Michael Bronner

Vanity Fair magazine publishes for the first time transcripts of audiotapes from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which captured the activities at its Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) during the course of the 9/11 attacks. NEADS had four multi-channel tape recorders in a corner of its operations floor, recording every radio channel along with time stamps. Nearly 30 hours of audio, covering six-and-a-half hours of real time, have been released by the Pentagon to journalist Michael Bronner, who’d been a producer on the recent movie United 93. Previously, the tapes had been provided under subpoena to the 9/11 Commission, but only a few short clips were played during its public hearings. Bronner, who describes the recordings in detail in his Vanity Fair article, calls them “the authentic military history of 9/11.” They reveal “in stark detail” that parts of the testimony given by NORAD officials to the 9/11 Commission “were misleading, and others simply false.” For example, they show that at 9:16 a.m. on 9/11, when NORAD originally claimed it had begun tracking Flight 93, “the plane had not yet been hijacked. In fact, NEADS wouldn’t get word about United 93 for another 51 minutes.” The New York Times says, “The tapes demonstrate that for most of the morning of Sept. 11, the airspace over New York and Washington was essentially undefended, and that jet fighters scrambled to intercept the hijacked planes were involved in a fruitless chase for planes that had already crashed.” [Vanity Fair, 8/1/2006; New York Times, 8/3/2006]