FAA was befuddled on 9/11

WASHINGTON — Blindsided by terrorists and beset by poor communications, officials were so slow to react on Sept 11, 2001, that the last of four hijacked planes had crashed by the time Vice President Dick Cheney ordered hostile aircraft shot down, a bipartisan commission reported Thursday.

In an unflinching report, the panel depicted the Federal Aviation Administration as slow to alert the military to the hijackings — even failing to pass along word that one of the planes had been seized.

Deseret Morning News graphic Events leading to Sept. 11 Requires Adobe Acrobat.

But the panel praised those aboard one passenger jet — headed for Washington, D.C. — that crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers struggled with their hijackers.

"The nation owes a debt to the passengers," the report said. "Their actions saved the lives of countless others and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction," the commission's report said.

In testimony before the panel, Gen. Ralph Eberhart said military pilots would have been able to "shoot down the airplanes" if word of the hijackings had been immediate. The commission, though, made no such claim.

Some military pilots "were never briefed about the reason they were scrambled," the panel said. The Secret Service, worried about a plane approaching the capital, went "outside the chain of command" to ask for warplanes to be sent aloft.

President Bush, in Florida when the terrorists struck, was not immune to communications woes. The commander in chief later told interviewers he had been frustrated that day at delays in establishing secure phone links with officials in a capital city feared under attack.

"There was a real problem with communications that morning," the commission's chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, told reporters. "There were a lot of people who should have been in the loop who were not in the loop."

The commission sketched its picture as it neared the end of an exhaustive investigation into terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 on a day when terrorists seized four planes. Terrorists seized four planes on a single day, flying two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. The fourth was the one that crashed in Pennsylvania.