BEN-VENISTE: Let me direct my remaining time to General Eberhart and General Arnold.

Why did no one mention the false report received from FAA that flight 11 was heading south during your initial appearance before the 9/11 Commission back in May of last year? And why was there no report to us that, contrary to the statements made at the time, that there had been no notification to NORAD that flight 77 was a hijack?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49429-2004Jun17?language=printer

BEN-VENISTE: General, is it not a fact that the failure to call our attention to the miscommunication and the notion of a phantom flight 11 continuing from New York City south, in fact, skewed the whole reporting of 9/11? It skewed the official Air Force report, which is contained in a book called "Air War Over America," which does not contain any information about the fact that you were following or thinking of a continuation of flight 11 and that you had not received notification that flight 77 had been hijacked?

ARNOLD: Well, as I recall, first of all, I didn't know the call signs of the airplanes when these things happened. When the call came that American 11 was a possible hijacked aircraft, that aircraft just led me to come to a conclusion that there were other aircraft in the system that were a threat to the United States.

BEN-VENISTE: General Arnold, surely by May of last year, when you testified before this commission, you knew those facts.

ARNOLD: I didn't recall those facts in May of last year. That's the correct answer to that.

BEN-VENISTE: General Arnold,...

ARNOLD: It didn't happen.

BEN-VENISTE: ...according to source...

ARNOLD: We scrambled those aircraft to get them over Washington, D.C., to protect Washington, D.C.

BEN-VENISTE: According to our staff, you know that there was a substantial problem in getting information from NORAD; that we received information, we were told that the information was complete, we went out into the field -- our staff did and did a number of interviews.

And as a result of those interviews, we found that there were tapes which reflected the facts relating to flight 11. And we found additional information by which we were able, through assiduous and painstaking work, listening to any number of tape recordings, to reconstruct what actually occurred as you have heard in the staff statement.

EBERHART: Yes. The Northeast Air Defense sector apparently had a tape that we were unaware of at the time. And you're -- and to the best of my knowledge, what I've been told by your staff is that they were unable to make that tape run.

EBERHART: Though they were later able to -- your staff was able, through a contractor, to get that tape to run.

And so, to the best of my knowledge, that was an accurate statement in May that I did not know of any tape recordings. If I would have had them available to me, it certainly would have been -- I would have been able to give you more accurate information.

Our focus was on when the events occurred, and we did not focus on when we -- we didn't have a record -- I did not have a record of when we had been told different things.

BEN-VENISTE: In order to clarify it, When I asked the question, "Let me ask you whether there's a regularly made tape recording of these open line indications?" General Arnold answered "Not to my knowledge," and General McKinley answered, "Not to my knowledge."

It was through the painstaking investigation that discovered these tapes and then our staff listening to those tapes which assisted us in being able to provide the level of detail and accuracy which we've done today.

MYERS
So as far as I'm concerned, the command and control was -- it was in place, the secretary, except for the short period of time that he went outside to examine where the aircraft came into the Pentagon and then to help, because at that point they needed hands and he lended his hand to help those injured and those responding, but then came back in some time around 10 o'clock and was upstairs -- I know he talked to the president, I know he -- some time in there I know he went to the -- what we call the ESC, but where the communications for the secretary's office goes through.


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GORELICK: General Myers, if you listen to the staff statement this morning, I think the question that has to be on the minds of the American people is: Where was our military when it should have been defending us? I think that's a fair question from a layman's point of view.

And the response of NORAD, which you used to command and which General Eberhart now commands, is that NORAD was not postured to defend us domestically unless someone was coming at us from abroad.

And that has lots of implications: It has implications for where our fighters were to dispatch, how much we cared about the internal radars which didn't function particularly well, which you were, at NORAD, dependent on. It has implications for whether you can communicate with your fighter pilots when they're up in the air in the interior of the country. It has implications for how you quickly get authorities to the pilots.

And so I want to explore very briefly this question with you. Because for years the Department of Defense did, in fact, resist having a domestic mission, and with all due respect, said, "This was a law enforcement function; we do not have a domestic role." It was very uncomfortable with that role and I think it's important to address that.

Now, that's why I come back to this word "posture." We were postured against an external threat.

In my experience, the military is very clear about its charters and who is supposed to do what. And so, if you go back and you look at the foundational documents for NORAD, they do not say "defend us only against a threat coming in from across the ocean or across our borders."

It has two missions, and one of them is control of the airspace above the domestic United States, and aerospace control is defined as "providing surveillance and control of the air space of Canada and the United States."

To me, that air sovereignty concept means that you have a role which, if you were postured only externally, you defined out of the job.

So I have two questions for you.

By what process was it decided to only posture us against a foreign threat, if you will?

GORELICK: And two, if you look at, you know, the threats that were postulated to the military, in the 1996 Olympics of a domestic hijacking, flying a plane into one of the stadiums in Atlanta, the 1998 PDB about an aircraft loaded with explosives, the kind of exercise that we did around the NATO 50th anniversary, the Genoa G-8, the threats that Secretary Lehman is talking about, I would like to know, as a second question, is it your job, and if not, whose job is it, to make current assessments of a threat and decide whether you're positioned correctly to carry out a mission which, at least on paper, NORAD had?

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KERREY: I've got some concern for the military in this whole situation, because the optics for me is that you all are taking a bullet for the FAA.

KERREY: I appreciate that may be wrong but that's how it appears. Because, General Arnold, you in particular on the day, covered yourself in glory. And I think the military performed, under the circumstances, exceptionally well.

And I don't understand why the -- and again, General Myers is the guy to ask because there was a briefing at the White House on the 17th of September. And it feels like something happened in that briefing that produced almost a necessity to deliver a story that's different than what actually happened on that day.

Now, General Arnold, is that an unfair optic on my part?

Because, as I said, if you look at what you all did on that day, it's hard to find fault. And we really haven't uncovered this stuff. I mean, it's readily available; I mean, the facts are all there. And so it leaves the impression that there was an attempt to create a unified story here. And has you all, as I said, taken a bullet for the FAA. Because the FAA should have told you what was going on, it seems to me.

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ROEMER: General Eberhart, a question about our training posture on the day of 9/11. On page 5 of our staff statement, the FAA says at 8:38 in the morning, "High Boston Center TMU, we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed toward New York and we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there. Help us out." NIAD (ph) says, "Is this real world or an exercise?"

My question is, you were postured for an exercise against the former Soviet Union. Did that help or hurt? Did that help in terms of were more people prepared? Did you have more people ready? Were more fighters fueled with more fuel? Or did this hurt in terms of people thinking, "No, there's no possibility that this is real world; we're engaged in an exercise," and delay things? Shouldn't it have both impacts?

EBERHART: Sir, my belief is that it helped because of the manning, because of the focus, because the crews -- they have to be airborne in 15 minutes and that morning, because of the exercise, they were airborne in six or eight minutes. And so I believe that focus helped.

The situation that you're referring to, it most cost us 30 seconds, 30 seconds for...

ROEMER: That's what we have recorded.

ROEMER: I just wondered if there was more of that down the line.

EBERHART: No, it became painfully clear, Commissioner, that this was not an exercise.