Blindsided by terrorists and beset by poor communications, officials were so slow to react on Sept. 11, 2001, that the last of four hijacked planes had crashed by the time Vice President Dick Cheney ordered hostile aircraft shot down, a bipartisan commission reports.
In an unflinching report, the panel on Thursday depicted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as slow to alert the military to the hijackings -- even failing to pass along word that one of the planes had been seized.
In testimony before the panel, General Ralph Eberhart said military pilots would have been able to "shoot down the airplanes" if word of the hijackings had been immediate. The commission, though, made no such claim.
Some military pilots "were never briefed about the reason they were scrambled," the panel said. The Secret Service, worried about a plane approaching the capital, went "outside the chain of command" to ask for warplanes to be sent aloft.
US President George W. Bush, in Florida when the terrorists struck, was not immune to communications woes. The commander in chief later told interviewers he had been frustrated that day at delays in establishing secure phone links with officials in a capital city feared under attack.
"There was a real problem with communications that morning," the commission's chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, told reporters. "There were a lot of people who should have been in the loop who were not in the loop."
The commission sketched its picture as it neared the end of an exhaustive investigation into terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000.
The commission held its final day of public hearings as Bush challenged its day-old finding that there had been no "collaborative relationship" between former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the attacks.
"There was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda," Bush insisted. "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
"We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, for example, Iraqi intelligence agents met with [Osama] bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda in the Sudan," he said.
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