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Friendly Fire: The
Coddling of Condee
OPINION by Jason Kirk
My current unemployment has afforded me a freedom of opportunity that I have
remorselessly squandered in front of the television, if only in small doses.
Though it amounts to less than a direct benefit, I have seen a few short bits
of our National Security Adviser’s testimony in front of the much-ballyhooed
9/11 commission, not that the commission’s gentle and misguided pawing has
amounted to the thorough inquisition this still-warm tragedy deserves. The
softball questions our supposedly representative interrogators lobbed at
Condoleezza Rice amount to kid gloves next to what existing evidence should be
compelling the commission to ask.
In a nutshell, the thrust of the interrogation has concerned itself with
whether or not the Bush Administration and the various intelligence agencies
had sufficient warning to stop the 9/11 attacks. Condoleezza Rice, like a
dutiful servant, has parroted the Administration’s stance that although both
foreign and domestic intelligence agencies had warned the Pentagon of Al
Qaeda’s inclination to use commercial airlines as bombs and to do so within
months of the Summer 2001 reports, none of these reports (apparently even when
taken together) made for a sufficiently specific tip-off.
“There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the attacks,” Rice
testified. But is the most powerful government the planet has ever known
relying only on intelligence reports for the defense of the people it
purportedly exists to protect? Of course not. To do so would be tantamount to
asking parents to rely on traffic reports to tell them whether or not it’s
safe to let their kids play in the street. Because intelligence regularly
fails, because the CIA and FBI have long behaved like competitors, and because
bureaucracies regularly hamper emergencies response, institutions have
standard operating procedures, rules by which they behave unless circumstances
call for adaptation.
Even if you believe that no one was equipped to see the tragedy approaching
(and I don’t recommend it), no one should have had to see it coming. Standard
Operating Procedures (SOP) for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the
US military, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) are in
place to detect and take decisive action against unplanned deviation in the
flight pattern of any and all personal and commercial passenger planes. The
military routinely scrambles fighter jets – at speeds of Mach 2 and faster –
to establish visual contact with planes that have lost contact with ground
controls, veered more than 15 degrees from their planned routes, or both. None
of this happened on 9/11 until it was way too late.
Flights 175 and 11 hit the World Trade Center at least 28 minutes after they
were known to have been hijacked, their transponders disconnected, and their
courses radically altered. Under normal circumstances, fighter jets from the
nearest Air Force bases would have been scrambled (sent up to establish visual
contact with the errant aircraft and, if necessary, take further measures to
escort it back on course – unless it’s been hijacked, in which case the jets
can shoot the plane down, but only under direct orders from the President). On
9/11, it didn’t happen. Dick Cheney, on Meet the Press later that month, took
great pains to say that the President didn’t know about the hijacking in time
to order the scrambling of jets, despite the fact that SOP only calls for
Presidential approval for a strike. Otherwise, the whole process is Standard
Operating Procedure. It happens all the time.
Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:40 am, almost an hour and a half after word of
the hijacking of Flight 11 had made its rounds to the FAA and NORAD. Knowing
that Flight 77 was headed toward Washington, the military did eventually
scramble two jets to intercept it, but not until more than 20 minutes after
the Pentagon’s 9:06 notification that terrorist attack was indeed underway.
The jets were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base (130 miles from
Washington) rather than Andrew’s Air Force Base (10 miles away). When the
scrambling of jets in aviation emergencies is established, practiced, even
routine SOP, the utter failure of this procedure on 9/11 has to beg
questioning.
And now, when we have our chance, the 9/11 Commission is bathing in its own
self-importance and thoroughly happy to try and prod Condoleezza Rice into
admitting the existence of some silver bullet or magic eight-ball or
hand-written letter carried from bin Laden to the Oval Office. Much of the
necessary questioning can be found in a book called The War on Freedom, by
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed (Tree of Life Publications, 2002, ISBN 0-930852-40-0).
Ahmed is no conspiracy theorist. Far from claiming to have compiled
irrefutable evidence that Bush himself was complicit in the attacks, Ahmed
calls only for a more thorough inquiry into the tragedy. In analyzing the
book’s heaving compilation of thoroughly documented facts about the breakdown
of SOP on 9/11 and much, much more, he makes a rock-hard case for the need for
such an investigation.
Good luck finding the book, though. It took Border’s eight weeks to get my
copy, and while the lag-time doesn’t amount to evidence of a conspiracy to
squash the book’s dissemination, it doesn’t exactly diminish the likelihood
that its snooping is very much on the right track. The War on Freedom makes
plain the absolute narrowness of the public inquiry, the inquiry that – had it
only bothered to read this book written by a 22-year-old British policy
researcher in 2002 – shouldn’t be content to toss a handful of thoroughly
misguided questions at Ms. Rice and then call it a day.
Meanwhile, fighting continues in Iraq. But against what? Weapons of mass
destruction have been effectively ruled out. Saddam’s in US custody. Now the
talking heads and both visible presidential candidates all take for granted
the premise that “We have to finish it once we’ve started it.” How short are
our collective memories? Didn’t George Bush the First back out of Iraq just 10
years ago? Have we forgotten? Wise or otherwise, there are other options.
We’re now fighting a war (ostensibly) for the Iraqi people against the Iraqi
people that are fighting back, as astonishing as it may seem to all the news
stations as they trot out their rote shock that small bands of brown thugs
were so clever as to learn how to inflict flesh wounds on a few tank jockeys.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not a pacifist, but I do believe that any
country embroiled in an external war is failing, for how much success can be
tallied for a nation (as distinct from its inhabitants) that can’t come to any
peaceful understanding with its neighboring nations (as distinct from their
inhabitants)? Who has decided that the terms of peace are impossible to live
with? The measure of failure is greater when the concentration of wealth,
power, freedom and intellectual options is so imbalanced that the Bush family
and the residents of Pelican Bay State Prison in California are both citizens
of this nation’s so-called freedom of opportunity. But I repeat: I’m not a
pacifist. I’m ready to combat the enemy that I understand to be the enemy. I
will brave death and defeat. I will fight. Just as soon as I find a job. |
