Funny how you bring up this old thread, since just this past month the NORAD tapes were finally released and they confirmed that the Pentagon lied to the 9/11 Commission just as I had suggested 3 years ago in this thread.
9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon
Allegations Brought to Inspectors General
Panel mulled probe into Pentagon’s ‘lies’ on 9/11
9/11 panel felt deceived
Tapes prompt 9/11 military response probe
But as usual, the press fails to ask important questions like:
1. Who was responsible for scheduling multiple war games and terror exercises involving aircraft for Sept 11th?
2. Who moved "Global Guardian" normally scheduled for October to September?
3. Who designed the war games to involve hijackings?
4. Who planned and scheduled the movement of Airforce aircraft north to Canada, Alaska and Greenland?
5. Who planned the terror exercise at the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) involving an evacuation in response to threat from the air?
6. Who was "hands-on" responsible for coordinating all the war games the morning of September 11th?
7. Who would have been responsible for turning off the war games to enable a timely real world response to the attacks?
8. How were as many as 21 false radar blips or possible targets inserted into NORAD radar screens?
9. Who was responsible for the identification of ghost flight 11 which allegedly continued to fly south past Manhattan and which may have caused NORAD's Langley intercept jets to vector North toward NYC rather than D.C.?
BTW, now that the proper information has finally been released, you were correct in that there was obviously no order to "stand down". Their original timeline was impossible unless their was a stand down order. I had assumed their timeline was correct. But now the tapes prove that they lied, and their timeline was false. What is now clear is that a situation was created to confuse the hell out of NORAD by:
1) scheduling several war games "exercises" all for the same morning, including a couple that included hijackings
2) diverting most of the available fighters on the east cost up to Canada, Alaska and Greenland to take part in these exercises, thus leaving only 4 fighters to protect the entire east coast.
3) falure to stop the war games even after it was realized that the 9/11 attacks were real, causing "phantom" planes to appear all over NORAD's radar screens.
When presented with a conspiracy theory, the question is always asked "how could so many people be involved and keep their mouths shut?". Well, the answer is to run the operation much like an intelligence operation, which is that nobody knows much at all. In this case, nobody at NORAD had to be complicit except perhaps one or two people in charge. Everyone else was simply put in a situation where they were doomed to fail.