FAA Foot Dragging? (On providing records of 9/11 to commission) [View All]

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.com/news/980701.asp?0cv=CB10

The federal commission investigating the September 11 terror attacks has approved subpoenaing the Federal Aviation Administration after learning about the existence of potentially important tapes, radar records and other materials about the events of that day that the agency had failed to turn over, NEWSWEEK has learned.

THE BELATED discovery of the FAA tapes and other material infuriated some members of the commission and raised new fears that foot-dragging by federal agencies and the White House may make it impossible for the panel to complete its work by its legally imposed deadline next May. At an emergency meeting on Tuesday night, the commissioners unanimously agreed to issue the subpoenas—the first time it has taken such a step since it began its work late last year, commission sources said.

“This is a shocking display of inattention at best,” Richard Ben-Veniste, a commission member told NEWSWEEK, about the FAA’s failure to turn over the material. “It’s simply unacceptable for us to labor under a deadline and have a lack of compliance” such as that exhibited by the FAA.

The newly discovered tapes are potentially significant evidence related to the U.S. government’s response to the September 11 attacks. Of most immediate importance to the commission: when precisely was the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) notified that the country was under a terrorist attack? Investigators want to know whether the Bush White House and the U.S. military could have acted more quickly to—at a minimum—intercept American Airlines Flight 77, the hijacked aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon at 9:38 a.m., after both World Trade Center towers had been hit.

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...Investigators want to know why, for example, the FAA wasn’t already on alert for a possible hijacking plot and why there was no policy in place that allowed a military response to a domestic hijacking—even after multiple warnings about such a possibility had been given to President Bush and other senior officials during the summer of 2001. Top White House officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and briefly President Bush, participated in an “air-threat conference call” on the morning of September 11—but an order giving the military authority to shoot down hijacked aircraft didn’t come until after the Pentagon crash.

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