Reply #13: "No one ever expected that planes would crash into buildings." [View All]

[Old and In the Way]

-Condi Rice


From the www.cooperativeresearch.org timeline on 9/11:

(6:30 a.m.) Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins and other NORAD employees at NEADS (NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector that covers the Washington and New York areas) are starting their work day. NORAD is unusually prepared on 9/11, because it is conducting a week-long semiannual exercise called Vigilant Guardian. NORAD is thus fully staffed and alert, and senior officers are manning stations throughout the US. The entire chain of command is in place and ready when the first hijacking is reported. An article later says, "In retrospect, the exercise would prove to be a serendipitous enabler of a rapid military response to terrorist attacks on Sept. 11." ABC News later reports that because NORAD is "conducting training exercises therefore extra fighter planes on alert." Colonel Robert Marr, in charge of NEADS, says, "We had the fighters with a little more gas on board. A few more weapons on board." The exercise poses "an imaginary crisis to North American Air Defense outposts nationwide." Accounts by participants vary on if 9/11 was the second, third, or fourth day of the exercise. Since NORAD was in peak form, isn't the incredible slowness of its response times on 9/11 even more inexplicable?