List 3 failures of the FAA on 9-11.

Despite being given plenty of notice about the four planes hijacked on 9/11, FAA management did not request military assistance to ensure the planes were intercepted before they crashed.  The 9/11 Commission attributes this to a string of gross failures in communication between the FAA and the military on 9/11.  However, The Report places no blame on any of the people who were involved and doesn’t even mention the one person who was most important to this chain of communications.

One of the most important people involved was Benedict Sliney, who had, just before 9/11, left a lucrative law career defending Wall Street financiers to return to work as a specialist at the FAA.  It was his first day on the job.  With regard to ensuring military interception of the hijacked planes, he said he did not receive a “request to authorize a request.”  Sliney also claimed to not know that FAA management at the Command Center, where he was in charge, or FAA HQ, had any role in requests for military assistance.   This is in contradiction to the stated protocol in the 9/11 Commission report and also the idea of an FAA “hijack coordinator.”

The FAA hijack coordinator was Michael Canavan, a career special operations commander who had come to the civilian FAA job only nine months before 9/11.  According to an FAA intelligence agent, one of the first things Canavan did in that job was lead and participate in exercises that were “pretty damn close to the 9/11 plot.”  He was also known within the FAA for writing a memo just a few months before 9/11 that instituted a new leniency with regard to airport and airline security.

With regard to the communication failures, Canavan offered the unsolicited excuse that he was absent during the morning hours of 9/11, in Puerto Rico.  The 9/11 Commission did not pursue this excuse nor did it ask who was filling the critical hijack coordinator role in Canavan’s absence.  In fact, the 9/11 Commission report didn’t address the hijack coordinator role at all.  The Report mentioned Sliney only once in the entire narrative and did not refer to Canavan in his role as hijack coordinator.

When a new, honest investigation is finally convened, it should look into why a lawyer, who knew how to handle evidence and get financiers off the hook, was experiencing his first day on the job as national operation manager at the FAA.  And If 9/11 was a “special operation” as many people now suspect, that investigation might consider that a number of special operations specialists were in place to ensure that the operation went off without a hitch and was not discovered.  Long-time special operations leaders like Michael Canavan, Hugh Shelton, Brian Michael Jenkins, and Richard Armitage played critical parts with respect to the facilities, events, and official story of 9/11.  These facts seem worth investigating.