9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon
Allegations Brought to Inspectors General
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 2, 2006; A03
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 2, 2006; A03
Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.
Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.
In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.
"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."
Although the commission's landmark report made it clear that the Defense Department's early versions of events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the revelation that it considered criminal referrals reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension between it and the Bush administration.
A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the inspector general's office will soon release a report addressing whether testimony delivered to the commission was "knowingly false." A separate report, delivered secretly to Congress in May 2005, blamed inaccuracies in part on problems with the way the Defense Department kept its records, according to a summary released yesterday.
A spokesman for the Transportation Department's inspector general's office said its investigation is complete and that a final report is being drafted. Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said she could not comment on the inspector general's inquiry.
In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today, Vanity Fair magazine reports aspects of the commission debate -- though it does not mention the possible criminal referrals -- and publishes lengthy excerpts from military audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC News aired excerpts last night.
For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.
In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.
These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies' reluctance to release the tapes -- along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence -- led some of the panel's staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.
"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true."
Arnold, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not have all the information unearthed by the panel when he testified earlier. Other military officials also denied any intent to mislead the panel.
John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.
"My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don't know," Lehman said. "But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn't seem to make sense to me."
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9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes
How did the U.S. Air Force respond on 9/11? Could it have shot down United 93, as conspiracy theorists claim? Obtaining 30 hours of never-before-released tapes from the control room of NORAD's Northeast headquarters, the author reconstructs the chaotic military history of that day—and the Pentagon's apparent attempt to cover it up.
VF.com exclusive: VANITY FAIR : FEATURES : GENERAL
Hear excerpts from the September 11 NORAD tapes. Click PLAY after each transcript to listen
BY MICHAEL BRONNER
ucked in a piney notch in the gentle folds of the Adirondacks' southern skirts—just up from a derelict Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern rail spur—is a 22-year-old aluminum bunker tricked out with antennae tilted skyward. It could pass for the Jetsons' garage or, in the estimation of one of the higher-ranking U.S. Air Force officers stationed there, a big, sideways, half-buried beer keg.As Major Kevin Nasypany, the facility's mission-crew commander, drove up the hill to work on the morning of 9/11, he was dressed in his flight suit and prepared for battle. Not a real one. The Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), where Nasypany had been stationed since 1994, is the regional headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the Cold War–era military organization charged with protecting North American airspace. As he poured his first coffee on that sunny September morning, the odds that he would have to defend against Russian "Bear Bombers," one of NORAD's traditional simulated missions, were slim. Rather, Nasypany (pronounced Nah-sip-a-nee), an amiable commander with a thick mini-mustache and a hockey player's build, was headed in early to get ready for the NORAD-wide training exercise he'd helped design. The battle commander, Colonel Bob Marr, had promised to bring in fritters.
NEADS is a desolate place, the sole orphan left behind after the dismantling of what was once one of the country's busiest bomber bases—Griffiss Air Force Base, in Rome, New York, which was otherwise mothballed in the mid-90s. NEADS's mission remained in place and continues today: its officers, air-traffic controllers, and air-surveillance and communications technicians—mostly American, with a handful of Canadian troops—are responsible for protecting a half-million-square-mile chunk of American airspace stretching from the East Coast to Tennessee, up through the Dakotas to the Canadian border, including Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
It was into this airspace that violence descended on 9/11, and from the NEADS operations floor that what turned out to be the sum total of America's military response during those critical 100-some minutes of the attack—scrambling four armed fighter jets and one unarmed training plane—emanated.
The story of what happened in that room, and when, has never been fully told, but is arguably more important in terms of understanding America's military capabilities that day than anything happening simultaneously on Air Force One or in the Pentagon, the White House, or NORAD's impregnable headquarters, deep within Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado. It's a story that was intentionally obscured, some members of the 9/11 commission believe, by military higher-ups and members of the Bush administration who spoke to the press, and later the commission itself, in order to downplay the extent of the confusion and miscommunication flying through the ranks of the government.
The truth, however, is all on tape.
Through the heat of the attack the wheels of what were, perhaps, some of the more modern pieces of equipment in the room—four Dictaphone multi-channel reel-to-reel tape recorders mounted on a rack in a corner of the operations floor—spun impassively, recording every radio channel, with time stamps.
The recordings are fascinating and chilling. A mix of staccato bursts of military code; urgent, overlapping voices; the tense crackle of radio traffic from fighter pilots in the air; commanders' orders piercing through a mounting din; and candid moments of emotion as the breadth of the attacks becomes clearer.
For the NEADS crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings—some real, some phantom—that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening. At one point, in the span of a single mad minute, one hears Nasypany struggling to parse reports of four separate hijackings at once. What emerges from the barrage of what Nasypany dubs "bad poop" flying at his troops from all directions is a picture of remarkable composure. Snap decisions more often than not turn out to be the right ones as commanders kick-start the dormant military machine. It is the fog and friction of war live—the authentic military history of 9/11.
"The real story is actually better than the one we told," a NORAD general admitted to 9/11-commission staffers when confronted with evidence from the tapes that contradicted his original testimony. And so it seems.
Subpoenaed by the commission during its investigation, the recordings have never been played publicly beyond a handful of sound bites presented during the commission's hearings. Last September, as part of my research for the film United 93, on which I was an associate producer, I requested copies from the Pentagon. I was played snippets, but told my chances of hearing the full recordings were nonexistent. So it was a surprise, to say the least, when a military public-affairs officer e-mailed me, a full seven months later, saying she'd been cleared, finally, to provide them.
"The signing of the Declaration of Independence took less coordination," she wrote.
I would ultimately get three CDs with huge digital "wav file" recordings of the various channels in each section of the operations floor, 30-some hours of material in full, covering six and a half hours of real time. The first disc, which arrived by mail, was decorated with blue sky and fluffy white clouds and was labeled, in the playful Apple Chancery font, "Northeast Air Defense Sector—DAT Audio Files—11 Sep 2001."
"THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE"
t 8:14 a.m., as an Egyptian and four Saudis commandeered the cockpit on American 11, the plane that would hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, only a handful of troops were on the NEADS "ops" floor. That's the facility's war room: a dimly lit den arrayed with long rows of radarscopes and communications equipment facing a series of 15-foot screens lining the front wall. The rest of the crew, about 30 Americans and five or six Canadians, were checking e-mails or milling around the hall. A briefing on the morning's training exercise was wrapping up in the Battle Cab, the glassed-in command area overlooking the ops floor.On the Dictaphone decks, an automated voice on each channel ticked off, in Greenwich Mean Time, the last few moments of life in pre-9/11 America: "12 hours, 26 minutes, 20 seconds"—just before 8:30 a.m. eastern daylight time.
The first human voices captured on tape that morning are those of the "ID techs"—Senior Airman Stacia Rountree, 23 at the time, Tech Sergeant Shelley Watson, 40, and their boss, Master Sergeant Maureen "Mo" Dooley, 40. They are stationed in the back right corner of the ops floor at a console with several phones and a radarscope. Their job in a crisis is to facilitate communications between NEADS, the civilian F.A.A., and other military commands, gathering whatever information they can and sending it up the chain. Dooley—her personality at once motherly and aggressive—generally stands behind the other two, who are seated.
The tapes catch them discussing strategy of an entirely domestic order:
08:37:08
O.K., a couch, an ottoman, a love seat, and what else … ? Was it on sale … ? Holy smokes! What color is it?
In the background, however, you can make out the sound of Jeremy Powell, then 31, a burly, amiable technical sergeant, fielding the phone call that will be the military's first notification that something is wrong. On the line is Boston Center, the civilian air-traffic-control facility that handles that region's high-flying airliners.
08:37:52
BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [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.
POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?
BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.
PLAY | STOP
Powell's question—"Is this real-world or exercise?"—is heard nearly verbatim over and over on the tapes as troops funnel onto the ops floor and are briefed about the hijacking. Powell, like almost everyone in the room, first assumes the phone call is from the simulations team on hand to send "inputs"—simulated scenarios—into play for the day's training exercise.
Boston's request for fighter jets is not as prescient as it might seem. Standard hijack protocol calls for fighters to be launched—"scrambled"—merely to establish a presence in the air. The pilots are trained to trail the hijacked plane at a distance of about five miles, out of sight, following it until, presumably, it lands. If necessary, they can show themselves, flying up close to establish visual contact, and, if the situation demands, maneuver to force the plane to land.
At this point, certainly, the notion of actually firing anything at a passenger jet hasn't crossed anyone's mind.
In the ID section, the women overhear the word "hijack" and react, innocently enough, as anyone might with news of something exciting going on at work:
8:37:56
WATSON: What?
DOOLEY: Whoa!
WATSON: What was that?
ROUNTREE: Is that real-world?
DOOLEY: Real-world hijack.
WATSON: Cool!
PLAY | STOP
For the first time in their careers, they'll get to put their training to full use.
Almost simultaneously, a P.A. announcement goes out for Major Nasypany, who's taking his morning constitutional.
08:37:58
P.A.: Major Nasypany, you're needed in ops pronto. P.A.: Major Nasypany, you're needed in ops pronto.
[Recorded phone line:]
SERGEANT MCCAIN: Northeast Air Defense Sector, Sergeant McCain, can I help you?
SERGEANT KELLY: Yeah, Sergeant Kelly from Otis, how you doing today?
SERGEANT MCCAIN: Yeah, go ahead.
SERGEANT KELLY: The—I'm gettin' reports from my TRACON [local civilian air traffic] that there might be a possible hijacking.
SERGEANT MCCAIN: I was just hearing the same thing. We're workin' it right now.
SERGEANT KELLY: O.K., thanks.
PLAY | STOP
"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,'" Nasypany recalled. (The fact that there was an exercise planned for the same day as the attack factors into several conspiracy theories, though the 9/11 commission dismisses this as coincidence. After plodding through dozens of hours of recordings, so do I.)
n tape, one hears as Nasypany, following standard hijack protocol, prepares to launch two fighters from Otis Air National Guard Base, on Cape Cod, to look for American 11, which is now off course and headed south. He orders his Weapons Team—the group on the ops floor that controls the fighters—to put the Otis planes on "battle stations." This means that at the air base the designated "alert" pilots—two in this case—are jolted into action by a piercing "battle horn." They run to their jets, climb up, strap in, and do everything they need to do to get ready to fly short of starting the engines.Find the full story at the link above.
![Analysis: Eleven Questions Avoided by Corporate Media concerning DoD Lies & 9/11 Commission Cover-up
Thursday, August 03, 2006 - 12:53 PM
Posted by: khence
Kyle F. Hence -- 9/11 CitizensWatch -- August 3, 2006
Recent articles in corporate media examine deception and lying by the Department of Defense relative to the attacks of September 11th 2001. They shed light on an effective cover-up by the 9/11 Commission in its refusal to bring Government deception to the American people by way of their discredited 9/11 Report. Links to these articles follow as do 11 questions which these revelations and NORAD tapes beg to be asked and which must be answered: Washington Post
9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon
Allegations Brought to Inspectors General
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080101300_pf.html
Vanity Fair
9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes
http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/060801fege01
The New York Times
New Tapes Disclose Confusion Within the Military on Sept. 11
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/us/03norad.html
=======================================
The real and problematic confusion and fog is one which is seemingly preventing the corporate media from grappling with any of the following pressing questions which have been advanced for years by the 9/11 families, advocates and independent researchers.
Here are Eleven Questions that the corporate media have thus far refused to raise or attempt to answer in their examination of the NORAD tapes and related issues:
Who was responsible for scheduling multiple war games and terror exercises involving aircraft for Sept. 11th
Who moved "Global Guardian" normally scheduled for October to September?
Who designed the war games to involve 'hijackings'?
Who planned and scheduled the movement of Airforce aircraft north to Canada, Alaska and Greenland?
Who planned the terror exercise at the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) involving an evacuation in response to threat from the air?
Who was "hands-on" responsible for coordinating all the war games the morning of September 11th?
Who would have been responsible for turning off the war games to enable a timely real world response to the attacks?
How were as many as 21 false radar blips or possible targets (per Jane Garvey) inserted into FAA radar screens?
Who was responsible for the identification of ghost flight 11 which allegedly continued to fly south past Manhattan and which may have caused NORAD's Langley intercept jets to vector North toward NYC rather than D.C.?
[NOTE: John Farmer of the 9/11 Commission said to me personally that the 9/11 Commission was never able to identify the individual for this flight 11 information--to resolve this anomaly.]
Why was there no reference to the pattern of 9/11 Commission cover-up including that of Able Danger as revealed by Capt. Scott Philpott?
=================
The bottom line question that corporate media refuse to answer and which the 9/11 Commission ignored is who, specifically, would have been responsible for creating the circumstances that led to the confusion or fog the morning of 9/11 and who should have immediately ceased any and all war gaming activity and deceptive radar data?
To begin to answer these questions journalists intent on getting answers to questions long asked by the families and others should visit:
Center for Cooperative Research: Essay -- "U.S. Military Exercises up to 9/11"
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=militaryExercises
Randi Rhodes interview with Complete 9/11 Timeline author, Paul Thompson on Air America
http://www.911podcasts.com/files/audio/RandiRhodes_PaulThompson_NORAD_080206.mp3
Enough with excusing those responsible by pointing to 'confusion' or 'fog'. The real and dangerous 'fog' here is that which prevents journalists from doing their jobs and asking and answering the hard questions about 9/11 including those posed above and those surrounding the growing evidence for controlled demolition of the World Trade Center towers and WTC #7. [Google Dr. Steven Jones & World Trade Center]
Kyle F. Hence
Executive Director
9/11 CitizensWatch
http://www.911citizenswatch.org
kfh@911citizenswatch.org
401-935-7715 See also:
Exclusive Report: Did Military Exercises Facilitate the 9/11 Pentagon Attack?
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060718232126585](911%20Norad%20Deception_files/shapeimage_6.png)
911 "Conspiracy Theorists" Vindicated: Pentagon deliberately misled Public Opinion
Military officials made false statements to Congress and to the 911 Commission
by Michel Chossudovsky
August 2, 2006
Recent revelations by members of the 911 Commission (quoted in the Washington Post, 2 August 2006) have farreaching implications.
.
They confirm that the Pentagon was involved in criminal wrong doing by deliberately distorting and/or withholding information concerning the September 2001 attacks:
"Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate." (WP, 2 August 2006)
These revelations uphold what has been documented regarding 911 in several carefully researched studies, which the mainstream media continues to identify as "conspiracy theories".
It would appear that the 911 "Conspiracy Theorists" have at last been vindicated. The information now released and yet to come is that the Pentagon was involved in acts of coverup at the highest levels of the military hierarchy.
"Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said." (Ibid)
If this were known to the 911 Commission, why was it withheld?
More generally, why was the contradictory evidence presented by the Pentagon, the White House and the CIA taken at face value. Why did the 911 Commission uphold the lies and falsehoods in its "authoritative" Report?
Damage control
The Commission was not misled. The Commission deliberately and consciously distorted the facts regarding 911. A large part of the 911 narrative as presented in its report is fabricated.
The Pentagon's top brass (including senior NORAD officials) were involved in acts of perjury with a view to misleading public opinion. If the Commission doubted the veracity of the information presented, why did it replicate the lies and falsehoods in its report.
These recent revelations have all the appearances of "damage control": they consist in admitting that the Pentagon withheld information, without questioning the broader findings of the 911 Commission Report:
"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true." (Ibid).
It would appear that the 911 "Conspiracy Theorists" have at last been vindicated. The information now released and yet to come is that the Pentagon was involved in acts of coverup at the highest levels of the military hierarchy.
"Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said." (Ibid)
If this were known to the 911 Commission, why was it withheld?
More generally, why was the contradictory evidence presented by the Pentagon, the White House and the CIA taken at face value. Why did the 911 Commission uphold the lies and falsehoods in its "authoritative" Report?
Damage control
The Commission was not misled. The Commission deliberately and consciously distorted the facts regarding 911. A large part of the 911 narrative as presented in its report is fabricated.
The Pentagon's top brass (including senior NORAD officials) were involved in acts of perjury with a view to misleading public opinion. If the Commission doubted the veracity of the information presented, why did it replicate the lies and falsehoods in its report.
These recent revelations have all the appearances of "damage control": they consist in admitting that the Pentagon withheld information, without questioning the broader findings of the 911 Commission Report:
"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true." (Ibid).
Arnold, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not have all the information unearthed by the panel when he testified earlier. Other military officials also denied any intent to mislead the panel.
John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.
"My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don't know," Lehman said. "But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn't seem to make sense to me." (Ibid).
The integrity of the 911 commission members remains unscathed. The broader issue of sheer fabrication, presenting al Qaeda as the architect of the WTC attacks is not mentioned. Neither is the issue of Operation Able Danger, the Pentagon's secret operation, which consisted essentially is fabricating terrorist cells ahead of 911:
"Atta, according to the Kean report, was the “tactical leader of the 9/11 plot”. He was the pilot who on that dreadful morning flew the first plane, American Airlines 11, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. It was Atta’s face, on television and in newspapers across the world, that became the symbol of Islamic terrorism. And it was Atta’s name - not the names of any of the 18 other hijackers allegedly lead by Atta on that day - that was cited by international security researchers. Atta was, as the Kean report stresses, “the tactical commander of the operation in the United States”. According to both the Bush administration and the official 9/11 Commission report, he was working on the orders of Osama Bin Laden who, from remote Afghanistan, controlled the entire operation.
"Atta, according to the Kean report, was the “tactical leader of the 9/11 plot”. He was the pilot who on that dreadful morning flew the first plane, American Airlines 11, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. It was Atta’s face, on television and in newspapers across the world, that became the symbol of Islamic terrorism. And it was Atta’s name - not the names of any of the 18 other hijackers allegedly lead by Atta on that day - that was cited by international security researchers. Atta was, as the Kean report stresses, “the tactical commander of the operation in the United States”. According to both the Bush administration and the official 9/11 Commission report, he was working on the orders of Osama Bin Laden who, from remote Afghanistan, controlled the entire operation.
Now, almost exactly four years after 9/11, the facts appear to have been turned upside down. We now learn that Atta was also connected to a top secret operation of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in the US. According to Army reserve Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a top secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger had identified Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the attacks.
Able Danger was an 18-month highly classified operation tasked, according to Shaffer, with “developing targeting information for al-Qaida on a global scale”, and used data-mining techniques to look for “patterns, associations, and linkages”. He said he himself had first encountered the names of the four hijackers in mid-2000." (See Daniele Ganser's study on Operation Able Danger
Michel Chossudovsky's most recent book, which reviews in detail the events of 911 is entitled: America’s "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005. To order Chossudovsky's book America's "War on Terrorism", click here.
Michel Chossudovsky's most recent book, which reviews in detail the events of 911 is entitled: America’s "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005. To order Chossudovsky's book America's "War on Terrorism", click here.
NORAD Tapes Only Intensify Implausibility Of 9/11 Official Story
"These guys are smart," statement completely inconsistent with flight instructors description of hijacker's skills
"These guys are smart," statement completely inconsistent with flight instructors description of hijacker's skills
Newly released portions of NORAD tapes from 9/11 featured in a Vanity Fair article do little to answer skeptic's questions about the impotence of U.S. air defenses on 9/11 and if anything only increase focus on the incompatibility of the official version of events with what is actually known to have taken place on that day.
It is clear that the exercises revolving around hijacked airliners scheduled for that morning created so much noise in the system that controllers could not pinpoint the positions of any of the real airliners to orchestrate any kind of intercept.
Errant 'ghost' aircraft such as 'Delta 89' and American Airlines 11 which controllers weren't aware had already crashed into the World Trade Center north tower continually confuse NORAD officials and at one point after Flight 77 has hit the Pentagon, they even intercept their own aircraft.
Several exchanges between NORAD personnel outline the confusion that the drills caused and delayed the response of air defense procedures.
continued at link above.
