The 9/11 Commission report was released at 11:30am EST today. It is 585 pages in length and contains some shocking revelations at the overall unprepared state of the FAA and the military to address the situation. I will not comment at length because I don’t believe that I have more than a common knowledge about 9/11.

You can download the report here

So far, here are some of the more shocking paragraphs that I have found:

At 9:36, the FAA’s Boston Center called NEADS and relayed the discovery about an unidentified aircraft closing in on Washington:�Latest report. Aircraft VFR [visual flight rules] six miles southeast of the White House. . . . Six, southwest. Six, southwest of the White House, deviating away.� This startling news prompted the mission crew commander at NEADS to take immediate control of the airspace to clear a flight path for the Langley fighters:�Okay,we�re going to turn it . . . crank it up. . . . Run them to the White House.� He then discovered, to his surprise, that the Langley fighters were not headed north toward the Baltimore area as instructed,but east over the ocean.�I don�t care how many windows you break,� he said.�Damn it. . . . Okay. Push them back.�

…

The time of notification of the crash of United 93 was 10:15.174 The NEADS air defenders never located the flight or followed it on their radar scopes.The flight had already crashed by the time they learned it was hijacked… As it turned out, the NEADS air defenders had nine minutes� notice on the first hijacked plane, no advance notice on the second, no advance notice on the third, and no advance notice on the fourth.

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More than the actual events, inaccurate government accounts of those events made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond to two of the hijackings, raising questions about the adequacy of the response.Those accounts had the effect of deflecting questions about the military�s capacity to obtain timely and accurate information from its own sources. In addition, they overstated the FAA�s ability to provide the military with timely and useful information that morning.