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Twenty-four hours later, on the Friday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz seemed to confirm it. “We responded awfully quickly, I might say, on Tuesday,” he said in a nationally broadcast interview, “and in fact we were already tracking in on that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I think it was the heroism of the passengers on board that brought it down, but the Air Force was in a position to do so if we had had to … it’s the President’s decision on whether to take an action as fateful as that.”

The same day, though, another senior officer flatly contradicted Wolfowitz. Major General Paul Weaver, commander of the Air National Guard, gave reporters a detailed timeline of the military’s reaction. According to him, no airplanes had been scrambled to chase Flight 93. “There was no notification for us to launch airplanes … We weren’t even close.”

What, moreover, asked Weaver, could a fighter pilot have done had he intercepted one of the hijacked airliners? “You’re not going to get an American pilot shooting down an American airliner. We don’t have permission to do that.” The only person who could grant such permission was the President, the general pointed out, leaving the impression that Bush had not done so.

By week’s end, however, that notion was turned on its head. Vice President Cheney, speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, said that George W. Bush had indeed made the “toughest decision”—to shoot down a civilian airliner if necessary. Fighter pilots, he asserted, had been authorized to “take out” any plane that failed to obey instructions to move away from Washington.

In spite of denials by General Myers and others, there were people who thought United 93 might in fact have been shot down. Bush himself had asked Cheney, “Did we shoot it down, or did it crash?” “It’s my understanding,” Cheney had told Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, that “they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.” Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who was with the Vice President at the White House, recalled thinking, “Oh, my God, did we shoot it down?”

At one base, a crewman saw a fighter returning without missiles, surmised that it had shot down Flight 93—then learned that the plane had never been loaded with missiles in the first place. One F-16 pilot who flew that day heard that the aircraft had been downed—only to be told that the report was incorrect. Rumors would still be circulating years later.

In the absence of good evidence to the contrary, though, few now credit the notion that any pilot shot down an airliner filled with helpless civilians on September 11. No pilot would have fired without authorization, could not have done so without fellow officers, radio operators, and others being aware of it. There was no way such an action could have been kept secret.

Shoot-down aside, the statements by the military and political leadership raised a host of questions. Had fighters really gone up in time to intercept any of the hijacked planes? If they did get up in time, what had they been expected to do? Could they—would they—have shot a plane down? If pilots were cleared to shoot, was the order given in the way the Vice President described? If so, when did he issue the order and when did it reach military commanders?

Getting clear answers to these questions at first seemed a manageable task. Why would it not be, given that the military, the FAA, and the White House all kept logs and records and taped hours of phone and radio exchanges? The law establishing the Commission “required” those involved to produce all records on request. In the event, though, investigators were thwarted by delayed responses, irritating conditions, and actual obstruction.

The FAA said it had produced all relevant material, only for Commission staff to discover that was not true. It had failed to provide a large number of tapes and transcripts. What the Department of Defense and NORAD—North American Aerospace Defense Command—provided was, in the words of one Commission staff member,