Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: 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;
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:
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:
Here is the same scene of confusion as described from the standpoint of another participant:
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:
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:
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:
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
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:
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:
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)
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)