This film contains a short summary of the publicly available — but still widely unnoticed — evidence for supposed to attempt to obstruct the air defense on September 11th, 2001.
Thesis:
The commander of the northeast sector of the US air defense (NEADS) tried successfully at least five times to obstruct or slow down the military response to the hijackings on 9/11.
We start with the acting persons.
The chain of command on 9/11 looked like this:
George W. Bush
Donald F. Rumsfeld
gen. Ralph Eberhart
maj. Gen. Larry Arnold
col. Robert Marr
maj. Kevin Nasypany
Interestingly the top of this chain of command was empty on 9/11
President Bush spent the morning in Florida and stayed out of the loop in terms of military orders.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the abandoned his post and was not available for his air defense subordinates during the attack.
The real management of the air defense on the morning of 9/11 was actually in the hands of two men even further down in the chain of command.
maj. Kevin Nasypany — mission crew commander at NEADS.
and his direct superior: Colonel Robert Marr — commander of NEADS.
The decisions of these two men had great effect on 9/11. It was in their direct responsibility to intercept the hijacked airliners with fighter jets.
Unfortunately, one of them — the higher ranking officer on the left — supposedly tried at least five times to obstruct this process.
Here are the facts:
Obstruction No. 1
Two fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base, 300 km northeast of New York, were alarmed and sat in their jets ready to start their engines at around 8:42, even before any hijacked plane had hit the World Trade Center towers.
But then they had to wait.
Colonel Marr, who could have ordered them to take off immediately, chose not to do that. He made an unnecessary phone call with his boss, General Arnold, instead. In effect the order to take off was delayed for crucial 3 to 4 minutes.
Without that delay the pilots could possibly have intercepted the 2nd hijacked plane, which crashed at 9:03.
Sources: Internal interview by the 9/11-Commission with Major Daniel Nash, 14.10.03; Interview with Colin Scoggins, Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center, 28.10.07; NEADS Tapes, Channel 2
And here is the quite remarkable flight route of these Otis jets, taking off finally at 8:52, according to official radar data:
Obstruction No. 2
At 9:09, after both of the towers were hit, major Nasypany wanted to launch a second pair of fighters from Langley Air Force Base, 200 km southeast of Washington, to place a barrier near the capitol.
A wise request.
But Colonel Marr, his superior, refused this. In the end the order to scramble the Langley Jets was given no sooner than 9:24. 15 important minutes were lost.
Had Marr ordered the scramble at 9:09, as requested, the jets could have reached the Pentagon before it was attacked at 9:37.
Sources: Internal interviews by the 9/11-Commission with Nasypany and Marr, 22./23.01.04; NEADS Tapes, Channel 2
Obstruction No. 3
Captain Craig Borgstrom was the "Supervisor of Flying" at Langley air force base. He was responsible for coordinating the langley pilots during a mission, giving them orders from the ground and maintaining the flow of information.
Shortly before 9:24 he got a phone call from NEADS leadership — meaning Colonel Marr — ordering him to leave his coordination post on the ground and to take off as a third pilot.
This was highly unusual, as an alert mission is always consisting of two fighters. The order brought actually no advantages for the air defense but a major drawback: no officer was left on the ground to keep in touch with the Langley pilots.
So when they were finally sent also in the wrong and unintended direction, not for Washington, but straight out to the east over the ocean (a scandal that remains even 10 years later still unexplained, by the way), nobody could reach them and tell them to turn around to save the Pentagon.
With Borgstrom on the ground this would have been no problem. Marr decided otherwise.
Sources: Interview with Captain Craig Borgstrom by author Leslie Filson; Lynn Spencer, "Touching History", 2008, pp. 118, 148; NEADS Tapes, Channel 2, Transcripts pp. 44-45
And here is the strange flight route of the Langley fighters, taking off at 9:30, according to official radar data:
Obstruction No. 4
When Vice President Cheney ordered his "Shoot down order", it was again Colonel Marr who decided not to convey this order to the pilots. In 2002 he also lied about this in a TV interview and offered no further explanation.
That means: even if any fighter pilot had reached one hijacked airliner after this order had been given, he wouldn't have known that he had actually clearance to shoot.
Colonel Marr had prevented it.
Sources: 9/11-Commission, 12th Public Hearing, 17.06.04, Transcript pp. 61-62; ABC News, "9/11: Interviews by Peter Jennings", 11.09.02; John Farmer, "The Ground Truth", 2009, p. 261
Obstruction No. 5
When the commander of Syracuse airbase called major Nasypany to offer fighter jets, he stated that his pilots could be airborne within 50 minutes with hot guns. Nasypany appreciated the offer: "Hot guns, well that's good enough for me" — and gave the Syracuse commander the phone number of his superior, Colonel Marr — "if you want to talk to him".
Syracuse did this and repeated the offer to Marr: airborne with hot guns in 15 minutes, with heat-seeking missiles in 30 minutes, or with "slammers" (missiles with active radar) in an hour, because it would take some time to put these missiles on board.
Marr chose the unnecessary: "I want it all."
Sources: NEADS Tapes, Channel 2, 10:12; Aviation Week, "Exercise Jump-Starts Response to Attacks", 03.06.02
So he delayed the start of the fighter jets again.
As he had done it with the Otis pilots and then was the Langley pilots. As he had ordered Borgstrom away from his coordination post, and as he had prevented the transfer of the "Shoot down order" to the pilots.
Five obstructions. And one man responsible
To clarify:
With all these facts now available, it's of course still not proven that Colonel Marr made all these decisions in order to intentionally weaken the air defense.
This is only a thesis so far. It could be false. But one thing is also clear: to get to the bottom of this it needs a new public investigation of 9/11.