What’s more, the decades-old procedure for a quick response by the nation’s air defense had been changed in June of 2001. Now, instead of NORAD’s military commanders being able to issue the command to launch fighter jets, approval had to be sought from the civilian Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. This change is extremely significant, because Mr. Rumsfeld claims to have been "out of the loop" nearly the entire morning of 9/11. He isn’t on the record as having given any orders that morning. In fact, he didn’t even go to the White House situation room; he had to walk to the window of his office in the Pentagon to see that the country’s military headquarters was in flames.

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For literally years, I've been questioning why NORAD behaved completely contrary to what everyone who'd been associated with it for the previous 50 years would have expected in a situation like this. Yes, the media reported NORAD never trained for this scenario, but others tell me NORAD trains for UFO landings (and was not attempting to be making a joke). That they train for every conceivable situation. But what was the other explanation, then?

The explanation is that Rumsfeld changed the procedures so that fighter launches went through him. And ONLY HIM. Meaning that when Cheney tried to relay Bush's orders to get fighters in the air (btw: I don't easily buy the 'technical problems' stuff - it really sounds like Cheney simply tried to take over the chain of command with Bush's highly misguided blessing), they were either not believed, or blatantly disobeyed because they did not come from either the President, or Rumsfeld himself.