While planning a high-level training exercise months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. military officials considered a scenario in which a hijacked foreign commercial airliner flew into the Pentagon, defense officials said yesterday.
But the scenario was rejected as not in keeping with the theme of the April 2001 exercise, which dealt with how command of U.S. forces would be maintained in the event the Pentagon became unusable during a major war, the officials said.
The episode came to light in a 21/2-year-old e-mail message that surfaced yesterday. The message, written a week after airliners commandeered by terrorists were flown into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, begins, "In defense of my last unit, NORAD." NORAD is the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is responsible for defending U.S. skies.
Addressed to several friends of the author, a retired Army officer, the brief message said the hijacking scenario had been suggested by a NORAD planner and rejected by "Joint Staff action officers" as "too unrealistic." It also said that U.S. Pacific Command had objected to the idea "because it would take attention away from their exercise objectives."
The contents of the message were first reported by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group here. A member of the group, Peter Stockton, said a military official had provided a copy of the e-mail "to show at least that someone was paying attention" to the threat of an air assault on the Pentagon.
Defense officials confirmed that a NORAD planner had suggested the airliner scenario for the exercise, which was known as Positive Force. But they said the idea was deemed not to fit with the exercise's general purpose.
"It wasn't a counterterrorism exercise or an air defense exercise," said Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman.
