Beheading Tops 911 Scandal

Hey, don’t pay any attention that your imperialist masters could have stopped those planes ...Look over here, another CIA manufactured beheading?

truthout.com

Also see below:
Cheney Authorized Shooting Down 9/11 Planes •
Questioning Nearly Every Aspect of the Responses to Sept. 11 •
Panel Says Chaos in Administration Was Wide on 9/11 •

Editor’s Note | The release of the 9/11 Commission report on the terror attacks of September 11 has sent an earthquake rolling through Washington D.C. Beyond the repudiation of the Iraq-al Qaeda connections so often touted by the Bush administration as a proper cause for war, the panel has opened a bright window into the actions of the administration on the day the attacks unfolded.
For three years now, many have wondered how it was possible for four commercial airplanes to pierce the most formidable air defenses in the history of the universe. Now, we hear from the commander of NORAD that, indeed, those planes could have been stopped had there been order within the chain of command. For three years, we have been told that George W. Bush was absolutely in command on that day. Now, we hear that Bush sat reading a story about goats as the second plane struck the Towers. Most shockingly, we now hear that it was Cheney who wound up giving the too-late shoot-down order, an order that should have been given by the President himself. - wrp

Air Defenses Faltered on 9/11, Panel Finds
By Dan Eggen and William Branigin
Washington Post

Thursday 17 June 2004

Report documents command and communication errors.
The chief of U.S. air defenses testified today that if his command had been notified immediately of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings and ordered to intervene, U.S. fighter jets would have been able to shoot down all four of the airliners that were seized by terrorists and that ultimately crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that had the Federal Aviation Administration conveyed word of the hijackings as soon it knew of them, "yes, we could shoot down the airplanes."

The chairman and vice chairman of the commission later expressed surprise about Eberhart’s claim, and a report by the panel’s staff said it was uncertain that any of the hijacked planes could have been shot down.

Eberhart, who has headed NORAD since February 2000, assured the commission that if the Sept. 11 plot were carried out today, the command’s planes would be able to shoot down all four planes with time to spare, because of improvements implemented since the attacks. But he warned that NORAD should always be considered a "force of last resort."

According to the commission’s new staff report, Vice President Cheney did not issue orders to shoot down hostile aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, until long after the last hijacked airliner had already crashed, and that the order was never passed along to military fighter pilots searching for errant aircraft that morning.

A painstaking recreation of the faltering and confused response by military and aviation officials on Sept. 11 also shows that the fighter jets that were scrambled that day never had a chance to intercept any of the doomed airliners, in part because they had been sent to intercept a plane, American Airlines 11, that had already crashed into the World Trade Center.

The jets also would probably not have been able to stop the last airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, from barreling into the White House or U.S. Capitol if it had not crashed in Pennsylvania, according to the report.

"We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93," the report’s authors wrote, referring to an apparent insurrection that foiled the hijackers’ plans. "Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction."

The stark conclusions come as part of the last interim report to be issued by the staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which is racing to complete a final book-length report by the end of next month. The 10-member bipartisan panel will hear its last public testimony from military and aviation officials today.

Among the new information contained in the latest report is a detailed reconstruction of the reactions of President Bush, Cheney and other top government leaders that morning, including a recitation of a call between the two at 9:45 a.m. after the Pentagon had been hit.

"Sounds like we have a minor war going on here," Bush tells Cheney, according to notes of the call. "I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war. . . . Somebody’s going to pay."

During the presentation of the report this morning, commission staffers played recordings of hijackers’ voices in radio transmissions that were picked up by air traffic controllers.

"We have some planes," an unidentified hijacker said in accented English from American Airlines flight 11 at 8:24 a.m. "Just stay quiet, and you’ll be okay. We are returning to the airport."

A few seconds later, the hijacker was heard saying, "Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet." At 8:34 a.m., he said again, "We’re going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves."

Twelve minutes later, the plane struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

The commission staff concluded that NORAD had received notice of the hijacking nine minutes before Flight 77 hit the North Tower.

"The nine minutes notice was the most the military would receive that morning of any of the four hijackings," the report says.

The report also documents a succession of mistakes, wrong assumptions and puzzling errors made on the morning of Sept. 11 by air defense and aviation employees, who often did not communicate with each other when they should have and frequently seemed unsure of how to respond to the unprecedented assault by the al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.

Panel investigators also tersely conclude that authorities with NORAD repeatedly misinformed the commission in testimony last fall about its scrambling of fighters from Langley Air Force Base just north of Hampton, Va. NORAD officials indicated at the time that the jets were responding to either United 93 or American Airlines 77, which struck the Pentagon.

In fact, they were chasing "a phantom aircraft," American 11, which had already struck the World Trade Center, the panel found.

Air defense agencies "were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001," the report concludes. "They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet."

Among the breakdowns cited in the report was that American Airlines Flight 77, which was hijacked after taking off from Dulles International Airport, flew undetected by anyone for 36 minutes as it turned and headed back east toward the Pentagon.

The FAA never asked for any military assistance or notified the military about either Flight 77 or United Airlines Flight 93 before they crashed, the panel’s staff found.

Nor did the FAA’s command center issue an order to implement cockpit security measures in other planes that were in flight or on the ground after the hijackings became known, the investigators reported.

The new account essentially shifts the terms of the debate about air-defense response that day, because it indicates that none of the jetliners likely could have been intercepted given the time available. But the report also suggests that time to respond might have been lengthened if the status of the flights had been communicated more quickly to and among military and Federal Aviation Administration officials.

Commission investigators, based on private interviews with both Bush and Cheney and other witnesses, reported that a telephone conversation occurred between the two leaders shortly before 10:10 a.m. or 10:15 a.m. in which Bush authorized Cheney to order jet pilots to shoot down hostile aircraft.

Within a few minutes, Cheney issued the first shoot-down order, based on reports from the Secret Service of an aircraft - United 93 - headed toward Washington. But the reports were based on trajectory estimates; Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m. The vice president issued a similar order at around 10:30 a.m. in response to another report of a hijacked plane.

"Eventually," the report notes, "the shelter received word that the alleged hijacker five miles away had been a Medevac helicopter."

Cheney’s general shoot-down orders were issued to NORAD at 10:31 a.m., but clear instructions were never passed along to pilots in the air.

"In short," the report says, "while leaders in Washington believed the fighters circling above them had been instructed to ’take out’ hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed to the Langley pilots were to ’ID type and tail.’ "

The Langley pilots were also never told why they were scrambled or that hijacked commercial airliners were a threat, the commission’s staff found.

At one point, Cheney mistakenly informed Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that U.S. fighters had shot down a couple of hijacked aircraft on his orders.

Bush, who was visiting an elementary school in Florida at the time of the hijackings, was first informed that something was amiss when senior adviser Karl Rove told him that a small, twin-engine plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, the report says.

"The president’s reaction was that the incident must have been caused by pilot error," the report says.

Shortly afterward, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was at the White House, informed Bush that the plane was a commercial flight.

While Bush was seated in a classroom of second-graders, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. whispered to him, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack," the report says.

"The president told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis," the 29-page document continues. Bush saw the phones and pagers of reporters starting to ring as they stood behind the children in the classroom and "felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening," the report says.

It was after he had left the school that Bush told Cheney, "We’re at war."

Faced with advice from Cheney and the Secret Service that he not return to Washington immediately, Bush reluctantly agreed to board Air Force One and fly to a destination that had not yet been determined.

"All witnesses agreed that the president strongly wanted to return to Washington and only grudgingly agreed to go elsewhere," the report says.

Interviewed on CNN before today’s hearing began, commission member John F. Lehman, a Republican former secretary of the Navy, said that "there was considerable breakdown in command and control" on Sept. 11 in the air defense effort.

"It’s a picture of lack of preparation between the FAA and the Air Force," he said. But he said the question of whether better coordination would have saved lives is still an open one.

"I think had they been better trained and organized to cooperate that it is possible that [flight] 77 might have been intercepted, but it would have been a very, very close call even in the best of cooperation."

In his testimony before the commission, Eberhart said NORAD’s ability to respond in such a situation today "is much better."

But he said he felt compelled to add, "NORAD is not the right way to work this problem. It is the force of last resort. . . . If we have to take action, it takes a bad situation from getting worse, because everyone on that airplane will die."

Shooting down a hijacked airliner "is a stopgap final measure," Eberhart said. "But where we really need to focus is destroying these terrorist networks, not allowing them into our country. Don’t allow them into our airports. Don’t allow them in our aircraft, and if they get in our aircraft, don’t let them take control of the airplane."

He also stressed that before shooting down a hijacked airliner, "it’s important for us to see a hostile act" - a sign of intent to use the plane as a weapon - because it may turn out to be a "traditional hijacking," or control of the airliner may have been wrested back by "brave souls" on board.

After the hearing, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana and the panel’s vice chairman, said he was surprised by Eberhart’s "extraordinary statement" that U.S. fighters could have shot down the hijacked planes on Sept. 11 if NORAD had been promptly notified. "He’s making a lot of assumptions there about almost instantaneous communications," Hamilton said.

Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who chairs the commission, said Eberhart "believes that if such an event happened today, they would be capable of taking out all four planes, and I hope he’s right."

During the hearing, commission members reserved some of their toughest questions for senior FAA officials who testified after Eberhart and other top military officers.

Lehman pointed to "very identifiable" failures by FAA headquarters on the day of the terrorist attacks, including the failure of the agency to issue a broad early notification of multiple hijackings and to notify the military of that Flight 93 was heading toward Washington.

"I think [FAA] headquarters blew it," said commission member Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic governor and senator from Nebraska.

Monte Belger, the acting deputy administration of the FAA at the time of the attacks, said his attention on Sept. 11 quickly became focused entirely on getting the 4,500 planes that were airborne that morning safely on the ground.

He said he never received some of the key intelligence that was available on the prospect of terrorist hijackings, notably a CIA briefing paper that said al Qaeda was determined to strike inside the United States and pointed to signs of hijacking preparations. Nor was he informed, Belger said, of an FBI report that a terrorist suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, had been arrested while undergoing flight training.

Asked after the hearing if he were satisfied with the FAA officials’ answers, Kean, the commission chairman, answered, "No." He added that that in view of warnings over the years, the FAA should have been better prepared for a catastrophic act of terrorism.

Hamilton said, "One of the failures . . . is the failure of imagination. Our policy people simply were not able to imagine using an airplane as a weapon." Because of that failure, he said, FAA officials were placed in an "extremely difficult and unprecedented" position.

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Cheney Authorized Shooting Down Planes
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post

Friday 18 June 2004

At 10:39 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney, in a bunker beneath the White House, told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a videoconference that he had been informed earlier that morning that hijacked planes were approaching Washington.

"Pursuant to the president’s instructions, I gave authorization for them to be taken out," Cheney told Rumsfeld, who was at the Pentagon. Informing Rumsfeld that the fighter pilots had received orders to fire, Cheney added, "It’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out."

Cheney’s comments, which were soon proved erroneous, were detailed in a report issued yesterday by the commission investigating the terrorist attacks. The comments are part of the considerable confusion that surrounded top government officials as the tense drama unfolded.

The commission’s description of actions taken by Cheney and President Bush, based in part on interviews with both men, provides new details of that morning. The report portrays the vice president taking command from his bunker while Bush, who was in Florida, communicated with the White House in a series of phone calls, and occasionally had trouble getting through.

Cheney, who told the commission he was operating on instructions from Bush given in a phone call, issued authority for aircraft threatening Washington to be shot down. But the commission noted that "among the sources that reflect other important events that morning there is no documentary evidence for this call, although the relevant sources are incomplete." Those sources include people nearby taking notes, such as Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Cheney’s wife, Lynne.

Bush and Cheney told the commission that they remember the phone call; the president said it reminded him of his time as a fighter pilot. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who had joined Cheney, told the commission that she heard the vice president discuss the rules of engagement for fighter jets over Washington with Bush.

Within minutes, Cheney would use his authority. Told - erroneously, as it turned out - that a presumably hijacked aircraft was 80 miles from Washington, Cheney decided "in about the time it takes a batter to swing" to authorize fighter jets scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., to engage it, the commission reported.

Only later did White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten suggest that Cheney call Bush once more to confirm the engagement order, according to the commission. Logs in Cheney’s bunker and on Air Force One confirm conversations at 10:18 and 10:20, respectively.

Later, Cheney spoke to Rumsfeld via videoconference. When the vice president said the orders had been relayed to the jets and "a couple of aircraft" had been downed, Rumsfeld replied: "We can’t confirm that. We’re told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that they did it."

But the commission determined that the Langley fighter jets sent to circle Washington never received the shoot-down order. It was passed down the chain of command, but commanders of the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s northeast sector did not give it to the pilots.

"Both the mission commander and the weapons director indicated they did not pass the order to fighters circling Washington and New York City because they were unsure how the pilots would, or should, proceed with this guidance," the commission reported.

"In short," the report added, "while leaders believed the fighters circling above them had been instructed to ’take out’ hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed to the Langley pilots were to ’ID type and tail.’ "

Unknown to Cheney or Bush, however, by 10:45 other fighter jets would be circling Washington, and these had clear authority to shoot down planes, the commission determined. They were sent from Andrews Air Force Base by the commander of the 113th Wing of the Air National Guard, in consultation with the Secret Service, which relayed instructions that an agent said were from Cheney.

That arrangement was "outside the military chain of command," according to the commission report. Bush and Cheney told the commission they were unaware that fighters had been scrambled from Andrews.

Cheney would give the order to engage twice - at news that United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was approaching Washington, and at what turned out to be a medevac helicopter, the commission determined. Neither aircraft was engaged.

About 9 a.m. that day, at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., it was Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, who first told him and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, though initially it was believed to be a small private plane, the commission reported.

Cheney, told by his assistant to turn on his television, was pondering "how the hell a plane could hit the World Trade Center" when he saw the second plane crash into the South Tower, the commission reported.

White House officials jumped into action, but the commission was skeptical about whether their efforts that morning had much effect. It said a video teleconference in the White House situation room, chaired by Richard A. Clarke, then head of counterterrorism at the White House, "had no immediate effect on the emergency defense efforts."

Bush remained in the classroom for "five to seven minutes" after learning of the second crash as the children around him continued reading. He had his first conversation with Cheney at about 9:15. Those traveling with the president did not know other aircraft were missing, the commission reported.

Communications with Washington were so poor that Bush, who told the commission he was "deeply dissatisfied" with the technical problems, at one point resorted to using a cell phone on the way to Air Force One, according to commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton. Both said Bush’s motorcade took a wrong turn on the way to the airport and had to reverse.

Bush and Cheney spoke again at 9:45, while Bush was on the tarmac aboard Air Force One. By that time, both towers of the World Trade Center were aflame and the Pentagon had been hit.

"Sounds like we have a minor war going on here," Bush told Cheney, according to the commission report. "I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war . . . somebody’s going to pay."

Cheney joined the Secret Service and Card in urging Bush not to return to Washington. The two apparently were still on the phone, about 10 minutes later, as Air Force One took off from Florida without a destination. "The objective was to get up in the air - as fast and as high as possible - and then decide where to go," the commission report noted.

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Questioning Nearly Every Aspect of the Responses to Sept. 11
By Douglas Jehl
The New York Times

Thursday 17 June 2004

Washington - For most of 2002, President Bush argued that a commission created to look into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would only distract from the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.

Now, in 17 preliminary staff reports, that panel has called into question nearly every aspect of the administration’s response to terror, including the idea that Iraq and Al Qaeda were somehow the same foe.

Far from a bolt from the blue, the commission has demonstrated over the last 19 months that the Sept. 11 attacks were foreseen, at least in general terms, and might well have been prevented, had it not been for misjudgments, mistakes and glitches, some within the White House.

In the face of those findings, Mr. Bush stood firm, disputing the particular finding in a staff report that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization. "There was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Mr. Bush declared.

Such assertions, attributed by the White House until now to "intelligence reports," may now be perceived by Americans as having less credibility than they did before the commission’s staff began in January to rewrite the history of Sept. 11, in one extraordinarily detailed report after another.

With its historic access to government secrets, the panel was able to shed new light on old accountings, demonstrating, for example, that Mr. Bush himself, in the weeks before the attack, had received more detailed warnings about Al Qaeda’s intentions than the White House had acknowledged.

For now, the panel is casting its work in tentative terms. Its final report is due next month, on the eve of the Democratic convention. In this election year, its contribution has already been to portray Sept. 11 not just as a starting point in the war on terrorism, but also as a point on a continuum, one preceded and followed by other treacheries and failures.

At a briefing, a senior White House official sought again to turn away attention from the past. "The real issue is how do we move forward," the official said. "We’ve made a lot of changes since Sept. 11, because this country was simply not on war footing at the time of the attacks."

In the studies, Mr. Bush in particular has come off as less certain and decisive than he has portrayed himself. The final report, issued on Wednesday, reminded Americans that Mr. Bush remained in a classroom in Florida for at least five minutes after the second jet struck the World Trade Center, in what he told the panel was an effort "to project calm" for a worried nation.

Initially it was Henry A. Kissinger, the pillar of Republican foreign policy, whom Mr. Bush selected as the panel chairman, with George J. Mitchell, a former Democratic leader in the Senate, as vice chairman.

But those two appointees quickly fell by the wayside, to be replaced by former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, a Republican, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana , whose milder manners undoubtedly gave the panel a less partisan demeanor.

Notably, the two men joined forces successfully to persuade the White House to allow the panel access to crucial documents, including copies of the Presidential Daily Brief, and to pivotal figures, including Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, who testified under oath in March, and to Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who appeared jointly in a closed session.

Whether the two leaders and the other panel members, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, can join forces in presenting final conclusions remains to be seen. Among the issues to be decided, and which the White House is closely watching, is the position on how and whether to reorganize United States intelligence agencies, in hopes of closing gaps that might have contributed to the Sept. 11 failures.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation bore the particular brunt of the staff reports, for missteps in communication, intelligence gathering and analysis that contributed to failures in anticipating the attack and in intercepting the hijackers.

So too, the Justice Department and the Pentagon came under fire, the Justice Department for doing too little to speed information sharing among law enforcement and intelligence agencies and the Pentagon for being ill prepared to combat the peril posed by aircraft hijacked by suicide pilots.

The staff has been critical of the Clinton administration, too, pointing out missed opportunities in the late 1990’s, when that White House shied from what might have been opportunities to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda.

But it was Mr. Bush and his top aides, particularly Mr. Cheney and Ms. Rice, who were most in the spotlight, particularly in this final week of the public hearings. On Thursday, it was Mr. Bush’s self-image of being calm under fire that came under scrutiny, with a portrayal of a White House that was slow to respond as the attacks unfolded.

Starker still were preliminary staff conclusions on Wednesday that took aim at the assertions made by Mr. Cheney, in particular, of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda in connection to Sept. 11, including what the White House has repeatedly said might well have been a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the chief hijacker, and a senior Iraqi intelligence officer.

Much of the support for the American invasion of Iraq last year was based, polls have suggested, on a perception that Mr. Hussein and his government were behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Bush acknowledged last fall that there was no evidence of such ties, but it was a perception that the White House never actively sought to squelch.

With the commission staff’s saying it did not believe that the Prague meeting had occurred and that there was no evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq in connection with the attacks, Mr. Bush on Thursday sounded very much on the defensive.

"This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda," he said.

The sole example he cited of "numerous contacts" between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda was a meeting between a senior Iraq intelligence agent and Mr. bin Laden in Sudan in 1994, one that the commission said appeared to have gone nowhere.

In 2002, Mr. Bush did finally sign off on the plan to form the commission, bowing to Congressional pressure. Until now, he has resisted other proposals being pushed by Congress, including a major overhaul of intelligence agencies.

A plan for such an overhaul is expected to be among the commission’s final recommendations next month, presenting Mr. Bush and the White House with yet another challenge.

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Panel Says Chaos in Administration Was Wide on 9/11
By Philip Shenon and Christopher Marquis
The New York Times

Friday 18 June 2004

Washington - Offering an extraordinary window into the government’s chaotic response on Sept. 11, 2001, the commission investigating the terrorist attacks detailed on Thursday a series of communications breakdowns at the White House and the Pentagon that were so severe that military commanders did not tell fighter pilots that they had been given the authority by Vice President Dick Cheney to shoot down hijacked planes.

The commission showed that White House communication systems were so close to collapse in the hours after the attack that President Bush, who was visiting a Florida elementary school that morning, could not obtain an open line to Mr. Cheney at the White House and had to resort to a cellphone to reach him.

In the commission’s final public hearing after an 18-month investigation, members said that Mr. Bush had complained to them in his recent interview that the communications problems continued after he boarded Air Force One.

A staff report released at the hearing provided new details about the confusion that enveloped the White House, the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration. It found that Mr. Cheney did not issue a shoot-down order - on Mr. Bush’s behalf - until after 10 a.m., more than an hour after Mr. Bush had been told by his chief of staff that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and that "America is under attack."

After the hearing, White House spokesmen rejected any suggestion that the response on Sept. 11 had been any more confused than would have been expected after a major terrorist attack, and they continued to question the findings of a staff report issued Wednesday by the commission that said there did not appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

In justifying the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and Vice President Cheney cited what they called long-standing ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And on Thursday they both repeated the assertion.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney cited what they called longstanding ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And on Thursday, they both repeated the assertion. Mr. Bush said there had been "numerous contacts" between Al Qaeda and Mr. Hussein, while Mr. Cheney said "there was clearly a relationship" between the two.

The bipartisan 10-member commission has tried to bring its investigation full circle by focusing this week on the details of the attack plot, how it was conceived by Osama bin Laden and his terror network and how the White House, the military and other government agencies responded on the morning of Sept. 11.

The interim staff report issued Thursday offered harsh criticism of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, which is responsible for defense of the nation’s airspace, and the F.A.A., which tracked the hijacked flights, and said they had been unable to share information quickly or coherently as the terrorist attack unfolded.

Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, the commander of Norad, testified to the commission that had information about the hijackings been passed along faster from the F.A.A. - and had there been an immediate shoot-down order - fighter jets could have intercepted and shot down most or all of the hijacked planes, a statement that was received by commission members with skepticism. "I’m assuming that they told us, F.A.A. told us as soon as they knew," General Eberhart said.

The staff report included an exhaustive minute-by-minute re-creation of the morning of the attacks, showing that there had never been a hope of intercepting and shooting down the planes before they hit their targets because of communication gaps between Norad and the F.A.A., which prevented armed fighter jets from being scrambled fast enough. The timeline demonstrated that the last of the four planes had crashed before Mr. Cheney ordered the shoot downs.

The report found, as the panel has indicated before, that a passenger uprising aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, was what had prevented the plane from reaching its intended target in Washington.

"The nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93," the staff wrote. "Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction."

Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged in testimony to the commission on Thursday that the Pentagon’s planning had always focused on threats from abroad - not from a terrorist strike launched from within the nation’s borders - and that "the lessons learned from 9/11 are many."

After the hearing, the panel’s chairman, Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, said there was "great chaos" within the government on the morning of Sept. 11. "This is a story of a lot of problems, and shame on us if we don’t learn from them," Mr. Kean said.

He suggested that the military’s faults went far beyond a failure of planning and strategy and that the events of Sept. 11 posed a more fundamental question about its willingness to follow a chain of command that begins with the president.

"That’s very, very disturbing," said Mr. Kean, whose commission is expected to recommend a sweeping overhaul of the structure of the nation’s intelligence community and of the government’s emergency-response systems. "When the president of the United States gives a shoot-down order, and the pilots who are supposed to carry it out do not get that order, then that’s about as serious as it gets as far as the defense of this country goes."

The staff report found that the extraordinary order allowing fighter pilots to shoot down passenger planes was issued by Mr. Cheney at the White House shortly after 10:10 a.m., minutes after a telephone conversation with Mr. Bush from Florida in which the president is said to have approved the decision.

According to notes of the call cited by the commission, Mr. Bush told the vice president: "Sounds like we have a minor war going on here. I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war."

But the commission’s investigators found that while the shoot-down order had been relayed to the Pentagon, it had not been shared by Norad commanders with fighter pilots then in the skies over New York and Washington.

Their report found that one commander did not pass along the order "because he was unaware of its ramifications," while two other officers said "they were unsure how pilots would, or should, proceed with this guidance."

"In short," the report said, "while leaders in Washington believed the fighters circling above them had been instructed to ’take out’ hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed" to the pilots were to try to locate the hijacked planes.

The confusion of that morning was so great, the report found, that Mr. Cheney told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a teleconference at 10:39 that he had received information that two of the hijacked planes had already been brought down on his order. "It’s my understanding that they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out," he said.

The report also provides an explanation of one of the lingering mysteries of Mr. Bush’s actions on the day of the attacks: why he remained in a meeting with pupils at the Florida elementary school for between five and seven minutes after he was interrupted in the classroom by his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., and told that the major terrorist attack was under way.

According to the report, Mr. Bush told commission members in his interview with the panel this spring that his "instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis." The president, it said, "felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."

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