Pacific Command - which has oversight over U.S. Dan Hetlage, another spokesman for the Defense Department, told Reuters that the U.S. It was not designed for counterterrorism or air defense, they said. “We believe the 9/11 Commission should ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff why they prevented NORAD from training to respond to the possibility that terrorists might hijack commercial airliners and use them as missiles,” Stockton added in a posting on the organization’s Web site.ĭefense officials countered that the main exercise, a major annual look at command and control, was not designed to protect the sprawling Defense Department headquarters on the banks of the Potomac River in a Virginia suburb of Washington from airliners used as missiles. The Pentagon incident, reported Wednesday in The Washington Post and The New York Times, came to light after a 2½-year-old e-mail message was made public on Tuesday by the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, a nonprofit watchdog group. 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York using hijacked airliners and whether the government could have done more to prevent the strikes that killed about 3,000 people. But the focus of the exercise was command continuity, and it was decided that there was enough already built in,” said Larry Di Rita, a spokesman for the Defense Department.ĭi Rita spoke as an independent commission continued its hearings into the Sept. “They needed a scenario under which the Pentagon became inoperable.
Defense officials said that several scenarios under which military command had to be moved from the Pentagon were rejected and that the suggestion involving a possible foreign commercial airliner strike not only appeared unrealistic but could have taken over the whole exercise.
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