Angel in the morning

of 9/11

Brad Delong asked me how I was going with the 9/11 commission report and is interested in who decided that Air Force One (Angel) was threatened on 9/11. The commission deals with the issue in an uncharacteristic way. In the main text the report is very brief and firm


P 325 "After the attacks had occurred, while crisis managers were still sorting
out a number of unnerving false alarms, Air Force One flew to Barksdale Air
Force Base in Louisiana. One of these alarms was of a reported threat against
Air Force One itself, a threat eventually run down to a misunderstood communication
in the hectic White House Situation Room that morning.1"


However endnote 1 to chapter 10 is not a brief listing of sources like most footnotes to the report

P 554 Chapter 10 endnote 1 "... Notes from the morning indicate that Vice President Cheney informed President Bush in a phone conversation shortly after 10:30 that an anonymous threat had been phoned into the White House that was viewed as credible. At about the same time, news of the threat was conveyed on the air threat conference call.

The Secret Service intelligence division tracked down the origen of this threat and, during the day, determined that it had originated in a misunderstanding by a watch officer in the White House Situation Room. The director of the White House Situation Room that day disputes this account. But the intelligence division had the primary job of running down the story, and we found their witnesses on this point to be credible."

Notice that as with the authorization to shoot down airliners the first person which documents show said something is Richard Cheney.

This is in total contrast with the approach in the rest of the report. "The director of the White House Situation Room that day" shares with IIRC Khalid Sheik Muhammad and no one else the distinction of being directly contradicted by the conclusions of the report in the absence of any documentary proof that he (or she) was incorrect. It is odd that the word of people who were in the situation room seems to carry less weight than the testimony of un-named witnesses. It is also unique that the number of secret service intelligence division witnesses is not reported.

Also the English is not up to the standard of the rest of the report. There is a dangling modifier "White House that was viewed as credible." Surely they don't expect the reader to cling to the notion that the White House is credible all the way to page 554. The origen of a nonexistent threat can't be traced. Whoever wrote this bit of the report meant "the origen of this theat report."

Could it be the section was rewritten by someone senior whose limited literacy was balanced by his unlimited willingness to cover for Richard Cheney.