Sept. 11 Panel Delays Next Hearing

The Sept. 11 commission’s next hearing is being delayed a week because of scheduling problems with some witnesses, the panel’s spokesman said Tuesday.

The hearing here on “national crisis management” had been planned for June 8-9 but now will be held the following week. The dates have not been determined.

“We have some issues with some of our people, but it’s not a major item,” said spokesman Al Felzenberg, declining to comment further.

The hearing is expected to delve into how quickly the Federal Aviation Administration notified U.S. air defenses about hijacked planes on the day of the 2001 attacks. Officials of the FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, are slated to testify.

Details of the Sept. 11 plot also will be examined, with testimony from intelligence and law enforcement officials.

Victims’ relatives and critics long have charged that if military jets had been scrambled sooner after the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m., they might have kept American Airlines Flight 77 from crashing into the Pentagon more than 50 minutes later, killing 184 people.

At the commission’s hearing on aviation safety last May, Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, a retired NORAD commander, acknowledged under questioning that the jets could have intercepted Flight 77 if they had been sent sooner.

Felzenberg said the June hearing will focus on tracing the timeline of the FAA’s notification, as well as when President Bush delivered the order to NORAD to shoot down any hijacked planes.

Meanwhile, the 10-member panel has begun working on drafts of its final report, which is due July 26, and it expects to start handing over portions to the White House in the next week or so for declassification.

The report, expected to be 500 to 700 pages, will be posted on the Internet once the White House has completed its review and will be released in book form by W.W. Norton & Co.