WASHINGTON — The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is expected to offer sharp criticism of the Pentagon's domestic air-defense command in its final report and will suggest that quicker military action might have prevented a hijacked jet from crashing into the Pentagon itself, according to commission officials.
The failure of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, will be a focus of the remaining public hearings of the 10-member commission.
Commission officials said interim reports expected to be released at the hearings would suggest that Norad had time on Sept. 11 to launch jet fighters that could have intercepted American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., more than 50 minutes after the first hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center. A total of 184 people died in the Pentagon attack.
The commission is trying to establish a detailed timeline of how and when Norad pilots were informed on Sept. 11 that President George W. Bush had given the extraordinary order allowing them to shoot down passenger planes.
Norad officers have said they did not learn of the order until about 10:10 a.m., a few minutes after the last of the four hijacked jets crashed in Pennsylvania. But White House officials have suggested that the order was made earlier in the morning.
The commission has repeatedly complained that Norad, a joint U.S.-Canadian military command created at the height of the Cold War in 1958 to defend North American air space from Soviet attack, has been uncooperative in the investigation.
Senior military commanders have said Norad may have been slow to act on Sept. 11 because of the command's traditional focus on threats from outside the United States, not on a terrorist strike within U.S. borders.
Their argument was undermined this month by the disclosure that in April 2001, Norad considered an exercise in which military commanders would weigh how to respond to an attack in which hijackers flew a plane into the Pentagon.
Commission officials said they want to know why it was not until 44 minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center that Norad launched fighters in the Washington area.
By the time three F-16s were airborne from Langley Air Force Base, about 105 miles from Washington, American Airlines Flight 77 was only seven minutes from plunging into the Pentagon.