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by Bryan Bender
The Boston Globe, April 14, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Five months before Sept.
11, 2001, the officers responsible for defending American airspace
wanted to test their ability to prevent a hijacked airliner from being
crashed into the Pentagon, but the scenario was rejected by the Joint
Chiefs of Staff as impractical, a Joint Chiefs spokesman confirmed
yesterday.
The disclosure was made after a
government watchdog group released a leaked e-mail from a former
official at the North American Air Defense Command. In the message, the
official told colleagues a week after the attacks that in April 2001
NORAD requested that war games run by the Joint Chiefs include an
''event having a terrorist group hijack a commercial airline . . . and
fly it into the Pentagon."
Last night, Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant
Commander Dan Hetlage confirmed the account, saying: ''That scenario was
rejected because it would have become a whole exercise in and of itself.
It wasn't looked on at the time as being practicable."
The NORAD proposal is the clearest sign
yet that national security officials were worried before 9/11 about
terrorists using hijacked airliners as missiles, despite testimony that
senior leaders, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
didn't know of such concerns.
A secret Aug. 6, 2001, memo prepared for
President Bush said Al Qaeda terrorists in the United States might be
planning to hijack airliners, but it did not raise the possibility that
Al Qaeda could slam those planes into buildings -- let alone the
Pentagon, which was struck by American Airlines Flight 77.
Rice testified before the commission
investigating the 9/11 attacks last week that ''it did not raise the
possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles."
However, she held out the possibility
that some government officials might have raised concerns, without
senior officials' knowledge, about such a mode of attack.
Officials at NORAD apparently were
concerned. But the e-mail said, the US Pacific Command, which was
overseeing the exercises simulating a war with North Korea, ''didn't
want it because it would take attention away from their exercise
objectives, and Joint Staff action officers rejected it as too
unrealistic."
The author of the message, a former NORAD
official, could not be located yesterday.
Peter Stockton, chief investigator for
the Project on Government Oversight, said yesterday he was told by the
source who provided the memo that a special forces officer attached to
the NORAD command at the time had first proposed the Pentagon scenario
be practiced.
Concerns that terrorists might use
hijacked airliners as missiles dates back to the 1996 Olympic games in
Atlanta, when jets were placed on patrol to guard against such a threat.
Testifying before the 9/11 commission
yesterday, former FBI Director Louis Freeh said that ''I believe it came
up in a series of these, as we call them, special events."
But Freeh said, ''I never was aware of a
plan that contemplated commercial airliners being used as weapons after
a hijacking."
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