FAA Destroyed Sept. 11 Air-Traffic-Control Tapes

"The 'protocols' you refer to were not in place prior to 9/11."

Stewart's Learjet veered sharply off-course just after takeoff on Oct. 26, 1999. All contact with air traffic controllers was lost.

Within 15 minutes, US fighter jets had already intercepted the jet. Everyone on board was likely dead due to depressurization. NORAD fighters escorted the Stewart plane until another group of Air National Guard jets took over and followed Stewart's plane until it ran out of fuel and crashed in South Dakota.

These fighter jets were dispatched by NORAD. NORAD's job is to monitor and defend US airspace 24 hours a day. It maintains a huge array of land-based radar systems and has fighter jets on alert at all times to respond to a crisis.

The response to the Stewart tragedy is exactly what one expects of the greatest -- and most expensive -- military power in world history.

So, once again, why on 9-11 was the same NORAD that so effortlessly intercepted Stewart's jet two years before in 1999, nowhere to be found in the two-hour period between the first planes going off course and the last one crashing into the field in Pennsylvania?

How is it possible that the airspace between Boston and Washington DC, the political and economic heart of the country, was left completely defenseless? The second plane to hit the WTC had flown off course without communication for 40 minutes. On its way to New York, it actually flew within a few miles of McGuire Air Force base in New Jersey, after the first tower had already been hit.

And how is it possible that Washington DC was left undefended (long after the New York attacks) when Andrews Air Force base is within car driving distance? The jets which did finally arrive were far too late.

Incompetence by NORAD??? This is not "post 9-11" stuff. Get real.

"No tin foil hat here, just seems strange that the stupervisor would be so quick to 'follow procedures', given the gravity of the event."

The history of events like this --from the blowing up of the USS Maine in Havana harbor 110 years ago up to 9-11 -- is the American people are always the last to know what really happened.

The masses were understandably shocked, saddened, then enraged and thus spoiling for war after 9-11. Fortunately, I don't think it will take 50 years to find out the truth about 9-11. I just hope we have not turned into a complete police state before it gets out.

"Following procedures" in this case sounds more and more like "destroying evidence".

For comparison, we now know that the charter jet golfer Payne Stewart and his entourage died on was intercepted within 15 minutes of the controllers losing radio contact with the cockpit.

Intercepted by an UNARMED aircraft that was already airborne in the area.

Supposedly NORAD has protocols for immediately scrambling when a commercial plane departs from its flight plan or loses radio contact with the tower.

Today, yes.

That was not the case prior to 9/11.

Incidentally, prior to 9/11, the US had, on routine alert, on any given day...about a dozen armed interceptors, divided between Florida and Alaska.

That's because the US air defense posture was, for many years, tied to the level of activity at the air bases of the Russian 37th Air Army (the Russian heavy bomber force).

In other words, it took the Defense Department ten years to figure out that the Cold War was over.

Yet these loaded airliners were off-course and unaccounted for for 45 minutes over the most densely populated airspace in the country.

Generating armed fighters in 45 minutes is close to a record for the Air Force and Air National Guard.

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