TAPES UNDERMINE PENTAGON STORY OF 9/11 ACTIONS

PHILIP SHENON, NY TIMES - Newly disclosed tapes offer evidence of the
widespread confusion within the military as the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks were being carried out, further undermining claims by
the Pentagon that it moved quickly to try to intercept and shoot down
one or more of the hijacked jets. . . The full collection of nearly 30
hours of tapes from the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or
NORAD, were released by the Pentagon last year to Michael Bronner, a
producer on the recent film "United 93," who described them in detail in
an article posted this week on the Web site of Vanity Fair . . . 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.

Although much of the conversation in the tapes is heavy with military
jargon, it makes clear the terror of the morning, with military air
controllers trying to monitor the whereabouts of hijacked planes bearing
down on lower Manhattan and Washington.

"I got an aircraft six miles east of the White House!" one military
commander is quoted as barking to a colleague. . .

Members of the commission said the tapes demonstrated that the
Pentagon's initial account of its actions on Sept. 11 was wrong and that
some military officers might have intentionally provided false
statements to the commission.

The officers had testified that NORAD had been tracking Flight 93, the
plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field after a cockpit struggle
between passengers and the hijackers, and were prepared to shoot it down
if it approached Washington. But the tapes show that the military was
not even alerted to the hijacking of the United flight until four
minutes after it had crashed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/us/03norad.html?ex=1312257600&en=
bf6fbe79b7d31f38&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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9/11 FIREFIGHTERS' LUNGS AGED 12 YEARS THANKS TO 400 CHEMICALS AT SITE

LIZ SZABO, USA TODAY - Working amid the rubble of the World Trade Center
may have aged the lungs of firefighters and rescue workers by an average
of 12 years, a new study shows. "It's pretty shocking," says John
Balmes, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San
Francisco who reviewed the research, published today in the American
Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, but was not involved
in writing it. . . Air pollution at Ground Zero included more than 400
chemicals, according to the study.

http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/UsatodaycomHealth-TopStories/
~3/7869160/2006-07-31-wtc-lung-loss_x.htm