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Failing Upward? Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State;
UQ Wire: The Role Of The US Government On 9-11
Scoop.co.nz (press release), New Zealand - Jan 16, 2005
... A Federal News Service reporter questioned National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice on this subject as follows: "Are you aware of the reports at the time that ...
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0501/S00116.htm
tribution via the Unanswered Questions Wire
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/ .
For Oil & Empire: Unanswered Questions about the Role of the U.S. Government on 9-11
by Mitchel Cohen
co-editor "G" -- the newspaper of the New York State Greens / Green Party of New York
"Without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey for any yellow dwarf with a pocket-knife."
- U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson
(Yes, he really said that!)
For 50 minutes, from 8:15 a.m. until 9:05 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense were aware that four domestic U.S. passenger airplanes had been hijacked.
American Airlines Flight 11 out of Logan airport in Boston deviated from its path shortly after 7:45 a.m. It hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City at 8:46 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175, also out of Logan and en route to Los Angeles, deviated from its flight plan a short time later.
Meanwhile, American Flight 77 left Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. en route to Los Angeles. The plane reversed course over Ohio and is reported to have flown all the way back, passing the Pentagon and the White House before executing a complicated 270 degree turn. It crossed the Potomac and, the official story goes, plowed into a low-populated section of the Pentagon that was under repair..
NORAD tracked these planes all the way. Why didn't U.S. air defenses stop them before they hit their targets?
New York and Washington, D.C. are surrounded by airbases and defensive systems, and they have been used on numerous occasions to send fighter jets into the air within minutes of an "event" to intercept wayward aircraft. The FAA has published guidelines about what to do as soon as a plane deviates from its flight plan. If there is any doubt, air traffic controllers are taught to assume that a hijacking is underway.
Yet no fighter jets intercepted the off-course aircrafts. An accident? For that to be true, 116 different safeguards would have had to have failed simultaneously or been bypassed on that fateful morning.
Did officials of the U.S. government know ahead of time of plans to hijack these planes? Did they allow them to happen? There is growing evidence that U.S. government officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, made decisions before and during that morning indicating that they not only allowed the attacks to occur but facilitated them.
The Stand-Down of U.S. Defenses
In the year leading up to September 11, 2001, the U.S. military defense command issued 67 orders to intercept errant flights; the previous year there were more than 120 such commands.(1) Such orders constitute standard operating procedure. Deviations from this procedure require direct orders to withdraw from intercepting, i.e., to "stand-down."
Were U.S. defenses ordered to stand-down on 9-11 and, if so, who gave the order?
This was the question asked of acting head of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Air Force General Richard B. Myers, on September 13, 2001.
Florida Senator Bill Nelson asked Myers to explain contradictory statements about why no fighters were dispatched on 9-11 to protect Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon.
NELSON: "Perhaps we want to do this in our session, in executive session. But my question is an obvious one for not only this committee, but for the executive branch and the military establishment. If we knew that there was a general threat on terrorist activity, which we did, and we suddenly have two trade towers in New York being obviously hit by terrorist activity, of commercial airliners taken off course from Boston to Los Angeles, then what happened to the response of the defense establishment once we saw the diversion of the aircraft headed west from Dulles turning around 180 degrees and likewise, in the aircraft taking off from Newark and, in flight, turning 180 degrees? That's the question. I leave it to you as to how you would like to answer it. But we would like an answer."
MYERS: "You bet. I spoke, after the second tower wa..., I spoke to the commander of NORAD, General Eberhart. And at that point, I think the decision was, at that point, to start launching aircraft. One of the things you have to understand, senator, is that in our posture right now, that we have many fewer aircraft on alert than we did during the height of the Cold War. And so, we've got just a few bases around the perimeter of the United States. So it's not just a question of launching aircraft, it's launching to do what?"
This was a very strange non-response. Myers said: "We have many fewer aircraft." That does not answer the question of whether U.S. air defenses responded. Myers also threw in the important phrase, "At that point." "At that point ... after the second tower wa...." But the question was, What actions were taken up until that point? Why did Myers say that he had not decided until after the second WTC tower had been hit to launch the planes? No planes were actually launched until after the Pentagon wa... -- a non-response.
The FAA and military have rules for how an interceptor communicates to a wayward aircraft. The F-16 attempts to get the pilot's attention, using visual as well as electronic signals to determine if the aircraft is in distress and is being flown by the proper pilot. If necessary, it will force the wayward plane to land. If it refuses to do so, the U.S. Air Force may be instructed to shoot it down.
In his direct testimony, Gen. Myers provided no explanation for the U.S. government's failure to gear up defenses during the attacks on 9-11. The entire top chain of command (Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers, Winfield) all kept themselves pointedly out of the decision-making process during the actual time of the attacks. But instead of being sacked, Myers was promoted!
One day later, September 14, 2001, the official story changed. The FAA and the Defense Department claimed that fighter jets were launched -- from Otis Air National Guard base on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, contradicting Myers' testimony.
This information raises new questions: Why were the fighter jets sent from a base which was relatively distant from the location of the hijacked airlines? Even so, these should have been able to reach the Pentagon and the second World Trade Center plane before they hit.
According to Aviation Week and Space Technology, at the time of the first WTC crash, 8:46 a.m., three F-16s assigned to Andrews Air Force Base 10 miles from Washington were flying a training mission in North Carolina, 207 miles away from DC. They were already in the air. The F-16s top speed is 1,500 miles per hour -- 25 miles per minute. They could have been over DC airspace in 8.3 minutes. They could have been there at 8:55 a.m., a half hour before the Pentagon wa.... Instead, they were recalled. They are reported to have landed at Andrews Air Force base after Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
According to the first version of the official story it was not until 9:35 a.m. that planes were ordered up in the air. Yet Vice President Cheney made the following statement -- an apparent slip-up -- on Meet the Press: "The Secret Service has an arrangement with the FAA," and that around 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, "they had open lines after the World Trade Center was ..."
The interviewer, Tim Russert, interrupted Cheney mid-sentence and went on to a different line-of-thought. (2) Too bad, because if Cheney had developed the theme that the FAA was communicating with the Secret Service on "open lines" right after 8:46 a.m. when the first tower wa..., then this would be proof that George W. Bush and company in Florida had been informed before he even began traveling to the school to read with the childen, which seriously contradicts the official story. Bush's early knowledge of the attack is supported by two journalists who were with Bush on 9-11. ABC's Jon Cochran and Associated Press' Sonya Ross reported that the President stated that he knew of the terrorist attacks before he left his hotel.
Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney and U.S. air defenses were well aware of Flight 77's approach to the Washington D.C. area even though it had been lost on radar at one point, and then mysteriously reappeared. In the Meet the Press interview, Cheney said that they'd tracked the plane as it approached and then circled the White House before crashing a few minutes later into the Pentagon.(3)
Did Cheney order the US defense fighter planes to stand down? There is now a growing pile of crucial questions about the events themselves and government officials' involvement on the morning of 9-11 that remain to be answered. Unfortunately, there is no indication that the official commission investigating 9-11 asked them.
Additional Questions
* Who ordered aircraft to pick up the scores of bin-Laden family members in the United States and fly them out of the country when every other plane in the U.S. was "grounded," and why?
* Why were the extensive missile batteries and air defenses reportedly deployed around the Pentagon not activated during the attack?
* Was a war against Iraq already "in the cards," awaiting the right pretext? Ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil states in his book that the war in Iraq was planned from the first day of the Bush Administration and that there was no evidence then, nor now, that Iraq was involved in 9-11. Former "terrorism czar" Richard Clarke says that after 9-11, Rumsfeld instantly wanted to attack Iraq. The film "Hijacking Catastrophe," narrated by Julian Bond, documents the plans for war developed by Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Perle, Feith and others in the 1990s in a document titled "Plan for a New American Century." And, shortly after the World Trade Center wa..., what had been originally called "Operation Iraqi Liberation" (OIL) was launched.
* Two of the alleged hijackers were trained in Florida at the Hoffman School of Aviation. Why, immediately after 9-11, did Jeb Bush -- the President's brother, Governor of Florida -- seize the alleged terrorist pilots' records at Hoffman Aviation, order them placed onto a government cargo plane and have them flown out of the country? [from a lawsuit filed by Ellen Mariani, whose husband was a passenger on one of the planes that crashed on 9-11.]
* Why in March of 2000, did an FBI agent destroy all of the FBI's Denver-based intercepts of messages from bin Laden's colleagues who were under investigation?
MUCH MORE:>>
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0501/S00116.htm
- 9/11 - THE NEW PEARL HARBOR — David Ray Griffin, Tue Jan 18 04:18
Main Page - Thursday, 01/19/05
Message Board by American Patriot Friends Network [APFN]
