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9/11 See other 9/11 Articles Title: 9/11 Live or Fabricated: Do the NORAD Tapes Verify The 9/11 Commission Report? 9/11 Live or Fabricated: Do the NORAD Tapes Verify The 9/11 Commission Report? David Ray Griffin September 4, 2006 Part I of II Conclusion of article at: http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2006091418303369 A significant stir was created by the publication in Vanity Fair of “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes” by Michael Bronner, the first journalist to be given access to these audiotapes--which NORAD had provided, upon demand, to the 9/11 Commission in 2004. The public impact of Bronner’s essay was increased greatly by the availability of snippets from these tapes (which could be accessed from the online version of the article) to be played on TV and radio news reports about the article.1 The stir was caused primarily by Bronner’s report of the charge by members of the 9/11 Commission--which had played excepts from these tapes during hearings in 2004--that the military had made false statements to the Commission, perhaps knowingly. This stir was increased by the publication at the same time--the first week of August 2006--of Without Precedent, a book by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton--the chairman and vice chairman of the Commission, respectively--in which this charge is also made.2 The charge primarily involves the military’s pre-2004 claims about the responses of NEADS--the Northeast Air Defense Sector of NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command)--to two flights: AA (American Airlines) 77 and UA (United Airlines) 93. (There is also, although Bronner does not deal with it, a serious discrepancy with regard to UA 175.) These claims are contradicted by the tapes, with “tapes” here meaning not only the NORAD tapes, to which Bronner refers in his essay’s subtitle, but also what he calls “the parallel recordings from the F.A.A.,”3 which he used in conjunction with the NORAD tapes. (Excerpts of these FAA tapes had also been played at the Commission’s June 2004 hearings.) Here are the earlier claims made by the military--as represented at a Commission hearing in May of 2003 by Colonel Alan Scott and Major General Larry Arnold--followed by the contrary information provided by the tapes: (1) The military’s earlier claim: When fighter jets at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia were scrambled at 9:24 that morning, they were scrambled in response to word from the FAA that possibly either AA 77 (as implied by Colonel Scott) or UA 93 (as stated by General Arnold) had been hijacked and was headed towards Washington. What the tapes indicate: NEADS did not learn that AA 77 and UA 93 had been hijacked until after they had crashed. The Langley fighters were instead scrambled in response to “phantom AA 11”--that is, to a false report that AA 11 had not struck the World Trade Center and was instead headed towards Washington. (2) The military’s earlier claim: Having learned from the FAA about the hijacking of UA 93 at 9:16, NEADS was tracking it and was in position to shoot it down if necessary. (Although the claim about the 9:16 notification is not reflected in NORAD’s timeline--which instead has “N/A”--both Arnold and Scott made this claim in their May 2003 testimony.) What the tapes indicate: NEADS, far from learning of the possible hijacking of UA 93 at 9:16, at which time it had not yet been hijacked, did not receive this information until 10:07, four minutes after UA 93 had crashed. So NEADS could not have had fighter jets tracking it. (3) The military’s earlier claim: NEADS was prepared to act on a command, issued by Vice President Cheney, to shoot down UA 93. What the tapes indicate: There was no command to shoot down UA 93 before it crashed. Cheney was not notified about the possible hijacking of this flight until 10:02, only one minute before it crashed, and the shoot-down authorization was not given by him until many minutes after UA had crashed. Assuming that the newly released tapes provide the definitive account of NEADS’ conversations on 9/11, the implications go far beyond the conclusion that Colonel Scott and General Arnold made false statements to the 9/11 Commission, evidently deliberately (Commission members, pointing out that the military had reviewed the tapes, dismiss the view that Scott and Arnold could have simply been confused). The implications are more sweeping because the statements by Scott and Arnold reflected the timeline issued by NORAD on September 18, 2001, which gave the times at which, NORAD then claimed, the FAA had notified it about the four flights and then the times at which NEADS had scrambled fighters in response. Scott, in fact, had prepared this timeline in conjunction with Colonel Robert Marr, then the battle commander at NEADS. The implication of the NORAD tapes, therefore, is that virtually the entire account given by NORAD on September 18, 2001--which served as the official story from that date until the issuance of The 9/11 Commission Report in July 2004--was false. The crucial difference is that according to the earlier story, although the FAA had been unaccountably slow in notifying the military about the possible hijacking of AA 11, UA 175, AA 77, and UA 93, it had notified it about all of them before they crashed and, at least with regard to the last three, soon enough that military jets could have intercepted them. On the basis of the tapes, The 9/11 Commission Report, while agreeing with the earlier timeline with regard to AA 11 (according to which notification came only nine minutes before it crashed), claims that the military was not notified about the other three flights until after they had crashed. The military, therefore, cannot be blamed for failing to stop them. If this tapes-based timeline is correct, the central claims by those who give an alternative account--that the military failed to intercept UA 175 and AA 77 because of a “stand-down order” and then shot down UA 93 (perhaps to prevent survivors from talking)--are undermined. It is no wonder, then, that one general, taking the tapes-based story to be the real story, said: “The real story is actually better than the one we told.”4 Assuming the truth of the new story, the fact that it puts the military in a much better light has a staggering implication: Everyone in the military--from those in the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center (NMCC), under which NORAD operates, to high-level officers at NEADS and in NORAD more generally, to pilots and other subordinates--who knew the true course of events, whether from direct experience or from listening to the tapes, kept quiet about the inaccuracies in NORAD’s timeline, even though they knew that the true story would put the military in a better light, completely removing the possibility that the military had stood down its defenses. Why would they do this? Addressing this issue in terms of the question of why Scott and Arnold evidently lied to the Commission, Bronner says that members of the 9/11 Commission staff to whom he spoke said that “the false story . . . had a clear purpose.” What was that purpose? It was, according to staff member John Farmer, “to obscure mistakes on the part of the F.A.A. and the military, and to overstate the readiness of the military to intercept and, if necessary, shoot down UAL 93.”5 The motivation to lie, in other words, was to cover up confusion and incompetence. That same motivation is presumably thought to explain why the military in general acquiesced in the lie from September 18, 2001, until the 9/11 hearings in June 2004, when General Arnold was confronted with evidence from NORAD’s tapes contradicting statements he had made at the hearing in May 2003. However, although this explanation has been widely accepted, is it really believable? If our military had been guilty only of confusion and incompetence on 9/11, it would have been strange for its officials, by saying that they had been notified by the FAA earlier than they really had, to open themselves not only to the charge of criminal fraud but also to the suspicion that they had deliberately not intercepted the hijacked airliners. We are being asked to believe, in other words, that Scott, Arnold, and the others, in telling the earlier story, acted in a completely irrational manner--that, while being guilty only of confusion and a little incompetence, they told a lie that could have exposed them with being charged with murder and treason. Nevertheless, we must conclude that they acted in this irrational way as long as we accept the unexpressed premise in Bronner’s piece, namely, that the NORAD tapes are authentic--that they were, as the VF press release states, “made in the bunker of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)’s Northeast headquarters (NEADS) on the morning of September 11, 2001.”6 That premise is clearly presupposed in Bronner’s statement that the tapes contain “the authentic military history of 9/11.”7 It is also presupposed in stories in the mainstream press, such as a New York Times story speaking of what “the tapes demonstrate.”8 If this presupposition is false, however, the tapes do not demonstrate anything--except that the military, perhaps in collusion with members of the 9/11 Commission, went to extraordinary lengths to fabricate audiotapes that would seem to rule out the possibility that the military, and thereby the Bush-Cheney administration, were themselves complicit in the 9/11 attacks. But is there any reason to suspect the truth of this alternative hypothesis (which to many people would seem too fanciful to take seriously)? In particular, is there any reason to believe that the 9/11 Commission would have engaged in such deceit? Are there reasons to believe that the story as reflected in the tapes is false? Is there any way in which the tapes could have been fabricated? Although to some readers these questions may seem merely rhetorical, the answer to each one is actually “Yes.” Let us begin with the question of whether the 9/11 Commission would engage in deceit. 1. Would the 9/11 Commission Engage in Deceit? One fact about the Commission that most Americans still do not know is by whom its work was carried out. Although the public face of the Commission was provided by the ten commissioners led by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the actual research and writing of reports was carried out by a staff of about 75 people, over half of whom were former members of the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and other governmental agencies.9 Most important, this staff was directed by Philip Zelikow, who was virtually a member of the Bush administration: He had worked with Condoleezza Rice on the National Security Council in the administration of George H. W. Bush; Rice and Zelikow later co-authored a book; then as National Security Advisor for President George W. Bush, Rice brought Zelikow on to help make the transition; he was then appointed to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; finally, she brought him on to be the principal drafter of the Bush administration’s 2002 version of the National Security Strategy, which used 9/11 to justify a new doctrine of preemptive (technically “preventive”) war, according to which the United States can attack other countries even if they pose no imminent threat.10 This was hardly the man to be in charge of an investigation that should have been asking, among other things, whether the Bush-Cheney administration, which had benefited so greatly from the 9/11 attacks, was itself complicit in them. And yet in charge Zelikow was. As executive director, he decided which topics would be investigated by the staff and which ones not. The staff was divided into eight investigative teams and, one disgruntled member reportedly said at the time, seven of these eight teams “are completely controlled by Zelikow.” More generally, this staff member said, “Zelikow is calling the shots. He’s skewing the investigation and running it his own way.”11 As executive director, moreover, Zelikow was able to control what would appear in--and be excluded from--The 911 Commission Report. To illustrate how crucial such exclusions could be and also why the Zelikow-led 9/11 Commission cannot be assumed to be above deceit, we can look at a portion of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta’s testimony at the Commission’s hearing on May 23, 2003. Mineta testified that at 9:20 on the morning of 9/11, he went down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) under the White House, where Vice President Cheney was in charge. Mineta then said: During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”12 When Mineta was asked by Commissioner Timothy Roemer how long this conversation occurred after he arrived, Mineta said: “Probably about five or six minutes,” which, as Roemer pointed out, would mean “about 9:25 or 9:26.” This story was very threatening to the account that would be provided in The 9/11 Commission Report. According to that account, Cheney did not even enter the PEOC until almost 10:00, “perhaps at 9:58,”13 but according to Mineta’s testimony, Cheney had arrived some time prior to 9:20. Mineta’s time is consistent, moreover, with many other reports about Cheney’s descent to the PEOC, including his own.14 The Commission’s time is clearly false. Also, the Commission would claim that no one in the government knew that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon until 9:36, so that the military “had at most one or two minutes to react to the unidentified plane approaching Washington.”15 According to Mineta’s account, however, the vice president knew at least 10 minutes earlier, by 9:26. Worse yet, Mineta’s account could be read as eye-witness testimony to the confirmation of a stand-down order. Mineta himself, to be sure, did not make this allegation. He assumed, he said, that “the orders” mentioned by the young man were orders to have the plane shot down. Mineta’s interpretation, however, does not fit with what actually happened: The aircraft was not shot down. Mineta’s interpretation, moreover, would make the story unintelligible: If the orders had been to shoot down the aircraft if it entered the forbidden air space over Washington, the young man would have had no reason to ask if the orders still stood. His question made sense only if the orders were to do something unexpected--not to shoot it down. How did The 9/11 Commission Report deal with Mineta’s testimony? By simply omitting it from the final report. One can understand such a omission, of course, if the purpose of the Zelikow-led Commission was to protect the official account of 9/11. This omission is not, however, consistent with the Commission’s purpose as stated by Kean and Hamilton, namely, “to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11.”16 This omission of Mineta’s testimony, as serious as it is, might not be fatal to our overall judgment as to the reliability of The 9/11 Commission Report if it were an isolated example. As I have shown in a book-length critique, however, it is simply one example of a systematic pattern, in which all available evidence that contradicts the official story is systematically omitted or, in some cases, distorted.17 For another example, we can look at the Commission’s treatment of the alleged hijackers. According to the official story of 9/11, the planes were hijacked by devout Muslims ready to meet their maker. The 9/11 Commission Report supports this picture, saying of Mohamed Atta, called the ringleader, that he had become very religious, even “fanatically so.”18 However, stories by Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, and investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker had reported that Atta loved cocaine, alcohol, gambling, pork, and lap dances.19 The Wall Street Journal had reported, moreover, that several of the other alleged hijackers had indulged such tastes in Las Vegas.20 But the 9/11 Commission, simply ignoring these reports, professed to have no idea why these men met in Las Vegas several times.21 The Commission also ignored reports published by the British mainstream press that some of the alleged hijackers were still alive after 9/11. Eleven days afterwards, for example, BBC News reported that Waleed al-Shehri, after seeing his photograph in newspapers and TV programs, notified authorities and journalists in Morocco, where he worked as a pilot, that he was still alive.22 However, The 9/11 Commission Report, ignoring this evidence about al-Shehri (as well as evidence that other alleged hijackers had still been alive after 9/1123), not only named al-Shehri as one of the hijackers and reproduced the FBI’s photograph of him. It even suggested that al-Shehri stabbed one of the flight attendants shortly before Flight 11 crashed into the north tower.24 In the light of these and over a hundred other illustrations provided in my critique of The 9/11 Commission Report, we cannot rule out in advance the possibility that the Zelikow-led Commission might have engaged in deceit with regard to the NORAD tapes. We need to look closely at the 9/11 Commission’s story, based on these tapes, to see if there are reasons to believe that it contains falsehoods. One reason to suspect this is the story’s portrayal of the FAA’s behavior that morning. 2. Is the 9/11 Commission’s Tapes-Based Portrayal of the FAA Believable? There are, I suggest, two major problems with the 9/11 Commission’s tapes-based portrayal of the FAA’s behavior. It is intrinsically incredible and it is contradicted by many prior reports, some of which we otherwise have no good reason to question. Bronner focuses on the idea that these tapes are embarrassing to the military, showing it to have been very confused and inept on 9/11. In fact, as we have seen, that is said to have provided sufficient motive for military leaders to give a false account. However, when one looks at the actual story told by Bronner and the 9/11 Commission on the basis of the tapes, it is the FAA, not the military, that is primarily portrayed as incompetent. This portrayal of incompetence is, in fact, so extreme as to strain credulity. This problem arises because FAA personnel, from top to bottom, are portrayed as repeatedly failing to follow standard procedures on 9/11, even though these men and women are highly competent individuals who prior to that day had carried out these procedures regularly. According to these standard procedures, if an FAA flight controller notices anything about an airplane that suggests that it is in trouble--if radio contact is lost, if the plane’s transponder goes off, or if the plane deviates from its flight plan--the controller is to contact a superior. If the problem cannot be fixed within about a minute, the FAA is to ask the military to scramble jet fighters to intercept the airplane to find out what is going on. The FAA makes such requests routinely--over 100 times a year.25 According to the NORAD tapes and the 9/11 Commission, however, the FAA, far from following these procedures on 9/11, did not even come close. AA Flight 11 According to the tapes, the FAA did not tell the military that AA 11 was hijacked until 8:38, although radio contact had been lost at 8:14, the transponder signal was lost at 8:21, and the voice of a hijacker was heard at 8:25. In spite of these three events, any one of which should have evoked a call to the military, the FAA’s Boston Center did not call anyone until 8:28. And then, rather than calling the military directly, Boston called the FAA Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, after which Herndon, rather than immediately calling the military, waited until 8:32 and then called FAA headquarters in Washington--which also did not contact the military. NEADS was finally contacted at 8:38 only because the Boston Center finally took the initiative to contact it directly (which raises the question of why it did not do this in the first place).26 Can we really take seriously this account, according to which gross and even criminal negligence was shown by FAA personnel at every level? Is not this portrayal rendered especially unbelievable by the lack of reports that any FAA employees at Boston, Herndon, or Washington were fired or even reprimanded for dereliction of duty? The story becomes even more incredible, moreover, when we see the same level of incompetence allegedly repeated in relation to the other flights. UA Flight 175 We are told by the Commission that although UA 175 veered off course some minutes after 8:42 and its transponder code was changed at 8:47, the flight controller at the Boston Center did not notice anything untoward until 8:51, after which, at 8:55, he told an FAA manager in New York City. This manager then allegedly tried to contact the regional managers but “was told that they were discussing hijacked aircraft . . . and refused to be disturbed.” New York then called Herndon, saying: “We have several situations going on here. It’s escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us.” But Herndon did not call the military. Finally, New York called NEADS directly--but this was not until 9:03, “at about the time the plane was hitting the South Tower.”27 Bronner, reporting on what the tapes say about events at the New York Center, states that controllers there noticed nothing until they saw UA 175 suddenly swing toward Manhattan at about 8:57, at which time they “start speculating what the hijacker is aiming at” so that it is “not until the last second, literally, that anyone from New York Center thinks to update NEADS.”28 These accounts of FAA behavior, besides being intrinsically unbelievable, are also in tension with several prior reports. First, although Bronner’s article does not mention it, NORAD’s September 18 timeline said that it had been notified by the FAA about UA 175 at 8:43.29 Can we believe that NORAD officials would have said this--which would mean that NEADS failed to prevent this flight from crashing into the WTC even though it had 20 minutes to do so--if the truth was that the military was not notified until 9:03? Would that not have been a very irrational lie? The only other explanation would seem to be that these NORAD officials were confused. But can we believe that they would have been confused about such a major point only a few days after the event? Second, the Commission’s tapes-based claim that the military did not know about Flight 175 until it crashed is also contradicted by a report involving Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD’s headquarters in Colorado. According to a story in the Toronto Star, Jellinek was on the phone with NEADS as he watched Flight 175 crash into the south tower, after which he asked NEADS, “Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with?”--to which NEADS replied that it was.30 If the new timeline is accepted, that story must be regarded as a fabrication. But what motive would Jellinek or the reporter have had for making up such a story? The 9/11 Commission avoided this question by not mentioning this story. Third, the claim that the military did not know about problems with UA 175 until NEADS received a telephone call from the FAA’s New York Center at 9:03 is in conflict with several reports about ongoing conversations; I will mention two. A story by the Newhouse News Service contains this statement: “At 8:43 a.m., [Master Sergeant Maureen] Dooley's technicians [at NEADS], their headsets linked to Boston Center, heard of a second plane, United Flight 175, that also was not responding. It, too, was moving to New York.”31 According to this story, NEADS knew by 8:43 that UA 175 was problematic. A memo entitled “FAA Communications with NORAD on September 11, 2001,” sent to the 9/11 Commission in 2003 by Laura Brown, the Deputy in Public Affairs at FAA headquarters, stated: Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges that included FAA field facilities, the FAA Command Center, FAA headquarters, DOD [meaning the NMCC in the Department of Defense], the Secret Service. . . . The US Air Force liaison to the FAA immediately joined the FAA headquarters phone bridge and established contact with NORAD. . . . The FAA shared real-time information on the phone bridges about the unfolding events, including information about loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest. . . . 32 From these and other reports of ongoing contact,33 we can see that the military would not have needed to wait for a telephone call from the FAA to learn about UA 175. AA Flight 77 One of the primary targets of the Commission’s tapes-based account, as we have seen, was the military’s earlier assertion that it was notified by the FAA at 9:24 (not 9:34, as the tapes have it) that AA 77 had possibly been hijacked and appeared to be headed back toward Washington. The Commission, labeling this assertion “incorrect,” also called it “unfortunate,” because it “made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond.”34 Refuting that notification time, the Commission thereby indicated, was essential to protecting the military from the charge that it had, whether through complicity or incompetence, failed to prevent the attack on the Pentagon. The real problem, the Commission claims on the basis of the tapes, was “the FAA’s [in]ability to provide the military with timely and accurate information that morning.”35 It was, in other words, entirely the FAA’s fault, not partly the military’s. According to the Commission’s tapes-based account, the FAA controller in Indianapolis, after seeing Flight 77 go off course at 8:54, lost its transponder signal and even its radar track. However, not knowing about the other hijackings (even though AA 11 had hit the WTC eight minutes earlier), the Indianapolis Center assumed that AA 77 had crashed. Later, after hearing about the other hijackings and coming to suspect that AA 77 may also have been hijacked, Indianapolis shared this suspicion with Herndon, which at 9:25 shared it with FAA headquarters. But no one called the military, so “NEADS never received notice that American 77 was hijacked.”36 NEADS finally did hear about this flight at 9:34, but it learned only that it was lost (not that it had been hijacked) and it learned this only by chance, during a NEADS-initiated conversation with the FAA’s Washington Center about AA 11.37 This story strains credulity and then some. Can anyone really believe that the officials at Indianapolis could have been so irresponsible and that those at Herndon and FAA headquarters, after knowing that two hijacked airplanes had already crashed into the WTC, would not have told the military that AA 77 might also have been hijacked? This story, moreover, is challenged by earlier reports. For example, contrary to the claim that Indianapolis did not know of previous hijackings, Boston flight controllers, according to stories in the Guardian and the Village Voice that appeared shortly after 9/11, had at 8:25 notified other regional centers--one of which is Indianapolis--of the hijacking of Flight 11.38 Also, contrary to the claim that Indianapolis first noticed something amiss--AA’s 77 deviation from its flight path--at 8:54, NORAD’s earlier report and many newspaper stories said otherwise. According to these accounts, AA 77 went significantly off course for four minutes at 8:46,39 after which radio contact was lost.40 The 9/11 Commission Report did not refute these reports but simply, as usual, ignored them. The Commission’s tapes-based story is also challenged, finally, by evidence that the FAA had first notified the military about AA 77 not at 9:24, as NORAD’s September 18 timeline said, but considerably earlier. FAA official Laura Brown’s earlier mentioned memo, after stating that a teleconference was established with the military “within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center” (and hence by about 8:50), said that the FAA shared “real-time information” with the military about “all the flights of interest, including Flight 77“ (emphasis added). Bringing out the full implication of this assertion, she added: “NORAD logs indicate that the FAA made formal notification about American Flight 77 at 9:24 a.m., but information about the flight was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges before the formal notification.”41 In a telephone conversation I had with Laura Brown in 2004, she emphasized this distinction, saying that the formal notification was primarily a formality and hence irrelevant to the question of when the military knew about Flight 77.42 Brown’s main point, in other words, was that the FAA and the military had been talking about AA 77 long before 9:24. The implication of her memo, therefore, is that although, as Bronner and the 9/11 Commission say, the 9:24 notification time was false, it was false by being too late, not too early. Brown’s account is supported, moreover, by a New York Times story that appeared four days after 9/11, which began: “During the hour or so that American Airlines Flight 77 was under the control of hijackers, up to the moment it struck the west side of the Pentagon, military officials in a command center on the east side of the building were urgently talking to law enforcement and air traffic control officials about what to do.”43 Laura Brown’s 2003 memo, therefore, reflects information that was available immediately after 9/11. What did the 9/11 Commission do about Brown’s memo? It did discuss it. Richard Ben-Veniste, after reading it into the record, even said: “So now we have in question whether there was an informal real-time communication of the situation, including Flight 77's situation, to personnel at NORAD.”44 The Commission knew, therefore, that this was the FAA’s position, and it offered no rebuttal. When The 9/11 Commission Report appeared, however, it contained no mention of this memo or its account. The Commission implicitly claimed, in fact, that the memo’s account could not be true by claiming that the FAA-initiated conference--which according to Brown’s memo had begun about 8:50--did not begin until 9:20.45 As usual, inconvenient facts were simply eliminated. If we, however, refuse to ignore all these facts, we have good reason to consider the Commission’s tapes-based account of AA 77 false--which would imply that the tapes are inauthentic. An examination of the Commission’s account of UA 93 will provide additional support for this conclusion. UA 93: When Did the Military Learn? Given the fact that Michael Bronner was an associate producer for the film United 93, which essentially follows the 9/11 Commission’s tapes-based account, it is not surprising that he focuses heavily on the military’s earlier statements about this flight that, assuming the accuracy of the tapes, must be false. One of those statements was the statement that the military, having learned about the hijacking of UA 93 at 9:16, was tracking it before it crashed. On the basis of the tapes, the 9/11 Commission argues that the military did not learn about the hijacking of UA at 9:16 or at any other time prior to its crash at 10:03. This claim involves yet another tale of amazing incompetence by FAA officials. At 9:28, the Commission says, the traffic controller in Cleveland heard “sounds of possible screaming” and noticed that Flight 93 had descended 700 feet, but he did nothing. At 9:32, he heard a voice saying, “We have a bomb on board.” On this basis, not being completely brain dead, he finally notified his supervisor, who in turn notified FAA headquarters. But four minutes later at 9:36, when Cleveland asked Herndon whether the military had been called, Herndon “told Cleveland that FAA personnel well above them in the chain of command had to make the decision to seek military assistance and were working on the issue.”46 To accept this account, we must believe that the decision to call the military is a momentous, extraordinary one, not a routine one, made over a hundred times a year. We must also believe that, on a day on which hijacked airliners had already caused much death and destruction, officials at FAA headquarters had to debate whether a hijacked airliner with a bomb on board was important enough to disturb the military. We must believe, moreover, that they were still debating this 13 minutes later at 9:49, when the following conversation between Herndon and FAA headquarters occurred: Command Center: Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft? FAA Headquarters: Oh, God, I don’t know. Command Center: Uh, that’s a decision somebody’s gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes. The decision, moreover, was obviously that the military should not be disturbed, because 14 minutes later, at 10:03, when Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, “no one from FAA headquarters [had yet] requested military assistance regarding United 93.”47 To believe the Commission’s tapes-based report, in other words, we must believe that FAA officials acted like complete idiots. Besides the fact that the Commission’s new story about UA 93 is intrinsically implausible in the extreme, it is challenged by some inconvenient facts. One fact is the existence of the teleconference mentioned in Laura Brown’s memo. The Commission, as we saw, claims that this FAA-initiated teleconference did not start until 9:20 (instead of about 8:50, as her memo indicated), but this claim provides no help with regard to UA 93, which did not crash until 10:03 AM, so that the time between 9:30 and 10:00 was the crucial period. Her memo said, as we saw, that “[t]he FAA shared real-time information . . . about . . . all the flights of interest,” and the Commission itself agrees that by 9:34, FAA headquarters knew about the hijacking of Flight 93 so that it was a “flight of interest.” Accordingly, the Commission’s tapes-based claim--that the military was not told about the hijacking of UA 93 until it crashed--is flatly contradicted by Laura Brown’s memo, which, although it was ignored in the Commission’s final report, had been read into the Commission’s record by Richard Ben-Veniste. Another inconvenient fact was a videoconference being run from the White House that morning by Richard Clarke, the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, who described this videoconference in his best-selling book, Against All Enemies--which came out in 2004 while the hearings were still going on. The FAA was represented in this videoconference by its head, Jane Garvey. And although the Commissioners claimed, absurdly, that they did “not know who from Defense participated,”48 Clarke had clearly stated that the Pentagon was represented by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, who on 9/11 had been Acting Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Clarke had also reported that at about 9:35, Garvey reported on a number of “potential hijacks,” which included “United 93 over Pennsylvania.”49 Therefore, more than 25 minutes before Flight 93 crashed, according to Clarke, both Myers and Rumsfeld heard from the head of the FAA that Flight 93 was considered a potential hijack. Still another inconvenient fact is the existence of military liaisons to the FAA, through whom the military, if by no other means, would have known about FAA communications. The existence of such liaisons, besides being mentioned in Laura Brown’s memo, were discussed by Monte Belger, the Acting Deputy Administrator of the FAA, during his testimony to the 9/11 Commission in 2004. After Commissioner Bob Kerrey, on the basis of the tapes, said to Belger, in relation to UA 93: “[A] plane was headed to Washington D.C. FAA Headquarters knew it and didn't let the military know,” Belger replied: I truly do not mean this to be defensive, but it is a fact--there were military people on duty at the FAA Command Center. . . . They were participating in what was going on. There were military people in the FAA's Air Traffic Organization in a situation room. They were participating in what was going on.50 Accordingly, if FAA headquarters heard about UA 93’s approach to Washington at 9:32, as the tapes indicate, then that would be when the military learned about it. The Commission, while portraying the FAA personnel as incompetent fools who debated endlessly whether “to seek military assistance,” ignored the fact, pointed out by both Brown and Belger, that military personnel were already informed. Another inconvenient fact is that Secret Service personnel would also have been aware of these FAA communications about UA 93 (and other flights). Laura Brown’s memo mentioned that the Secret Service was part of the teleconference established by the FAA. Richard Clarke, reporting that the Secret Service’s director told him shortly after 9:30 that radar showed the existence of an aircraft headed towards Washington, explained: “Secret Service had a system that allowed them to see what FAA’s radar was seeing.”51 This fact was also revealed inadvertently by Vice President Cheney, who during a television interview five days after 9/11 said, "The Secret Service has an arrangement with the FAA. They had open lines after the World Trade Center was . . .”--at which point he stopped himself before finishing the sentence.52 The combined force of these inconvenient facts provides powerful evidence against the Commission’s main claim about UA 93--that “[b]y the time the military learned about the flight, it had crashed.”53 This evidence becomes even stronger when we look at the next disputed question about this flight: UA 93: Was the Military Ready to Shoot It Down? Whereas the main problem for the Commission with regard to the first three flights was to explain why the military did not intercept and perhaps shoot them down, its main concern in relation to UA 93 was to refute the idea that the military had shot it down. There was, in fact, considerable evidence to support this claim. Part of this evidence consisted of a rumor to this effect within the military. Major Daniel Nash, an F–15 pilot sent to New York City that morning, reported that when he returned to base he was told that a military F-16 had shot down an airliner in Pennsylvania.54 During General Myers’ interview with the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 13, chairman Carl Levin asked him about “statements that the aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down.” 55 This rumor was, moreover, seemingly confirmed by reports from people who lived near the spot where the airliner came down--reports of sightings of a small military airplane, of missile-like noises, of debris falling from the airliner miles from its crash site, and of part of one of the engines far from that site.56 The Commission, in seeking to refute the claim that UA 93 had been shot down, did not do so by disputing any of this evidence; it simply ignored it. It instead constructed a new timeline, based in part on the tapes, which entails that the military could not possibly have shot down UA 93. This new timeline involves four claims: (1) Cheney, who was known to have issued the shoot-down authorization, did not get down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center until almost 10:00. (2) Since NEADS did not learn that UA 93 had been hijacked until 10:07, it could not have been tracking it.57 (3) Cheney was not notified about UA 93 until 10:0258--”only,” Bronner emphasizes, “one minute before the airliner impacted the ground.” (4) Cheney did not give the shoot-down authorization until “some time between 10:10 and 10:15.”59 As we saw in the first section, the first claim is clearly false. The second claim--that NEADS could not have been tracking UA 93--is challenged not only by the evidence, examined above, that the military knew about the hijacking long before it crashed, but also by evidence that UA 93 was, in fact, being tailed by US military fighters. One flight controller, ignoring a general order to controllers not to talk to the media, reportedly said that “an F-16 fighter closely pursued Flight 93.”60 On September 13, General Richard Myers said that fighters were scrambled “on the [airliner] that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania. . . [W]e had gotten somebody close to it.”61 Two days later, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said that “the Air Force was tracking the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania . . . and had been in a position to bring it down if necessary.”62 Moreover, one on the Air Force pilots who was in the air that morning, Lt. Anthony Kuczynski, has reported that while he was flying an E-3 Sentry (a modified Boeing 707) toward Pittsburgh alongside two F-16s, they were “given direct orders to shoot down an airliner” and would have done so if UA 93 had not crashed before they could intercept it.63 For the Commission’s tapes-based account to true, the statements of all those men would have to be false. The third and fourth claims--about when Cheney learned of UA 93’s hijacking and gave the shoot-down authorization--are challenged by many contrary reports. For example, although the Commission says that Richard Clarke did not receive the shoot-down authorization from Cheney until 10:25, Clarke himself indicated that he received it at least 35 minutes earlier, by 9:50.64 During an interview with Peter Jennings on ABC News a year later, moreover, Brigadier General Winfield Montague, Deputy Director for Operations at the Pentagon’s NMCC, made this twofold point while adding that the military had received shoot-down authorization: We received the report from the FAA that Flight 93 had turned off its transponder . . . and was now heading towards Washington, DC. . . . The decision was made to try to go intercept Flight 93. . . . The Vice President [said] that the President had given us permission to shoot down innocent civilian aircraft that threatened Washington, DC. We started receiving reports from the fighters that were heading to . . . intercept. The FAA kept us informed with their time estimates as the aircraft got closer and closer. . . . At some point, the closure time came and went, and nothing had happened, so you can imagine everything was very tense in the NMCC. . . . It was about, you know, 10:03 that the fighters reported that Flight 93 had crashed.65 Immediately afterwards, Cheney, who was also being interviewed, said: “Eventually of course, we never fired on any aircraft.” Even if that point were granted, however, Winfield’s statement said, contrary to the tapes-based account, that the military, being informed by the FAA, had fighter jets closing in on UA 93 with permission to shoot it down. That the shoot-down authorization was actually transmitted to pilots was stated during the same interview by Colonel Marr, the commanding officer at NEADS. After receiving the order, he reports, he “passed that on to the pilots. United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington, DC.”66 However, the fighters that were sent after UA 93, Marr added, had no weapons, so they were to get very close to the hijacked airliner and try to convince its pilot to land. If that failed, one of them would have been ordered to crash into it. Both Colonel Marr and Larry Arnold, moreover, gave more complete accounts in a book about 9/11 produced by the US Air Force, Air War over America. Arnold, reporting that they were tracking UA 93 even before it turned around--meaning before 9:36--is quoted as saying: “we watched the 93 track as it meandered around the Ohio-Pennsylvania area and started to turn south toward D.C.67 Marr, reporting that the shoot-down authorization was received that early, said: “we received the clearance to kill if need be. In fact, Major General Arnold's words almost verbatim were: 'We will take lives in the air to save lives on the ground.’”68 Leslie Filson, the author of this Air Force account, concludes his discussion with these words: The North Dakota F-16s were loaded with missiles and hot guns and Marr was thinking about what these pilots might be expected to do. "United Airlines Flight 93 would not have hit Washington, D.C.,” Marr says emphatically. “He would have been engaged and shot down before he got there.” Arnold concurs: “I had every intention of shooting down United 93 if it continued to progress toward Washington, D.C.”69 According to the Air Force’s official account in 2003, then, it knew before 9:36 that UA was in trouble; it was tracking it; and it was in position to shoot it down. This whole account, to be sure, is said by Bronner and the 9/11 Commission to be false, since it disagrees with the story suggested by the tapes. As we have seen, however, the list of people who had been lying, if the story on the tapes is true, extends far beyond Colonel Scott and General Arnold, on whom Bronner focuses. It also includes Colonel Robert Marr, General Richard Myers, General Montague Winfield, and, as Bronner points out, Vice President Cheney: After quoting Cheney’s statement, made with “dark bravado,” that the order to a pilot “to shoot down a plane full of Americans is . . . an order that had never been given before,” Bronner adds: “And it wasn’t on 9/11, either.”70 We will return later to the implications of the fact that, if the 9/11 Commission’s tapes-based account is true, there had been massive lying throughout the military and the Bush administration from 2001 to 2004. For now, we need to examine one more issue that has led to the charge of wide-spread lying. Phantom Flight 11 The concept of “phantom flight 11”--the name given to the nonexistent plane that, according to the tapes, was thought by the FAA and NORAD to be heading towards Washington--is absolutely crucial to the 9/11 Commission’s new story. It is so important because of the well-entrenched report that fighters were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base at 9:24 (becoming airborne at 9:30). As we saw earlier, the original NORAD timeline indicated that the Langley fighters were scrambled in response to word from the FAA at 9:24 that AA 77 had possibly been hijacked and appeared to be heading back toward Washington. General Larry Arnold, in his 2003 testimony to the Commission, gave a different account, saying that the fighters were really scrambled in response to word about UA 93. The 9/11 Commission, insisting that the military did not learn about either flight until after 9:30, needed an alternative explanation for the Langley scrambles. The tapes provide this alternative explanation: phantom AA 11. Although the tapes-based story of phantom 11 is undoubtedly convenient, the question is whether it is true. An examination of this story--which, thanks to Bronner’s article, is now available in more detail than it was in The 9/11 Commission Report--will provide reasons to doubt its truth. At 9:21 (34 minutes after Flight 11 had crashed into the World Trade Center), according to Bronner’s account, NEADS received word from Colin Scoggins, the manager of the FAA’s Boston Center, that AA 11, rather than having hit the WTC, was actually still aloft and headed toward Washington. As to how this false idea came about, Scoggins reportedly told Bronner that while he was monitoring a conference call between FAA centers, “word came across--from whom or where isn’t clear--that American 11 was thought to be headed for Washington.” The problem evidently started--to quote Bronner’s paraphrase of Scoggins’ statement--”with someone overheard trying to confirm from American whether American 11 was down--that somewhere in the flurry of information zipping back and forth during the conference call this transmogrified into the idea that a different plane had hit the tower, and that American 11 was still hijacked and still in the air.” Then, after talking to a supervisor, Scoggins “made the call and said [American 11] is still in the air and it’s probably somewhere over New Jersey or Delaware heading for Washington, D.C.”71 This message then, according to the 9/11 Commission, went to the NEADS Mission Crew Commander, who issued a scramble order to Langley. So, the Commission claims, the Langley jets were scrambled in response to “a phantom aircraft,” not to “an actual hijacked aircraft.”72 This new story, however, is riddled with problems. One problem is the implausibility of the idea that Scoggins or anyone else at the FAA could have made such a huge mistake. The traffic controllers at the Boston Center were reportedly very clear about the fate of AA 11. According to a story in the Christian Science Monitor two days after 9/11, flight controllers said that they never lost sight of the flight.73 Flight controller Mark Hodgkins later told ABC News: “I watched the target of American 11 the whole way down.”74 New York Times and Newhouse News stories reported that as soon as the Boston flight controllers heard that a plane had hit the WTC, they knew that it was AA 11, because they had been tracking it continuously since it had begun behaving erratically.75 Scoggins, as the manager of the Boston Center, presumably knew all of this. How, then, could any conversation have “transmogrified” into “the idea that a different plane had hit the tower, and that American 11 was still hijacked and still in the air”? To be sure, Bronner reports that, according to the tapes, confusion had developed at the Boston Center “over whether the plane that hit the tower really was American 11.”76 But that story sounds suspiciously like a set-up for the phantom 11 story. If the latter story was fabricated, we would expect someone to have fabricated something like the former story as well. [Paper continues at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060914191232454] ================ NOTES for Part 1 1. Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” Vanity Fair, September 2006, 262-285 (http://www.vanityfair.com/pdf/pressroom/advance_Air_Force_9-11.pdf). Henceforth cited as “Bronner.” 2. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, Without Precedent (New York: Knopf, 2006). 3. Bronner 282. 4. Bronner 264. 5. Bronner 285. 6. Vanity Fair, Press Release, “Vanity Fair Obtains Complete Set of NORAD 9/11 Audiotapes,” Aug. 2, 2006. 7. Bronner 264. 8. Philip Shenon, “New Tapes Disclose Confusion Within the Military on Sept. 11,” New York Times, August 3, 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/us/03norad.html). 9. See David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2005), 282-95. Henceforth cited as 9/11CROD. 10. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 316, 327-31. 11. These statements are quoted in Peter Lance, Cover Up: What the Government is Still Hiding about the War on Terror (New York: Harper-Collins/ReganBooks, 2004), 139-40. 12. Quoting “Statement of Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, May 23, 2003” (available at http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2003/commissiontestimony052303.htm). 13. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 241. Henceforth cited as 9/11CR. 14. See Griffin, 9/11CROD 241-44. 15. 9/11CR 27, 34. 16. 9/11CR xvi. 17. Griffin, 9/11CROD (see note 9, above). 18. 9/11CR 116. 19. Newsweek, October 15, 2001; San Francisco Chronicle, October 4, 2001. Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida (Eugene: MacCowPress, 2004). 20. “Terrorist Stag Parties,” Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001 (http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001298). 21. 9/11CR 248. 22. David Bamford, “Hijack ‘Suspect’ Alive in Morocco,” BBC News, Sept. 22, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1558669.stm). 23. See David Harrison, “Revealed: The Men with Stolen Identities,” Telegraph, September 23, 2001 (www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml). 24. 9/11CR 19-20. 25. According to the FAA, the military scrambled fighters at its request 67 times between September 2000 and June 2001 (FAA News Release, August 9, 2002). According to the Calgary Herald (Oct. 13, 2001), NORAD scrambled fighters 129 times in 2000. According to a report by the US General Accounting Office in 1994, moreover, NORAD scrambled fighters 1518 times during the previous four years, which would have been an average of 379 times per year (http://www.fas.org/man/gao/gao9476.htm). 26. 9/11CR 18-20. 27. 9/11CR 22-23. 28. Bronner 268. 29. “NORAD’s Response Times,” September 18, 2001 (available at http://www.standdown.net/noradseptember182001pressrelease.htm). 30. Toronto Star, December 9, 2001. 31. Hart Seely, “Amid Crisis Simulation, 'We Were Suddenly No-Kidding Under Attack,’” Newhouse News Service, January 25, 2002. 32. Laura Brown’s memo is available at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2004081200421797. 33. See Griffin, 9/11CROD 182-88. 34. 9/11CR 34. 35. 9/11CR 34. 36. 9/11CR 24-25. 37. 9/11CR 27. 38. Village Voice, September 13, 2001; Guardian, October 17, 2001. 39. This deviation was shown in the flight course for AA 77 provided by USA Today (available at http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&day_of_911=aa77). 40. Guardian, October 17, 2001; New York Times, October 17, 2001; Boston Globe, November 23, 2001. 41. For Laura Brown’s memo, see note 33. 42. Telephone conversation between Laura Brown and David Ray Griffin on Sunday, August 15, 2004. 43. Matthew Wald, “After the Attacks: Sky Rules; Pentagon Tracked Deadly Jet but Found No Way to Stop It,” New York Times, September 15, 2001. 44. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, May 23, 2003 (http://www.911commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm). In introducing the memo, Ben-Veniste said he was told it had been authored by two “high level individuals at FAA, Mr. Asmus and Ms. Schuessler.” That it was in reality written by Laura Brown, however, was confirmed during a telephone conversation I had with her on Sunday, August 15, 2004. 45. 9/11CR 36. 46. 9/11CR 28-29. 47. 9/11CR 29-30. 48. 9/11CR 36. 49. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 7. 50. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 12th Public Hearing, June 17, 2004. 51. Clarke, Against All Enemies, 7. 52. “Meet the Press,” NBC News, Sept. 16, 2001. 53. 9/11CR 34. 54. William B. Scott, “Exercise Jump-Starts Response to Attacks,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 3, 2002; Cape Cod Times, August 21, 2002. 55. This exchange is quoted in Meyssan, 9/11: The Big Lie, 162. 56. Griffin, 9/11CROD 150-51. 57. 9/11CR 30. 58. 9/11CR 41. 59. 9/11CR 41. Bronner, who says that the shoot-down authorization was not given by President Bush until 10:18 (282)--a claim with which United 93 ends--diverges here somewhat from the 9/11 Commission. Whereas the Commission says that Cheney talked to the president at 10:18, it also, besides saying that Cheney gave the authorization earlier, expresses skepticism about the claim, made by both Bush and Cheney, that Bush gave Cheney the authorization shortly after 10:00 (see 9/11CR 40-41 and Griffin, 9/11CROD 245-46). 60. Associated Press, September 13, 2001. 61. General Myers Confirmation Hearing, Senate Armed Services Committee, Washington D.C., September 13, 2001 (http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/mycon.htm). 62. Boston Herald, September 15, 2001. Wolfowitz’s statement was also referred to in Matthew Wald’s New York Times article of that day, “After the Attacks: Sky Rules.” 63. Dave Foster, “UST grad guides bombers in war,” Aquin, December 4, 2002 (http://www.stthomas.edu/aquin/archive/041202/anaconda.html). 64. 9/11CR 37; Clarke, Against All Enemies, 6-7. 65. “9/11: Interviews by Peter Jennings,” ABC News, September 11, 2002. 66. Ibid. 67. Leslie Filson, Air War over America: Sept. 11 Alters Face of Air Defense Mission, Foreword by Larry K. Arnold (Public Affairs: Tyndall Air Force Base, 2003), 72. 68. Ibid., 68. 69. Ibid., 71. 70. Bronner 282. 71. Bronner 275. In The 9/11 Commission Report, the statement reads: “I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air, and it’s on its way towards--heading towards Washington” (26). 72. 9/11CR 34. 73. Christian Science Monitor, September 13, 2001. 74. ABC News, September 6, 2002. 75. New York Times, September 13, 2001; Hart Seely, “Amid Crisis Simulation, 'We Were Suddenly No-Kidding Under Attack,’” Newhouse News Service, January 25, 2002. 76. Bronner 267. David Ray Griffin is professor emeritus of philosophy of religion and theology at the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, where he taught 31 years. He has published some 30 books, including 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Ed. with Peter Dale Scott (Olive Branch Press /Interlink Books); Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action, (Westminster John Knox Press); The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Interlink Books, 2004); and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Interlink Books, 2005). © David Ray Griffin. Permission granted to all readers of this website to link to any and all articles found in the public areas of the website, http://www.911truth.org, so long as the full source URL (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2006091418303369, in this case) is posted with the article.
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#2. To: Kamala (#0)
Griffin was on Guns and Butter a couple of weeks ago with show titled "The NORAD Audio Tapes: Real or Faked?". It was a great show. Interview with Dr. David Ray Griffin regarding his most recent article, "9/11 Live or Fabricated: Do the NORAD Tapes Verify the 9/11 Commission Report?" Griffin's article, written primarily in response to Vanity Fair Magazine's, "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes" by Michael Bronner in their September 2006 issue, deconstructs the preposterous argument that NORAD was not notified by the FAA of hijacked airliners until they had struck their targets or crashed, and that the only jets the military scrambled were in response to a flight that did not exist. Griffin takes a close look at NORAD's audio tapes, on whose authenticity these claims depend.
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