The official story about Eberhart contains the following elements, discussed in the order they appeared in the summary above:

• Eberhart said that he first tried to contact Gen. Shelton, finding that he was on the way to Europe. However, given that Shelton’s trip had been planned for some time, the claim that Eberhart did not know when his immediate superior (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) would be absent is not credible.
• Eberhart said that he called General Myers while the latter was on Capitol Hill – which, as shown in the 9/11 Consensus Point about Myers, [17] was false.
• Although Eberhart reported that the hijacked airliners, having used the hijack code, were talking to the ground, the failure of all eight pilots to squawk the hijack code is one of the main problems with the official account. [18]
• Although Eberhart justified driving to the Operations Center by saying that things had “quieted down,” two hijacked airliners were still in the air (which his statements about several hijack codes implies that he believed).
• If he had a good reason to get to the Operations Center, he could have taken the quick helicopter trip (rather than wasting 45 minutes or longer driving the distance). [19]
• Although Eberhart claimed that he was unable to communicate by cell phone during the trip, he at 9:49 AM (7:49 Mountain) reportedly ordered – during an air threat conference call – interceptor pilots to get to their battle stations. [20]
• Although “battle stations” sounds like an effective action, it actually means that pilots wait in their jets with the engines off, so they were not ready to scramble immediately. [21]
• Eberhart’s claim that he could not implement SCATANA immediately, without making a bad situation worse, is not credible, given that SCATANA was a procedure set up for emergencies, and the modified SCATANA would have surely been already worked out, especially given the fact that NORAD was doing exercises at the time, including a plane crashing into a Manhattan skyscraper. Also the NORAD officers who were urging Eberhart to order SCATANA evidently saw no problem with doing so.

Accordingly, the official account about Eberhart contains inaccuracies, extraordinary claims, and actions and omissions through which the interception of the hijacked airliners would have been delayed.

There were additional irregularities regarding Eberhart’s actions, omissions, and statements:

• It is standard operating procedure for NORAD to intercept a flight if it has lost radio contact, turned off its transponder, and gone off course. This was true of all four 9/11 flights and yet NORAD, under Eberhart, did not intercept any of them. [22]
• As to why NORAD failed to intercept, it gave out a timeline in 2001, claiming NORAD knew about the hijackings and tried to intercept the airliners but could never get there in time. [23] NORAD told this story from 2001 until 2004. But then, in The 9/11 Commission Report, it gave a completely different account, according to which (1) the FAA failed to alert NORAD about American 11 until it was too late for jets to reach it and (2) the FAA failed to tell NORAD about all three of the other flights until after they had crashed. [24]
• Regarding American 77 (which reportedly hit the Pentagon), Eberhart and the 9/11 Commission said that “NEADS never received notice that American 77 was hijacked.” [25] But if that were true, why did Eberhart, about six weeks after the attacks, tell the U.S. Senate that NORAD had scrambled jets at 9:24 AM after being notified that hijacked American 77 was coming towards Washington, adding that this was a “documented notification”? [26] Did the 2004 timeline mean that Eberhart’s 2001 statement to the Senate was a lie? Or did it mean that the FAA was lying when it emphatically said that it had shared “real-time information” with NORAD and the Pentagon about “all the flights of interest, including Flight 77.” [27]
• As to why the new story may have emerged: The 9/11 research community had shown that NORAD’s first timeline did not excuse NORAD, because there would have been time to intercept the airliners before the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit. In June 2004, while the 9/11 Commission Report was being prepared, Eberhart said that this view was correct – that if NEADS had been told about the flights when the FAA claimed, his people would have been able to “shoot down all three of them — all four aircraft.” [28]
• When Eberhart was interviewed by the 9/11 Commission in March 2004, he said he had “no knowledge of the circumstance [sic] that initiated the scramble” [29] of fighter jets at 9:24 AM from Langley. Having learned that NEADS had scrambled those fighters in response to a false report – that American 11, which had hit WTC 1, was still airborne and heading toward Washington DC – Eberhart said that he had learned about this false report only “recently.” [30] It seems incredible that the head of NORAD would have been ignorant about which fighters had been scrambled until two and a half years following the attacks.
• Eberhart had the responsibility of setting the alert levels of the INFOCON, which defends against attacks on the Pentagon’s communications networks. Just 12 hours before the attacks, INFOCON was reduced to its least protective level and then not raised until after the second WTC attack. [31]
• Eberhart was also in charge of many of NORAD’s military exercises (“war games”) that occurred on 9/11, such as Vigilant Guardian, which had a scenario in which terrorists hijacked an airliner with the aim of attacking New York City. The exercise was conducted “sim over live,” meaning the simulated hijackings were to be inserted into the live air traffic control system. As a result, NEADS personnel for some time were uncertain whether the radar tracks were real or simulated.
  According to Eberhart’s own testimony, he realized after the second WTC attack, hence shortly after 9:00 AM, that a “coordinated terrorist attack” was underway. Eberhart was the person with the primary responsibility to protect Canada and the US from attack, and yet he allowed the war games to continue until after 10:00 AM.
  Moreover, radar personnel at Cheyenne asked NEADS to “get rid of this goddamn sim.” According to a 9/11 Commission interview with Canadian Lt. Gen. Rick Findley, who was NORAD’s Battle Staff Director at Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center on the morning of September 11, there was, following the second attack, “confusion as to how many, and which aircraft, were hijacked.” [32] Nevertheless, the sim remained until after the time of the Pentagon attack (at 9:37 AM). When asked about the impact of the military exercises by the 9/11 Commission, Eberhart falsely claimed that they had “at most cost us 30 seconds.” [33]
• Researcher and reporter Michael Kane of Global Free Press, who was on the scene at a 9/11 Commission Hearing, reported: “After General Eberhart’s sworn testimony, I asked him who was in charge of coordinating the multiple war games running on 9/11. He replied: ‘No Comment.’” [34] However, Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins from the North East Air Defense Sector (NEADS) told the Commission, “Exercises that are designed on the NORAD level are created at planning conferences. NORAD planning exercises are mostly held at Peterson,” which is where General Eberhart was in charge. [35]