Air Force officials would initially fail to realize that a real-world crisis was taking place, which they needed to respond to immediately?

The tactics used to prevent these officials from responding quickly could have been part of an effort to ensure key individuals from various military and government agencies, who might have organized a successful response to the attacks, were "out of the loop"--unavailable or unable to respond--when the attacks took place.

The evidence currently available is limited and inconclusive. But the behavior of the Air Force's leaders when the 9/11 attacks began certainly deserves further scrutiny.

AIR FORCE LEADERS WERE BEING BRIEFED ABOUT TERRORISM

At the time the World Trade Center towers were hit, around 40 senior Air Force officers were together in a room in the basement of the Pentagon,attending a staff meeting chaired by General John Jumper. This was Jumper's first staff meeting since he took over as Air Force chief of staff five days earlier. [4]

The regular meeting, known as the "Ready Brief," was where the highest levels of the military would be updated on worldwide issues. [5] The briefing on September 11, as was always the case on the second Tuesday of each month, was about "black world activities"--things that would not usually be in the news. That day, it happened to be on the subject of anti- and counterterrorism. It included descriptions of terrorist incidents, and the faces of terrorists were being shown on the presentation screen. (Whether Osama bin Laden--the man who supposedly ordered the 9/11 attacks--was among the terrorists depicted is