US: As a US Air Force fighter plane was sent over the burning Pentagon on September 11th, 2001, the pilot had no idea what he was supposed to do, and thought the defence HQ had been hit by a cruise missile from Russia. "I thought the bastards had sneaked one past us," he testified later.
Hundreds of miles away, President Bush, after being told America was under attack, stayed a further five to seven minutes listening to children read to him in a school before leaving, telling the commission later he wanted to project "strength and calm".
The two incidents, related at the final day of hearings of the independent commission into the 9/11 attacks, served to illustrate its conclusion that the US was totally unprepared for the use of hijacked planes as missiles, and that confusion and mixed signals meant that chances to shoot down the planes were lost.
The confusion was so great that at one point Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly thought US warplanes shot down two aircraft. Mr Cheney, after getting the go-ahead from Mr Bush, ordered the shooting down of hijacked planes, but the order was never passed to pilots until after the last of four hijacked planes had crashed.
The North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) told the commission it could have shot down one plane, but the commission report concluded: "We are not so sure."
Officials of NORAD and the Federal Aviation Administration were "unprepared in every respect" for such attacks, the commission stated in a staff report read out at the hearing in Washington, attended by relatives of the nearly 3,000 people killed.
The level of communications between the military and the FAA was found to be "abysmal".
At the hearing, chilling tape recordings from the hijacked planes and control towers were heard for the first time.
In a transmission from the cockpit of American Airlines flight 11, the first plane to smash into the World Trade Centre, lead hijacker Mohamed Atta was heard telling passengers: "We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be okay. We are returning to the airport."
Thirteen minutes were lost as the controllers tried to reach the military, the hearing heard. The commission will issue a report by July 26th.