Dayton: 'NORAD lied'
During the hearing, Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 commission,
that, based on the commission's report, a NORAD chronology made public
a week after the attacks was grossly misleading.
The chronology said the FAA notified the military's emergency air
command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still
airborne.
Dayton cited commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD
about three of the planes until after they had crashed.
And, he said, a squadron of NORAD fighter planes that was scrambled
was sent east over the Atlantic Ocean and was 150 miles from
Washington, D.C., when the third plane struck the Pentagon -- "farther
than they were before they took off."
Dayton said NORAD officials "lied to the American people, they lied to
Congress and they lied to your 9/11 commission to create a false
impression of competence, communication and protection of the American
people."
He told Kean and Hamilton that if the commission's report is correct,
President Bush "should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD ... betrayed
their public trust by not telling us the truth."
Asked about Dayton's allegation, a spokesman for Colorado
Springs-based NORAD said, "We stand on our testimony to the
commission" and declined to discuss the 2001 chronology.
Erin Utzinger, a spokeswoman for Dayton, said the senator "assumes the
FAA knew of NORAD's coverup."
FAA spokeswoman Rebecca Trexler said the agency "has never and would
never intentionally misrepresent or alter information. We worked very
closely with the 9/11 commission and provided them with everything
that was available to us."
Dayton told reporters that he skipped festivities at the Democratic
National Committee Tuesday night and sat in his hotel room until 2:30
a.m. reading the commission report.
After piecing together the section about the FAA and NORAD, he said,
he could not fall asleep.
Dayton outraged
"I'm a strong defender of government," he said.
"When government fails, it really outrages me. It just destroys
peoples' trust and faith."
Using the chronology, Dayton argued that if the FAA had promptly sent
a systemwide message about the hijackings, the pilot of the fourth
plane seized, United Airlines Flight 93, might have been able to
secure the cockpit doors and land the plane.
Passengers, including Minnesota native Tom Burnett, Jr., "could very
well be alive," he said.
"This is unbelievable negligence," Dayton said.
"It doesn't matter if we spend $550 billion annually on our national
defense, if we reorganize our intelligence or if we restructure
congressional oversight if people don't pick up the phone to call one
another."
He also noted that NORAD could not find the hijacked jetliners because
terrorists turned off their transponders and NORAD lacked adequate
radar to locate them without that beamed signal.
Dayton said NORAD also falsely claimed that during the hijackings, it
had F-16 Combat Air Patrol planes in place at Langley Air Force Base
in Virginia and an AWAC command ship in the air to protect the
nation's capital.
Dayton, a former Minnesota state auditor, called the FAA's and NORAD's
failures "the most gross incompetence and dereliction of
responsibility and negligence that I've ever, under those extreme
circumstances, witnessed in the public sector."
From The Star Tribune, 7/31/04:
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/4904237.html
Dayton: FAA, NORAD hid 9/11 failures
Greg Gordon, Star Tribune Washington Bureau Correspondent
WASHINGTON, D.C. --
Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., charged Friday that the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command
(NORAD) have covered up "catastrophic failures" that left the nation
vulnerable during the Sept. 11 hijackings.
"For almost three years now, NORAD officials and FAA officials have
been able to hide their critical failures that left this country
defenseless during two of the worst hours in our history," Dayton
declared during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.
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So who gets prosecuted?
Harry
.
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