User:JDG/texthold

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Contents 1 TEXTHOLD 2 Greystone 3 NYT op-ed piece on Race 4 Figs 5 Advertising slogans 6 Vanity Fair piece by Michael Bronner 7 ABC NEWS TRANSCRIPT

[edit] TEXTHOLD

This page is to hold text and notes I plan to use in some way in future editing.

[edit] Greystone

Following is text from http://www.gpph.net/history.html. Must write to greystonepark@gmail.com for use permission.

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The State Asylum for the Insane at Morristown was conceived, designed and constructed in the 1870s as a state of the art medical facility for the treatment of mental illness. The Asylum's varied history illustrates important developments in institutional architecture, state care for the mentally ill, and American psychiatry. Yet, the Asylum for the Insane at Morristown has been overlooked in discussions of New Jersey history, medical history, and the history of asylums. Built as a "modern" hospital for the insane, it continued to be a leader in psychiatric care during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The institutions' continued professionalism was due to the superintendents' high regard for patient care and for their attention to, and application of, the most advanced principles of psychiatric care and medical treatment for the benefit of their patients. Originally designed to house and treat 600 patients, the asylum, later renamed Greystone, grew into a self-contained community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first 75 years of its history, the facility expanded to accommodate over 6,000 patients. This extraordinary growth created serious difficulties in providing the individualized care for which Victorian asylums were originally designed. Greystone's superintendents implemented innovative solutions to treat and care for the large patient population and the facility that housed them.

In 1871, the asylum commissioners selected a site for the new asylum in Hanover Township, Morris County to house various classes of patients in separate wards, each having dining and exercise rooms. The location was three miles from Morristown, and one quarter of a mile from Morris Plains. Like the Trenton asylum, it gave patients the benefit of a peaceful and beautiful rural setting. The site was also close to Newark, Jersey City, and Paterson, the major industrial cities of northern New Jersey. Greystone’s rural setting provided for a healthful, quiet, bucolic setting for its patients, yet it was easily accessible by train for patient visitors and state officials, and for receiving supplies. The site also had ample spring water and a granite quarry. The initial purchase consisted of 335 acres costing almost $67,000. The chairman of the committee for locating and purchasing a site, George Vail, had to resign when it was found that he was either a part or full owner of the land selected. Additional contracts were purchased between 1871 and 1872, bringing the total cost to the state to nearly $79,000 for 408 acres. Construction was supervised by Major Martin B. Monroe and Dr. Horace A. Buttolph.

The asylum building was built on Dr. Thomas S. Kirkbride’s asylum principles known as “The Kirkbride Plan.” Greystone’s patientcare principles and employee attitudes were based on Kirkbride’s philosophy and were firmly established under the first superintendent, Horace Buttolph. Buttolph was a friend of Kirkbride’s. He was a firm believer in the Kirkbride Plan as demonstrated by his administration at the Trenton Asylum and at Greystone. Buttolph's basic principles continued under succeeding superintendents and medical directors.

Architect Samuel Sloan and Trenton State Asylum Superintendent Buttolph collaborated and designed Greystone’s internal space in the Kirkbride Plan in accordance with the most advanced philosophy given to asylum patient care of the period. Construction began on the asylum in 1871. Greystone’s original design allowed for the accommodation of 600 patients with 673,706 square feet. The building’s size was among the largest, if not the largest of the period. For comparison, the Texas State Lunatic Asylum was built around the same time, but could only accommodate 130 patients in 1879. The State Asylum for the Insane at Morristown finally received its first patients from the overcrowded State Lunatic Asylum in Trenton on August 17, 1876. The first 292 patients transferred were originally from northern New Jersey. Thereafter, Greystone received patients from the northern counties, while the Trenton asylum received them from the southern counties. This arrangement practically guaranteed that Greystone would be plagued with problems of overcrowding because the northern counties had a large industrial immigrant population yet the southern ones were predominately agricultural. The Board of Commissioners in Trenton announced the asylum’s opening and availability for admissions in northern New Jersey newspapers. By October 1876, 54 additional patients had been admitted, for a total of 346 patients “nearly all of whom were of the most unfavorable class.” After the opening, the State Board of Managers made weekly visits to Greystone and in 1876 testified to the “faithful and humane manner in which the various attendants have performed their duties, and the perfect order and cleanliness in which the various wards dormitories and other apartments are kept in.”

The Morristown facility faced the challenge of over-crowding early in its history. In 1880, the asylum population in New Jersey was 1,632, divided almost equally between the asylum in Trenton and the new asylum in Morristown. By 1914, the Morristown Asylum housed 2,412 patients, but had maximum capacity of 1,600 patients, yet the Trenton asylum had only 1,600 patients in the 1914 census of state institutions. While the patient population at the State Asylum in Trenton remained constant, Greystone's patient load increased rapidly and impacted patient care. To relieve overcrowding, many states constructed new asylums. In comparison with other states, New Jersey funded few asylums. After Greystone’s opening in 1876, the Garden State had only two state funded asylums where as New York had nine, Ohio had seven, Michigan had five, and even Mississippi had four state funded asylums.

In 1887, eleven years after the hospital opened, the exercise rooms on the wards were converted to dormitories to accommodate the hospital's jump in population. In 1901, in attempt to relieve the overcrowding, the Dormitory Building was built to the rear of the Main Building. It still wasn't enough and in the same year the Main Building dining rooms had to be converted into dormitories.

In 1921, a survey conducted by the State Board of Mental Hygiene, found all State Hospitals overcrowded and in dire need of repairs, especially Greystone Park. The State funded repairs and new construction, specifically to assist Greystone Park's expansion and to meet the needs of the 2,700 patients. As a result, by 1927, the Curry Complex was completed along with a new power plant, barns, greenhouses, a fire station and auxiliary buildings. The Curry Complex consisted of a Reception Building, Clinic Building, large staff congregate dining rooms and new housing for staff. The Clinic Building, which was the first building opened in 1923, closed 52 years later when the Central Avenue Complex opened in 1975. The Reception Building was closed in 1976 and the dining rooms in the mid-1980's.

In 1924 the hospital was renamed Greystone Park after the building stones which are a light grey gneiss, resembling granite. By then the use of the word "Lunatic" was dropped from common use when referring to the mentally ill. In 1929 and 1930 there were two serious fires in the Main Building, one destroyed the attic and the other fire destroyed the first floor center. Both fires were started as a reult of unsupervised fireplaces which were commonly used throughout the hospital.

In 1930 the Chest Building (TB Treatment Center) and 30 Ellis Drive were opened. The Chest Building housed mentally ill patients suffering from tuberculosis. Due to the decrease in tuberculosis, this building was closed in the mid 1970's. 30 Ellis Drive was eventually used as the Children's Unit (patients under the age of 18) It closed in the early 1980's and remodeled for adult patient occupancy. Today, it is presently in use as the Admission Unit. In 1940, 10 and 50 Ellis Drive opened, and in 1974, 34 years later a major renovation was completed.

In the late 1940's Greystone Park's patient population had reached 7,000. During this period many patients were veterans and victims of World War II "Postwar Trauma." At the time, Greystone was one of the few hospitals able to provide the only available treatment for this condition which was Insulin Shock Coma and Electro-Convulsive Therapy.

The late 1970's and early 1980's saw a movement toward de-institutionalization which further reduced the hospital's census.

106 years later, on another Summer Day, August 12, 1982, the hospital expanded its facilities when it officially opened twenty "independent living" cottages; each cottage providing housing for eight patients.

In 1999, an affiliation agreement was instituted between Greystone Park and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) was established. Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital currently serves 550 patients. The Hospital because of its aging physical plant will be replaced with a new building that will continue to serve the Northern Region of New Jersey. The Kirkbride will be renovated and saved due to its historical value. Future plans for the Kirkbride remain unclear.

Margaret Shultz & Janet J. Monroe

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[edit] NYT op-ed piece on Race

(would love to carefully paraphrase this piece into a single paragraph for Race)

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New York Times March 14, 2005 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR A Family Tree in Every Gene By ARMAND MARIE LEROI

London — Shortly after last year's tsunami devastated the lands on the Indian Ocean, The Times of India ran an article with this headline: "Tsunami May Have Rendered Threatened Tribes Extinct." The tribes in question were the Onge, Jarawa, Great Andamanese and Sentinelese - all living on the Andaman Islands - and they numbered some 400 people in all. The article, noting that several of the archipelago's islands were low-lying, in the direct path of the wave, and that casualties were expected to be high, said, "Some beads may have just gone missing from the Emerald Necklace of India."

The metaphor is as colorful as it is well intentioned. But what exactly does it mean? After all, in a catastrophe that cost more than 150,000 lives, why should the survival of a few hundred tribal people have any special claim on our attention? There are several possible answers to this question. The people of the Andamans have a unique way of life. True, their material culture does not extend beyond a few simple tools, and their visual art is confined to a few geometrical motifs, but they are hunter-gatherers and so a rarity in the modern world. Linguists, too, find them interesting since they collectively speak three languages seemingly unrelated to any others. But the Times of India took a slightly different tack. These tribes are special, it said, because they are of "Negrito racial stocks" that are "remnants of the oldest human populations of Asia and Australia."

It's an old-fashioned, even Victorian, sentiment. Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter - and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome. The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years.

But now, perhaps, that is about to change. Last fall, the prestigious journal Nature Genetics devoted a large supplement to the question of whether human races exist and, if so, what they mean. The journal did this in part because various American health agencies are making race an important part of their policies to best protect the public - often over the protests of scientists. In the supplement, some two dozen geneticists offered their views. Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist.

The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an "indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge." Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.

Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.

The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.

But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.

One of the minor pleasures of this discovery is a new kind of genealogy. Today it is easy to find out where your ancestors came from - or even when they came, as with so many of us, from several different places. If you want to know what fraction of your genes are African, European or East Asian, all it takes is a mouth swab, a postage stamp and $400 - though prices will certainly fall.

Yet there is nothing very fundamental about the concept of the major continental races; they're just the easiest way to divide things up. Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map. This has not yet been done with any precision, but it will be. Soon it may be possible to identify your ancestors not merely as African or European, but Ibo or Yoruba, perhaps even Celt or Castilian, or all of the above.

The identification of racial origins is not a search for purity. The human species is irredeemably promiscuous. We have always seduced or coerced our neighbors even when they have a foreign look about them and we don't understand a word. If Hispanics, for example, are composed of a recent and evolving blend of European, American Indian and African genes, then the Uighurs of Central Asia can be seen as a 3,000-year-old mix of West European and East Asian genes. Even homogenous groups like native Swedes bear the genetic imprint of successive nameless migrations.

Some critics believe that these ambiguities render the very notion of race worthless. I disagree. The physical topography of our world cannot be accurately described in words. To navigate it, you need a map with elevations, contour lines and reference grids. But it is hard to talk in numbers, and so we give the world's more prominent features - the mountain ranges and plateaus and plains - names. We do so despite the inherent ambiguity of words. The Pennines of northern England are about one-tenth as high and long as the Himalayas, yet both are intelligibly described as mountain ranges.

So, too, it is with the genetic topography of our species. The billion or so of the world's people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well. Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.

But it is a shorthand that seems to be needed. One of the more painful spectacles of modern science is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between "ethnic groups." Given the problematic, even vicious, history of the word "race," the use of euphemisms is understandable. But it hardly aids understanding, for the term "ethnic group" conflates all the possible ways in which people differ from each other.

Indeed, the recognition that races are real should have several benefits. To begin with, it would remove the disjunction in which the government and public alike defiantly embrace categories that many, perhaps most, scholars and scientists say do not exist.

Second, the recognition of race may improve medical care. Different races are prone to different diseases. The risk that an African-American man will be afflicted with hypertensive heart disease or prostate cancer is nearly three times greater than that for a European-American man. On the other hand, the former's risk of multiple sclerosis is only half as great. Such differences could be due to socioeconomic factors. Even so, geneticists have started searching for racial differences in the frequencies of genetic variants that cause diseases. They seem to be finding them.

Race can also affect treatment. African-Americans respond poorly to some of the main drugs used to treat heart conditions - notably beta blockers and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors. Pharmaceutical corporations are paying attention. Many new drugs now come labeled with warnings that they may not work in some ethnic or racial groups. Here, as so often, the mere prospect of litigation has concentrated minds.

Such differences are, of course, just differences in average. Everyone agrees that race is a crude way of predicting who gets some disease or responds to some treatment. Ideally, we would all have our genomes sequenced before swallowing so much as an aspirin. Yet until that is technically feasible, we can expect racial classifications to play an increasing part in health care.

The argument for the importance of race, however, does not rest purely on utilitarian grounds. There is also an aesthetic factor. We are a physically variable species. Yet for all the triumphs of modern genetics, we know next to nothing about what makes us so. We do not know why some people have prominent rather than flat noses, round rather than pointed skulls, wide rather than narrow faces, straight rather than curly hair. We do not know what makes blue eyes blue.

One way to find out would be to study people of mixed race ancestry. In part, this is because racial differences in looks are the most striking that we see. But there is also a more subtle technical reason. When geneticists map genes, they rely on the fact that they can follow our ancestors' chromosomes as they get passed from one generation to the next, dividing and mixing in unpredictable combinations. That, it turns out, is much easier to do in people whose ancestors came from very different places.

The technique is called admixture mapping. Developed to find the genes responsible for racial differences in inherited disease, it is only just moving from theory to application. But through it, we may be able to write the genetic recipe for the fair hair of a Norwegian, the black-verging-on-purple skin of a Solomon Islander, the flat face of an Inuit, and the curved eyelid of a Han Chinese. We shall no longer gawp ignorantly at the gallery; we shall be able to name the painters.

There is a final reason race matters. It gives us reason - if there were not reason enough already - to value and protect some of the world's most obscure and marginalized people. When the Times of India article referred to the Andaman Islanders as being of ancient Negrito racial stock, the terminology was correct. Negrito is the name given by anthropologists to a people who once lived throughout Southeast Asia. They are very small, very dark, and have peppercorn hair. They look like African pygmies who have wandered away from Congo's jungles to take up life on a tropical isle. But they are not.

The latest genetic data suggest that the Negritos are descended from the first modern humans to have invaded Asia, some 100,000 years ago. In time they were overrun or absorbed by waves of Neolithic agriculturalists, and later nearly wiped out by British, Spanish and Indian colonialists. Now they are confined to the Malay Peninsula, a few islands in the Philippines and the Andamans.

Happily, most of the Andamans' Negritos seem to have survived December's tsunami. The fate of one tribe, the Sentinelese, remains uncertain, but an Indian coast guard helicopter sent to check up on them came under bow and arrow attack, which is heartening. Even so, Negrito populations, wherever they are, are so small, isolated and impoverished that it seems certain that they will eventually disappear.

Yet even after they have gone, the genetic variants that defined the Negritos will remain, albeit scattered, in the people who inhabit the littoral of the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. They will remain visible in the unusually dark skin of some Indonesians, the unusually curly hair of some Sri Lankans, the unusually slight frames of some Filipinos. But the unique combination of genes that makes the Negritos so distinctive, and that took tens of thousands of years to evolve, will have disappeared. A human race will have gone extinct, and the human species will be the poorer for it.

Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of "Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body."

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[edit] Figs

Use below to update History section of Agriculture: <begin quote>

June 2, 2006 In West Bank, a First Hint of Agriculture: Figs By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

In the ruins of a prehistoric village near Jericho, in the West Bank, scientists have found remains of figs that they say appear to be the earliest known cultivated fruit crop, perhaps the first evidence anywhere of domesticated food production at the dawn of agriculture. The figs were grown some 11,400 years ago.

Presumably that was well after Adam and Eve tried on the new look in fig leaves, in which case the fig must have grown wild in Eden.

Two botanists and an archaeologist, who describe the discovery in today's issue of the journal Science, said the figs came from cultivated trees that grew about 1,000 years before such staples as wheat, barley and chickpeas were widely domesticated in the Middle East. These grain and legume crops had been considered the first steps in agriculture.

The researchers uncovered nine small figs in the ruins of a burned building. The fire left the figs charred, preserving them in a condition for detailed analysis. The researchers established the age of the cache by dating the fire's remains.

A comparison with modern wild and domesticated varieties, the scientists said, led them to conclude that the ancient figs had undergone a mutation in the wild that produced a sweet fruit but no fertile seeds.

Because these trees were a reproductive dead end, the botanists reasoned, they could have been propagated only by people planting shoots of the variant strain again and again. A piece of stem stuck in the ground will sprout roots and grow into a tree, which could explain why figs were domesticated much earlier than grapes, olives and other fruit plants.

The archaeobotanists who conducted the study were Mordechai Kislev and Anat Hartman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Their co-author of the journal report was Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at the Peabody Museum of Harvard.

In an interview by telephone from Israel, Dr. Bar-Yosef said that he was "confident about the identification of the figs as being of a domesticated variety" and that they were probably the earliest known domesticated crop. The cultivation technique, he said, seemed to be well enough advanced to suggest that people had thus been intervening in nature for several centuries.

Dr. Bar-Yosef noted that the experimental technique of repeated plantings was similar to the methods by which hunter-gatherers collected wild grains and legumes and gradually developed cultivated crops.

Over the last century, scientists have scoured the Middle East for traces of the origins of agriculture and argued over what the first crops were and where they were grown. Dr. Bar-Yosef contends that the first cultivated grains were introduced in what is now Israel and north into the upper Euphrates River valley. Other researchers think the most likely origins were in southern Turkey.

But scholars agree with Dr. Bar-Yosef that the beginning of agriculture, whether with the first sweet fig or ripe grain, was pivotal in human cultural evolution.

"Eleven thousand years ago, there was a critical switch in the human mind — from exploiting the earth as it is, to actively changing the environment to suit our needs," Dr. Bar-Yosef said in a statement from Harvard. "People decided to intervene in nature and supply their own food rather than relying on what was provided by the gods."

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[edit] Advertising slogans

Standout slogans:

• "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" (United Negro College Fund, USA, via Ad Council)
• "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires" (National Forest Service? via Ad Council)
• "Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk" (??? via Ad Council)
• "Take a Bite Out of Crime" (??? via Ad Council)

Recent slogans:

• "Life comes at you fast" (Nationwide, USA insurance and financial services company)

[edit] Vanity Fair piece by Michael Bronner

(Use as primary source for a "Norad and Neads on 9/11" article?) <begin quote> 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes How did the U.S. Air Force respond on 9/11? Could it have shot down United 93, as conspiracy theorists claim? Obtaining 30 hours of never-before-released tapes from the control room of NORAD's Northeast headquarters, the author reconstructs the chaotic military history of that day—and the Pentagon's apparent attempt to cover it up. VF.com exclusive: Hear excerpts from the September 11 NORAD tapes. Click PLAY after each transcript to listen By MICHAEL BRONNER

ucked in a piney notch in the gentle folds of the Adirondacks' southern skirts—just up from a derelict Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern rail spur—is a 22-year-old aluminum bunker tricked out with antennae tilted skyward. It could pass for the Jetsons' garage or, in the estimation of one of the higher-ranking U.S. Air Force officers stationed there, a big, sideways, half-buried beer keg.

As Major Kevin Nasypany, the facility's mission-crew commander, drove up the hill to work on the morning of 9/11, he was dressed in his flight suit and prepared for battle. Not a real one. The Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), where Nasypany had been stationed since 1994, is the regional headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the Cold War–era military organization charged with protecting North American airspace. As he poured his first coffee on that sunny September morning, the odds that he would have to defend against Russian "Bear Bombers," one of NORAD's traditional simulated missions, were slim. Rather, Nasypany (pronounced Nah-sip-a-nee), an amiable commander with a thick mini-mustache and a hockey player's build, was headed in early to get ready for the NORAD-wide training exercise he'd helped design. The battle commander, Colonel Bob Marr, had promised to bring in fritters.

NEADS is a desolate place, the sole orphan left behind after the dismantling of what was once one of the country's busiest bomber bases—Griffiss Air Force Base, in Rome, New York, which was otherwise mothballed in the mid-90s. NEADS's mission remained in place and continues today: its officers, air-traffic controllers, and air-surveillance and communications technicians—mostly American, with a handful of Canadian troops—are responsible for protecting a half-million-square-mile chunk of American airspace stretching from the East Coast to Tennessee, up through the Dakotas to the Canadian border, including Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

It was into this airspace that violence descended on 9/11, and from the NEADS operations floor that what turned out to be the sum total of America's military response during those critical 100-some minutes of the attack—scrambling four armed fighter jets and one unarmed training plane—emanated.

The story of what happened in that room, and when, has never been fully told, but is arguably more important in terms of understanding America's military capabilities that day than anything happening simultaneously on Air Force One or in the Pentagon, the White House, or NORAD's impregnable headquarters, deep within Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado. It's a story that was intentionally obscured, some members of the 9/11 commission believe, by military higher-ups and members of the Bush administration who spoke to the press, and later the commission itself, in order to downplay the extent of the confusion and miscommunication flying through the ranks of the government.

The truth, however, is all on tape.

Through the heat of the attack the wheels of what were, perhaps, some of the more modern pieces of equipment in the room—four Dictaphone multi-channel reel-to-reel tape recorders mounted on a rack in a corner of the operations floor—spun impassively, recording every radio channel, with time stamps.

The recordings are fascinating and chilling. A mix of staccato bursts of military code; urgent, overlapping voices; the tense crackle of radio traffic from fighter pilots in the air; commanders' orders piercing through a mounting din; and candid moments of emotion as the breadth of the attacks becomes clearer.

For the NEADS crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings—some real, some phantom—that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening. At one point, in the span of a single mad minute, one hears Nasypany struggling to parse reports of four separate hijackings at once. What emerges from the barrage of what Nasypany dubs "bad poop" flying at his troops from all directions is a picture of remarkable composure. Snap decisions more often than not turn out to be the right ones as commanders kick-start the dormant military machine. It is the fog and friction of war live—the authentic military history of 9/11.

"The real story is actually better than the one we told," a NORAD general admitted to 9/11-commission staffers when confronted with evidence from the tapes that contradicted his original testimony. And so it seems.

Subpoenaed by the commission during its investigation, the recordings have never been played publicly beyond a handful of sound bites presented during the commission's hearings. Last September, as part of my research for the film United 93, on which I was an associate producer, I requested copies from the Pentagon. I was played snippets, but told my chances of hearing the full recordings were nonexistent. So it was a surprise, to say the least, when a military public-affairs officer e-mailed me, a full seven months later, saying she'd been cleared, finally, to provide them.

"The signing of the Declaration of Independence took less coordination," she wrote.

I would ultimately get three CDs with huge digital "wav file" recordings of the various channels in each section of the operations floor, 30-some hours of material in full, covering six and a half hours of real time. The first disc, which arrived by mail, was decorated with blue sky and fluffy white clouds and was labeled, in the playful Apple Chancery font, "Northeast Air Defense Sector—DAT Audio Files—11 Sep 2001."

"This is not an exercise"t 8:14 a.m., as an Egyptian and four Saudis commandeered the cockpit on American 11, the plane that would hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, only a handful of troops were on the NEADS "ops" floor. That's the facility's war room: a dimly lit den arrayed with long rows of radarscopes and communications equipment facing a series of 15-foot screens lining the front wall. The rest of the crew, about 30 Americans and five or six Canadians, were checking e-mails or milling around the hall. A briefing on the morning's training exercise was wrapping up in the Battle Cab, the glassed-in command area overlooking the ops floor.

On the Dictaphone decks, an automated voice on each channel ticked off, in Greenwich Mean Time, the last few moments of life in pre-9/11 America: "12 hours, 26 minutes, 20 seconds"—just before 8:30 a.m. eastern daylight time.

The first human voices captured on tape that morning are those of the "ID techs"—Senior Airman Stacia Rountree, 23 at the time, Tech Sergeant Shelley Watson, 40, and their boss, Master Sergeant Maureen "Mo" Dooley, 40. They are stationed in the back right corner of the ops floor at a console with several phones and a radarscope. Their job in a crisis is to facilitate communications between NEADS, the civilian F.A.A., and other military commands, gathering whatever information they can and sending it up the chain. Dooley—her personality at once motherly and aggressive—generally stands behind the other two, who are seated.

The tapes catch them discussing strategy of an entirely domestic order:

08:37:08O.K., a couch, an ottoman, a love seat, and what else … ? Was it on sale … ? Holy smokes! What color is it?

In the background, however, you can make out the sound of Jeremy Powell, then 31, a burly, amiable technical sergeant, fielding the phone call that will be the military's first notification that something is wrong. On the line is Boston Center, the civilian air-traffic-control facility that handles that region's high-flying airliners.

08:37:52BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.PLAY | STOP

Powell's question—"Is this real-world or exercise?"—is heard nearly verbatim over and over on the tapes as troops funnel onto the ops floor and are briefed about the hijacking. Powell, like almost everyone in the room, first assumes the phone call is from the simulations team on hand to send "inputs"—simulated scenarios—into play for the day's training exercise.

Boston's request for fighter jets is not as prescient as it might seem. Standard hijack protocol calls for fighters to be launched—"scrambled"—merely to establish a presence in the air. The pilots are trained to trail the hijacked plane at a distance of about five miles, out of sight, following it until, presumably, it lands. If necessary, they can show themselves, flying up close to establish visual contact, and, if the situation demands, maneuver to force the plane to land.

At this point, certainly, the notion of actually firing anything at a passenger jet hasn't crossed anyone's mind.

In the ID section, the women overhear the word "hijack" and react, innocently enough, as anyone might with news of something exciting going on at work:

8:37:56WATSON: What?DOOLEY: Whoa!WATSON: What was that?ROUNTREE: Is that real-world?DOOLEY: Real-world hijack.WATSON: Cool!PLAY | STOP

For the first time in their careers, they'll get to put their training to full use.

Almost simultaneously, a P.A. announcement goes out for Major Nasypany, who's taking his morning constitutional.

08:37:58P.A.: Major Nasypany, you're needed in ops pronto. P.A.: Major Nasypany, you're needed in ops pronto.[Recorded phone line:]SERGEANT MCCAIN: Northeast Air Defense Sector, Sergeant McCain, can I help you?SERGEANT KELLY: Yeah, Sergeant Kelly from Otis, how you doing today?SERGEANT MCCAIN: Yeah, go ahead.SERGEANT KELLY: The—I'm gettin' reports from my TRACON [local civilian air traffic] that there might be a possible hijacking.SERGEANT MCCAIN: I was just hearing the same thing. We're workin' it right now.SERGEANT KELLY: O.K., thanks.PLAY | STOP

"When they told me there was a hijack, my first reaction was 'Somebody started the exercise early,'" Nasypany later told me. The day's exercise was designed to run a range of scenarios, including a "traditional" simulated hijack in which politically motivated perpetrators commandeer an aircraft, land on a Cuba-like island, and seek asylum. "I actually said out loud, 'The hijack's not supposed to be for another hour,'" Nasypany recalled. (The fact that there was an exercise planned for the same day as the attack factors into several conspiracy theories, though the 9/11 commission dismisses this as coincidence. After plodding through dozens of hours of recordings, so do I.)

n tape, one hears as Nasypany, following standard hijack protocol, prepares to launch two fighters from Otis Air National Guard Base, on Cape Cod, to look for American 11, which is now off course and headed south. He orders his Weapons Team—the group on the ops floor that controls the fighters—to put the Otis planes on "battle stations." This means that at the air base the designated "alert" pilots—two in this case—are jolted into action by a piercing "battle horn." They run to their jets, climb up, strap in, and do everything they need to do to get ready to fly short of starting the engines.

Meanwhile, the communications team at NEADS—the ID techs Dooley, Rountree, and Watson—are trying to find out, as fast as possible, everything they can about the hijacked plane: the airline, the flight number, the tail number (to help fighter pilots identify it in the air), its flight plan, the number of passengers ("souls on board" in military parlance), and, most important, where it is, so Nasypany can launch the fighters. All the ID section knows is that the plane is American Airlines, Flight No. 11, Boston to Los Angeles, currently somewhere north of John F. Kennedy International Airport—the point of reference used by civilian controllers.

ID tech Watson places a call to the management desk at Boston Center, which first alerted NEADS to the hijack, and gets distressing news.

08:39:58WATSON: It's the inbound to J.F.K.?BOSTON CENTER: We—we don't know.WATSON: You don't know where he is at all?BOSTON CENTER: He's being hijacked. The pilot's having a hard time talking to the—I mean, we don't know. We don't know where he's goin'. He's heading towards Kennedy. He's—like I said, he's like 35 miles north of Kennedy now at 367 knots. We have no idea where he's goin' or what his intentions are.WATSON: If you could please give us a call and let us know—you know any information, that'd be great.BOSTON CENTER: Okay. Right now, I guess we're trying to work on—I guess there's been some threats in the cockpit. The pilot—WATSON: There's been what?! I'm sorry.UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Threat to the … ?BOSTON CENTER: We'll call you right back as soon as we know more info.

Dooley is standing over Watson, shouting whatever pertinent information she hears to Nasypany, who's now in position in the center of the floor.

08:40:36DOOLEY: O.K., he said threat to the cockpit!PLAY | STOP

This last bit ratchets the tension in the room up considerably.

At Otis Air National Guard Base, the pilots are in their jets, straining at the reins. ("When the horn goes off, it definitely gets your heart," F-15 pilot Major Dan Nash later told me, thumping his chest with his hand.) But at NEADS, Nasypany's "tracker techs" in the Surveillance section still can't find American 11 on their scopes. As it turns out, this is just as the hijackers intended.

Radar is the NEADS controllers' most vital piece of equipment, but by 9/11 the scopes were so old, among other factors, that controllers were ultimately unable to find any of the hijacked planes in enough time to react. Known collectively as the Green Eye for the glow the radar rings give off, the scopes looked like something out of Dr. Strangelove and were strikingly anachronistic compared with the equipment at civilian air-traffic sites. (After 9/11, NEADS was equipped with state-of-the-art equipment.)

In order to find a hijacked airliner—or any airplane—military controllers need either the plane's beacon code (broadcast from an electronic transponder on board) or the plane's exact coordinates. When the hijackers on American 11 turned the beacon off, intentionally losing themselves in the dense sea of airplanes already flying over the U.S. that morning (a tactic that would be repeated, with some variations, on all the hijacked flights), the NEADS controllers were at a loss.

"You would see thousands of green blips on your scope," Nasypany told me, "and now you have to pick and choose. Which is the bad guy out there? Which is the hijacked aircraft? And without that information from F.A.A., it's a needle in a haystack."

At this point in the morning, more than 3,000 jetliners are already in the air over the continental United States, and the Boston controller's direction—"35 miles north of Kennedy"—doesn't help the NEADS controllers at all.

On tape, amid the confusion, one hears Major James Fox, then 32, the leader of the Weapons Team, whose composure will stand out throughout the attack, make an observation that, so far, ranks as the understatement of the morning.

08:43:06FOX: I've never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise.PLAY | STOP

Less than two minutes later, frustrated that the controllers still can't pinpoint American 11 on radar, Nasypany orders Fox to launch the Otis fighters anyway.

08:44:59FOX: M.C.C. [Mission Crew Commander], I don't know where I'm scrambling these guys to. I need a direction, a destination—NASYPANY: O.K., I'm gonna give you the Z point [coordinate]. It's just north of—New York City.FOX: I got this lat long, 41-15, 74-36, or 73-46.NASYPANY: Head 'em in that direction.FOX: Copy that.PLAY | STOP

Having them up, Nasypany figures, is better than having them on the ground, assuming NEADS will ultimately pin down American 11's position. His job is to be proactive—to try to gain leverage over the situation as fast as possible. His backstop is Colonel Marr, the battle commander and Nasypany's superior up in the Battle Cab, whose role is more strategic, calculating the implications of each move several hours down the line.

Marr, 48 at the time (and since retired), is a well-liked leader. Most of his conversations on 9/11 are unrecorded: he speaks over a secure phone with his superior, Major General Larry Arnold, stationed at NORAD's command center at Tyndall Air Force Base, in Florida, or over an intercom with Nasypany. In the latter case, only Nasypany's side of the conversations is recorded.

In the last lines of his first briefing to Marr, Nasypany unwittingly, in his last line, trumps Fox in the realm of understatement.

08:46:36NASYPANY: Hi, sir. O.K., what—what we're doing, we're tryin' to locate this guy. We can't find him via I.F.F. [the Identification Friend or Foe system]. What we're gonna do, we're gonna hit up every track within a 25-mile radius of this Z-point [coordinate] that we put on the scope. Twenty-nine thousand [feet] heading 1-9-0 [east]. We're just gonna do—we're gonna try to find this guy. They can't find him. There's supposedly been threats to the cockpit. So we're just doing the thing … [off-mic conversation] True. And probably right now with what's going on in the cockpit it's probably really crazy. So, it probably needs to—that will simmer down and we'll probably get some better information.PLAY | STOP

American 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center four seconds into this transmission.

ore than 150 miles from Manhattan, within the same minute as American 11 hits the tower, the stoplight in the Alert Barn at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod turns from red to green, Colonel Marr and General Arnold having approved Nasypany's order to scramble the fighters. The pilots taxi out and fire the afterburners as the planes swing onto the runway. NEADS has no indication yet that American 11 has crashed.

Five minutes later, Rountree, at the ID station, gets the first report of the crash from Boston Center (as her colleagues Watson and Dooley overhear).

08:51:11ROUNTREE: A plane just hit the World Trade Center.WATSON: What?ROUNTREE: Was it a 737?UNIDENTIFIED MALE (background): Hit what?WATSON: The World Trade Center—DOOLEY: Who are you talking to? [Gasps.]WATSON: Oh!DOOLEY: Get—pass—pass it to them—WATSON: Oh my God. Oh God. Oh my God.ROUNTREE: Saw it on the news. It's—a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.DOOLEY: Update New York! See if they lost altitude on that plane altogether.

Watson places a call to civilian controllers at New York Center.

WATSON: Yes, ma'am. Did you just hear the information regarding the World Trade Center?NEW YORK CENTER: No.WATSON: Being hit by an aircraft?NEW YORK CENTER: I'm sorry?!WATSON: Being hit by an aircraft.NEW YORK CENTER: You're kidding.WATSON: It's on the world news.PLAY | STOP

In light of this news, someone asks Nasypany what to do with the fighters—the two F-15s from Otis Air National Guard Base—which have now just blasted off for New York at full afterburner to find American 11. (The flying time at full speed from Cape Cod to New York is about 10 minutes.) Pumped with adrenaline, Nasypany doesn't miss a beat.

08:52:40NASYPANY: Send 'em to New York City still. Continue! Go!NASYPANY: This is what I got. Possible news that a 737 just hit the World Trade Center. This is a real-world. And we're trying to confirm this. Okay. Continue taking the fighters down to the New York City area, J.F.K. area, if you can. Make sure that the F.A.A. clears it— your route all the way through. Do what we gotta do, okay? Let's press with this. It looks like this guy could have hit the World Trade Center.PLAY | STOP

"I'm not gonna stop what I initially started with scrambling Otis—getting Otis over New York City," Nasypany recalled when I played him this section of his tape. "If this is a false report, I still have my fighters where I want them to be."

Meanwhile, confusion is building on the ops floor over whether the plane that hit the tower really was American 11. Rumors that it was a small Cessna have started to circulate through the civilian air-traffic system. ID tech Rountree is on the phone with Boston Center's military liaison, Colin Scoggins, a civilian manager, who at first seems to confirm that it was American 11 that went into the tower.

08:55:18BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yeah, he crashed into the World Trade Center.ROUNTREE: That is the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center?BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yup. Disregard the—disregard the tail number [given earlier for American 11].ROUNTREE: Disregard the tail number? He did crash into the World Trade Center?BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): That's—that's what we believe, yes.PLAY | STOP

But an unidentified male trooper at NEADS overhears the exchange and raises a red flag.

08:56:31MALE NEADS TECH: I never heard them say American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center. I heard it was a civilian aircraft.

Dooley, the ID desk's master sergeant, takes the phone from Rountree to confirm for herself, and the story veers off course …

DOOLEY (to Boston): Master Sergeant Dooley here. We need to have—are you giving confirmation that American 11 was the one—BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): No, we're not gonna confirm that at this time. We just know an aircraft crashed in and …DOOLEY: You—are you—can you say—is anyone up there tracking primary on this guy still?BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): No. The last [radar sighting] we have was about 15 miles east of J.F.K., or eight miles east of J.F.K. was our last primary hit. He did slow down in speed. The primary that we had, it slowed down below—around to 300 knots.DOOLEY: And then you lost 'em?BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yeah, and then we lost 'em.PLAY | STOP

The problem, Scoggins told me later, was that American Airlines refused to confirm for several hours that its plane had hit the tower. This lack of confirmation caused uncertainty that would be compounded in a very big way as the attack continued. (Though airlines have their own means of monitoring the location of their planes and communicating with their pilots, they routinely go into information lockdown in a crisis.)

Amid the chaos, Nasypany notices that some of his people are beginning to panic, so he makes a joke to relieve the tension.

08:57:11NASYPANY: Think we put the exercise on the hold. What do you think? [Laughter.]

Just at that moment, in one of the dark, U-shaped air-traffic-control areas at New York Center, on Long Island, a half-dozen civilian controllers are watching a second plane that's turned off course: United 175, also scheduled from Boston to Los Angeles. As the controllers try to hail the pilots, a manager comes running in and confirms that the plane that hit the first tower was, indeed, a commercial airliner, rather than a small Cessna. It's just at that moment that United 175, 38 minutes into its flight and now near Allentown, Pennsylvania, moving southwest farther and farther off course, makes a sudden swing northeast toward Manhattan. Suddenly—instinctively—the civilian controllers know: it's another hijacking, and it's not going to land.

The controllers start speculating what the hijacker is aiming at—one guesses the Statue of Liberty—and the room erupts in profanity and horror. One controller is looking at his scope, calling out the rate of descent every 12 seconds as he watches the radar refresh. It is not until the last second, literally, that anyone from New York Center thinks to update NEADS. ID tech Rountree fields the call.

09:03:17ROUNTREE: They have a second possible hijack!PLAY | STOP

Almost simultaneously, United 175 slams into the south tower of the World Trade Center, something several NEADS personnel witness live on CNN, including Colonel Marr, the commanding officer. (Dooley told me she remembers looking up toward the Battle Cab and, for a long moment, seeing Marr's jaw drop and everyone around him frozen.)

On the ops floor, there is considerable confusion as to whether the second hijacking New York Center just called in is the same plane that hit the second tower, or whether there are now three missing planes.

09:03:52NASYPANY (to Marr): Sir, we got—we've got unconfirmed second hit from another aircraft. Fighters are south of—just south of Long Island, sir. Right now. Fighters are south of Long Island.

There's seemingly enough commotion in the Battle Cab that Nasypany needs to clarify: "Our fighters … " The two F-15s, scrambled from Otis, are now approaching the city.

In the background, several troops can be heard trying to make sense of what's happening.

09:04:50—Is this explosion part of that that we're lookin' at now on TV?—Yes.—Jesus …—And there's a possible second hijack also—a United Airlines …—Two planes?…—Get the fuck out …—I think this is a damn input, to be honest.PLAY | STOP

The last line—"I think this is a damn input"—is a reference to the exercise, meaning a simulations input. It's either gallows humor or wishful thinking. From the tape, it's hard to tell.

"We've already had two. Why not more?"eanwhile, flying southwest over the ocean, the two fighters from Otis Air National Guard Base are streaking toward Manhattan. The pilots are startled, to say the least, when they see billowing smoke appear on the horizon; no one's briefed them about what's going on. They were scrambled simply to intercept and escort American 11—a possible hijacking—and that is all they know.

"From 100 miles away at least, we could see the fire and the smoke blowing," Major Dan Nash, one of the F-15 pilots, told me. "Obviously, anybody watching CNN had a better idea of what was going on. We were not told anything. It was to the point where we were flying supersonic towards New York and the controller came on and said, 'A second airplane has hit the World Trade Center.' … My first thought was 'What happened to American 11?'"

With both towers now in flames, Nasypany wants the fighters over Manhattan immediately, but the weapons techs get "pushback" from civilian F.A.A. controllers, who have final authority over the fighters as long as they are in civilian airspace. The F.A.A. controllers are afraid of fast-moving fighters colliding with a passenger plane, of which there are hundreds in the area, still flying normal routes—the morning's unprecedented order to ground all civilian aircraft has not yet been given. To Nasypany, the fact that so many planes are still in the sky is all the more reason to get the fighters close. ("We've already had two," he told me, referring to the hijackings. "Why not more?")

The fighters are initially directed to a holding area just off the coast, near Long Island.

asypany isn't happy, and he makes sure that's duly noted for posterity as he calls out to Major Fox, the leader of the Weapons Team.

09:07:20NASYPANY: Okay, Foxy. Plug in. I want to make sure this is on tape.… This is what—this is what I foresee that we probably need to do. We need to talk to F.A.A. We need to tell 'em if this stuff's gonna keep on going, we need to take those fighters on and then put 'em over Manhattan, O.K.? That's the best thing. That's the best play right now. So, coordinate with the F.A.A. Tell 'em if there's more out there, which we don't know, let's get 'em over Manhattan. At least we got some kinda play.PLAY | STOP

He tells the Battle Cab he wants Fox to launch two more fighters from Langley Air Force Base, in Virginia, to establish a greater presence over New York, but the request is refused. The order from the Battle Cab is to put the Langley jets on battle stations only—to be ready, but not to launch.

"The problem there would have been I'd have all my fighters in the air at the same time, which means they'd all run out of gas at the same time," Marr later explained.

Incredibly, Marr has only four armed fighters at his disposal to defend about a quarter of the continental United States. Massive cutbacks at the close of the Cold War reduced NORAD's arsenal of fighters from some 60 battle-ready jets to just 14 across the entire country. (Under different commands, the military generally maintains several hundred unarmed fighter jets for training in the continental U.S.) Only four of NORAD's planes belong to NEADS and are thus anywhere close to Manhattan—the two from Otis, now circling above the ocean off Long Island, and the two in Virginia at Langley.

Nasypany starts walking up and down the floor, asking all his section heads and weapons techs if they are prepared to shoot down a civilian airliner if need be, but he's jumping the gun: he doesn't have the authority to order a shootdown, nor does Marr or Arnold, or Vice President Cheney, for that matter. The order will need to come from President Bush, who has only just learned of the attack at a photo op in Florida.

On the ops floor, you hear Nasypany firmly pressing the issue. He briefs Marr on the armaments on board the F-15s, and how he sees best to use them "if need be":

9:19:44NASYPANY: My recommendation, if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft, we use AIM-9s in the face.… If need be.PLAY | STOP

If there's another hijacking and the jets can engage, Nasypany is telling Marr, a missile fired into the nose of the plane will have the greatest chance of bringing it down.

But the prospect soon becomes real. Mo Dooley's voice erupts from the ID station on the operations floor.

9:21:37DOOLEY: Another hijack! It's headed towards Washington!NASYPANY: Shit! Give me a location.UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Okay. Third aircraft—hijacked—heading toward Washington.PLAY | STOP

This report, received from Colin Scoggins at Boston Center, will set off a major escalation in the military response to the attack, resulting in the launch of additional armed fighter jets. But 20 months later, when the military presents to the 9/11 commission what is supposed to be a full accounting of the day, omitted from the official time line is any mention of this reported hijacking and the fevered chase it engenders.

t was the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, 2003, and the hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building, in Washington, was half empty as the group of mostly retired military brass arranged themselves at the witness table before the 9/11 commission. The story the NORAD officers had come to tell before the commission was a relatively humbling one, a point underscored by the questions commission chairman Thomas Kean introduced during his opening remarks: How did the hijackers defeat the system, and why couldn't we stop them? These were important questions. Nearly two years after the attack, the Internet was rife with questions and conspiracy theories about 9/11—in particular, where were the fighters? Could they have physically gotten to any of the hijacked planes? And did they shoot down the final flight, United 93, which ended up in a Pennsylvania field?

On hand, dressed in business suits (with the exception of Major General Craig McKinley, whose two stars twinkled on either epaulet), were Major General Larry Arnold (retired), who had been on the other end of the secure line with NEADS's Colonel Marr throughout the attack, and Colonel Alan Scott (retired), who had been with Arnold at NORAD's continental command in Florida on 9/11 and who worked closely with Marr in preparing the military's time line. None of the military men were placed under oath.

Their story, in a nutshell, was one of being caught off guard initially, then very quickly ramping up to battle status—in position, and in possession of enough situational awareness to defend the country, and the capital in particular, before United 93, the fourth hijacked plane, would have reached Washington.

Major General Arnold explained to the commission that the military had been tracking United 93 and the fighters were in position if United 93 had threatened Washington. "It was our intent to intercept United Flight 93," Arnold testified. "I was personally anxious to see what 93 was going to do, and our intent was to intercept it."

Colonel Marr, the commanding officer at NEADS on 9/11, had made similar comments to ABC News for its one-year-anniversary special on the attacks, saying that the pilots had been warned they might have to intercept United 93, and stop it if necessary: "And we of course passed that on to the pilots: United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington, D.C."

hen I interviewed him recently, Marr recalled a conversation he had had with Arnold in the heat of the attack. "I remember the words out of General Arnold's mouth, or at least as I remember them, were 'We will take lives in the air to save lives on the ground.'" In actuality, they'd never get that chance.

In the chronology presented to the 9/11 commission, Colonel Scott put the time NORAD was first notified about United 93 at 9:16 a.m., from which time, he said, commanders tracked the flight closely. (It crashed at 10:03 a.m.) If it had indeed been necessary to "take lives in the air" with United 93, or any incoming flight to Washington, the two armed fighters from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia would have been the ones called upon to carry out the shootdown. In Colonel Scott's account, those jets were given the order to launch at 9:24, within seconds of NEADS's receiving the F.A.A.'s report of the possible hijacking of American 77, the plane that would ultimately hit the Pentagon. This time line suggests the system was starting to work: the F.A.A. reports a hijacking, and the military reacts instantaneously. Launching after the report of American 77 would, in theory, have put the fighters in the air and in position over Washington in plenty of time to react to United 93.

In testimony a few minutes later, however, General Arnold added an unexpected twist: "We launched the aircraft out of Langley to put them over top of Washington, D.C., not in response to American Airlines 77, but really to put them in position in case United 93 were to head that way."

How strange, John Azzarello, a former prosecutor and one of the commission's staff members, thought. "I remember being at the hearing in '03 and wondering why they didn't seem to have their stories straight. That struck me as odd."

The ears of another staff member, Miles Kara, perked up as well. "I said to myself, That's not right," the retired colonel, a former army intelligence officer, told me. Kara had seen the radar re-creations of the fighters' routes. "We knew something was odd, but we didn't have enough specificity to know how odd."

As the tapes reveal in stark detail, parts of Scott's and Arnold's testimony were misleading, and others simply false. At 9:16 a.m., when Arnold and Marr had supposedly begun their tracking of United 93, the plane had not yet been hijacked. In fact, NEADS wouldn't get word about United 93 for another 51 minutes. And while NORAD commanders did, indeed, order the Langley fighters to scramble at 9:24, as Scott and Arnold testified, it was not in response to the hijacking of American 77 or United 93. Rather, they were chasing a ghost. NEADS was entering the most chaotic period of the morning.

"Chase this guy down"t 9:21 a.m., just before Dooley's alert about a third hijacked plane headed for Washington, NEADS is in the eye of the storm—a period of relative calm in which, for the moment, there are no reports of additional hijackings.

The call that sets off the latest alarm ("Another hijack! It's headed towards Washington!") comes from Boston and is wholly confounding: according to Scoggins, the Boston manager, American 11, the plane they believed was the first one to hit the World Trade Center, is actually still flying—still hijacked—and now heading straight for D.C. Whatever hit the first tower, it wasn't American 11.

The chase is on for what will turn out to be a phantom plane.

9:21:50NASYPANY: O.K. American Airlines is still airborne—11, the first guy. He's heading towards Washington. O.K., I think we need to scramble Langley right now. And I'm—I'm gonna take the fighters from Otis and try to chase this guy down if I can find him.PLAY | STOP

Arnold and Marr approve scrambling the two planes at Langley, along with a third unarmed trainer, and Nasypany sets the launch in motion.

It's a mistake, of course. American 11 was, indeed, the plane that hit the first tower. The confusion will persist for hours, however. In Boston, it is Colin Scoggins who has made the mistaken call.

"When we phoned United [after the second tower was hit], they confirmed that United 175 was down, and I think they confirmed that within two or three minutes," Scoggins, the go-to guy at Boston Center for all things military, later told me. "With American Airlines, we could never confirm if it was down or not, so that left doubt in our minds."

An unwieldy conference call between F.A.A. centers had been established, and Scoggins was monitoring it when the word came across—from whom or where isn't clear—that American 11 was thought to be headed for Washington. Scoggins told me he thinks that the problem started with someone overheard trying to confirm from American whether American 11 was down—that somewhere in the flurry of information zipping back and forth during the conference call this transmogrified into the idea that a different plane had hit the tower, and that American 11 was still hijacked and still in the air. The plane's course, had it continued south past New York in the direction it was flying before it dipped below radar coverage, would have had it headed on a straight course toward D.C. This was all controllers were going on; they were never tracking an actual plane on the radar after losing American 11 near Manhattan, but if it had been flying low enough, the plane could have gone undetected. "After talking to a supervisor, I made the call and said [American 11] is still in the air, and it's probably somewhere over New Jersey or Delaware heading for Washington, D.C.," Scoggins told me.

ver the next quarter-hour, the fact that the fighters have been launched in response to the phantom American 11—rather than American 77 or United 93—is referred to six more times on Nasypany's channel alone. How could Colonel Scott and General Arnold have missed it in preparing for their 9/11-commission testimony? It's a question Arnold would have to answer later, under oath.

In the middle of the attack, however, the hijackers' sabotaging of the planes' beacons has thrown such a wrench into efforts to track them that it all seems plausible.

9:23:15ANDERSON: They're probably not squawking anything [broadcasting a beacon code] anyway. I mean, obviously these guys are in the cockpit.NASYPANY: These guys are smart.UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, they knew exactly what they wanted to do.PLAY | STOP

Another officer asks Nasypany the obvious question.

9:32:20MAJOR JAMES ANDERSON: Have you asked—have you asked the question what you're gonna do if we actually find this guy? Are we gonna shoot him down if they got passengers on board? Have they talked about that?PLAY | STOP

Approval for any such order would have to come from the commander in chief. Just after 9:30, however, the president was in his motorcade preparing to leave the Emma Booker Elementary School, in Sarasota, for the airport and the safety of Air Force One. The 9/11 commission determined that the president had not been aware of any further possible hijackings and was not yet in touch with the Pentagon.

But a clear shootdown order wouldn't have made a difference. The Langley fighters were headed the wrong way—due east, straight out to sea into a military-training airspace called Whiskey 386, rather than toward Washington, which NEADS believed was under attack. According to the 9/11 commission, the Langley pilots were never briefed by anyone at their base about why they were being scrambled, so, despite having been given the order from NEADS to fly to Washington, the pilots ended up following their normal training flight plan out to sea—a flight plan dating from the Cold War. As one pilot later told the commission, "I reverted to the Russian threat—I'm thinking cruise-missile threat from the sea."

At NEADS, a 28-year-old staff sergeant named William Huckabone, staring at his Green Eye, is the first to notice that the Langley jets are off course. His voice is a mix of stress and dread as he and the controller next to him, Master Sergeant Steve Citino, order a navy air-traffic controller who's handling the fighters to get them turned around toward Baltimore to try to cut off the phantom American 11. The navy air-traffic controller seems not to understand the urgency of the situation.

9:34:12NAVY A.T.C.: You've got [the fighters] moving east in airspace. Now you want 'em to go to Baltimore?HUCKABONE: Yes, sir. We're not gonna take 'em in Whiskey 386 [military training airspace over the ocean].NAVY A.T.C.: O.K., once he goes to Baltimore, what are we supposed to do?HUCKABONE: Have him contact us on auxiliary frequency 2-3-4 decimal 6. Instead of taking handoffs to us and us handing 'em back, just tell Center they've got to go to Baltimore.NAVY A.T.C.: All right, man. Stand by. We'll get back to you.CITINO: What do you mean, "We'll get back to you"? Just do it!HUCKABONE: I'm gonna choke that guy!CITINO: Be very professional, Huck.HUCKABONE: O.K.CITINO: All right, Huck. Let's get our act together here.PLAY | STOP

All hell is breaking loose around them. Boston Center has called in with another suspected hijacking—the controllers there don't know the call sign yet—and ID tech Watson is speed-dialing everyone she can to find a position on the resurrected American 11. In the course of a call to Washington Center, the operations manager there has sprung new information about yet another lost airplane: American 77.

9:34:01WASHINGTON CENTER: Now, let me tell you this. I—I'll—we've been looking. We're—also lost American 77—WATSON: American 77?DOOLEY: American 77's lost—WATSON: Where was it proposed to head, sir?WASHINGTON CENTER: Okay, he was going to L.A. also—WATSON: From where, sir?WASHINGTON CENTER: I think he was from Boston also. Now let me tell you this story here. Indianapolis Center was working this guy—WATSON: What guy?WASHINGTON CENTER: American 77, at flight level 3-5-0 [35,000 feet]. However, they lost radar with him. They lost contact with him. They lost everything. And they don't have any idea where he is or what happened.PLAY | STOP

his is a full 10 minutes later than the time Major General Arnold and Colonel Scott would give in their testimony; reality was a lot messier. Forty minutes prior, at 8:54 a.m., controllers at Indianapolis Center had lost radar contact with American 77, flying from Washington Dulles to LAX, and assumed the plane had crashed because they weren't aware of the attack in New York. Though they soon realized this was another hijacking and sent warnings up the F.A.A. chain, no one called the military; it was only by chance that NEADS's Watson got the information in her call to Washington Center.

As Watson takes in the information from Washington Center, Rountree's phone is ringing again. By this point, the other ID techs have taken to calling Rountree "the bearer of death and destruction" because it seems every time she picks up the phone there's another hijacking. And so it is again. At Boston Center, Colin Scoggins has spotted a low-flying airliner six miles southeast of the White House.

9:35:41ROUNTREE: Huntress [call sign for NEADS] ID, Rountree, can I help you?BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Latest report, [low-flying] aircraft six miles southeast of the White House.ROUNTREE: Six miles southeast of the White House?BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yup. East—he's moving away?ROUNTREE: Southeast from the White House.BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Air—aircraft is moving away.ROUNTREE: Moving away from the White House?BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yeah.…ROUNTREE: Deviating away. You don't have a type aircraft, you don't know who he is—BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Nothing, nothing. We're over here in Boston so I have no clue. That—hopefully somebody in Washington would have better—information for you.PLAY | STOP

This will turn out to be American 77, but since the hijackers turned the beacon off on this plane as well, no one will realize that until later. Depending on how you count, NEADS now has three reported possible hijackings from Boston (the phantom American 11 and two unidentified planes) as well as Washington Center's report that American 77 is lost.

Of these four vague and ultimately overlapping reports, the latest—word of a plane six miles from the White House—is the most urgent. The news sets off a frenzy.

9:36:23NASYPANY: O.K., Foxy [Major Fox, the Weapons Team head]. I got a aircraft six miles east of the White House! Get your fighters there as soon as possible!MALE VOICE: That came from Boston?HUCKABONE: We're gonna turn and burn it—crank it up—MALE TECH: Six miles!HUCKABONE: All right, here we go. This is what we're gonna do—NASYPANY: We've got an aircraft deviating eight [sic] miles east of the White House right now.FOX: Do you want us to declare A.F.I.O. [emergency military control of the fighters] and run 'em straight in there?NASYPANY: Take 'em and run 'em to the White House.FOX: Go directly to Washington.CITINO: We're going direct D.C. with my guys [Langley fighters]? Okay. Okay.HUCKABONE: Ma'am, we are going A.F.I.O. right now with Quit 2-5 [the Langley fighters]. They are going direct Washington.NAVY A.T.C.: Quit 2-5, we're handing 'em off to Center right now.HUCKABONE: Ma'am, we need to expedite that right now. We've gotta contact them on 2-3-4-6.PLAY | STOP

"Six miles south, or west, or east of the White House is—it's seconds [away]," Nasypany told me later. "Airliners traveling at 400-plus knots, it's nothing. It's seconds away from that location."

The White House, then, is in immediate danger. Radar analysis in the following weeks will show that the plane abruptly veers away and turns toward the Pentagon, though the controllers at NEADS have no way of knowing this in the moment. Looking in the general capital area, one of the tracker techs thinks he spots the plane on radar, then just as quickly loses it.

9:37:56MALE TECH: Right here, right here, right here. I got him. I got him.NASYPANY: We just lost track. Get a Z-point [coordinate] on that.… O.K., we got guys lookin' at 'em. Hold on.… Where's Langley at? Where are the fighters?PLAY | STOP

The fighters have no chance. They're about 150 miles away, according to radar analysis done later. Even at top speed—and even if they know the problem is suicide hijackings of commercial airliners rather than Russian missiles—it will take them roughly 10 minutes to get to the Pentagon.

9:38:50NASYPANY: We need to get those back up there—I don't care how many windows you break!… Goddammit! O.K. Push 'em back!

But the Pentagon is already in flames, American 77 having plowed through the E-ring of the west side of the building seconds before, at 9:37:46. The Langley fighters will not be established over Washington for another 20 minutes.

"You were just so mad"n the ops floor, everyone is staring at CNN on the overhead screen. Seeing the first pictures of the Pentagon in flames is gut-wrenching. Nasypany's voice can be heard cursing in frustration: "Goddammit! I can't even protect my N.C.A. [National Capital Area]." You hear troops prod one another to stay focused.

CITINO: O.K.—let's watch our guys, Huck. Not the TV.

"The more it went on, the more unbelievable it got, and then the one that did the Pentagon," Dooley told me, "we just couldn't believe it. You were just so mad that you couldn't stop these guys and so you're looking for the next one. Where are they going next?"

It looks like Washington again. Three minutes after the Pentagon is hit, Scoggins, at Boston Center, is back on the phone. The Boston controllers are now tracking Delta 1989—Boston to Las Vegas—which fits the same profile as the other hijackings: cross-country, out of Boston, lots of fuel, and possibly off course. But this one's different from the others in one key respect: the plane's beacon code is still working. In this chase, NEADS will have a chance, as the excitement in Dooley's last line reflects:

9:40:57ROUNTREE: Delta 89, that's the hijack. They think it's possible hijack.DOOLEY: Fuck!ROUNTREE: South of Cleveland. We have a code on him now.DOOLEY: Good. Pick it up! Find it!MALE TECH: Delta what?ROUNTREE: Eight nine—a Boeing 767.DOOLEY: Fuck, another one—PLAY | STOP

They quickly find the plane on radar—it's just south of Toledo—and begin alerting other F.A.A. centers. They're not sure where the plane is headed. If it's Chicago, they're in big trouble, because they don't have any planes close enough to cut it off. Marr and Nasypany order troops to call Air National Guard bases in that area to see if anyone can launch fighters. A base in Selfridge, Michigan, offers up two unarmed fighters that are already flying, on their way back from a training mission.

9:54:54SELFRIDGE FLIGHT OFFICER: Here—here's what we can do. At a minimum, we can keep our guys airborne. I mean, they don't have—they don't have any guns or missiles or anything on board. But we—NEADS TECH: It's a presence, though.PLAY | STOP

But NEADS is victim again to an increasingly long information lag. Even before Rountree gets the urgent call that Delta 1989 is hijacked, a civilian air-traffic controller in Cleveland in contact with the pilot has determined that the flight is fine—that Delta 1989 isn't a hijacking after all.

eanwhile, however, NEADS has gotten a call from a NORAD unit in Canada with yet another suspected hijacking headed south across the border toward Washington. In the barrage of information and misinformation, it becomes increasingly difficult for the controllers to keep count of how many suspected hijackings are pending. So far, it is known that three have hit buildings, but given the uncertainty about the fates of American 11 and American 77—no one knows yet that this is the plane that hit the Pentagon—the sense at NEADS is that there are possibly three hijacked jets still out there, and who knows how many more yet to be reported. At this point, no one on the military side is aware that United 93 has been hijacked.

Then, over a crackly radio, one of the Langley fighter pilots, now in a combat air patrol over Washington, is calling in urgently.

10:07:08PILOT: Baltimore is saying something about an aircraft over the White House. Any words?CITINO: Negative. Stand by. Do you copy that, SD [Major Fox]? Center said there's an aircraft over the White House. Any words?FOX: M.C.C. [Nasypany], we've got an aircraft reported over the White House.PLAY | STOP

A fourth hijacking? Nasypany, who's running full throttle, replies instinctively.

NASYPANY: Intercept!FOX: Intercept!NASYPANY: Intercept and divert that aircraft away from there.PLAY | STOP

On one channel, you hear a weapons tech very dramatically hailing the fighters and ordering the intercept.

CITINO: Quit 2-5 [Langley fighters], mission is intercept aircraft over White House. Use F.A.A. for guidance.FOX: Divert the aircraft away from the White House. Intercept and divert it.CITINO: Quit 2-5, divert the aircraft from the White House.PILOT: Divert the aircraft.…PLAY | STOP

Meanwhile, Nasypany calls the Battle Cab. With a plane headed straight for the White House, Nasypany needs an update on his rules of engagement—fast.

10:07:39NASYPANY: Do you hear that? That aircraft over the White House. What's the word? … Intercept and what else? … Aircraft over the White House.PLAY | STOP

The "what else?" is the big question: do they have the authority to shoot? The request skips up the chain to Arnold.

"I was in Vietnam," Arnold later told me. "When people are shooting at you, you don't know when it's going to stop. And that same thought went through my mind [on 9/11]. You begin to wonder, How can I get control of this situation? When can we as a military get control of this situation?"

Arnold, in turn, passes the request for rules of engagement farther up the chain.

It is in the middle of this, simultaneously, that the first call comes in about United 93. ID tech Watson fields it.

10:07:16CLEVELAND CENTER: We got a United 93 out here. Are you aware of that?WATSON: United 93?CLEVELAND CENTER: That has a bomb on board.WATSON: A bomb on board?! And this is confirmed? You have a [beacon code], sir?CLEVELAND CENTER: No, we lost his transponder.

The information is shouted out to Nasypany.

NASYPANY: Gimme the call sign. Gimme the whole nine yards.… Let's get some info, real quick. They got a bomb?PLAY | STOP

But by the time NEADS gets the report of a bomb on United 93, everyone on board is already dead. Following the passengers' counterattack, the plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m., 4 minutes before Cleveland Center notified NEADS, and a full 35 minutes after a Cleveland Center controller, a veteran named John Werth, first suspected something was wrong with the flight. At 9:28, Werth actually heard the guttural sounds of the cockpit struggle over the radio as the hijackers attacked the pilots.

Werth's suspicions about United 93 were passed quickly up the F.A.A.'s chain of command, so how is it that no one from the agency alerted NEADS for more than half an hour?

A former senior executive at the F.A.A., speaking to me on the condition that I not identify him by name, tried to explain. "Our whole procedures prior to 9/11 were that you turned everything [regarding a hijacking] over to the F.B.I.," he said, reiterating that hijackers had never actually flown airplanes; it was expected that they'd land and make demands. "There were absolutely no shootdown protocols at all. The F.A.A. had nothing to do with whether they were going to shoot anybody down. We had no protocols or rules of engagement."

n his bunker under the White House, Vice President Cheney was not notified about United 93 until 10:02—only one minute before the airliner impacted the ground. Yet it was with dark bravado that the vice president and others in the Bush administration would later recount sober deliberations about the prospect of shooting down United 93. "Very, very tough decision, and the president understood the magnitude of that decision," Bush's then chief of staff, Andrew Card, told ABC News.

Cheney echoed, "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before." And it wasn't on 9/11, either.

President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which—though no one knew it at the time—was 15 minutes after the attack was over.

But comments such as those above were repeated by other administration and military figures in the weeks and months following 9/11, forging the notion that only the passengers' counterattack against their hijackers prevented an inevitable shootdown of United 93 (and convincing conspiracy theorists that the government did, indeed, secretly shoot it down). The recordings tell a different story, and not only because United 93 had crashed before anyone in the military chain of command even knew it had been hijacked.

At what feels on the tapes like the moment of truth, what comes back down the chain of command, instead of clearance to fire, is a resounding sense of caution. Despite the fact that NEADS believes there may be as many as five suspected hijacked aircraft still in the air at this point—one from Canada, the new one bearing down fast on Washington, the phantom American 11, Delta 1989, and United 93—the answer to Nasypany's question about rules of engagement comes back in no uncertain terms, as you hear him relay to the ops floor.

10:10:31NASYPANY (to floor): Negative. Negative clearance to shoot.… Goddammit!…FOX: I'm not really worried about code words at this point.NASYPANY: Fuck the code words. That's perishable information. Negative clearance to fire. ID. Type. Tail.PLAY | STOP

The orders from higher headquarters are to identify by aircraft type and tail number, and nothing more. Those orders—and the fact that the pilots have no clearance to shoot—are reiterated by NEADS controllers as a dramatic chase towards the White House continues. Two more problems emerge: the controllers can't find the White House on their dated equipment, and they have trouble communicating with the Langley fighters (which are referred to by their call signs, Quit 2-5 and Quit 2-6).

CITINO: Quit 2-6, Huntress. How far is the—suspect aircraft?PILOT: Standby. Standby.… About 15 miles, Huntress.CITINO: Huntress copies two-two miles.PILOT: 15 miles, Huntress.CITINO: 15 miles. One-five … noise level please … It's got to be low. Quit 2-6, when able say altitude of the aircraft.… Did we get a Z-track [coordinates] up for the White House?HUCKABONE: They're workin' on it.CITINO: Okay. Hey, what's this Bravo 0-0-5 [unidentified target]?FOX: We're trying to get the Z-point. We're trying to find it.HUCKABONE: I don't even know where the White House is.CITINO: Whatever it is, it's very low. It's probably a helicopter.MALE VOICE: It's probably the helicopter you're watching there.… There's probably one flying over the [Pentagon].MALE VOICE: It's probably the smoke. The building's smoked. [They're seeing more pictures of the flaming Pentagon on CNN.]HUCKABONE: Holy shit.… Holy shit …CITINO: Yes. We saw that. O.K.—let's watch our guys, Huck. Not the TV.… Quit 2-6, status? SD, they're too low. I can't talk to 'em. They're too low. I can't talk to 'em.FOX: Negative clearance to fire.CITINO: O.K. I told 'em mission is ID and that was it.FOX: Do whatever you need to divert. They are not cleared to fire.PLAY | STOP

As it turns out, it's just as well the pilots are not cleared to shoot. Delta 1989 and the Canadian scare turn out to be false alarms. American 11 and United 93 are already down. And the fast-moving target near the White House that the armed fighters are racing to intercept turns out to be a friendly—a mistake by a civilian controller who was unaware of the military's scrambles, as weapons techs Huckabone and Citino, and their senior director, Fox, suddenly realize.

HUCKABONE: It was our guys [the fighters from Langley].CITINO: Yup. It was our guys they saw. It was our guys they saw—Center saw.FOX: New York did the same thing….CITINO: O.K., Huck. That was cool. We intercepted our own guys.PLAY | STOP

At that point in the morning, Marr later told me, preventing an accidental shootdown was a paramount concern. "What you don't want happening is a pilot having to make that decision in the heat of the moment where he is bearing all that burden as to whether I should shoot something down or not," Marr said.

It is 12 minutes after United 93 actually crashed when NEADS's Watson first hears the word. Her voice is initially full of hope as she mistakenly believes she is being told that United 93 has landed safely.

10:15:00WATSON: United nine three, have you got information on that yet?WASHINGTON CENTER: Yeah, he's down.WATSON: What—he's down?WASHINGTON CENTER: Yes.WATSON: When did he land? Because we have confirmation—WASHINGTON CENTER: He did—he did—he did not land.

Here, on the tape, you hear the air rush out of Watson's voice.

WATSON: Oh, he's down down?MALE VOICE: Yes. Yeah, somewhere up northeast of Camp David.WATSON: Northeast of Camp David.WASHINGTON CENTER: That's the—that's the last report. They don't know exactly where.PLAY | STOP

"I know what spin is"n June 17, 2004, a year after the 9/11 commission's initial public hearing, Major General Arnold and a more robust contingent of NORAD and Pentagon brass arrived to testify before the commission at its 12th and final public meeting. This time, they would testify under oath.

The hearing began with an elaborate multi-media presentation in which John Farmer Jr., the commission's senior counsel, John Azzarello, and another staff attorney, Dana Hyde, took turns illustrating, in withering detail, the lag time between when the F.A.A. found out about each of the hijacked aircraft and the time anyone from the agency notified the military. Excerpts from the NEADS tapes and parallel recordings from the F.A.A., which show the civilian side in equal turmoil, were played in public for the first time. (Both sets of recordings were provided to the commission only after being subpoenaed.)

The focus of the pointed questioning that followed wasn't on why the military didn't do better, but rather on why the story Major General Arnold and Colonel Scott had told at the first hearing was so wrong, in particular with respect to the phantom American 11, which the officers had never mentioned, and United 93, which they claimed to have been tracking. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, who cut his teeth 30 years earlier working for the Watergate special prosecutor, led off the questioning and came out swinging.

"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?" he asked Arnold, who replied that he had not been aware of those facts when he testified the year before.

"I've been in government and I know what spin is," Farmer, the senior counsel, told me. The military's story was "a whole different order of magnitude than spin. It simply wasn't true." Farmer says he doesn't understand why the military felt the need to spin at all. "The information they got [from the F.A.A.] was bad information, but they reacted in a way that you would have wanted them to. The calls Marr and Nasypany made were the right ones."

Both Marr and Arnold bristled when I asked about the commission's suspicion that there had been an effort to spin the story. "I can't think of any incentive why we'd want to spin that," Marr said, his eyes tensing for the first time in what had been friendly interviews. "I'll be the first to admit that immediately after—in fact, for a long time after—we were very confused with who was what and where, what reports were coming in. I think with having 29 different reports of hijackings nationwide, for us it was next to impossible to try and get back there and figure out the fidelity [about the morning's chronology] that the 9/11 commission ended up being able to show."

zzarello, Farmer, and several other commission members I spoke to dismissed this fog-of-war excuse and pointed out that not only had the military already reviewed the tapes but that the false story it told at the first hearing had a clear purpose. "How good would it have looked for the government in general if we still couldn't have stopped the fourth plane an hour and 35 minutes [into the attack]?" Azzarello asked. "How good would it have looked if there was a total breakdown in communication and nothing worked right?"

If nothing else, it might have given the public a more realistic sense of the limitations, particularly in the face of suicide terrorism, of what is, without doubt, the most powerful military in the world.

As one of its last acts before disbanding, in July 2004, the 9/11 commission made referrals to the inspector general's offices of both the Department of Transportation (which includes the F.A.A.) and the Defense Department to further investigate whether witnesses had lied. "Commission staff believes that there is significant evidence that the false statements made to the commission were deliberately false," Farmer wrote to me in an e-mail summarizing the commission's referral. "The false testimony served a purpose: to obscure mistakes on the part of the F.A.A. and the military, and to overstate the readiness of the military to intercept and, if necessary, shoot down UAL 93." A spokesman for the Transportation Department's inspector general's office told me that the investigation had been completed, but he wasn't at liberty to share the findings, because the report had not been finalized. A spokesman at the Pentagon's inspector general's office said its investigation had also been completed, but the results are classified.

oring over time-stamped transcripts that undercut the Pentagon's official story, one is tempted to get caught up in a game of "gotcha." For those on the operations floor in the thick of it that day, however, the cold revelations of hindsight are a bitter pill to swallow.

Listening to the tapes, you hear that inside NEADS there was no sense that the attack was over with the crash of United 93; instead, the alarms go on and on. False reports of hijackings, and real responses, continue well into the afternoon, though civilian air-traffic controllers had managed to clear the skies of all commercial and private aircraft by just after 12 p.m. The fighter pilots over New York and D.C. (and later Boston and Chicago) would spend hours darting around their respective skylines intercepting hundreds of aircraft they deemed suspicious. Meanwhile, Arnold, Marr, and Nasypany were launching as many additional fighters as they could, placing some 300 armed jets in protective orbits over every major American city by the following morning. No one at NEADS would go home until late on the night of the 11th, and then only for a few hours of sleep.

Five years after the attack, the controversy around United 93 clearly eats at Arnold, Marr, Nasypany, and several other military people I spoke with, who resent both conspiracy theories that accuse them of shooting the flight down and the 9/11 commission's conclusion that they were chasing ghosts and never stood a chance of intercepting any of the real hijackings. "I don't know about time lines and stuff like that," Nasypany, who is now a lieutenant colonel, said in one of our last conversations. "I knew where 93 was. I don't care what [the commission says]. I mean, I care, but—I made that assessment to put my fighters over Washington. Ninety-three was on its way in. I knew there was another one out there. I knew there was somebody else coming in—whatever you want to call it. And I knew what I was going to have to end up doing." When you listen to the tapes, it couldn't feel more horrendously true.

When I asked Nasypany about the conspiracy theories—the people who believe that he, or someone like him, secretly ordered the shootdown of United 93 and covered it up—the corners of his mouth began to quiver. Then, I think to the surprise of both of us, he suddenly put his head in his hands and cried. "Flight 93 was not shot down," he said when he finally looked up. "The individuals on that aircraft, the passengers, they actually took the aircraft down. Because of what those people did, I didn't have to do anything."

On the day, however, there was no time for sentiment. Within 30 seconds of the report that United 93 has crashed, killing everyone on board, once again, the phone is ringing.

10:15:30POWELL: Southeast just called. There's another possible hijack in our area.…NASYPANY: All right. Fuck …

Michael Bronner was an associate producer on the movie United 93. His article about military recruiters appeared in the September 2005 issue of Vanity Fair. <end quote>

[edit] ABC NEWS TRANSCRIPT

Copyright 2001 Burrelle's Information Services

ABC News

SHOW: ABC News Special Report: America Under Attack (3:00 PM ET) - ABC September 11, 2001 Tuesday TYPE: Special Report/Newscast LENGTH: 10113 words HEADLINE: America Under Attack, 3:00 PM

ANCHORS: PETER JENNINGS

REPORTERS: JOHN McWETHY ; LISA STARK ; GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS ; ANN COMPTON ; BILL BLAKEMORE ; DON DAHLER ; CLAIRE SHIPMAN

BODY:

PETER JENNINGS, anchor:

And there are a couple of new pieces of information, too, about the--the flights in question that we have been so focused on today. In--in--in--in the case of American Flight 11, this was the one that first crashed into the Trade Towers this morning at 8:48, just a little before 9:00 this morning. ABC's Lisa Stark who covers aviation for us now says that a flight attendant called from the plane to say that two flight attendants had been stabbed, and people on board the aircraft had broken into the flight deck, into where the captain and the--and the co-pilot and, in the case of a 767--I can't recall, they're not an engineer--but certainly broken into the cockpit where the pilot and co-pilot were located; two hostages, two--two flight attendants stabbed. And in the case of United Airlines Flight 737, which was the aircraft--the United Airlines which crashed just near Pittsburgh, Lisa does confirm for us our reporting of a little while ago that a passenger did call from a cell phone--on the phone--to an emergency service, a 911 emergency service they managed to do from the air to say that, in fact, they were in the process of being hijacked.

And Ann Compton, one of our White House correspondents calls just a short while ago to say that the president has landed again, this time at an Air Force Base in Nebraska. And this suggests, A, that the Secret Service is still is very much in--in charge of the president's movements at the moment and that there is a very strong feeling in the highest reaches of government that the president should stay on the move. He's going to--to stay there conceivably for the next little while because we've also been told by Ann that he's going to speak to the National Security Council this afternoon on a teleconference. The president is going to stay abroad--and I suppose you can do that from Air Force One as well, I'm not altogether sure, I think you probably can--that the president is going to talk to the National Security Council from somewhere other than Washington, and he is now in Nebraska. As I think Terry Moran, our White House correspondent and others mentioned very early on in the day, there's a very delicate line for the president to follow; stay on the move lest there be any security threat to the president. And this will be absolutely decided by the national leadership of Secret Service in conjunction with the National Security Council while the political operatives in the president's entourage, very much want him, we're told by Claire Shipman and others, to get him back to Washington to be in control in the place which is familiar to most Americans. And Mrs. Bush, is, of course, we've already said, is at an undisclosed location and Vice President Cheney, who carries an enormous load in this particular administration, is currently working out of the White House.

John McWethy who covers the Pentagon, national security, and a good deal of terrorism and international intelligence issues for us is at the Pentagon.

John, what have you got?

JOHN McWETHY reporting:

A whole plate full of things, Peter. First of all, we've been talking throughout the day about possible ship movements, American ship movements. It is true that two aircraft carriers, five other combatants and a hospital ship are all now heading north along the Atlantic seaboard toward New York. No decision has yet been made about exactly what to do with those ships when they get there, but of course aircraft carriers have a very large hospital capability so they could be used for that. I think it is a--a responsive measure.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, after the attack on the Pentagon, went immediately to the gash that you see behind me here when the very first destruction was--was detected, and helped pull some people out of the rubble. He is now in what is called the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, and he intends to stay there indefinitely. Until all forces around the world have been secured. All forces around the globe at this point are at Threatcon Delta, which is the highest level of threat condition that American troops can be in.

One of the difficulties with the fire and the rescue effort here in the Pentagon, Peter, is we have seen continuous outbreaks of fires within the different levels of the Pentagon, and it has been extremely difficult for search and rescue people to get inside the Pentagon. It was five hours before the first people were able to get in to some of the rubble to try to begin to pull out people who may have been trapped. The fire in the Pentagon was described as an inferno by those people who were in some of the worst areas. The evacuation in parts of the Pentagon was very orderly, some of it was complete chaos, as you might expect.

JENNINGS: OK, John, thanks very much. John McWethy at the Pentagon. We'll take a quick look at John there.

Jack, are you there for a second?

Offscreen Voice: Yeah, we're here.

JENNINGS: I want to--I want to put John on-camera for a second because you--earlier today you described--you just turn around and take a look at the gash in the Pentagon there and describe again for us--you think it's--what--200 feet wide? Two to three hundred feet wide?

McWETHY: It is at least two or 300 feet wide, Peter. Just imagine a very large commercial aircraft ramming into this space. The Pentagon is built like a block house, as you know, during World War II. It is a very substantial building, and this aircraft traveling at between 150 and 200 miles an hour penetrated deeply into the--the rings of the Pentagon, almost to the center. The destruction on the five floors that are above ground is considerable. The--one of the admirals was briefing us earlier that he felt that the section that was hit was one of the areas that was being repaired. We now believe that is not true. It is an area that was very fully staffed, primarily with Navy and Marine Corps personnel, but also the Defense Intelligence Agency.

JENNINGS: OK. Thanks very much, John McWethy at the Pentagon. We'll come back to you.

On the phone with us at the moment is the former CIA Director, James Woolsey.

Mr. Woolsey, there's so much to ask you about at a moment like this in terms of your experience, but as our political director or--actually that's not true--as a former senior White House official said a short while ago to one of us, there's going to be a hellacious amount of finger-pointing at the moment. What's happened--what's gone wrong here?

Mr. JAMES WOOLSEY (Former CIA Director): Well, one thing that's gone wrong, Peter, I think, is that for some years now we have adopted a theory that terrorism first was likely just to be sort of a pick-up team, these loose associations of terrorists inspired, say, by the blind sheik in New York. This was the thought on the two bombings, one attempted, one real in New York back in the early '90's. And then the Clinton administration veered off into saying everything looked like it might be Osama bin Laden. It's important that we realize there is a real possibility, when you have something this devastating and well-coordinated, that there could be state action of some sort behind it.

Now, I don't know that that's the case, and I won't say that it's the case. But there is at least a plausible case that there was Iraqi government involvement in the World Trade Center bombing back in 1993. This all has to do with the identity, the true identity of Ramsey Yousef, who was the mastermind, who's in prison out in Colorado now. At his sentencing the judge said, 'We still don't really know who you are.' And if there was a chance that there was Iraqi government involvement in that, since Yousef was the mastermind of the World Trade Center and of a bombing plot in the Pacific which he was working on when he was caught, to have a lot of American Airlines in the Pacific blown up, what happened today is a sort of amalgam of the earlier two Ramsey Yousef plots. It's at least, I think, interesting that that's the case. And--and if some of the observers, Laurie Mylroie and others, are correct that there's a reasonable chance that he was, in fact, involved with the Iraqi government, there could also be a chance the Iraqi government is involved here, even if bin Laden or other terrorist groups are as well.

JENNINGS: OK. Can I ask you just a couple of really elementary questions about intelligence? You--you've just done something on the air which strikes me as what intelligence officers do when they sit down to try to figure out what the heck is going on. Is that--is that, in fact, what you're trying to do at the moment. You called it "an amalgam: of two plots. Is that--is that how it works at the moment?

Mr. WOOLSEY: Well, this is nothing but circumstantial evidence that I've been talking about, but it's interesting circumstantial information anyway. And yes, that's the sort of thing that I think intelligence officers need to do. Part of the problem with the World Trade Center bombing back in '93 is that most of the information about it was under grand jury secrecy until the trial, and after that not many people paid attention to it. So even most of the federal government had no access to it exce--outside the FBI and parts of justice.

JENNINGS: Now, you mentioned--you mentioned governments and individual organizations or operations. Don't governments traditionally leak information more than--than independent or semi-independent terrorist cells? If there were a government involved, is it--is it not inconceivable that the United States didn't pick up something?

Mr. WOOLSEY: I think it's possible that a government could be involved and not be picked up, especially if it was operating very carefully, as the Iraqis, or conceivably the Iranians, might under these circumstances. It is normally somewhat easier to learn what's going on inside a government than a--a terrorist group, particularly one that doesn't use many communications and the like and does everything within just very small number of people. But it's not impossible that terrorist groups could work together with the government, that--the Iraqi government has been quite closely involved with a number of Sunni terrorist groups and--and on some matters has had contact with bin Laden. So...

JENNINGS: I'm sorry, Mr. Woolsey, I think I just lost you.

Mr. WOOLSEY: I said on some matter...

JENNINGS: You're lost at the moment, and I hope we'll get him back on the telephone, the former director of the CIA, James Woolsey, on the phone, agreeing that there will be a heck of a lot of finger pointing at the FBI, at the--at the Department of Defense and at the CIA.

No, I have my epi, thank you very much. I just lost the director of the CIA. OK? Thank you very much.

Because as this former official in the--in--in the White House points out, people are going to demand massive retaliation. Mr. Woolsey raises quite--two quite fascinating possibilities. One, that there's a terrorist organization or group involved with a government, that there is, as there has been believed in the past, a terrorist operation within the Iranian political establishment which perhaps even other parts of the Iranian political establishment didn't know about, and similarly true, though much likely for them to be operating in ignorance of Saddam Hussein (sic), inside Iraq as well. But the reason that--and I'll bring John Miller back briefly on this. Again, the reason he suggests an amalgam, Mr. Woolsey does, of two footprints is because of the potential, never perfectly proved, that Ramsey Yousef, who has been on trial and convicted of the First Trade Tower attack, did seem to have some tenuous connection with Iraq.

MILLER: And that this is a mixture of--of the two plots that were--were his two big capers.

JENNINGS: Right. Right.

MILLER: One, the plot to blow up numerous airlines on the Pacific route, targeting American tourist. The other--the other, to blow up the World Trade Center. Here, planes, American carriers, have been used to attack the World Trade Center.

JENNINGS: OK. Thank...

MILLER: There's...

JENNINGS: I apologize.

MILLER: No. As Mr. Woolsey pointed out, the difficulty with Ramsey Yousef and really getting to the bottom of the World Trade Center, was while he escaped as the mastermind, and while he was captured in a--a guest house funded by bin Laden, nobody every knew who sent him in the first place or what his real nationality was or even what his real name was, which set him apart from all the other people connected with those cases. Truly a mystery man, still in prison here in America.

JENNINGS: Yeah. Somebody said a few--a little while ago, too, in terms of everything we're looking at now, suspects, there's no good options on the table in this regard whatsoever. Let's try to keep up with the running developments of the day.

Lisa Stark is with us from Seattle. She covers aviation for us. And Lisa, when we last--when we last commented on the status of this planes (sic), we have at least one--I beg your pardon, at least two of them in the process of being hijacked.

LISA STARK reporting:

Right. Peter, here's--here's what we--here's the latest information we know right now. We know, obviously, the two American planes were lost: Flight 11 from Boston to LA, that is one of the planes that went into the World Trade Tower; Flight 77 from Dulles to Los Angeles. We believe that that may have been the plane that went into the Pentagon. The two United planes: United 93, that is the plane that crashed south of Johnstown, Pennsylvania; and now United 175, that plane--the plane from Boston to Los Angeles, a government source has confirmed that that was the second plane that went into one of the World Trade Towers in New York.

I'm also being told by government sources--and again, these things change throughout the day, Peter, you know, I want to caution the people--but this is what we know now. A government source tells me that on American Airlines Flight 11--again that was the flight from Boston to Los Angeles that went into the Trade Tower--that a flight attendant on that plane was apparently able to call the American Airlines operation center to tell them that two flight attendants had been stabbed and that the perpetrators had broken into the flight deck. We've also been told that a passenger aboard one of the United flights--United Flight 93, the one that crashed in Pennsylvania--a passenger on that flight was able to call 911, apparently, and let them know that the plane was being hijacked. Again, this information from government sources...

JENNINGS: Right.

STARK: ...and we don't know if it will hold up throughout the day, but that's what we are told at this time.

JENNINGS: I--I very much appreciate you bringing us up to date. There's one thing that I don't--I'm never quite clear on yet, and that may be because of where I'm sitting. Do we know--American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles was a 767, is that correct?

STARK: Correct. Yes.

JENNINGS: United Airlines 175, which went into the World Trade Center?

STARK: That was a 767 as well.

JENNINGS: A 767, as well. The American aircraft--plane, which we're a little uncertain about the crashing into the Pentagon, was an American. Was it Boeing 757?

STARK: Correct.

JENNINGS: And the--it was also a 757 that crashed near Johnstown.

STARK: Exactly.

TEXT:

American Airlines Flight 11 : Boston to LA CRASHED INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER

Flight 77 : Dulles to LA CRASHED INTO THE PENTAGON

United Airlines Flight 175 : Boston to LA CRASHED INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER

Flight 93 : Newark to San Francisco CRASHED SE OF PITTSBURGH, PA

JENNINGS: So--so we have two very popular and very widely used and very important aircraft in these two airlines being used. Lisa, thanks very much, indeed.

On the phone from Washington with us now is the former Secretary of State, James Baker.

Are you there Mr. Baker?

Mr. JAMES BAKER: I'm here, Peter.

JENNINGS: So, what would you do?

TEXT:

North Tower 8:45 AM 1st Plane Crash

South Tower 9:03 AM 2nd Plane Crash

9:58 AM 1st Collapse

10:28 AM 2nd Collapse

Mr. BAKER: Well, it's a pretty tough one, Peter. It's--everybody, of course, is in--is in deep sorrow and shock. It seems to me that this is something we've been worried about for a long time. We've been able, fortunately, to foreclose it up until now. We may be entering a bit of a new era. We may have to do a bit more to preempt these types of events. We may need to get some better human intelligence to penetrate some of these groups before acts like this can be--can be carried out. We may need to do even more to beef up--obviously, I suppose, we need to do even more to beef up our airport security. There's a lot--there's a lot along those lines, I think, that needs to be done, and--and mostly I think strengthen our intelligence capabilities.

JENNINGS: You are the second person, second senior former government official to say to us today--to imply very clearly that human intelligence in those areas of the world which are, to some extent, breeding grounds of terrorism, are plainly weak.

Mr. BAKER: Well, they are weak, Peter. We took--you know we--we went on a real witch-hunt with our CIA back in the early mid-'70's. We had hearings--I won't mention the name of the--of the legislator who conducted those hearings--but they, in effect, resulted in our eliminating a lot of our human intelligence capabilities. It's a dirty business. When you're--you have human intelligence, you're doing business with the pe--the kinds of people that will--that will commit these acts. Sometimes the first test of a--of a human intelligence agent, the first test they send them out on is to go out and kill somebody. So, it's pretty tough for America to--to--to get into that, and we got out of it. But it may be we have to get into that kind of business.

JENNINGS: Mr. Secretary, why don't you just name the legislator, because you're just going to make--cause more trouble for me to go to the file and look it up. Who--who held these hearings and what's the point you're trying to make? That there's an ad...

Mr. BAKER: Well, they were the Church Committee hearings, and what I did--what I think we did as a consequence of those hearings was to, in effect, unilaterally disarm in terms of our intelligence capabilities. Now, we have the best--you know--we have the best technological intelligence-gathering operations and capabilities in the world. But, we need this human intelligence to penetrate groups like the group that must have carried out this--these operations.

JENNINGS: I have only a vague recollection of this. But, I think the point you're making is that there are some forces, political and otherwise in the United States, who believe that getting down and dirty with potential terrorists around the world is not something we should be doing. We should do it technically, therefore, not put people at risk?

Mr. BAKER: That's correct. That was the thinking and that's pretty much the--pretty much the policy we've followed since then. And I think we need to get back into the down-and-dirty business so we can penetrate these groups and hopefully prevent these types of things from happening in the future.

JENNINGS: Mr. Baker, I don't want to get ahead of things and I'm sure you do not, either. But, if there is--and as somebody said earlier, there're no good options out there at the moment--but do you believe that the United States is--if it finds out that a state is involved is going to have to go to war in an active way against that state?

Mr. BAKER: Well, first of all, I don't believe we're going to find out that a state is involved. I cannot really, frankly conceive of a state doing this. There could be, I suppose, some indirect assistance from a state or groups within a state. And I don't think that's going to be the case. But, if it were the case, I think we need to do whatever--whatever we reasonably and responsibly can to protect the American people, whatever that involves.

JENNINGS: Now, this is always the toughest question for somebody who has been in office but is not currently. How much easier is it to say what you'd do now that you're not in government? In other words, were you still--were you the man--were you the secretary of state in the Bush administration at--at the moment now, would you not feel rather constrained by modern circumstances as to what you could do?

Mr. BAKER: Well, I don't know. I mean, there--you know, we have--we--we--frankly, Peter, we have some laws on our books that we ought to take a look at. One of them is simply a presidential executive order that says the United States doesn't go out and assassinate people. I think there was a very good reason behind that, but I dare say that you would have about 99 percent, if not 100 percent, public support across the United States today--if we found out that one terrorist group was responsible for this--for these incidents, you would have 100 percent support, almost, for--for taking care of that--of the person who leads that group.

JENNINGS: One of the difficulties, of course, Mr. Baker, is that in a--in a situation like this we end up fighting like the terrorists to some extent, right?

Mr. BAKER: Well, that--that--that is unfortunately the case. That's true. But--but it may be that that's the only way we can really take care of the problem. You know, the president said today, made a statement I think was absolutely the right statement, he said--he said, 'America is under attack, under a terrorist attack.' And he said, 'We are going to hunt down and punish those we find responsible for this.' And that, to my way of thinking, means doing whatever is required.

JENNINGS: Mr. Baker, thanks very much for the time.

Mr. BAKER: Thank you, Peter.

JENNINGS: James Baker, the former secretary of state, also widely known in the country as the man who did as much as he did to win Florida for George Bush at the last presidential election, but a long-time member of the American political and foreign policy establishment, and who knows how complicated this is, and who thinks a very openly--you'll hear this a lot in the next few days, "Not enough human intelligence." And we'll review who that legislator was.

Tony Cordesman, our military analyst, you're listening to Mr. Baker, is he making sense?

Mr. TONY CORDESMAN (ABC News Military Consultant): He is, Peter. But I think we need to have an important caution here. Human intelligence isn't as simple as it sounds. The actual agents can take years to develop. Historically they've often been unreliable. And the more hostile the ideology is, the more uncertain the collection. Human intelligence is also analysis. Our analytic side is weak. The CIA has had hiring freezes. There is so little money for CIA and for DIA, that most of the country analysts have never been to the countries they're actually analyzing, much less talk to many of the elements within them. And as Secretary Baker pointed out, if you're going to go into operations, that's different from human intelligence. And our operations capability has been allowed to decline for nearly a decade.

JENNINGS: Thank you, Tony. The game has changed a good deal today.

So let us get back--yes, John? John:

MILLER: Before Jerry Hauer leave us, and he's promised to come back, all of the discussions we've had raise the question to me--and I know Jerry's been more fully briefed on these national security agencies than an--matters than any of us have. How many of these attacks have we known about and been able to prevent? How many that we've heard about, how many that we haven't heard about, and have any of them been on this scale?

Mr. HAUER: That's difficult to answer, John, because a lot of that--a lot of that material is classified, a lot of that is kept classified. But there clearly are a number of threats that occur in this country almost on a daily basis. Some of them are--are hoaxes. Some of them are credible. Some of them are qurite--quite credible. And the--the spectrum varies. And they've--they've had--and some we've been very fortunate with, as we were right before the millennium with the...

JENNINGS: The intrusion from Canada.

Mr. HAUER: Yeah, the...

MILLER: But that--but that was the one that was the work of an alert agent. How many have had we actually prevented through intelligence, which is--is kind of what Mr. Woolsey and Mr. Baker have been talking about?

Mr. HAUER: Yeah. I'm--I'm not sure anybody has a good number on that. That's something that, I think, that would difficult--be difficult to put your finger on at this point, you know, and I would be interested to get that from the FBI. I'm not sure that I've ever heard a number on how many we've actually thwarted.

JENNINGS: Have you ever picked up the phone in your emergency management center and had someone on the other end who said we're going to blow up something?

Mr. HAUER: We actually did receive a number of threats.

JENNINGS: What was it like? What did--what did...

Mr. HAUER: We had letters come in. And we turn them over to the FBI. By and large, we felt that the majority of them were hoaxes. But we relied on the FBI for their--their intelligence, for their analysis of threats. We relied on the police department intelligence division. And by and large, with the exception of one or two that were more credible than others, most of them were pretty lame hoaxes.

MILLER: I remember two of those that were quite serious. In '94 and '95, when I was with the police department, we received information from the FBI that there was going to be a truck bomb attack within 48 hours on the New York Stock Exchange. We responded by surrounding it, literally, with sanitation sand trucks and blocking the street, and eventually set up a cordon which has still not come down. The other was a planned attack on the Israeli mission to the United Nations, which has been surrounded by cement blocks--first the sand trucks, and--and ever since, again.

JENNINGS: Ever since. Ever since.

Our thanks to Jerry Hauer, the former head of the New York Mayor's Office of Emergency Management and Operations. And as we said at the beginning, it's an office which is not operating in the place that Jerry Hauer set it up, which was right adjacent to the World Trade Center. And it has been blocked off, put out of commission in one way or another by the horrendous, horrendous devastation which has occurred in that part of town today. And we don't want to lose sight of it for a second in all this discussion about--about intelligence and terrorism.

So, I want to go back to George Stephanopoulos on the--who's--who's closer to the building than anybody else, and then Bill Blakemore. They are both watching the search and rescue operations, and--and both report now. George:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS reporting:

Well, Peter, we still don't know that it is a search and rescue operation yet. Just a little while ago one of the volunteers who tried to go down there and help, reported back and said when you actually got to the scene--and you see it behind me, that cloud of black smoke--when you got to the scene at the World Trade Center, what was most remarkable, what was most amazing, what was most horrifying is that basically nothing was happening. They couldn't go into the building and actually perform any real rescue operations. And he also described the scene very close to the World Trade Center: soot and silt up to his waist. He said it was hell.

We have also talked to some firefighters who've gotten fairly close to the scene. They've now set up a special command center over here at Manhattan Borough Community College here on the west side where they're relieving each other. One fireman said that he was buried underneath all the dirt and debris. He said he had to dig himself out, but still didn't know what happened to his six partners...

JENNINGS: George?

STEPHANOPOULOS: ...who had--who had gone into the building and near the building.

JENNINGS: George, can I just interrupt you for a sec? I'll come right back to you. But, Ann Compton, who's been with the president all day is on--on the phone from Nebraska. And we don't want to lose her if we can have her.

Annie, can you hear me?

ANN COMPTON reporting:

Yes, Peter I can. And...

JENNINGS: What are you doing in Nebraska?

COMPTON: Well, we didn't know where we were until we landed. President Bush is here at the home of the Strategic Command. This is the air--this is the base where those big doomsday aircraft are kept. And he has disappeared down the rabbit hole, Peter. Down through a red, brick, small building--he and what skeleton staff are with him--down into an underground bunker where Ari Fleischer tells me the president is going to chair a National Security Counsel meeting by teleconference. We're also told that the president has been on the phone several times to the vice president who is able to work out of a command center at the White House itself in one of the secure areas below in the White House.

JENNINGS: Annie, your description of the president going down the rabbit hole, going into a very secure compound, bunker in--in--in Nebraska, Offutt Air Force Base, suggests that people in his entourage believe there has been a threat today or a potential threat to the highest political leadership in the country. Is that correct?

COMPTON: Well, and I asked exactly that question. They say there was no hint of any warning of the attacks that came on the East Coast today. As you know, they always take the precaution, especially once the Pentagon was hit, that the president might be a target as well. And that is why he has come to as secure a place as he could where he is trying to marshal the forces. He's also talking to some of the civilian leaders on the ground, including Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki. But we were told there was no direct threat to him and no advanced warning. And that in itself, Peter, is distressing to the very small number of staff with the president here at Offutt.

JENNINGS: So--so the procedures are in place, and--and they do what they do, right?

COMPTON: Well, you know, in--in 27 years of covering presidents in crises, we have never played the kind of hunted game that was played today. Where we would take off in the plane and not know where we were going to land, and then once we landed in Louisiana; where we were literally told not to use cell phones so our location couldn't be pinpointed. To take off again and head to the...(unintelligible). It does feel like a cat and mouse game. Ari Fleischer, when I asked him if the president feels in jeopardy or hunted, he said the president understands that this is kind of the precaution that is necessary at a time like this and that he's anxious to get back to Washington.

JENNINGS: And--and, for example, when you phoned us just a moment ago, thank goodness you did, did you have to ask permission to do it?

COMPTON: No, because it--it is hard to hide a great big airplane like Air Force One. And when we were coming, and I could tell we were over a flat area, a fairly urban area, and I guess it was Nebraska. Knowing that we hadn't been that far out of Louisiana, and indeed as we came down over the field, I saw a satellite, a TV satellite truck out on the highway and sure enough on our screens inside the plane, we watched ourselves land. The local media was already here, figuring this is where the president of the United States, the commander in chief would land.

JENNINGS: Because it's part of the old strategic air defense command.

COMPTON: Exactly right. It has the facilities, the secure facilities here where the president can still be, what Ari tells me, is seamlessly in touch with the command structure in Washington.

JENNINGS: And which we remind ourselves, and I'm going to involve George Stephanopoulos in this conversation. Just think about how the world has changed and yet in some respects hasn't. The president has gone to Nebraska to a facility which was designed during the Cold War where the president might retreat or go in the case of a thermonuclear exchange or atomic thermonuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union. That's really something to think about.

COMPTON: It--it's is an amazing comment on where we are in the 21st century. You know, we have been checked, our bags over and over again today. We take that kind of security routinely on Air Force One, but it's been double that today. And just the thought of Americans who are stranded in airports all across the country trying to--to get home today or tomorrow, the kind of security they will then--then face. Certainly the White House sees the ramifications and the impact of this extending through American life as far as you can see.

JENNINGS: Annie, thank you very much. I hope you'll stay--in fact, I know you'll stay in touch.

COMPTON: Thank you. There are five of us who have been allowed to stay with the president, but we are not allowed in the underground bunker with him.

JENNINGS: Now, say that again.

COMPTON: There are only five of us reporters have been allowed to stay with him. Everyone else was left in Louisiana. There are four staff members five--five of us from the press and a very small Secret Service contingent. It was an--almost an empty Air Force One that brought us here. We don't know how long we'll be here or when the president will find it safe to go back to Washington.

JENNINGS: But you're not in the bunker?

COMPTON: No, they would not let us in the bunker. We are above ground looking at the bunker between--between him and us.

JENNINGS: OK, Annie, thank you very much. Ann Compton. Just to bring you up to date very quickly on the rest of--of--of the--of the first family. Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary did say that Barbara--of the two 19 year-old girls, Barbara at Yale and--and--and Janet at the University of Texas, were moved to secure locations. Mrs. Bush is with a group of friends and they were in--in--in an undisclosed location, but she's had a chance to talk with the president and everything is pretty cool there. But everything we hear and everything we report to you hour after hour after hour is a reminder of how seriously people have taken this. And I want to go to George Stephanopoulos, not so much in his position as a reporter today, but calling on his experience in the White House. George, I--to be honest I would plead naivete, maybe, here today but I'm surprised at the lengths to which whomever has gone to keep the president on the move from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska rather than going back to Washington. What is the thinking behind that and would it have occurred in the previous administration?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, my--my guess is first of all we've never seen anything like this before so it's hard to answer your second question. This is a testimony to the seriousness of--of the situation and make sure--number one, this means that the Secret Service, I think, is in charge.

JENNINGS: Right.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Their number one and really only job is to protect the body of the president and they're going to all lengths to do that right now. Peter, there are also some--some small indications that--that the broader evacuation of the senior staff of the White House that is always planned for in emergencies, as you hinted at, from a relic from the Cold War days, has also gone into effect. I've spoken with the spouse of the senior White House...

JENNINGS: Hang on, George--hang on, George. I apologize. I'm only interrupting you because you're so--OK, you don't have those sirens behind you. Go ahead.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The sirens behind me, sorry. I spoke earlier, just a little while ago, to the spouse of a senior White House official who received a call simply from the Secret Service saying your spouse is safe, is in a secure location right now. I remember from my early days, Peter, in the White House, several senior White House staff are given cards that have evacuation plans for places to go in cases of a national emergency. And as I said, it does seem to be there--there does seem to be some indication that that may have been put into effect. I would just add one more note, you--Ann was talking about the possibility of the president now doing a teleconference with his--his senior national security officials.

JENNINGS: Right.

STEPHANOPOULOS: There are facilities in the White House, not the normal situation room which everyone has seen in the past, has seen pictures of, but there is a second situation room behind the--the primary situation room which has video conferencing capabilities. The--the director of the Pentagon, the defense chief can speak from a national military command center at the Pentagon. The secre--secretary of state can speak from the State Department; the president from wherever he is and they'll have this capability to video conference throughout this crisis and my time at the White House was used in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. In the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing and--and that would be the way they would stay in contact through the afternoon.

JENNINGS: Now, just a couple of--of--of--of short questions. Given where the president has gone from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska; and given that we hear from the political staff that he'd--they'd like him to come back to Washington, does the president have any say at the moment, basically, if the Secret Service says go left or go right or go here or go there?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the president has the ability to overrule them if he wants, but I think in this situation, Peter, he would--he would follow their directions. Obviously pushing them to try to get back as soon--as soon as he could, if that was really what his political advisors wanted. But--but he would--he would take their direction on this one. Sometimes you can fight the Secret Service on, you know, how long you're going to spend in a rope line but I don't think you'd do it on this.

JENNINGS: Okey-dokey. And the other question is in terms of--Dick Cheney, the vice president, is in the White House now. Just from a purely operational point of view, if you were trying to run things at the moment, would you like to be in the White House or in a bunker in Nebraska, or would it make any difference?

STEPHANOPOULOS: I think right now, Peter, it doesn't make any difference. Air Force One, and this bunker in Nebraska has complete communications all across the board. And as I said, my guess is that Vice President Cheney is in that second situation room. A camera is trained on him, he can see the president, the president can see him, they can see Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Powell. It's as if they're meeting in one room.

JENNINGS: Now, tell me, let's--let's return to the--the media business at hand. I--I--every time I check in with you or we check in with you, I hear sirens virtually right underneath you. What's going on right underneath you?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, right underneath--I'm at Canal Street and the Avenue of the Americas; which is about 20 blocks away from the World Trade Center there. Every once in a while right outside my window right now there are four police vans and a police car. They--they're--but the police seem to be stationing there, almost resting right now. The area right around us is quite quiet. About an hour ago, two hours ago, there were hoards of people walking uptown. That's pretty much stopped. Now, Peter, I've got to tell you, it's very strange. You look on the sidewalk and you just have people strolling in their summer clothes up in this neighborhood right here. But, again, from what we've heard of that situation down by the World Trade Center, it's horrific; it's kind of eerily silent. The--the firemen are--are relieving each other every 15 minutes or so, they come out, they get showered down with firehouses to get all the soot off and then they go right back in and get to work.

JENNINGS: And--and--and just remind me one more time, George, that, you know, the layman's notion of a bunker is one thing out in Nebraska and I see the White House has another notion of bunker. What does it mean down the rabbit hole and into the bunker?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, in the bunker it would just be; certainly underground, a secure situation room. But--but the important point, Peter, is that wherever that bunker is, and it's reinforced by guards and concrete and all that, the president is in full communication with his entire national security team, and he can direct them at a moment's notice. And I think the big question that they're going to have to address now as they gather the facts, as they try and figure out who is responsible for this--even though they want to get the president back to Washington as soon as possible, and I'm sure they'll do that--they don't want him to go before the country again until he has more to say and probably until he can say what actions he's going to take in response to this.

JENNINGS: OK. Thanks, George Stephanopoulos, who, as he pointed out, was somewhat isolated from the violence there because he's as close as they'll let you broadcast at this point. But you can still see the smoke coming up. It's felt all over the country. A number of newspapers around the country are now putting out special editions of the day. I remember when the Challenger exploded. We were on the television for many, many, many hours. And which does, to some extent, isolate you from what is happening. You become a conveyor belt for information, going back to the hotel and realizing that the New York Times and the Washington Post had then put out 30 some odd page editions, in terms of the Challenger disaster, John. And it just--it just reminds you that you can be isolated from something that is so overwhelming.

And--and George Stephanopoulos acknowledges he is not as close to the violence and tragedy--like ABC's Bill Blakemore is somewhat closer. Bill, can you hear me? Bill Blakemore? OK, we'll come back to Bill Blakemore. But Bill Blakemore has--you know, we want to be as close as we can and not get in anybody's way. And I was pointing out that newspapers across the country, publishing these--these special editions. There's not been a special edition of this magnitude probably since the Challenger disaster; before that Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Or in some cases, newspapers are putting out the first major special edition they've done since John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Many of the papers will clear--clearly use terror in their banner headlines. Certainly the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was one that did that with--with a sub-heading saying, 'Attacks rip Trade Center, Pentagon, America's soul.' I think a great many people in the country feel that is precisely what has happened today. That the--that the Trade towers, as we've said many times; these--these absolute symbols of the United States in so many ways, right there at the edge of Manhattan, first city in the new world, the--the great advertisement to the rest of the world of commerce and success and upward mobility and all that stuff. And those two Trade towers are simply no longer there.

And then the attack on the Pentagon at the very heart of the--of the establishment, the military government establishment today. And the deep psychological damage that this--or wound, if not long-term damage this is going to do to the country. Then we learned just a short while ago that--that that United Airlines jet that was carrying 45 people which crashed near Johnstown in Pennsylvania today; was at least according to one congressman, James Moran, Democrat from Virginia, who had had a marine corps briefing in Washington. He believes that that aircraft was intended, originally intending by it's hijackers to go to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the mountains of Maryland. And the crash site actually turns out to be about 85 miles northwest of Camp David.

So no one should be surprised, perhaps no one is, at the--at the ripple effect at every level of government, not to mention in everybody's soul today, from this initial attack on the Trade towers. One of our reporters, Ellen Davis, reports, by the way, from the American Red Cross in New York City. They've actually had so many volunteers for blood that about 1200 people showed up at the--at the blood donation center in New York City. And they actually have enough blood for now except for people with type O and RH negative blood because they have a shortage of those. But in terms of all other types of blood, they seem to be in pretty good shape. John Miller, what are you finding on the telephone?

MILLER: Basically, still, that they are just beginning to try and mount a rescue operation in the Trade Center. That they are still trying to assess how many people are trapped inside. And they're still trying to collate the number of people that they removed to so many different hospitals in two states and--and--and now because our burn centers here in New York, of which there are only three, have been overwhelmed, even in Canada. So they're really just beginning what's going to be an operation that's going to take not days but weeks, more likely months.

JENNINGS: Let's go--thank you, John. Let's go to ABC's Bill Blakemore, who I said is in lower Manhattan and closer even than George Stephanopoulos was able to get. Bill, do you hear me?

BILL BLAKEMORE reporting:

I do, Peter.

JENNINGS: Go ahead.

BLAKEMORE: There's an enormous search and rescue operation being mounted here for what's clearly going to be many days of grim work. We're just north of the wreckage and the smoke is still coming out. On the West Side Highway, right next to the Hudson River, hundreds of firemen are reassembling and restaging here after their first partial defeat this morning. And they know that many of their colleagues are missing with the civilians in the wreckage. I've talked to several of them who were in one of the towers when the other one was collapsing who barely got out. They're not quite sure how and can't even begin to talk about it. Tables have been set up in the street here by some of the officers who are helping them figure out who is going to go in when they can. There's a triage center that's been set up in the Manhattan Community College; where bodies and people and survivors are going to be brought as they begin to figure out how badly they're injured. And we can tell, because they still can't go in, they're still milling around in the hot sun here, that it's going to take a long time before they even begin to assess how many people there are who need their help in search and rescue, which is going to go on for some time.

The streets just behind us are quite different. There--there's almost an eerie war scene type of feeling because much of this part of the West Village has emptied out on this very clear, hot day. There are occasionally jet fighters circling overhead, so there's even just the touch of the feeling of covering a war. But for the most part everybody is still looking at this enormous wreckage and just beginning to absorb what it is. And these firemen are eager and ready to get in there as they begin to gather themselves and dust themselves off from--from their first foray in this morning.

JENNINGS: Bill, this is an excellent report. I just have this one question, and it may just simply be my inability to grasp it visually. Are they actually getting into either of the former towers of the Trade Center, or are they still working on the outside perimeter?

BLAKEMORE: I cannot tell you the exact answer to that. Many of them are still waiting on the outside of the perimeter to figure out how to get into the general area. When the north tower collapsed, parts of the top of it fell over, all the way over here to the river. And so they're still trying to sort out through the smoke just exactly where they can get into. They are not letting the media get anywhere near the actual base of the two towers themselves. But there's just a general sense of these accumulating hundreds of firemen, that they're--they're ready to go in, they're waiting to find where an opening will be.

JENNINGS: OK. Thanks very much, Bill Blakemore. ABC's Done Dahler did manage to get, I think, pretty close to the building at one point earlier today. Don, are you there?

DON DAHLER reporting:

Yes Peter, I'm here. I'm--I'm just back to about four blocks away. But I was--I escorted a federal agent through the--up to the site of the World Trade Center itself and can tell you it is probably the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life. There is total devastation, but beyond that there--there's no nongruesome way to describe this. But there were--bodies and body parts on top of some buildings next to where the World Trade Center stood in the streets. There is still a number of fires going on in buildings surrounding including the...

There is a--the Marriott building appears to be--be on fire. There's a building directly behind the federal office building, I can't identify which building it is, but it's a taller building. The police and the firemen are--are getting away from that area. They're afraid that that building will collapse as well. There have been a couple building collapses, or portions of them collapsing from the flames. So there are some buildings that they are letting burn to collapse because it's too dangerous for them to fight it right now.

JENNINGS: Don, thanks very much, Don. And now here is the--we are going to go to a briefing now on behalf of the political wing of the president--I'm sorry.

Unidentified Woman: Just have a very brief statement, and I want Chief...(unintelligible)...to talk about the search and rescue efforts under way. No surprise, we have very, very few details. We'll tell you what we can at this stage, but we have very few details. This is a terrible day. It is a tragic day for America. Our thoughts and prayers are with the injured and their families and the casualties. We're taking every appropriate step and precaution to prevent further attacks. We are making every effort to take care of the injured still in the building. And we're taking every appropriate measure to determine who is responsible. The secretary of defense...

Ms. KAREN HUGHES (Counselor to the President): And at President Bush's direction, we are implementing it. We began to implement it immediately after the first attack in New York this morning. We contacted American forces and embassies throughout the world and placed them on high alert. The United States Secret Service immediately secured the president, the vice president, and the speaker of the house, and they are all safe. They have also secured members of the national security team, the president's Cabinet, and senior staff.

As you know, President Bush was in Sarasota, Florida, when the first attack occurred this morning. Air Force One has now landed at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. And the president is in a secure location. He is in continuous communication with the vice president and key members of his cabinet and national security team. Vice President Cheney and our national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, are in a secure facility at the White House. I have just come from there. The secretary of transportation and other members of our White House senior staff are gathered at a command center there, and we are coordinating with other branches of our federal government.

The secretary of defense remains at the Pentagon. And the secretary of state is en route back to Washington from his trip to South America. President Bush is conducting a meeting of the National Security Council as we speak. They are meeting, President Bush, from his location, and other members from different locations in Washington and other locations.

As many of you have been reporting, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered all airports closed, and all planes which were in the air were directed to land at the nearest airport. International flights were diverted to alternate locations outside of the United States. Transportation Secretary Mineta has directed the Federal Aviation Administration to suspend operations until at least noon tomorrow. So no airline flights will operate until at least then and until the FAA announces that operations will be resumed. Secretary Mineta has also issued orders controlling the movement of all vessels in United States navigable waters.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has activated eight urban search and rescue task forces in New York, and four of these highly trained teams are at work here in Washington at the Pentagon. Every federal agency has implemented continuity of operations plans to make sure the government continues to function effectively. While the markets closed today because of the situation in Manhattan, the United States financial system has continued to operate. Banks have been opened all day, the Federal Reserve has operated regularly and continuously. The Department of Health and Human Services has mobilized medical personnel and supplies to provide help to local authorities who are working so diligently to respond and try to help the victims of these terrible attacks.

President Bush has committed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to identify and bring to swift justice those responsible for these despicable attacks. The Department of Justice is setting up a hotline for families who fear that their relatives may have been victims of one of these attacks, and we will be announcing that telephone number shortly.

Our fellow citizens and our freedom came under attack today, and no one should doubt America's resolve. President Bush and all our country's leaders thank the many Americans who are helping with rescue and relief efforts. We ask our fellow Americans for your prayers for the victims, for their families, for the rescue workers and for our country. Thank you all very much, and we will continue to update you as information is available and confirmed.

JENNINGS: Karen Hughes--Karen Hughes, the president--I must say, John Miller, that there's not an enormous amount of news in there if we have been following this--this event all day.

MILLER: No, even the White House seems to be having difficulty gleaning the facts which the officials in New York City just don't seem to know.

JENNINGS: Yeah.

MILLER: In terms of level of casualties, number of people killed.

JENNINGS: And it--and it's enormously--enormous--we--we're are going to go to our White House correspondent, Claire Shipman, one of our White House correspondents, Claire Shipman, at the moment to see what's going on. But it's--I'm very deeply sympathetic with the--with the difficulty it is to get down to street level, either at the Pentagon or certainly in New York City and understand the chaos and the tragedy that--that appeared at ground level. Those of us sitting in news rooms bringing in, interpreting, analyzing information at a variety of levels are not doing a good enough job because it's probably an impossible job to do--to try to--to have ourselves and you understand just what happened when that building fell in on each other. Listening to Bill Blakemore a short while ago, and Don Dahler, very helpful in terms of trying to understand it. But there is--there is a delay in--in everything. A delay in government at the federal, state and the national level. The airlines, of course, across the country closed down. And it's--an it's true with news coverage as well. As best we can sense from here that it's hard to get back from the immediate scene of this enough of a sort of texture to help us understand how--what--enormous this is--maybe you don't need it. Maybe you already appreciate that, but that's our sense from here. But there's Karen Hughes making--the president has appeared, remember, twice. Claire Shipman ready? Claire?

CLAIRE SHIPMAN reporting:

Yes.

JENNINGS: Can you hear me? OK.

SHIPMAN: I can.

JENNINGS: Are you--you--better you--much better you than me bring us up to date on what's happening and the presidential establishment both there and elsewhere.

SHIPMAN: Well, let me tell you what we know so far. You obviously just heard a statement from Karen Hughes that seemed designed to try to express to the country that the government is still up and running. The--the political advisors have you--as you have mentioned a couple times, would very much like to see the president get back to Washington when it's safe so that he can address the country. But in the meantime, they certainly want to give the impression that everything is under control; that the vice president is at the White House, Condoleezza Rice is at the White House, the Federal Reserve is still operating, banks are opened, HHS is mobilized. And--and I think that was the point she is trying to get across.

We've been told that the president may be back as early as this evening. The AP was also reporting he's considering some sort of address to the nation this evening. But, again, it may be he will want to have something very specific to be able to tell the public before that happens. Colin Powell we're told is on his way back from Peru. It's not clear where he will head. At this moment, what has happened in terms of the Secret Service is that their plan has gone into effect for this sort of emergency. The first time, we're told, that a plan like this has been implemented in--in recent history, of course. But what it means is they have all of their protectees accounted for, they're satisfied with

PAGE 20 ABC News September 11, 2001 Tuesday

that now. Now we're told they are in level two where they're assessing the threat. And they will then decide things, for example, as to whether Colin Powell can go back and safely work at the State Department and whether the president can come back to Washington. In the meantime, as you probably know, there's been a state of emergency declared in the city of Washington and in the state of Virginia allowing both of those places to be able to mobilize military and police forces as needed, Peter.

JENNINGS: Thanks very much. Claire Shipman from Washington. It is--it's very difficult to keep your hands on the political establishment today. In--in part because we rely on government so often in cases like this to tell us what is going on in their various departments. And it has been very difficult today to get--for example, the Federal Emergency Management Administration got involved in--in this today. But it's hard because of the communications problems all across the country to have a real appreciation of what they are participating. The most direct communication we have had has been with New York City on the ground. That is other than in terms of the president's movements from Florida to Louisiana and now on to Nebraska where he is going to stay for the indefinite future, though political--political staff keeps saying he would like to come back to Washington.

MILLER: There is something interesting in the laundry list of--of things that Karen Hughes, counselor to the president, said in the briefing we just looked at, which is, one is that airspace will remain shut down under government control until noon tomorrow and that the movements of ships around the coast will be regulated by the government. That suggests--I mean, we're talking about not a few hours. We're talking about halfway into the next day. That suggests that there's a real feeling in the intelligence community and--and in Washington that this may not be over. That they don't want to let go of--of the assets like air traffic that they think could unleash even more attacks.

JENNINGS: I--I--I wonder, John, if there is a real feeling in the intelligence community that may not be over, or, 'God, we didn't know any of this was going on. Maybe there's something else there we don't have the vaguest idea about.'

MILLER: Precisely, I mean, it seems to be an abundance of caution and some degree of fear.

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