Chapter 7: Canavan, Sliney and the FAA

Among the most important unanswered questions about the attacks of September 11 is: Why were none of the four planes intercepted? The failure of the U.S. air defenses can be traced to a number of factors and people but some of the most startling root causes have to do with the utter failure of communications between two agencies responsible for protecting the nation’s airspace. At one of them, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), two people stood out in this failed chain of communications. One was a lawyer on his first day at the job, and another was a U.S. Special Operations commander who was never held responsible for his critical role, or even questioned about it.

The 9/11 Commission reported that:

“On 9/11, the defense of U.S. airspace depended on close interaction between two federal agencies: the FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).”[1] 

According to the Commission, this interaction began with air traffic controllers (ATCs) at the relevant regional FAA control centers, which on 9/11 included Boston, New York, Cleveland, Washington, and Indianapolis. In the event of a hijacking, these ATCs were expected to “notify their supervisors, who in turn would inform management all the way up to FAA headquarters. Headquarters had a hijack coordinator, who was the director of the FAA Office of Civil Aviation Security or his or her designate.”

The hijack coordinator’s responsibility was to “contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center (NMCC)” and “the NMCC would then seek approval from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to provide military assistance. If approval was given, the orders would be transmitted down NORAD’s chain of command [to the interceptor pilots].”[2]

The 9/11 Commission Report (the report) indicated that the military was eventually notified about all the hijackings but none of those notifications came in time to intercept the hijacked aircraft. The report also contradicted a good deal of testimony given on the subject by suggesting that earlier statements made by military leaders, in testimony to the Commission, were “incorrect.” The corrections to these statements led to a reassessment of how much time the military actually had to respond to requests for assistance that it received from the FAA. Ultimately, the report stated that NORAD’s North East Air Defense Sector (NEADS) “air defenders had nine minutes’ notice on the first hijacked plane, no advance notice on the second, no advance notice on the third, and no advance notice on the fourth.”[3]

The report does not place blame for the failure to intercept on any specific people in the chain of communications, but it specifically exonerates “NEADS commanders and officers” and “[i]ndividual FAA controllers, facility managers and Command Center managers.” In fact, the report goes so far as to praise these people for how well they did.[4] Curiously, the hijack coordinator at FAA headquarters was not mentioned in the list of those who were exonerated.

The ATCs did notify their management as required, but further notification to FAA headquarters (FAA HQ) was supposedly riddled with delays. FAA HQ ultimately got plenty of notice of the four hijacked planes but failed to do its job. Perhaps the most glaring example was demonstrated by the failure of FAA HQ to request military assistance for the fourth hijacking, that of Flight 93.

On page 28, the report says: “By 9:34, word of the hijacking had reached FAA headquarters.” Despite this advance notice, Flight 93 was said to have crashed in Pennsylvania, never having been intercepted, sometime between 10:03 and 10:07.

To put this in perspective, FAA notification at 9:34 a.m. EST was over 30 minutes after a second airliner had crashed in the World Trade Center. At that time it was known that a third plane was hijacked and that plane was just about to crash into the Pentagon. Everyone knew the country was under a coordinated terrorist attack via hijacked aircraft because, as of 9:03 a.m., mainstream news stations had already been televising it.

That was the situation when FAA HQ was notified about a fourth hijacking. Given those circumstances, an objective observer would expect the highest level of urgency throughout all levels of government in response to that fourth hijacking. But that was not what happened. FAA management did not follow the protocol to ask for military assistance. The 9/11 Commission contends that FAA HQ gave air defenders no notice whatsoever of the hijacking of Flight 93 until after the plane had been destroyed. For whatever reasons, the FAA’s Command Center (located in Herndon, VA) did not request military assistance either. In fact, neither the Command Center nor FAA HQ contacted NMCC to request military assistance for any of the hijacked planes.

Therefore it seems reasonable to look at the people whose roles were most important in this failed chain of communications. Once the entire country was aware that a terrorist attack was underway and that planes were being hijacked and used as weapons, the two people who were most important to the FAA’s response were the person running the FAA’s national Command Center and the hijack coordinator at FAA headquarters.

It turns out that these two people were both new to their jobs. In fact, it was the first day on the job for Benedict Leo Sliney, the national operations manager at FAA’s Command Center.

Benedict Sliney 

Benedict Sliney was an ATC in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War and, after that; he worked at the FAA for the first half of his professional career. In the 1980s, Sliney went on from the FAA to work as an attorney and continued in that career throughout the 1990s. He worked for several law firms during this time, handling various kinds of cases, and he was a partner in some of those firms.

Sliney’s clients included financial investors who were accused of Securities and Exchange violations. In one 1998 case, he represented Steven K. Gourlay, Jr., an employee of Sterling Foster. It was reported that Sterling Foster was “secretly controlled” by Randolph Pace and was at the center of “one of the most notorious scams ever.”[5] Sliney got Gourlay’s charges dropped in 1998[6] but, in a related 2002 case, Gourlay pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud, and was sentenced to six months in prison.[7]

In the summer of 2000, Sliney represented Merrill Lynch in a case in which the delay of the transfer of clients’ funds to Smith Barney was said to have “caused their investments with Merrill, Lynch to lose some $638,000 in value.” Sliney was able to get Merrill Lynch off the hook.[8]

For whatever reasons, Sliney decided to leave his lucrative law career just months before 9/11 in order to return to the FAA. It was reported that Jack Kies, FAA’s manager of tactical operations, offered Sliney the job of Command Center national operations manager. Instead, Sliney asked to work as a specialist and he started in that role. Kies offered Sliney the national operations manager position again six months later and Sliney accepted.[9] His first day on the job was September 11, 2001.

On 9/11, others present at the FAA’s Command Center outranked Sliney. Interviews of those others, however, including Linda Schuessler and John White, confirm that Sliney was given the lead in the Command Center’s response to the hijackings that day. Despite that critical role, Sliney is mentioned only one time in the narrative of the 9/11 Commission Report.

According to the summary of his interview for the investigation, Sliney was first notified of “a hijack in progress” sometime between 8:15 and 8:20 a.m. EST. This was about the same time as communications were lost with American Airlines Flight 11, the first of the planes to be hijacked, and it was about 30 minutes before that plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC). It was nearly two hours before Flight 93 was destroyed in Pennsylvania. Incredibly, according to Sliney’s interview, it was not until after a second confirmed hijacking occurred and two planes had crashed into the WTC (nearly an hour after he learned about the first hijacking) that Sliney “realized that the hijackers were piloting the aircraft.”[10]

After the second tower was hit, Sliney responded by asking for a military response via the special military unit assigned to the FAA’s Command Center, the Air Traffic Services Cell (ATSC). This was at approximately 9:06. At the time, one of the three military officers in the ATSC called the NMCC and that officer was told that “senior leaders” at the NMCC are “in a meeting to determine their response” to the attacks, and would call back.[11] As this example shows, there are as many unanswered questions about what went on at the NMCC that morning as there are about what happened at the FAA.[12]

Several of the FAA’s top people confirmed that the military was engaged and knew about the hijackings early on. This included Jeff Griffith at the Command Center and Monte Belger, the FAA’s acting Deputy Administrator, who was present at FAA Headquarters. According to Belger, “there were military people on duty at the FAA Command Center, as Mr. Sliney said. They were participating in what was going on. There were military people in the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization in a situation room. They were participating in what was going on.”[13]

Sliney’s interview summary is full of phrases like he “did not recall” and “was not aware,” although he did recall being informed that interceptors were eventually launched (too late). Apparently, Sliney didn’t know what the fighters would do if they were launched. He recalled thinking: “Well, what are they going to do?” In an apparent defensive posture, Sliney claimed, “definitively that he did not receive a request to authorize a request to the military for assistance.”[14]

One might think that the national operations manager for the FAA’s Command Center would not need a “request to authorize a request for military assistance” and that he might know what military assistance would entail. But Sliney’s interview summary suggests that he did not even know what the protocol was for requesting military assistance in the event of a hijacking. Sliney’s understanding on 9/11 and two years later, when the interview was conducted, was that an FAA request for military assistance “emanates from the effected Center…directly to the military.” That is, Sliney supposedly was not aware of any role that the FAAs’ Command Center or FAA HQ might have had in the request for interception of hijacked aircraft. This is in contradiction to the protocol given by the 9/11 Commission Report and it is definitely in contradiction to the concept of a “hijack coordinator.”

In addition to the confusion about the Command Center’s role in requesting military assistance, it seems there was only one person at FAA headquarters who was authorized to request military assistance – the hijack coordinator. On 9/11, Benedict Sliney was told that no one could find that one person. Sliney later recounted his experience learning of that fact in this way:

“I said something like, ‘That’s incredible. There’s only one person. There must be someone designated or someone who will assume the responsibility of issuing an order, you know.’ We were becoming frustrated in our attempts to get some information. What was the military response?”[15]

Michael Canavan

The hijack coordinator at FAA headquarters, Lt. Gen. Michael A. Canavan, had been in his position for only nine months and would leave the job within a month after 9/11. Surprisingly, although Canavan was mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, he was not cited for his role as the FAA’s hijack coordinator, a role that was at the center of the failure to intercept the planes on 9/11.

Instead of being mentioned as the hijack coordinator, Canavan was in the report because he had been the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which ran the military’s counterterrorism operations and covert missions. The report described Canavan’s part in the failure to follow-through on a carefully laid-out 1998 CIA plan to capture Osama bin Laden (OBL) in Afghanistan. Canavan was quoted as saying that the plan put tribal Afghanis at too much risk and that the “operation was too complicated for the CIA.”[16] Ironically, after 9/11, few if any U.S. leaders would express concern for tribal Afghanis while engaging in a war of aggression in Afghanistan.

Nearly the entirety of Canavan’s career was in military special operations. He was a Special Forces soldier for many years and, before he was JSOC Commander, he was Special Operations Commander for the U.S. European Command (SOCEUR), which included operations throughout Africa as well. Canavan was SOCEUR from 1994 to 1996 and JSOC Commander from 1996 to 1998.

JSOC is a successor organization to the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which was a secret government-funded organization authorized by the National Security Council in 1948. The OPC was led by CIA director Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, a State Department official who wielded unprecedented power due to his position in New York law and financial circles. The JSOC was created in 1980 by the Pentagon and run by Ted Shackley’s OPC colleague, Richard Stillwell. According to author Joseph Trento, JSOC quickly became “one of the most secret operations of the U.S. government.”^[17]

Creation of the JSOC was, ostensibly, a response to the failed 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran called Operation Eagle Claw. JSOC immediately went on to engage in an “array of highly covert activities” by way of “black budgets.”[18] This included operations in Honduras and El Salvador which supported the illegal wars associated with the Nicaraguan rebels called the Contras.

In 1987, JSOC was assigned to a new military command called the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) that came about through the work of Senator William Cohen. Senator Cohen went on to become the Secretary of Defense from 1997 to 2001 and it was he who led the Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997 that reduced the number of jet fighters actively protecting the continental U.S. from 100 to 14.[19] Cohen is now chairman of The Cohen group, where he works with his vice chairman Marc Grossman, who FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds says figures prominently in the information she has attempted to provide.

Hugh Shelton was the commander of SOCOM during the same years that Canavan was the commander of JSOC. Shelton went on to become the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS), which is the highest position in the U.S. military. He was in that position on September 11^th and was, like Canavan, curiously absent for just the morning hours on that day.[20]

In any case, it seems odd that Michael Canavan occupied what turned out to be the most important position relative to the failure to intercept the hijacked planes on 9/11 and was also involved in evaluating plans to capture OBL just three years earlier. Apart from the coincidence that he was selected as the most qualified person for both of those very different positions, he was also a central figure in these two different reasons why the 9/11 attacks were said to have succeeded.

When he first started the job as FAA’s hijack coordinator, just nine months before the attacks, Canavan was in charge of running training exercises that were “pretty damn close to [the] 9/11 plot,” according to John Hawley, an employee in the FAA’s intelligence division.[21] In his comments to the 9/11 Commission, Canavan denied having participated in such exercises and the Commission apparently didn’t think to reconcile the conflicting comments it had received from Hawley and Canavan on this important issue.

That’s not surprising in light of the fact that Canavan’s treatment by the 9/11 Commission was one of uncritical deference. Reading through the transcript of the related hearing gives the impression that the Commission members were not only trying to avoid asking the General any difficult questions – they were fawning over him.

Lee Hamilton began his questioning of Canavan by saying “You’re pretty tough on the airlines, aren’t you?”[22] As with many of the statements and reports made by Hamilton, the evidence suggests that the opposite is true.

In May 2001, Canavan wrote an internal FAA memorandum that initiated a new policy of more lax fines for airlines and airports that had security problems. The memo suggested that, if the airlines or airports had a written plan to fix the problem, fines were not needed. For whatever reason, the memo was also taken to mean that FAA agents didn’t even have to enforce corrections as long as the airline or airport said they were working on it.[23] Canavan’s memo was repeatedly cited as a cause of failure to fix security problems in the months leading up to 9/11.[24]

The FAA’s office of Civil Aviation Security, which Canavan led, was also responsible for the “Red Teams.” These teams were responsible for covertly conducting airport security testing in order to identify vulnerabilities. The Red Teams were intended to test all of the hijacking prevention systems that the alleged hijackers defeated on 9/11. In his position as leader of that office, Canavan quickly learned all the weaknesses of those systems. 

One of Canavan’s Read Team Leaders, Bogdan Dzakovic, later testified to the 9/11 Commission that airports had begun to be warned by the FAA before the Red Teams got there. He also claimed that FAA officials knew something like 9/11 was going to happen and that they purposefully ignored the evidence. Dzakovic indicated that his team “repeatedly warned the FAA of the potential for security breaches and hijackings but was told to cover up its findings.” A Department of Transportation inquiry into the claims revealed that, prior 9/11, the “Red Team program was grossly mismanaged and the result was a serious compromise of public safety.”[25]

Canavan’s job as hijack coordinator was clearly the most important link in the communications chain between the FAA and the military. But the 9/11 Commission did not address this hijack coordinator position, and did not mention the alarming fact that we don’t know who actually handled the job of hijack coordinator on the day of 9/11. We don’t know because Canavan said he was in Puerto Rico that morning and claimed to have missed out on everything that happened that day.[26]

Here is Canavan’s exact statement to the Commission, in response to an unrelated question from Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, whose questions were, like Hamilton’s, rather submissive.

“Here’s my answer — and it’s not to duck the question. Number one, I was visiting the airport in San Juan that day when this happened. That was a CADEX airport, and I was down there also to remove someone down there that was in a key position. So when 9/11 happened, that’s where I was. I was able to get back to Washington that evening on a special flight from the Army back from San Juan, back to Washington. So everything that transpired that day in terms of times, I have to — and I have no information on that now, because when I got back we weren’t — that wasn’t the issue at the time. We were — when I got back it was, What are we going to do over the next 48 hours to strengthen what just happened?”[27]

One might think that the Commissioners would have expressed surprise at Canavan’s rambling, incoherent claim that he was just not available during the events of 9/11. We would certainly expect the Commissioners to have followed up with detailed questions about who was in charge that day with respect to the most important role related to the failed national response. But that was not the case. Instead, Ben-Veniste redirected the discussion while “putting aside the issue.” None of the other Commissioners said a word about Canavan being missing that day or even asked who was filling in for him as the primary contact between the FAA and the military with regard to hijackings. And, of course, the 9/11 Commission Report did not mention any of it at all.

Canavan’s assistant and back-up, Lynne Osmus, just happened to be out sick that day. It was not clear who the back-up to the back-up would have been, but someone from another department was vaguely cited. This was Lee Longmire, a veteran U.S. Army counterintelligence officer who on 9/11 was in charge of Airport Compliance and Field Operations. But Longmire was apparently not aware that he was filling in for Canavan because the notes from his 9/11 Commission interview did not reflect it.[28] 

Longmire suggested that the Commission talk to one of his assistants, Mike Weikert, who he believed was more involved. Weikert is of further interest because FAA intelligence officer John Hawley, who claimed that Canavan had led table top exercises that “were pretty damn close to the 9/11 plot,” also stated in his Commission interview that Weikert had helped to lead those exercises.[29] 

In the interest of finding out more about what happened, investigators should return to the failure of FAA HQ to request military assistance for Flight 93. The question should be asked — what was FAA HQ doing for those 30 minutes after being informed of a fourth hijacking, and in the absence of the one person who was charged to do something about it? Apparently, for fifteen minutes nothing was done. But after that, according to the official account, the conversations were going nowhere.

At 9:49 a.m., according to the report, this was the exchange between the FAA Command Center and FAA HQ:

Command Center: Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft?

FAA HQ: Oh, God, I don’t know.

Command Center: Uh, that’s a decision somebody’s gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes.

FAA HQ: Uh, ya know everybody just left the room.

The report says that ineffectual discussions about scrambling aircraft were still occurring at FAA HQ twenty minutes after it had received notification of the fourth hijacking.

At 9:53 am, “FAA headquarters informed the Command Center that the deputy director for air traffic services was talking to Monte Belger about scrambling aircraft.” This contradicts Benedict Sliney’s testimony that an FAA request for military assistance “emanates from the effected Center…directly to the military.” Moreover, the Deputy Director of Air Traffic Services that day was Jeff Griffith and Monte Belger was the Deputy Administrator for the FAA. And Belger and Griffith denied they ever had a conversation about scrambling aircraft, despite the 9/11 Commission stating this as fact.

Jane Garvey was also present during the failed response at FAA HQ. She was the FAA Administrator from 1997 to 2002 and coincidentally, in the years before that, had been the director of Logan International Airport in Boston, where two of the flights took off on 9/11. Apparently Garvey’s record as director for the Logan airport, which had for many years the worst security record of any major airport, was not a problem for her nomination to the top job at FAA. It was Garvey who appointed Canavan to his role as Associate Administrator for Civil Aviation Security, commonly known as the hijack coordinator.

In any case, in the absence of the hijack coordinator the FAA was completely incompetent in terms of communicating the need to intercept the hijacked planes on 9/11. Officially, the only notice of the hijackings to the military came directly from the FAA centers, bypassing both the Command Center and FAA HQ. Boston Center reached NEADS at 8:37 to request help with the first hijacking, and New York Center notified the military of the second hijacking at 9:03. NEADS only found about the third hijacking at 9:34 by calling the Washington Center to ask about Flight 11, and the military was said to have first learned about the hijacking of Flight 93 from Cleveland Center at 10:07. Nevertheless, none of the planes were intercepted.

9/11 and Special Operations 

Although Michael Canavan was unavailable to perform his critical job on 9/11, he was fully involved in the response to the attacks. Just two days later, he attended a “Principals Committee Meeting” chaired by Condoleezza Rice that included all of George W. Bush’s “war cabinet.”[30]This meeting set the stage for how the new War on Terror would be conducted.

Canavan later cashed in on the windfalls of the resulting wars and the privatization of military operations when he was hired on at Anteon International Corporation as president of its Information Systems Group. In doing so he joined a number of prominent defense department alumni, including his former special operations colleague Hugh Shelton, who was on the board of directors at Anteon.

Since 9/11, covert activities have been authorized frequently but, prior to that, SOCOM was not supposed to conduct covert operations. Therefore, JSOC had worked intimately with the CIA’s clandestine group called the Special Activities Division. Canavan led those kinds of operations in northern Iraq, Liberia and Bosnia. He ran special operations in Croatia in 1996 and, according to President Clinton, was the one who identified Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown’s body after Brown’s plane crashed there.[31]

JSOC regularly works with foreign intelligence agencies, including the Mossad.[32] It has been involved with hijackings, for example that of the Achille Lauro and TWA Flight 847. It has also operated from bases in foreign countries, such as Saudi Arabia, for many years.[33]  Presidential Decision Directive PDD-25, gave JSOC one of the rare exemptions from the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which meant that JSOC could legally conduct its missions within the United States.[34]

In the War on Terror, the special mission units of JSOC have been given the authority to pursue secret operations around the world. JSOC effectively operates outside the law, capturing and killing people with or without the knowledge of the host countries in which it operates. JSOC missions are always low-profile and the U.S. government will not acknowledge any specifics about them.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has discovered that an assassination squad of the JSOC was under the command of Vice President Cheney after the 9/11 attacks.[35]Hersh also claimed that the leaders of JSOC “are all members of, or at least supporters of, the Knights of Malta” and that “many of them are members of Opus Dei.”[36] The ties between the Knights of Malta and high-level U.S. intelligence personnel, including William Casey and William Donovan, have been well-documented.[37] Such accusations have also been made of Louis Freeh, who would have worked closely with Canavan and Shelton in the pursuit of special operations targets.

Other special operations leaders who were involved in the lack of response on 9/11 included Richard Armitage, who supervised the Bureau of Consular Affairs that granted express visas to the alleged hijackers. Armitage was present on the secure video teleconference with Richard Clarke during the attacks.[38] 

As reviewed in Chapter 3, Armitage was involved in special operations in Vietnam and later was party to several of the most well-known covert operations in U.S. history, including the Phoenix Program and the Iran-Contra crimes.[39] After the invasion of Iraq, Armitage was identified as the one who betrayed CIA agent Valerie Plame by revealing her identity, apparently in retaliation for her husband’s attempt to set the record straight on weapons of mass destruction. Armitage admitted that he revealed Plame’s identity but claimed it was done inadvertently.[40]

Another special operations soldier who testified to the 9/11 Commission and played a significant role with regard to the airlines and facilities prior to 9/11 was Brian Michael Jenkins. While Shelton and Canavan were running SOCOM and JSOC, Jenkins was the deputy chairman of Kroll Associates when that company was designing the security system for the World Trade Center (WTC) complex.[41]

Jenkins was appointed by President Clinton to be a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, where he collaborated with James Abrahamson of WTC security company Stratesec, and FBI director Louis Freeh. As will be discussed in Chapter 11, Jenkins served as an advisor to the National Commission on Terrorism, led by L. Paul Bremer, who went on to be an executive of WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan and then the Iraq occupation governor. Jenkins returned to the RAND Corporation where he had previously worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Frank Carlucci of The Carlyle Group, and Paul Kaminski of Anteon.

Lieutenant Colonel John Blitch was yet another special operations soldier who played a big part in the events immediately following 9/11. Blitch spent his career in the U.S. Army’s Special Forces and was said to have retired just the day before 9/11 to become an employee of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Immediately following the attacks, he was put in charge of the team of robotic machine operators that explored the pile at Ground Zero, using devices that had previously been used for elimination of unexploded ordnance.

Conclusions

Despite being given plenty of notice about the four planes hijacked on 9/11, FAA HQ did not request military assistance to ensure the planes were intercepted before they crashed. The 9/11 Commission attributed this to a string of gross failures in communication between the FAA and the military. However, the report placed no blame on any of the people who were involved and didn’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 at 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.

Independent investigators 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 operations manager at the FAA. And if 9/11 was a “special operation” as some people now suspect, investigators 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, Brian Michael Jenkins, and Richard Armitage played critical roles with respect to the facilities, events, and official story of 9/11. These facts seem worthy of further scrutiny.

Notes to Chapter 7

1. The 9/11 Commission Report, page 14
2. The 9/11 Commission report, pages 17 to 18
3. The 9/11 Commission report, page 34
4. Ibid
5. Matthew Goldstein, When Bad Scams Go Good, The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2001
6. NASD Regulation, Inc. Office of Dispute Resolution, Arbitration No. 9644952
7. Westlaw citation WL 31426028, United States District Court, S.D. New York, No. 00 CR 91-11 RWS, Oct. 28, 2002
8. United States District Court, E.D. New York, 103 F.Supp.2d 579, Downes v. O’Connell, 103 F.Supp.2d 579 (2000)
9. Lynn Spencer, Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11, Free Press, 2008, page 2
10. 9/11 Commission memorandum for the record, Interview with Benedict Sliney, May 21, 2004
11. Notes from interview of ATSC officers, T8 B18 HQ FAA 1 of 3 Fdr- Air Traffic Services Cell (ATSC) Events Summary 074, access at 911DocumentArchive, Scribd, http://tinyurl.com/d6s68bf 
12. Matthew Everett, The Repeatedly Delayed Responses of the Pentagon Command Center on 9/11, Shoestring 9/11 Blog, November 7, 2010
13. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Twelfth Public Hearing, June 17, 2004
14. 9/11 Commission memorandum for the record, Interview with Benedict Sliney, May 21, 2004
15. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Secret History Of 9/11: United flight 93
16. The 9/11 Commission report, page 113
17. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Rowan & Littlefield, 2010, p 115
18. Harvey M. Sapolsky, Benjamin H. Friedman, Brendan Rittenhouse Green, US military innovation since the Cold War: creation without destruction, Taylor & Francis Publishers, 2009
19. History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline, Profile for William S. Cohen
20. Kevin R. Ryan, Gofer and Trout: Questions on Two Flights Out of Andrews AFB on 9/11, DigWithin.net, December 4, 2011
21. 9/11 Commission Memorandum for the Record (MFR) on John Hawley interview, October 8, 2003
22. Transcript of 9/11 Commission public hearing of May 23, 2003, 9/11 Commission Archive
23. Andrew R. Thomas, Aviation Security Management: Volume 1, Greenwood Publishing Group, page 78
24. Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, FAA Culture of Bureaucracy Stymies Security Reform Efforts, Critics Say, Los Angeles
25. Catherine Rampell, Ex-employee says FAA warned before 9/11, USA Today, November 24, 2006
26. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Public Hearing, May 23, 2003
27. Interview of Michael Canavan, 9/11 Commission Public Hearing, May 23, 2003
28. See “Lee Longmire 4/30/04 Background See Team 7 Interview”, accessed at the 911Archive at Scribed.
    See also the 9/11 Commission Memorandum for the Record: Interview with Lee Longmire, Prepared by Bill Johnstone, dated October 28, 2003. 
29. 9/11 Commission Memorandum for the Record (MFR) on John Hawley interview, October 8, 2003
30. 9/11 Commission Report, footnote 36 to Chapter 10
31. White House press briefing by Leon Panetta, January 10, 1996
32. Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, Thomas Dunne Books, 1995, pp 309-310
33. John T. Carney, Benjamin F. Schemmer, No Room for Error: The Story Behind the USAF Special Tactics Unit, Presido Press, 2002, p 232
34. Graeme C. S. Steven, Rohan Gunaratna, Counterterrorism: a reference handbook, ABC-CLIO, 2004, p 230
35. Abbas Al Lawati, ‘You can’t authorise murder’: Hersh, Gulf News, May 12, 2009
36. Blake Hounshell, Seymour Hersh unleashed, Foreign Policy, January 18, 2011
37. Matthew Phelan, Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh And The Men Who Want Him Committed, WhoWhatWhy.com, Feb 23, 2011
38. Summary of 9/11 Commission interview with John Flaherty, Chief of Staff for Secretary of Transportation, Norman Mineta, April 2004
39. Spartacus Educational webpage for Richard Armitage
40. CNN Politics, Armitage admits leaking Plame’s identity, September 08, 2006
41. Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two – Security, 911Review.com, August 22, 2009