A CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

At 6:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001, employees at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) begin work, already alerted that a week-long series of war game exercises with the overall title “Vigilant Guardian” would command their attention that day. The event was designed to pose an “imaginary crisis” in the form of an “air defense exercise simulating an attack on the United States,” according to later news reports. But we now know that these exercises provided the distraction and confusion necessary for the real air attacks of that day to succeed.

Furthermore, at a time when there were complaints that some airlines were canceling flights that were not full to save money, the craft involved on 9/11 carried a suspiciously low number of passengers.

Sometime between 7:45 a.m. and 8:10 a.m. that day, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 were hijacked. By 8:15, air traffic controllers knew that they were obviously off course. Flight 11, a Boeing 767 with 92 persons on board out of a possible 351, had taken off from Boston's Logan International Airport en route to Los Angeles. Flight 175, another Boeing 767 carrying 65 passengers out of a possible 351, also departed from Logan to Los Angeles.

During that same time frame, American Flight 77, a Boeing 757 with 64 passengers out of a possible 289, took off from Dulles International Airport in Washington destined for Los Angeles, while United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 with 45 passengers out of a possible 289, headed for San Francisco from Newark Airport at 8:42 a.m., after a long delay.

According to the independent timeline presented here, at about 8:40 a.m., the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) of NORAD was alerted to the hijackings of Flights 11 and 175 by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and, according to a NORADstatement, two F-15 jet fighters were scrambled from the Otis Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Taking the initial call was Tech. Sgt. Jeremy Powell, a member of the Air National Guard at NEADS. “Hi. Boston [controller here], we have a problem here,” Powell was told by Boston Flight Control. “We have a hijacked aircraft headed toward New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.” Powell's reply was: “Is this real-world or exercise?”

Moments after 8:55 a.m., it was known to the FAA that four airliners had been hijacked—an unprecedented occurrence.

At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 struck the north face of the 110-story North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) at the 96th floor. Also at this time, the two F-15s from Otis took to the air, after earlier warnings of a hijacking and waiting for several critical minutes for take-off orders. They quickly were directed to New York City.

At 8:47 a.m., despite having its transponder tracking beacon turned off by the hijackers, air traffic controllers could see that American Flight 77 had reversed course somewhere over West Virginia and was moving back toward the East Coast.

At 9:03 a.m., with the hesitant evacuation of the WTC towers proceeding amidst fear and confusion, United Flight 175 careened into the southeast corner of the South Tower at the 80th floor, sending a massive ball of burning fuel into the air over lower New York City. The F-15s were reported as being seventy-one miles away. According to official sources, the jets arrived over New York City at 9:10 a.m., seven minutes too late.

A short time after 9:03 a.m., Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld joined in on an emergency teleconference of top government officials being run out of the White House that included counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, acting chairman of the joint chiefs Richard Myers, and FAA head Jane Garvey. Despite the 9/11 Commission's claim that no one could locate Rumsfeld until approximately 10:30 a.m. that morning, the record shows that Rumsfeld—the military's top civilian official—was on the teleconference by as early as 9:05 a.m., along with the top official of the FAA. (See appendix for further details on this point.)

Nonetheless, according to the timeline presented in The 9/11 Commission Report, FAA authorities failed to the inform NORAD and NEADS about three of the four hijackings until after these planes had crashed (i.e., Flight 175 into the second World Trade Center tower at 9:03 a.m., Flight 77 into the Pentagon at 9:32 a.m., and Flight 93 in Pennsylvania at 10:06 a.m.).

At 9:06 a.m., President Bush is attending a photo op in Sarasota, Florida at Booker Elementary School in a second grade classroom. His chief of staff, Andrew Card, enters the room and whispers into his ear, “A second plane hit the other tower, and America's under attack.” Bush looks perplexed.

Between 9:06 and 9:16 a.m., with both WTC towers burning and terrified occupants leaping to their deaths, President Bush reads My Pet Goat to second graders for nearly ten minutes. Apparently, he never considered simply getting up, stating, “I’m sorry children, I have some presidential business to conduct,” and walking out to defend his country.

By 9:20 a.m., Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta arrives at the emergency operations bunker under the east wing of the White House. Vice President Cheney had already been rushed to this location by the Secret Service, according to several witnesses. When Mineta arrives, Cheney and others are engaged in the emergency teleconference indicated above. He witnesses Vice President Cheney being told by an aide that an airplane is headed toward Washington from only 50 miles away. The 9/11 Commission Report ignores this eyewitness account by Mineta and others, and instead asserts that Cheney did not reach the White House bunker until about 10 a.m.

At 9:30 a.m., two F-16 fighters are scrambled from Langley Air Force Base (AFB) in Hampton, Virginia, heading toward Washington, D.C., in an attempt to intercept incoming Flight 77. But according to numerous authoritative sources, this pair of interceptors is ordered to fly at about a quarter of its top possible speed, as were the F-15s dispatched from Otis.

At 9:31 a.m., President Bush, speaking from the schoolhouse in Florida, declared the disaster in New York an apparent terrorist attack.

At 9:32 a.m. rather than at the official time of 9:37 a.m.—according to veteran military journalist Barbara Honegger, author of the special Appendix in this book—a flying object crashes into the west side of the steel-reinforced concrete and limestone Pentagon, penetrating three of its five rings of offices. A hot debate continues over what actually struck the Pentagon and exactly when. If it is true that Flight 77 actually did hit the Pentagon at 9:32 a.m., anyone concerned with the fact that their tax money supports a half trillion yearly defense budget should be appalled that this flight was allowed to wander over northeastern airspace unmolested for over an hour and that automated defense missile batteries failed to react. Also at about this moment, a bomb or bombs reportedly go off at the same location in the west side of the Pentagon as the location of the crash of a flying object. (See the Appendix.)

At 9:35 a.m., what official sources claim to be American Flight 77, but which may have been a reconnaissance fighter jet that was dispatched just after the impact on the Pentagon, begins making a complicated 270-degree spiral turn while descending seven thousand feet in the direction of the Pentagon.

By 9:48 a.m., key officials of the White House and the Capitol were evacuated and taken to secure but undisclosed locations. One minute later, in an unprecedented action, the FAA ordered all airline flights across the nation grounded. Air traffic controllers, who moments before appeared paralyzed by the confusion over the hijacked planes, were able to accomplish this nationwide grounding activity with unprecedented alacrity.

As early as 9:50 and no later than 10:00 a.m., according to numerous mainstream sources, President Bush had issued a shoot-down order that was transmitted to the military and was intended to apply to any remaining hijacked planes. This would have included Flight 93. With no supporting evidence, the 9/11 Commission claims that this order was not given until 10:25 a.m.

Shortly after 10 a.m., the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, covering lower Manhattan with tons of asbestos-filled ash, dust, smoke, and debris.

At 10:06 a.m., United Flight 93, also with transponder turned off or disabled, crashed in western Pennsylvania about eighty miles southeast of Pittsburgh near Shanksville after passengers reportedly used back-of-the-seat radio phones to report that they intended to fight the hijackers.

This event was followed about twenty-three minutes later by the collapse of the WTC North Tower, the upper floors of which had been burning for about an hour and a half and much longer than the South Tower.

By noon, there were closings at the United Nations, Securities and Exchange Commission, the stock markets, some skyscrapers in several cities and even some large tourist attractions such as Walt Disney World, Mount Rushmore, the Seattle Space Needle, and St. Louis's Gateway Arch.

At 1:04 p.m., President Bush proclaimed, “Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.” But until the April 2006 conviction of Zacarias Moussaoui, who, while admitting to being a member of al Qaeda, denied any involvement in the 9/11 attacks, there were no convictions of any terrorist involved in the 9/11 attacks. The proclaimed architect of the attacks, Osama bin Laden, was finally reported “killed” almost a decade later.

At 5:25 p.m. the 47-story Salomon Brothers (Building 7 of the WTC) suddenly collapsed despite the fact it was not hit by aircraft nor suffered major fire—a rather strange occurrence usually ignored in the official accounts until brought to the attention of the public by independent researchers. Inexplicably, both CNN and the BBC reported the collapse of the building about 30 minutes prior to the incident. BBC reporter Jane Standley on a live broadcast stated the building had collapsed even as it was pictured standing in the New York skyline behind her. About an hour and a half following the collapse of Building 7, disaster relief crews began moving into the area searching for survivors and removing debris.

It should be noted that this timeline is not sacrosanct as there are unresolved conflicts between times reported by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), The 9/11 Commission Report, and the independent research cited in this book. A 2006 Washington Post article co-authored by the 9/11 Commission's senior counsel John Farmer stated, “Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate. Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources…I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.…This is not spin. This is not true.”

Only a truly independent inquiry possessing subpoena power will ever be able to resolve these and a myriad of other factual discrepancies. This book provides essential support to such an effort which is still to come.

[Editor's note to researchers: a very detailed timeline information may be found at www.cooperativeresearch.org. Also, for a useful graphic depiction of some of the various 9/11 issues covered in this book, search the Internet for the documentary Loose Change.]