Tony Blair says UK nearly shot down passenger jet after 9/11

Protocols drawn up in the wake of the World Trade Centre attack gave Blair the authority to blow the plane up, he has revealed Tony Blair has revealed how he came close to ordering a passenger jet over UK airspace to be shot down “some time after” 9/11 because it was not responding to air traffic control. He said fighter jets had been prepared to take off after the plane “appeared to be deviating for the path it was in” and new protocols drawn up in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre gave him the authority to blow the plane up. “We were really not very far away from having to take a final decision as to whether to bring the plane down, because we had the provision to do that,” he said. Asked how close he came to giving the order to shoot it down. “It came quite close. It was a situation where I ended up talking directly to the officer who was in charge of the operation and trying to work out whether the plane in question was for some reason a mishap which obviously was the overwhelming likelihood, but what if it wasn’t?” he said in an interview with Jon Sopel on BBC World News. “It was an extremely frightening moment.” He said that fighter jets had been “prepared en route to take off” in readiness to intercept the jet, which was later found not to be a threat. Blair did not specify when the threat occurred, but said it was some time “later” in his premiership. Asked by Sopel whether he would have given the order to take it down, he said he probably would have not. “I don’t know. I think we had already passed the first threshold of when I was supposed to take the decision, and I was pushing it back as much as I could for obvious reasons, and I think probably in the end I would have taken the risk that indeed it was – as it turned out to be – that they had just lost touch with air traffic control because of the consequences of shooting it down and finding that it was [not a terrorist threat]. “There was at a later time when we then had to put in place a whole lot of protocols, frameworks for action in circumstances where you lost contact with a plane or a plane was not in proper contact with air traffic control,” he said. In the same interview, Blair says he believes the battle against terrorism will be “a generation-long struggle”. But he says the world has learned a lot in the 10 years since 9/11. “We have learned a lot about how to deal with the terrorist threat, we have also learned a lot about nation-building.” He said the Arab spring was a good thing and the most important country in the region was Egypt. Tony Blair September 11 2001 United States Global terrorism Lisa O’Carroll guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 10, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.