Yeah, just no.

From: http://www.history.com/topics/9-11-timeline and the above linked Wikipedia article,

"8:40 am – The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alerts North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) about the suspected hijacking of Flight 11. In response, NEADS scrambles two fighter planes located at Cape Cod’s Otis Air National Guard Base to locate and tail Flight 11; they are not yet in the air when Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower [at 8:46, the second plane hits at 9:03]."

The first report of Flight 11 being hijacked seems to be at 8:19am, given a lag of 21 minutes before the hijacking was reported to NORAD, and thus giving the F15's coming from Cape Cod to intercept and (possibly/probably shoot down?) the planes in 6 and 17 minutes respectively. And because planes don't magically leap into the sky, The F15's were not in the air until 8:53 (at which point Flight 11 had crashed 7 minutes previously, and it was just 10 minutes until Flight 175 hits the tower).

So yes, I don't believe there is any _reasonable_ proof that NORAD "dropped the ball".

If you really feel (like the OG author) that NORAD deserves some blame, great. But considering all the institutional failures of our intelligence services that occurred before the hijackers ever stepped foot on the planes, it's strange/weird/stupid/asinine/missing the point/whatever to blame NORAD for 9/11 (at any meaningful scale).

"Damn you NORAD for not having fighters capable of Mach 10 in the air knowing those planes were going to be hijacked at that specific day and already having a plan in place that gave a single fighter pilot the ability to shoot down a US flagged civilian airliner with the knowledge aforethought to know those airliners would be used as physical weapons rather than the traditional hostage taking that had occurred in the past!"

There's plenty of blame to go around.

But NORAD is responsible for aerial defense of the US. The fact that they didn't have fighters available was their responsibility, and I'd note that they have changed deployment so that that won't happen again.

I'd argue they didn't drop the ball on 9/11 - they dropped it years earlier when those deployment plans were agreed.

Do you also blame every police officer for failing to stop every murder, due to the police not being at the exact right place at the exact right time, knowing exactly what is about to happen, who is going to be the murderer, who is going to be the murdered, and the technique/weapon that is used to commit the crime? Because based on your reasoning, you should.

Edited to add:

The reason this argument bothers me so is that I'm not some great big fanboy of NORAD. But rather because the actual reasoning that goes behind blaming NORAD seems rather poor and includes a lack of understanding in regards to how we know things. If we then use hindsight to judge, we must be careful about the knowledge we have now, and our past and present assumptions. Sometimes these judgeents can make sense, sometime they don't. This is one of those cases.

9/11 was such a vastly different event in the history of the US, it seems quite unfair to blame NORAD for not predicting how things turned out. An argument that blames NORAD (imo) seems to blame NORAD because they were not omniscience and omnipotent.

We're looking back at a historical event where we have an incredible amount of information about exactly what happened. How could we assume that NORAD would have planes flying to cover NYC and Washington DC, two very important cities in the US. Do we also know exactly what their targets in those two large cities are going to be? That's a rather ridiculous argument.

This is especially true, because almost no one had used Airliners as guided missiles before. (And the reason that Flight 93 is so special, it shows that once the passengers were made aware of how the plane was no longer a traditional hijacking, they may have forced the terrorists to crash the plane without greater casualties.)

How do you stop these events? Let's assume that we know the hijackers were going to target those two cities, (and those 3 buildings) but couldn't the hijackers have targeted two other cities that didn't have air cover (and again, the fighters had de facto permission to shoot down hijacked civilian airliners). Do we give air cover to every minor city in the entire US? Do we put SAM sites in every US downtown? Let's just militarize the entire US, it wouldn't be the first time we had "Fortress America."

We can't always look back at an event knowing what we know now and judge it based on our knowledge at this moment versus knowledge at that moment. (This could quickly descend into a philosophical argument about knowledge, epistemology, etc., but I'm not going there.) But I will say that when analyzing things such as this, we have to be careful about our own assumptions and how we have learned the things we know, and then apply those to a historical event.

And that's all I'll say about that.

I don't blame NORAD for not predicting 9/11. I blame them for not having planes close enough to be useful.

There's a difference. NORAD assumed they would always get early warning of an attack, and there weren't even enough operational fighters to do anything about it. Both of those things were bad assumptions.

Again, my point was not to assign blame, because I don't know anything about the events. I was just pointing out that your inital comment contains a non sequitur:

> You can certainly make the argument that the FBI, CIA, and NSA ...dropped the ball on 9/11, but NORAD did not. NORAD's primary goal has never been to stop terrorism/hijacking from occurring on passenger planes within the United States, but rather to warn of enemy planes and missiles from _entering_ the US.

If you wanted to excuse NORAD, you should have appealed to the FAA's actions, not their "primary mission".

Once again, just no.

> I mean, I guess you could argue that's not their "primary mission", but then I don't think that is in conflict with the OP's assertion that they "dropped the ball".

Part of what you quoted does seem to be in conflict with the article's assertion that NORAD dropped the ball:

"The 9/11 Commission determined that on the morning of September 11, the FAA deliberately did not adequately notify NORAD of the hijackings of Flights 11, 77, 93, or 175 in time for escort aircraft to reach the hijacked flights."

So, if anything, that means the FAA dropped the ball, not NORAD.

I'm well aware of that. See my reply to sgnelson.