Quote from Haroki:
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=139027&highlight=intercept
Page 2, post #50.
Mother of God... not NORAD claims again. What claim is SteveAustin resurrecting this time? Is he pitching the whole idea of "NORAD Stood Down" at once, or is he just trying to step into it slowly by saying NORAD should have intercepted the jets?
Basic - and just for emphasis, so people understand, BASIC i.e. beginning, prerequisite, necessary - reading in order to understand the situation with US air defense on that day:
The NORAD response to 9/11 - http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=70300
Timeline - FAA/NORAD response - http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=1845150&postcount=1
Vanity Fair: The NORAD Tapes- http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/norad200608
Q&A With 9/11 Boston Center Air Traffic Controller - http://911guide.googlepages.com/cs
9/11 Myths page listing the common NORAD conspiracy fantasies - http://911myths.com/html/stand_down.html
Gravy's page: Info on NORAD, FAA, NTSB... etc. - http://wtc7lies.googlepages.com/norad,faa,ntsb,aircraftcapabilities,pilo
Bottom line to lurkers and newbies: People often reintroduce the claim that the US air defense should have intercepted the jets and stopped 9/11 from occuring. Some go so far as to say that NORAD was "Stood Down" i.e. ordered into a lesser state or readiness. These myths often stem from misunderstandings (or outright distortions) of NORAD's mission to facetious claims about what other entities consider to be NORAD's duties. The fact of the matter is:
NORAD did NOT have authority to conduct intercepts at will inside the US borders. Rather, their assistance had to be requested. Andrew Burfield's "The NORAD Response to 9/11" presents the facts that make this quite clear. As he has pointed out:
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Originally Posted by gumboot
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is responsible for the intercept of aircraft inside the ADIZ. However, as it is the FAA and Transport Canada that handle the ADIZ clearances, a request for intercept from one of these agencies precedes any action by NORAD against civilian aircraft. NORAD do not, and never have, directly monitored air traffic inside the ADIZ themselves.
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The FAA documents supporting this are linked at the page linked above.
Regardless of authority or standing orders - which again, is information gathered and republished at Gumboot's link above - the fact remains that the FAA was having trouble getting a handle on the situation with enough clarity to conduct any sort of intercept. This is patently clear from a study of the NORAD tapes (refer to Vanity Fair article above), and made explicity clear with Andrew Burfield's timeline (also linked above). The time NEADS (the Northeast Air Defense Sector component of NORAD) had between getting notification of the hijackings and those jets crashing were:
[See link for details]
AA11 - 9 minutes
UA175 - 0 minutes
AA77 - 2 minutes
UA93 - minus 4 minutes
As Andrew said in summary:
1-NORAD's area of responsibility is inside the ADIZ
2-The Hijackings occurred outside the ADIZ
3-There was no standard procedure for hijackings outside the ADIZ on 9/11
4-From 1991 to 2001 only one military intercept occurred over CONUS airspace (Note: This was the famous "Payne Stewart's jet" intercept). It took 81 minutes and the aircraft transponder remained on at all times.
5-Incident-specific conditions on 9/11 did not favour a successful intercept, based on previous experience.
The information linked above is necessary context that you'll need to judge any of the conspiracy fantasy claims forwarded by any truther here. I'll leave the refutation of the specifics of this claim to others better informed than me; Reheat and Beachnut have US Air Force experience, and can more readily address details than I. And Andrew Burfield (aka Gumboot) has studied this topic to greater detail; if he chooses to participate, you would benefit from paying close attention to what he posts. Others, too, will have valuable information to chime in with. The point I'm making is that any of you lurkers and new folks should study the information I've listed above - yes, it's dense; my apologies, but it can't be helped. There's simply a lot of information that's necessary to develop the proper context - and use that as background with which to judge the claim-of-the-week recycled by the truther-of-the-month in this thread. And you can also use the search function to look up old threads; I particularly urge you to search for "NORAD" and "Gumboot", although also using terms like "NEADS", "stood down", "ADIZ" and the like will produce results.
Bottom line: Please pay attention to the basic informational links I've provided. It's good information painstakingly assembled by rational individuals interested in the real truth, not the conspiratorial, fantasy "truth" pitched by conspiracy peddlers.
You should learn to write better. Providing a trillion of links to other forums does you no justice.