The Wall Street Lawyer and the Special Ops Hijack Coordinator
Several of the FAA’s top people confirmed that the military was engaged and knew about the hijackings early on. This included Jeff Griffith at the Command Center and Monte Belger, the FAA’s acting Deputy Administrator, who was present at FAA Headquarters. Belger stated that “[T]here were military people on duty at the FAA Command Center, as Mr. Sliney said. They were participating in what was going on. There were military people in the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization in a situation room. They were participating in what was going on.”[13]
Sliney’s interview summary is full of phrases like he “did not recall” and “was not aware,” although he did recall “being informed” that interceptors were eventually launched (too late). Apparently, Sliney didn’t even know what the fighters would do if they were launched. He recalled thinking: “Well, what are they going to do?” Additionally, in an apparent defensive posture, Sliney claimed “definitively that he did not receive a request to authorize a request to the military for assistance.”[14]
One might think that the national operations manager for the FAA’s Command Center would not need a “request to authorize a request for military assistance” and that he might know what military assistance would entail. But Sliney’s interview summary suggests that he did not even know what the protocol was for requesting military assistance in the event of a hijacking. Sliney’s understanding on 9/11 “and today” (two years later, when the interview was conducted) was that an FAA request for military assistance “emanates from the effected Center…directly to the military.” That is, Sliney supposedly was not aware of any role that the FAAs’ Command Center or FAA HQ might have had in the request for interception of hijacked aircraft. This appears to be in contradiction to the protocol given by the 9/11 Commission report and it is definitely in contradiction to the concept of a “hijack coordinator.”
In addition to the confusion about the Command Center’s role in requesting military assistance, it seems there was only one person at FAA headquarters who was authorized to request military assistance. On 9/11, Ben Sliney was told that no one could find that one person. Sliney later recounted his experience learning of that fact in this way:
I said something like, “That’s incredible. There’s only one person. There must be someone designated or someone who will assume the responsibility of issuing an order, you know.” We were becoming frustrated in our attempts to get some information. What was the military response?[15]
Michael Canavan
The hijack coordinator at FAA headquarters, Lt. Gen. Michael A. Canavan, had been in his position for only nine months, and would leave the job within a month of 9/11. Surprisingly, although Mike Canavan was mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report, he was not cited for his role as the FAA’s hijack coordinator, a role that was at the center of the failure to intercept the planes on 9/11.
Instead of being mentioned as the hijack coordinator, Canavan was in the report because he had been the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which ran the military’s counterterrorism operations and covert missions. The report described Canavan’s part in the failure to follow-through on a carefully laid-out 1998 CIA plan to capture Osama bin Laden (OBL) in Afghanistan. Canavan was quoted as saying that the plan put tribal Afghanis at too much risk and that the “operation was too complicated for the CIA.”[16]
Nearly the entirety of Canavan’s career was in military special operations. He was a Special Forces soldier for many years, and before he was JSOC Commander, he was Special Operations Commander for the US European Command (SOCEUR), which included operations throughout Africa as well. Canavan was SOCEUR from 1994 to 1996 and JSOC Commander from 1996 to 1998.
JSOC is a successor organization to the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which was a secret government-funded organization authorized by the National Security Council in 1948. The OPC was led by CIA director Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, a State Department official who wielded unprecedented power due to his position in New York law and financial circles. The JSOC was created in 1980 by the Pentagon and run by Ted Shackley’s OPC colleague, Richard Stillwell. According to author Joseph Trento, JSOC quickly became “one of the most secret operations of the US government.”[17]
Creation of the JSOC was, ostensibly, a response to the failed 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran called Operation Eagle Claw. JSOC immediately went on to engage in an “array of highly covert activities” by way of “black budgets.”[18] This included operations in Honduras and El Salvador which supported the illegal wars associated with the Nicaraguan rebels called the Contras.
In 1987, JSOC was assigned to a new military command called the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) that came about through the work of Senator William S. Cohen. Senator Cohen went on to become the Secretary of Defense from 1997 to 2001, and it was he who led the Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997 that reduced the number of fighters actively protecting the continental US from 100 to 14.[19] Cohen is now chairman of The Cohen group, where he works with his Vice Chairman, Marc Grossman, whom FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds says figures prominently in the information she has been trying to provide.
Interestingly, Hugh Shelton was the commander of SOCOM during the same years that Canavan was the commander of JSOC. Shelton went on to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which is the highest position in the US military. He was in that position on September 11th and was, like Canavan, curiously absent for just the morning hours on that day.[20]
In any case, it seems odd that Michael Canavan occupied what turned out to be the most important position relative to the failure to intercept the hijacked planes on 9/11 and was also involved in evaluating plans to capture OBL just three years earlier. Apart from the coincidence that he was selected as the most qualified person for both of those very different positions, he was also a central figure in these two different reasons why the 9/11 attacks were said to have succeeded.
When he first started the job as FAA’s hijack coordinator, just nine months before the attacks, Canavan was in charge of running training exercises that were “pretty damn close to [the] 9/11 plot,“ according to John Hawley, an employee in the FAA’s intelligence division.[21] In his comments to the 9/11 Commission, Canavan denied having participated in any such exercises and the Commission apparently didn’t think to reconcile the conflicting comments it had received from Hawley and Canavan on this important issue.
That’s not surprising in light of the fact that Canavan’s treatment by the 9/11 Commission was one of uncritical deference. Reading through the transcript of the related hearing gives the impression that the Commission members were not only trying to avoid asking the General any difficult questions, but they were fawning over him.
Lee Hamilton began his questioning of Canavan by saying “You’re pretty tough on the airlines, aren’t you?”[22] As with many of the statements and reports made by Hamilton, however, the evidence suggests that the opposite is true.
In May 2001, Canavan wrote an internal FAA memorandum that initiated a new policy of more lax fines for airlines and airports that had security problems. The memo suggested that, if the airlines or airports had a written plan to fix the problem, fines were not needed. For whatever reason, the memo was also taken to mean that FAA agents didn’t even have to enforce corrections as long as the airline or airport said they were working on it. Canavan’s memo was repeatedly cited as a cause of failure to fix security problems in the months leading up to 9/11.[23,24]
Canavan’s job as hijack coordinator was clearly the most important link in the communications chain between the FAA and the military. But the 9/11 Commission did not address this hijack coordinator position in terms of how it was fulfilled on 9/11, and did not mention the alarming fact that we don’t know who actually handled the job of hijack coordinator on the day of 9/11. We don’t know because Canavan said he was in Puerto Rico that morning and claimed to have missed out on “everything that happened that day.”[25]
Here is Canavan’s exact statement to the Commission, in response to a question from Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, whose questions were, like Hamilton’s, rather submissive:
Here’s my answer — and it’s not to duck the question. Number one, I was visiting the airport in San Juan that day when this happened. That was a CADEX airport, and I was down there also to remove someone down there that was in a key position. So when 9/11 happened, that’s where I was. I was able to get back to Washington that evening on a special flight from the Army back from San Juan, back to Washington. So everything that transpired that day in terms of times, I have to — and I have no information on that now, because when I got back we weren’t — that wasn’t the issue at the time. We were — when I got back it was, What are we going to do over the next 48 hours to strengthen what just happened?[26]
