Why the Planes Were Not Intercepted on 9/11

The Wall Street Lawyer and the Special Ops Hijack Coordinator

One might think that the Commissioners would have expressed surprise at Canavan’s rambling, somewhat incoherent claim that he was just not available during the events of 9/11.  We would certainly expect the Commissioners to have followed up with detailed questions about who was in charge that day with respect to the most important role related to the failed national response.  But that was not the case.  Instead, Ben-Veniste redirected the discussion while “putting aside the issue.”  None of the other Commissioners said a word about Canavan being missing that day or even asked who was filling in for him as the primary contact between the FAA and the military with regard to hijackings.  And, of course, the 9/11 Commission report did not mention any of it at all.

In the interest of finding out what happened, we should return to the failure of FAA HQ to request military assistance for Flight 93.  We should ask: What was FAA HQ doing with this information for those 30 minutes in the absence of the one person who was charged to do something about it?  Apparently, for fifteen minutes, nothing was done.  But after fifteen minutes, according to the 9/11 Commission report, the conversations were going nowhere.

At 9:49, according to the report, this was the exchange between the FAA Command Center and FAA HQ.

Command Center:  Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft?

FAA Headquarters:  Oh, God, I don’t know.

Command Center:  Uh, that’s a decision somebody’s gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes.

FAA Headquarters:  Uh, ya know everybody just left the room.

The Commission report says that ineffectual discussions about scrambling aircraft were still occurring at FAA HQ twenty minutes after it had received notification of the fourth hijacking.

At 9:53 am, “FAA headquarters informed the Command Center that the deputy director for air traffic services was talking to Monte Belger about scrambling aircraft.”

Apart from contradicting Benedict Sliney’s testimony that an FAA request for military assistance “emanates from the effected Center … directly to the military,” this part of the 9/11 Commission report never mentions who the “deputy director for air traffic services” was.  Tape recordings suggest that it was someone named Peter.  This might have been Peter  H. Challan, an engineer who had worked for the FAA since 1969 and had been Deputy Associate Administrator for Air Traffic Services since July 1999.  But the Deputy Director of Air Traffic Services that day was Jeff Griffith.  Monte Belger was the Deputy Administrator for the FAA, second in command to the FAA Administrator, Jane Garvey.  Belger and Griffith later denied they ever had a conversation about scrambling aircraft, despite the 9/11 Commission stating this as fact.

Jane Garvey was also present during the failed response at FAA HQ.  She was the FAA Administrator from 1997 to 2002 and, coincidentally, in the years before that, had been the director of Logan International Airport in Boston, where two of the flights took off on 9/11.  Apparently Garvey’s record as director for the Logan airport, which had for many years the worst security record of any major airport, was not a problem for her nomination to the top job at FAA.  It was Garvey who appointed Canavan to his role as Associate Administrator for Civil Aviation Security and, therefore, as hijack coordinator.

In any case, in the absence of the hijack coordinator, the FAA was completely incompetent in terms of communicating the need to intercept the hijacked planes on 9/11.  Officially, the only notice of the hijackings to the military came directly from the FAA centers, bypassing both the Command Center and FAA HQ.   Boston Center reached the North East Air Defense Sector (NEADS) at 8:37 to request help with the first hijacking, and New York Center notified the military of the second hijacking at 9:03.  NEADS only found out about the third hijacking at 9:34 by calling the Washington center to ask about Flight 11, and the military was said to have first learned about the hijacking of Flight 93 from Cleveland Center at 10:07. Still, none of the planes were intercepted.

9/11 and special operations

Although Michael Canavan was unavailable to perform his critical job function on 9/11, he was fully involved in the response to the attacks.  Just two days later, he attended a “Principals Committee Meeting” chaired by Condoleezza Rice that included all of Bush’s “war cabinet.”[27] This meeting set the stage for how the new War on Terror would be conducted.

Canavan later cashed in on the windfalls of the resulting wars and the privatization of military operations when he was hired on at Anteon International Corporation as president of its Information Systems Group.  In doing so, he joined a number of prominent defense department alumni, including his former special operations colleague, SOCOM commander and JCS chairman Hugh Shelton, who was on the board of directors at Anteon.

Since 9/11, covert activities have been encouraged at a much higher level, but, prior to 9/11, SOCOM was not supposed to conduct covert operations.  Therefore, JSOC worked intimately with the CIA’s clandestine division called the Special Activities Division (SAD). Canavan led those kinds of operations in northern Iraq, Liberia and Bosnia. He ran special operations in Croatia in 1996 and, according to President Clinton, was the one who identified Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown’s body after Brown’s plane crashed there.[28]

JSOC regularly works with foreign intelligence agencies, including the Mossad.[29] It has been involved with hijackings, for example that of the Achille Lauro and TWA Flight 847.  It has also operated from bases in foreign countries, such as Saudi Arabia, for many years.[30] Presidential Decision Directive PDD-25 gave JSOC one of the rare exemptions from the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which means that JSOC can legally conduct its missions within the US.[31]

In the “War on Terror”, the special mission units of JSOC have been given the authority to pursue secret operations around the world.  JSOC effectively operates outside the law, capturing and killing people with or without the knowledge of the host countries in which it operates.  JSOC missions are always low-profile, and the US government will not acknowledge any specifics about them.

Reporter Seymour Hersh has reported that the JSOC was under the command of Vice President Dick Cheney after the attacks.[32] Hersh also claimed that the leaders of JSOC “are all members of, or at least supporters of, the Knights of Malta” and that “many of them are members of Opus Dei.”[33] The ties between the Knights of Malta and high-level US intelligence personnel, including William Casey and William Donovan, have been well-documented.[34] Such accusations have also been made of Louis Freeh, who headed the FBI from 1993 to June 2001 and would have worked closely with Canavan and Shelton in the pursuit of special operations targets.

Other special operations leaders who were involved in the lack of response on 9/11 included Richard Armitage, who was present on the Secure Video Teleconference (SVTS) during the attacks.[35] This was the White House meeting chaired by Richard Clarke, which the 9/11 Commission said convened at 9:25 and included leaders of the CIA, the FBI, the FAA, as well as the departments of State, Defense and Justice.   Even with all those leaders in on the call, nothing was done to stop Flight 93 from “crashing” that morning, approximately 40 minutes after the call began.  Instead, we were left completely undefended.

Like Canavan and Shelton, Armitage was involved in special operations in Vietnam and later was reportedly involved in several of the most well-known covert operations in US history, including the Phoenix Program and the Iran-Contra crimes.[36] Although he had spent many years in the Defense department, he was Deputy Secretary of State on 9/11.  After the invasion of Iraq, he was identified as the one who betrayed CIA agent Valerie Plame by revealing her identity, apparently in retaliation for her husband’s attempt to set the record straight on weapons of mass destruction.  Armitage admitted he revealed Plame’s identity, but claimed it was done inadvertently.[37]