Comes from this link at the
Times (subscription req'd).
Specifically it is, who was in charge on the morning of September 11th?
Here's to hoping this comes out correctly.
"There was only one set of fighters orbiting Washington, D.C., during this time frame," the report said, referring to a pair of F-16's from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. "They were armed and under Norad's control."
But they had not been told that they were authorized to shoot down an aircraft, contrary to what Vice President Dick Cheney thought at that time. In fact, the report noted, "the Langley pilots were never briefed about the reason they were scrambled" and did not know that the vice president had ordered that a Washington-bound hijacked jet be shot down.
According to the highlighted passage, Air Force pilots were not given any order to shoot down hijacked airliners. In fact, the pilots official mission at the time was:
[T]o identify and divert aircraft flying within a certain radius of Washington, but [they] did not know that the threat came from hijacked commercial airliners
One pilot who was circling DC at the time even noted:
I reverted to the Russian threat...I'm thinking cruise missile threat from the sea.
So using this information, we know that no order was given by NORAD to shoot down anything. NORAD takes their command from, ultimately, the President of the United States. It can be implied from this that the President did not give an order to have anything shot down on 9/11. If he did and NORAD didn't issue this order, then there was a breakdown in the chain of command, and there was no one in command.
But here's where it gets strange. The well documented discussion between VP Cheney and Sec. Rumsfeld follows:
The confusion was illustrated in a telephone exchange between Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that began at 10:30 a.m., almost an hour after the Pentagon was struck and, although they did not know it, 27 minutes after Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Cheney said he had given authorization for hijacked airliners to be shot down.
"Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?" Mr. Rumsfeld asked.
"Yes, it has," Mr. Cheney replied, unaware that the fighter pilots from Langley had not been so instructed. A moment later, Mr. Cheney said, "it's my understanding they've already taken a couple aircraft out."
"We can't confirm that," Mr. Rumsfeld replied.
So, the Vice President believed that an order to shoot down hijacked airliners was given, in fact, that he had given such an order. At that time, 2 more F-16's were scrambled with the expressed mission of shooting down hijacked airliners.
I assume that the Vice President is authorized to make these decisions in the event that the President is incapacitated (being hustled into a secure location, etc. - no snark here, if the Secret Service has 4 burly men pushing you into a car, then plane, you really can't make decisions). So with the President incapacitated, and the VP making military decisions (specifically ordering the downing of hijacked airliners), and those orders not making it through NORAD to the pilots that could have done something about it; who was in charge? At what time did the Vice President order the downings? Was the President consulted? If the order came early enough (I seem to remember a bit of a lag between the first 3 crashes and then the PA one), why were the pilots of the F-16's not aware of their updated mission until 10:45?
This could be tinfoil hat territory, but it just seems strange to me that the VP is giving a military order, and that order isn't passed to pilots, and the Defense Secretary seems to be the last to know about it. Who was in charge while our nation was under attack?