The U.S. military rejected a scenario in which a hijacked airliner flew into the Pentagon as it planned a training exercise five months before an airliner slammed into the building in September 2001, defense officials said Wednesday.
The proposed scenario was rejected by the Defense Department’s elite Joint Staff as not in keeping with the April 2001 exercise, which dealt largely with how U.S. forces would be commanded in a confrontation with North Korea if defense headquarters somehow became incapacitated.
Defense officials said that several scenarios under which military command had to be moved from the Pentagon were rejected and that the suggestion involving a possible foreign commercial airliner strike not only appeared unrealistic but could have taken over the whole exercise.
“They [planners] needed a scenario under which the Pentagon became inoperable. But the focus of the exercise was command continuity, and it was decided that there was enough [cause] already built in,” said Larry Di Rita, a spokesman for the Defense Department.
Di Rita spoke as an independent commission continued its hearings into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York using hijacked airliners and whether the government could have done more to prevent the strikes that killed about 3,000 people.
The Pentagon incident, reported Wednesday in The Washington Post and The New York Times, came to light after a 2½-year-old e-mail message was made public on Tuesday by the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, a nonprofit watchdog group.
Week after September attacks
The message was written a week after airliners commandeered by terrorists were flown into the buildings. It began: “In defense of my last unit, NORAD.”
NORAD is the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a joint U.S.-Canadian effort designed to protect the skies over the two countries.
The brief mail was addressed to several friends of the author, a retired Army officer who was not identified, and said the hijacking scenario was suggested by a NORAD planner and rejected by Joint Staff action officers as too unrealistic.
FOR SUBSCRIBERSA harrowing ordeal aboard an Israel-bound plane
FOR SUBSCRIBERSThe debate over AI’s future rages on both coasts
FOR SUBSCRIBERSA harrowing ordeal aboard an Israel-bound plane
FOR SUBSCRIBERSThe debate over AI’s future rages on both coasts
“It was made available to us by those who felt it should be, by those who wanted to examine timelines for scrambling fighter jets and other protective aircraft,” Peter Stockton, an investigator for POGO, told Reuters.
“We believe the 9/11 Commission should ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff why they prevented NORAD from training to respond to the possibility that terrorists might hijack commercial airliners and use them as missiles,” Stockton added in a posting on the organization’s Web site.
Defense officials countered that the main exercise, a major annual look at command and control, was not designed to protect the sprawling Defense Department headquarters on the banks of the Potomac River in a Virginia suburb of Washington from airliners used as missiles. It was not designed for counterterrorism or air defense, they said.
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Dan Hetlage, another spokesman for the Defense Department, told Reuters that the U.S. Pacific Command — which has oversight over U.S. forces in the sprawling Asia-Pacific region — objected to the idea “because it would have taken attention away from the exercise objectives.”
“It was focused on North Korea, and that [a crash into the Pentagon] would have become a whole exercise in itself. It would have consumed the exercise,” Hetlage said.