Will Bunch Questions the Air Defense Response

and other things as well about flight 93.

Good for him:

On 9/11, where was NORAD, the jet fighter squadron tasked with defending America's skies?

For four-and-and-a-half years, there has been contradictory evidence whether Flight 93 -- the fourth hijacked plane, which crashed in a field in western Pennsylvania -- was intercepted by military jets or not. A number of Shanksville residents saw a white jet nearby that was military in nature. But the Pentagon's story has been that the doomed jetliner was never intercepted -- even though Dick Cheney in the White House situation room was ordering exactly that.

Now, the 31-minute cockpit tape seems to back up the official version. The tapes will not be played out loud for the general public -- that's standard procedure -- but the transcript reveals no comments by the hijackers that explicitly mention other planes.

Some of the comments and actions still seem ambiguous -- at 10:00:09, when a hijacker says in Arabic, "When they all come, we finish it off," they is presumed to mean the passengers and probably does -- but could also mean jet fighters.

Also interesting is this hijacker comment at 9:53:12: "Let him look through the window." The standard procedure for NORAD in intercepting a hijacked jetliner would be to circle to cockpit and visually ID who was flying the plane. On the other hand, the NORAD pilot would also try to contact the hijacker pilots by radio -- and the tape seems to give no indication that happened (assuming, of course, the cockpit was even picking up radio transmissions.)

The problem for the Bush administration on Flight 93 has been the ultimate lying-or-incompetence situation. Today, they did what should have been done four years ago, and played the tape -- insisting that, "See, we were never lying." Fine -- we won't contest that, for now.

So why were you so incompetent?

At 9:39 that morning, when the Cleveland ATC confirmed that there was a bomb or a hijacking on Flight 93, FAA or NORAD officials had known of hijackings for at least one hour and 14 minutes, according to researcher Paul Thompson's excellent timeline. Both World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon had been struck, and jet fighters capable of flying nearly 200 miles in just 10 minutes had been scrambled.

NORAD's failure to confront Flight 93 defies belief, and the cockpit recording only amplifies that. Nor has the government ever fully explained why intercept procedures that worked dozen of times before 9/11 failed the one time that it really mattered.

There are a lot of questions that we'd hoped the release of the cockpit tape would answer -- but most are still a mystery.

-- Did the heroic passengers reach the cockpit, or didn't they?

-- Did the hijackers murder the two pilots, or were they kept alive for possible use later in the flight?

-- Why would the al-Qaeda pilots crash the plane on purpose rather than fight the passengers to the death -- seeing as they were already on a suicide mission?

-- Why does the tape end at 10:03:09, when the world's best "forensic seismologist" told us in 2002 that he was 100 percent certain the jet crashed at 10:06.

And those are just a few big ones -- there are many others.

Meanwhile, we remain dismayed at the hypnotic trance that continue to hover other both the media and -- hard as it is to believe -- the blogosphere when it comes to 9/11. Think about it this way -- there is "the real world" and then there is "9/11 world."

In the "real world," the Bush administration lies constantly, about uranium from Niger, mushroom clouds in Iraq, or mobile WMD labs that are really "sand toilets." But in "9/11 world," those very same people in the White House have never told a lie, and never been challenged. Unfortunately, "9/11 world" continued to trump the "real world" during the Iraq war run-up of 2002-2003.

Likewise, for the media, "9/11 world" is a place where facts don't matter. Example? This morning, CNN's Kelli Arena said that a comment on the tape, "Roll it," was related to the famous remarks by passenger Todd Beamer. In fact, Beamer had been speaking on an in-plane telephone when he said, "Let's roll." "Roll it" was likely a failed attempt by the passenger to break into the cockpit with a food cart.

And the brave blogosphere, we looked tonight for commentary on this important event, and found almost none. What are you people so afraid of.

Maybe someday, we can look at the events of 9/11 with the same jaundiced eye that we view the rest of the Bush administration, from Iraq to Katrina. Maybe that tipping point came today. We hope so.