flights, and that that order had been processed through the chain of command and passed to the fighters. This was untrue.”
Why might a phony scenario have been created? “The administration version,” Farmer noted, “implied, where it did not state explicitly, that the chain of command had been functioning on 9/11, and that the critical decisions had been made by the appropriate top officials.… None of this captures how things actually unfolded on the day.”
THE POTENTIAL NEED to shoot down an airliner occurred to the man in the hot seat at NEADS, Major Nasypany, as early as 9:20 on 9/11—after two successful terrorist strikes and the realization that there might be more to come. “My recommendation if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft,” he was taped saying, “we use AIM-9s [heat-seeking air-to-air missiles] in the face.” Nasypany began asking his team whether they could countenance such an act. Everyone knew, though, that a shoot-down would require authorization from the top.
“I don’t know,” said Technical Sergeant Watson, on the line to the FAA, “but somebody’s gotta get the President going.” “I’m amazed,” responded the operations manager at New York Center, “that we’re not at a higher level of Defcon readiness already.”
It was 9:30 by then. The President had yet to leave the school in Florida. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, whose responsibility it was to set Defcon—the forces’ Defense Condition, or military alert status—knew of the New York attacks but had so far taken no action. A few minutes later, when the Pentagon was hit at 9:37, that key figure in the chain of command would head off to view the damage—and have no contact with the President or Vice President until after 10:00.
Staff at the National Military Command Center, whose task it was to connect the President and the defense secretary to those charged with carrying out their orders, looked for Rumsfeld in vain. It was “outrageous,” an unnamed senior White House official would later complain, for the man responsible for the nation’s defense to have been “out of touch” at such a time.
Official reports disagree on what Rumsfeld did after leaving the scene of the crash and before his reappearance at the Pentagon’s Executive Support Center around 10:15. Rumsfeld said in his Commission testimony that he had “one or more calls in my office, one of which I believe was with the President.” The Defense Department’s own report, however, states that he “tried without success to telephone the President.”
When the President and Rumsfeld did finally speak, according to the secretary’s communications assistant, the conversation covered only such questions as “Are you okay?” and “Is the Pentagon still intact?” The Commission decided that it was “a brief call, in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed.”
Rumsfeld was still “just gaining situational awareness”—as he put it—as late as 10:35, when he finally joined a conference call that included Vice President Cheney. Shoot-down authority had already been issued, Cheney said, and—as the transcript of the conversation makes clear—that was news to the defense secretary:
C
HENEY:
There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington—a couple were confirmed hijack. And, pursuant to the President’s instructions, I gave authorization for them to be taken out … [Long pause] Hello?
R
UMSFELD:
Yes, I understand. Who did you give that direction to?
C
HENEY:
It was passed from here through the [Operations] Center at the White House, from the PEOC [shelter beneath the White House].
R
UMSFELD:
OK, let me ask the question here. Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?
C
HENEY:
Yes, it has.
R
UMSFELD:
So we’ve got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?
C
HENEY:
That is correct. And it’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.
Later, interviewed for his own department’s report, Rumsfeld was asked whether shoot-down authorization “had come from the Vice President.” “Technically,” he replied, “it couldn’t. Because the Vice President is not in the chain of command. The President and he were talking, and the President and I were talking, and the Vice President and I were talking. Clearly he was involved in the process.”
That fuzzy answer was of no use in establishing when and by whom the shoot-down authority was issued. Rumsfeld’s public testimony to the 9/11 Commission was no more useful. The record of what he told staff in closed session is still withheld, and his 2011 memoir added no substantive detail.
The White House itself ought to have been the best source of information on communications between Bush and Cheney, but the White House proved unhelpful. Though the Commission did manage to get clearance to interview a few of the staff members who had been around the President and Vice President that morning, what they learned on the shoot-down issue was of virtually no use.
“Very little new information has been gained in the five White House meetings conducted thus far,” a frustrated staffer noted in the final months of the Commission’s work. “To a person, no one has any recollection of the circumstances and details surrounding the authorization to shoot down commercial aircraft.… Our sense is that the White House will take the position that it is not possible to reconstruct—with any degree of accuracy or reliability—what went on that morning.”
Investigators also asked for interviews with relevant Secret Service agents, but the White House stalled. Then it offered limited access to some of them, with an attorney present. It was next to impossible, the staffer reported, to probe beyond the vague stories told by Bush and Cheney in their media interviews.
Faced with this obstruction, the Commission team concentrated on the paper trail. The White House famously keeps track of all high-level communications, maintains records of phone calls, logs of Secret Service operations, logs kept by military officers, a Situation Room log, a log of activity in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center—PEOC—the bunker in the bowels of the White House where Cheney spent much of the day on September 11, and logs kept aboard Air Force One. For the day of 9/11, there were also notes kept by individuals: President Bush’s press secretary, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, and his wife, Lynne Cheney.
Once again, however, the investigators found themselves stalled. White House personnel sought to limit the Commission’s access to the contemporary record, while simultaneously insisting it was unreliable. Undeterred, Commission staff built a chronology as best they could from available logs and from what witness testimony they did manage to obtain.
The record, such as we have it, does not support the Bush/Cheney version of events, that the President gave Cheney shoot-down authorization during a phone conversation sometime soon after 10:00 A.M., after Cheney’s arrival in the underground bunker.
The Bush/Cheney version, with its implication of the requisite line of command—Bush granted authority, Cheney transmitted it—does not mesh with events as they unfolded.
The emergency teleconferences that morning—one in the White House Situation Room, one at the Pentagon, another at the FAA—overlapped with one another, making for confusion rather than clarity. To participate in one, senior staff would temporarily have to drop out of another. The conference in the Situation Room—below the West Wing—was not linked to the part of the Pentagon dealing with the crisis, nor was it adequately linked to the Vice President in the PEOC, beneath the East Wing. “In my mind,” one witness recalled of the teleconferences, “they were competing venues for command and control and decision-making.”
