Cheney Gave NORAD Stand-Down Order
John OBrien
Back to the morning of 9-11; the command was busy with this training exercise. We were instructed to bring all our gear in to prep for a mock (staged) deployment to the Middle East. On the morning of 9-11 I had been on base prepped and ready to go since about 0400am. During my time at the base that morning, they were setting up barriers around the command and placing gun posts on the roofs. When I questioned one of the security officers about the machine gun and shoulder fired rockets on the roof I was given the answer its a precaution for a plane attempting to crash into this building.
So, I was standing in the SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility), which is basically this underground bunker command post for USCENTCOM, when the first plane hit. We were watching the fly patterns of all the planes on the aerospace grid. This contained not only all commercial flights at the time, but all military flights, and fake enemy planes that were supposedly put on there for the exercise. Many of the planes sent to intercept the fake blips were scrambled from Andrews which is an air defense AFB for the East Coast. They were sent across the US and left very few planes to defend the capital. After the first plane hit the tower we were all in disbelief. After the initial shock was over, our questions were what are the odds this could happen for real, during a training exercise thats covering the same scenario? We were all at wits end. Then to top all of this off, Cheney gave NORAD the order to stand down scrambling jets to intercept. A few moments later tower 2 was hit. Only after the Pentagon was hit, did he give the orders to scramble the jets to intercept the plane bound for the WhiteHouse