The independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks has found that the Pentagon’s domestic air-defence command was disastrously unprepared for a terrorist attack on US soil and was slow in its response to the hijackings, according to officials. They said the draft report, circulated among commission members and at the Pentagon in preparation for release on Thursday, summarises the response of the military, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies saying: ‘‘On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen. What ensued was a hurried attempt to create an improvised defence by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced.’’ The report, they said, suggests that a more organised response by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, might have allowed fighter pilots to reach American Flight 11 and shoot it down before it plummeted into the Pentagon, more than 40 minutes after the first of the hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York. Instead, the report finds, an emergency order from Vice-President Dick Cheney authorising the hijacked planes to be shot down did not reach pilots until after the last of the four commandeered jets had crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. A spokesman for NORAD made no comments on the report. NORAD’s commander, Gen Ralph E. Eberhart, and Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are to testify before the panel on Thursday, along with former FAA officials. Commission officials said NORAD and FAA believed elements of criticism in the draft report were wrong or exaggerated, and that they were pressing for last-minute corrections. The commission’s public hearings this week — on Wednesday on Al Qaeda and the development of the 9/11 plot, and on Thursday on the chronology of that morning and how NORAD, the FAA and other agencies responded to the attacks — are the last the panel is scheduled to hold before it delivers a final, all-encompassing report next month. —(NYT)
