9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:41 am

PART 2 OF 3 (CH. 5 CONT'D.)

WERE THE ACCUSED HIJACKERS PHYSICALLY CAPABLE OF PILOTING THE PLANES?

The best opinions on whether or not the official story of hijackers piloting the airliners in to buildings might come from experienced commercial airline pilots. There are few available opinions on this matter, as is understandable. The hegemony of the 9/11 myth has been very great among the population in general, and airline pilots as a group have special problems. Most of them are retired military officers, and they often move in circles where people with military backgrounds are common. If they are employed, they have to worry about their jobs. If they are retired, they may see no reason to get involved in a controversy that promises no gain, but only needless trouble for them personally. Nevertheless, there is enough evidence to substantiate the doubt that the four inept persons named in the official version would have been able to operate the aircraft in the way the observed phenomena indicate.

Flying a large modern commercial airliner is not especially demanding as long as the plane is taking advantage of its built-in guidance systems and computerized automatic pilot, which depend in turn on radio beacons, navigation aids, Global Positioning Satellites, and the like. As long as the plane sticks to its pre-arranged flight path, the pilot acts more like a superintendent than a driver. But the enterprise attributed to the hijackers changes all this. The hijackers are supposed to have abruptly wrenched the airliners out of the influence of all navigation aids, beacons, and positioning systems, and flown them by the seat of their pants to hit three demanding targets under conditions of conflict and stress inside the planes, and with the constant fear that fighter aircraft would soon pull up alongside, demanding to be followed. The issue is the transition from instrument flight techniques to visual flight rules and techniques in a context where all the usual instrument aids would have been in operative. Apart from the operation of the controls, there is also the question of how the hijackers could have navigated. On a fine clear day like September 11, 2001, it might be possible to follow certain natural features from one point to another, using landmarks for additional guidance. For the planes coming from Boston, one obvious expedient would have been to fly west, find the Hudson River, and then turn left towards New York City. But this is not what is shown on the maps offered by newspapers at the time. Instead of orienting towards natural features and landmarks, the planes fly strange detours, ignoring rivers and related navigation reference points. Real hijackers would have been concerned with reaching their targets as fast as possible, before they were overtaken by air defenses. But the 9/11 aircraft think nothing of deviating 50 miles in the wrong direction. All of this makes the official story implausible.

The 9/11 commission provided its own maps of the flight routes flown by the hijacked planes. Here there are pervasive anomalies that should have attracted the commission's curiosity, but did not. The hijackers did not choose the most direct routes to their targets, but flew long and dangerous detours. Real hijackers would have known that the greatest danger to their project was interception of their hijacked planes by us military aircraft. They could not have tolerated even the most minimal deviations from the direct path towards their goal. Another obvious course for American 11 would have been southwest across Rhode Island and Connecticut to the shore of Long Island Sound and thence down the East River to hit the North Tower. This would also have simplified navigation because of the constant orientation provided by the Connecticut coast, the Sound, and the north shore of Long Island. Instead, when it left its prescribed course, American 11 turned northwest, and came close to clipping the southwest corner of Vermont. It went well north of Albany before carrying out a 270 degree turn to then head approximately south, more or less following the Hudson River to New York City.

For United 175, the same course over Rhode Island, Connecticut, along Long Island Sound, and down the East River would have been the most direct and the most practical for amateur pilots of light planes. But according to the 9/11 commission's own map, this plane supposedly flew across southern New York state, across northern New Jersey, and entered Pennsylvania before finally turning back onto a northeasterly course towards the WTC south tower.

The case of American 77 is even more difficult to discuss, because of the numerous anomalies it offers. But, according to the 9/11 commission's own map, this plane is alleged to have flown all the way out to the meeting point of southern Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia before allegedly turning back towards Washington DC. The 9/11 commission map suppresses a five-minute jug- handle detour by this flight over the West Virginia panhandle along the way, which had attracted much curiosity and suspicion when it appeared in USA Today and other papers.

Finally, United 93, which took off last, went all the way across Pennsylvania, entered northern Ohio, and was west of Cleveland when it finally turned back towards the east.

Real hijackers could never have indulged in these interminable detours. For the success of their crimes, time was of the essence, and they would have had to choose far more direct routes in the case of each and everyone of the 9/11 aircraft. This pattern raises the level of suspicion about the coherence of the official version, and suggests that reality was not what the 9/11 commission and its predecessors claimed it was.

MUBARAK'S CRITIQUE

In a CNN interview on September 15, 2001, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak commented about the 9/1l events. His testimony is of interest because he spent his military career as a fighter pilot in the Egyptian Air Force. Mubarak was also one of the world leaders who had tried to warn the US government about what was coming in the summer of 2001. Mubarak said first of all that he found the US government's official version, which was then taking shape, technically implausible. Mubarak: "Not any intelligence in the world could have the capability in the world to say they are going to use commercial planes with passengers on board to crash the towers, to crash the Pentagon, those who did that should have flown in the area for a long time, for example. The Pentagon is not very high, a pilot could come straight to the Pentagon like this to hit, he should have flown a lot in this area to know the obstacles which could meet him when he is flying very low with a big commercial plane to hit the Pentagon in a special place. Somebody has studied this very well, someone has flown in this area very much." Sensing a challenge to the orthodoxy of the official version, the CNN reporter countered: "Are you suggesting it was an inside operation? I may ask, who do you think was behind this?" Mubarak: "Frankly speaking, I don't want to jump to conclusions...something like this done in the United States is not an easy thing for pilots who had been training in Florida, so many pilots go and train just to fly and have a license, that means you are capable to do such terrorist action? I am speaking as a former pilot, I know that very well, I flew very heavy planes, I flew fighters, I know that very well, this is not an easy thing, so I think we should not jump to conclusions for now." (Meyssan 2002 26) One senses that Mubarak is restraining his skepticism for diplomatic reasons; he does not believe the official story, and he has good reasons for not doing so. ( http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/557/intrvw.htm )

NIKKI LAUDA: ACTUAL FLIGHT EXPERIENCE ON BOEINGS WAS REQUIRED

On the day after 9/11, two experienced German airline pilots, both veterans of many hours at the controls of Boeing 757s and 767s, agreed in the course of a September 12 prime time television broadcast that neither a real professional flight simulator and even less flight simulation software on a PC could ever suffice to impart the skills demonstrated by the supposed 9/11 suicide pilots. They were asked by host Guenter Jauch whether the hijackers could have flown the planes.

Captain Joerg Kujak's evaluation: "No. It's not that simple," whatever many laymen might think. "That wouldn't work. An amateur is not capable of steering a large commercial airliner anywhere with accuracy, neither with the automatic pilot, nor, with his hands on the controls. He would need training for that, and that does not necessarily have to last three years, the way normal pilot training in a flight school goes, but it has to go on for a certain amount of time. He needs basic training in the specific type of plane or on a jet in general, and through that he has to learn how to fly manually. With a PC you don't get the same feeling, for example for the trim tabs, for the steering yoke, for the change of situations. If you put your foot on the gas, then a jet rears up, because it has its engines under the wings, and that would be too much for an amateur, that can't be done without training."

Nikki Lauda, a legendary Formula One race driver, was a pilot and the founder of his own airline. He was asked by Jauch: "Is it easy to learn, we've seen that a video was found in a car near the Boston airport, and people think that the car belonged to a kidnapper, who had used it to bone up in advance on what the inside of a cockpit looks like. Is it so simple, for example, to learn that with the help of a computer simulator?"

Laud a judged that "these gentlemen were properly trained to fly a plane like that." In particular, he stressed that "you have to know exactly what the turning radius of a plane like that is, if I am trying to hit the World Trade Center. That means, these had to be fully trained 767 or 757 pilots, because otherwise they would have missed. It certainly could not be the case that some half-trained pilot tries it somehow, because then he will not hit it. That's not so easy, coming out of a curve ... If he's coming out of a curve, then he has to know precisely the turning radius that derives from the speed of the plane in order to be able to calculate it, so that he will hit right there."

Jauch asked which was harder to hit, the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Lauda: "Well, what impressed me is the organization of this whole operation, since without good weather it would have not been possible at all, because then you can't see anything. These were visual flights, using VFR [visual flight rules] as we call them. And so the World Trade Center is relatively easy to find, because it is stands out so tall ... The Pentagon is another matter again, because it is a building that is relatively flat. That means, they had to be trained well enough that they had flown around in the air in the New York area, I would speculate, so they could see the scene from above of where the building is located and how you could best reach it." To hit a flat building like the Pentagon is "an even more difficult case" than the World Trade Center. Lauda: "That means, to fly downwards out of a curve, and still hit the building, in its core, I would have to be the best trained of all. I would speculate that a normal airline pilot would have a hard time with that, because you are simply not prepared for things like that. That means, they must have had some super-training to have been able to handle an airliner so precisely."

Could this have been done with the best, most expensive professional flight simulator, asked Jauch. For Lauda, the flight simulator was only a prerequisite. "I don't think a simulator by itself would be enough to know all the New York landscapes, and to know exactly what angle to use to fly in there. I believe that these people had actually flown these airliners; they could have been pilots from some airline or the other, just to get this feeling for the plane -- in real flight, not on a simulator -- so they could then carry out this act of terror." (Wisnewski 38-40) Of course, not even the FBI has ever ascribed such thorough training to the accused suicide pilots; practice on a 757 or 767 was not available at Huffman Aviation.

THE GRANDPRE SEMINAR

In the days after 9/11, a private group of US military and civilian pilots held a seminar to evaluate this crucial feature of the official story -could the hijackers have flown the planes with the requisite accuracy? After 72 hours of deliberation and discussion, they issued a press release summarizing their findings: "The so-called terrorist attack was in fact a superbly executed military operation carried out against the USA, requiring the utmost professional military skill in command, communications and control. It was flawless in timing, in the choice of selected aircraft to be used as guided missiles and in the coordinated delivery of those missiles to their pre-selected targets." The seminar report expressed grave doubt as to whether the alleged hijackers, supposedly trained on Cessna light aircraft, could have located a target dead-on 200 miles or more from their takeoff point. The participants also called into question the ability of the hijackers to operate within the intricacies of the instrument flight rules (IFR) during the interval between their takeover of the planes and the moment of impact. One of the organizers of the seminar, retired Colonel Donn Grandpre, said that it would be impossible for novices to have taken control of the four aircraft and orchestrated such a complicated operation, which obviously had as a prerequisite military precision of the highest order. The seminar concluded that it was likely that the hijackers were not the ones in control of the aircraft. One participant in the seminar was a US Air Force officer who flew over 100 sorties during the Vietnam war. This experienced combat pilot concluded that "Those birds either had a crack fighter pilot in the left seat, or they were being maneuvered by remote control."

Another spokesman for the group was identified as Captain Kent Hill (USAF retired), who was reportedly a friend of Chic Burlingame, the pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Hill recalled that the US had already carried out multiple flights of an unmanned aircraft, similar in size to a Boeing 737, between Edwards Air Force base in California across the Pacific to South Australia. Hill said this plane had flown on a pre- programmed flight path under the supervision of a pilot in an outside station.

Other expert witnesses at the inquiry were of the opinion that airliners could be controlled by electro-magnetic pulse or radio frequency instrumentation from command and control platforms based either in the air or at ground level. Captain Hill maintained that the four airliners must have been choreographed by an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). This system can engage several aircraft simultaneously by knocking out their on-board flight controls.

According to press accounts, the pilot seminar also pointed to the inherent problems of the official account. In this, they drew on their own experience and the likely reactions of pilots like themselves. "All members of the inquiry team agreed that even if guns were held to their heads, none of them would fly a plane into a building. Their reaction would be to ditch the plane into a river or a field, thereby safeguarding the lives of those on the ground. A further question raised by the inquiry was why none of the pilots concerned had alerted ground control. It stated that all pilots are trained to punch a four-digit code into the flight control's transponder to warn ground control crews of a hijacking -- but this did not happen." The veteran pilots were also surprised by what had not happened. They noted that the pilots and crews of the hijacked aircraft had not taken any evasive action to resist the supposed hijackers. They had not attempted any sudden changes in flight path or nose-dive procedures -- which led them to believe that they had no control over their aircraft.

A reporter from the Portugal News, the largest English language publication in that country, sought an independent evaluation of these findings from Captain Colin McHattie of Algarve, Portugal. McHattie, a pilot with 20 years' experience, was then currently working for Cathay Pacific. He agreed with the independent commission's findings. He added that, while it is possible to fly a plane from the ground, the installation of the necessary equipment is a time-consuming process, and needs extensive planning. The pilots' seminar sent a copy of their findings to the White House, but there was no response. (Portugal News, August 3, 2002)

HYPOTHESIS: GLOBAL HAWK

The insuperable problems posed by the notion that the four misfits and patsies of the official version actually flew the planes can, however, be satisfactorily explained with the help of a hypothesis involving the application of a technology which is known to exist. This is Global Hawk, a guidance system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the Pentagon. Global Hawk is a robot plane, the modern form of remote control, which has been a familiar concept for decades -- at the very least since the 1950s, when Nike missiles and Skysweeper radar-controlled antiaircraft guns used remote control drones for testing. Global Hawk is a somewhat more advanced and sophisticated version of the guidance system of the Predator drone, which has been used to attack supposed targets (and a wedding party) in Afghanistan. Predators were available during the later years of the Clinton administration.

Global Hawk became widely know as a result of its first transpacific flight, which took place in April 2001. The new weapons system was touted by the media in glowing terms:

The Global Hawk, a jet-powered aircraft with a wingspan equivalent to a Boeing 737, flew from Edwards Air Force Base in California and landed late on Monday at the Royal Australian Air Force base at Edinburgh, in South Australia. The 8600 mile (13840 km) flight, at an altitude of almost 12.5 miles (20 km), took 22 hours and set a world record for the furthest a robotic aircraft has flown between two points. The Global Hawk flies along a pre-programmed flight path, but a pilot monitors the aircraft during its flight via a sensor suite which provides infra-red and visual images.


According to Rod Smith, who managed the Australian end of the Global Hawk project, "The aircraft essentially flies itself, right from take-off, right through to landing, and even taxiing off the runway." The robot plane version of Global Hawk reportedly could fly non-stop for 36 hours. "Emerging systems such as the Global Hawk offer Australia great potential for surveillance, reconnaissance and ultimately the delivery of combat power," crowed Brendan Nelson, parliamentary secretary to the Australian defence minister. (ITN Entertainment April 24, 2001)

The existence of this technology in a fully operational form raises the possibility that it might have been installed in commercial airliners, and further that it may have been such airliners under the control of a Global Hawk equivalent which crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon. This entire matter is covered with secrecy, but it is clear that it is technically quite feasible that commercial jets were equipped with remote control systems capable of piloting them to landings (or to crashes) under the pretext of an anti-terrorism measure. The rationale would have been that, if terrorist had taken over the plane, authorities on the ground would have been able to frustrate the terrorists by seizing control of the hijacked airliners and flying them to safety. However, for such a system to be effective, it would have to include the ability of ground controllers to deny the personnel occupying the cockpit -the terrorists and the pilots under their control-any ability to steer the plane. To be effective, Global Hawk would presuppose that activating it would simultaneously deactivate the cockpit controls, making them useless. Otherwise, the hijackers might find ways to override the commands to the servomechanisms, flight surfaces and avionics being issued through Global Hawk from the ground. Total control of the plane, in other words, would have to be on the ground.

The advantages of such a system against classical hijack scenarios are clear. If the hijackers tell the pilot, "Fly to Cuba," and threaten to kill him if he does not do so, the plane can be landed in Miami no matter what the hijackers do or do not do, all thanks to Global Hawk. But what happens if the Global Hawk ground control center falls into the hands of a group of moles bent on insurrection and subversion, and determined to use aircraft as missiles in support of their attempt to re-order world affairs along the lines of the clash of civilizations doctrine? Here we can see that Global Hawk has an enormous potential for abuse. There is every reason to believe that the events of 9/1l were rendered possible, not by superhuman piloting skills on the part of the patsies, but by competent professionals using Global Hawk and operating out of a ground control center or an airborne command center such as AWACS.

There would be nothing new about any of this. Modern aircraft are equipped with a "Flight Control System" or FCS, which is integrated with sophisticated avionics capable of automatically landing the aircraft in zero visibility conditions. Even the takeoff and landing of large jets in largely automated, and the role of the pilots is more and more that of standing by for the unlikely eventuality that the guidance systems fail. To produce events of the type seen on 9/11, it would only be necessary for the computer access codes of an aircraft equipped with Global Hawk to fall into the hands of moles and professional experts with treasonous designs.

As aeronautical engineer Joe Vialls has pointed out, the main prerequisite for the use of Global Hawk in the manner suggested would be the installation of a back door on a plane's computer system so as to allow an interface with the Global Hawk command post located elsewhere. Vialls says that DARPA has indeed provided these back doors on certain aircraft. These aircraft came to be equipped with "a primary control channel for use in taking over the flight control system and flying the aircraft back to an airfield of choice, and secondly a covert audio channel for monitoring flight deck conversations.

Once the primary channel were activated, all aircraft functions came under direct ground control, permanently removing the hijackers and pilots from the control loop." Vialls is a former member of the Society of Licenced Aeronautical Engineers and Technologists, London.

The Global Hawk hypothesis also helps explain one of the singularities of 9/11, which is that none of the transponders in the hijacked planes ever broadcast the coded message telling ground controllers that the planes had been hijacked. The transponder is a combined radio transmitter and radio receiver which sends out signals announcing each flight's airline name and flight number, and thus indicating the plane's position. This is a supplement to radar, and becomes more important than radar for flight controllers in busy aviation corridors. Vialls' hypothesis is that Global Hawk operated by taking over the transponder channel and monopolizing it for the purpose of controlling the plane. So no airliners signaled that they had been hijacked, because the transponder channel which could have sent this code had been usurped for purposes of remote control. Vialls regards the lack of such coded hijack warning signals as "the first hard proof that the target aircraft had been hijacked electronically from the ground, rather than by motley crews of Arabs toting penknives."

According to Vialls, the remote control "listening device on the flight deck utilizes the cockpit microphones that normally feed the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), one of two black boxes armored to withstand heavy impact and thereby later give investigators significant clues to why the aircraft crashed." But once the remote control protocol has been activated, the "CVRs are bypassed and voice transmissions are no longer recorded on the 30-minute endless loop recording tape." In this case, after 30 minutes the CVR, which is designed to record the last minutes before a crash, will end up totally blank. This would explain the fact that the CVRs from the Pentagon and Pittsburgh aircraft were both claimed by the FBI to have been blank. For Vialls, this would be an additional indication that remote control had been employed.

It is not known if other US commercial aircraft have been equipped with back doors and interfaces permitting remote control by means of a technology cognate with Global Hawk. Vialls tells the story of a European carrier, possibly Lufthansa, which removed the flight control computers which had come with its Boeings as original equipment, and replaced them with computers impervious to Global Hawk, but this has yet to be confirmed. He also speculates that up to 600 US aircraft may still be vulnerable to Global Hawk. ( http://www.Qratyeka.org/wtc/wot/home-run.htm )

After 9/11, a special aviation radio was found in a safe in the Millennium Hilton Hotel near the World Trade Center. The radio was a transceiver of the type used by pilots to communicate air- to-air and air-to-ground. The FBI detained Abdallah Higazy, the son of an Egyptian diplomat, who was staying in the room in which the safe with the transceiver was located. Higazy was released on January 17, 2002 when it was established that the transceiver belonged to another hotel guest who was a private pilot. Since this pilot was neither Egyptian nor Arab, he was automatically exempted from suspicion -another example of the racist incompetence of the FBI. This transceiver might have been a radio beacon or a positioning or homing device of some kind.

During the 1999 bombing of Serbia, the government there had accused NATO agents of placing radio beacons at key points in Belgrade to aid in the bombing campaign. (Associated Press, January 17, 2002)

THE SCENARIO FOR 9/11 ON FOX ENTERTAINMENT

As so frequently happens in the world of US intelligence, the concept for this operation was popularized before the fact in a scenario film. This drama was entitled "The Lone Gunmen," and was broadcast by the Fox Entertainment Network on March 4, 2001. The writers were John Shiban, Vince Gilligan, and Frank Spotnitz, the director Rob Bowman. The filming was done in New York City and Vancouver , Canada between March 20 and April 7, 2000. Among the stars were Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund, Bruce Harwood, and Zuleikha Robinson. This was the pilot for a series of thirteen episodes, after which Fox cancelled the series.

In this film, the good guys board Atlantic National Flight 265 for its 6:50 PM takeoff from gate 34 at Boston's Logan Airport -- just like Atta and Shehhi in the official story. The good guys are fighting a governmental power named Overlord which they believe is going to try to destroy Atlantic National 265. The good guys think they are dealing with a bomb, so they bring along some mini hydrocarbon sniffers to locate the explosives. But Overlord is not using bombs this time: the airplane is seized by a mysterious remote control system against which the pilot is helpless; the controls do not respond. The plane seems headed towards New York City, and soon the twin towers of the World Trade Center loom ahead. Realizing what is happening, the good guys use their laptop to attempt to hack into the Overlord computer. At first it seems like it will take seven to ten days to defeat Overlord's defenses, but the good guys access the remote control system just in time with the help of the new Octium IV computer chip. They take back control of the airplane, which misses the World Trade Center towers by a hair. ( http:/www.tvtome.com/servlets/EpisodeGuideSummary/showid-38/ .)

DOPPELGANGER, PHANTOMS, AND APPARITIONS

In 1995, Ziad Jarrah rented an apartment in Brooklyn, and reportedly worked as a photographer. The signed and dated lease is convincing proof of the presence of this Ziad Jarrah in New York. But there was another Ziad Jarrah, who was 20 years old and living with his family in Beirut, Lebanon. This Jarrah left home in 1996, when he went to study in Germany, where he found an ethnic Turkish fiancee to whom he was engaged to be married; their engagement was cut short by 9/11. One Ziad Jarrah was questioned on January 30, 2001 at Dubai Airport at the request of the CIA on suspicion of involvement in terror activities. The other Ziad Jarrah, a student at Kruithofs Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, was visiting his family and sick father in Beirut. Jarrah was among the more convivial of the accused terrorists, and would go for beer~; with KruithoL It would appear that the fake (Brooklyn) Jarrah obtained a pilot's license in Hamburg before the real (Beirut) Jarrah got his in Florida. Jarrah clearly had a double -- or Doppelganger, from the German -- who resembled him to some extent. The presence of doubles is an infallible signal for the presence of an intelligence agency. ( http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/essa ... ssayjarrah )

During the month of August 2001, the San Diego trio of Al-Hamzi, Al Midhar and Hanjour went traveling. One or two of them were at various times reported as sighted in Falls Church, Virginia getting illegal drivers licenses. They were in Las Vegas, and then in Baltimore, followed by ten days in New Jersey. Sightings were then reported in southern Maryland. However, their neighbors at the Parkwood Apartments in San Diego said that Al Hazmi, Al Midhar, and Hanjour had all stayed put in San Diego until about September 1, or perhaps as late as September 8. The use of doubles is standard intelligence practice in synthetic terrorism. If there is something the terrorist controllers need a patsy to do, but which the patsy is unwilling or incapable of accomplishing, then a double will step in to see that the necessary action is indeed carried out. At times in 1963 there were two or perhaps even three Lee Harvey Oswalds.

"KSM"

In the spring of 2002, it was announced that a certain Khalid Sheikh Mohamed had been the "mastermind" of 9-11. When this same KSM was allegedly captured by the US, this event was hailed by Porter Goss as an event equal in world-historical importance to the liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 1944. From the very beginning, the overblown KSM story has been a magnet for world skepticism. When the US media showed a video tape of what was supposed to be the capture of KSM, Geraldo Rivera reported that "foreign journalists looking at it laughed and said this is baloney." (Fox News, Hannity and Colmes, March 10,2002) Gerhard Wisnewski has shown that the account of KSM presented by Nick Fielding and Yosri Fouda in their study Masterminds of Terror -- billed as the last word on KSM -- lacks all probative elements. (Wisnewski 203 ff) The US government has never produced KSM for a trial, so everything that is alleged about him is pure hearsay, and thus to be discounted. One of the glaring incongruities of the 9/11 commission report is the degree to which unsubstantiated allegations about al Qaeda operations are regarded as proven simply because they allegedly came from KSM, who ranks as one of the star witnesses of the final report.

THE LIVING DEAD

There is also the possibility that Nawaf AI Hazmi and Salem Al Hazmi are still alive. According to press accounts, accused hijackers Salem Al Hazmi was reported alive and well and working at a petrochemical plant in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia after 9/11. (Guardian, September 21, 2001) Of the others on the FBI's list, a Waleed al-Shehri turned out to be alive in Casablanca, Morocco, working as a pilot with Saudi Arabian Airlines. An Abdulaziz al-Omari was also reported alive, and complaining that he had lost his passport in Denver. A Saeed al-Ghamdi was also alive and working as a pilot in Saudi Arabia. Khalid al-Midhar was also reported alive. (Marr 17-18) Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal noted that "it was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened" after his meeting with Bush on September 20, 2001. The FBI, contemptuous as always of both the truth and world public opinion, has stubbornly refused to revise the list of accused hijackers.

BEHIND THE AIR DEFENSE DEBACLE: 9/11 MANEUVERS

On 9/11, US air defense collapsed. Before and after 9/11, US air defense functioned more or less normally. What happened on 9/11 to create this paralysis, and why was that date such an anomaly in comparison to the previous and subsequent operation of the Federal Aeronautics Administration/North American Aerospace Defense Command tandem? The heart of the coverup of these events performed by the 9/11 commission can be found in the section sub-headed "Clarifying the Record," on page 31. The 9/11 commission here concedes that "the defense of US airspace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with pre- existing training and protocols." (31) Why then were the well-established procedures suddenly abandoned, for that one day? On this crucial point the 9/11 commission's sense certainty empirical account is silent.

What the 9/11 commission should have done, but did not do, was to prepare an honest timeline and then compare that timeline to the notification times as they would have been had the standard procedures been followed, rather that mysteriously thrown out the window. They would have found that American 11 (North Tower) at 8:20 AM stopped transmitting its IFF beacon and veered sharply off course. It was thus at 8:20 that F AA should have notified NORAD, and NORAD should have scrambled interceptors. Instead, the F AA waited until 8:38, and NORAD pilots at Otis AFB on Cape Cod were not informed of the emergency until 8:40, were not ordered to take off until 8:46, and did not actually get into the air until 8:52. By this time American 11 had already hit the World Trade Center, at 8:46. The pilots flew slowly and did not arrive over New York in time to protect the WTC South Tower, which was hit at 9:03. At this time the Otis jets were still 71 miles away.

Similarly, the hijacking of United 175 was evident at 8:42, when the aircraft went off course and its transponder was turned off This time NORAD was told within a minute, by 8:43, but was unable to scramble any additional planes from bases in New Jersey, despite the fact that multiple hijackings were now evident.

The 9/11 commission also found that on that day US air defense "was improvised by civilians who had never handled a hijacked aircraft that attempted to disappear, and by a military unprepared for the transformation of commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction. " (31) This is dishonest in the extreme. The long-established defenses against traditional, classical, or normal hijacking would also have been effective against the suicide hijacking that the 9/11 commission claimed was involved this time. One suspects that Philip Zelikow, the controversial Executive Director of the 9/11 commission, is attempting to provide cover for his former business partner Condoleezza Rice, who had made that absurd remark on precisely this subject ("I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." [May 16, 2002]) As Miss Rice knew or should have known, these scenarios had been prominent since the mid-1990s, since the Atlanta Olympics, since the threatened attack on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, since the 2001 Genoa summit, and were routinely one of the main themes of military exercises on various levels.

Why was it necessary to improvise US air defense? Before and after 9/11, the air defense system was noted primarily for its stability and regularity in responding to any emergency. An emergency was defined objectively as a plane that went off course, a plane that did not respond to radio communication, a plane whose transponder went off: or a plane that refused to obey the instructions of an air traffic controller. If anyone of these conditions were fulfilled, an emergency had to be declared, and fighters had to be scrambled for intercept. Intercept did not mean shooting down any aircraft; intercept simply meant that fighters would join the aircraft in trouble, carry out visual observation, and signal the pilot to follow them to a landing place. Only if these attempts failed, would shooting down an aircraft become an option. And shooting down would have to be approved by the President. The great virtue of its system was its automatic functioning, which was recognized by all concerned. The criteria were all objective. If there were any doubt that an incident had to be treated as an emergency, it was automatically upgraded to an emergency. Nothing fell between the chairs as long as the guidelines were observed. Before and after 9/11, the FAA/NORAD link worked like a well-oiled machine. Sixty-seven cases of successful intercept were carried out by the FAA-NORAD combination between January 1 and September 10, 2001.

STANDARD PROCEDURES: PAYNE STEWART, 1999

On October 26, 1999, a Lear jet carrying the famous golfer Payne Stewart veered off course and traveled for 1500 miles cross the United States before crashing into a field near Mina, South Dakota. Stewart had intended to fly to Love Field in Dallas for a business meeting. Stewart took off from Orlando, Florida at 9: 19 in the morning. His plane apparently lost oxygen pressure, leading to the deaths of the passengers. The plane proceeded on automatic pilot. The air traffic controllers stopped getting responses to their radio contacts with Stewart's plane. Following established procedures, FAA air traffic controllers called NORAD to inform them that something had gone wrong with a plane in the air. As soon as it was clear that Stewart's plane was in distress, the US Air Force scrambled two F-15s from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, which intercepted the plane and followed it to Missouri. According to published accounts, fighter jets intercepted Stewart's jet in either 15 or 21 minutes after his plane first lost contact. An F-16 fighter aircraft came up behind it and did a visual inspection. The pilot said the windows of Stewart's plane were frosted over.

Two F-15s from Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida had been also sent to track the Lear jet, but they turned away when the Eglin planes got there first. After the Lear jet reached the Midwest, the two Eglin F-16s returned to base and four F-16s and a midair refueling tanker from the Tulsa National Guard followed it. Finally, four F-16s from Fargo, North Dakota moved in; they also helped to clear air space. According to the Air Force, additional F-16s were also scrambled from the Oklahoma Air National Guard unit in Tulsa, but were not used because the Fargo planes arrived first. Two additional F-16s on "strip alert" at Fargo, South Dakota, were armed, but never took off. This is a fair sample of the capabilities NORAD could normally deploy if it wanted to.

The Pentagon said it never came close to shooting down Stewart's plane in order to prevent a crash into a heavily populated area. Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon said, "Once it was determined it was apparently going to crash in a lightly populated area, we didn't have to deal with other options, so we didn't." The FAA routed air traffic around the Lear jet and prevented other planes from flying underneath it, in case it should suddenly lose altitude. (CNN, ABC, October 26, 1999) Andrews Air Force Base is 12 miles from the White House, and on 9/11 was the home of a fighter squadron of F-16s as well as a fighter squadron of FA-18s.

A change in the standard operating procedures was introduced on June 1, 2001; this inserted the Secretary of Defense into the bureaucratic chain. This marked a radical departure from procedures which had been in relatively successful operation for some 35 years. Now, the approval of the Secretary of Defense was required for the scrambling of aircraft. The authority to order the shooting down of an aircraft remained with the president. There may have been something more afoot here than simply adding another layer of bureaucracy. The authors of this change may have been seeking to introduce that element of disorder and uncertainty which might be necessary in order to allow the success of the upcoming operation. Who was responsible for this needless change? The 9/11 commission, as usual, is silent.

THE 9/11 COMMISSION'S FUDGED TIMELlNES

The 9/11 commission was also guilty of doctoring the time lines of the key events of the day. These timelines had been established and empirically validated by a number of researchers, including Mike Ruppert, Paul Thompson, and others. The timelines had been assembled by an exhaustive collation of media reports, and, apart from a detailed analysis which need not detain us here, they provided conclusive demonstration that NORAD had had ample time to scramble fighter jets to intercept America 77 (Pentagon) and United 93 (Shanksville). If the system had performed according to its own strict protocols, there would also have been a fighting chance to intercept American II (North Tower) and United 175 (South Tower). But the 9/11 commission, in a sweeping and breathtaking revision of everything that was known about the chronology of the day, writes: "As it turned out, the NEADS air defenders had nine minutes' notice on the first hijacked plane, no advance notice on the second, no advance notice on the third, and no advance notice on the fourth." (31) For the 9/11 commission, it would appear that the longer the crisis went on, the less the lead time available for NORAD. During the time between 8:55 and 9:41 the whole world knew ( or thought it knew) that American 77 was headed east towards Washington; when even the Washington news stations were warning that the capital was a likely target, NORAD was incapable of providing two planes over Washington DC to provide a minimal screen against the threatened decapitation of the federal government.

The 9/11 commission hypocritically pretended that it was setting the record straight: "More than the actual events, inaccurate government accounts of those events made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond to two of the hijackings, raising questions about the adequacy of the response. Those accounts had the effect of deflecting questions about the military's capacity to obtain timely and accurate information from its own sources. In addition, they overstated the FAA's ability to provide the military with timely and useful information that morning." (34) Underlying this obfuscation is a strategic decision by the 9/11 commission to scapegoat the F AA, while attempting to lead investigators away from NORAD track, which in reality is likely the more important one. The 9/11 commission cites the testimony of NORAD officers that NEADS had learned from the FAA of the hijacking of United 93 at 9: 16. The 9/11 commission report claimed that there had been no such notification, since United 93 had not yet been hijacked at that time. In the last sessions of the 9/11 commission, we had the absurd spectacle of NORAD officers thanking the commissioners for helping them to straighten out their own erroneous and fragmentary in-house chronologies. Perhaps NORAD had decided early in the game to spread the chaff of disinformation as a means of foiling the radar of any future inquiries. If so, it appeared to have worked.

One of the more obvious absurdities recounted by NORAD personnel during the 9/11 commission hearings was their fairy tale to the effect that NORAD radar was only able to look outwards from US coasts, and that their radar capability for tracking events in US airspace was zero. NORAD, they claimed, could look out, but could not look in. In the May 2003 hearings, we have this exchange:

Mr. Ben-Veniste: And so on the day of September 11th, as you can see these dots -- I know it may be difficult to see -- NORAD was positioned in a perimeter around the United States, but nothing in the central region, nothing on the border with Canada?

Gen. McKinley: That's correct, sir.


This is a crude subterfuge. The NORAD generals would have us believe, for example, that a Russian submarine-launched cruise missile, once it had penetrated the US coastline in New Jersey, would have nothing more to fear from NORAD and could proceed on its leisurely way to Detroit or St. Louis, without any risk of further interference? Or, would they have us believe that a Russian Bear bomber, having once gotten into Minnesota, could fly on unmolested to destroy Chicago, because NORAD could no longer detect it? These nonsensical arguments refute themselves. NORAD was known to possess phased array warning system radars (PAWS) of various types which provided a comprehensive overview of US airspace and beyond.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:42 am

PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 5 CONT'D.)

CHENEY'S TERRORISM TASK FORCE

In May of 2001, one week before the execution of Timothy McVeigh, Bush issued an Executive Order making Cheney the leader of a new terrorism task: force. According to Bush, Cheney's job was to consist in the development of "a coordinated national effort so that we may do the very best possible job of protecting our people from catastrophic harm," Bush said. The threat of chemical biological or nuclear attack on the U.S. "while not immediate -- is very real," Bush added. "Should our efforts to reduce the threat to our country from weapons of mass destruction be less than fully successful, prudence dictates that the United States be fully prepared to deal effectively with the consequences of such a weapon being used here on our soil."

The executive order gave Cheney authority over the anti-terror operations of 46 government agencies. Cheney said that his new task force would "figure out how we best respond to that kind of disaster of major proportions that in effect would be manmade or man-caused." Cheney said the threats under his purview would include "a hand-carried nuclear weapon, or biological or chemical agent." "The threat to the continental United States and our infrastructure is changing and evolving and we need to look at this whole area oftentimes referred to as homeland defense," said Cheney. Cheney also announced in an interview with CNN television that Bush was creating an office within the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate the government's response to any biological, chemical or nuclear attack. Cheney added that his task force would cooperate with FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh. Cheney's task force was supposed to report to the Congress and the National Security Council by October 1, 2001, according to press reports. (AP, CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg May 8, 2001)

Many observers have concluded that Cheney's supposed terrorism task force was nothing but a boondoggle, and that this group never did anything; references to a "do-nothing: anti-terror task force abound. But perhaps Cheney's task force was a good deal more sinister. Since Cheney is a candidate for witting participation in the rogue network in a way that Bush himself can hardly be, we must wonder about how Cheney may have deliberately abused his authority over the anti- terrorism capabilities of those 46 agencies. Did his sweeping authority extend to military maneuvers as well? If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then we must conclude that Cheney must bear a good deal of the responsibility for the total disarray of the US anti-terror posture on the morning of 9/11. Indeed, Cheney's task force appears to be the universal common denominator for that pattern of chaos and confusion.

COVERT USES OF MILITARY EXERCISES

In addition to being a day of terrorism, 9/11 was also a day of military and civilian maneuvers. These may turn out to have been more closely connected than many people might think. Let us recall a recent coup d'etat of US history, that of March 30, 1981. On that day John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Reagan. Scott Hinckley, the elder brother of the would-be assassin, was a personal friend of Neil Bush, the son of the Vice President who would have assumed the presidency if Reagan had died that day. George H. W. Bush presided over a cabinet meeting that same day which declared it to be the official policy of the US government that Hinckley was a lone assassin who had acted by himself, without any accomplices. But the question of the close relations between the Bush and Hinckley families has never been cleared up. (Tarpley 1992)

The aspect of the attempted assassination of Reagan which concerns us here is the fact that the shooting had occurred on the eve of two important maneuvers, one military and one civilian. As I described these events in my 1992 Unauthorized Biography of Bush the elder;

Back at the White House, the principal cabinet officers had assembled in the situation room and had been running a crisis management committee during the afternoon. Haig says he was at first adamant that a conspiracy, if discovered, should be ruthlessly exposed: "It was essential that we get the facts and publish them quickly. Rumor must not be allowed to breed on this tragedy. Remembering the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, I said to Woody Goldberg, 'No matter what the truth is about this shooting, the American people must know it.'" But the truth has never been established. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger's memoir of that afternoon reminds us of two highly relevant facts. The first is that a "NORAD [North American Air Defense Command] exercise with a simulated incoming missile attack had been planned for the next day." Weinberger agreed with General David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that this exercise should be cancelled. Weinberger also recalls that the group in the Situation Room was informed by James Baker that "there had been a FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Administration] exercise scheduled for the next day on presidential succession, with the general title 'Nine Lives.' By an immediate consensus, it was agreed that exercise should also be cancelled." (Tarpley 1992, Chapter -XVII -- The Attempted Coup D'Etat of March 30, 1981)


The FEMA exercise was much more than an uncanny coincidence -- that a presidential succession exercise was planned for the day after a real presidential succession was supposed to take place. It is very unlikely that Hinckley acted alone, and it is likely that whoever prodded him to act when he did could well have been aware of the upcoming presidential succession exercise. This suggests that we need to think about the ways in which military maneuvers which seem to be coincidental and routine events can prepare and promote other types of actions, including important terrorist attacks.

Military exercises come in two varieties -- there are the field exercises or live-fly exercises, war games in which real tanks or real planes move around in the fields or the sky. There are also staff exercises, which mainly involve officers assigned to the headquarters, who move markers in a sandbox, map grid, or computer screen.

The classic use of war games has been to prepare a sneak attack. The aggressor army announces that it is holding its summer maneuvers near the border of the target state. The deployment takes place under the cover of press releases announcing that these are merely maneuvers. When the troops are in position, they receive an order for a real attack. If field exercises can be used for fooling the adversary, then staff exercises are more useful for deceiving ones own side. In December 1975, in the wake of the US defeat in Vietnam, when the Pentagon was smarting from the reverse and looking for ways to redress the balance, there were certain circles in NATO who considered using the staff exercise HILEX 75 to set up a confrontation with the Warsaw Pact in Europe. Staff officers of countries who were not party to that plan were told not to be alarmed by the war preparations they saw; after all, those were only part of a staff exercise. Fortunately, due to the efforts of a network of alert citizens in a number of NATO countries, word got out about the really explosive potential of HILEX 75, and the confrontation option was abandoned. But these are at least two models of how maneuvers can be used for deception that we should keep in mind; there are more.

Staff exercises or command exercises are perfect for a rogue network which is forced to conduct its operations using the same communications and computer systems used by other officers who are not necessarily party to the illegal operation, coup or provocation as it may be. A putschist officer may be working at a console next to another officer who is not in on the coup, and who might indeed oppose it if he knew about it. The putschist's behavior is suspicious: what the hell is he doing? The loyal officer looks over and asks the putschist about it. The putschist cites a staff maneuver for which he is preparing. The loyal officer concludes that the putschist's activities are part of an officially sanctioned drill, and his suspicions are allayed. The putschist may even explain that participation in the staff exercise requires a special security clearance which the loyal officer does not have. The conversation ends, and the putschist can go on with his treasonous work.

Most civilians would assume that a military exercise or drill, be it a field or live fly exercise, or a staff drill, would tend to enhance the readiness of the military units taking part. This was the view expressed by 9/11 widow Mindy Kleinberg to 9/11 commission in March 2003, when she remarked that: "... on September 11, NEADS (of the North East Air Defense System of NORAD) was several days into a semiannual exercise known as 'Vigilant Guardian.' This meant that our North East Air Defense System was fully staffed. In short, key officers were manning the operation battle center, "fighter jets were cocked, loaded, and carrying extra gas on board."' (Testimony to 9/11 commission, March 31, 2003) But in reality the maneuvers may have introduced confusion and scattered available resources. The drills included false radar blips, military aircraft pretending to be hijacked, and the transfer of many NORAD fighters to northern Canada and Alaska.

AMALGAM VIRGO: COVER STORY FOR 9/11

The military exercise called Amalgam Virgo bore a close relationship to the events of 9/11. Amalgam Virgo was a military drill that had to do with hijacked airliners, sometimes from inside the United States, and sometimes used as weapons. A cruise missile was included at least once. The best working hypothesis is that Amalgam Virgo was the cover story under which the 9/11 attacks advanced through the bureaucracy. Preparations for carrying out 9/11 were conducted under the cover of being preparations for Amalgam Virgo. Most of those who took part in Amalgam Virgo could hardly have been aware of this duplicity.

One of the military officers who had been responsible for organizing Amalgam Virgo '01 was Colonel Alan Scott. Scott testified on May 23, 2003 at the 9/11 commission hearings:

... MR. ALAN SCOTT: Yes, sir. Specifically Operation Amalgam Virgo, which I was involved in before I retired, was a scenario using a Third World united -- not united -- uninhabited aerial vehicle launched off a rogue freighter in the Gulf of Mexico.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: That was Operation Amalgam Virgo. In fact, this exercise -- in this exercise we used actual drones -- NQM-107 drones, which are about the size of a cruise missile, to exercise our fighters and our radars in a Gulf of Mexico scenario. ...

MR. BEN-VENISTE: You are referring to Amalgam 01, are you not?

MR. SCOTT: Yes, sir, Amalgam 01.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: I am referring to Amalgam 02, which was in the planning stages prior to September 11th, 2001, sir. Is that correct?

MR. SCOTT: That was after I retired, and I was not involved in 02.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Will you accept that the exercise involved a simultaneous hijacking scenario?

MR. SCOTT: I was not involved in 02.

GEN. MCKINLEY: Sir, I do have some information on 02, if you would allow me to read it for the record.

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Please.

GEN. MCKINLEY: [Reads from briefing book.] Amalgam Virgo in general, 02, was an exercise created to focus on peacetime and contingency NORAD missions. One of the peacetime scenarios that is and has been a NORAD mission for years is support to other government departments. Within this mission falls hijackings. Creativity of the designer aside, prior motivations were based on political objectives -- i.e., asylum or release of captured prisoners or political figures. Threats of killing hostages or crashing were left to the script writers to invoke creativity and broaden the required response of the players.


What this means is that the scenario papers prepared for the officers participating in the drill by collaborating writers included crashing planes into targets; these papers were evidently an integral part of the drill. McKinley is explicitly acknowledging that the drills did indeed include the concept of hijacked aircraft being used as weapons. Ben-Veniste, feigning not to understand this, thought McKinley's answer was "fatuous," and added ironically "It wasn't in the minds of script writers when the Algerians had actually hijacked the plane, when they were attempting to fly into the Eiffel Tower .... Don't you agree we could have been better prepared?" But Amalgam Virgo was not fatuous, it was sinister. Here was an exercise which included many of the elements which were put into practice on 9/11. Amalgam Virgo thus provided the witting putschists with a perfect cover for conduiting the actual live fly components of 9/11 through a largely non-witting military bureaucracy. Under the cover of this confusion, the most palpably subversive actions could be made to appear in the harmless and even beneficial guise of a drill. In addition, a red herring was built in for the purpose of confusing investigators arriving after the fact: the hijacked planes involved were generally imagined as coming from abroad. But even that covering detail was dubious.

These exercises came up again in the April 2004 hearings of the 9/11 commission. In her much- touted appearance, NSC director Condoleezza Rice repeated her well-known and discredited contention that the White House had not contemplated hijacked airliners being used as weapons. Bush himself had chimed in, asserting that "Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale." As the hearings showed, during the two years before the 9/11attacks, NORAD conducted exercises using hijacked airliners as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. Another scenario involved crashing an airliner into the Pentagon, but this was not conducted after the Defense Department objected that it was too unrealistic. But it was done as a staff exercise -- one might say, as a rehearsal. Perhaps it was realistic, but too revealing. One drill, planned for July 2001 but not conducted until later, involved planes from airports in Utah and Washington which were hijacked for the purposes of the drill. These aircraft were then escorted by US and Canadian interceptors to airfields in British Columbia and Alaska.

A NORAD statement issued in April 2004 confirmed that "Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft. These exercises test and track detention and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures." According to NORAD, these were regional drills, not regularly scheduled continent-wide drills. (USA Today, April 18, 2004) Not surprisingly, there is absolutely no mention of Amalgam Virgo in the report of the 9/11 commission.

Mike Ruppert has contributed much to illuminating the causes of the "complete paralysis of fighter response on 9/11 ..." Ruppert wrote in June 2004 that he had "obtained an on-the-record statement from someone in NORAD, which confirmed that on the day of 9/11 the Joint Chiefs (Myers) and NORAD were conducting a joint, live-fly, hijack Field Training Exercise (FTX) which involved at least one (and almost certainly many more) aircraft under US control that was posing as a hijacked airliner." Ruppert also concluded that "There never was a stand down order issued. That would have been way too incriminating and risky a piece of evidence." (From the Wilderness, June 6, 2004)

The exercises that were conducted on 9/11 were these:

1. Vigilant Guardian

From what is known about Vigilant Guardian, it is clear that it closely mimicked the actual events of 9/11. Vigilant Guardian was thus the source of much confusion among the non-witting NORAD personnel. As we will see, NORAD personnel were bewildered as to whether the reports they were getting represented fictitious events within the exercise, or whether they were dealing with a real emergency. (Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 3, 2002) This was a joint US-Canada exercise, and was designed to test the coordination of the two defense establishments. According to GlobalSecurity.org: "The VIGILANT GUARDIAN (VG) is a VIGILANT OVERVIEW Command Post Exercise (CPX) conducted in conjunction with USCINCSTRAT -- sponsored GLOBAL GUARDIAN and USCINCSPACE -- sponsored APOLLO GUARDIAN exercises. The exercise involves all HQ NORAD levels of command and is designed to exercise most aspects of the NORAD mission. One VG is scheduled each year and the length will vary depending on the exercise scenario and objectives." ( http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... ardian.htm ) According to another source, "The planning for Vigilant Guardian Exercise-2001 probably began in 2000; and it was responding to a growing uneasiness of the US government and intelligence reports, world-wide -- including NORAD -- about plans for terrorist seizure of commercial air planes to be used as missiles against American targets." ( http://www.911teachin.net/L5A.html )

The 9/11 commission had this to say about Vigilant Guardian: "On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union." This is a very narrow definition of the drill in question, and is probably intended to mislead. The 9/11 commission continues: "We investigated whether military preparedness for the large-scale exercise compromised the military's response to the real-world terrorist attack on 9/11. According to General Eberhart, 'it took about 30 seconds to make the adjustment to the real-world situation.' (Ralph Eberhart testimony, June 17, 2004). We found that the response was, if anything, expedited by the increased number of staff at the sectors and at NORAD because of the scheduled exercise. See Robert Marr interview (Jan. 23, 2004)" (911 commission 458 n. 116) Eberhart's braggadocio was transparent, and the commission's verdict was a lie. Here is one example of the profound confusion engendered by the simultaneous occurrence of drill and real emergency:

FAA: Hi. Boston Center TMU [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.

NEADS: [Staff Sergeant Jeremy Powell, Air National Guard] Is this real-world or exercise?

FAA: No, this is not an exercise, not a test. (9/11 commission report 20)


Here is the same scene of confusion as described from the standpoint of another participant:

On Sept. 11, as Americans watched horror rain upon New York and Washington, command teams at a little-known military outpost in Rome, N.Y., worked feverishly to restore safe skies and rouse a slumbering homeland defense.

At the Northeast Air Defense Sector, radar operators who constantly scan the continent's boundaries suddenly faced a threat from within and a race they could not win.

Four months after the terrorist attacks, there are still untold stories. This is one.

6 A.M.: WAR GAMES

Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins figured it would be a long day.

Sept. 11 was Day II of "Vigilant Guardian," an exercise that would pose an imaginary crisis to North American Air Defense outposts nationwide. The simulation would run all week, and Deskins, starting her 12-hour shift in the Operations Center as the NORAD unit's airborne control and warning officer, might find herself on the spot.

Day I of the simulation had moved slowly. She hoped the exercise gathered steam. It made a long day go faster.

8:40 A.M.: REAL WORLD

In the Ops Center, three rows of radar scopes face a high wall of widescreen monitors. Supervisors pace behind technicians who peer at the instruments. Here it is always quiet, always dark, except for the green radar glow.

At 8:40, Deskins noticed senior technician Jeremy Powell waving his hand. Boston Center was on the line, he said. It had a hijacked airplane.

"It must be part of the exercise," Deskins thought.

At first, everybody did. Then Deskins saw the glowing direct phone line to the Federal Aviation Administration.

On the phone she heard the voice of a military liaison for the FAA's Boston Center.

"I have a hijacked aircraft," he told her.


Three minutes later, the drill was still a factor of confusion for Lt. Deskins in the form of a simulated hijacked plane heading for JFK Airport in New York City:

Deskins ran to a nearby office and phoned 1st Air Force Chief Public Affairs Officer Major Don Arias in Florida. She said NEADS had a hijacked plane no, not the simulation likely heading for JFK.

"The entire floor sensed something wrong," Chief of Operations Control Lt. Col. Ian Sanderson said. "The way this unfolded, everybody had a gut sense this wasn't right." ("Amid Crisis Simulation, 'We Were Suddenly No-Kidding Under Attack,"' Newhouse News Service, January 25, 2002)


It is not clear from this account whether the "simulation" in question was an artificial radar blip inserted on the NEADS screens, or an actual aircraft (piloted or remote controlled) going towards the New York airport.

2. Vigilant Warrior

This drill was identified by Richard Clarke in his recently published memoir. Here is what he writes:

"I turned to the Pentagon screen. 'JCS, JCS. I assume NORAD has scrambled fighters and AWACS. How many? Where?'

'Not a pretty picture, Dick. ' Dick Meyers, himself a fighter pilot, knew that the days when we had scores of fighters on strip alert had ended with the Cold War. 'We are in the middle of Vigilant Warrior, a NORAD exercise, but ... Otis has launched two birds toward New York. Langley is trying to get two up now. The AWACS are at Tinker and not on alert' Otis was an Air National Guard base on Cape Cod. Langley Air Force Base was outside Norfolk, Virginia. Tinker AFB, home to all of America's flying radar stations, was in Oklahoma."

'Okay, how long to CAP over DC?' Combat Air Patrol, CAP, was something we were used to placing over Iraq, not over our nation's capital.

'Fast as we can. Fifteen minutes?' Myers asked, looking at the generals and colonels around him. It was now 9:28." (Clarke 5)


3. Northern Vigilance

Operation Northern Vigilance involved deploying fighter interceptors to air bases in northern Canada and Alaska. It undoubtedly reduced the number of interceptors available to defend the lower 48. Northern Vigilance was supposedly mounted by NORAD to counter a Russian maneuver going on at the same time. It could have been planned in advance, provided the timing of the Russian drill had also been known in advance. It was announced publicly in a NORAD press release of September 9, 2001 under the headline "NORAD Maintains Northern Vigilance." Here we read:

CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN AFS, Colo. -- The North American Aerospace Defense Command shall deploy fighter aircraft as necessary to Forward Operating Locations (FOLS) in Alaska and Northern Canada to monitor a Russian air force exercise in the Russian arctic and North Pacific ocean. "NORAD is the eyes and ears of North America and it is our mission to ensure that our air sovereignty is maintained," said Lieutenant-General Ken Pennie, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of NORAD. "Although it is highly unlikely that Russian aircraft would purposely violate Canadian or American airspace, our mission of vigilance must be sustained." NORAD- allocated forces will remain in place until the end of the Russian exercise. NORAD conducted operation Northern Denial from December 1 to 14, 2000 in response to a similar, but smaller scale, Russian deployment of long-range bombers at northern Russian air bases. NORAD-allocated forces were deployed to three FOLS, two in Alaska and one in Canada. More than 350 American and Canadian military men and women were involved in the deployment.


The net effect of Northern Vigilance was drastically to reduce the number of fighter interceptors available at airports in the lower 48 states of the continental US. It is not known exactly how many planes moved north.

4. Northern Guardian

This drill is the least documented. It may have involved a complement to Northern Vigilance; one group of planes might have played the attackers, while another group played the defenders. A reference to this drill was found in the Toronto Star, December 9, 2001. At the very minimum, it appears to have been a northern Canada-Alaska-centered drill, which would have siphoned off planes from the lower 48 towards those areas.

5. National Reconnaissance Office Drill

This drill simulated an airplane crashing into the headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Chantilly, Virginia, near Dulles Airport. It meant that the employees of the NRO were evacuated from their buildings just as the 9/11 attacks were actually taking place. The AP ran a story about this drill under the headline "Top US Intelligence Agency was to simulate plane crash into government building on September 11, 2001." The story stated that "a US intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings." (AP, August 21, 2002)

The NRO was a supersecret agency responsible for spy satellites and other eavesdropping from space. It was created in 1960, and its existence was not officially acknowledged for some 32 years. The NRO draws its personnel from the military and the Central Intelligence Agency and has a budget equal to the combined budgets of both the CIA and the National Security Agency. On 11 September 2001, the NRO director was Keith R. Hall, who had headed the agency since 1996. In his capacity as DNRO, Hall was responsible for the acquisition and operation of all United States space-based reconnaissance and intelligence systems. At the same time Hall also served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space. As Nico Haupt has pointed out, Booz Allen Hamilton is a prominent subcontractor for the NRO. The obvious effect of evacuating the NRO was at least temporarily to blind institutional US intelligence to events which could have been monitored from space. NRO could have provided a real time view of the air space over North America; as a result of the evacuation, this may not have been available. The advantages for the perpetrators are obvious.

6. Tripod II

Tripod II was a biological warfare exercise conducted jointly by the US Department of Justice and the City of New York; it was scheduled for September 12, 2001, and formally speaking never took place. Its obvious relevance was to provide a cover for various pre- 9/11 activities in New York City.

It would seem that the code name "Tripod II" was revealed for the first time in testimony by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the 9/11 commission; however, the basic facts about this exercise had been described by Giuliani in his self-serving memoir, Leadership, published in 2002. Here the former Mayor wrote:

For months, we had in place an exercise in which we'd drill on our response to a biochemical attack, specifically practicing for the distribution of medication. The planned date: Wednesday, September 12. We had stored much of the materials for that drill at Pier 92. Pier 92 offered 125,000 square feet of open space and easy transportation to and from Ground Zero by way of boat and the West Side Highway. Moreover, because it was already in use by the military, the points of access were relatively easy to guard." (Giuliani 355)

After Giuliani's unusable command center in WTC 7 had been destroyed by the inexplicable collapse of that large building, he transferred his command post to Pier 92. The ease of the transition is suspicious in and of itself: had Giuliani known in advance that he would need this fallback option?

7. Finally, a number of jets from the Washington DC area were on an informal training flight over North Carolina on 9/11, a circumstance that took them away from the national capital airspace.

Vigilant Guardian in particular compels our attention because it appears to have been transformed from a staff or command post exercise to a live fly exercise. Specifically, VG had all the earmarks of an anti-terrorism live fly exercise. According to research by Mike Ruppert presented at the Toronto 9/11 Inquiry, Vigilant Guardian included the use of military aircraft to simulate hijacked commercial airliners.

In his book, Richard Clarke recalls being told by an official on the morning of 9/11, "we have reports of eleven aircraft off course or out of communication, maybe hijacked." Clarke said he repeated this number, "Eleven." (Clarke 4) This figure of eleven has come to be seen as the canonical maximum of the aircraft reported hijacked for whatever reason at the height of the emergency. Because of the post-Cold War defense build-down initiated by Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense under Bush 41, the air defenses of the US had been drastically denuded. Ruppert's best estimate is that, on 9/11, there were just 8 fighter jets at the ready in the northeast US. Since these jets generally fly in pairs, this meant that there were four pairs of aircraft ready to be scrambled to intercept four aircraft. Therefore, there were at least 11 possible targets as compared to a total of four defensive asset packages available to cover them. According to Ruppert, leaks of classified information suggest that the number of airliners reported or feared hijacked had at one point risen to 21. Some of the extra hijacks were represented by false blips made to appear on FAA and NORAD radar screens as part of the exercises that have been discussed. Other hijacks would have been accounted for by the actual military aircraft which were playing the roles of hijacked aircraft in the drills. Blips and dummy hijacks combined to create an insuperable confusion. This would have made the predicament of any loyal air defense commanders even more difficult.

Who in the Pentagon coordinates military maneuvers, be they of the command post or live fly variety? There must be some focal point where alternative dates are weighed, conflicts foreseen, and the need of maintaining a minimum distribution of assets so as not to compromise defense capabilities calculated. Whatever office in the bowels of the Pentagon does this, it is an urgent candidate for being swept for the presence of moles. However, even these insights do not by any means explain the failure to deploy fighter interceptors on 9/11. Any military commander would have realized that all available assets had to be scrambled, at the latest by the point at which the second WTC tower was hit. In particular, any military commander would have been alert to the imminent threat of the decapitation of the national command structure centered in Washington. All the commanders running the show had been schooled in the Cold War, when a Soviet submarine- launched ballistic missile detonating over Washington was regarded as the most plausible overture for the third world war. The eight lanes of superhighway leading from Washington DC to Dulles Airport are monuments to the all-encompassing concern of the US federal bureaucracy for its center in Washington. The autonomic reaction of the military establishment would normally have been to place at least one pair of jets over Washington, whatever else was done or not done. The fact that even this was not done until well after the Pentagon had been hit indicates a remarkable density of moles at high levels of the US command structures.

AL QAEDA MOLES OR US GOVERNMENT MOLES?

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the maneuvers enumerated above all took place on the same day. Some of the exercises were public knowledge, but some were not. If the actions of the hijackers (assuming there were hijackers) and the US military maneuvers were coordinated, what does this suggest? Did al Qaeda have a spy inside the US government, or was the US government directing or influencing the actions of al Qaeda? One who believes that al Qaeda had penetrated the US government in order to learn the day of the many simultaneous maneuvers is Barbara Honegger, the former Reagan Administration official and author of October Surprise, an account of Bush 41's secret negotiations with Iran during the 1980 election campaign. Ms. Honegger is currently with the US Naval Postgraduate School. She rightly calls attention to the salient fact that the terror attacks and the US government exercises took place on the same day. She argues for the

growing reasons to believe that the date for the attack was not 'chosen' by the hijackers at all, but that one of them learned that a counter-terror war-game/exercise simulating a scenario like the one that actually took place on 9-11 was planned for that morning, and then 'piggybacked' the 'real thing' on top of it.


But for Ms. Honegger, all of this does not point to the obvious reality that al Qaeda, notorious as the CIA's Arab Legion, was marching to the tune of a rogue network of rebel moles inside the US state apparatus. In order to avoid this evident conclusion, she reaches for a deus ex machina in the person of the myth-drenched Khalid Sheikh Mohamed. Not only does she mobilize KSM; she presents him as a wily triple agent who has successfully bamboozled the chief personalities of the US regime. After describing the question of the coordination of the terrorist attacks with the day of drills, Ms. Honegger writes that "... for all of this to 'work', the bad guys had to have at least one person among them who had fooled U.S. intelligence into believing that he was 'one of us.' That person, almost certainly, is Khalid Shaikh Muhammed -- the only person about whom all information is still classified, even his name, even though reams have already been written about him in the open press. And for good reason. Vice President Cheney, President Bush, CIA Director George Tenet, CIA officer and chief of NRO's strategic gaming division for their 9/11 'plane-into- building' exercise, John Fulton, and all the others who were so stupid as to risk thousands of innocent American lives on the bet that their star 'informant', Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, had really been 'turned' to the U.S. 'side' -- don't want him to talk about what he knows. And he knows a lot. On Sept. 10, 2002, Knight Ridder quoted a top U.N. counter-terror expert that Mohammad is probably the only person who has all the pieces to the 9/11 puzzle." At this point 9/11 the day of the drills becomes 9/11 the day of the dupes. In reality KSM, to the extent that he exists at all, does so as a patsy and operative of US intelligence. The orchestration of the terror attacks and the 9/11 drills was the handiwork of the rogue network inside the US government, and not a product of an Afghan cave or the teeming slums of Karachi.

In support of her thesis, Ms. Honegger also over-interprets the term "match" as used in the supposed communication between Atta and the phantomatic Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on September 10, 2001, but not translated until after the attacks. The text of this message was: "The Match is about to begin. Tomorrow [i.e., 9/11] is zero hour." (AP February 8, 2003) Ms. Honegger notes that Cheney was so incensed when this became public that he ordered an FBI investigation of members of the JICI to find out who might have leaked it. According to Ms. Honegger, "match' is "what you would expect if the speaker were referring to his discovery of the date that the U.S. Government had selected to conduct its counter-terror simulation/exercise on the scenario of plane(s) crashing into government buildings -- one that was about to turn very real when the terrorists 'piggybacked' their long-planned plot onto it." But this interpretation is strained. If the speaker was speaking English, he might have been speaking the British English which is still prevalent in the Middle East, and in British English "match" would simply mean "game." If the speaker was speaking Arabic, then we need to be aware of the multiple problems faced even by competent Arabic translators. So the philological and linguistic problems involved with this term "match" finally appear insuperable; it tells us nothing reliable. (Barbara Honegger, "The U.S. Government, Not the Hijackers, 'Chose' the Date of the 9/11 Attacks.")

MODES OF STANDING DOWN

The obvious lack of any air defense on 9/11 , combined with the flagrant disregard for well- established and long institutionalized procedures involving the FAA air traffic controllers and NORAD, led soon after 9/11 to the notion that an order or guideline must have been issued that was responsible for the paralysis of the usual intercept routine. A written "stand down" order per se has never been found, but this does not mean that it did not exist, possibly in some non-written form. Orders can be conveyed in verbal form, or better yet the expectations of a superior can be conveyed by indirection. But the surest way to make sure that nothing gets done is to make sure that moles, more or less witting partners in the covert operation, occupy the key nodal points in the bureaucracy on the day of the big event. And since we ascribe responsibility for 9/11 to precisely such a network of moles, this is the conclusion that is offered here.

If the FAA guidelines had been observed, an exchange like this one between the FAA Command Center and the FAA headquarters from 9:49 AM would have been simply unthinkable:

FAA Headquarters: They're pulling Jeff away to go talk about United 93.

Command Center: Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft?

FAA Headquarters: Oh, God, I don't know.

Command Center: Uh, that's a decision somebody's gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes.

FAA: Uh, ya know everybody just left the room. (9/11 commission 29)


Was one or both of these speakers a mole? As they knew well, since the plane was off course, not responding to the radio, not following orders, and had its transponder turned off, there was absolutely no doubt that fighters had to be scrambled automatically and immediately, and not in ten minutes. In fact, anyone of these conditions would have been enough to scramble fighters.

Another example of extremely suspicious behavior on 9/11 -- this time from the private sector rather than the government -- became known after June 4, 2004, when the FBI finally allowed a group of victims' families gathered at Princeton, New Jersey to hear tapes of the responses of managers and officials of American Airlines to the obvious fact that American 11 and United 175 had been hijacked.

The FBI had tried as usual to intimidate the families with nondisclosure agreements and a ban on note-taking. However, some of the content of this tape seeped out, and was reported by Gail Sheehy of the New York Observer. One crucial passage recorded at the headquarters of American Airlines in Fort Worth, Texas, beginning about 8:21 AM on September 11, showed that American Airlines managers had done everything possible to prevent the news of a hijacking from leaking out. Here is a segment, according to the best recollection of family members of the deceased:

Don't spread this around. Keep it close.

Keep it quiet.

Let's keep this among ourselves. What else can we find out from our own sources about what's going on?


These were the words of two managers at American Airlines Systems Operations Control. According to the recollection of another family member, their words were: "Do not pass this along. Let's keep it right here. Keep it among the five of us." When a United Airlines dispatcher was told by his superiors to transmit the order that all planes had to land, he was also told, "Don't tell the pilots why we want them to land."

We cannot know if the unnamed speakers were moles within the American Airlines bureaucracy, but this is certainly what moles would have done on such an occasion. Family members noted that if the news of the hijack of American 11 had been transmitted with the necessary rapidity, United 93 might never have taken off from Newark Airport. When Gerald Arpey, the president of American Airlines, testified before the 9/11 commission, he never mentioned the existence of the tapes played in Princeton on June 4. Clearly Arpey had not been served with a duces tecum subpoena, instructing him to present the 9/11 commission with all relevant records and exhibits. ("9/11 Tapes Reveal Ground Personnel Muffled Attacks," New York Observer, June 17, 2004) As for the FBI, they were indignant that their non-disclosure had been violated, not that airline officials blocked timely notification about a hijack. This was another example of the FBI's abuse of the Moussawi case to withhold vital information from the public.

As for the FAA, it issued an official gag order for all of its employees in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and for a long time what little was known had been divulged in violation of that gag order. Even some twelve FAA directives and warnings sent out during the summer of 2001 were reportedly classified. The mystery enveloping the actions of the FAA on 9/11 was made deeper by the notorious Kevin Delaney, the FAA official who deliberately destroyed audio tapes of the reports and recollections of New York air traffic controllers about what they had done on the morning of 9/11. (New York Times, June 6, 2004) If those tapes still existed, they might shed some more light on the air defense stand down of 9/11.

RESIDUAL ANOMALIES

Using documentation from press reports, Woody Box and Nico Haupt have concluded that two distinct aircraft took off from Boston on the morning of September under the designation of American Flight 11. "Where did Flight 11 start?," writes Box. "There are two answers: Gate 26 and Gate 32. And both answers resist any attempt to refute them." American 11's departure was regularly scheduled for 7:45 AM from Terminal B, Gate 32 of Boston's Logan Airport. This was American 11's departure gate on 9/11, as shown in a transcript of radio communications between American 11 and the Logan tower published in the New York Times: "7:45:48 -- Ground Control 1: American eleven heavy Boston ground gate thirty two you're going to wait for a Saab to go by then push back" (New York Times, October 16, 2001) But many press reports indicate that passengers on American 11 embarked at Gate 26 (Washington Post, September 15, 2001, and other newspapers) Gate 26 is located in another wing of Terminal B, and is about 1000 feet away from Gate 32. Gate 26 is the majority view.

One paper, the Boston Globe, mentioned both gates on successive days. In an extra of the Boston Globe published on September 11, we find: "One airport employee, who asked not to be identified, said the American flight left on time from Gate 32 in Terminal B, and that nothing unusual was apparent." One day later, in the Boston Globe article entitled "Crashes in NYC had grim origins at Logan", we read: "The American flight left from Gate 26 in Terminal B, and the United flight from Gate 19 in Terminal C. One airport employee said nothing unusual was apparent when the American flight left." Was this the same employee as the day before? The Gate 26 flight pushed back later than its scheduled departure time of 7:45 AM.

Was one of these two flights a dummy flight, a decoy being used in one of the live fly hijacking exercises described above? Did its unannounced presence contribute even more to the confusion that reigned in US airspace on the morning of 9/11? Or was there some other, more devious purpose?

There are also reports of another mystery flight landing in Cleveland. And then there is a cryptic remark by Richard Clarke in his White House narrative of the morning of 9/11. Clarke reports hearing: "We have a report of a large jet crashed in Kentucky, near the Ohio line." (Clarke 13)
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:53 am

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER VI: THE COLLAPSE OF WORLD TRADE CENTER 1, 2, AND 7

We now reach the center of the tragedy, the hecatomb of innocent airline passengers and office workers occasioned by the unprecedented and inexplicable collapse of the two World Trade Center towers. Here is where vast numbers of ordinary persons were immolated by the terrorist controllers for the sake of their insane geopolitical plans. Coming from a family which lived in New York for six decades after about 1910, having lived in New York City (Flushing, Queens) from the age of 4 to the age of 16, having attended New York City public schools from the first grade through the twelfth (PS 23, PS 20, JHS 185, Flushing High School), having worked in the city for a year as an adult living in Brooklyn, and having had an uncle who was a New York City policeman, the author is as much of a New Yorker as anyone. 9/11 has marked a decisive new step downward in the city's decline, and the bitter recognition of this tragic situation can only spur on the exposure of the actual process involved in 9/11.

THE KEY: SECONDARY EXPLOSIONS

According to the official version, which the 9/11 commission hardly comments on, the twin towers fell because of the impact of the planes and of the effects of the subsequent fires. The problem is that this is physically impossible, as we will show. The fall of the towers thus depends on some other cause: controlled demolition of some kind is the only possible hypothesis. The key to seeing beyond the official version is to chronicle the presence of secondary explosions, since these are the tell-tale signs of controlled demolition. When we examine the literature, we find a multitude of references to such secondary explosions.

Louie Cacchioli, aged 51, was a firefighter attached to Engine Company 47, based uptown in Harlem. "We were the first ones in the second tower after the plane struck," Cacchioli recounted later. "I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the twenty- fourth floor to get in a position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building." Cacchioli was trapped in an elevator but was able to escape with the help of some fireman's tools. (People Weekly, September 24, 2001)

Auxiliary Fireman Lt. Paul Isaac Jr. also spoke of bombs in an interview with internet reporter Randy Lavello. Isaac had served with Engine Company 10 in lower Manhattan during the late 1990s, so he knew the area around the WTC. Isaac said that many New York firemen were very concerned about the ongoing cover-up of why the World Trade Center collapsed. "Many other firemen know there were bombs in the buildings," he revealed, "but they are afraid for their jobs to admit it because the higher-ups forbid discussion of this fact. There were definitely bombs in those buildings." Among those suppressing real discussion about what had happened, Isaac cited the neocon heavy James Woolsey, who had been CIA Director under Clinton, who had become the New York Fire Department's antiterrorism consultant. (Marrs 34)

Teresa Veliz was a manager for a software development firm. She was on the 47th floor of the North Tower when American 11 struck. Veliz was able to reach the ground level at about the same time that the South Tower collapsed. Flung to the ground in total darkness, Veliz and a colleague followed another person who happened to have a flashlight. As she narrated later; "The flashlight led us into Borders bookstore, up an escalator, and out to Church Street. The explosions were going off everywhere. I was convinced that there were bombs planted all over the place and someone was sitting at a control panel pushing detonator buttons. I was afraid to go down Church Street towards Broadway, but I had to do it. I ended up on Vesey Street. There was another explosion. And another. I didn't know which way to run." (Murphy; Marrs 34)

Ross Milanytch viewed the scene from the 22nd floor of a nearby building. He reported seeing "small explosions on each floor. And after it all cleared, all that was left of the buildings, you could just see the steel girders in like a triangular sail shape. The structure was just completely gone." (America at War; Marrs 34)

Steve Evans, a reporter for the BBC, happened to be in the South Tower that morning. "I was at the base of the second tower, the second tower that was hit," he reported. "There was an explosion -- I didn't think it was an explosion -- but the base of the building shook. I felt it shake ... then we were outside, the second explosion happened and then there was a series of explosions .... We can only wonder at the kind of damage -- the kind of human damage -- which was caused by those explosions, those series of explosions." (Christopher Bollyn, American Free Press; http://www.zeitenschrift.com/news/wtc/_wahrheit.ihtml )

Fox 5 News, a New York television channel, was able to catch on videotape a large white cloud billowing out near the base of the South Tower. The newsman commented: "There is an explosion at the base of the building .... white smoke from the bottom ... something has happened at the base of the building ... then, another explosion. Another building in the World Trade Center complex ...." (Marrs 35)

Tom Elliott was at work at his desk in the offices of Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the South Tower just before 9 AM. When the North Tower was hit, he decided to leave the building and began walking down the stairs with a small group of people. At the 70th floor, Elliott was encouraged by a woman to disregard the announcement on the public address system that there was no need to evacuate. When Elliott had reached the 67th floor, United 175 struck the South Tower, above where he was. Elliott later told a reporter what he was able to observe after that; "Although its spectacularly televised impact was above Elliott, at first he and those around him thought an explosion had come from below. An incredible sound -- he calls it an 'exploding sound' - shook the building and a tornado of hot air and smoke and ceiling tiles and bits of drywall came flying up the stairwell. "In front of me, the wall split from the bottom up," Elliott recounted. Elliott was able to get out of the South Tower by 9:40. (Christian Science Monitor, September 17, 2001)

At 11:56 AM, NBC News broadcast a segment in which reporter Pat Dawson summarized a conversation he had just had with Albert Terry of the FDNY. Terry had told the reporter that he had about 200 firefighters in the WTC buildings at around 9 AM. Then, Terry said, he had heard a kind of secondary explosion. Dawson:

Just moments ago I spoke to the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department, who was obviously one of the first people here after the two planes were crashed into the side, we assume, of the World Trade Center towers, which used to be behind me over there. Chief Albert Terry told me that he was here just literally five or ten minutes after the events that took place this morning, that is the first crash. The Chief of Safety of the Fire Department of New York City told me that shortly after 9:00 he had roughly ten alarms, roughly 200 men, trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in there, and that basically he received word of a secondary device, that is another bomb, going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said that there was another explosion which took place. And then an hour after the first hit here, the first crash, that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here. So obviously, according to his theory, he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. One of the secondary devices, he thinks, that [detonated] after the initial impact he thinks may have been on the plane that crashed into one of the towers. The second device, he thinks, he speculates, was probably planted in the building. So that's what we have been told by Albert Terry, who is the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department. He told me that just moments ago. (Wisnewski 135-136)


Proponents of the official version have attempted to explain some of these explosions as having been caused by gas escaping from leaks in gas mains, but this cannot account for the phenomena described by Terry. Nor can such other explanations as exploding transformers, etc.

Ann Thompson of NBC reported at 12:42 PM that she had reached the corner of Broadway and Fulton on her way to the World Trade center that morning when she heard an explosion and a wall of debris came toward her. She took refuge in a building. When she came out again about 10:30, she heard a second explosion. Firemen warned her about another explosion. (Wisnewski 136; Trinkhaus, 4 ff.)

The eyewitness Michael Benfante told a German TV camera team: "As I was leaving, I heard it. I looked back, and the top of the North Tower was exploding. And even then I did not believe that the whole tower could fall. I thought, only the top exploded and is now going to fall on me. I turned around again and ran away. I felt the rumble of the explosions, the thunder of the collapsing building." (German ARD network, "Tag des Terrors -- Anschlag aus heiterem Himmel," August 30, 2002, Wisnewski 136)

A reporter tried to film a standup with the WTC in the background, but was interrupted by the sound of an explosion: "We can't get any closer to the World Trade Center. Here you can see the firemen who are on the scene, the police and FBI officers, and you see the two towers -- A huge explosion! Debris is coming down on all of us!" ("Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit," West German Television, Cologne, July 24, 2002; Wisnewski 136)

Yet another eyewitness reported: "We heard a huge explosion, and everything got black. Glass was falling down, people were getting hurt when the glass hit them. It was a big explosion, everything got dark, this here is not snow, it's all from the building, a horrible nightmare." "I was on Sixth Avenue and I had just tried to call somebody when I heard an explosion and saw how the people were throwing themselves on the ground, screaming and crying, I looked up and saw all that smoke, as the tower came down, and all that smoke in one tower." (Segment by Oliver Voegtlin and Matthias Fernandes, NTV, September 11, 2001)

Another European documentary showed a man with glasses recovering in a hospital bed who recalled: "All of a sudden it went bang, bang, bang, like shots, and then three unbelievable explosions." ("Terror gegen Amerika," RTL, September 13, 2001)

An eyewitness who worked in an office near the WTC described his experiences to a reporter for the American Free Press. He was standing in a crowd on Church Street, about two and a half blocks from the South Tower. Just before the South Tower collapsed, he saw "a number of brief light sources being emitted from inside the building between floors 10 and 15." He saw about six of these flashes and at the same time heard a "a crackling sound" just before the tower collapsed." (Christopher Bollyn, American Free Press, December 2, 2001; Wisnewksi 137)

Kim White, 32, who worked on the 80th floor of the South Tower, was another eyewitness who reported hearing an explosion. "All of a sudden the building shook, then it started to sway. We didn't know what was going on," she told People magazine. "We got all our people on the floor into the stairwell ... at that time we all thought it was a fire ... We got down as far as the 74th floor ... then there was another explosion." (Christopher Bollyn, American Free Press, December 2, 2001)

A black office worker wearing a business suit that was covered with dust and ashes told the Danish television network DR-TV1: "On the eighth floor we were thrown back by a huge explosion." (Wisnewski 138)

The German network SAT 1 broadcast a report featuring survivors who also were talking about explosions. One of these eyewitnesses, by the name of Tom Canavan, was cut off in mid-sentence by two FBI agents who barged in, grabbed him as he was speaking, and hustled him away; this scene was captured on tape. (Wisnewski 138)

NBC TAPES SHOW CONTROLLED DEMOLITION EXPLOSIONS

In his best-selling study and also in his prime-time special broadcast on German television in August 2003, Gerhard Wisnewski employed out-takes from NBC News cameras near the World Trade Center to provide actual examples of what are almost certainly controlled demolition charges being detonated. On the NBC tape, we see the two towers burning and emitting clouds of black smoke. Then, at about frame 131 of the tape, there emerges a cloud of white-grey smoke along about two thirds of the 79th floor of the South Tower. Two thirds of the southeast facade correspond to the dimensions of the central core column complex, which would be where controlled demolition charges would have to be placed. This line of white-grey smoke billows up, contrasting sharply with the black smoke from the fire. At about frame 203, another line of white- grey smoke emerges several floors below the first, and billows up in its turn. This represents decisive photographic evidence of controlled demolition charges being triggered in the World Trade Center. (Wisnewski 216)

Andreas von Bulow, the former Social Democratic Technology Minister of Germany under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, noted in his study of 9/11 that news tapes show smoke being forced out of the hermetically sealed windows of both towers in the minute or so just before they fell. (Von Buelow 146-147) This is very likely also evidence of controlled demolition charges or other artificial processes going on inside the buildings.

FIREMEN WERE CONFIDENT OF EXTINGUISHING THE FIRE

The Guiliani administration in New York City, and its successor, the Bloomberg administration, refused for a long time to allow the public to hear tapes of the radio conversations among the FDNY firemen on the scene at the WTC. In the summer of 2002, press accounts surfaced which indicated that firemen had been able to climb to the Sky Lobby on the 78th floor and been able to survey the extent of the fire from there. The fuselage of United 175 had struck the 80th floor, and one of its wings had clipped the 78th floor itself. The FDNY officers describe a situation with only two pockets of fire, and they express confidence that they will be able to fight the fire successfully with two hose lines. Two officials who are mentioned by name on the tape are Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer and Fire Marshal Ronald P. Bucca, both of whom died when the South Tower collapsed. "Once they got there," the Times says, "they had a coherent plan for putting out the fires they could see and helping victims who survived." According to the New York Times summary, the two officers "showed no panic, no sense that events were racing beyond their control .... At that point, the building would be standing for just a few more minutes, as the fire was weakening the structure on the floors above him. Even so, Chief Palmer could see only two pockets of fire and called for a pair of engine companies to fight them ....

The limited transcripts made available on the internet were as follows:

Battalion Seven ... Ladder Fifteen, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous Code Ones.


The audio tape has never been released to the public. The Justice Department claims that it is evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussawi in Alexandria, Virginia. (New York Times, August 4, 2002) Christopher Bollyn, already cited, commented: "The fact that veteran firefighters had 'a coherent plan' for putting out the 'two pockets of fire' indicates they judged the blazes to be manageable. These reports from the scene of the crash provide crucial evidence debunking the government's claim that a raging steel-melting inferno led to the tower's collapse." (Marr 38-39)

Earlier in the morning, Pete Ganci, the Chief of the Department, and thus the highest- ranking uniformed firefighter in the city, had told Giuliani: "We can save everybody below the fire. Our guys are in the building, about halfway up the first tower." (Giuliani 8) Ganci was killed in action later in the day.

THE CASE OF WTC 6

CNN broadcast the image of smoke rising up from street level near the base of Building 6, the Customs House. This video footage had originated at 9:04, about one minute after United 175 struck the South Tower. Remember that WTC 6 was on the north side of the north tower, so any explosions there cannot be regarded as having been generated by the impact to the South Tower. A powerful explosion inside WTC 6 had hurled a cloud of gas and debris 170 meters high. A CNN archivist commented, "We can't figure it out." (Marrs 36) This incident was soon eclipsed by the collapse of the South Tower, and has tended to be forgotten. The various official reports have had precious little to say about WTC 6. Overhead views of the ruins later showed a large crater in the steel structure of WTC 6; it was clear that this crater could not have been caused by fire. (Von Bulow 163- 164)

THE AGONY OF THE FDNY

FDNY lost 343 firefighters that day, more than their casualties in the previous hundred years. It is worth asking why this came about. In the case of fires in high-rise skyscrapers, outside ladders cannot be used above a certain level. Therefore, the firemen are trained to use staircases to climb up to the fire and fight it within the building. They could do this with a certain degree of confidence because no modern, steel-framed, fireproof building had ever collapsed as a result of fire. On 9/11, three of them -- WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7, all collapsed. Veteran firefighters knew what they were doing. Their losses are not attributable to any mistake on their part, but, in all probability, to the fact that the twin towers and WTC 7 were brought down by some form of controlled demolition.

The 1 Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia had burned lustily for many hours in 1991, but came nowhere near collapsing. The 1 Meridian fire burned for 19 hours, leaping from floor to floor and burning out as combustible materials were used up. On May 4-5, 1988, the 62-story First Interstate Bank Building in Los Angeles - -a structure that was more or less comparable to the twin towers -- burned for more than three hours, with bright, intense flames licking up the sides of the building. In a post-blaze assessment, Iklim Ltd., a company that specializes in building inspections and structural analyses after fires, concluded: "In spite of the total burnout of four and a half floors, there was no damage to the main structural members and only minor damage to one secondary beam and a small number of floor pans."

These comparisons were noted with some discomfort by the New York Times, which commented that "High-rise buildings are designed to be able to survive a fire, even if the fire has to burn itself out. The strategy is to ensure that the steel support structures are strong enough or protected well enough from fire that they do not give way in the time it takes for everything inside an office building, like furniture, to burn. In major high-rise fires elsewhere in the country, such as the 1 Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia in 1991 and the First Interstate Bank fire in Los Angeles in 1988, this approach has worked. But the fires at 7 World Trade Center raged mainly on lower floors and never burned out, and in the chaos of Sept. 11, the Fire Department eventually decided to stop fighting the blazes." One can sense the acute embarrassment of the mythographs; this is all just absurd. "What the hell would burn so fiercely for seven hours that the Fire Department would be afraid to fight it?" said one member of the investigation team quoted in this same article. (New York Times, March 2, 2002)

THE ROMERO ANALYSIS

An important early contribution to the discrediting of the official version regarding the WTC came in an interview with a New Mexico expert in mining technology which appeared a few days after 9/11. This highly realistic analysis appeared in the Albuquerque Journal of September 14, 2001 under the headline "Explosives Planted in Towers, New Mexico Tech Expert Says," the byline belonged to Olivier Uyttebrouck.

Televised images of the attacks on the World Trade Center suggest that explosive devices caused the collapse of both towers, a New Mexico Tech explosion expert said Tuesday. The collapse of the buildings appears "too methodical" to be a chance result of airplanes colliding with the structures, said Van Romero, vice president for research at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

"My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse," Romero said. Romero is a former director of the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center at Tech, which studies explosive materials and the effects of explosions on buildings, aircraft and other structures.

Romero said he based his opinion on video aired on national television broadcasts. Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures. "It would be difficult for something from the plane to trigger an event like that," Romero said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C.

Romero said he and another Tech administrator were on a Washington- area subway when an airplane struck the Pentagon. He said he and Denny Peterson, vice president for administration and finance, were en route to an office building near the Pentagon to discuss defense-funded research programs at Tech.

If explosions did cause the towers to collapse, the detonations could have been caused by a small amount of explosive, he said. "It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points," Romero said. The explosives likely would have been put in more than two points in each of the towers, he said.

Romero said that if his scenario is correct, the diversionary attack would have been the collision of the planes into the towers.

The detonation of bombs within the towers is consistent with a common terrorist strategy, Romero said. "One of the things terrorist events are noted for is a diversionary attack and secondary device," Romero said. Attackers detonate an initial, diversionary explosion that attracts emergency personnel to the scene, then detonate a second explosion, he said. Romero said that if his scenario is correct, the diversionary attack would have been the collision of the planes into the towers. ( http://www.abqiournal.com/aqvan09-11-01.htm -- removed from archive; see http://www.emperors-clothes.com/news/albu.htm )


Here was an honest appraisal from a qualified expert. Romero successfully identified some of the main anomalies presented by the spectacle of collapse, and proceeded from there to the only tenable hypothesis: controlled demolition. He was also acutely perceptive in seeing that the aircraft impacts could not in themselves have been the cause of the fall of the twin towers; they rather had to be regarded as a diversion or cover story to make the fall of the buildings plausible to public opinion. However, the America of late September 2001 was marked by a climate of neo- cCarthyite hysteria wholly antithetical to public truth; Van Romero later retracted his highly insightful remarks, and is rumored to have since found preferment from the federal government.

But numerous foreign experts arrived independently at similar conclusions. Steffen Kretz, the news anchor of the Danish television channel DR-1, reported that "the World Trade Center Tower collapsed after two more explosions." In a commentary of this same network, it was stated that the World Trade Center collapsed after an additional explosion. (Wisnewski 138) On 9/11, Denmark's DR-1 broadcast an interview with Jens Claus Hansen, a high-ranking officer of the Danish Military Academy. His view was: "Additional bombs must have been placed inside the WTC towers -- otherwise they would not have collapsed as they actually did." Another guest was the former NATO General Keld Hillingsoe, who commented: "Additional bombs must have been installed in the buildings." (Wisnewski 138) The Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende, the leading conservative paper in the country, published an interview with the explosives expert Bent Lund, who pointed out that fire alone could not have caused the collapse of the twin towers. He estimated that about a ton of explosives must have exploded inside the buildings in order to bring them down in this way. (Berlingske Tidende, September 12, 2001; Wisnewski 138)

THE VIEW OF A SWISS ENGINEER

Another leading authority who raised the issue of sabotage from within the towers was Hugo Bachmann, professor emeritus of building dynamics and earthquake engineering at the world- famous Swiss Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich -- where Einstein had taught. As Bachmann told the Neue Zuricher Zeitung Online on September 13, 2001, at first glance there seemed to be two possibilities in the fall of the towers. The first was the fire and its effect on the steel supports. But Bachmann had an alternative: "In the second scenario, an additional terrorist action would have caused the collapse of the buildings. In this way, according to Bachmann, buildings like the World Trade center can be destroyed without great logistical exertion." The article went on to say that "Bachmann could imagine that the perpetrators had installed explosives on key supports in a lower floor before the attack." If the perpetrators had rented office space, then these "explosive tenants" could have calmly placed explosive charges on the vulnerable parts of the building "without having anyone notice." Bachmann thought that it was less likely that explosives in the below ground parts of the building could have caused the collapse. Here the logistic problems would be harder to solve in order to put the charges in the right places, and the foundations were probably of more stable construction than the steel towers. Bachmann commented that "the question of whether in fact one of these two scenarios is applicable cannot be answered at this time." But he felt it was a central issue that the second scenario should get more attention, whether or not it applied to the WTC. Bachmann observed that anyone who had enough knowledge of static structures and explosives technology could in principle destroy any building, since every structure has its Achilles heel. An attack aimed at that weak point would be relatively easy to carry out, but would require careful and time-consuming planning. Not all buildings were equally vulnerable, but the twin towers of the World Trade Center were in Bachmann's opinion probably among the more sensitive targets. (Wisnewski 141-143)

OPPORTUNITIES FOR TAMPERING

There are numerous pieces of unconfirmed anecdotal evidence suggesting strange and unusual activities in the World Trade Towers in the days and weeks before their destruction. One New York businessman told me in an interview three years after the fact that he had visited a client in one of the towers numerous times during the months preceding the attack, and had always found that certain elevators were out of service. Another report came from Scott Forbes, an employee of Fiduciary Trust, a firm which was located on floors 90 and 94-97 of the South Tower. Eighty-seven employees of Fiduciary Trust were killed on 9/11. In an email account, Forbes reported that over the weekend of September 8-9, 2001, floors 50 and above of the South Tower experienced a "power down," meaning that all electrical current was cut off for about 36 hours. The reason officially cited was that the electrical cables in the building were being upgraded. Forbes was an information technology officer in charge of Fiduciary Trust's computer network; his attention was engaged by the power down because it fell to him to shut down all the company's computers and related systems before the power went out. After the power down, he had to turn the computers back on again, and restore service on the network. Because there was no electric power above the fiftieth floor, there were also no security cameras and no security locks. There were however many outside engineering personnel coming in and out of the tower at all hours during the weekend. Forbes lived in Jersey City and could see the WTC towers from his home; when he saw the conflagration on the morning of 9/11, he immediately related it to the events of the previous weekend. ( http://www.serendipity.li/wot/forbes01.htm )

SEISMIC EVIDENCE

The seismic effects of the collapse of the towers were observed and measured by Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory just up the Hudson River in Palisades, New York. Here seismographs recorded two spikes reflecting two shock waves in the earth on the morning of 9/11. The crucial fact is that these two spikes came just before the collapse of the towers began. Specifically, Columbia scientists at the facility registered a tremor of 2.1 on the Richter scale at 9:59:04 EDT, just before the beginning of the collapse of the South Tower, and a 2.3 shock just as the North Tower began to come down at 10:28:31 EDT. Both tremors were recorded before the vast majority of the mass of the buildings hit the ground. Although they were not of earthquake proportions, these were considerable shocks, about twenty times more potent than any previously measured shock wave generated by a falling building. The 1993 WTC truck bomb had produced no seismic effects at all -- it had failed to register. At 5:20 local time on the afternoon of 9/11, there was also a 0.6 tremor from the collapse of WTC 7, also at the beginning, rather than the end, of this building's collapse. Dr. Arthur Lerner-Lam, the director of the Columbia Center for Hazards and Risk Research, commented that "during the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage -- but not causing significant ground shaking." But Lerner-Lam declined to draw any conclusions from the glaring anomaly represented by his data, which the 9/11 commission has also avoided. (Marrs 39 ff.)

After most of the pile was removed, experts found that there were pools of what appeared to have been molten metal which had congealed on foundations of the buildings many levels underground. Some steel appeared to have partially melted, other steel had undergone alternations to its crystalline structure, and still other steel was full of holes, like a Swiss cheese.

GIULIANI OBLITERATES THE WTC CRIME SCENE

Mayor Giuliani, by pedigree, was a creature of the highly repressive bureaucratic- authoritarian apparatus which had consolidated itself in the Justice Department during the Reagan years. He now performed yeoman service in defense of the 9/11 myth, a myth which had its most obvious vulnerability in its most spectacular point: the unprecedented and physically inexplicable collapse of the twin towers. Giuliani used the pretext that his term was ending on December 31, 2001 to organize the massive obliteration of the WTC as a crime scene. Parallel to this, Giuliani engineered a confrontation with the New York firemen, both to divert public attention from his tampering with the evidence, and also to neutralize the potential of the firemen, the one group which might have denounced the presence of controlled demolition charges in WTC 1, 2, and 7, of which, as we have seen, they were well aware.

During the crisis, Giuliani had been eager to exploit for his own political image the immense admiration and gratitude which had been expressed around the nation and the world for the epic feats of the New York firefighters. The firemen were now the most revered symbols in the country: typical was the cover of Newsweek's post-9/11 issue, which showed some firemen raising a flag over the ruins, with an evident allusion to the flag raising on Iwo Jima. Giuliani made a practice of appearing in public wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the letters "FDNY." The police he relegated to his windbreaker, which bore the legend "NYPD." Giuliani proved to be treacherous in practice to both, and he did this by playing the firefighters against the police, and vice versa -- all in the service of the 9/11 coverup. The firemen, once revered, would soon be "inexcusable," according to Giuliani.

CONTROLLED DEMOLITION AGAIN

Giuliani brought in Controlled Demolition, the same highly suspect firm which had finished the demolition of the Murragh Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, and which had disposed of the evidence there in the process.

This contract was let surreptitiously just eleven days after 9/11, and empowered Controlled Demolition to recycle the steel of the World Trade Center. Giuliani has not a word to say about this in his memoirs. The city accepted rock-bottom prices for the steel; the priority was to make it disappear fast. Trucks hauling the steel away were equipped with $1,000 Global Positioning System locators to ensure that none of them went astray, and that no suspect steel ended up in the back yard of a maverick 9,/11 researcher. All investigators, in fact, were banned from ground zero. Now Controlled Demolition would eradicate any chance of using the abundant physical evidence present in "the pile," as the mass of twisted rubble of the WTC quickly came to be called. It was a scene out of Kafka -- it was impossible to find out which officials were superintending the destruction of the evidence, to save a myth that was being used to set in motion a world war.

Giuliani, along with ghostwriter Ken Kurson, has produced a relentlessly self-laudatory and self- promoting autobiography entitled Leadership. This work constitutes a monument of hypocrisy. During one of his visits to the WTC site, the Mayor noticed that many visitors were taking pictures of the site. Because there was so much to hide, he found this troubling: "I noticed a disturbing phenomenon -- hundreds of people carrying disposable cameras and handheld video cameras. I understood the impulse -- this was a historic event, and experiencing it up close had a tremendous impact. At the same time, this was a crime scene, and a dangerous one. I did not want anyone to get hurt, or to damage evidence as they scouted out the best angle for their snapshots. If we didn't do something about it immediately, it would soon be out of control, a voyeur's paradise, and we risked the site developing a distasteful freak show aspect." (Giuliani 49) An independent photographic documentation of the crime scene, one the FBI would not be able to confiscate? Horrors! Giuliani promulgated his infamous order that all photos were illegal in the area around the WTC complex. Those who risked a snapshot also risked going to jail.

When it was a question of preventing public scrutiny, Giuliani considered the WTC pile a crime scene where there was evidence that had to be preserved. But when it was a question of sending the crucial evidence to the other end of the world, Giuliani's motto became "scoop and dump" -- with the help of Controlled Demolition. As Thomas Van Essen, Giuliani's fawning appointee as Fire Commissioner, described the scene: "... a full-blown recovery operation was under way, and the site had become an enormous construction zone. Trucks and plows rolled around everywhere. Giant cranes lofted massive steel beams over the heads of the men below." (Van Essen 263) The steel was being sent to a city land fill at Fresh Kills, Staten Island.

According to Van Essen, by the end of October Giuliani was filled with humanitarian concern about the danger of accidents to those working on the pile. One of the main groups present there were firefighters who were seeking the bodies or other remains of their hundreds of fallen comrades. According to the literary provocateur Langewiesche, "there were some among the construction workers and the police who grew unreasonably impatient with the firemen, and became overeager to repeat the obvious -- in polite terms, that these so-called heroes were just ordinary men. On the other hand, the firemen seemed to become steadily more self-absorbed and isolated from the larger cleanup efforts underway." (Langewiesche 158) "Firemen were said to prefer watches from the Tourneau store, policemen to opt for kitchen appliances, and construction workers (who were at a disadvantage here) to enjoy picking through whatever leftovers they came upon -- for instance, wine under the ruins of the Marriott hotel, and cases of contraband cigarettes that spilled from the US Customs vault in the Building Six debris." (Langewiesche 159) Langewiesche reported with great gusto the discovery of evidence that the firemen had been looting even before the towers came down. "Fifty feet below the level of the street they began to uncover the hulk of a fire truck that had been driven deep by the collapse." According to Langewiesche, the field superintendent who only wanted to get on with the job at hand felt "delight, then, after the hulk of the fire truck appeared, that rather than containing bodies (which would have required decorum), its crew cab was filled with dozens of new pairs of jeans from The Gap, a Trade Center store. When a grappler pulled off the roof, the jeans were strewn about for all to see. It was exactly the sort of evidence the field superintendent had been waiting for. While a group of initially bewildered firemen looked on, the construction workers went wild." (Langewiesche 161) The firemen, we must remember, were those who knew most about the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, and they were also the group most likely to tell what they knew. In this sense, the firemen posed perhaps the greatest immediate threat to the 9/11 myth upon which the oligarchy had staked so much. The obvious campaign of psychological warfare against the firemen, therefore, was of world- historical importance. Given the stakes, it would be impossible to exclude that the dungaree incident which Langewiesche found so delightful had been cynically staged as a means of keeping the angry and rebellious firemen off-balance, distracted and confused. The jeans could easily have been planted at a quiet moment during the graveyard shift. Langewiesche's reporting came out during the fall in the Atlantic Monthly, and rankled deeply among the angry firemen and the bereaved families.

On October 31, Halloween, Giuliani decreed without any meaningful consultation that there would be an upper limit of 25 firefighters on each shift at the WTC pile, along with 25 New York City policemen and 25 Port Authority patrolmen. Soon "the rescue workers were up in arms. Stories went around that we had simply given up on finding bodies; that the mayor wanted to speed the cleanup so it would be finished before he left office; that we had recovered gold from the trade center and didn't care about anything else ... Union officials started telling the workers we were haphazardly trucking everything to Fresh Kills -- a 'scoop and dump' operation." (Van Essen 265)

Langewiesche defends the Mayor's justification of cutting the firemen's representation on the pile: "when Giuliani gave 'safety' as the reason for reducing their presence on the pile, he was completely sincere." (Langewiesche 161) In his view, the big problem on the pile was "firemen running wild." (Langewiesche 162) In mid-October, an audience of firemen, policeman, widows, and orphans loudly booed several members of the Giuliani administration, but also Senator Hillary Clinton and a local Democratic politician. (Van Essen 258) On Friday, November 2, Giuliani was able to harvest the results of his provocations. In the morning, more than 1,000 firemen came together at the WTC. Their chants included: "Bring the brothers home! Bring the brothers home", "Do the right thing!", "Rudy must go!", and "Tom must go!", a reference to Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen, a Giuliani appointee. Their signs read, "Mayor Giuliani, let us bring our brothers home." Speakers denounced Giuliani's hasty carting off of wreckage and remains to Fresh Kills as a "scoop and dump" operation. One well-respected former captain appealed to the crowd: "My son Tommy of Squad 1 is not home yet! Don't abandon him!" This was met with a cry of "Bring Tommy home!" from the assembled throng. This scene soon degenerated into an altercation between the firefighters and the police guarding the site, and then into a full-scale riot. Twelve firefighters were taken to jail, while five policemen were injured. Giuliani had gladly sacrificed the 9/11 myth of national solidarity to the needs of his campaign of psychological warfare and provocations against the firemen. It was All Souls Day, the day of the dead, November 2, 2001.

At a press conference that same day, Giuliani hypocritically condemned the actions of the firemen as inexcusable. The police wanted to make more arrests, and were scanning videotapes of the riot to identify firefighters. The city was appalled by what had happened; many newspapers were anti- Giuliani this time. One trade union leader, Gorman, called Giuliani a "fascist," and referred to the Police Commissioner and the Fire Commissioner as Giuliani's "goons."

On Monday, November 11, Giuliani and his officials were again confronted by 200 angry firefighters and bereaved families at a meeting. Giuliani was accused again and again of running a "scoop and dump" operation. One widow protested: "Last week my husband was memorialized as a hero, and this week he's thought of as landfill?" When Van Essen stammered that the department had been overwhelmed, a widow replied, "Stop saying you are overwhelmed! I am overwhelmed! I have three children and my husband is dead!" Dr. Hirsch of the "biological stain" theory discussed below tried to defend Giuliani by arguing that nothing resembling an intact body was being found any longer, but he was shouted down by firemen who knew from their experience on the pile that this was not so. Van Essen was forced to concede that, based on photographic evidence he personally examined, remains were indeed still be found that had to be "considered intact bodies." (Van Essen 270-271)

Giuliani's rush to eradicate the crime scene without regard to the preservation of human remains thus served two important goals. He was able to destroy much pertinent evidence, and he succeeded in throwing the firefighters on the defensive and playing them off against the police, the construction workers, and other groups. He was able to split the firefighters themselves. The firefighters were tied into knots emotionally, and were left with no time or energy to pursue the issue of justice for their heroic fallen comrades, which could only have been served by directly raising the issue of the indications of controlled demolition in numerous points of the World Trade Center complex. Nor was the cynical oligarchical strategy limited to Giuliani: at the 9/11 commission's last set of hearings in New York City, the FDNY, NYPD, and other line departments of the city were mercilessly baited by the likes of former Navy Secretary John Lehman, who told them that their operational coordination was inferior to that of a Boy Scout troop. So far the firefighters have not been able to mount a challenge to the 9/11 myth, which necessarily portrays them as incompetent, in spite of their heroism and huge losses. Only by demolishing the myth, only by unearthing the story of controlled demolition, can the immense historical merits of the firefighters be duly recognized.

Giuliani's memoir is mainly for self-aggrandizement, but it also attempts to shore up the official version at certain key vulnerable points, since the Giuliani legend and the 9/11 myth are now inextricably intertwined. The following remarks are attributed to Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, the Medical Examiner of New York City in the late afternoon of 9/11: "Most of the bodies will be vaporized. We're going to end up with biological stains, where the tissue has become shapeless, amorphous masses of matte ." According to Giuliani, Hirsch estimated that the temperature inside the building had reached 2,000 degrees (presumably Fahrenheit). Such a temperature is impossible in the physical universe as we otherwise know it to be constituted. (Giuliani 22)
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:54 am

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 6 CONT'D.)

CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS: "BORDERLINE CRIMINAL"

The scandalous eradication of the WTC crime scene was one of the main themes of hearings held by the House Science Committee on March 2, 2002. Congressman Anthony D. Weiner, a New York Democrat, led off by contrasting the businesslike handling of the crash scene of Flight 186 on November 12, 2001 with the chaos and disdain for the integrity of evidence that had prevailed on the WTC pile under Giuliani's management: "Within literally moments of that plane crash, the National Transportation Safety Board was on the ground sequestering evidence, interviewing witnesses, subpoenaing information, if necessary, and since then, they have offered periodic reports. One month and a day earlier, when the World Trade Center collapsed, nothing could have been further from the truth. According to reports that we have heard since, there has been no comprehensive investigation. One expert in fire engineering concluded that there was virtually a nonexistent investigation. We haven't examined any aspects of the collapse that might have impacted rescue worker procedures even in this last month. Second, reports have emerged that crucial evidence has been mishandled. Over 80 percent of the steel from the World Trade Center site has already been sold for recycling, much of it, if not all of it, before investigators and scientists could analyze the information."

Weiner pointed out that at the flight 186 Rockaway crash scene on November 11, he had been able to "watch the National Transportation Safety Board point to pieces of evidence, [and] say to local law enforcement, don't touch this or it is going to be a felony if you do." (House March 104) That had been the procedure before 9/11, and it had become procedure once again after 9/11; only in regard to the 9/11 events did these methods, mandated by federal law, go out the window. It was a massive breakdown of the rule of law, and all in the service of the coverup.

Weiner pointed out that there was also plenty of blame to go around for the federal government as well. This centered on inter-agency turfwars, always a favorite means used by moles to disguise the scope and motivation of what they are really doing; "... we have allowed this investigation to become woefully bogged down and in fighting and lack of cooperation among agencies. Researchers from FEMA did not get timely access to the designs of the building. News accounts have said there has been friction between engineers in FEMA because of concerns about where the information would wind up. Even the National Science Foundation, which has awarded grants to several scientists to study the collapse, but didn't coordinate these efforts with FEMA or the American Society of Civil Engineers."

The reality was even worse. FEMA's Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) was carried out not by full-time government officials, but rather by a group of volunteer investigators, with a budget of just $600,000. (Ken Starr's budget for hounding Clinton: more than $40 million.) FEMA volunteers had no subpoena power, and could not stay the hand of steel recyclers or confiscate evidence if they required it. They were denied the blueprints of the buildings. They generally could not enter ground zero, apart from an early walking tour. They never saw a piece of steel wreckage until October. Out of millions of fragments, the FEMA BPAT was able to save only 156 from the recyclers.

Weiner also deplored the parsimonious budget that had been granted to the investigation: "... finally, we have seen and noted the painfully that the financial commitment to this investigation simply is not there. It is not uncommon to spend tens of millions of dollars investigating why a plane crashed. But we have yet to spend even a million dollars on this investigation, and the Bush Administration has refused to commit to release the full funding necessary." (House March 48)

In a later hearing, Weiner elaborated that "thousands of tons of steel were carted away and recycled before any expert could examine what could have been telltale clues. Support trusses, fireproofing fragments, and even burned-out electrical switches that might have given scientists and engineers insight were lost forever even before an investigation was underway. (House May 20-21)

Weiner was also well aware that the Giuliani administration, just like the Bush regime in Washington, was behaving with implacable hostility towards any and all investigations. "We just heard testimony that the city was the opposite of cooperative. That they had refused to provide basic information," said Congressman Weiner at the March hearings. He told the government witnesses from FEMA and other agencies: "The idea that there was some level of cooperation, I have to tell you, the anecdotal record is replete with stories of people having cameras confiscated from them, being stopped at checkpoints. You are officials of the United States Government. The idea that this should have to be a subject of a long negotiation over what information would be at your disposal, to me is most troubling." (House March 133) Indeed, the FEMA's Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) was not even allowed on the scene until October.

Weiner's concerns were shared by Virginia Republican J. Randy Forbes, who complained that he was "disappointed to learn that investigators were unable to examine recovered pieces of steel from the Twin Towers before they were recycled. I am also troubled that investigators had difficulty in obtaining blueprints, design drawings, and maintenance records because of liability concerns from the buildings' owners. (House March 55) It even turned out that, despite repeated urgent requests, the investigators were being denied the out-takes of the video tapes shot by the various television networks operating around the WTC on 9-11. This is a reminder that moles are sometimes just as necessary in the private sector as they are in government.

Glenn P. Corbett, Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, reminded the committee that "handling the collapse study as an assessment has allowed valuable evidence -- the steel building components -- to be destroyed. The steel holds the primary key to understanding the chronology of events and causal factors resulting in the collapse. The collapse of the world Trade Center towers were the largest structural collapses in world history. A disaster of such epic proportions demands that we fully resource a comprehensive, detailed investigation. Instead, we are staffing the HPAT with part-time engineers and scientists on a shoestring budget." (House March 78) Corbett called for a World Trade Center Disaster Commission, but the Bush administration was not interested.

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a Berkeley professor of civil engineering, related his own shock in discovering that the structural steel was simply being shipped out: "I believe I was the first one to find out that the steel was being recycled. New York Times reporter Jim Glanz told me two weeks after the quake-after the collapse. And I tried to contact the city and also the New York Times reporters tried to make sure we could have access to the steel to do the research. It was not happening. And I went myself-directly contacted the recycling plant and made the arrangement." (House March 128) Even so, most of the steel was soon gone.

Congressman Crowley of New York correctly suggested that the flagrant illegalities and abuses of the crime scene would permanently undercut whatever explanation the government was seeking to purvey: "I do believe that conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this. They are going to make the Warren Commission look like a walk in the park. And that is unfortunate not only for the Members of Congress who are trying to work on this issue, but for all the families out there that are listening very carefully to what we are talking about today, what these experts are saying. And I just think there is so much that has been lost in these last six months that we can never go back and retrieve. And that is not only unfortunate, it is borderline criminal." (House March 129)

Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a liberal Republican like Giuliani, ran interference for the Mayor. He rejected the idea that the WTC was a crime scene where there was still something to be discovered, something to be proven; Shays said he had "a particular bias that the actions against us weren't criminal acts, they were acts of war, acts of terror. And I kind of bristle when I think of our treating this as a criminal act in which we have to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that someone did it and they were at the scene or whatever you need to deal with in a crime." (House May 115) This chauvinistic rhetoric was a cover for the urgent need of annihilating the evidence. For this school of thought, there was no need for evidence because there was nothing to prove and nothing to learn; they thought they knew what happened a priori thanks to CNN and Bush. The supposed government of laws was in eclipse.

Small wonder, all in all, that the august, 125-year old fireman's trade paper Fire Engineering blasted the entire inadequate investigation process in January 2002 editorial. Editor Bill Manning wrote that "for more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on a slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car ." Manning charged that "Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the 'official investigation' blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure." "The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately," Manning demanded. Elsewhere in the same issue, a fire official deplored that "we are literally treating the steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence." (Fire Engineering, January 2002)

An extremely serious aspect of the botched investigation of the World Trade Center events involved the issue of the four black boxes from the two planes (American 11 and United 175) -a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data reporter from each plane. The official version, as codified by the 9/11 commission, claims that not one of these black boxes was ever found. But a New York City firefighter named Nicholas De Masi claimed that he escorted FBI agents into the WTC ruins and helped them to find and recover three of the four missing black boxes. DeMasi's account is supported by the WTC volunteer Mike Bellone, who said that he had seen at least one black box being taken from the wreckage. The three black boxes were removed from the wreckage with the help of DeMasi's all terrain vehicle, according to this account. Then the three black boxes were taken away by the FBI, and have never been heard of again. The black boxes of the two planes that apparently hit the WTC are the only cases in which black boxes from jetliners have not been recovered. DeMasi wrote about this experience in his book Ground Zero: Behind the Scenes, which was published by Trauma Recovery and Assistance for Children (TRAC Team) in 2003. Here DeMasi recalls: "There were a total of four black boxes. We found three." DeMasi's story has been denied by the FBI and the FDNY. It has been largely ignored by the controlled corporate media, except for an article in the neocon New York Post which alleged that TRAC team was heavily in debt. (Philadelphia News, October 28, 2004)

THE FEMA BPAT REPORT OF MAY 2002: "A HALF-BAKED FARCE"

The worthy culmination of this "half-baked farce" was the FEMA BPAT report issued in May 2002. A key section is the one entitled "Structural Response to Fire Loading," where the central tenets are developed in all their intimate poverty. According to the FEMA/ASCE experts:

• As fire spread and raised the temperature of structural members, the structure was further stressed and weakened, until it eventually was unable to support its immense weight. Although the specific chain of events that led to the eventual collapse will probably never be identified, the following effects of fire on structures may each have contributed to the collapse in some way. Appendix A presents a more detailed discussion of the structural effects of fire.

• As floor framing and supported slabs above and in a fire arm are heated, they expand. As a structure expands, it can develop additional, potentially large, stresses in some elements. If the resulting stress state exceeds the capacity of some members or their connections, this can initiate a series of failures.

• As the temperature of floor slabs and support framing increases, these elements can lose rigidity and sag into catenary action. As catenary action progresses, horizontal framing elements and floor slabs become tensile elements, which can cause failure of end connections and allow supported floors to collapse onto the floors below. The presence of large amounts of debris on some floors of WTC 1 would have made them even more susceptible to this behavior. In addition to overloading the floors below, and potentially resulting in a pancake-type collapse of successive floors, local floor collapse would also immediately increase the laterally unsupported length of columns, permitting buckling to begin. As indicated in Appendix B, the propensity of exterior columns to buckle would have been governed by the relatively weak bolted column splices between the vertically stacked prefabricated exterior wall units. This effect would be even more likely to occur in a fire that involves several adjacent floor levels simultaneously, because the columns could effectively lose lateral support over several stories.

• As the temperature of column steel increases, the yield strength and modulus of elasticity degrade and the critical buckling strength of the columns will decrease, potentially initiating buckling, even if lateral support is maintained. This effect is most likely to have been significant in the failure of the interior core columns.

Concerning the twin towers FEMA, had only agnostic conclusions to offer: "With the information and time available, the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each tower could not be definitively determined." Concerning WTC 7: "The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue." (911research.wtc7.net) The World Trade Center disaster was the centerpiece of an event which the Bush administration had seized on to start what may well turn out to be a world war, but that main event could not be explained, many months after the fact.

The FEMA report is redolent of conscious distortion and of fraud. The illustrations in the spring 2002 FEMA report do everything possible to make the twin towers look like flimsy, unstable structures. In one cross-section (Figure 2-1 ), the core columns are depicted in about one third of their actual dimensions. FEMA gives short shrift or no shrift at all to the cross-bracing core beams and the core columns. One picture (D-13) shows what is purportedly a core column with a construction hard hat on it to convey its dimensions, but this column is about half the size of the real core columns.

FEMA's illustrations offered in support of their theory of truss failure (2-20, 21, 22) show no steel columns in the core of the building at all. These fake diagrams duly impressed the radical empiricists at the New York Times, who quickly reported that the interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft, not 47 massive steel box columns.

The heart of the FEMA argument is that the astronomical temperatures allegedly reached by the fires weakened the floor trusses, leading to each floor pancaking onto the one below. As the floors fell away, the columns in the facade as well as the core columns remained standing, but they then quickly buckled at the points where they were bolted together, and came crashing down. This theory is not based on observation, but on pure speculation. It is a purely cinematic explanation of what happened -- it tries to account for the phenomenon of collapse, but takes no notice of whether such a process could occur in the real world. In fact, the floor truss/pancake theory cannot function in the real world. Even if the floors failed, the strong structure of the 47 central columns, minus a very few which might have been severed by the impact of the airlines (even fewer in the South Tower) would have remained standing. That would have left a 110-floor steel spine intact, and this is not what was observed. Many of the deceptive drawings contained in the FEMA report then became the inspiration for the graphics used in the NOVA documentary program on this subject which was aired on PBS.

Because of the difficulties of the pancake theory, busy academics have whipped up new theories to try to meet obvious objections. Apologists for the official version start with the notion of killer fires -- fires which, even though they are fed by carpets, paper, and office furniture, are able to melt steel. From here they develop the notion of progressive total collapse -the buildings do not fall to one side, but simply collapse in place upon their own foundations. Since no modern steel framed skyscraper had ever succumbed to fire, the attempted coverup then required new pseudo- theoretical constructs. One of these was the column failure, or wet noodle, theory. This suggested that fires melted the core columns, and that was that. Of course, even the coverup cannot change the fact that the fires were not hot enough to melt the core columns. Steel is a very effective conductor of heat, meaning that a serious hot spot on one floor is likely to be dissipated up and down the columns that pass through that hot spot. The internal and external columns, that is to say, act as cooling ribs. According to a study by Corus Construction cited at http://www.911research.wtc7.net, the highest temperature reached by steel in the presence of hydrocarbon fires was logged at about 360 degrees Fahrenheit -far below what is needed to weaken steel.

Given the disadvantages of the column failure theory, the truss failure theory was advanced. The trusses were relatively lightweight metal structures which attached the metal decks bearing the concrete slabs of each floor to the core columns and the columns in the facade. The trusses offered the added advantage of being invisible from the outside, so that it was possible to assert without fear of being refuted that they had gotten extremely hot.

MIT Professor Thomas Eagar is one who has rushed into the many breaches of the FEMA report in an attempt to shore up its credibility. Not content with trusses and pancakes, Eagar has propounded the zipper theory, which he has judiciously combined with the domino effect. Eagar's argument is that if the angle on one side of the building had given way, then the unbearable load on the other angle clips would have caused the entire floor to become totally unzipped in just a few seconds. According to Eagar, "If it had only occurred in one little corner, such as a trash can caught on fire, you might have had to repair that corner, but the whole building wouldn't have come crashing down. The problem was, it was such a widely distributed fire, and then you got this domino effect."
( http://www.911research.wtc7.net/talks/w ... eagar.html ) In reality, the buildings had been designed to resist a Boeing 707, not just a trash can fire.

FACT CHECK

The melting point of steel is 1,538 degrees Celsius, equal to 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, although it will weaken and buckle at somewhat lower temperatures. But the absolute maximum that can be achieved with hydrocarbons, such as the kerosene-like mixture used for jet fuel is 825 degrees Celsius or 1517 Fahrenheit -- unless the mixture is pressurized or pre-heated through the admixture of fuel and air , which in this case it could not be. Diffuse flames burn at a lower temperature, and fires fed by inadequate oxygen are cooler still. The best estimate is that the fires in the towers were burning at a temperature substantially less than 800 Celsius. The collapse of the towers through the effects of the fires is thus a physical impossibility.

LOIZEAUX PREDICTED THE COLLAPSE

In the March hearings of the House Science Committee, Robert F. Shea, the Acting Administrator of the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration noted that "the World Trade Center was a tragedy. And, frankly, it was an anomaly. No one who viewed it that day, including myself, believed that those tower would fall. Our collective thought process for laymen and engineers and firefighters changed that day forever." (House March 60)

At those same hearings, a leaflet was distributed by the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, an organization which included many members of the victims' families. Here the Congressmen were reminded: "The collapse of the Twin towers caused the biggest loss of life in a single incident on U.S. soil since the Civil War. Their collapse constituted the first failures of high-rise protected steel structures in history. Not a single structural engineer, including those working for the firm that built the Twin Towers and those working in the Fire Department of New York, seems to have anticipated their collapse, even when those individuals saw the extent of the fires raging in the buildings. The Twin Towers were designed to withstand the impact of the largest passenger jets of their day, a Boeing 707. ..." (House March 167)

However, it turned out that there was at least one expert who claimed that he had immediately intuited that the towers could collapse. As John Seabrook wrote in the New Yorker, "among the dozens of people I have spoken to recently who are experts in the construction of tall buildings (and many of whom witnessed the events of September 11th as they unfolded), only one said that he knew immediately, upon learning, from TV, of the planes hitting the buildings, that the towers were going to fall. This was Mark Loizeaux, the president of Controlled Demolition Incorporated, a Maryland-based family business that specializes in reducing tall buildings to manageable pieces of rubble. 'Within a nanosecond,' he told me. 'I said, "it's coming down." And the second tower will fall first, because it was hit lower down."' Loizeaux was billed as a "structural undertaker" whose job was to destroy old buildings. Here is Loizeaux' version of how he foresaw the disaster:

I thought, "Somebody's got to tell the Fire Department to get out of there .... I picked up the phone, dialed 411, got the number, and tried it -- busy. So I called the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management" -- which was in 7 World Trade. "All circuits were busy. I couldn't get through."


But how could Loizeaux know what no other expert claimed to know, and which went against a hundred years accumulated by civil engineers in building skyscrapers? If suspects are those who had the means, the motive and the opportunity, then Loizeaux may well have had the means. According to the demolitions man:

First of all, you've got the obvious damage to the exterior frame from the airplane -- if you count the number of external columns missing from the sides the planes hit, there are about two-thirds of the total. And the buildings are still standing, which is amazing -- even with all those columns missing, the gravity loads have found alternate pathways. O.K., but you've got fires -- jet-fueled fires, which the building is not designed for, and you've also got lots of paper in there. Now, paper cooks. A paper fire is like a coal-mine fire, it keeps burning as long as oxygen gets to it. And you're high in the building, up in the wind, plenty of oxygen. So you've got a hot fire. And you've got these floor trusses, made of fairly thin metal, and fire protection has been knocked off most of them by the impact. And you have all this open space -- clear span from perimeter to core -with no columns or partition walls, so the airplane is going to skid right through that space to the core, which doesn't have any reinforced concrete in it, just sheetrock covering steel, and the fire is going to spread everywhere immediately, and no fire-protection systems are working -- the sprinkler heads shorn off by the airplanes, the water pipes in the core are likely cut. So what's going to happen? Floor A is going to fall onto floor B, which falls onto floor C; the unsupported columns will buckle; and the weight of everything above the crash site falls onto what remains below -- bringing loads of two thousand pounds per square foot, plus the force of impact, onto floors designed to bear one hundred pounds per square foot. It has to fall." (The New Yorker, November 19, 2001)


Naturally, the pancake theory was original neither to Loizeaux nor to FEMA. The pancake theory had been advanced by "Osama Bin Laden" in the remarks attributed to him, allegedly made in mid- November 2001, and widely publicized by the US government in December 2001. Here Bin Laden is alleged to have commented: "We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (Inaudible) Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for." But there are indications that the stocky figure shown on the tape may not be the supposedly ascetic Bin Laden at all, but a double or ham actor. (Meyssan 2002 192)

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM: WTC 7

In the May House Science Committee W. Gene Corley, the American Society of Civil Engineers representative on the BPAT, conceded that "Building 7, which was across the street from the main towers, also collapsed and provided us with the first example that we recognized of a building collapsing as a result of fire." (House May 30) WTC 7 presents the image of a classical controlled demolition. Whereas the twin towers are seen to explode, WTC 7 implodes -- it falls in upon itself with none of the spectacular mushroom plumes of smoke and powder which had marked the demise of the larger twin towers. The foundations collapse before the facade, the middle of the building collapses before the outer walls, and streamers of smoke are emitted from the facade. WTC 7 did imitate the twin towers by collapsing almost exclusively upon its own foundations. WTC 7 contained electrical generators and a supply for diesel fuel to operate these, and apologists of the official version like Gerald Posner have seized on this circumstance to make the collapse of this building plausible. But there has been no sign of raging diesel fuel fires, as can be seen from the photos of the fall of WTC 7, so the apologists are grasping at straws.

The owner of the WTC complex was Larry Silverstein, who recounted the fall of WTC 7 in the September 2002 PBS documentary, America Rebuilds, complete with this astounding revelation: "I remember getting a call from the ... fire department commander , telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'we've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing is to pull it. And they made the decision to pull and we watched the building collapse." "To pull" would appear to be the jargon term in controlled demolition circles for the deliberate detonation of charges leading to the destruction of a building. And if WTC 7 was pulled, why not WTC 1 and 2? (Marrs 43)

ANOMALIES OF THE WTC COLLAPSE

The twin towers did not simply collapse as a result of gravity; they were violently pulverized in mid-air in an explosive process which hurled debris hundreds of meters in all directions -they were vaporized by an explosive force. Anomalies abound. The North Tower was hit first, was hit hardest in its core columns, and had more jet fuel burn inside its structure than the South Tower -- but the North Tower exploded later. The South Tower was hit later, with a more glancing blow which had less impact on its core columns, and which also caused more jet fuel to be consumed outside of the building in a spectacular plume; the South Tower's fires were less severe -but the South Tower fell first. WTC 7 was never hit by anything, and had fires only on two floors (there are no photos of WTC 7 enveloped in flames and smoke) -- but WTC 7 fell anyway. WTC 6 witnessed an explosion and fire which has never been explained or even addressed. Finally, we have the embarrassing fact that steel frame skyscrapers are virtually indestructible by fire. The official version of events argues that, at least as far as the towers are concerned, it was the combined effect of crash impact plus fire which caused the collapses. But even the South Tower collapsed well after most of the jet fuel had burned away, and a fire based on paper, rugs, and furniture melts steel even less than one based on jet fuel. By all indications, the South Tower began the collapse sequence precisely at the moment when, well after the impact had been absorbed, the fires too were subsiding. The hole made in the North Tower by American 11 had cooled so much that, just before the collapse of the North Tower, survivors were observed looking out through the gash in the side of the building. (Marr 41)

The upper floors of both towers, after showing symptoms of high pressure which forced smoke out through the widows, exploded into spectacular mushroom clouds. Debris and other ejecta were thrown at speeds of 200 feet per second to distances of up to 500 feet in all directions. The clouds then descended, always emanating from the towers as these fell. The mushroom clouds had expanded to two or three times the diameter of the towers after five seconds, and had expanded to five times the diameter of the towers after 15 seconds. Blast waves broke windows in buildings over 400 feet away. In the thick mushroom clouds, solid objects were hurled out ahead of the dust, another telltale sign of explosive demolition.

One might have expected the buildings to tip over at an angle starting at the points where they had been hit like a tree which leaves a stump as it falls towards the side where it has been most chopped, but instead they did not topple and there were no stumps; apart from some initial asymmetry in the top of the South Tower, the two towers both collapsed down on themselves in a perfectly symmetrical way -- a suspicious sign, since this is one of the prime goals and hallmarks of controlled demolition.

The fall of the twin towers took place at breathtaking speed. The tops of the buildings reached the ground as rubble no more than 16 seconds after the collapse process had begun. A weight in a vacuum would have taken 9.2 seconds to cover the same distance. This meant that air resistance and little else had slowed the fall of the upper stories. This indicates that the lower floors must have been demolished and pulverized before the upper stories fell on them. The building, in other words, had been pulverized, and in many areas vaporized, in mid-air. No gravity collapse could have created this phenomenon.

The non-metallic elements of the twin towers, especially the cement slabs which formed the horizontal surface of each floor, were pulverized into a fine dust, with particles of less than 100 microns in diameter. This was the dust which pervaded lower Manhattan as the explosive clouds spread from hundreds of yards in all directions. This dust took a long time to settle, but the Giuliani administration tried to convince office workers in the area that there was no danger. All the steel in the building superstructures was simply shredded. The exceptionally strong central core columns were neatly diced into 10 or 20 floor segments -- something which has never been explained.

According to Jim Hoffman, the leading expert on the collapse of the World Trade Center and the source heavily relied on here, the energy necessary to create the mushroom clouds and expand them to the extraordinary dimensions actually observed to pulverize virtually all the concrete in the towers, and to chop the steel into segments is far greater than the gravitational energy represented by the buildings in the first place. According to Hoffman, there must have been powerful additional energy sources at work. When prodded to do so at recent conferences, Hoffman has been willing to speculate that these energy sources might have been unconventional ones. High energy microwave interferometry using coaxial beams for constructive and destructive interference might be a possibility, but this would require so much energy that, if it had to be delivered as conventional electric current, it would necessitate a cable about half a meter in diameter -- and there is no evidence of this. So the problem remains intractable.

THE TWIN TOWERS WERE ROBUST STRUCTURES

The twin towers were robust structures. The structure of the twin towers was represented first of all by an internal core of 47 steel box columns which measured 36 by 90 centimeters; the steel was thickest near the base, where it attained a thickness of 10 centimeters (about four inches), and tapered gradually down to 6 centimeters on the upper floors. There were 236 exterior columns in the buildings' facades; these were 10 centimeters thick at the base, but only 6 millimeters thick in the highest floors. Each floor was a steel plate into which concrete had been poured. In the center of the building was a reinforced core featuring four steel columns encased in concrete. The structure is abundantly cross-braced, so that stress in one sector could be efficiently shifted to other parts of the structure. All steel columns rested directly on the bedrock under Manhattan. This structures had been designed to withstand 140 mile per hour winds, and had resisted them successfully for more than thirty years. They had been designed by Lee Robertson, the structural engineer who built the towers to absorb the impact of a Boeing 707, an aircraft roughly comparable in size and fuel capacity to the aircraft that appear to have struck the towers on 9/11.

In the case of the twin towers, the technical problem of how to account for the immense quantities of energy released would seem to point to an energy source beyond the capabilities of conventional controlled demolition. For a possible explanation of what kind of energy source could have been at work, we must turn our attention to the realm of new physical principles, and thus to the class of directed energy weapons which are probably most familiar to the general public in connection with President Reagan's SO- called star wars speech of March 23, 1983. We may be dealing here with high energy microwave interferometry using coaxial beams for constructive and destructive interference. The inherent problem with this conjecture, as engineer Ken Jenkins has pointed out, is that such a device would require a power cable half a meter in diameter, and the presence of such a power cable has not been demonstrated. The solution to this problem will indeed require more time and research.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:00 am

CHAPTER VII: WHAT HIT THE PENTAGON?

The speed, the maneuverability, the way he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.
-- Danielle O'Brien


The official version and the 9/11 commission report claim that it was American 77, a hijacked Boeing 757, which struck the side of the Pentagon. In the case of the Pentagon, the official version is perhaps at its most vulnerable: the impact hole in the side of the building is far too small to have been created by a Boeing 757, and there is almost no recognizable aircraft debris. Beyond these insuperable problems with the physical evidence, the reports of eyewitnesses, while contradictory, show that many thought they had seen a flying object much smaller than a Boeing 757. Some spoke of a missile, and at least one of the smell of high explosives in the air.

Perhaps because of these grave difficulties, it was the Pentagon chapter of the official 9/11 story which came under attack soonest. The timely exposure of the absurdities of the official story was largely due to the clarity and the courage of Thierry Meyssan of the Reseau Voltaire in Paris, who used his web site to demystify what had happened. Meyssan's success in making telling points on the internet and on French national television even motivated Le Monde, the leading French center- left newspaper, to attempt a grotesque and degrading defense of the US official account in February and March 2002. Quelle honte! Three days before Meyssan's pioneering book L'effroyable imposture (The Big Lie) was published, the FBI gave CNN a meager five frames from a surveillance video camera located at a gas station near the Pentagon which purported to show how the Pentagon was hit -- although these images proved nothing of value to shore up the official version. The pictures were reported in the Washington Post of March 7, 2002, and televised on March 8, 2002, certainly not by coincidence.

The defenders of the official story can point to a number of eyewitnesses who claim to have seen something like a Boeing 757 on its way to impact the Pentagon wall. But one problem is that many of these witnesses are military officers, Pentagon contractors, or federal government employees. This gives them all a very evident conflict of interest as witnesses, and renders their testimony a priori suspect. The other problem is that the Pentagon was hit much later in the morning than the World Trade Center. The Pentagon was in fact struck at 9:43 AM, that is to say about one hour and 29 minutes after American 11 had gone off course and entered the hijacked category at 8: 15 AM. The irony is that it had been an open secret for almost a full hour that American 77 was a potential threat to the capital; American 77 had gone off course at 8:46. The local cable television news outlet, Newschannel 8, had been telling its viewers of an imminent threat for many minutes before the actual impact at the Pentagon. We should also recall that Andrews Air Force Base, with its two combat-ready fighter wings, was only 11 miles from the Pentagon -- just a few minutes' flying time away. Nevertheless, the Air Force proved incapable of getting their assets airborne in time to prevent what could easily have been a decapitation attack on the national capital. It was a record of indescribable ineptitude, which was itself only a cover for active complicity by some key officers in the attack and its geostrategic goals.

Since eyewitnesses who work for the military must be eliminated from consideration, and since so much of the traffic on the roads around the Pentagon owe their daily bread to the US federal government, eyewitness accounts must be relegated to a subordinate position. It is always good forensic practice to accord primacy to the irrefutable physical evidence, as against the testimony of witnesses. In this case, it is indispensable.

The southwest face of the Pentagon was undergoing renovation, and it was therefore more sparsely populated than any other part of the building. The section that was impacted was scheduled to house the command center of the US Navy. The Navy top brass was not present that day. In fact, it is notable that no top-level civilian officials or military officers were killed in the attack. Many of the dead were construction workers and low-level Defense Department employees. The oligarchy, in short, did not pay a serious price for the strike against the Pentagon. The flying object, whatever it was, could have most easily hit the Pentagon from above, in a vertical dive-bombing run. But the flying object went out of its way to hit the empty quarter of the building. As CBS News reported on September 12,2001, "Radar shows that Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two and a half minutes." (Hoffman 6) In addition to multiplying the difficulties, this maneuver also meant that the attacking craft was in the air and exposed to fighter interceptors for an additional two minutes, and that in the most sensitive and presumably well-guarded air space in the world. It is hard to see why real hijackers, intent only on striking the heart of imperialism or of the infidels, would not have hit the eastern part of the building, where they might have been able to number Rumsfeld and other top officials and officers among their victims.

THE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE

In the case of the alleged crash of American 77 into the Pentagon, the official version runs up against insuperable physical problems. In short, the flying object which hit the Pentagon cannot have been American 77. American 77 was a Boeing 757-200, a type of aircraft which is 155 feet long and which has wingspan of 125 feet. When the landing gear are retracted in flight, the plane measures 18 feet from the bottom of its engine to the top of its fuselage. The height of the plane from the bottom of the engines to the top of the tail is 45 feet. The fuselage is 13 feet in diameter.

The original impact punched a hole estimated by Marrs as between 15 and 20 feet wide, and by Meyssan as between 15 and 18 feet wide -- barely wide enough for the fuselage of a 757. Above the impact hole is an intact wall which is not more than 25 feet above the ground, some 20 feet too low to accommodate the tail. The flying object that collided with the Pentagon could not have been a Boeing 757-200.

Each of the five faces of the Pentagon is 280 meters long. The central physical problem of the official version is that, even after the collapse of the building facade on either side of the original small impact hole, the collapsed section of wall measures only 19 meters, in contrast to the plane's 38 meter wing span. Even after the fire had collapsed the section of wall, the hole was only half as wide as it needed to be. This problem was made worse by the fact that, according to the Pentagon and press accounts, the alleged plane came in almost perfectly level, but at an oblique angle of about 45 degrees with the southwest facade of the building. This angle of attack would have increase the stretch of wall impacted by the plane and its wings to some 177 feet.

Given that the position of the impact hole was so close to the ground, attention naturally turned to the Pentagon lawn between the building and a multi-lane highway that passes nearby. Strikingly, the Penta-lawn (as it came to be called) was totally pristine and untouched. It looked like the most perfect putting green at an opulent country club. One or two lamp posts had been knocked down, but others were intact. Of the few vehicles parked near the lawn, one or two had burst into flames, but the others were intact. Everything indicated a flying object much smaller than a 757.

OBSTACLES IN THE FLIGHT PATH

In order to fulfill the specifications of the official version, it must be assumed that American 77 flew across the Penta-lawn at well below treetop level -- the plane must be thought of as skimming along just inches above the ground. The flight path is known with some precision because a number of lamp posts were knocked down. But there were other, more serious obstacles: American 77 had to fly across a construction site which was surrounded by a chain link fence. There was a generator located about where the right engine of the plane would have passed. There were also large spools of cable or wire. The fence, the generator, and the spools present serious difficulties for the official version. The jet engines of a Boeing 757 are about 10 feet in diameter, and the engine assemblies extend 5 feet below the fuselage.

NO COMMERCIAL AIRLINER DEBRIS

Another great anomaly of the Pentagon crash scene is the total absence, with only one very suspicious exception, of identifiable aircraft debris. The Pentagon was unable to show any jet engines, any landing gear, and tail section, any wing fragments, any sections of fuselage, any seats, any bodies, any luggage. The small metal fragments which were shown to the press were about enough to fill a small washbasin. Where was the plane?

After the fact, a search line of about 20 men in uniform appeared on the Penta-lawn in front of the impact zone. Men wearing white shirts and ties also appeared on the lawn and carefully gathered up various fragments of debris that had been scattered there. If this had indeed been the scene of an airplane crash, the National Transportation Safety Board should have gone into action, securing important pieces of evidence and holding all other agencies at bay under the threat of felony prosecution. But at the Pentagon there was no sign of the NTSB. After a while a group of military men in uniform carried away what appeared to be a large container wrapped in a tarpaulin with something large but not excessively heavy inside.

Since the Pentagon is located in Arlington County, Virginia, it was the Arlington County Fire Department which had the primary responsibility for fighting the Pentagon fire. The Arlington County Fire Chief was Ed Plaugher. The Arlington County firefighters were not allowed to approach the immediate impact site; they fought the fire at a distance, from the outside lawn and inside the Pentagon. They were kept away from the place where the airliner was supposed to be by a special Urban Search and Rescue Team from FEMA.

Even so, Ed Plaugher's testimony is valuable. Plaugher was allowed to speak at a Pentagon press conference held on September 12, and run by Victoria Clarke, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, and thus the chief Pentagon spokeswoman. Chief Plaugher was unable to answer some very basic, common-sense questions about what is alleged by the government to have occurred at the Pentagon. Here is an excerpt:

Reporter: Is there anything left of the aircraft at all?

Plaugher: First of all, the question about the aircraft, there are some small pieces of aircraft visible from the interior during this fire-fighting operation I'm talking about, but not large sections. In other words, there's no fuselage sections and that sort of thing. [...]

Reporter: Chief, there are small pieces of the plane virtually all over, out over the highway, tiny pieces. Would you say the plane exploded, virtually exploded on impact due to the fuel or ...?

Plaugher: You know, I'd rather not comment on that. We have a lot of eyewitnesses that can give you better information about what actually happened with the aircraft as it approached. So we don't know. I don't know. [ ...]

Reporter: Where is the jet fuel? Just. ..?

Plaugher: We have what we believe is a puddle right there that the ... what we believe is to be the nose of the aircraft. (The Big Lie 23)


The unique piece of apparent aircraft wreckage associated with the Pentagon crash was found on the Penta-lawn. This fragment matched the color scheme of American Airlines, and seemed to bear a part of the letter "n." A consensus of analysts assembled by Jim Hoffman tends to view this fragment as belonging to the starboard forward portion of the fuselage of a Boeing 757. There is no sign of fire damage, no soot, no black coating as would be typical of a jet fuel fire. The fact that this lone piece of evidence turned up in such utter isolation increases the natural suspicion that it was simply planted as part of an effort to shore up the credibility of the Pentagon's claim that a commercial airliner had hit the building.

COVERUP

The overall impression of a rather maladroit coverup is increased by the behavior of the FBI at and around the crime scene. First, all available video tape from surveillance cameras which might have captured the flying object was confiscated with the speed of lightning. This included video tape from the gas station that was directly under the flight path of the object, and from another gas station a hundred yards or so to the west. It also included video tape from a camera maintained by the Sheraton Washington Hotel. It included every business in the area. The FBI has never released these tapes, and they were not made public by the 9/11 commission. All that has been released has been a few frames from the surveillance camera of one of the gas stations, heavily edited to remove the frame or frames which might have showed the actual flying object itself. The contents of the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder have never been released, under the claim that they were rendered inoperable by the fire. Initially, the FBI claimed that it was assembling the pieces of wreckage or at least inventorying them, but no more was ever heard about any such effort.

EYEWITNESSES

We now cite several eyewitness reports, frankly focusing on those which contradict the official version. FAA air traffic controllers assigned to Dulles Airport, near Washington in northern Virginia, picked up a flying object coming towards Washington DC at high speed. "The first Dulles controller noticed the fast-moving plane at 9:25 AM. Moments later, controllers sounded an alert that an aircraft appeared to be heading directly toward the White House." (Washington Post, November 3, 2001)

Danielle O'Brien, an air traffic controller at Dulles Airport, said in all interview with ABC News that she and her colleagues had observed the radar blip approaching the Pentagon as it carried out this remarkable maneuver. Here is what she later said they all concluded at that time: "The speed, the maneuverability, the way he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane." (ABC News, October 24,2001) This reflects the CBS report we have already examined, according to which "Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two and a half minutes." (Hoffman 6)

Army Captain Lincoln Liebner claimed that he had distinctly seen an American Airlines airliner coming towards the Pentagon at high speed and at a low altitude. (Marrs 29) But Army captains are not likely to undercut the official version; they are under military discipline, and therefore not their own men.

Steve Patterson told a reporter: "The airplane seemed to be able to hold between eight and twelve persons." (Washington Post, September 11, 2001)

Tom Seibert: "We heard something that made the sound of a missile, then we heard a powerful boom." (Washington Post, September 11, 2001)

Mike Walter told CNN: "A plane, a plane from American Airlines. I thought, 'That's not right, it's really low.' And I saw it. I mean, it was like a cruise missile with wings." (Marrs 29)

April Gallop, a Pentagon employee, was working at her job on the morning of 9/11. She was getting ready to take her son to his day care when the impact occurred. "I thought it was a bomb," she recounted later. "I was buried in rubble and my first thought was for my son. I crawled around until I found his stroller. It was all crumpled up into a ball and I was very afraid. But then I heard his voice and I managed to locate him. We crawled out through a hole in the side of the building. Outside they were treating survivors on the grassy lawn. But all the ambulances had left, so a man who was near the scene stepped up, put us in his private car, and drove us to the hospital. The images are burned into my brain."

While in the hospital, Gallop received a series of visits from men in suits, presumably FBI agents. "They never identified themselves or even said which agency they worked for. But I know they were not newsmen because I learned that the Pentagon told news reporters not to cover survivors' stories or they would not get any more stories out of there. The men who visited all said they couldn't tell me what to say, they only wanted to make suggestions. But then they told me what to do, which was to take the [victim compensation fund] money and shut up. They also kept insisting that a plane hit the building. They repeated this over and over. But I was there and I never saw a plane or even debris from a plane. I figure the plane story is there to brainwash people." (Marrs 26)

Christine Peterson; "My mind could not comprehend what happened. Where did the plane go? ... But there was no plane visible, only huge billows of smoke and torrents of fire." (911research.wtc7.net)

DeChiaro: "My brain could not resolve the fact that it was a plane because it only seemed like a small hole in the building. No tail. No wings. No nothing." (911research.wtc7.net)

Moran: "I saw the flash and subsequent fireball rise approximately 200 feet above the Pentagon. There was a large explosion noise and the low frequency sound echo that comes with this type of sound. Associated with that was the increase in air pressure, momentarily, like a small gust of wind. For those formerly in the military, it sounded like a 2000lb bomb going off 1/2 mile in front of you." (911research.wtc7.net)

Perkal: "Even before stepping outside I could smell the cordite. Then I knew explosives had been set off somewhere." (911research.wtc7.net)

Joel Sucherman thought that he had seen an American Airlines plane, "But whoever was flying the plane made no attempt to change direction. It was coming in at a high rate of speed, but not at a steep angle -- almost like a heat-seeking missile was locked on its target and staying dead on course." ("Journalist Witnesses Pentagon Crash," eWeek, September 13, 2001)

Dick Cheney later recalled how he had first learned of the attack on the Pentagon: "The first reports on the Pentagon attack suggested a helicopter and then a private jet." (Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2001)

Later, in an interview with Parade Magazine, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld himself also referred to the object which hit the Pentagon as a "missile." (Marrs 29) Was this a Freudian slip by the loquacious defense chief?

The lead pilot of the interceptor group sent from Langley AFB said later: "I reverted to the Russian threat .... I'm thinking cruise missile threat from the sea. You look down and you see the Pentagon burning and I thought the bastards snuck one by us .... [Y]ou couldn't see any airplanes, and no one told us anything." (9/11 commission 45) This pilot is in effect reporting that the damage he observed at the Pentagon was compatible with a cruise missile explosion. His explicit citing of a cruise missile should not be neglected.

What then is the origin of the claim that the Pentagon was hit by a Boeing 757, and specifically by American 77? During the first 9/11 official press conference by the Defense Department, Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Craig Quigley was unable to offer any specifics about what he was at that time calling an "allegedly hijacked commercial aircraft." (Defense Link Dod, 11 September 2001) During the course of the afternoon, the new party line that American 77 had hit the Pentagon was spread by anonymous military leakers. According to the Los Angeles Times of 9/11, officials "speaking under the condition of anonymity" had briefed journalists that the flying object which had crashed into the Pentagon was American 77.

THE FIVE BELATED FRAMES OF MARCH 2002

The only available photographic evidence for the events at the Pentagon emerged on March 6, 2002, when five US news organizations were able to obtain a limited number of frames from a security camera in a Pentagon parking lot somewhat to the west of the point of impact. (Washington Post, March 7, 2002)

One frame showed a bright, orange-colored fireball, but there was no sign of an American Airlines jet. The Washington Post thought it saw a small, blurry white object. Whatever is shown in this frame has a tail that is at most half as tall as the Pentagon facade, but the tail of a real Boeing 757 would be almost as tall as the Pentagon itself, and possibly taller, depending on how close to the ground it was flying. American Airlines, furthermore, has always preferred to keep the fuselages of its planes gleaming silver, not white. The frames also show a thin trail of white smoke left behind by the flying machine. This should not be confused with the condensation trails which are left behind by planes flying in the extremely cold air of the higher altitudes. Apart from a slight darkening, jets flying near the ground leave very little trail of any kind behind them. As Gerhard Wisnewski points out, "Such a smoke trail does not speak at all for the presence of a jet, but for a rocket." (Wisnewski 154)

Thierry Meyssan's Pentagate contained an authoritative assessment of the explosion at the Pentagon, taking into account what was seen on the selected and censored frames of video tape released by the FBI after many months. This study was contributed by Colonel Pierre-Henri Bunel. Bunel, a French artilleryman and graduate of the world-famous Ecole Militaire of St. Cyr, the French equivalent of West Point and Sandhurst, was a battlefield damage assessment officer who served in the first Gulf War of 1991. One of Bunel's fundamental points is a discussion of the different types of explosions. His focus is the speed of the shock wave which each type of explosion produces:

Explosive materials are divided into two groups, according to their progressiveness [i.e., the speed of propagation of their shock wave].

Explosives produce a shock wave whose speed of propagation is superior to a value of about six thousand feet per second. One says that they "detonate." Explosive materials whose shock wave speed is lower than that do not detonate. They deflagrate. This is the case, for example, of gunpowder or hydrocarbons.

Jet fuel, which is similar to kerosene, does not possess the high explosive power of cordite or other materials used for making bombs and conventional missile warheads. The most jet fuel can manage is deflagration; it is not powerful enough to generate a detonation. The frames of the Pentagon being hit show a fireball which is a white- ot, brilliant fireball attaining some 130 feet in height, thus indicating a powerful detonation, most likely caused by high explosives of some type. Compare this to the jet fuel explosion involving the South Tower of the World Trade Center, where a cloud of jet fuel went from yellow to orange to black as the fuel was consumed. The evidence again suggests that a large commercial airliner was not involved, but rather some form of missile.

This argument is supported by the white vapor or exhaust trail of the flying object as shown on the Pentagon's own video frames. This is not the exhaust of fan jets running on kerosene fuel, since this exhaust trail would be darker if it were visible at all so close to the ground. (Pentagate 67 ff.)


So much for the exhaust trail and fireball observed at the outer facade of the Pentagon. Another issue posed by the Pentagon events is the ability of the flying object to penetrate several rings of the large building's structure. Bunel reminds us here of the bunker- busting bombs used during the Gulf War of 1991, and much improved since. Bunel notes that "for certain very hard fortifications, one even finds that there are multi-charged weapons. The first charges fracture the concrete, while the later one or ones penetrate and detonate. In general, anti-concrete charges are hollow charges. The jet of energy and melted materials penetrates the fortification and spreads quantities of hot materials inside which are propelled by a column of energy which pierces the walls like a punch. The great heat produced by the detonation of the hollow charge sets fire to everything that is combustible inside." (Pentagate 71 )

Colonel Bunel discusses the flight patterns of cruise missiles, which generally have a launch phase, a cruise phase, and an acceleration phase as they are approaching the target, so that they attain their maximum speed just before impact. He also points out that cruise missiles also carry out an end-course correction in order to impact the target at precisely the point and angle of attack desired. According to Bunel, "that is why it so often happens that the missile ends its cruising flight with a tight turn that allows it to adopt the right alignment. A witness might observe that the missile reduces its engine power before throttling back up." (Pentagate 72) This would account for the spectacular 270 degree turn carried out by the flying object that hit the Pentagon, while descending 7,000 feet in two minutes. It is far more plausible that this extremely demanding maneuver was carried out by the computerized, pre-programmed guidance system of a cruise missile, than that it was due to the dubious flying skills of the notorious bungler, Hani Hanjour.

Bunel also points out that the firemen shown fighting the Pentagon fire in the available photographs are not using foam, as they would for a jet-fuel fire, but a water-based mixture. They are using water hoses, not foam cannons. There is some evidence of foam, but this appears to be limited to one or two vehicles on the Pentagon lawn that burst into flames as the flying object hit; their gasoline fuel tanks were what required the foam, and not the larger fire in the Pentagon building itself.

Bunel examines the pictures published by the Department of Defense as allegedly showing the maximum penetration of the flying object that hit the Pentagon, which managed to punch a hole 7 feet in diameter in the inner wall of the third ring in from the outside facade.

The appearance of the perforation in the wall certainly resembles the effects of anti- concrete hollow charges that I have been able to observe on a number of battlefields. These weapons are characterized by their "jet" ... this jet pierces concrete through many feet of thickness. It could thus pierce five thick walls of the building without any problem. Five walls out of six because the facade was already perforated by the delivery system itself. (Pentagate 84)


Based on these considerations, and with special reference to his analysis of the photo of the inner wall of the third ring, Colonel Bunel offers the following hypothesis:

This photo, and the effects described in the official version, lead me therefore to think that the detonation that struck the building was that of a high-powered hollow charge used to destroy hardened buildings and carried by an aerial vehicle, a missile. (Pentagate 85-86)

WHY NO AIR DEFENSE OF THE PENTAGON?

In 2001, the Pentagon should have been one of the best-defended points on earth. Nevertheless, it was hit by a flying object carrying a warhead at 9:43 AM, one hour and twenty-nine minutes after American 11 had been hijacked. For the official version, this remains an acute embarrassment and an insoluble mystery. It is widely reported, and even more widely assumed, that the Pentagon was equipped with powerful batteries of surface to air missiles. This is virtually impossible to confirm, since the details of defense dispositions are all strictly classified. The hypothesis of a cruise missile fired off by a military unit in support of the 9/11 putsch helps solve problems here as well. Military aircraft of all types, including cruise missiles, are equipped with a friend-foe indicator which allows the US side to distinguish its own (and allied) air assets from hostile objects. If it was indeed a US cruise missile which hit the Pentagon, then it is likely that such a cruise missile would have carried a friend-foe indicator signaling that it was a military asset of the US side. This feature may well have helped to neutralize or defeat the Pentagon's air defense system: the incoming object may have been perceived as a friendly one. But there may be further complications.

In testimony to the 9/11 commission, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta recounted what he had seen in the White House Bunker. Mineta had arrived at the Presidential Emergency Operating Center soon after the South Tower had been hit. Mineta testified:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?" And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand! Have you heard anything to the contrary? Well at the time, I didn't know what all that meant. ...[That was the] flight that came into the Pentagon." (Marrs 30)


To the question of whether the orders being referred to involved shooting down the incoming flying object, Mineta replied:

Well, I don't know that specifically. I do know that the [interceptor] airplanes were scrambled from Langley or from Norfolk, the Norfolk area, and so I did not know about the order specifically other than to listening to that other conversation .... Subsequently, I found that out.


This exchange poses a number of important issues. It has been interpreted as the repeated confirmation of an order to shoot down wayward aircraft that refused to respond to orders. If these conversations actually happened, and if Cheney had indeed issued the order to "take out" planes that did not respond to orders from air traffic controllers, then we must wonder why the aircraft approaching the Pentagon was not in fact shot down. Since that did not happen, it may be that the unstated terms of Cheney's exchanges with the "young man" were based on something else. Was the premise here in fact the elusive stand-down order which in the opinion of some would have been necessary to cripple US air defense to the extent that occurred on September 11? If this is so, then what was being repeatedly confirmed here was an order not to shoot down the incoming flight. This latter interpretation is perfectly possible, based on the literal text of what Mineta says he heard.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:04 am

CHAPTER VIII: SHANKSVILLE

United 93 took off from Newark Airport at 8:42 after a 40-minute delay. It left the ground just as the hijacking of United 175 out of Boston was becoming known to the FAA. The airplane headed west, and its hijacking became known at 9:36. At this point United 93 turned off its transponder and headed back towards the east. Again, the moment the transponder channel ceased to operate is the likely moment when Global Hawk or some other system of remote control assumed control of the aircraft.

Around this time, Bush and Cheney were discussing the need to authorize shoot-downs of civilian airliners by the pilots in the Combat Air Patrols the Air Force was now straining to deploy. Clarke told the teleconference of key agencies: "Three decisions. One, the President has ordered the use of force against aircraft deemed to be hostile. Two, the White House is also requesting fighter escort of Air Force One. Three, and this applies to all agencies, we are initiating COG. Please activate your alternate command center and move staff to them immediately." (Bamford 200466) COG was continuity in government, the centerpiece of the long-standing machinery for emergency rule from bunker complexes which had been developed over the years, including with the help of figures like Oliver North and Buster Horton. Clarke spoke at around 9:55 AM.

Soon after, the authorization to open fire on hijacked aircraft that refused to obey the instructions of interceptor jets passed down the chain of command. Bamford, with access to interviews with 9/11 insiders, portrays this moment: "Sitting in the glassed-in Battle Cab of NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Operations Center [NEADS] at Rome, New York, Air Force Colonel Robert Marr received the call. Then he sen1: out word to air traffic controllers to instruct fighter pilots to destroy the United jetliner and any other threatening passenger plane. 'United Airlines flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington DC,' said Marr. Maj. Daniel Nash, the F-15 pilot from Cape Cod, heard the message while patrolling over Manhattan. 'The New York controller did come over the radio and say if we have another hijacked plane we're going to have to shoot it down,' he said. 'From where we were sitting, you could see there were people dying and it had to stop. So if that's what it's going to take, that was our job. We would have done it." (Bamford 2004 66)

So what was the U.S. air defense posture over southern Pennsylvania at about 10 a.m. -- 74 minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and about a half-hour after air traffic controllers and United started to suspect that Flight 93 had been hijacked? The 9/11 commission claimed that NORAD pilots never got a shoot-down order in time to impact the course of United 93: "The Vice President was mistaken in his belief that shootdown authorization had been passed to the pilots flying at NORAD's direction." (44) According to the commission, the first fighters to operate under a shootdown order were fighters of the 133th Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard, operating from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and responding to a direct appeal from the Secret Service. The first of these fighters, the 9/11 commission says, took off at 10:38, and then established a Combat Air Patrol over the capital by 10:45. At 9:55, the Page 237 Secret Service ordered all pilots to defend the White House at all costs. Around this time also, Cheney had his ambiguous exchanges with the "young man" who kept asking him whether his orders stood as a plane approached Washington DC. The young man told Cheney that Air Force fighters were close to the hijacked plane.

CBS reported before 10:06 -- just as the flight of United 93 was ending -- that two F-16s were on the tail of United 93. (AP, September 13,2001; Nashua Telegraph, September 13, 2001) Some time later, an Air Traffic Controller working for the FAA, ignoring the blanket ban imposed on public statements by government officials with inside knowledge of the 9/11 events, said that an F- 6 had closely followed United 93, even making 360 degree turns to stay in close range of the airliner. The federal flight controller said the F- 16 was "in hot pursuit" of the hijacked United jet. "He must have seen the whole thing," an unnamed aviation official said. (Independent, August 13, 2002; CBS News)

According to a Reuters report dated September 13, 2001 the FBI was at that point refusing to rule out that Flight 93 was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet before it crashed in Pennsylvania. Citing indications that this plane was indeed shot down, this report stated: "Pennsylvania state police officials said on Thursday [September 13] debris from the plane had been found up to 8 miles away [from the crash site] in a residential community where local media have quoted residents as speaking of a second plane in the area and burning debris falling from the sky." Finding debris so far from the crash site indicates that the aircraft was disintegrating well before it hit the ground, as would be the case if it had been shot down. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on September 12 that among debris found miles from the crash site were "clothing, books, papers and what appeared to be human remains."

Shortly after the crash, rumors began circulating in the local community that United 93 had been shot down by a U.S. fighter jet, but had no authoritative confirmation. The news desk at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was contacted September 22 by the Idaho Observer. The editor confirmed the news release and stood by the information contained in it. The editor also said that, although the FBI later changed its story, "The FBI confirmed to us that the debris came from that airliner!" (The Idaho Observer, October 2001)

Rumsfeld, the FBI, and NORAD soon united on a common line: United 93 had not been shot down. The Bush administration was transparently eager to avoid the opprobrium of having shot down a commercial airliner carrying American citizens; this would have exposed the regime as impotent to defend the lives of its own citizens, but able to kill some of those citizens to protect top oligarchs in the White House and other Washington buildings. This would have led to an outcry from the victims' families far beyond anything that was in fact observed.

The other complicating factor was that United 93 appeared to have been the scene of a partially successful US citizens' counterattack against the shadowy enemy, on a day which otherwise offered only stories of US incompetence, bungling, and abject defeat. This was the version of events which was developed around a cell phone call made around 9:45 EDT by United 93 passenger Todd Beamer to Lisa Jefferson of the GTE Airfone Customer Care Center in Oakbrook, Illinois near Chicago. This call lasted slightly more than 15 minutes, according to published accounts. It was towards the end of this conversation that Todd Beamer told Lisa Jefferson that he and a group of other passengers had decided to storm the cockpit and overpower the hijackers. Todd asked Lisa to recite the Lord's prayer with him, and then he pronounced the famous words: "Let's roll!" (Beamer 216) "Let's roll!" became the symbol of the resistance of the American people against terrorist fanatics and murderers.

Todd Beamer had been on the phone with Lisa Jefferson, and not with his own wife, Lisa Beamer. According to her account, Jefferson had offered to put the call through to Lisa Beamer, but Todd had, strangely enough, declined. It was from Ms. Jefferson that Mrs. Beamer obtained the story which made her husband and herself famous. Ms. Beamer soon appeared on Good Morning America, Primetime, NBC Dateline, CNN's Larry King Live, and other television programs. She was then invited to attend Bush's address to the joint session of Congress, where she sat next to Joyce Rumsfeld, the wife of the Pentagon boss. Early in his speech, Bush intoned:

In the normal course of events, presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the union. Tonight, no such report is needed. It has already been delivered by the American people. We have seen it in the courage of passengers who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground. Passengers like an exceptional man named Todd Beamer. And would you please help me to welcome his wife, Lisa Beamer, here tonight?"


As Ms. Beamer retells it, "The room erupted in applause The entire Congress of the United States of America rose to its feet in one motion, so almost instinctively, I rose as well. The Congress applauded and applauded, and it was the most humbling experience of my life to know that they were applauding me, in an indirect effort to express their appreciation to Todd and the other heroes aboard Flight 93. I was overwhelmed." (Beamer 247-248)

With that, the reality of United 93 had been eclipsed by the propaganda needs of the Bush machine. The "Let's roll!" story originally had the passengers breaking into the cockpit and struggling for the controls with the hijackers, resulting in the crash. Later, during 2003, the FBI backed away from this story and fell back on a second version which described the hijackers deciding to crash the plane into the ground as passengers were about to force their way into the cockpit. The FBI has never let the general public have a transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder, which apparently survived. The FBI has played that CVR tape to a gathering of the United 93 victims' families, but only after swearing them to secrecy. Finally, small portions of the tape were played during the 9/1 1 commission hearings in the spring of 2004.

The official story has evolved over time. As CNN noted just before the release of the 9/11 commission report in late July 2004: "In the weeks and months after the attacks, there were reports that officials believed passengers had overtaken the plane, forcing it to crash in the field in Pennsylvania. However, last year, officials began backing away from that theory. [The 9/11 commission report] gives no indication that passengers ever broke through the cockpit door, but it makes clear that passengers' actions thwarted the plans of the terrorists." ( http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/07/22/91 ... index.html )

The "Let's roll!" story, despite some doubts about the technical feasibility of the in-flight cell phone call to Lisa Jefferson, may be real. It certainly does appear that the passengers were about to take back the plane. It also appears that Global Hawk, or whatever the system of remote control was which was supposed to take control of United 93, had malfunctioned in the case of this flight. The pilot and co-pilot had reportedly been killed, but on board United 93 were Donald F. Greene, who was an experienced pilot of an amphibious, single-engined, four-seater private plane, which he used to fly from his home near Greenwich, Connecticut to northern Maine. There was also Andrew Garcia, a former Air Traffic Controller with the California National Guard. (Longman 182) These two, with much assistance from Air Traffic Controllers and other personnel, might well have been able to land the aircraft. But this would have posed immense problems for the entire official 9/11 story. An aircraft safely landed meant, in all probability, living hijackers who could have been interrogated. What would their cover story have been? What would they have revealed about their own intentions and their own understanding of what they were doing? Would their testimony have exploded the official version? And what if there simply were no hijackers on board? The official version would fall to the ground. It was a risk that the terrorist controllers could not afford to run. And then again, there was the aircraft. Would a forensic examination have revealed the presence of Global Hawk, defective or otherwise, or of some other remote control guidance system? Would the FBI have succeeded in destroying this evidence as well? Despite the prolific capabilities of the FBI in destroying evidence, this might have been beyond their powers. These considerations point, along with abundant physical evidence and a large portion of the eyewitness accounts, towards the conclusion that United 93 was shot down to destroy evidence and silence suspects and witnesses forever.

UA93 was identified as a hijack at 9:16 AM. At 9:24, NORAD ordered three F-16s from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to scramble. They were airborne at 9:30. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz confirmed a few days later on TV that "we were already tracking that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania." At 9:35 AM, three F-16s were ordered to "protect the White House at all costs" when it turned towards the capital. At 10:06 AM. it crashed at Shanksville, just minutes' flying time from Washington at full throttle.

Based on the plane's easterly course, the official consensus view was that Flight 93 was headed toward Washington for a strike on the White House or the Capitol. The 9/11 commission has endorsed this notion. But in 2002, the London Times, quoting U.S. intelligence sources and noting the plane's low altitude and erratic course, suggested that the real target might have been a nearby nuclear power plant. The Three Mile Island plant, near Harrisburg, was about than 10 or 15 minutes' flying time away. An attack on a nuclear reactor might have caused severe disruptions, although it should also be stressed that the protective shell of a US nuclear reactor is designed to protect the vessel by resisting the impact of a crashing airliner. Oliver North told Fox News that he thought Flight 93 was headed towards Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, where the national emergency military command center is located.

At approximately 9:58 AM, roughly eight minutes before impact, a 911 emergency dispatcher in neighboring Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, took a call from a distraught passenger, Edward Felt, who said he had locked himself in the bathroom of Flight 93, and reported that the plane had been hijacked. The caller said there had been an explosion aboard the plane and that he could see white smoke. Authorities have never been able to explain this report, and the 911 tape itself was immediately confiscated by the inevitable FBI. In addition, the supervisor who took the call has been gagged by the FBI. The FBI evidently has not made the full recording of this call public, despite their evident desire to discredit this report. Cell phone calls from the passengers all stopped about 9:58 AM -- roughly the same time that the caller to 911 in Westmoreland County stated there had been an explosion. The plane didn't come down until 10;06 -- leaving an 8-minute gap of unexplained flying time, and thus a great mystery. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001)

PHYSICAL EVIDENCE

The former mine where the plane crashed is composed of very soft soil, and searchers said that much of the wreckage was found buried 20-25 feet below the large crater. But despite that, there was also widely scattered debris in the immediate vicinity and also some much farther away. Considerable debris washed up more than two miles away at Indian Lake, and a canceled check and brokerage statement from the plane was found in a deep valley some eight miles away later that week.

The official version insists the plane exploded on impact, yet a one-ton section of the engine was found over a mile away and other light debris was found scattered over eight miles away. This account is confirmed by a number of media accounts. Some of the details may vary -- at least one version has a half-ton piece of jet engine being found over a mile away -- but most accounts converge on concentrations of debris two, three, and eight miles away. Needless to say, this indicates that the end of United 93 was caused by an explosion within the aircraft or a missile -- almost certainly fired by the US Force pursuant to an order from Bush and Cheney -- rather than a crash provoked by an altercation between passengers and hijackers in the cockpit, or as a result of a desperate decision by the hijackers to dive the plane into the ground because they feared that the seizure of the cockpit by passengers was imminent. The FBI has tried to account for the widely scattered debris by citing the wind. As we read in Jere Longman's rendering of the official version: "Debris was found as far as eight miles from the crash of flight 93, in a southeast direction, but this airborne material had traveled from the crater in the direction of the prevailing wind." But this only makes sense if the plane had broken up in mid-air, which is exactly the conclusion which the FBI was seeking to disprove. While the FBI has asserted the plane was largely obliterated by the roughly 500 mph impact, they also conceded that an engine -- or at least a 1,000-pound fragment of one -- was found "a considerable distance" from the main impact crater. That information further buttresses the shoot-down theory, since a heat-seeking, air-to-air Sidewinder missile from an F-16 would likely have impacted one of the Boeing 757's two large engines.

The mayor of Shanksville, Ernie Stull, changed his story several times after giving interviews to reporters and investigators. (Wisnewski 2003 197-198; Spiegel, September 8, 2003) But one of his first comments after the demise of United 93 was that he knew of two people who had heard a missile. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001) The presence of debris at Indian Lake, between 1.5 and 2 miles away, also supports the theory that there had been a mid-air explosion of some kind before United 93 hit the ground. Debris rained down on the lake; this is almost impossible to account for if the plane had actually been intact when it hit the ground. "It was mainly mail, bits of in-flight magazine and scraps of seat cloth," according to witness Tom Spinelli." The authorities say it was blown here by the wind. " But there was only a 10 mile per hour breeze and you were a mile and a half away?" Light debris was also found eight miles away in New Baltimore. The FBI said the impact bounced it there. But the few pieces of surviving fuselage, in the words of local coroner Wallace Miller, were "no bigger than a carry-on bag."

EYEWITNESSES

Laura Temyer, who lives in Hooversville, several miles north of the crash site, was hanging some wash on the line outside when she heard an airplane pass overhead. That struck her as unusual since she had just heard on TV that all flights had been ordered grounded.

She told the Philadelphia Daily News: "I heard like a boom and the engine sounded funny. I heard two more booms -- and then I did not hear anything." Temyer's explanation for what she heard is this: "I think the plane was shot down." Temyer told a reporter she had twice told her story to the FBI. She also insists that people she knows in state law enforcement agreed with her story, namely that the plane was shot down and that decompression sucked objects from the aircraft, which would account for the wide debris field.

Nevin Lambert, a neighbor, had a different account. According to him, the plane seemed to be fully, or largely, intact. "I didn't see no smoke, nothing," said, this elderly farmer, who witnessed the crash from his side yard less than a half-mile away. Lambert added that he also later found a couple of pieces of debris, one, a piece of metal, less than 12 inches across, with some insulation attached. A caller to the Howard Stern Radio Show related the story of how he saw Flight 93 in flames while it was in the air and also saw two other aircraft circling it. (Howard Stern Show, April 21 2004)

OTHER AIRCRAFT

A minimum of six witnesses claimed to have seen a small military-type plane in the vicinity shortly before UA93 crashed. Some-spoke of a mysterious white jet which they had observed in the vicinity. The FBI stubbornly denied the presence of any other aircraft. The London Daily Mirror wondered later whether "in the moments before the airliner piled into the black, spongey earth at 575 miles per hour did an American fighter pilot have to do the unthinkable and shoot down a US civil airliner?"

Susan McElwain, 51, who lived two miles from the crash site, told a British reporter that she had seen a white aircraft pass directly over her head. 'It came right over me, I reckon just 40 or 50ft above my mini-van," she said. "It was so low I ducked instinctively. It was traveling real fast, but hardly made any sound. Then it disappeared behind some trees. A few seconds later I heard this great explosion and saw this fireball rise up over the trees, so I figured the jet had crashed. The ground really shook. So I dialed 911 and told them what happened. I'd heard nothing about the other attacks and it was only when I got home and saw the TV that I realized it wasn't the white jet, but Flight 93. I didn't think much more about it until the authorities started to say there had been no other plane. The plane I saw was heading right to the point where Flight 93 crashed and must have been there at the very moment it came down. There's no way I imagined this plane -- it was so low it was virtually on top of me. It was white with no markings but it was definitely military, it just had that look. It had two rear engines, a big fin on the back like a spoiler on the back of a car and with two upright fins at the side. I haven't found one like it on the internet. It definitely wasn't one of those executive jets. The FBI came and talked to me and said there was no plane around. Then they changed their story and tried to say it was a plane taking pictures of the crash 3,000 feet up. But I saw it and it was there before the crash and it was 40 feet above my head. They did not want my story -- nobody here did." (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Ms. McElwain, a special education teacher, refused to accept the official version of what she saw, in part because of a conversation she had several hours after the fact with the wife of friend of the family who is in the Air Force. According to McElwain, that friend "said her husband had called her that morning and said 'I can't talk, but we've just shot a plane down."' "I presumed they meant Flight 93.1 have no doubt those brave people on board tried to do something, but I don't believe what happened on the plane brought it down. If they shot it down, or something else happened, everyone, especially the victims' families, have a right to know." (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Lee Purbaugh, aged 32, was the sole person to see the final seconds of Flight 93 as it descended on the former strip-mining land at precisely 10.06 AM -- and he also saw the white jet. He was at his job at the Rollock Inc. scrapyard on a ridge overlooking the point of impact, less than half a mile away. "I heard this real loud noise coming over my head," he told a journalist of the London Daily Mirror. "I looked up and it was Flight 93, barely 50 feet above me. It was coming down in a 45 degree and rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and it just crashed into the ground. There was this big fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke." Lee Purbaugh also saw the mysterious other plane; "Yes, there was another plane. I didn't get a good look but it was white and it circled the area about twice and then it flew off over the horizon."

Tom Spinelli, 28, was working at India Lake Marina, a mile and a half away. "I saw the white plane," he reported. "It was flying around all over the place like it was looking for something. I saw it before and after the crash."

At 9:22 AM a sonic boom, almost certainly caused by supersonic f1ight, was registered up by a seismic monitoring station in southern Pennsylvania, 60 miles from Shanksville. (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Kathy Blades, who was in her small summer cottage with her son about a quarter-mile from the impact site, also reported seeing a white aircraft. Blades and her son ran outside after they heard the crash and saw the jet, which according to them had sleek back wings [sic] and an angled cockpit, race overhead. "My son said, 'I think we're under attack!"' Blades remembered.

A few days after the crash, the FBI tried to provide a plausible explanation for this embarrassing and mysterious white jet which the various witnesses had identified. The FBI now claimed that a private Falcon 20 jet bound for nearby Johnstown was in the vicinity and was asked by authorities to descend and help survey the crash site. But the authorities failed to provide the identity of the owner of the jet, and also could not justify why it was still flying some 40 minutes after the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered all planes to land at the nearest airport. "I think it was shot down," was the opinion of Dennis Mock, who did not see United 93 come down, but who lived closest to the crash site, immediately to the west of the crater. "That's what people around here think," he added. (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Even though United 93 had supposedly been flying at an altitude of less than 10,000 feet, there was no tail section, no jet engines, no large sections of fuselage in view anywhere near the impact crater. This can be compared to the crash scene at Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Here a Boeing 747 was destroyed by a bomb at an altitude of 30,000 feet. One whole side of the forward part of the plane and many other pieces were clearly identifiable as coming from a large commercial airliner. If there were a plane in Shanksville, it appeared to have disappeared into the ground -- as in the case of the Valujet which had crashed into the Everglades swamp in 1994. But the Pennsylvania countryside was not the Everglades. Here is the depiction of the last moments of United 93 from former New York Times reporter Jere Longman's Among the Heroes, probably the most sustained attempt to present the official version of this flight:

Traveling at 575 miles per hour, the 757 had inverted and hit the spongy earth at a 45-degree angle, tunneling toward a limestone reef at the edge of a reclaimed strip mine. Because the plane crashed upside down, the engines and stowed landing gear thrust upward and forward. The ground became littered with the fractured underbelly of the plane, electronics, shredded wiring. The cockpit and first class shattered like the point of a pencil, and remnants sprayed into a line of hemlock pine trees. The fuselage accordioned on itself more than thirty feet into the porous, backfilled ground. It was as if a marble had been dropped into water. (Longman 215)


Longman is not interested in the shootdown hypothesis, nor does he wonder much about the presence of other aircraft in the area. But Longman must also deal with the amazement of the local emergency workers, who found that they were not dealing with a normal crash site. Here is Longman's reconstruction of what one rescuer saw as he approached the crash site:

As he approached the scene, adrenaline thoughts raced through [the rescuer's] head. What are we going to see? Is there going to be a fire in the fuselage? Will people be trapped? He jumped out of his truck and noticed small fires in different places, but he could not see the plane.

Where is it?

He was sure a commercial airliner had crashed, but he saw only small broken pieces. A 757 is composed of six hundred twenty-six thousand parts, fastened by six hundred thousand bolts and rivets, connected with sixty miles of wire. That's all that he could see now, fragmented parts and rivets and wires, a catastrophic uncoiling. Other firemen and townspeople at the scene had the same quizzical looks. Metal and plastic and paper were everywhere, in the trees, on the ground, a shirt, a shoe, underwear, a backless seat sitting in its aluminum track, a remnant of seat cushion smoking on the roof of a nearby cabin. The pine trees were peppered with shrapnel. King saw the pushed-up earth and crater that measured thirty feet or more in diameter, and he knew it had been the point of impact. He sent a crew to hose down the smoldering debris, but still he did not realize what had plunged into the disturbed ground. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think half the plane was down there," King said.

Maybe it wasn't a commercial airliner.

The rumors started. There were two hundred people on the plane, four hundred. There were no passengers, only mail. Bewilderment prevailed. No one knew anything for certain. King sent his men into the woods to search for the fuselage, and they kept coming back and telling him, 'Rick. There's nothing.' (Longman 215-216)


Longman struggles to account for the pulverized state of the aircraft, which is simply not consistent with the crash of an airplane which had not already broken up in mid-air:

In the hours after the crash, Pennsylvania state troopers said that they had seen no piece of the plane larger than a phone book. Later, an eight-by-seven foot section of the fuselage containing several windows would be found. It was about the size of the hood of a car. A piece of one engine, weighing a thousand pounds, landed more than a hundred yards from the crater, apparently jettisoned upward in a tremendous arc. The cockpit data recorder, one of the so-called black boxes, would be excavated fifteen feet into the crater and the cockpit voice recorder at twenty-five feet. Ash and paper, a canceled check, a charred brokerage statement, traveled eight miles from the crash on a prevailing wind. Brush fires would spark up in the woods for more than a week. Where were the people? Where were the bodies? (Longman 215-216)


Notice that Longman slyly diverges from the eyewitness accounts in attempting to locate the jet engine wreckage much closer to the impact crater -- 100 yards instead of about a mile. But Longman cannot avoid the extraordinary pulverization of the plane: "'You couldn't take a step without stepping on some part of that aircraft," said Craig of the FBI ... two weeks before Christmas, rivets and wires littered the field as if someone had spilled a plane-building kit. Ninety- five percent of the airplane had been recovered, the FBI said, but thousands of splintered pieces lay about in the field." (Longman 262)

There was also the gruesome detail that the human remains collected were not commensurate with the number of passengers. "The collective weight of the forty-four people aboard the plane was seven thousand five hundred pounds, the coroner said. Only six hundred pounds of remains were discovered ...." (Longman 260) According to a reporter: "the largest piece of human tissue found was a section of spine eight inches long." (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

The FBI was adamant that there was no evidence of explosives of any kind having been used. All of this led to speculation not only that United 93 had been shot down by the US Force, but that the plane had been destroyed -- pulverized in mid-air -- by a futuristic weapon based on new physical principles. Wallace Miller, the coroner, commented that he believed the plane had not been shot down, "unless there is some new technology we don't know about." (Longman 264) According to Longman, there was a military aircraft, a Lockheed Hercules C-130 transport plane, about 17 miles away. Such a plane could easily have carried a powerful airborne chemical laser, and this type of directed energy weapon based on new physical principles might have accounted for the physical effects actually observed on the scene.

The FBI was not curious to find out what had actually happened. Coroner Wallace Miller and Dennis Dirkmaat, a forensic anthropologist from Mercyhurst College in Erie PA, had proposed a detailed analysis of the crash site; they wanted to divide the area up into a grid with 60-foot squares. Distribution patterns would have cast light on how the plane struck the ground. The FBI, true to form, refused to allow this investigation. To justify this, they invented a soap opera theory that the investigation was designed to reveal in an invidious fashion who had stormed the cockpit and who had not. According to the FBI: "There was no mystery to solve about the plane. Everyone knew what happened with the plane." (Longman 262) But precisely what is well-known is least understood, as Hegel might have argued.

As of early September 2004, the FBI, which assumed control of the accident investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board, continues to refuse to make public the complete data from either of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. The pretext is, as always, the exigencies of the alleged war on terrorism. It is worth recalling that in the case of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in Queens in November 2001, NTSB officials had made public detailed information about the cockpit voice recorder within less than 36 hours. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001; London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Before departing, the FBI made sure that the crime scene was rendered totally opaque. The crater was filled in with dirt, to be followed by a layer of topsoil. The scorched trees were cut down and shredded into mulch. The FBI was gone two weeks after the crash. (Longman 258) More evidence had gone into the FBI's black hole in a molehill. Still, relatives of the victims had persistent questions for the FBI. Bob Craig of the FBI's evidence gathering team tried to convince them of the official account: "Turn the picture of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center on its side, and, for all intents and purposes, the face of the building is the strip mine in Shanksville. Look at the fireball in the picture. That's what happened." (Longman 260) According to Longman, "conspiracy theorists continued to assert that the plane was shot down, but evidence indicated otherwise."

The FBI later announced that the cockpit voice recorder had been recovered. The FBI at first kept the tape secret, but then agreed to let the bereaved families hear it. The tape was played at Princeton, New Jersey on April 18, 2002. Before they could hear the tape, the families had to sign a special waiver agreeing not to sue the government about any issue arising from the tape. They were forbidden to record the tape, or to take notes. Later, note taking was allowed. The FBI claimed that these procedures were necessary to prevent any damage to the prosecution of Zacarias Moussawi. The families listened through headphones while an FBI transcript was projected on a screen. Some family members later said that the tape raised more questions than it had answered. (Longman 270)

The tragedy of United Airlines flight 93 ended at 10:06 AM Eastern Daylight Time. This was a full 110 minutes, one hour and fifty minutes, after the hijack of United flight 11 from Boston. The US air defense system, usually a well-oiled machine, had failed utterly and completely. Had the air defense system compounded its own failure by shooting down United 93 to prevent the interrogation of hijackers, and the inspection of an aircraft that might have been equipped with Global Hawk? Had the air defense system in this last phase performed the same function as Jack Ruby in the Kennedy assassination -- the elimination of patsies whose testimony might have been fatal to the myth which the leakers and the media were busily constructing even before the tragedy of United 93 was complete?
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:11 am

PART 1 OF 3

CHAPTER IX: "ANGEL IS NEXT" -THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT SPEAKS

From 10:00 a.m. to approximately 8:00 p.m. (on Sept. 11 ), U.S. government officials were not thinking that this was the work of Arab terrorists, but rather that it was an expression of a military coup being carried out by U.S.-based extremists who were capable of provoking a nuclear war. -- Reseau Voltaire, Paris, September 27, 2001

"Sheikh: They [the Americans] were terrified thinking there was a coup." -- ("Bin Laden" tape of December 2001, Meyssan 2002 197)


The current tenant of the White House most probably was not familiar in advance with a detailed outline of the 9/11 plot. He was assisted in not knowing and not acting by his cognitive impairment, his contempt for detailed, accurate information, and his habitual mental lethargy. Whether or not he suspected that something was coming, whether or not he knew this or that detail, are all matters to be determined with the help of open archives and cross-examination of the subject. The guess here is that Bush knew far less than many of his most severe critics might surmise. Bush's crime was not the crime of knowing everything in advance; it was rather the crime of not knowing what he should have known, and of then compounding that by capitulating, by turning the US government and polity in the direction demanded by the terror plotters. Better than "Bush knew," as we will see, is "Bush surrendered." "Bush knew" makes a good political slogan, but it cannot be a guide to understanding the true scope of what actually happened. Students of 9/11 who build their work around the thesis that "Bush knew" are on treacherous ground.

As I pointed out in my 1992 study of Bush 41, the typical model of a Bush presidency is that of a weak and passive executive who comes into office with few ideas beyond the basic desire to rule and to appoint rich cronies to key posts, and who sits in the White House waiting for his networks to tell him what it is he must do. These impulses, naturally, are mediated through the handlers of the White House palace guard. But here lies the danger: when Bush was running for office, it was widely conceded by his supporters that their candidate was a moron, but a moron who would hire the best advisers available, who would guide him through the crises of his presidency. In this sense, the Bush 41 presidency was an oligarchical presidency, with the chief magistrate in fact functioning as the front man for a committee. The events of 9-11 showed the grave danger of such an oligarchical presidency: what happened if the advisors turned out to be traitors, misfits, or absent, as they did on 9/11: the presidency itself was paralyzed and incapable of acting, as occurred during the dark eternity of horror the world experienced as Bush busied himself with reading "My Pet Goat."

If the forces favorable to a policy of open-ended clash of civilizations warfare had been in total control of the government, they might have been able to orchestrate the outbreak of war directly, through an incident involving a target country like: Iraq -- somewhat along the lines of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This would have been enough to convince the mass media and the population. But the coup faction, the golpistas, felt that they needed to convince the state apparatus as well. It is significant that they did not pursue this option. Rather, they felt that they had to shake the state to its foundations, threaten the life of Bush in a number of ways, and run the risk of being caught in some highly treasonous activities, in order to get what they wanted. This can be shown through an analysis of Bush's conduct on 9/11.

As part of his "endless summer" approach to the presidency which had seen him on vacation for over 40% of his time in office up to 9/11, Bush was spending the evening of September 10 at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, a narrow coral island in the Gulf of Mexico, off Sarasota, Florida. This resort, a favorite destination for plutocrats, was billed as "America's greatest tennis resort." Here Bush dined on the evening of September 10 with his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, and a group of Republican politicians and rent seekers. Bush awoke at 6 AM on the morning of September 11, 2001, and went for his habitual jog. But in the night of September 10 to 11, Bush's security detail received a warning that he was in imminent danger. The Sarasota ABC affiliate reported on 9/11: "The warning of imminent danger was delivered in the middle of the night to Secret Service agents guarding the President," said reporter Monica Yadov "and it came exactly four hours and thirty-eight minutes before Mohammed Atta flew an airliner into the World Trade Center. (Hopsicker 2004 40)

ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

On the evening of September 10, Zainlabdeen Omer, a Sudanese national who was a local resident, reported an assassination threat against Bush to the Secret Service. Omer reported that a person he knew had made violent threats against Bush and was now in town, so Omer was worried about Bush's safety. Omer said the person in question was named Ghandi. The next day, 9/11, the Secret Service searched a Sarasota apartment in connection with this report. Three Sudanese men were questioned for about ten hours. The Secret Service also raided a Sarasota beauty supply store, whose owner, identified as "Hakim," told the agents that "Ghandi" was a member of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, a group fighting against the fundamentalist Muslim government in Sudan. (Hopsicker, July 22, 2002) The SPLA, led by US agent John Garang, is an asset of the CIA and the Mossad. It is not possible to determine whether this story represents the danger about which the local ABC station said Bush was warned.

It was at Longboat Key that Bush was the target of a possible assassination attempt. As Bush was preparing for his morning run, a van carrying several Middle Eastern men pulled up to the security post at the Colony's entrance. The men claimed to be a television news crew with a scheduled poolside interview with the president. They asked for a certain Secret Service agent by name. The message was relayed to a Secret Service agent inside the resort, who hadn't heard of the agent mentioned or of plans for an interview. He told the men to contact the president's public relations office in Washington, DC, and had the van turned away. (Longboat Observer, September 26, 2001; Hopsicker 2004 39-48)

This technique may have been the same one used to eliminate General Ahmed Shah Massoud two days earlier. Here a television camera crew composed of suicide bombers had gained access to the legendary anti-Soviet fighter and leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance. After setting up their equipment, a bomb inside their camera had detonated, killing Massoud and others. The official version sees this event as a preparation for 9/11, through attempting to cripple the Northern Alliance which the CIA was sure to use against the Taliban regime. But there is a more cogent view; Massoud was a proud nationalist who would not have taken orders from the CIA and UNOCAL, so it was urgent for the CIA to eliminate him. In the latter case, Bush may have come close to joining Massoud as the victim of the same rogue network of US intelligence which planned 9/11. In any case, the fact that a likely assassination attempt had been foiled would normally have been the basis for canceling the rest of Bush's schedule for the day and for quickly hurrying him back to Washington or some other secure destination. But on 9/11, the most minimal precautions were flaunted. Was it security stripping?

Bush's publicity event at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, on September 11, 2001, had been in the planning phase since August, but was only publicly announced on the morning of September 7. (White House, September 7, 2001) Later that same day of September 7, alleged 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi had traveled to Sarasota for drinks and dinner at a Holiday Inn located two miles down the beach from where Bush was scheduled to stay during his Sarasota visit. (Longboat Observer, November 21, 2001, Washington Post, January 27, 2002) Was this a coincidence, or did it have something to do with a possible assassination attempt on Bush?

On the surface, Bush's security arrangements at the Colony appeared elaborate. Surface-to-air missiles were placed on the roof of the resort (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 10, 2002), and an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) plane circled high overhead. (Sammon 25) Did this represent an enhanced level of protection for Bush in comparison to the usual norm?

At about 8;50 AM (when reports of the first World Trade Center crash were first broadcast), while standing on the Sarasota bay front waiting for the presidential motorcade to pass by, a passerby observed two Middle Eastern men in a dilapidated van "screaming out the windows 'Down with Bush' and raising their fists in the air." The FBl supposedly questioned the source of this report, but it is not clear if this was the same van that had appeared at the Colony security checkpoint. (Longboat Observer, September 26, 2001)

When did Bush learn that American flight 11 had hit the North Tower? There are several reports that Bush was told of the first crash before he arrived at the Booker school. The initial flashes of American 11's crash into the World Trade Center began around 8:48 AM, two minutes after the crash happened. (New York Times, September 15, 2001) Nevertheless, at 9:03 AM, fifteen minutes after a grave emergency was obvious, Bush sat down with a classroom of second-graders and begin a 20-minute photo opportunity? Part of the answer to this may lie in Bush's mental inertia and weak hold on external reality. But it may also be that Bush was being subjected to some form of security stripping by the networks who were carrying out the 9/11 attacks. It should be recalled that the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas was greatly facilitated by the absence of many of the redundant layers of security that usually envelop a traveling president. The many lapses in Bush's personal security on 9/11 suggest that the Secret Service was anything but immune to the rogue network operating behind the scenes.

An alert security detail would have taken Bush out of the Booker school at the first news that American 11 had hit the North Tower. A local reporter commented: "[Bush] could and arguably should have left Emma E. Booker Elementary School immediately, gotten onto Air Force One and left Sarasota without a moment's delay But he didn't." (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 12, 2001)

Months later, Bush offered his famous garbled and impossible account of how he learned of the first plane impacting the WTC. On December 4, 2001, Bush was asked: "How did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?" Bush answered, "1 was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I didn't have much time to think about it." (White House, 12/4/01) Many commentators have noted that the only known film of American 11 hitting the North Tower, the Naudet video, was not broadcast until many hours later. Some have verged into real nonsense, imagining that a secret camera had filmed the first impact and transmitted the pictures to a special television screen set up in the school, all for the edification of Bush. This vastly overestimates the importance of Bush, who was after all just another puppet president. More likely, this garbled version is simply another index of Bush's well-known mental impairment.

The children were opening their books to read a story together when Bush's White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card entered the room and whispered to Bush: " A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack." (San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 2002) Bush did not respond. He did not ask questions. He wanted no further information. He gave no orders or directives. He tasked no bureaucracies. He did literally nothing. Bush had run for president with the admission that he was a person of limited mental ability, but one who would hire the best advisers available. This moment showed the fatal weakness of that formula, of the oligarchical presidency. Now there was no time for options to be prepared; quick action, crisp orders were required -- orders to mobilize all air defenses, to evacuate key sites, to investigate what was happening. Bush had never been qualified for the presidency, and at this moment he proved it: he froze. As Dr. Franks has pointed out, Bush clings obsessively to his routine as a means of preventing the public disintegration of his personality. On 9/11, Bush clung to a routine with a vengeance, even as the world was crumbling around him. And when a head of state and a head of government fumbles, the goal line is wide open behind him. This was the defining moment of the Bush 43 presidency: the raging infantile id paralyzed by fear and dread. And this was Bush's pattern: When an American EP-3E spy plane had been forced down on the coast of China in the spring of 2001, "neither Bush nor Rice seemed anxious about the situation's deteriorating into a hostage crisis .... Bush went to bed around his usual time, before midnight .... In the White House, it was mostly business as usual. Bush came back from Camp David early on Sunday, not because of the crisis, but because bad weather interfered with his outdoor recreation." (Newsweek April 16, 2001)

"MY PET GOAT"

Bush's defense, as summarized by the 9/11 commission was that "the President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening." (9/11 commission report 38) This is exactly the ceremonial conception of the weak presidency, which sees the office as an object of popular emotional cathexis and symbolism, rather than as a policy-making post oriented toward action in the real world. It was left to the foreign press to ask the obvious question: whatever Bush's animadversions might have been, why was he not picked up and carried out? A Canadian reporter noted that "for some reason, Secret Service agents (did) not bustle him away." (Globe and Mail, September 12, 2001) There had in fact been one attempt. A member of Bush's entourage, variously identified as a Secret Service agent or as a Marine from the communications detail, had said, "We're out of here. Can you get everyone ready?" (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 10, 2002) But nothing happened. What strange process was at work behind the scenes to leave Bush as a sitting duck in a highly publicized location at a time of gravest danger? Was security stripping going on in the background? This lackadaisical response of Bush's Secret Service detail contrasts sharply with the aggressive manhandling of Cheney, who was lifted up by main force and carried toward the PEOC, the White House bunker, by Secret Service agents.

As for Bush, he was taking orders from his handlers, as usual. From the back of the room, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer held up a sheet of paper with the words "DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET" written on it in big block letters. (Washington Times, October 7, 2002) In the interval, Bush was listening to a pupil read the celebrated story of "My Pet Goat," while the crisis unfolded around him. This is the interval portrayed so graphically in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911; how long did Bush stay in the classroom after he was told of the second attack. The Tampa Tribune thought he had remained there "for eight or nine minutes" -- until sometime between 9:13 and 9:16. (Tampa Tribune, September 1, 2002) At a certain point a reporter asked Bush, "Mr. President, are you aware of the reports of the plane crash in New York? Is there anything ..." Bush, obedient to the instructions of Ari Fleischer to keep his mouth shut on this topic, responded, "I'll talk about it later." But even now the president did not depart. He tarried to shake hands with Ms. Daniels, the second grade teacher. It was evident that Bush felt no urgency to take any action in particular. "He was taking his good old time .... Bush lingered until the press was gone." According to Bill Sammon, a Bush backer who wrote for the Moonie- controlled Washington Times, Bush here earned the title of "the dawdler in chief" (Sammon 90)

This singularly lethargic conduct by Bush attracted criticism very early on. 9/11 widow and activist Kristen Breitweiser said on the Phil Donahue show: "It was clear that we were under attack. Why didn't the Secret Service whisk (Bush) out of that school? ... (H)e is the commander-in-chief of the United States of America, our country was clearly under attack, it was after the second building was hit. I want to know why he sat there for 25 minutes." (Donahue, August 13, 2002) This critique is all the more justified because of the security warning of the previous night, and the attempted assassination attempt of earlier that same morning.

One way to account for Bush's behavior in the classroom that morning, and perhaps the most likely one, is the notion that Bush simply froze in fear and insecurity about what to do. "We've seen Bush's sense of omnipotence threatened before -- in the hours following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon," wrote Dr. Frank. "All of us were understandably frightened, but Bush's fear at first appeared paralytic: he continued reading to the second grade class he was visiting for a full twenty minutes after he was told that the first tower had been hit. Then he fled for an entire day, serpentining across the country until the coast was clear and he could finally make it back to Washington." (Frank 99)

The 9/11 commission accepted without criticism and even without comment Bush's absurd decision to continue reading the story about the goat while the country was under attack, along with his explanation that this was motivated in his own mind by the desire to project an image of strength -- an answer which suggests that he was more concerned about maintaining appearances in his own delusional world than he was about providing concrete measures of national defense in this world.

Bush went to a private room in the school and conferred with his advisors. Then, at 9:30, he read the following statement:

THE PRESIDENT: Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I, unfortunately, will be going back to Washington after my remarks. Secretary Rod Paige and the Lt. Governor will take the podium and discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at Booker Elementary School for their hospitality.

Today we've had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. I have spoken to the Vice President, to the Governor of New York, to the Director of the FBI, and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families, and to conduct a full- scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.

Terrorism against our nation will not stand. And now if you would join me in a moment of silence. May God bless the victims, their families, and America. Thank you very much.

END 9:31 A.M. EDT


The operative term here is "apparent terrorist attack." As Meyssan argues, the general tone of Bush's remarks, including especially the term "test," might suggest a military conflict or internal insurrection just as easily as terrorism. (Meyssan 2002 47)

Soon after this, Bush left the Booker School for the nearby Sarasota Airport. But before he left, the Secret Service was to receive news of another threat to Bush: As the local paper reported a few days later: "Sarasota barely skirted its own disaster. As it turns out, terrorists targeted the president and Air Force One on Tuesday, maybe even while they were on the ground in Sarasota and certainly not long after. The Secret Service learned of the threat just minutes after Bush left Booker Elementary." (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 16, 2001)

Another account confirms that the Secret Service learned of a new threat to Bush and Air Force One "just minutes after Bush left Booker Elementary." Karl Rove, who was traveling with the president, commented: "They also made it clear they wanted to get us up quickly, and they wanted to get us to a high altitude, because there had been a specific threat made to Air Force One ... A declaration that Air Force One was a target, and said in a way that they called it credible." (New Yorker, October 1, 2001)

Air Force One took off from Sarasota between 9:55 and 9:57 AM, as many news reports confirm. The takeoff was a hurried one, followed by a steep climb to higher altitudes. Communications Director Dan Bartlett remembered, "It was like a rocket. For a good ten minutes, the plane was going almost straight up." (CBS, September 11, 2002) Air Force One began to roll down the Florida runway just as WTC 2 was about to collapse. "As the President sat down in his chair, (he) motioned to the chair across from his desk for me to sit down," recalled Karl Rove. "Before we could, both of us, sit down and put on our seat belts, they were rolling the plane. And they stood that 747 on its tail and got it about 45,000 feet as quick as I think you can get a big thing like that up in the air." (Bamford 2004 63)

However, despite the pattern of grave threat, Air Force One took off without any military fighter protection. This was about one hour after the impact on the South Tower. There was no lack of nearby air bases which should have been on continuous alert: Homestead Air Station was 185 miles from Sarasota, and Tyndall Air Station was 235 miles away. It should have been possible to improvise a small fighter escort in that interval. This poses the question: was fighter cover being denied to Bush by the rogue network, as part of the pattern of security stripping? This question is made more urgent by the fact that, according to most accounts, Air Force One did not get a fighter escort until well over one hour after it had made its emergency takeoff.

"AIR FORCE ONE IS NEXT"

Once in the airplane, Bush was in continuous contact with Cheney and others. Around this time, officials feared that as many as 11 airliners had been hijacked. (CBS, September 11, 2001) Some reports place Bush out of the loop because of communication difficulty, but out of the loop was his father's line from Iran-contra.

Shortly after takeoff, Cheney apparently informed Bush of "a credible threat" to Air Force One. (AP, September 13, 2001) US Representative Adam Putnam said he "had barely settled into his seat on Air Force One ... when he got the news that terrorists apparently had set their sights on the plane." (Orlando Sentinel, September 14, 2001) The Secret Service had received an anonymous message saying: "Air Force One is next." The caller spoke in the code words relating to Air Force One procedures. Colonel Mark Tillman, who was piloting Air Force One, was informed of the threat, and an armed guard was stationed at his cockpit door. The Associated Press reported that the threat came "within the same hour" as the Pentagon crash -- before 10:00 AM, and approximately when the plane took off. (AP, September 13, 2001) The threat contained in this message, "Air Force One is next," would appear to have been distinct from the earlier warning that came upon leaving Booker School, but this cannot be established with total certainty.

Bush wanted to go to Washington, but he was overruled by the White House palace guard. Card told Bush, "We've got to let the dust settle before we go back." (St. Petersburg Times, September 8, 2002) The plane apparently stayed over Sarasota until it was decided where Bush should go. Accounts conflict, but through about 10:35 AM (Washington Post, January 27, 2002), Air Force One "appeared to be going nowhere. The journalists on board -- all of whom were barred from communicating with their offices -- sensed that the plane was flying in big, slow circles." (London Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2001) What was being discussed on the secure phone during this time? Was Cheney communicating the demands of the coup faction to Bush? Was Cheney reporting these demands, or was he joining in urging Bush to accept them? At various points in the narrative, Cheney appears to be acting not just as relayer of information, but as a spokesman for the secret government network which was in action on 9/11. It is thus Cheney, far more than Bush, who must be considered a prime suspect in any serious investigation of 9/11.

"ANGEL IS NEXT"

According to Bob Woodward's canonical mainstream account; "At about 10:30 AM Cheney reached Bush again on Air Force One, which was still on its way toward Washington. The White House had received a threat saying 'Angel is next.' Since Angel was the codeword for Air Force One, it could mean that terrorists had inside information." Allegedly because of this report, Cheney argued that Bush should not return to Washington. "There's still a threat," said Cheney. (Woodward 18) Within minutes, the plane turned away from Washington and flew to Louisiana instead. (Washington Post, January 27, 2002) Was this now a third threat, after the post-Booker threat and the "Air Force One is next" threat? Did the terrorist controllers now add the code word "Angel" to further document their insider status, and their possible access to nuclear codes? Or are we dealing with two versions of the same threat?

We will return to "Angel is next." This represents the single most important clue as to the sponsorship of 9/11, since it was at this point that the sponsors showed their hand. They were not located in a cave in Afghanistan, but were rather a network located high within the US government and military. It was a moment of capital importance, the thread which, if properly pulled, will unravel the entire fabric of 9/11 deceit.

Around 10:55 AM, there was yet another threat to Air Force One. The pilot, Colonel Mark Tillman, said he was warned that a suspect airliner was approaching from dead ahead. "Coming out of Sarasota there was one call that said there was an airliner off our nose that they did not have contact with," Tillman related. Tillman took evasive action, pulling his plane even higher above normal traffic. (CBS, September 11, 2002) Reporters on board noticed the increased elevation. (Dallas Morning News, August 28, 2002; Salon, September 12, 2001) It has not been possible to establish exactly what the basis of this threat report was. Was the rogue network blackmailing Bush? Was this suspect airliner a military aircraft using participation in Vigilant Guardian/Vigilant Warrior as a cover story for assisting the plot?

Air Force One had some protection against heat-seeking missiles in the form of an infrared jammer code-named "Have Charcoal." There were also other electronic anti- missile countermeasures. The plane is shielded against the electromagnetic pulse effect (EMP) which can be generated by nuclear explosions, and which produces damage even at a considerable distance. (Bamford 2004 84)

At the time of this incident, it is apparent that Air Force One still had no fighter escort. Why were the fighters being withheld, and by whom? It was later reported that, in Cheney's 10:32 phone call, he told Bush that another 40 to 90 minutes would be required to get protective fighters up to escort Air Force One. (Washington Post, 1/27/02) This would have left Bush without fighter cover until noon. What was the tone of this remark by Cheney? Was it a threat? Was it blackmail? Our only certainty is that at the time of the 10:55 AM evasive action, there was still no fighter escort. By 1:30 there were reportedly six fighters protecting Air Force One. (Sarasota Magazine, September 19, 2001) According to another version, when the Air Force sent an AWACS early warning radar aircraft plus two F-16s to escort Air Force One, the presidential party treated them on a need to know basis. "We were not told where Air Force One was going. We were just told to follow the President," said Major General Larry Arnold of NORAD (Bamford 2004 87) Was the Bush party suspicious of certain military elements?

BARKSDALE AND NIGHT WATCH

Aboard Air Force One on the way to Barksdale, passengers, including the numerous press corps, were told to turn off their cell phones. The Secret Service then came around and removed the batteries from each phone to prevent the emission of any kind of signal that might reveal the plane's location. These measures turned out to be of dubious value, since the Shreveport television stations had placed at least one camera crew near the main runway. "The strange part about it was, here we were turning off cell phones and taking precautions, and we could see ourselves landing at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on the TV," recalled Eric Draper, Bush's personal photographer. (Bamford 2004 86)

Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force base near Shreveport, Louisiana at about 11:45 a.m. (CBS, September 11, 2002; Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2001) "According to intelligence sources, a key reason for deciding to land there was that Barksdale was home to the US Strategic (Air) Command's alternate underground command post, a bunker from which Bush could run a war if necessary. It was also a place where the President could rendezvous with 'Night Watch,' the 'Doomsday Plane.' Once a specially outfitted Boeing 707 known as the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, by 2001 it had become a heavily modified military version of the Boeing 747-200, similar to Air Force One. Renamed the National Airborne Operations Center (NAOC), the aircraft was designed to be used by the President to direct a war in case of nuclear attack. During the Cold War, one of the four Night Watch aircraft was always in the air, twenty-four hours a day. But in the 1990s, the decision was made to keep the alert aircraft on the ground with the ability to take off on fifteen minutes' notice." (Bamford 2004 84)

During the morning, Clarke had instituted Continuity of Government, the measures prescribed for emergency rule in the face of a catastrophic emergency. "Our coordinator for Continuity of Government (we will call him Fred here to protect his identity at the request of the government) joined us. 'How do I activate COG?' I asked him. In the exercises we had done, the person playing the President had always given that order. 'You tell me to do it,' Fred replied." After relaying messages to Bush and Cheney, Clarke added: "'Tell them I am instituting COG.' I turned back to Fred: 'Go."' (Clarke 8) Clarke, we see again, was running the country, while Bush zig-zagged.

It was at Barksdale that Bush made a second statement for television broadcast; it was taped and put on the air only after he had left the base. Bush said:

Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended. I want to assure the American people that the full resources of the federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help the victims of these attacks. Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts. I've been in regular contact with the vice president, secretary of defense, the national security team and my Cabinet. We have taken all appropriate security precautions to protect the American people. Our military at home and around the world is on high-alert status and we have taken the necessary security precautions to continue the functions of your government. We have been in touch with the leaders of Congress and with world leaders to assure them that we will do whatever is necessary to protect America and Americans. I ask the American people to join me in saying thanks for all the folks who have been fighting hard to rescue our fellow citizens and to join me in saying a prayer for the victims and their families. The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake: We will show the world that we will pass this test. God bless."


The crucial point here is that all reference to terrorism or terrorists had disappeared. Bush was now speaking under the impact of "Angel is next," which had given him the idea that his adversaries were not what the term "terrorists" would normally suggest.

While Bush was reading his 219-word statement, "he looked nervous," said The New York Times reporters David E. Sanger and Don Van Natta Jr. The Washington Post reporters Dan Balz and Bob Woodward agreed. "When Bush finally appeared on television from the base conference room, they wrote, "it was not a reassuring picture. He spoke haltingly, mispronouncing several words as he looked down at his notes." Judy Keen of USA Today noted that "Bush looked grim. His eyes were red-rimmed." An administration official later admitted, "It was not our best moment." (Bamford 2004 87)

While at Barksdale, Bush "spent the next hour and a half talking on the phone," still disputing with Cheney and others over where he should go next. (Sarasota Magazine, November 2001) There was probably much more at issue than Bush's itinerary. Were Bush and Cheney haggling about whether or how to accept the rogue group's demands, such as the war of civilizations? When Bush requested a return to Washington, Karl Rove answered: "Our people are saying it's unstable still." (Associated Press, September 13, 2001) Bush was told he should go to the US Strategic Command center in Offutt, Nebraska, and he agreed to go.

While still at Barksdale, Bush received word of yet another threat. Just after 1:00 PM, Bush reportedly "received an intelligence report from the base commander that a high- speed object was headed for his ranch in Crawford, Texas." It turned out to be a false alarm. (Sammon 117) By 12:16 PM, US airspace was supposedly empty, since all flights were thought to have landed. Was this another psychological warfare ploy by the rogue network in order to keep Bush off balance? (USA Today, August 12, 2002) Air Force One left Barksdale for Offutt Air Force Base around 1:30 PM. Perhaps better to mask the nature of Bush's predicament, most of the White House press corps were jettisoned at Barksdale. Bush's party was pared down to a few essential staffers such as Ari Fleischer, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, and Gordon Johndroe (White House, September 11, 2001), plus a pool of about five reporters. (AP, September 12, 2001) Were these reporters intelligence community assets who could be relied on not to report potentially explosive details? On the way to Offutt, Bush remained in "continuous contact" with the White House Situation Room and Vice President Cheney.

"By then (as Bush was leaving Barksdale) many in the press were beginning to question why the President hadn't returned to Washington during the grave crisis. The question was put to presidential counselor Karen Hughes, then at FBI headquarters. "Where's the President?" asked one reporter. "Is he coming back to DC?" asked another. Instead of answering, she simply turned on her heels and walked out of the room. NBC's Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press and the Washington bureau chief, also remarked about the nation needing the leadership of its president. Yet, rather than return to Washington, the decision was made to keep moving as quickly as possible in the opposite direction. It was a risky choice. '"If he stayed away," reported London's Daily Telegraph, "he could be accused of cowardice." (Bamford 2004 87)

OFFUTT, NEBRASKA: STRATCOM

Air Force One landed at Offutt shortly before 3:00 p.m. Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha Nebraska was the principal headquarters of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the successor organization to Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command of Cold War vintage. This base possessed the main military command bunker of the US for nuclear warfighting purposes. Bush arrived here at 2:50 Eastern Daylight Time. He went at once to the bunker, which was several stories underground, and protected by a series of blast doors and the like. The conference room was ABC proof: As Bamford evokes the tableau: "It was like a scene from Dr. Strangelove, or Seven Days in May. Never before had all the pieces been in place for the instant launch of World War III. The military alert level was at its highest level in thirty years. The Vice President was in the White House bunker, senior administration officials were at Site R, congressional officials had been flown to Mount Weather, the Secretary of Defense and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in the Pentagon War Room, and the President of the United States was in the nuclear command bunker at STRATCOM." (Bamford 2004 89) Was all of this because of terrorism, or was there some more serious threat of subversion to the state, perhaps complicated by the danger of a thermonuclear exchange? All of this behavior suggests at the very least that the White House thought that forces far more formidable than Bin Laden and his Afghan troglodytes were involved.

Both movies cited by Bamford involve military madmen attempting either to precipitate general thermonuclear war, or else to stage a coup d'etat in the US. A Straussian might see a hidden message here. The US military posture was now DEFCON DELTA, the highest state of alert short of all-out war. At Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, there were 200 Minuteman III ICBM silos, each one ready to launch three warheads. At other bases there were MX ICBM silos, and here each missile carried even more warheads.

Bush convened the NSC as a teleconference call with Vice President Cheney, National Security Advisor Rice, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, CIA Director Tenet, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, and others. Rice recalled that during the meeting, Tenet told Bush, "Sir, I believe it's al-Qaeda. We're doing the assessment but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like al-Qaeda." (CBS, September 11, 2002) Was Tenet articulating the program of the coup faction, and obliquely demanding that Bush declare that the clash of civilizations in the form of warfighting had commenced?

The plutocrat Warren Buffett happened to have been at Offutt that day, hosting an unpublicized charity benefit inside the base at 8:00 AM. With him were business leaders and several executives from the World Trade Center, including Anne Tatlock of Fiduciary Trust Co. International, who likely would have died had it not been for the meeting. (San Francisco Business Times, February 1, 2002)

Bamford notes that "... it was close to 4:30 on the East Coast, and except for the brief, two-minute taped comments made at Barksdale, no one had seen or heard from the President or even knew where he was. Republicans back in Washington were becoming worried. "I am stunned that he has not come home," said one Bush fundraiser. "It looks like he is running. This looks bad." William J. Bennett, a former education secretary and a drug czar under former President George Bush, said that it was important for Bush to return to the White House as soon as possible. "This is not 1812," he said. "It cannot look as if the President has been run off, or it will look like we can't defend our most important institutions." (Bamford 2004 91)

Air Force One left Offutt around 4:30 PM and landed at Andrews Air Force Base at 6:34 PM, escorted by two F-15 fighters and one F-16. Bush then took the Marine One helicopter to the White House, arriving shortly before 7:00 PM. Bush gave a nationally televised speech at 8:30 PM, speaking for about five minutes.

This speech is too long to be included here, but it is readily available. Indeed, the White House commemorative edition leaves out the earlier two statements, and begins with this one. The change of tone is remarkable. Bush is now possessed of a Manichean certainty about the events of the day. He is back to the line that the perpetrators were terrorists. One important passage came at the beginning, where Bush stated: "Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts .... Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror." (Bush 1) Later in this statement, Bush presented the kernel of what would later be termed the Bush doctrine, his declaration of war on the world: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." (Bush 2)

What had changed for Bush during the course of the afternoon and early evening? It may have been only at this moment that Bush began to recover from the panic which had gripped him around 9 AM that morning. Clarke noted that "unlike in his three television appearances that day, Bush was confident, determined, forceful." (Clarke 23) As we will argue below, there is persuasive evidence that he had decided to capitulate to the demands of the sponsors of the terrorist attacks by launching the war of civilizations which this network had demanded. This surrender, carried out sometime in the afternoon or evening of September 11, constitutes Bush's great betrayal of the Constitution and his great crime against humanity. Everything Bush has done since, down to the very structure of his personality, has been determined by the moment in which he declined to fight the rogue network, but rather preferred to follow its orders, in violation of his oath of office. Never before had the United States surrendered to an enemy in this way.

After his 8:30 PM television address, Bush met with key officials in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. According to Clarke, who was there, this was "a place he had never seen." (Clarke 23) This 9:00 PM meeting with Bush's full National Security Council was followed roughly half an hour later by a meeting with a smaller group of advisors. Bush and his advisors had already decided bin Laden was behind the attacks. CIA Director Tenet told Bush that al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan were essentially one and the same. When Bush insisted on sleeping in his own bed, he was warned that any threat would require that he go to the bunker. "And sure enough," said Mr. Bush. "We are in bed at about 11:30, and I can hear a guy breathing quite heavily. "Mr. President, Mr. President! There's an unidentified aircraft heading towards the White House!"' It turned out to be a false alarm -- or was it a good night kiss from the rogue network? (Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2001) Before going to sleep, Bush wrote in his diary, "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today We think it's Osama bin Laden." (Washington Post, January 27, 2002) There is no evidence that Bush, the man who never reads, writes enough to keep a diary. This reference to a diary would seem to be a vehicle to convey that depth of Bush's capitulation to the rogue network behind 9/11, a kind of intimate confession that he truly believed in the new party line he had embraced that afternoon or evening.

There was a brief phase of recrimination against Bush after 9/11, and it was based largely on his evasive retreats to Barksdale and Offutt. Human Events, the conservative magazine which had been favored by Reagan, noted that "some in the media were caustic in their description of the flight." The New York Times called it a "zigzag course." The New York Daily News charged, "A shocked and shaken President Bush - -who was hopscotched around the country yesterday in an extraordinary effort to keep him safe ..." Journalists were whispering about the president's absence. And even some friends are disturbed by the implications that the president or Washington may not have been safe. One former official with the first Bush administration said he was "deeply disappointed by his zigzagging across the country." "We had control of the skies by 10 o'clock," the source added. "I was hoping to see a Churchillian or Reaganesque sign of defiance. Bush was poorly served by his staff." (Human Events Online, 9/17/01)

There are several additional significant incidents which must be taken into account. These vanished early on from narratives of the event; they made the defenders of the official version uncomfortable. The first of these was a fire at the Old Executive Office Building or Eisenhower Building (OEOB), which is where the offices of the National Security Council are located. This is an integral part of the White House compound, and was the work place of such figures as Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and others. The ABC television network broadcast live pictures of a fire at the OEOB on 9/11 at 9:42 AM local time. (Meyssan 2002)

Another is the issue of a car bomb at the State Department: "Lisa slipped a note in front of me: "CNN says car bomb at the State Department. Fire on the Mall near the Capitol." (Clarke 9) According to another account, "at 10:20 a report came in that a huge car bomb had gone off outside the State Department in Washington. It wasn't true, but it changed the picture once more." (Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2001) The fire on the Mall near the Capitol is yet another incident. Clarke also recounts receiving a report: "There has been an explosion in the Pentagon parking lot, maybe a car bomb." (Clarke 7)

If we put these events together with the possible early morning attempt to assassinate George Bush, we see that the scope of the 9/11 plot was altogether broader and more inclusive even than the acts of spectacular synthetic terrorism which the world observed that day.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:12 am

PART 2 OF 3 (CH. 9 CONT'D.)

SAFIRE: INSIDE THE BUNKER

An initial exposition of Bush's claim to have acted under threats on 9/11 came in a September 13 New York Times column entitled "Inside the Bunker" from William Safire, a hardened old neocon sinner from the Nixon White House. According to Safire, "A threatening message received by the Secret Service was relayed to the agents with the president that 'Air Force One is next.' According to the high official, American code words were used showing a knowledge of procedures that made the threat credible."

Safire identified his source as Karl Rove, Bush's political Svengali. According to Rove, when Bush stubbornly insisted that he was going back to Washington, "the Secret Service informed him that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts. In light of the specific and credible threat, it was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort." Another Safire source, who was with Cheney in the White House bunker, related that it was Cheney who "suggested Air Force One go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, with a communications facility where the president could convene the National Security Council."

Safire correctly pointed out that "The most worrisome aspect of these revelations has to do with the credibility of the 'Air Force One is next' message. It is described clearly as a threat, not a friendly warning -- but if so, why would the terrorists send the message? More to the point, how did they get the code-word information and transponder know- how that established their mala fides? That knowledge of code words and presidential whereabouts and possession of secret procedures indicates that the terrorists may have a mole in the White House -- that, or informants in the Secret Service, FBI, FAA or C.I.A. If so, the first thing our war on terror needs is an Angleton-type counterspy." (New York Times, September 13, 2001) Of course, it may well be that the dubious Angleton networks, given their penchant for fascism, are themselves among the suspects. But that is another story.

The essential details given by Safire were confirmed by an AP wire that same day, also inspired by the opportunistic Rove. Here Ron Fournier wrote:

Hopscotching across half the country while America was under attack, President Bush vented his frustration with Secret Service officials who told him of an anonymous call saying; "Air Force One is next." Within the hour, the Secret Service received an anonymous call: "Air Force One is next." According to a senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, the caller knew the agency's code words relating to Air Force One procedures and whereabouts. (AP, September 13, 2001)


Foreign press organs, more critical than the controlled corporate media of the US, reported this story straight. The London Financial Times wrote that after Bush had taken off from Florida, "within an hour, an anonymous call reached the Secret Service. Using code words known only to the agency's staff, the caller issued a chilling warning: 'Air Force One is next."' (Financial Times, September 14, 2001)

The principal clue leading us to the existence of the rogue network behind 9/11 is the "Angel is next" threat. Since hasty attempts to deny that this ever existed came soon after 9/11, we pause to document the evidence that this call really did take place.

In an interview with Tony Snow on Fox News Sunday, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice confirmed that the September 11 threat against President Bush's life included a secret code name.

SNOW: Sept. 11 there was a report that there was a coded message that said, "We're going to strike Air Force One" that was using specific coded language and made the threat credible. Is that true?

RICE: That is true.

SNOW: So we have a mole somewhere?

RICE: It's not clear how this coded name was gotten. We're a very open society and I don't think it's any surprise to anyone that leaks happen. So, I don't know -- it's possible the code name leaked a long time ago and was just used.

SNOW: How on earth would that happen?

RICE: I don't know. I don't know. We're obviously looking very hard at the situation. But I will tell you that it was plenty of evidence from our point of view to have special measures taken at that moment to make sure the president was safe.


This exchange was reported by Carl Limbacher of NewsMax.com, who added that "U.S. intelligence officials have not ruled out the possibility that a government mole may have given terrorists the top secret code language they used to deliver the threat 'Air Force One is next' as the World Trade Center and Pentagon were under attack." (NewsMax.com, September 23, 2001) Of course, the real imperative was to consider whether the rogue network behind the attacks extended into the ranks of holders of top secret security clearances.

The threat to Air Force One was repeated by others in the administration. In the September 12 White House briefing, Ari Fleischer told reporters, "We have specific and credible information that the White House and Air Force One were also intended targets of these attacks." The next day Fleischer was asked, "[It was] yesterday reported that some of the people in the Pentagon were a little bit skeptical about your comments yesterday that the White House and Air Force One were attacked -- were targets of attack, given that the plane had come from the south. What do you --"Fleischer: "Who are these people?" Reporter: "Well, I don't know. They weren't my sources, so ..." Fleischer: "No. There's -- I wouldn't have said it if it wasn't true." Reporter: "Can you confirm the substance of that threat that was telephoned in ... that Air Force One is next and using code words?" Fleischer: "Yes, I can. That's correct." (September 13)

On Meet the Press of September 16, Cheney began to back away from the story, telling Russert: "The president was on Air Force One. We received a threat to Air Force One -- came through the Secret Service ..." Russert: "A credible threat to Air Force One. You're convinced of that." Cheney: "I'm convinced of that. Now, you know, it may have been phoned in by a crank, but in the midst of what was going on, there was no way to know that. I think it was a credible threat, enough for the Secret Service to bring it to me." (Meet the Press, September 16) Notice that the top-secret code words, the really sensitive point, have now disappeared. Still, the Bushmen were extremely sensitive to any impugning of their man's courage under fire. A journalist who said Bush was "flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother's bed after having a nightmare" and another who said Bush "skedaddled" were fired. (Washington Post, September 29, 2001)

In the short term, the Bushmen were eager to use the threat incidents to defend their leader from the charge of cowardice, and also to provide a cover for the reasons that had actually caused him to flee across the country. However, the "Angel is next" story contained an explosive potential for the longer term, since by pointing toward the existence of highly-placed moles within the administration who had access to top secret code words and procedures, it threatened to explode the official myth of 9/11 which was then taking shape. As Bush gathered momentum with his "war on terrorism" and Afghan invasion, the need to use the "Angel" story for political cover diminished, and the need to protect the coherence of the official myth became paramount. It was at this time that the threat story began to be denied, not by officials speaking on the record, but by mysterious, anonymous leakers. One of these leaks came two weeks after 9/11; "Finally, there is this postscript to the puzzle of how someone presumed to be a terrorist was able to call in a threat against Air Force One using a secret code name for the president's plane. Well, as it turns out, that simply never happened. Sources say White House staffers apparently misunderstood comments made by their security detail." (Jim Stewart, CBS Evening News, September 25, 2001) An AP wire of the same day, also based on an anonymous leak, read: "[Administration officials have] been unsuccessful in trying to track down whether there was such a call, though officials still maintain they were told of a telephone threat Sept. 11 and kept Bush away from Washington for hours because of it." (AP, September 25, 2001) But the "Angel" story was persistent. One full year after 9/11, CBS revived the story that terrorists had broken Air Force One's secret codes, even though it was CBS which had aired the leaked denial a year earlier. (CBS, September 11, 2002)

After these leaks, Fleischer also dropped the story. On September 26, a reporter asked about the September 11 warning. Fleischer replied: "I'm not going to comment on any particular threats coming toward the White House ... it is not an uncommon occurrence for people to threaten the government of the United States, regardless of whether it's President Bush or any of his predecessors. And that's why there are security precautions taken at the White House as a matter of routine." (Washington Post, September 27, 2001) Latent hatred and resentment of Bush made it easy for reporters to trivialize the threat story, and make it appear as a devious invention of the loathsome Karl Rove. In her column in the September 23 New York Times, the gossipy Maureen Dowd noted that Karl Rove had "called around town, trying to sell reporters the story -- now widely discredited -- that Mr. Bush didn't immediately return to Washington on Sept. 11 because the plane that was headed for the Pentagon may have really been targeting the White House, and that Air Force One was in jeopardy, too." Rove was indeed a scoundrel, but there was something much more important at stake.

Especially eager to dispense with the threat story and focus on the soap opera of Bush the skedaddler were the leftists. To illustrate these, we take the case of Joe Conason, who wrote indignantly that "The Bush administration told an outrageous lie that the president was a target of terrorists -- and Americans deserve an explanation." Conason, already inclining to defend the most reactionary lie of all, the official version, was especially upset about the reference to "code-word confirmation" -- since this was the point that threatened the al Qaeda myth. Conason was even more worried about the demand for an investigation to root out the mole network inside the US government:

Only when those assertions were shot down by CBS News and the Associated Press did the spinners back down, claiming that it had all been a "misunderstanding" by staffers, with little elaboration. How serious? In addition to undermining public confidence in the White House during a national emergency, this spinning of the president's flight from Washington led New York Times columnist William Safire, among others, to demand an internal investigation that would determine whether an administration "mole" had revealed top-secret information to America's enemies. That paranoid theme was immediately picked up in the foreign media, no doubt worrying allies and potential allies engaged in sensitive discussions with the United States. (Slate, October 5, 2001)


Conason's reference to foreign paranoids may have been meant for the Reseau Voltaire, which was already performing yeoman service in dismantling the official version. In the 9/11 commission hearings, it was Ben-Veniste who took care to assert that the story was spurious. As a leading public opponent of the Bush dynasty since the time of Bush 41, I yield to nobody in my determination to put an end to the monstrous prominent role of this family in US public life. However, to think that the moron Bush could have organized 9/11 is absurd. As we have seen, part of the project was evidently to liquidate Bush and pass power to Cheney, whose credentials as a possibly witting plotter are infinitely stronger. By surviving the Colony interview hit, Bush lived to encounter 9/11 as a fait accompli, in which he was told at gunpoint to acquiesce, and he promptly did so. To reduce everything to "Bush knew" is a good slogan -- far better than the official version -- but it does not deal with the rogue network which antedates 9/11, and which remains in place today, posing a constant threat of new terrorist attacks, with or without Bush.

Paul Thompson, whose empirical work on the 9/11 timelines is a valuable resource for all researchers, unfortunately buys into the denials of the threat story. After marshalling the available evidence, Thompson, who prides himself on his empirical precision, concludes: "Was there a mole in the White House? No. It turned out the entire story was made up." (Citizine, May 9, 2003) But it is far too simple to let this entire complex of problems and the vast issues it raises be swept under the rug by mere anonymous leaks, no matter how many times they might have been repeated. At stake is the most important clue in the entire 9/11 case. The regime is hiding something crucial here, and they must not be allowed to abscond. "Had terrorists hacked their way into sensitive White House computers?" Thompson asks. But the issue is much larger. If the threat to Bush came encrusted with code words, this means that the terror attacks were organized by high- level moles inside the US government -- not that a hacker in an Afghan cave had cracked the Pentagon mainframes.

BUSH AND PUTIN ON 9/11

The potential for a thermonuclear confrontation or even of an all-out thermonuclear exchange growing out of 9/11 has generally been ignored by the US controlled media, but such a potential was clearly present. It was inherently present because of the tense relations among the US, Russia, and China in the wake of the bombing of Serbia and the Kursk incident. It was made explicit when a flying object, probably a cruise missile, hit the Pentagon. As the 9/11 commission report notes, one fighter pilot who saw the damage to the Pentagon immediately thought of Russia as the most likely adversary. This innate mental reaction must have been repeated thousands of times in the minds of non-witting military personnel on the day of 9/11. Clarke points out that the US proclamation of Defcon Delta, the level of readiness just below actual war, was inevitably immediately noticed by Russia, and came near causing immediate countermeasures of readiness on the Russian side. This was the first Defcon Delta since Henry Kissinger had ordered a world- wide alert to deter possible Soviet intervention into the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East in October 1973. Defcon Delta posed the danger of an escalation of mobilization between the two leading nuclear powers:

Frank Miller reported that DOD had gone on a global alert, DEFCON 3: "This hasn't happened since the '73 Arab-Israeli War."

"State, State, go." Armitage acknowledged the call. "Rich, DOD has gone to DEFCON 3 and you know what that means." Armitage knew; he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration.

"It means I better go tell the Russkies before they shit a brick." Armitage activated the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, down the hall from the State Department Operations Center. The NRRC was connected directly to the Russian Ministry of Defense just outside of the Kremlin. It was designed to exchange information in crisis to prevent misunderstanding and miscalculation.

Armitage reappeared. "Damn good thing I did that. Guess who was about to start an exercise of all their strategic nuclear forces?" He had persuaded his Russian counterpart to defer the operation. (Clarke 15-16)


Most US 9/11 commentators have virtually nothing to say about Bush's famous telephone conversation with Russian President Putin; Bamford, Thompson, and others exhibit elaborate disinterest in this matter. And yet, this is another one of the central moments of 9/11. In order to avoid a possible thermonuclear exchange, Putin needed to be reassured that the US Defcon Delta was not a cover for a thermonuclear sneak attack upon his country, something perfectly within the realm of possibility from the Russian view. Putin also needed to be told that thermonuclear launches from the US toward the Middle East or other areas were the work of a rogue network, not of the constituted government. Putin, in short, had to be asked for cooperation and restraint.

During the hours after the 9/11 attacks, Putin became the first world leader to place a call to Bush. Officially, this was done so that Putin could offer his condolences. But in the course of this conversation, Putin told Bush that he had ordered a stand down of Russian strategic forces, meaning that the maneuvers planned for the Arctic Region were cancelled. Putin also sent an official telegram to Washington DC conveying "anger and indignation" against the "series of barbaric terrorist acts directed against innocent people." (See "On Russian President Vladimir Putin's Telegram of Condolence to US President George Bush, 11 September 2001, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, http://www.In.mid.ru ) [4] Bush later noted his appreciation for Putin's gesture and for Putin's strategic stand down of the Russian strategic rocket troops in deference to the US Defcon Delta. "It was a moment where it clearly said to me that he understands the Cold War is over." (Washington Post, October 4, 2004)

In a national television address later that day, Putin vehemently condemned the 9/11 attacks as "an unprecedented act of aggression on the part of international terrorism." These attacks, he claimed, were not a localized American issue but an event that "goes beyond national borders." Terrorism, Putin declared, is the "plague of the twenty first century" and "Russia knows first hand what terrorism is. So, we understand as well as anyone the feelings of the American people." Putin described 9/11 as "a brazen challenge to the whole of humanity, at least to civilized humanity." Resonating with Bush, Putin set up his own Manichean dichotomy between terrorist barbarism and 'civilized humanity.' Putin assured Bush that "we entirely and fully share and experience your pain. We support you." ("Statement by President Putin of Russia on the Terrorist Acts in the US, Moscow, September 11, 2001," http://www.In.mid.ru ) Putin later declared a national minute of silence in commemoration of the victims of the attacks.

Putin's actions on 9/11 can be seen as a successful attempt at war avoidance in extremis. Putin, as a KGB veteran, would have had no doubt that the official US version was hogwash, something a number of prominent Russian military officers expressed in the wake of 9/11. Putin could also see that the rogue network responsible for the bombing of Serbia and the sinking of the Kursk momentarily had the upper hand, and with them negotiation would be fruitless. Putin was determined not to play into the hands of the unhinged US rogue network behind 9/11. At a deeper level, his policy was therefore one of strategic deception or of maskirovka -- to gain time in the wake of the catastrophe. Putin must have seen that secret government madmen ferociously hostile to Russia had now taken over the US regime to an unprecedented degree. He could also see that the neocons, with their obsession with Israel's strategic predicament, might well attack various countries in the Middle East before they got around to attempting to deal with Russia. Such Middle East tar baby scenarios could only weaken, overextend, discredit, and isolate the United States, thus offering Russia some advantage. Putin was also busily working on the follow-on to the very formidable Topol missile, a weapons system that was probably superior to anything in the US arsenal, which would very likely allow Russia to defeat the US side's primitive off-the-shelf missile defense system. All these considerations suggested that Putin should camouflage himself for the time being as Bush's bosom buddy.

On September 24, 2001 Putin made a major television address, which grew out of a weekend of strategizing with his top advisors and a forty-minute phone call with President Bush. In this speech Putin accepted the establishment of US bases in the former Soviet republics of central Asia, which the US wanted to set up as staging areas for the imminent invasion of Afghanistan. On the surface this was capitulation, but underneath was still strategic deception. For a time, it appeared that a great US-Russian alliance was in the making, but this was more appearance than substance. Bush joined with Putin at a school in Crawford, Texas on November 15, 2001. The Bush-Putin honeymoon lasted into 2002. By the time Bush began seeking UN carte blanche for his war on Iraq, Russia had been attracted into the French-German continental bloc.

The existence of Russian strategic maneuvers on 9/11 involving bombers had been known to the Pentagon, since it was the explicit premise for the maneuver Northern Vigilance. In this case, it would have been known to the plotters as well. Therefore, the planners of 9/11 were well aware that their incendiary actions would take place against a backdrop of simultaneous US and Russian aircraft maneuvers.

BAMFORD: THE US INTELLIGENCE VERSION

Bamford compares Bush's actions on 9/11 with the behavior of President Lyndon B. Johnson on the day of the Kennedy assassination. Despite worries that the killing of the president might have been just the beginning of the strategic decapitation of the US under conditions of Cold War confrontation with the USSR, Johnson flew directly back to Washington and gave a short television address just after leaving his airplane. According to the usual procedure, Cheney should have gone to Site R on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. But he refused to go. Why? "Bush could have easily ordered Vice President Cheney to a secure location outside Washington to preserve the continuity of government and then flown back to Andrews Air Force Base and given a defiant, Johnson-like speech. Then, with the public -- and the rest of the world -- feeling confident that despite the terrorist actions the US government remained stable and firm, he could have gone back either to the White House or to one of the other highly protected, secure locations. That would have been the courageous thing to do." (Bamford 2004 70)

"Instead, the decision was made to leave Vice President Cheney in the White House while President Bush hopscotched around the country. Though reporters were told of a supposed call to the White House threatening Air Force One -- the reason for the President's odyssey -- later it was concluded that no such call or threat ever took place. 'They've been unsuccessful in trying to track down whether there was such a call,' one administration official told the Associated Press. CBS News reported the call 'simply never happened,' and the Washington Post headlined its article on the subject: 'White House Drops Claim of Threat to Bush.' (Bamford 2004 70) Bamford thus avoids most of the really essential questions about 9/11.

THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE VIEW

One of the most detailed accounts of the high-level state secrets possessed by the 9/11 conspirators was provided by the internet journal Debka, which often reflects the views of the Israeli Mossad. This Israeli analysis stresses the extent of the top-secret information controlled by the plotters, and the extensive network that would be necessary to have gathered such information. According to Debka, the message "Air Force One is next" was received by the U.S. Secret Service at 9 AM. For Debka, Cheney was hustled into the bunker three minutes later. Debka suggests that the code name of Air Force One is changed daily, and that "the terrorists' message threatening Air Force One was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code words." At the heart of Debka's account is the estimate that

...the terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals. This made it possible for a hostile force to pinpoint the exact position of Air Force One, its destination and its classified procedures. In fact, the hijackers were picking up and deciphering the presidential plane's incoming and outgoing transmissions. The discovery shocked everyone in the president's emergency operations center -- Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. Their first question was; How did the terrorists access top-secret White House codes and procedures? Is there a mole, or more than one enemy spy in the White House, the Secret Service, the FB1, the CIA or the Federal Aviation Administration?


Nor was this all; the reach of the conspirators was even greater: "In the week after the attacks in New York and Washington, more hair- raising facts emerged. The terrorists had also obtained the code groups of the National Security Agency and were able to penetrate the NSA' s state-of-the-art electronic surveillance systems. Indeed, they seemed to have at their disposal an electronic capability that was more sophisticated than that of the NSA."

According to Debka's information, the US intelligence community also believed "that terrorists are in possession of all or part of the codes used by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence and the intelligence offices of the State Department and Department of Energy."

According to Debka, the plotters had even mastered steganography, a technology which "enables users to bypass electronic monitoring by hiding messages randomly in seemingly innocent digital files, such as music files, those of the popular online marketplace eBay, pornographic files or even e-mail headers."

Here were the sure-fire premises for an incontrovertible argument that the 9/11 attacks were the work of a rogue network of dissident moles inside the US government and military. But after having made precisely this case, Debka attempted to lead its audience back to the myth of al Qaeda, this time presented as possessing scientific and technological capabilities superior to those of the US government! As one of the parties guilty of having given al Qaeda the codes, Debka fingered World Space Communication, described as "one of the known bin Laden assets," which the US counter-terrorism agencies, including the NSA, had supposedly been tracking. Debka also alleged that "Bin Laden also has the NSA beat on the employment front," since the wily Saudi had supposedly hired "the best computer experts on the market. One such is Nabil Khan Kani, a Syrian who lived in Barcelona with his Spanish wife, Jenna Florine, in the late 1980s and early 1990s."

Through one salto mortale after another, Debka clawed its way to the astounding conclusion that the only agency which could have secured access to all those code words was -- Iraq!! Debka wrote:

The nagging question of a mole in the highest reaches of the U.S. government and intelligence community -- with direct or indirect links with bin Laden -- remains. Since no single individual has access to every top-level code at any given time -- a single mole would not answer the case; it would have to be a large, widely spread number. U.S. experts do not believe bin Laden was capable of infiltrating double agents into the heart of the U.S. administration on a large scale. They are looking elsewhere, instead, at a country with a very well-oiled intelligence apparatus -- Iraq. (Debka, "Digital moles in White House? Terrorists had top-secret presidential codes." WorldNetDaily.com, September 22, 2001)


While this conclusion was absurd in the extreme, Debka had provided a valuable estimate of how high up in the US command structure the rogue network reached.

A CRITICAL FRENCH ACCOUNT

During the weeks after 9/11, the Reseau Voltaire of Paris represented one of the strongest voices calling the official version into question. Reseau Voltaire's most prominent writer was Thierry Meyssan, the well-known civil rights activist. His book on 9/11, L'effroyable imposture, was primarily a demonstration that the official thesis of a large commercial airliner striking the Pentagon was absurd and impossible. But Meyssan also focused on the central political-institutional questions posed by 9/11, and especially the "angels" question. For Meyssan, the plotters' use of top-secret code words suggested that they had access to other codes, including the US nuclear missile launch codes. At the heart of 9/11 was therefore a blackmail threat to the Bush regime that, if he refused to launch the war of civilizations, the plotters were in a position to do it on their own in a much more sweeping manner, by launching a US nuclear strike against a series of Arab and Islamic capitals. Whatever the Russian and Chinese attitude to such a launch might have been was not specified. Meyssan's thesis was that "from 10:00 AM to approximately 8:00 PM (on Sept. 11), US government officials were not thinking that this was the work of Arab terrorists, but rather that it was an expression of a military coup being carried out by U.S.-based extremists who were capable of provoking a nuclear war." ( http://www.reseauvoltaire.net , September 27, 2001)

On his website, and in his later books The Big Lie and Pentagate, Meyssan offered a detailed analysis of the events of the day, with special stress on the insurrectionary behavior of the US rogue network. He narrates that

About 10:05, the Secret Service, in charge of protecting top personalities, reportedly received an encoded telephone call from the assailants. They thus would have had at their disposal transmission and authentication codes for the White House and Air Force One. In other words, the security of the top American leaders is no longer guaranteed and the enemies of America are able to usurp the identity of President Bush, including to order a nuclear launch. According to Brian L. Stafford, director of the Secret Service, it is not a matter of the United States' facing terrorist actions, but facing a situation of war. He orders the implementation of the COG (Continuity of Government) plan. This ultra-secret procedure is orchestrated by FEMA ... which has already been supervising the rescue operations and working in coordination with the FBI. From this moment, FEMA steps ahead of the FBI and becomes the highest civilian authority of the administration. This agency, which cultivates opacity, is directed by Joe M. Allbaugh, a former campaign treasurer for the Bush family. ( http://www.reseauvoltaire.net )


The keystone of this aspect of Meyssan's analysis is the "angel" call:

According to sources close to George W. Bush, the Secret Service received during the course of the morning a telephone call from the authors of the attacks, probably to make demands. In order to accredit their call, the assailants revealed presidential transmission and authentication codes. Only a few trusted persons at the apex of the state apparatus could have access to these codes. It therefore follows that at least one of the authors of the September 11 attacks is one of the civilian or military leaders of the United States of America. (http://www.reseauvoltaire.net)


For Meyssan, the "angel" call definitely came from the "sponsors of the terror attacks in New York and Washington." He argues that "from 10 AM to 8 PM approximately, American officials did not think that those strikes were the result of Middle Eastern terrorists, but that they manifested an attempted military coup by American extremists capable of provoking nuclear war." The content of the call had been not so much to claim responsibility for the attacks, but to "pose an ultimatum, to force the hand of the President of the United States." The trump card of the plotters was their possible possession of nuclear launch codes, and to counteract that, "during some 10 hours, President Bush was forced to run away from Washington and to go personally to the US Strategic Command (Offut, Nebraska) both to take direct control of the armed forces; and especially so that no one could usurp his identity and unleash nuclear war." In Meyssan's view, in the wake of the "angel" call, "No member of the National Security Council thinks any longer about terrorist attacks, all think about a military putsch which is ongoing. Calm will only be restored at 8:30 PM." (Reseau Voltaire, Information Note 235-236, September 27, 2001)

The call was followed by the descent of Cheney and Rice into the White House bunker. Meyssan sees the defense preparations around the White House as directed against a possible attack by insurrectionary US troops:

Simultaneously, the Secret Service has the Presidential areas evacuated, and deploys special agents and sharpshooters armed with machine guns and rocket-launchers in the surrounding area. It prepares to repel a possible assault by airborne troops. The Secret Service also informs President Bush of the situation; he is on board Air Force One, en route to Washington.


Within this context, Meyssan sees the pattern of threats to Bush and to Air Force One:

The U.S. Strategic Air Command indicates to the President that it has detected a signal, moving towards Air Force One. Considering the velocity, it is probably a missile. To protect the President, the military demand that Air Force One, despite its profile, continue its flight at tree- top level and follow an evasive course, while the F- 5 and F-16 join it and escort it. But the military do not shut off its weather apparatus on board the Presidential plane, such that it continues to emit a signal allowing the international meteorological network to know its position continuously ... Over a scrambled phone line, Bush consults the Vice President. He decides to go to Offutt Air Force Base (Nebraska), headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command. If his identity can be usurped by the perpetrators, the only possibility to prevent them from giving orders to the U.S. army in his place, is for him to be physically where all the weapons of mass destruction are controlled, including nuclear bombs. But Air Force One consumes too much fuel flying at low altitude, and its refueling in flight is impossible for safety reasons. A stop is therefore planned for the military base at Barksdale. (http://www.reseauvoltaire.net )


Meyssan reported that his research team attempted to determine what network might have been behind the 9/11 attacks. His prime suspect was a group he called the "special forces underground," a terrorist network associated with US-controlled stay-behind networks of the Gladio type which in his opinion maintained close ties to Bin Laden among others. (Reseau Voltaire, Information Note 235-236, September 27, 2001)

Meyssan sums up the world-historical significance of 9/11 in these terms: "The attacks were thus not ordered by a fanatic who believed he was delivering divine punishment, but by a group present within the American state apparatus, which succeeded in dictating policy to President Bush. Rather than a coup d'etat aimed at overthrowing existing institutions, might it not involve instead the seizure of power by a particular group hidden within those institutions?" (Meyssan 202 48) This means that the September criminals are still at large, and capable of striking again.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:12 am

PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 9 CONT'D.)

THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE VIEW: NAMAKON

The Russian opposition weekly newspaper Zaftra, edited by the maverick Russophile Aleksandr Prokhanov, published on July 16, 2002 excerpts from a German-language EIR news agency report on the background of the attempted internal U.S. coup of 9/11. EIR's thesis was that "the New York and Washington attacks could not have occurred without the witting complicity of high-level rogue elements within the US military-intelligence command structures." Together with this material, Zaftra included some comments on the 9/11 issue from "Namakon" -- the pen-name used by a group of top-level former Soviet intelligence officers. Namakon agreed that the events of September 11 could not have occurred without high-level complicity by a network or faction within the U.S. military. Namakon also emphasized that the decision by President Bush, urged on by Tony Blair and others, on the evening of September 11 to endorse and embrace the Bin Laden cover story "meant a de facto capitulation of the U.S. Presidency to the real organizers of the attack, and the adoption of their policy of confrontation with the Islamic world, according to Huntington's formula for a 'Clash of Civilizations."'

Namakon also called attention to the much-neglected fact that the attempted orchestration of an escalating nuclear alert between the U.S. and Russia was a crucial part of the 9/11 coup plot. Namakon explicitly linked this potential for thermonuclear confrontation with the August 2000 sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, the full story of which has yet to be told. Namakon wrote that this "hypothesis leads us to ask whether the Kursk catastrophe might not also have been an included facet of the operations of the US putsch group, since an attack of such dimensions would necessarily lead to a large-scale reaction by the Russian military and population, creating an atmosphere favorable to provoking nuclear escalation." The escalation of the Kursk incident, which high ranking Russian military officials repeatedly blamed on the presence of NATO submarines near the site of the sinking in the Barents Sea, came perilously close to succeeding. A serious confrontation was avoided only by a direct hot line consultation between Russian President Putin and then-U.S. President Clinton. This telephone call was followed within 48 hours by a highly unusual visit to Moscow by CIA Director George Tenet. (Zaftra, July 16, 2002; EIR, July 22, 2004) In the case of 9/11, the immediate parallel was the telephone conversation between Bush and Putin, which, strangely enough, is never mentioned by an otherwise well-informed author like Bamford.

Many features of the analysis developed here with the help of lsraeli, French, and Russian sources in particular have become current among well-informed European circles. On August 23, 2002, at a moment when the neocon drive for war with Iraq appeared stalled, an influential British political figure made the following comments to the late investigative journalist Mark Burdman of EIR:

I have been noticing, as you have, the growing opposition, in Britain, in the United States, to this Iraq war. Last night, something occurred to me that I think is very relevant. I think the crowd that wants this Iraq war may well do something drastic in the coming days to regain the momentum. Some very big terrorism, perhaps. It is all very well that there are these challenges to the Iraq war. But we should not lose sight of the fact that there are powerful people in Washington, who pulled off this September 11 last year. They have their Plan A, which is now in trouble. But they also have their Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. They may well have been thinking until very recently that their coup that began on September 11 was going very well. But suddenly, they have to re-think. And I think they are desperate, and capable of a lot. (EIR, August 23, 2002)


In other words, the rogue network was still in place, and it might resort to a new round of terrorism.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 -- WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE SAID

We now leave the terrain of what actually happened, and move to a hypothetical sphere in which we can best try to shed further light on the events of 9/11. At this point a detailed account and timelines of what really happened behind the scenes on 9/11 cannot be attempted. However, we can speculate as to what an honest and courageous president might have done. Such a president might not have immediately understood the full scope of the 9/11 plot, but he would have insisted upon political accountability for appointed officials and on an immediate and thorough investigation. Some guidance might have come from an examination of the Ed Meese press conference of November 1986 which blew the lid off the Iran-contra scandal, and which was accompanied by the firing of Oliver North and John Poindexter, then the NSC director. The speech on the evening of 9/11 might have sounded something like this:

My fellow citizens:

Today our country and our political system have been targeted by large-scale acts of terrorism. These are monstrous crimes against humanity, and they will not go unpunished. We send our solidarity to the brave firemen, policemen, military people, and office workers who have borne the brunt of this assault. We promise an equitable and equal compensation for the human losses of this day. Insistent and irresponsible voices have been raised in my own White House and in the intelligence agencies, and have inspired media reports attributing these attacks to Arab or Islamic terrorists of the al Qaeda Bin Laden organization. But this is no time for snap decisions or a rush to judgment when we are dealing with the present and future peace of the world. It is true that we have bitter enemies around the world, but the capabilities displayed today appear to go far beyond the technical and physical means available to al Qaeda. We must also recall that, under the reckless and irresponsible policies of my predecessors, the CIA had been one of the main sponsors of Bin Laden and al Qaeda. If we think back to the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, we remember that media voices attempted in the first hours to attribute that tragedy to the Arab world. Although I am convinced that we still do not know the full story of Oklahoma City, it is clear that the Arab world was not involved.

There are too many unanswered questions at this point. How were the terrorists who seem to have been involved allowed to enter the United States and operate freely in this country? Why was there no air defense over a period of one hour and fifteen minutes? I have ordered an immediate inquiry into this question, and in the meantime I have accepted the resignations of Gen. Myers of the Air Force, the deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and of Gen. Bernhard of NORAD, whose agency failed the people today. There is also evident reason to believe that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have not performed satisfactorily, based on the fragmentary accounts available so far. I have therefore accepted the resignations of the leaders of those agencies, and of their principal deputies. I have furthermore accepted the resignation of the Secretary of Defense and his deputy, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Transportation, and of my National Security Adviser, since it is evident to me that they could not continue to serve the nation effectively because of the immense tragedy which has occurred on their watch. We rightly demand accountability from teachers, from railroad engineers, and from physicians. We therefore have all the more reason to demand accountability and responsibility from those who have been entrusted with the management of the executive departments, several of which have not served us well today.

Another question involves the collapse of the World Trade Center towers many minutes after they had been impacted by the airplanes. These events, as you know, represent an absolute anomaly in the history of skyscrapers. In particular, there is no explanation whatsoever for the collapse of building seven at five o 'clock in the afternoon.

Accordingly, and consistent with our urgent measures to save any victims remaining in the rubble, I am ordering the Seventh Mountain Division of Fort Drum, New York, to seize control of the site of the World Trade Center, cordoning it off as a crime scene and taking immediate measures for preserving the evidence we must have to determine what really happened. Not one scrap of metal will be removed before a full forensic survey has been carried out. Contrary to media accounts, we have not been able to identify the flying object which apparently hit the Pentagon, although it seems likely that it was not a Boeing 757, and thus could hardly have been United flight 73. As for the tragedy over Shanksville, we are investigating whether this aircraft was shot down by our own forces, and why. All crash sites are being secured by military units, acting under my direct orders, whose loyalty to the Constitution is beyond question.

The overriding question is whether the criminals who acted today enjoyed support or collaboration from within our own country and even within our own government. I have created a special unit of federal investigators which will act under my direct orders and which will report to me and to me alone. The first task of that unit will be to determine why there was no air defense, in violation of the standard operating procedures of NORAD and the FAA. Another task will be to examine the entire roster of FBI and CIA double agents presently infiltrating terrorist groups and how they are managed, with a view to identifying possible factors of collusion. Another task will be to determine why our watch list procedures and other forms of vigilance were not effective in screening the criminals out.

As far as the FBI is concerned, I urge the Congress to join me in breaking up this tragically dysfunctional agency. After Ruby Ridge, Waco, the FBI crime lab, Wen Ho Lee, the Atlanta Olympics and Richard Jewel, the withheld documents in the McVeigh case, we now have September 11, 2001. The FBI has never recovered from the corruption and mismanagement instilled during the fifty year reign of J. Edgar Hoover, a man whom we know today to have been unfit for public office. The FBI has many dedicated public servants, but they are trapped today in a structure of incompetence, corruption, and worse. Accordingly, I am placing the FBI into receivership by executive order with immediate effect; this agency will operate for the time being under the direction of my special assistant for internal security.

In determining the full scope of what happened today, I need the help of all our citizens. If you know something important about what happened today, I want to hear it. Call the White House and talk with one of my staff, who are mobilized to take your calls. If you see anyone, including especially federal agents, attempting to tamper with evidence, or if a federal agent attempts to intimidate you into saying you saw or heard something you did not see, I want to know about that, too.

I am also determined to find out if foreign intelligence agencies or foreign citizens were involved in today's events. I am appointing myself as temporary Director of the CIA, and in that capacity I will undertake a comprehensive review of foreign operations on American soil. No foreign agency will be exempted, and I promise you a full initial progress report.

In addition to the immediate investigations I have mentioned so far, I am also empanelling a board of inquiry to study today's events and offer a second opinion on what may have gone wrong. I am asking Senator Byrd to be the chairman of this body, and Lawrence Walsh, a Republican, the former Iran-contra prosecutor, to be the vice chairman. I have invited former Secretary of the Treasury O 'Neill, former President Carter, General Zinni, former Governor Ryan of Illinois to serve. I am also actively soliciting participation by outsiders and academics who have been critics of our government policies of recent years. I am inviting Susan Sontag, Eric Foner, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Howard Zinn, and Seymour Hersh to become members of the board of inquiry. Let them play the devil's advocates, if they will, so long as we obtain truth and justice. They will all receive the necessary security clearances directly from me personally, if necessary. I will personally supervise the rapid declassification of documents as recommended by the board of inquiry in order to educate the public about the board's findings. We all remember the failure of the Warren Commission; that failure will not be repeated during my presidency.

I recall the words of President Eisenhower in the wake of the Kennedy assassination: the American people, he commented will not be stampeded. I ask you to support your government and its constitutional institutions, and not to give way to the voices of hatred, fear, aggression, and paranoia. I promise that swift justice will be rendered for those who have struck us today, no matter who they turn out to be.

These dastardly attacks will not force this great nation off course; they will not force us to become something we are not. We will remain ourselves. We will go forward in the great American tradition of the Monroe Doctrine, the Good Neighbor Policy, the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan, and the Four Freedoms of the Atlantic Charter, starting with the freedom from fear.

Further attacks cannot be ruled out in the coming days and weeks. Because of the office I hold, and because of the constitutional responsibilities I must meet, I ask for your support -- no matter what may happen during the coming days and weeks.

Good night.


SEPTEMBER 25, 2001 -- WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE SAID

A real president would have glanced at Cicero's orations against Catiline, with which that orator had gone into the Roman Senate to stop the impending coup d'etat of the bankrupt aristocrat Lucius Sergius Catilina in 63 BC, who had planned to seize power through a massacre of Roman political leaders. He would have been mindful of General de Gaulle's 1962 speech in which he expressed his determination to defeat the coup attempt of four fascist generals in Algiers.

My fellow citizens:

Tonight I would like to present, as promised; a progress report on the investigations into the events of September 11, investigations which have been the main task of your government over the past several weeks. The tidings I bring you this evening are very grave, and they are related to the tempestuous events of the last few days which are known to you in whole or in part.

As many of you may know, during the morning of 9/11 the White House received a telephone call saying, "Angel is next." "Angel " was the top-secret code word designating my official aircraft, Air Force One, so this was a threat to shoot down Air Force One. It was also something more: as I realized immediately, it was quite possible that this telephone call had indeed come from the authors of the 9/11 terror attacks. If that was so, there existed the definite possibility that this group, whoever they were, also had access to other top-secret code words used by our government. This meant that there was imminent danger that the terrorist group might possess the code words and related signals that could be used to target thermonuclear ballistic missiles on targets in foreign countries -- or even here at home. A duplicate of the briefcase known as "the football," which follows me everywhere, might be in the hands of the plotters. I decided at once to proceed as quickly as possible to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska with a small force of bodyguards for the purpose of countermanding, by the immediate physical presence of the commander in chief, any and all illegal attack orders that might be issued by the rogue terrorist network which had so plainly declared war on our country. My intent was to assume direct personal control over the nuclear deterrent forces of this country, wherever they might be located.

During my flight to Nebraska, I received a phone call which presented this threat in the most concrete form. The call came from a man who identified himself as the spokesman for a secret organization of clandestine operatives and special forces -- clearly a subversive and insurrectionary group acting as a tool for a coterie of very powerful, wealthy, and ruthless persons. This spokesman told me that his organization had orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as a means of reversing the inexorable decline of American power in the world -- a process which I and my elected predecessors had been wholly negligent in allowing, he asserted. He also demanded that I immediately make a televised public statement identifying al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, Afghanistan, and Iraq as those responsible for the terror attacks, and announcing our government's plans to invade and occupy these two countries. Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, he added, might have to come later. If l failed to accept this ultimatum, the conspirators were determined to use the nuclear launch code words in their possession to destroy Cairo, Baghdad, Teheran, Rabat, Tunis, Karachi, Jakarta, Damascus, Pyongyang, Riyad, Havana, and possibly other cities. That would start 100 years of war of civilizations, they told me, and once it had started, nothing could stop it. I told this spokesman that he and his group, in addition to being guilty of high treason, were courting suicide. The Russian Federation might interpret the missile firings as the beginning of a US first strike against Russian targets, and might respond by initiating procedures for launch under attack, in an attempt to use their nuclear assets against us before they were destroyed on the ground. The People's Republic of China might respond in the same way. These countries might also conclude that our government had been taken over by madmen, and that their only hope of safety might lie in the use of military means against us. The spokesman for the group of plotters replied that those dangers were real, but that it was up to me to avoid this danger by granting the demands of the terrorist controllers, which came down to US attacks on Afghanistan, and Iraq, with the overthrow of the government of Saudi Arabia likely along the way. The terror group, he boasted, welcomed the bloody global conflict that I seemed to fear, and even regarded the prospect of world war engulfing this planet as preferable to the relative decline of the United States for which he said I and those like me were responsible.

At this moment, our country faced the greatest danger in our entire history. To accept the ultimatum of the plotters and to wage war against their target list of Arab and Islamic states would have cast the United States adrift on an ocean of blackmail, lies, and adventures. Blackmailers always escalate their demands, and the addiction to terrorism of the victorious criminal network might have poisoned our national life for decades, or even for centuries. If I had capitulated; I would have been a puppet of the plotters for as long as I remained in office, indeed for the rest of my life. On the other side, the danger of world war was immediate. I decided that the only honorable course coherent with my oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution was to defy the terrorists. At this point we had reached the SAC headquarters in Nebraska. I terminated my conversation with the spokesman for the plotters.

At this point, I activated several units of the Secret Service and Army intelligence under hand- icked officers whose constitutional loyalty I knew I could trust. I briefed them on what I knew so far, and gave them the task of finding the rogue terror network and rooting it out. These fine patriotic men and women went to work at once, and within 72 hours the main outlines of the plot were evident. Let me sum up what we have learned so far.

A group of al Qaeda operatives, manipulated by a cabal of rogue CIA case officers, had chosen September 11 to hijack several aircraft, force them to land, and use the passengers as hostages to extort the liberation of certain prisoners being held in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Among these al Qaeda operatives were several double agents, also under the control of rogue elements in our own intelligence community. These were dissolute and evil persons, who had been trained using the infrastructure left over from the Iran-contra affair.

Air defense that day was completely absent, in part because of four air exercises which were taking place at the same time in various parts of North America. A number of officers in critical positions at NORAD, its regional office in Rome, New York, and in the FAA appear to have been party to the plot. By a kind of collective inertia, they ignored the well-known and long-established standard operating procedures which govern the cooperation of FAA and NORAD, and were able to misdirect our few remaining fighter interceptors, out over the Atlantic Ocean in one case. More arrests are imminent as a result of ongoing investigations in this area.

What the al Qaeda operatives apparently did not know was that the aircraft they had chosen to hijack had been equipped with a new technology making it possible to seize control of these aircraft and operate them by remote control from a command center on the ground. It was this new technology, and not the dubious skills of the hijackers, which allowed the planes to hit their targets with such precision.

But even direct hits by the two planes could not have been enough to bring down the towers. According to the information we have developed; the collapse of World Trade Center buildings one, two, and seven was the direct result of controlled demolition -- the result of explosive charges which had been placed in these buildings over the previous days and weeks by the terror network, who infiltrated the buildings in the guise of cleaning and security personnel. We have not yet been able to solve all the problems posed by the collapse of the twin towers, since energy sources appear to have been at work which go beyond the realm of today's conventional technology. I will have more to report on this later, In the meantime, I regret to report that I have had to order the arrest of the Mayor of New York, who repeatedly attempted to bring about the destruction of evidence at the crime scene.

As for the Pentagon, it was struck by a US Air Force cruise missile fired from an aircraft above West Virginia, and not by one of the hijacked airliners. We have not yet been able to determine what happened to American flight 77, and we call on citizens to come to our aid in this matter. The launch of the cruise missile was the work of an entire Air Force unit in Ohio, and these traitors have all been taken into custody.

The airplane that crashed in Shanksville was cynically shot down through the actions of a rebel mole placed in a highly sensitive position at NORAD. This mole was aware that the passengers had retaken control of the aircraft from the lightly armed hijackers, and realized that the interrogation of the hijackers on board would have revealed critical dimensions of the real plot in which the hijackers, although certainly acting with criminal intent, were ultimately mere expendable pawns. The NORAD mole also feared that an examination of the aircraft might reveal the presence of the remote control technology, which had for some reason failed to function. Accordingly, the mole cynically directed jet interceptors to destroy this airplane, even though it was far away from any target of interest to the hijackers.

Several FBI officials and agents have been indicted for obstruction of justice; they have been accused of destroying security camera tapes at the Pentagon, and intimidating witnesses at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Members of the FBI crime lab and the NTSB team have been discovered attempting to sabotage the cockpit voice recorders of the planes in question; the recordings we have heard are consistent with the account of the 9/11 events I have just described.

Sadly, I must address the three mysterious suicides from the highest ranks of our own government which have caused so much speculation over the past several days. The vice president was found dead in his bunker at Site R last Thursday; the coroner has ruled this a suicide, and has established that the cause of death was a potassium cyanide pill. The same finding has been delivered in the case of the former deputy secretary of defense some hours later on that same day. The death of the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a gunshot wound to the head in the Pentagon at around that same time has also been ruled a suicide. I can only confirm that arrest warrants for all three had been issued by a federal grand jury empanelled to investigate the tragic events of September 11.

The mutiny of the Delta Force battalion based near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has been quelled by loyal troops and planes. The appeal of the rebel commander for a military rebellion against the legal government and for a military coup has been ignored.

As you may also know, a top former anti-terror official and several other high officials of the CIA and FBI have been missing for over two weeks, and are presumed to have fled abroad. I can confirm that arrest warrants have been issued for these persons. A number of journalists have also disappeared, and this may also be related to the recent upheaval. I can assure you that our constitutional procedures are just as vigorous as they have ever been, that habeas corpus remains alive, well, and in full force. We have no secret prisons and no secret prisoners, and I will tolerate none. Our open courts continue to function, and they will continue to do so.

We have uncovered complicity between the rogue network in this country and a number of foreign intelligence agencies. One of these is the British MI-6. After the raid by Scotland Yard on the headquarters of MI-6 in Oxford Circus, and after the resignation of Mr. Blair, I look forward to working with the new Labour Party prime minister to eradicate any remaining insurrectionary elements. We continue to observe the situation in several other countries we believe may have been involved in the 9/11 plot. I regret that General Sharon has refused to cooperate, and I invite the Congress to consider what response may be required.

I would like to thank President Putin of the Russian Federation and the leadership of the People's Republic of China for their wisdom and restraint, especially during the morning of 9/11, when the rebel network engaged in visible preparations for a nuclear launch. I am certain that the great powers, having weathered this storm, will be able to return to the path of confidence building measures at our summit next week.

More details will be announced as soon as practicable. In conclusion, let me say a few words about the state of the world.

I do not assert that terrorism is a spontaneous outgrowth of poverty and misery. In fact, I assert the opposite: terrorism is usually organized by an outside agency, often by a government or a network operating inside a government. But it is certainly true that poverty and misery provide the indispensable environment in which terrorist groups can recruit, or be created by intelligence agencies. In today's world, there are about 2 billion people who are attempting to get by on less than $1 per day. There are some 600 million homeless -- that is equal to about the entire population of Europe. About one and one half billion people do not have clean water to drink. With about one billion people unemployed, the unemployment rate in our world is about 33%, about one third. When that happened in our own country during the 1930s, we called that a great depression, and we must therefore acknowledge the existence of a world economic depression of unprecedented severity today. Two thirds of the people in the world -- 65% -- have never made a phone call. About 40% do not have access to electricity for household use; I would call that a clear need for rural and urban electrification. Every day in this world of ours, some 40,000 human beings perish from malnutrition and from easily treated diseases like diarrhea. Another 40,000 lose their lives each month as the result of warfare, all of which is absolutely futile and which has often been cynically fomented by foreign economic interests. I am thinking here of the crisis in Africa most specifically. In Africa, the standard of living of the average family has declined by 20% over the last twenty years. Eighty-nine countries are now worse off than they were at the beginning of the 1990s. 175 million people leave their home countries every year in the desperate search for jobs and food -- about 3% of humanity. The price of a human slave on the slave markets of southern Europe at this very moment is about 4,000 euros. In the midst of all this, the two hundred fifty-eight richest persons in the world own more in the way of assets and other property than the poorest 3 billion persons. When two hundred fifty eight own more than half of the human population of the world, I hope you will agree with me that such a world cannot be stable. Yet, this is the world that lies before us. I plan to use my powers as president to ameliorate this situation with every means at my disposal, and I call upon the Congress and upon all citizens to support these steps for a new world economic order that will be more just, more equitable, more prosperous, and more dynamic.

We have now been tested in the crucible of a brutal crisis. From this experience we must take renewed devotion to our best values. The decade of globalization has been revealed as a colossal failure, for ourselves as well as for others. We must find a better, more humane, more equitable way of organizing the affairs of this planet, To do this, we must work closely with almost two hundred sovereign states, and work out the details with them, since every country has an inherent right to economic development, science, technology, and dignity. The old imperialism denied these, and the old imperialism is now on the junkheap of history. In the days to come, my two lodestars will be peace and economic development, seen as the two sides of the same coin. Our world has turned over several times in the past month, but I am more certain than ever that I can count on the support of the American people in getting the world back on the right track. I ask you once again to remember the victims of the recent tragedy in your prayers. Good night.


CONCLUSIONS

So far we have come to the following conclusions:

1. The government's assertion that the so-called hijackers operated without being detected by official surveillance is untenable, and evidence is strong that the alleged hijackers acted in coordination with a faction within the government itself. The hijackers were therefore in all probability expendable double agents or, more bluntly, patsies.

2. The government's assertion that the four supposedly hijacked airliners were taken over and piloted by the four accused hijackers identified by the FBI is at or beyond the limits of physical and technical reality. The planes were in all probability guided to their targets by some form of remote access or remote control.

3. The government's assertion that the failures o fair defense were caused by the fog of war is lame and absurd. Air defense was in all probability sabotaged by moles operating inside the government.

4. The government's assertion that a Boeing 757-200 hit the Pentagon is physically impossible. Some other type of flying object, possibly a cruise missile, must therefore be considered.

5. The government's assertion that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed as a result of the impact of aircraft and of the subsequent fire is physically impossible. The fall of the towers cannot be explained without the hypothesis of controlled demolition of some form, possibly including unconventional methods employing new physical principles.

6. The government's assertion that World Trade Center 7 collapsed at 5:20 PM EDT on September 11 purely as a result of fire is physically impossible. The collapse of WTC 7 is coherent with controlled demolition of the conventional type.

7. The government's assertion that United Flight 93 crashed because of actions by the hijackers or because of a struggle in the cockpit is physically impossible, given the pattern in which the wreckage was distributed. All evidence points towards the hypothesis that United 93 was shot down by US military aircraft.

8. The government's refusal to investigate insider trading in American Airlines and United Airlines put options, the wholesale seizure and destruction of evidence, the systematic intimidation of witnesses by the FBI, and a series of other incidents point unmistakably to an attempted coverup on the part of the entire US government and establishment.

BUSH IN HELL

At the bottom of Dante's Inferno, in that third part of the traitors' ninth circle which is called Tolomea, Dante and Vergil encounter a certain Frate Alberigo of Faenza. Tolomea is devoted to that species of traitors who have betrayed their own guests. The peculiarity of Frate Alberigo is that he is apparently alive on earth, even while his soul is being tormented in the depths of Hell. Frate Alberigo explains that in cases of particularly heinous betrayal, the damned soul departs from the body and descends directly into Hell. The body remains alive, but it is operated by a demon during the rest of its natural life span. Something similar happened to Bush when he betrayed his oath of office by turning the US government over to the rogue network on 9/11. The demon has been in control ever since.

_______________

Notes:

4. For Putin's statements related to 9/11, see John O'Loughlin, Gearaid O Tuathail (Gerard Toal), and Vladimir Kolossov, " A 'Risky Westward Turn '? Putin's 9-11 Script and Ordinary Russians."
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:20 am

CHAPTER X: ANTHRAX

The anthrax incidents of October 2001 must be regarded as an integral part of the entire 9/11 operation. The 9/11 terror attacks were highly effective in terrorizing urban populations, since no one knew when another city might be struck, and with what means. But what of the vast suburbs, and what of rural America? Here kamikaze aircraft, poison gas and dirty bombs were hardly likely. But everyone in the country had a mailbox, and now that mailbox could become the delivery system for a deadly disease. Even the most humble and obscure person living in the most remote location could never be sure that a piece of junk mail in the letterbox had not brushed up against an envelope teeming with lethal anthrax spores. The most harmless daily routine, that of checking the mailbox, suddenly became a tense encounter with the world of biological warfare.

The anthrax attacks also provided a most welcome pretext for the Bush administration and the FBI to scale down and to slow down the ongoing probes into 9/11. The anthrax letters provided a reason to re-assign FBI agents to the new danger, before they got anywhere near unearthing the explosive secrets of 9/11. On October 10, FBI assets were shifted away from the 9/11 investigation with the explanation that they were needed for the anthrax emergency.

At the same time the anthrax attacks, if properly regarded, can become the Achilles heel of the entire 9/11 operation, since it is here that the cause and effect relationship reaching into the secure weapons labs and military facilities of the US federal government is the most obvious. Anthrax cannot be synthesized by a bunch of rag-heads in a distant cave. Weaponized anthrax can only be obtained at the US Army's biological weapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and at a very few other centers of the same type controlled by other governments. The existence of weaponized anthrax is ipso facto a strong case for US government collusion in terror attacks on this country.

The anthrax cases also provide a case study in FBI obstruction of justice. After the anthrax letters were used as a pretext for paring down the 9/11 searches, the agents so re- assigned accomplished virtually nothing. For a long time the bureau pretended that any microbiologist could have been the killer. But the pool of potential anthrax suspects was of course much smaller -- it numbered in the dozens, or less. But, in order to define a realistic suspect pool, the FBI would have had to admit that the most likely source of the anthrax attacks was the government labs themselves, and that was something the FBI clearly did not want to do, lest this revelation be projected backwards onto 9/11. After a while Stephen Hatfill, a supposedly disgruntled former biowar researcher with a sinister resume and opinions, and thus a probable diversionary scapegoat, was identified as a person of interest. He was vilified by FBI leakers, but never indicted. The FBI made a Potemkin show of an investigation by draining a pond near Frederick, Maryland, but Hatfill was never charged.

We may also note in passing that the US government response to the anthrax cases pointed up the extent of oligarchical stratification in this society. Bush and the White House staff started taking Cipro, an antidote to anthrax, before the attacks even started. Members of Congress and congressional staffers got Cipro as soon as anthrax letters were found on Capitol Hill, and their offices were shut down instantly. In the case of black postal workers, the Postal Service expected them to keep working in tainted facilities, while at the same time there was a marked reluctance to give out free Cipro to these workers. The head of the USPS, a Bush appointee, said that any criticism o fhow he ran his agency amounted to aid and comfort for terrorists.

We cannot exclude the hypothesis that the anthrax cases were intended to become a much larger epidemic, one that might have claimed thousands of lives rather than just a few. Finally, in the anthrax cases, we have a prima facie case for political targeting. The first recipients of anthrax letters were a tabloid newspaper which had been prominent in publicizing the disorderly and at times illegal conduct of Bush 43's two substance- abusing daughters. Other recipients, like Senators Daschel and Leahy, were possible sources of opposition to the Patriot Act and other liberticide measures demanded by Bush and Ashcroft.

Between October 10 and October 11, just one week after the first case of anthrax had been reported, the FBI contacted the University of Iowa in Ames, Iowa. For seventy years this university had maintained a comprehensive repository of samples of every known strain of anthrax pathogen. This university was furthermore the source which provided samples of anthrax pathogen to researchers seeking cures, and also to labs seeking to weaponize the pathogen. Immediately after this phone call by the FBI, the University of Iowa destroyed the Ames anthrax repository. While it is not difficult to imagine the cover stories the FBI might have used to obtain this result, it is also clear that the Ames repository could have been the key to definitively solving the anthrax letters case. Analysis of the anthrax spores in the letters by chemical and DNA techniques identified these spores as belonging to the Ames strain. With the help of the samples collected in the repository, it would have been possible to identify with great precision the specific batch from which the anthrax letters had been filled, along with a paper trail leading to the agency to which the sample had been transferred. As the New York Times reported:

Shortly after the first case of anthrax arose, the FBI said it had no objection to the destruction of a collection of anthrax samples at Iowa State University, but some scientists involved in the investigation now say that collection may have contained genetic clues valuable to the inquiry.

Criminal investigators have not visited many of the companies, laboratories, and scientific institutions with the equipment or capability to make the kind of highly potent anthrax sent in a letter to Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader. Where investigators have conducted interviews, they often seemed to ask general questions unlikely to elicit new evidence, several laboratory directors said.

Evidence Disappears

Last month, after consulting with the FBI, Iowa State University in Ames destroyed anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept in more than 100 vials. A variant of the so-called Ames strain had been implicated in the death of a Florida man from inhalation anthrax, and the university was nervous about security. Now, a dispute has arisen, with scientists in and out of government saying the rush to destroy the spores may have eliminated crucial evidence about the anthrax in the letters sent to Congress and the news media.

If the archive still existed, it would by no means solve the mystery. But scientists said a precise match between the anthrax that killed four people and a particular strain in the collection might have offered hints as to when the bacteria had been isolated and, perhaps, how widely it had been distributed to researchers. And that, in turn, might have given investigators important clues to the killer's identity.


No matter how scientifically illiterate they might be, the reflex response of any real detective would be to veto the destruction of anything remotely resembling evidence, or even of a key to interpreting evidence. But this time around, the FBI was pleading ignorance. According to Bill Tobin, a former forensic metallurgist who had worked at the infamous and scandal-ridden FBI crime laboratory in Washington DC, "The bureau was caught almost as unaware and unprepared as the public was for these events. It's just not realistic to ask 7,000 agents to overnight become sufficiently knowledgeable about bioterrorist agents [sic] and possible means of theft of those items and how they might be disseminated lethally to an American public."

Dr. Martin Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University, commented: "If those cultures were still alive they could have helped in clearing up the muddied history" of the spores found in the letters. Ronald M. Atlas, the president-elect of the American Society of Microbiology, the world's largest group of "germ professionals," saw large legal implications in the destruction of evidence. "Potentially," he said, "it loses evidence that would have been useful" in the legal investigation. (New York Times, "Experts See FBI Missteps Hampering Anthrax Inquiry," November 11, 2002) The FBI was obviously out to sabotage its own investigation. Here is yet another case of manifest obstruction of justice by the FBI molehill. The 9/11 commission ignores both the anthrax affair overall and the obstruction of justice by the FBI.

Starting about a week after 9/11, anthrax letters began to arrive at the offices of The Sun, a supermarket tabloid based in Florida, of Senators Daschle and Leahy, NBC News, and the New York Post. On October 5, Bob Stevens, photo editor of The Sun, died of anthrax. A number of postal workers in Washington DC also succumbed. A total of five people died. The anthrax spores found in the letters were the product of very sophisticated milling, and were coated with a chemical, silica, that is unique to US laboratories, Iraqi anthrax, by contrast, is coated with bentonite, a mixture of silica and aluminum.

A great deal of publicity was given to a series of reports by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a former government official and microbiologist at the State University of New York who was also working for the Federation of American Scientists. Rosenberg's work was enthusiastically supported by the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), and the radical ecologists of Greenpeace. The FBI orchestrated a series of derogatory leaks about Rosenberg, suggesting that a gang/counter-gang operation might be in progress. Rosenberg's basic thesis was that the anthrax attacks were the work of a disgruntled lone assassin who had once worked for the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, but had subsequently been laid off. Naturally, the lone assassin approach tended to rule out an action by a more extensive network of moles in the federal government, which seems much more probable. Whenever extremely complicated and demanding operations are attributed to a disgruntled loner, we should be on guard against disinformation fabricated by the intelligence community. For example, the terrorizing impact of the anthrax letters was vastly increased by their synchronization with the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Was this a mere coincidence, or did the authors of the anthrax operation have advance knowledge that 9/11 was coming? How could Hatfill have been able to coordinate his supposed actions with 9/11? Once again, the rogue networks of the invisible government, and not any disgruntled loner, emerge as the prime suspects.

And there were other disinformation operations. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a neocon who worked for a law firm representing Achmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, began a vigorous campaign to blame the anthrax attacks on Iraq. In addition, an anonymous letter was sent to police, apparently in September, accusing an Egyptian- born American scientist who had been laid off by USAMRIID of being a terrorist. The FBI questioned him and said that he was innocent. Details of the letter have not been released. Rosenberg thought it likely that this letter had been sent by the perpetrator.

According to Rosenberg's January 2002 statement,

The FBI has surely known for several months that the anthrax attack was an inside job. A government estimate for the number of scientists involved in the US anthrax program over the last five years is 200 people. According to a former defense scientist the number of defense scientists with hands-on anthrax experience and the necessary access is smaller, under 50. The FBI has received short lists of specific suspects with credible motives from a number of knowledgeable inside sources, and has found or been given clues (beyond those presented below) that could lead to incriminating evidence. By now the FBI must have a good idea of who the perpetrator is. There may be two factors accounting for the lack of public acknowledgement and the paucity of information being released: a fear that embarrassing details might become public, and a need for secrecy in order to acquire sufficient hard evidence to convict the perpetrator.


As for the anthrax, Rosenberg agreed that there was no doubt that the spores came from a US government lab:

All letter samples contain the same strain of anthrax, corresponding to the AMES strain in the Northern Arizona University database (which has been used for identification) Contrary to early speculation, there are no more than about 20 laboratories known to have the Ames strain. The names of 15 of these have been found in the open literature. Of these, probably only about four in the US might possibly have the capability for weaponizing anthrax. Those four include both US military laboratories and a government contractor.


Rosenberg based these conclusions on a technical analysis of the anthrax spores:

The extraordinary concentration (one trillion spores per gram) and purity of the letter anthrax is believed to be characteristic of material made by the optimal US process. The optimal US weaponization process is secret -- Bill Patrick, its inventor, holds five secret patents on the process and says it involves a combination of chemicals. There is no evidence that any other country possesses the formula. Under the microscope, the letter anthrax appears to be unmilled. Milled anthrax spores are identifiable because they contain debris. The optimal US process does not use milling. The Daschle sample contains a special form of silica used in the US process. It does not contain bentonite (used by the Iraqis). A "coating" on the spores in the letter sample, indicative of the secret US process, has been observed.


Rosenberg's thesis was that the sender of the anthrax letters had been familiar with a study about using a scenario of this type for a terror attack which had been conducted by anthrax weaponization expert Bill Patrick of USAMRID a couple of years earlier:

A classified report dated February, 1999 discusses responses to an anthrax attack through the mail. The report, precipitated by a series of false anthrax mailings, was written by William Patrick, inventor of the US weaponization process, under a CIA contract to SAIC. The report describes what the US military could do and what a terrorist might be able to achieve ... the report predicted about 2.5g of anthrax per envelope (the Daschle letter contained 2g) and assumed a poorer quality of anthrax than that found in the Daschle letter. If the perpetrator had access to the materials and information necessary for the attack, he must have had security clearance or other means for accessing classified information, and may therefore have seen the report and used it as a model for the attack.


Rosenberg offered the following portrait of the anthrax killer: "Insider in US biodefense, doctoral degree in a relevant branch of biology; Middle-aged American; Experienced and skilled in working with hazardous pathogens, including anthrax, and avoiding contamination; Works for a CIA contractor in Washington, DC area; Has up-to-date vaccination with anthrax vaccine; Has clearance for access to classified information; Worked in USAMRIID laboratory in the past, in some capacity, and has access now; Knows Bill Patrick and has probably learned a thing or two about weaponization from him, informally; Has had training or experience in covering evidence; May have had an UNSCOM connection; Has had a dispute with a government agency; Has a private location where the materials for the attack were accumulated and prepared; Worked on the letters alone or with peripheral encouragement and assistance; Fits FBI profile; Has the necessary expertise, access and a past history indicating appropriate capabilities and temperament; Has been questioned by FBI." (Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, "Analysis of the Source of the Anthrax Attacks," January 17-31, 2002)

During the autumn of 2001, the FBI blanketed central New Jersey with leaflets showing a sample of the anthrax killer's handwriting. The FBI also sent questionnaires to 32,000 US microbiologists, most of whom worked in fields that had nothing to do with the government's anthrax labs. This was clearly busy work designed to avoid making the government the prime suspects in the attacks. George Monbiot of The Guardian mocked this farce as "kind of 'investigation' which might have been appropriate for the unwitnessed hit and run killing of a person with no known enemies. Rather than homing in on the likely suspects, in other words, it appears to have cast a net full of holes over the entire population." Monbiot reported that he had telephoned an FBI spokesman about this issue. "Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? 'The investigation is continuing,' the spokesman replied. 'Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government office?' I asked. He put down the phone." Monbiot speculated that the reticence had to do with covering up US violations of international biowarfare treaties, since "the army's development of weaponized anthrax, for example, directly contravenes both the biological weapons convention and domestic law. So does its plan to test live microbes in 'aerosol chambers' at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research programmes which the US government has secretly funded. Several prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigour we might have expected because the federal authorities have something to hide. The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure." (The Guardian, May 21, 2002)

This would appear to have been Barbara Hatch Rosenberg's line as well. In a sympathetic profile in the March 18, 2002 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann reported that Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may be in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons convention. If the anthrax attacks were the work of a lone, disgruntled, mad scientist, the case for strengthening international safeguards would be enhanced. Rosenberg's basic demand was that this program be monitored. Fair enough, but not the whole story.

Towards the end of June, 2002 the FBI obtained a search warrant to examine the Maryland home of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 48, a bio-defence researcher who had worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Hatfill said at once that he was the victim of a witch-hunt. When he lived in Rhodesia, Hatfill once studied close to a school which bears the same name as the bogus address on the envelopes containing the fatal doses of anthrax. (The Guardian, June 28, 2002)

On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as "Mr. Z" and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist. "If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. It's time for the FBI to make a move: Either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion." In essence, the FBI did neither.

Kristof and the other journalists hostile to Hatfill claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these attacks. Hatfill held a press conference on August 12, 2002 in which he once again denied everything. In late August 2002, a paid two-page advertisement in the Washington Times argued that the anthrax killer had to be a member of the US military, probably someone with access to the U.S. off-budget, secret biological-warfare laboratories, or else someone with access to the Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) report on anthrax-mailing. The author of the ad was a certain Pete Yelis. Yelis asserted that Steven Hatfill was not the perpetrator. Yelis maintained that the evidence indicated that the mailings were probably prepared beginning two years earlier, and that the purpose was political -- to scare the U.S. into a domestic security/wartime response -- and not to kill a lot of people. He noted that the targets were among the strongest potential opponents of "Executive Branch/Homeland Security Wartime Powers expansions," citing, for example, the mailing to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The SAIC report, which Yelis says contained "the exact specifications of the anthrax mailed" would suggest that the mailers came from a group of military officers with access to the SAIC report. (Washington Times, August 26,2002) A day earlier Hatfill and his lawyer held a second press conference, which received exceptionally broad media coverage, denouncing the FBI and Attorney General John Ashcroft for the tactics used in their investigation.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, after having been interviewed by the FBI, said that the agents had asked repeatedly whether a team of government scientists could be trying to frame Hatfill. "They kept asking me did I think there might be a group in the biodefense community that was trying to land the blame on Hatfill," she told the press. (Washington Times, August 3, 2002)

Whatever the gyrations of the FBI, it was clear that the anthrax came from the US government, and that the FBI had deliberately flubbed the investigation. The pond draining of 2003 changed nothing in this picture. By the summer of 2004, it was evident that the FBI would never solve the anthrax case because it did not want to awaken the US population to the reality that terrorism can come, and indeed does come, not out of a distant cave, but out of a US government lab on a military base. As for Hatfill, he was most probably a fall guy. If the FBI was incompetent before 9/11, and incompetent in its first major test thereafter, what then is the likely truth value of the statements made by the FBI about 9/11 itself?

THE WASHINGTON DC AREA SNIPER

In the fall of 2002, a series of sniper murders once again immersed the Washington DC area in fear and terror. These started in Montgomery County, Maryland, and soon spread south into Virginia. Here again the suspect pool was defined as snipers, and snipers are trained by the military services and certain police units. Any competent investigation would have started with lists of snipers trained by the government, especially recently retired or disgruntled ones. But this would once again have made the government into the prime suspect, and again the FBI refused to do this. The investigation was supposedly placed under the control of Montgomery County police chief Charles Ramsey, who ignored the imperative of sifting through the sniper pool, and instead acted as if the shooters could have been any casual passerby. Ramsey announced that telephone tip lines were being set up, and that he would rely on information from the citizenry to catch the felons. Weeks went by. After every sniper attack, road blocks were set up to encircle the entire surrounding area, but nothing was ever found. Local radio stations featured interviews with trained snipers who argued that real snipers were humanitarians who would never fire on unarmed civilians. Finally information arrived which permitted the identification of the vehicle used by the shooters, who were caught while sleeping at a rest stop on I-270. Sure enough, the older of the two shooters had been trained as a sharpshooter by the US Army. He and his younger partner were quickly categorized as lone itinerant psychopaths. This affair served to terrorize the national capital area, including Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive departments, for the best part of two months. It refreshed and revived the horror generated by 9/11, and provided the immediate backdrop for the November 2002 election. That time around, al Qaeda and its mythical apparatus were not needed.
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