NORAD had drills of jets as weapons 2 years before 9/11

As recorded on the Whitehouse press release,

Quote:

I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. ... Andy Card, my Chief of Staff, who is sitting over here, walked in and said, "A second plane has hit the tower, America is under attack."

Now, it's a well known fact that the first airplane hitting the world trade center was not shown live on television, so this story clearly cannot be true as told. Many people choose to think of this a another example of GWB lying, but I'd like to be a bit more generous...

We all know that human memory plays tricks with us; that we don't always remember as clearly as we would think. What we seem to do is to recreate a narrative of the past events from significant fragments that we do retain; thinking back and 'remembering' the past is a mixture of recalling and retelling.

So, I won't call Bush a liar on this one. It's easy enough to imagine, for instance, that he heard about the first plane hitting the tower while he was waiting to go in, and then later saw the images on the TV, and those two memories have merged together to become the story that he told.

What fascinates me, though, about the story as Bush tells it, is that he tells it as if it were reasonable; as if, in this sequence of events, he behaved in a way consistent with his position as president. Whereas in fact, it would have shown a terrible dereliction of duty.

The President of the United States sees an aircraft - a passenger jet - crash into the side of a major building in the financial heart of the United States. Even if he assumes pilot error, an accident, as Bush says he did (assuming in the confusion he forget everything he knew about flying, about air traffic control, as he would have had to to come to this conclusion), what would a President do next? Go on into a classroom of kids and read to them?

Even as an accident, the first plane hitting the world trade center was a national emergency. There were clearly hundreds, probably thousands, dead; the markets were about to open in panic; the city could be descending into chaos; critical decisions would be needed, many of which would have national and international impact. Important though early reading lessons are, did the President of the United States really not think he might need to go and take control?

As I say, this narrative clearly isn't what really happened. But the fact remains that if we credit George W Bush with telling the story as he remembers it, then what he remembers is that he ignored the first major emergency of his tenure, and that he thinks that is an ok way for the President to act.