On 9/11 some Americans remembered "Russian threat"

The pilot of the US Air Force fighter plane which was taken off on the alarm on 9/11, said that he had decided that “the threat was coming from Russia”.
This is the information from the official statement of the members of the commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and the work of the US special services and the government.

According to the statement, after the first information on the terrorist attacks in the morning of 9/11, the alarm was given for the two F-16 fighter planes which were taken off from Langley air base in Virginia and started patrolling the sky over Washington, DC. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) was giving orders to the fighter planes.

"The pilots from Langley received no information for which reasons they were given alarm”, the statement says.

According to the commission, the leading pilot said, “I remembered Russian threat… I was expecting cruise missile from the direction of the sea… There were no aircrafts, and nobody told us anything”.

According to the commission, “in the morning of 9/11 there was no high-ranking person who possessed the exact information, in Washington, DC”.

The lack of information and coordination resulted in the White House’s order given by the military to shoot down the aircrafts posing a threat.

According to the record of the phone conversation between US Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Minister Donald Ramsfeld, the Vice President believed that the fighter planes managed to shoot down “a couple of aircrafts” hijacked by terrorists, but the Defense Minister replied that the military had no information of this kind, RIA-Novosti reported.

In addition, the Defense Minister was not aware of the order to shoot down “suspicious” aircrafts given by the White House.
Richard Cheney “misunderstood” that the pilots patrolling the sky over Washington, DC had the permission for shooting down “hostile” aircrafts, while in fact US military “was very much at a loss about the substance and the outcome of the order”, says the document.

According to the commission, the US military command did not give this order to the “pilots of the aircrafts wandering around the skies over New York and Washington, DC”.

According to the commission, in the morning of 9/11 there was no regular channel of communication between US President George Bush who was in Florida, and Vice President Cheney who was in Washington, DC, they just exchanged a series of phone calls.

According to the commission, initially the terrorists were going to hijack 10 aircrafts, not 4 as they did. They planned to attack the CIA and FBI headquarters in addition to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House.

According to the testimony of the man who had developed the plans of the terrorist attacks Halid Sheikh Mohammed (who was arrested in Afghanistan in 2003), Osama bin Laden quit this idea, and rejected another one – to hijack 12 planes in South-Eastern Asia, as he considered coordinating attacks on the two continents to be a too complicated thing.

Planning the terrorist attacks of 9/11 took 5 years as Halid shared his idea of attacking the WTC in 1996, NEWSru.com reported. The preparations for the attacks started in 199, and their date was postponed many times. The pilots failed to get ready by the middle of 2000, were not ready in May, 2001 (the were plans to hijack the planes on May 12, 7 months after the explosion on the board of US destroyer ship Cole in Yemen took place.

The terrorist attacks cost $400,000 – 500,000, in addition, some funds were spent on training the future terrorists in Afghanistan. In the USA the 19 hijackers spent about $270,000, mainly on training in piloting schools, trips, renting apartments and transportation.