Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts

Thursday, September 3, 2020

COVID 19 - WAR with CHINA - ISRAEL 911 and the BOEING UN-INTERUPTABLE AUTO PILOT

 

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DELETED BY YT UNDER "COMMUNITY GUIDELINES", APRIL 24, 2020. 
 
 
 UN Refugee Application | Brendon Lee O'Connell - 100MB PDF file
 
                                  War in the South China Sea, June-August 2020. Hopefully it will be contained. The "threat of war" will be enough to cause major trade dislocation, shortages of every kind and full blown, in the open, martial law and direct government (Israel) control of goods and services - food, food transportation and food distribution. Combined with the Corona lockdown, it is the end of the American Republic. It's over. According to Alex Jones, Donald Trump [say this breathlessly - chew your popcorn], is baled up in the Oval Office, besieged by Nancy Pelosi and an army of "deep state" hob goblins making his last stand ala Yassar Arafat style in the PLO Headquarters in the 90's. Donald Trump is the President of the United States: imbued with dictatorial powers of executive authority under The War Powers Act. He can literally do what ever he wants under the guise of "national security". Arbitrary arrest. Forced opening of businesses and trade under threat of immediate imprisonment. But Donald Trump does nothing...Nancy Pelosi and AOC have him by the balls...dancing on roof tops...he's helpless...and Melania has her "I Dont Care" jacket on. 
 
                         Donald Trump attended numerous Jeffrey Epstien events - just ask Roger Stone. Stone stated on Infowars three years ago that yes, indeed, they had been to a Jeff Epstein event and noted the "very young girls" playing in the pool. Stone stated, "We thought Jeff was a great guy allowing the next door neighbors kids to use his pool." Stone assured the Infowars listeners that he and Doanld - friends for 40 years - left immediately when they saw Jeff's playful teenie bopper entourage...they escaped in a nick of time! All that Adderal and Coke in Stone and Trump's systems assisted their rapid getaway from the impending crime scene. A year later, Jones (coming down off his coke and Adderal binge under orders from Dr Steve Pieczenik, and Dr Henry Kissinger), stated he had been courted by Hollywood for years - see, you all missed this because you don't torture yourselves like I do and watch Jones. 
 
          From 2008 to 2012, Jones went back and forth to L.A from Austin at $10,000 a time doing voice overs and auditions - these are his own admissions. He was hanging with the AIDS infected coke and porn fiend Charlie Sheen and coke nut Gary Busey. Luckily, Jones being a good and pious Christian, calling on the power of The Holy Spirit, resisted the temptations of the flesh and nasal stimulation. After 4 years and a few hundred thousand dollars later (that we know of), Jones saw the evil that was Hollywood and proceeded to become a pious monastic, crying loudly from the wilderness of his Austin multi million dollar studio...buy my bone broth! The end is near! At $20,000+ USD a WEEK, in his pocket...profit. He truly suffered for his craft. Jones further admissions were that during his divorce he partied at the ranch of the lead engineer of the Boeing F18 fighter jet. Alotta blondes, beer and AR15's were had...being a red blooded male that Jones is. In fact, Jones keeps telling us non stop he is a "red blooded male" and it brings me to the point of, 
 
"He doth protest to much..."
 
... did Jones getting a little high with Charlie and the gang in L.A one night and decided to give naked pole dancing a go? Just once...to make sure he was truly deep red blooded? For science.... Who knows, but strange things happen to the minds of mighty men when imbued with muchos stimulants in L.A. Even i was willing to give trump a chance. A chance that the US military must act, via the orange monkey and his signature. If the United States does not open immediately for business - you can throw away the 5D chess game, no if's and no but's. Donald Trump works for Bi Bi and The Bolsheviks. It's over. The Republic has been killed...we just watched it. Live on you tube. They have penetrated every level of the US high technology sector. The Bolsheviks and their high tech scientific rationalist system have finally won in the age of AI, Cambridge Analytica, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Alex Jones. Public Data Doesn’t Capture Extent of Chinese-Israeli Deals, Says Investor https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/ar... 
 
Acc Name: Brendon L. O'Connell 
Bank: St George Bank, Perth, Central Business District Acc No: 055164731 BSB: 116879 
SWIFF Code: SGBLAU2S PATREON https://www.patreon.com/talpiot 
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Thursday, October 10, 2019

EVIDENCE of FOREKNOWLEDGE of 9/11 ATTACKS STILL GOES UNINVESTIGATED



With clear evidence of a highly suspicious nature, one would think it would be unavoidable for law enforcement to investigate. Lucky Larry Silverstein admits to preparing for WTC 7 rebuild over a year before the attacks occurred, in a building that was recently renovated with millions of dollars and that housed some of the Federal, State, and City’s most clandestine and or extremely important offices including the CIA, Secret Service, Security and Exchange Commission (investigating massive insider trading scandal) the Mayors Emergency Command Bunker of which he never manned that day, and much much more. 

When will enough be enough?
It’s time to have an independent investigative body conduct a real investigation and bring these people to justice. 








Wednesday, January 2, 2019

BREAKING NEWS - HACKERS CLAIM to HAVE FILES to EXPOSE 9/11 and COMPLETELY BLOW APART OFFICIAL STORY - SILVERSTEIN PROPERTIES, LLOYD'S of LONDON to GOVT DOCS




© Reuters / Sean Adair

Hacker group The Dark Overlord has threatened to leak thousands of “secret” documents stolen from insurers and government agencies that they claim reveal the truth about 9/11 – unless they’re paid not to.

The Dark Overlord, a “professional adversarial threat group” known for their hacks of Netflix, plastic surgery clinics, and other sensitive targets, posted a link to a 10GB encrypted archive of documents relating to 9/11 litigation, promising to release the encryption keys if their demands were not met in a post on Pastebin on Monday.

The group claims the documents tell the story of what really happened on one of the most notorious dates in recent history, tweeting “We’ll be providing many answers about 9.11 conspiracies through our 18,000 secret documents leak.” They published a “teaser” consisting of letters, emails, and various documents that mention law firms, the Transport Security Administration, and the Federal Aviation Administration, with a promise of more to come.

They claim to have hacked documents from not only major global insurers like Lloyds of London and Hiscox, but also Silverstein Properties, which owned the World Trade Center complex, and various government agencies. The material, which supposedly includes confidential government documents that were meant to be destroyed but were instead retained by legal firms, allegedly reveals “the truth about one of the most recognizable incidents in recent history and one which is shrouded in mystery with little transparency and not many answers.”

Anyone worried they might be named in the documents can have their names redacted – for a fee, according to the announcement. “Terrorist organizations” and “competing nation states of the USA” are also offered first dibs on the info – if they pay up. Otherwise, the hackers write, the insurers can pay an unspecified Bitcoin ransom – or “we’re going to bury you with this.”

Some of the documents were nabbed in an April hack of a law firm associated with Hiscox that the firm acknowledgescould have exposed 1,500 of its US commercial policyholders. The Dark Overlord claims that while their ransom was paid in relation to that earlier hack, their victim violated the “agreement” by cooperating with law enforcement, necessitating further extortion.

The group emerged in 2016 with hacks on medical centers, advertising sensitive data for sale on the dark web in order to force victims to pay for its removal. They infamously leaked an entire season of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black last year to prove to that company they meant business and have stolen data from more than 50 companies, according to Vice.

Sample of Documents:

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

9/11 WAS a ZIONIST JOB - HOW AMERICA was NEO-CONNED INTO WORLD WAR IV

shutterstock_1147749479



Technical impossibilities

Thanks to courageous investigators, many anomalies in the official explanation of the events of 9/11 were posted on the Internet in the following months, providing evidence that this was a false flag operation, and that Osama bin Laden was innocent, as he repeatedly declared in the Afghan and Pakistani press and on Al Jazeera.[1] The proofs of this appalling fraud have been accumulating ever since, and are now accessible to anyone willing to spend a few hours of research on the Web. (Although, while preparing this article, I noticed that Google is now making access to that research more difficult than it was five years ago, artificially prioritizing anti-conspiracy sites.)
For example, members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have demonstrated that it was impossible for plane crashes and jet fuel fires to trigger the collapse of the Twin Towers. Even Donald Trump understood this. In fact, speaking of “collapse” is perhaps misleading: the towers literally exploded, pulverizing concrete and projecting pieces of steel beams weighing several hundred tons hundreds of meters laterally at high speeds. The pyroclastic dust that immediately flooded through the streets, not unlike the dust from a volcano, indicates a high temperature mixture of hot gasses and relatively dense solid particles, an impossible phenomenon in a simple collapse. It is also impossible that WTC7, another skyscraper (47 stories), which had not been hit by a plane, collapsed into its own footprint at near free-fall speed, unless by “controlled demolition.”
(We at RTR Truth Media ask the reader to go to Unz.com and pour over a wide variety of information and research we have found so valuable. We are preserving this article and sharing it with our readers as we find it essential to understanding and to coming to terms with 9/11. I would like to personally thank . By clicking his name it will take you to more of his articles.)

Testimonies of firefighters recorded shortly after the events describe sequences of explosions just before the “collapse”, well below the plane impact. The presence of molten metal in the wreckage up to three weeks after the attack is inexplicable except by the presence of incompletely burned explosives. Firefighter Philip Ruvolo testified before Étienne Sauret’s camera for his film Collateral Damages (2011): “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel—molten steel running down the channelways, like you were in a foundry—like lava.”
Aviation professionals have also reported impossibilities in the behavior of the planes. The charted speeds of the two aircraft hitting the Twin Towers, 443 mph and 542 mph, exclude these aircraft being Boeing 767s, because these speeds are virtually impossible near ground level. In the unlikely event such speeds could be attained without the aircraft falling apart, flying them accurately into the towers was mission impossible, especially by the amateur pilots blamed for the hijacking. Hosni Mubarak, a former pilot, said he could never do it. (He is not the only head of state to have voiced his doubts: Chavez and Ahmadinejad are among them.) Recall that neither of the black boxes of the jetliners was ever found, an incomprehensible situation.
And of course, there are the obvious anomalies of Shanksville and Pentagon crash sites: no plane or credible plane debris can be seen on any of the numerous photos easily available.

Inside Job or Mossad Job?

Among the growing number of Americans who disbelieve the official version of the 9/11 attacks, two basic theories are in competition: I called them “inside job” and “Mossad job”. The first one is the dominant thesis within the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, and blames the American government, or a faction within the American Deep State. The second one claims that the masterminds were members of a powerful Israeli network deeply infiltrated in all spheres of power within the US, including media, government, military and secret services.
This “Mossad job” thesis has been gaining ground since Alan Sabrosky, a professor at the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Military Academy, published in July 2012 an article entitled “Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake”, where he voiced his conviction that September 11th was “a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation.”
This insert is from Resurrect the Republic / RTR Truth Media
Dr. Alan Sabrosky - Brendon O'Connell on Resurrect the Republic with Tom Lacovara-Stewart - Israeli High Tech Intelligence 9/11 to Talpiot

On Resurrect the Republic with Tom Lacovara-Stewart a long anticipated conversation with Brendon O'Connell and Dr. Alan Sabrosky joining the RTR TRUTH MEDIA group RELOADED to discuss Israeli Tech world dominance, the Talpiot program and getting together a world conference to discuss these issues.





Dr. Alan Sabrosky

Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is a writer and consultant specializing in national and international security affairs. In December 1988, he received the Superior Civilian Service Award after more than five years of service at the U.S. Army War College as Director of Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, and holder of the General of the Army Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research. He is listed in WHO'S WHO IN THE EAST (23rd ed.). A Marine Corps Vietnam veteran and a 1986 graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Dr. Sabrosky's teaching and research appointments have included the United States Military Academy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Middlebury College and Catholic University; while in government service, he held concurrent adjunct professorships at Georgetown University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Dr. Sabrosky has lectured widely on defense and foreign affairs in the United States and abroad.

Dr. Sabrosky lays out the truth - 



Tuesday, September 18, 2018

9/11 SUSPECTS - THE DANCING ISRAELIS




 In the days after 9/11, while Ground Zero continued to smolder, millions heard Dan Rather and various media outlets repeat vague and unconfirmed reports of arrests that took place that day. These rumors held that Middle Eastern men, presumably Arabs, were arrested in explosive-packed vans in various places around the city on September 11th, and that some had even been photographing and celebrating those events. What most do not realize is that those reports were not mere rumors, and we now have thousands of pages of FBI, CIA and DOJ reports documenting those arrests.

TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=19760

9/11 WAR GAMES - WHAT YOU MAY HAVE NOT BEEN TOLD



Little did we know at the time, 9/11 was not a normal day of blue sky aviation. On the contrary, it was one of the busiest days in the history of American aviation, a dense forest of live fly exercises, drills, simulations, fake radar injects and utter confusion. And that was before the attacks even began. This is the story of 9/11 that you didn’t watch unfold on your TV that fateful day in 2001. This is the story of the 9/11 War Games.

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).



KNOW MORE NEWS Adam Green vs. INFOWARS Owen Shroyer - DEBATE


Adam Green of Know More News faces off with Owen Shroyer of InfoWars in a first time ever debate on topics not covered on InfoWars. Adam Green has been an opponent of Zionism for quite some time and makes the case that Zionism is an area that InfoWars gives a pass to covers for, while Owen defends that position. Adam brings up the supremacist views of the Zionists and how bad U.S. Foreign policy and Hollywood and Media are overcome by control of it, while Owen deflects.


ADAM GREEN on Resurrect the Republic / RTR Truth Media
before the debate...

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

WORLD TRADE CENTER 7 CASE FAR FROM OVER - DON'T BE FOOLED


The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Case Far From Closed
An examination of the two opposing hypotheses for the destruction of World Trade Center 7 rules out the official explanation of fire-induced collapse.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), videos of the collapse of the 47-story World Trade Center 7 on September 11, 2001 show the building succumbing to a fire-induced progressive collapse. Many independent researchers and scientists, however, including over 1,400 professional architects and engineers who have signed a petition calling for a new investigation, disagree, pointing to evidence that it was deliberately brought down in a controlled demolition.

Despite the dramatically different conclusions drawn, there does exist widespread agreement on both sides on a number of important questions. Proponents of both hypotheses agree that the damage to WTC 7 sustained from the impact of debris from the collapse of the north tower (WTC 1) was not an initiating or determinative factor in the collapse. Both sides also agree that the system of transfer trusses and girders in the building that allowed it to be constructed above the Consolidated Edison New York electric power substation played no role in the collapse, that hypothetical fuel oil fires from tanks stored in the building for emergency generators was not a causal factor, and that the office fires did not result in any significant loss of strength of the building’s load-bearing steel columns.
While NIST initially denied that the building achieved gravitational acceleration during its collapse in its draft report for public comment, it was forced to acknowledge that this was indeed the case in its final report after high school physics teacher David Chandler submitted his own analysis showing that the building collapsed at free-fall for approximately 2.5 seconds, and that there was a sudden onset of free-fall. According to NIST, the period of free-fall was 2.25 seconds.
To illustrate, what this means is that for 8 stories, or more than 100 feet, the building fell at the same rate as would a bowling ball dropped from the same height and falling through the air.
Proponents of the controlled demolition hypothesis argue that elementary laws of physics rule out the fire-induced collapse hypothesis. They point out, for example, that the law of conservation of energy dictates that free-fall means all of the building’s potential energy was converted to kinetic energy, which means there was no energy remaining to do the work of buckling the columns, as is required by NIST’s hypothesis. The corollary is that there must have been some external source of energy acting on the columns for this free-fall to have occurred.
NIST argues in its final report that the rate of collapse was consistent with its computer models. However, language that the collapse was consistent with physical principles that existed in the draft report, in which NIST denied free-fall, was removed from the final report, in which free-fall is acknowledged.
Active Thermitic Material in the WTC Dust
Photographs of the red/gray chips found in the WTC dust from a study conducted by a team of international scientists and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Independent researchers point to other evidence that NIST failed to account for in its hypothesis, such as the presence of active thermitic material in the dust from the collapses of the World Trade Center buildings, consistent with nano-thermite. This material was found in four separate samples of the dust collected from four separate locations following the collapses. An international team of scientists issued a paper of their study of these red/gray chips found in the dust in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal in 2009, though to date, there remains a blackout on the topic in the mainstream U.S. media.
The material found in the dust is not a naturally occurring substance, but a manufactured material of highly advanced technology. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, working under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy, has released a paper noting that by controlling the composition of energetic materials at the nano-meter scale, a more efficient chemical reaction can be produced, with applications for making explosives. The thermite reaction is specifically cited as an example. A publication of the U.S. Department of Defense has similarly pointed out that energetic materials produced on the nanoscale, such nano-thermite, has applications for “high-power, high-energy composite explosives”.

The ability of thermite to cut through steel has long been known. It involves a chemical reaction between aluminum and iron oxide, which produces aluminum oxide and molten iron. When sulfur is added to the thermite mixture, it is known as thermate. Conventional thermite, however, is an incendiary, while nano-thermite, or super thermite, results in a much more efficient chemical reaction, with much more explosive results, as noted by the Departments of Energy and Defense.
Also a “signature” of the WTC dust is the presence of iron-rich micro-spheres, which shows that the iron must have been molten prior to or during the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings, with the surface tension of the liquid forming a sphere before cooling and solidifying in that shape. Yet NIST itself points out that fires did not burn at anywhere near the temperature required to melt iron or steel. Such spheres are a known byproduct, however, of the thermite reaction.

Eutectic Steel
A photograph of a steel sample recovered from WTC 7 from Appendix C of the FEMA report.

And while NIST claims that no steel was recovered from WTC 7, it could not have been unaware of a sample that was recovered and studied by a team from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The steel had been severely corroded, showing signs of intergranular melting and sulfidation, with a “swiss cheese”-like appearance. The New York Times referred to this piece of steel as “Perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation”, and the team’s findings and recommendations for further study were published as Appendix C of the report of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Although NIST was tasked with carrying out the recommendations of the FEMA report, it ignored Appendix C altogether and implicitly denied the very existence of this steel.
Dr. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who headed up a separate effort with funding from the National Science Foundation to investigate the steel and recover important evidence, also recovered a piece of steel from WTC 7. He described steel flanges that “had been reduced from an inch thick to paper thin” to the New York Times. “Parts of the flat top of the I [of the “I-beam”], once five-eighths of an inch thick, had vaporized,” he observed.
The reason so little steel was recovered from WTC 7 is that it was quickly destroyed after having been removed from the site during the search and rescue operations. Engineers across the country were outraged by the destruction, prompting Bill Manning, editor-in-chief of Fire Engineering magazine, to write an editorial lambasting the official investigation under FEMA as “a half-baked farce”.
In stark contrast, in testimony at the Hearing Before the Committee on Science in the U.S. House of Representatives, the head of the FEMA investigation, Dr. Gene Corley, expressed little concern about the destruction of evidence and denied that it hampered the investigation.
Corley’s insouciance about the destruction was further contrasted by Manning’s prescient conclusion that “if they continue in such fashion, the investigation into the World Trade Center fire and collapse will amount to paper- and computer-generated hypotheticals.” Indeed, the NIST report itself observes that its WTC 7 investigation was conducted with no physical evidence, and its hypothesis relied entirely upon computer models.
While the removal of debris from the site of the World Trade Center disaster, or Ground Zero, was normal and necessary, the destruction of evidence from a crime scene is a felony offense under U.S. law. Yet no government or law enforcement agency has sought to hold anyone accountable for the destruction of the steel and other evidence from the WTC.
Another unsolved mystery about the collapse is the prolonged fires that burned under the rubble for months afterward, despite a number of rainfalls and the round-the-clock efforts of firefighters to extinguish them. Many credible witnesses, including scientists and engineers, reported seeing molten iron or steel at the site.
Molten metal at the WTC
Red hot metal being lifted from the WTC debris (Photo: Frank Silecchia).

When asked about this phenomenon, NIST investigator Dr. John Gross responded by denying not only that there was molten iron or steel, but that he had even heard any such reports. Yet one witness who described seeing “hot spots of molten metal” at Ground Zero was Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolitions, Inc., who was contracted to remove debris from the site and was also a consultant for the NIST report. Dr. Astaneh-Asl was also among those testified to having seen “melting of girders”.
While the official response to this and other testimonial evidence is to dismiss it, proponents of the alternative hypothesis have suggested the possibility that ongoing chemical reactions from the use of thermitic materials might help to explain why the fires could have burned for so long, despite several rainfalls and firefighters’ best efforts, and how such temperatures could have occurred in the oxygen-starved environment under the rubble.
There are other holes in NIST’s hypothesis apart from its failure to account for the physical and testimonial evidence. It requires, for example, that fires were raging in the northeast area on the 12th floor, and it input data assuming this scenario into its simulations. Yet the NIST report itself states that fires only burned in any given area for 20-30 minutes before moving on, and NIST extensively documents the fires from photographic and video evidence, showing that the fire had burned through this area and already moved on, burning towards the west end of the floor at the time of the collapse at 5:20 pm.
Apart from the unscientific approach of inputting data according to an assumption contradicted by their own evidence, NIST also assumed its own worst-case scenario for maximum fire temperature and duration, and carried only that scenario forward into its final computer analyses. NIST has also refused to release its computer data for others to verify and reproduce their results — a remarkable rejection of the scientific method for an agency claiming to have used science to prove the fire-induced collapse hypothesis.
Ph.D. chemist F. R. Greening, who does not accept the controlled demolition hypothesis and has debated it with its proponents, stated in comments on the NIST draft report, “The main problem with the NIST fire simulation appears to be the calculated duration of the fire on the 12th and 13th floors of WTC 7…. In view of the fact that NIST appears to have overestimated the intensity and duration of the fires in WTC 7, particularly on floors 12 and 13, it follows that the heating of the structural steel is also overestimated in the WTC 7 Draft Report. This is fatal to the overall validity of NIST’s collapse initiation hypothesis….”
The NIST hypothesis is that fires on the 12th floor caused thermal expansion of 13th floor beams in the northeast of the building. As a result of this thermal expansion, shear studs, which make the beams composite with the metal decking and concrete floor slab above, failed. The expanding beams then pushed a girder spanning between the core and perimeter columns, causing its welds and connections to fail and the girder to rock off its seat where it was attached to the northeastern-most core column, number 79. This failure resulted in the local collapse of the 13th floor. The floors below, where beams were also weakened due to heat from the fires, could not sustain the impact, and so a cascading series of floor failures resulted. Column 79, unsupported laterally over nine stories, buckled. Column failure then progressed through the core, from east to west, and, as load was transferred to the perimeter columns, the entire building began to move downward as a single unit.
This is what one may witness in videos of the collapse of WTC 7, according to NIST. The FEMA report noted that the building “imploded”, and NIST lead investigator Dr. Shyam Sunder stated that because the core failed first, due to fire, followed by the perimeter columns, “you get the impression it was like a controlled demolition”.
Many architects, engineers, scientists, firefighters, scholars, and other groups of independent researchers calling for a new investigation argue that the alternative hypothesis better explains all the available evidence. They offer a perhaps simpler explanation for what one witnesses in videos of the collapse: it appears to be a controlled demolition because it was.

Monday, September 10, 2018

9/11 MILITARY DRILLS - A NEW INVESTIGATION is NOT ONLY NEEDED but MUST BE DEMANDED

Note to readers: please visit the site Global Research for more
First published in September 2007.
GR & RTR Truth Media Editor’s Note

We bring to the attention of our readers this carefully researched analysis.
“Given the warnings of incipient terrorist attacks that had been repeatedly received by the Administration and the FBI, why would anyone coordinate two major annual air training exercises at this time, and divert key resources to the North Pole on an outdated mission? Who was in a position to do this?”

The 911 Commission carefully overlooked these considerations.
“It ignored the issue of the drills and continuously pointed to FAA incompetence.  Thus the the mock live hijackings which were apparently in progress on the morning of September 11th should be investigated as a plausible explanation for why the national defense was such an abysmal failure.”
*** 
First published in September 2007.

Information regarding military exercises is classified and difficult to research. Though there was unusually high and confusing drill activity on 9/11, this strange coincidence has not gained much public notice. This essay quotes military officials from their own magazines, and compares their statements to what the 9/11 Commission wrote about the so-called surprise factor, and also to the Commission’s position that the drills aided the response.
Though both the 9/11 Commission Report and members of the Bush Administration repeatedly stated that the use of planes as weapons could not have been predicted, other official sources indicate that military exercises had been underway to counteract this very possibility.

1. Was it a Surprise that Hijacked Planes Were Used as Weapons on 9/11?
The element of surprise has been widely given (and quoted) as the reason why the 9/11 attacks were so successful against the world’s greatest military power.
Before proceeding to the statements on both sides of the issue, the context for these attacks should be understood in light of three defense procedures which were unusually and significantly changed in the months preceding 9/11:
  1. A May 8th, 2001 Statement by the President gave responsibility for coordinating, training and planning all national defense programs related to weapons of mass destruction to Vice President Cheney, whose office was not part of the National Command Authority. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta testified before the 9/11 Commission that he was present and observed Dick Cheney in the Presidential Emergency Operating Center tracking the position of Flight 77 for many miles as it approached the Pentagon.1 “Based on Norm Minetta’s testimony and other information, it appears that the military has regarded Cheney as a ‘Deputy Commander-in-Chief’. They also understand that he is the real power behind the throne…It appears that Vice President Dick Cheney was in charge of all the many air defense exercises that took place on the morning of September 11, 2001.”2
  2. The 1997 hijacking scramble protocol CJCSI 3610, which distinguished emergent situations (requiring immediate action between the FAA and the military) from non-emergent situations (requiring decision input from the highest levels of the DoD) was rewritten June 1, 2001, as ordered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.3 As a result, the number of fighter-interceptor scrambles fell from the usual average of 7-8 per month before the rewrite, to zero during the 3.3 months before September 11th, and to zero on September 11th itself.4
  3. Changes in the dates of annual and semi-annual military air defense exercises resulted in an unprecedented concentration of air drills on September 11th and included hijackings and drills in which planes hit buildings. These will be explored later.
The transfer of two line defense roles to senior members of the Bush-Cheney Administration, paired with the concentration of air drills on the day itself, raises serious questions regarding the success of the attacks.
Early expressions of surprise over the attacks: In response to the seemingly inexplicable success of the 9/11 attacks, a chorus of astonishment issued from the White House, the military, and the FBI. Tim Ruppert asked Donald Rumsfeld on September 30, 2001, whether he had ever imagined that the Pentagon would be attacked by a terrorist using an American commercial airline. “Oh goodness no! “Never would have crossed anyone’s mind.”5 His Commander-in-Chief had earlier said that “al Qaeda “struck in a way that was unimaginable.”6
General Richard Myer, acting air defense commander, told the military press in late October: “You hate to admit it, but we hadn’t thought about this.”7 FBI Director Robert Mueller declared a week after the attacks, “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.”8
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer fell into step. “Until the attack took place, I think it is fair to say that no one envisioned that as a possibility.”9
However, on May 17, 2002, CBC News revealed that a 1999 report, “Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” “…warned the executive branch that bin Laden’s terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building.”10
On May 19th, the London Observer quoted a New York newspaper report that “angry citizens are asking why they have suddenly learned what George W. Bush knew all along: that weeks before the event, the CIA had warned the President and other top officials of an active plot to seize civilian aircraft.”11
Later that day, Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen of the Washington Post covered the hijack briefing in more detail:
“The top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush on Aug. 6 carried the headline, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.’. . . .The President’s Daily Briefing underscored that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to ‘bring the fight to America.’. . .The August 6th memo. . .suggested that bin Laden’s followers might be planning to hijack U.S. airliners.”12
The story had, several days earlier, prompted a press conference from White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, saying: “Never did we imagine what would take place on September 11th, where people use those airplanes as missiles and weapons.” His statement was echoed later in the day by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, as quoted below in a Baltimore Sun article.13
A 2003 Joint Inquiry into the Intelligence Community tells a different story.
The denials continued into 2004, when Donald Rumsfeld told the 9/11 Commission, “I knew of no intelligence during the six-plus months leading up to September 11 to indicate terrorists would hijack commercial airlines, use them as missiles to fly into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers.”14
But a Congressional Joint Inquiry report, released July 24th, 2003,15 suggested that the government had failed to act on warnings of a terrorist attack within the country, involving aircraft as missiles. The New York Times published excerpts:
“Shortly after…May 1998…the community began to acquire intelligence that bin Laden’s network intended to strike within the United States. Many of these reports were disseminated throughout the community and to senior U.S. policy makers…the totality of the information…clearly reiterated a consistent and critically important theme: bin Laden’s intent to launch terrorist attacks within the United States…In the spring of 1999, the [intelligence] community obtained information about a planned bin Laden attack on a government facility in Washington, D.C…In September 1999, the community obtained information that bin Laden and others were planning a terrorist act in the United States, possibly against specific landmarks in California and New York City…In March 2000, the community obtained information regarding the type of targets…The Statue of Liberty was specifically mentioned, as were skyscrapers, ports, airports and nuclear power plants…In April 2001, the community obtained information…that bin Laden was interested in commercial pilots as potential terrorists. The source warned that the United States should not focus only on embassy bombings, that terrorists sought “spectacular and traumatic” attacks and that the first World Trade Center bombing would be appealing.” 16
Four days later, the Baltimore Sun published the following:
“President Bush’s adviser [Condoleezza Rice] told the public in May 2002 that a pre-Sept. 11 intelligence briefing for the president on terrorism contained only a general warning of threats and largely historical information, not specific plots, the report said.
But the authors of the congressional report, released last week, stated the briefing given to the president a month before the suicide hijackings included recent intelligence that al-Qaida was planning to send operatives to the United States to carry out an attack using high explosives.
At the same May 2002 press briefing, Rice also said that “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.”
But the congressional report states that “from at least 1994, and continuing into the summer of 2001, the Intelligence Community received information indicating that terrorists were contemplating, among other means of attack, the use of aircraft as weapons.”17
The contradiction could not be more evident.
Contradictions Within the 9/11 Commission Report:
The Commission reported early in its pages:
“NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet.”18
But the Report later documented, in reference to the use of planes as weapons, that such a “possibility was imaginable, and imagined.” It cited intelligence from the August 1999 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Civil Aviation Security that warned about the possibility of a Bin Ladin “suicide hijacking operation,” and that NORAD had “imagined the possible use of aircraft as weapons, too, and developed exercises to counter such a threat—from planes coming to the United States from overseas.”19
The Commission further reported that on August 24, 2001, the CIA had described “subjects involved in suspicious 747 flight training,” and Zacarias Moussaoui as a possible “suicide hijacker;”20 also that the week before the attacks a Minneapolis FBI agent had told the FAA that Moussaoui, was “an Islamic extremist preparing for some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals.”21 The Commission further noted that on August 23, 2001, CIA Director George Tenet “was briefed about the Moussaoui case in a briefing entitled ‘Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.’”22
And Louis Freeh, FBI Director from 1993 to June 2001, told the 9/11 Commission that in 2000 and 2001, the subject of “planes as weapons” was always considered in the planning of National Special Security Events (NSSE’s), in which the FBI and FEMA participated, and that “resources were actually designated to deal with that particular threat.” He confirmed that “the use of airplanes, either packed with explosives or otherwise, in suicide missions” was “part of the planning” for NSSE’s.23
A Summary of the Contradictions:
There are thus stark contradictions: 1) between White House spokespersons and each of : The Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities of July 2003; the August 6, 2001, Presidential Briefing Memo; many press reports detailing the two foregoing documents; and the testimony of FBI Director Louis Freeh; 2) between the 9/11 Commission’s findings and all of the above; and 3) within the 9/11 Commission Report itself.
How did the 9/11 Commission deal with these contradictions? It did not: it simply left out the findings of the Joint Inquiry report and the Louis Freeh testimony, and though it copied the August 6th Presidential Briefing Memo into its Report,24 it did not include the memo in its entirety as quoted by CNN on April 10, 2004.25 And further to that Memo, the Commission referred to Condoleezza Rice’s April 8th Hearing testimony, but did not include it. In it, she had said, “I was concerned about possible threats inside the United States.”26
As the foregoing summary shows the element of surprise to have been very much in doubt, a new investigation should question how a non-surprise attack could have been so successful.
2. What did the Military Training Drills Reveal about US Expectations?
The military exercises of 9/11 will be examined in relation to two of the things that the Commission blamed for the critical element of surprise:
  1. the unheard of concept of using hijacked planes as weapons—a departure from predictable, traditional hijackings, and
  2. the fact that the attacks originated, unpredictably, from within the country, and not from outside it.
Two 9/11 Commission Report quotations below document these perceptions:
“In sum, the protocols in place on 9/11 for the FAA and NORAD to respond to a hijacking presumed that. . .the hijacking would take the traditional form: that is, it would not be a suicide hijacking designed to convert the aircraft into a guided missile.”27
“America’s homeland defenders faced outward. NORAD itself was barely able to retain any alert bases. Its planning scenarios occasionally considered the danger of hijacked aircraft being guided to American targets, but only aircraft that were coming from overseas.”28
The Pre 9/11 Military Training Drills:  Though neither the White House nor the FBI had envisaged planes as weapons, the military, supposedly adrift from its government and bereft of communication –no small feat with a 2001 budget of over $400 billion — had.
According to Professor John Arquilla, a Special Operations expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, “The idea of such an attack (like 9-11) was well known. It had been war-gamed as a possibility in exercises before Sept. 11, 2001.”29
The following exercises demonstrate that many military minds were concerned with the express idea of planes hitting buildings.
In October 2000, a military exercise created a scenario of a simulated passenger plane crashing into the Pentagon. The exercise was coordinated by the Defense Protective Services Police and the Pentagon’s Command Emergency Response Team.30
US Medicine reports that two health clinics housed within the Pentagon trained for a hijacked airplane to hit the Pentagon in May 2001. “Though the Department of Defense had no capability in place to protect the Pentagon from an ersatz guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner, DoD medical personnel trained for exactly that scenario in May.”31
The Department of Transportation in Washington held an exercise on August 31, 1001, which was described by a participant, Ellen Engleman:
      “Ironically, fortuitously, take your choice, 12 days prior to the incident on September 11th, we were going though a tabletop exercise. It was actually much more than a tabletop…in preparation for the Olympic…which was a full intermodal exercise…Part of the scenario, interestingly enough, involved a potentially highjacked plane and someone calling on a cell phone, among other aspects of the scenario that were very strange when twelve days later, as you know, we had the actual event.”32
According to USA Today:
      “In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties…One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center…NORAD, in a written statement, confirmed that such hijacking exercises occurred…‘Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft,’ the statement said…The exercises differed from the Sept. 11 attacks in one important respect: The planes in the simulation were coming from a foreign country…But there were exceptions in the early drills, including one operation, planned in July 2001 and conducted later, that involved planes from airports in Utah and Washington state that were “hijacked… Until Sept. 11, 2001, NORAD conducted four major exercises a year. Most included a hijack scenario, but not all of those involved planes as weapons.”33
The New Yorker reported:
      “A former top F.B.I. official said that the bureau had been concerned about an attack in New York City ever since…associates of Osama bin Laden…were convicted in federal court in connection with the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Africa. …During the last several years, the government regularly planned for and simulated terrorist attacks, including scenarios that involved multiple-plane hijackings.”34
One such multiple hijacking drills using planes from inside the United States was Amalgam Virgo 2002, planned for 1500 people in July 2001 and scheduled for operation in June 2002. In the Second 9/11 Commission Hearing, Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste was foiled in several attempts to extract information from General McKinley and Colonel Scott regarding this drill:
MR. BEN-VENISTE: …My question is: The concept of terrorists using airplanes as weapons was not something which was unknown to the U.S. intelligence community on September 10th, 2001, isn’t that fair to say?
GEN. MCKINLEY: I’d like the intelligence community to address that. I would find it hard to believe that they hadn’t speculated against that. But it was unavailable to us at the time.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, let’s start, for example, with September 12th, 1994, a Cessna 150L crashed into the South Lawn of the White House, barely missing the building, and killing the pilot. Similarly, in December of 1994, an Algerian armed Islamic group of terrorists hijacked an Air France flight in Algiers and threatened to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. In October of 1996, the intelligence community obtained information regarding an Iranian plot to hijack a Japanese plane over Israel and crash it into Tel Aviv. In August of 1988, the intelligence community obtained information that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center. The information was passed on to the FBI and the FAA.
In September of 1998, the intelligence community obtained information that Osama bin Laden’s next operation could possibly involve flying an aircraft loaded with explosives into a U.S. airport and detonating it. In August 2001, the intelligence community obtained information regarding a plot to either bomb the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi from an airplane, or crash an airplane into it. In addition, in the Atlanta Olympics, the United States government and the Department of Justice and my colleague Jamie Gorelick were involved in planning against possible terrorist attacks at the Olympics, which included the potential of an aircraft flying into the stadium. In July 2001, the G-8 summit in Genoa, attended by our president, among the measures that were taken were positioning surface-to-air missile ringing Genoa, closing the Genoa airport and restricting all airspace over Genoa.
Was not this information, sir, available to NORAD as of September 11th, 2001?
GEN. MCKINLEY: … we had not postured prior to September 11th, 2001, for the scenario that took place that day.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, obviously it would be hard to imagine posturing for the exact scenario. But isn’t it a fact, sir, that prior to September 11th, 2001, NORAD had already in the works plans to simulate in an exercise a simultaneous hijacking of two planes in the United States?
This question was followed by a wall of obfuscation from General McKinley and Colonel Scott, and Ben-Veniste never did get an answer.35 Nor was the matter included in the Commission Report.
Ben-Veniste also questioned the officers on the “vestigial” nature of planning primarily for Cold War attacks from Russia and other nations beyond US borders.36 (And on this point, Major Arias had told the News-Herald in June 2001 that “The Cold War is over”.)
These two points raise disturbing questions as to why Vigilant Guardian diverted much of the US defense fleet to the North Pole that day; who made the decision that this should occur; and why NORAD and the Commission were so silent about the hijacking drills.
Air Training Drills the Morning of September 11th:
On the morning of September 11th, two nationwide annual air defense drills were in full stride.
NORAD was in the midst of one of its four major annual exercises, the week-long “Vigilant Guardian”, which the Commission described as “postulat[ing] a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union.”37
A second annual global readiness exercise, Global Guardian, which had traditionally been held in October or November, and which, according to NBC News military analyst William Arkin, had been scheduled for October 22-31, 2001,38 was also underway. The Space Observer, a military newspaper, reported on March 23rd, 2001 that this exercise was scheduled for October 2001,39 which meant that sometime after March 23rd, Global Guardian was rescheduled for early September.
Third, Richard Clarke, in his book “Against All Enemies”, noted that acting Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) Chairman Richard Myers told him in a video-conference on 9/11, “Not a pretty picture, Dick…We are in the middle of Vigilant Warrior, a NORAD exercise.”40
Information about military drills is classified and difficult to research. There have been suggestions that Richard Clarke confused this drill with Vigilant Guardian (the North Pole drill) but Vigilant Guardian is a NORAD exercise, apparently without JSC involvement. It has also been reported41 that the “Warrior” designation equates to JSC involvement and includes “live-flies”. A NORAD press release, reported in USA Today in 2004, stated that “These ‘mock hijacked aircraft,’ otherwise called ‘live-flies,’ are used sometimes in air-based war games involving hijacking scenarios. They are actual planes of a variety of makes, in the air (manned or under remote control), pretending to be hijacked for the benefit of effective training.”42
Thus the evidence suggests that mock hijacks were in progress on September 11th, which would explain the reports of military officers in the next section.
There were more “planes into buildings” scenarios going on that morning. “In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings… The National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise…in which a small corporate jet would crash into…the agency’s headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure. …The agency is about four miles from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport.”43
Finally, USA Today reported that “a joint FBI/CIA anti-terrorist task force that specifically prepared for this type of disaster” was on a “training exercise in Monterey, Calif.” Thus, “as of late Tuesday, with airports closed around the country, the task force still hadn’t found a way to fly back to Washington.”44 Furthermore, the FBI had deployed “all of its anti-terrorist and top special operations agents at a training exercise (complete with all associated helicopters and light aircraft) in Monterey, California.” While the attacks were in progress, then, “the chief federal agency responsible for preventing such crimes was being AWOL.”45
A Summary of the Contradictions:
There is a strong and clear contradiction between the White House and 9/11 Commission claims of wildly unpredictable surprise attacks, and the training exercises which were running to counter such attacks. In short, these training exercises reflected an expectation that multiple, simultaneous, internal hijackings using planes as weapons were very imaginable indeed.
How did the Commission deal with this problem? With the exception of one footnote mentioning Northern Vigilance, it simply failed to mention the drills at all. By repeatedly claiming that no one had expected such attacks to have originated from within the United States, it diverted attention away from the drills, and away from warnings that there were Muslim operatives within the country who were learning to fly commercial airliners.
Were these diversions merely cowardly flights from a failed responsibility, or were they more ominous indications of foreknowledge? This crucial question should be the subject of a new impartial investigation.
If, as the evidence suggests, the White House and the Commission were not surprised by such attacks (whereas in fact, they were aware of such events)46 the new investigation should ask why they said they were.
  1. Did the 9/11 Military Training Drills Help or Harm the Response?
As mentioned above, the only reference made by the 9/11 Commission to the September 11th training exercises was to Vigilant Guardian, in footnote 116 from Chapter 1 of the Report:
“On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union. We investigated whether military preparations 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).”47
Unfortunately for the Commission, this conclusion has been contradicted by many military participants that day.
Remember, all of NORAD was participating in Vigilant Guardian that morning. Other exercises were also running. As one research organization noted, “NORAD is thus fully staffed and alert, and senior officers are manning stations throughout the US. The entire chain of command is in place and ready when the first hijacking is reported.”48
Almost immediately, however, confusion and bewilderment set in:
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.
Six minutes later, at 8:46, the exercises were still causing confusion: “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.
ABC News quoted NORAD Commander Major General Arnold, from a command center at the Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. “First thing that went through my mind was, ‘Is this part of the exercise? Is this some kind of a screw-up?'”49
NEADS Major Nasypany later recalled:
“When they told me there was a hijack, my first reaction was ‘Somebody started the exercise early,'” Nasypany later told me. The day’s exercise was designed to run a range of scenarios, including a “traditional” simulated hijack in which politically motivated perpetrators commandeer an aircraft, land on a Cuba-like island, and seek asylum. “I actually said out loud, ‘The hijack’s not supposed to be for another hour.'”50
Later yet, at 9:09 AM, Richard Clarke reports that FAA Command Center Head Jane Garvey told him by video-conference, “We have reports of eleven aircraft off course or out of communications.”51 This was verified in an aviation report, “…the FAA command center then reported 11 aircraft either not in communication with FAA facilities, or flying unexpected routes.”52
Major-General Larry Arnold recalled,
“As I walked out of a video teleconference with NORAD, someone came up and told me that the Northeast Air Defense sector had a possible hijacking. My first thought was the hijacking was part of the exercise…Then we began getting calls of other potential hijackings. Not all the calls were true. These hijacking reports added to the confusion… We were receiving many reports of hijacked aircraft. When we received those calls, we might not know from where the aircraft had departed. We also didn’t know the location of the airplane…By the end of the day, we had twenty-one aircraft identified as possible hijackings.”53
In a 2006 interview with Vanity Fair, Arnold went further: “I’ll be the first to admit that immediately after—-in fact, for a long time after—-we were very confused with who was what and where what reports were coming in.”54
Robert Marr, head of NEADS on 9/11, says, “At one time I was told that across the nation there were some 29 different reports of hijackings.”55
General Richard Meyers at the Pentagon confirmed that “conflicting reports throughout the morning led to confusion in the Command Center.”56 The Commission itself documented, “During the course of the morning, there were multiple erroneous reports of hijacked aircraft in the system.”57
Thus it would appear that simultaneous air defense drills were fogging the defense data streams and that personnel was chasing 4 real hijacked airplanes among 29 unidentified blips.
And so there is a profound contradiction between the Commission’s position that the drills enhanced the defense response, and the reports by officers on duty that day.
Summary of the Contradictions:
Why, when only 4 planes were hijacked, were there so many reports of other hijacked planes? And why were the military personnel so ready to interpret these hijacking reports as being part of the exercises, when no one had ever “imagined” such a thing?
Given the warnings of incipient terrorist attacks that had been repeatedly received by the Administration and the FBI, why would anyone coordinate two major annual air training exercises at this time, and divert key resources to the North Pole on an outdated mission? Who was in a position to do this?
Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste resolved to pursue these questions “very very diligently”, and made determined efforts to do so.
But what did the Commission do about his unanswered questions? It ignored the issue of the drills and continuously pointed to FAA incompetence.58 However, blaming the FAA lacked credibility, because the failures of duty were not followed up and no one was disciplined.
Thus the mock live hijackings which were apparently in progress on the morning of September 11th should be investigated as a plausible explanation for why the national defense was such an abysmal failure.
If the drills impeded the response, a new investigation should question why the two strange departures from longstanding air defense protocols were made in the months before 9/11.
And if the drills enhanced the response, a new investigation should ask how the attacks could have succeeded on a day when the country was specially prepared to handle them.
Either way, the situation cries out for clarification.
NOTES
1 9/11 Commission Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta Testimony.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=norman+mineta
2 Colonel Robert Bowman, Ph.D., U.S. Air Force(ret.)
Director of Advanced Space Programs Development under Presidents Ford and Carter. Email, September 26, 2007.
3 The flight base commanders were required by the June 1st “Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction” to seek approval from the Secretary of Defense before responding to hijackings, whereas before the rewrite they could have responded routinely. Robin Hordon, a retired pilot and FAA officer, has ”emphasized that the debate has deliberately been channeled by NORAD and the government to focus on reactions to hijackings when the real issue is the emergency condition of the aircraft well before a hijacking is even confirmed.” http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=36598&st=90
4 Guns and Butter. Interview with Robin Hordon, former FAA ATC, Boston Center. KPFA Radio, April 18, 2007.)
 (http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=19792)
The original and the rewritten documents are available at
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/cjcsd/cjcsi/3610_01.pdf (7/31/1997: CJCSI 3610.10 and
5 “Text: Rumsfeld on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’”, September 30, 2001.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/nbctext_093001.html)
6 White House News Release. “President Meets with Muslim Leaders,” Sept. 26, 2001.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010926-8.html
7 American Free Press Service, Oct. 23rd, 2001.
 (http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44621)
8 Text: Justice Department Briefing, Washington Post, Monday, Sept. 17, 2001. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/justice091701.html  
9 What Bush Knew Before Sept. 11,” Washington, May 17, 2002
(http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/16/attack/main509294.shtml )
10 Ibid.
11 Ed Vulliamy. “A Bad Call?” Observer, May 19, 2002 (citing Joe Conason of the New York Observer.)
12 Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen. “Aug. Memo Focused On Attacks in U.S.” Washington Post, May 19, 2002. 
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A35744-2002May17&notFound=true).
A transcript of this presidential briefing was later published by CNN: “Transcript: Bin Laden determined to strike in US,” April 10, 2004.
(http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/index.html)
13 The White House. “Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer,” May 16, 2002. 
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020516-4.html
Rice’s statement is at (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020516-13.html)
14 “Bush, Clinton figures defend terrorism policies,” CNN Report, March 24, 2004.
 http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/23/911.commission/index.html
15 “9/11 Report: Joint Congressional Inquiry. Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 – by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. 858 p. Published 2002 and publicly released on July 24, 2003. http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/911rpt/ 
16 “Excerpts From Report on Intelligence Actions and the Sept. 11 Attacks,” NYT, July 25, 2003. Available for purchase at (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/25/national/25TTEX.html?ex=1189569600&en=87b62bfc380ea076&ei=5070 
See also, “9/11: Threats about airplanes as weapons prior to 9/11,” Dr. Matthew Robinson, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, Appalachian State University, http://www.justiceblind.com/airplanes.html, and see, “US Received Warnings of “Airplanes As Weapons,” By Dana Priest, Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2002. http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/analysis/2002/0918warn.htm
(article has disappeared from the WP website and the Lexis Nexis database) See also: Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, “The Secrets of September 11. The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret. Does the 2004 election have anything to do with it?” Newsweek, April 30, 2003. The quoted material, printed in December 2002, became available to the public on July 24, 2003, at
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/fullreport_errata.pdf, and is found on pp. 124-5.
17 “9/11 report, Rice remarks in conflict: Investigators say Bush got specific data on threats,” Associated Press, July 29, 2003
18 9/11CR, p. 45.
19 9/11CR, pp. 345-6.
20 9/11CR, p. 274.
21 9/11CR, p. 273.
22 Ibid., p. 275.
23 Public hearings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 10th, April 13, 2004, p. 28.
 http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/index.htm
24 9/11CR, pp.261-2.
25 CNN Report. “Transcript: Bin Laden determined to strike in US”, Saturday, April 10, 2004. (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/index.html) This transcript includes a sentence left out by the 9/11 Commission Report: “An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told – – service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike.”
26 Public hearings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9th, April 8, 2004, p. 8.
http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/index.htm
27 9/11CR, p. 18.
28 9/11CR, p. 352.
29 Kevin Howe. “Expert Stresses Need for Intelligence.” Monterey County Herald, July 18, 2002. (http://web.archive.org/web/20021128002557/http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/3686928.htm)
30 Dennis Ryan. “Contingency planning Pentagon MASCAL exercise simulates scenarios in preparing for emergencies,” Nov. 3, 2000.
http://www.mdw.army.mil/content/anmviewer.asp?a=290
31 Matt Mientka.”Pentagon Medics Trained For Strike,” U.S .Medicine, October 2001. (http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=272&issueID=31)  
32 National Transportation Security Summit. Washington, DC, Oct. 30, 2001. “MTI Report S-01-02,” Mineta Transportation Institute, San José State University,2001. http://transweb.sjsu.edu/mtiportal/research/publications/documents/terrorism/Terrorism%20Symposium%202001.htm
33 Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri. “NORAD had drills of jets as weapons,” USA Today, April 18, 2004,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.htm
34 “September 11, 2001,” The New Yorker, September 24, 2001.
(http://web.archive.org/web/20020215175752/http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?010924fa_FACT)
35 Public hearings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2nd, Day 2, May 23, 2003.
 (http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm)
This lack of cooperation with Commissioner Ben-Veniste is underscored by the fact that the 10-member Commission panel was forced to issue subpoenas to both NORAD and the FAA, and encountered “serious delays” in obtaining information from the Defense Department. “We are especially dismayed by problems in the production of records of activities of NORAD and certain Air Force commands on Sept. 11th,” the panel reported.(In the Commission’s November 7 Press Release,
see http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2003/11/911-110703.pdf)
A second subpoena served on the Pentagon was similarly unsuccessful in obtaining records. (Philip Shenon. 9/11 Panel Issues Subpoena to Pentagon. Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2003.
 http://nucnews.net/nucnews/2003nn/0311nn/031108nn.htm#501)  
36 Ibid.
37 9/11CR, p. 458.
38 Arkin, William M. “Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World”, Steerforth, 2005, p. 379.
39 “21st Space Wing Priorities,” Space Observer, March 23, 2001, p. 2.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030320100542/http:/www.peterson.af.mil/21sw/observer/23mar01.pdf
40 Richard A. Clarke. “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror”, Free Press, 2004, pp. 4-5.
42 Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri. “NORAD had drills of jets as weapons,” USA Today, April 18, 2004,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.htm
43 John J. Lumpkin, Associated Press. “Agency planned exercise on Sept. 11 built around a plane crashing into a building,” August 21, 2002. 
http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/wire_stories/0903_plane_exercise.htm  
44 Bill Nichols, Homeland defense needs now ‘grim reality,’ Sept. 11, 2001.
(http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/11/security.htm)
45 .” U.S. Devastated by Terrorist Attacks: Bush Faces Defining Moment, As Others Scramble For Advantage.” USA Today, Sept. 11, 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20030312214742/http://www.evote.com/features/2001-09/091101attack.asp
46 See Commissioner Ben-Veniste’s long list of prior incidents, cited above.
47 9/11CR, p. 458.
48 Cooperative Research. “Complete 9/11 Timeline. Military Exercises up to 9/11.”
 (http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=militaryExercises)
49 “Moments of Crisis, Part 1: Terror Hits the Towers: How Government Officials Reacted to Sept. 11 Attacks.” ABC News, September 14, 2002. http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2002/abcnews091402.html
50 Michael Bronner. “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes.” Vanity Fair, August 2006, p. 2.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/norad200608?currentPage=10
51 Richard A. Clarke. “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror”, Free Press, 2004, pp. 4-5.
52 William B. Scott. “Exercise Jump-Starts Response to Attacks, Aviation Week & Space Technology, June 3, 2002. http://web.archive.org/web/20020917072642/http://www.awstonline.com/ or
http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/defense/aviationnow_jumpstart.htm
53 “Conversation With Major General Larry Arnold, Commander, 1st Air Force, Tyndall AFB, Florida.” Code One, An Airpower Projection Magazine, 1st Quarter, 2002. http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/2002/articles/jan_02/defense/
54 Michael Bronner. “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes.” Vanity Fair, August 2006, p. 10.
55 Robert A. Baker. “Commander of 9/11 Air Defenses Retires.” Newhouse News Service, March 31, 2005. (http://web.archive.org/web/20050519084002/http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/baker033105.html 
56 Kathleen Rehm, “Myers and Sept. 11: ‘We Hadn’t Thought About This,’” American Forces Press Service, Oct. 23, 2001.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44621
57 9/11CR, p. 28.
58 9/11CR. The first 30 pages of the Commission Report alone contain statements criticizing the FAA for delays and false assumptions on pages 11, 26, 27, 29, and 30.