten.

In sum, NORAD claimed it had acted to defend Washington DC from AA77 when it didn't, and its planes in fact ended up 150 miles away.  And, despite the (sworn?) testimonies of senior NORAD officials, "no one at any level in NORAD (or DOD)" knew about Flight UA93 at all, ever, absolutely not, so the idea that the plane was shot down is itself completely shot to pieces.  And, if you believe that, I have a timeshare appartment you'll just love.