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9/11 SYNTHETIC TERRORISM MADE IN USA |
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CHAPTER V: COULD THE ALLEGED HIJACKERS FLY THE PLANES?
We must now begin to discuss the specific patsies of 9/11. Much detail about them will have to be ignored; much of it is disinformation which deserves to be ignored anyway. This entire area is dominated by hearsay evidence purveyed by the fiction-mongers of the FBI. Many of the identities offered are frauds, composites, or legends. What will interest us in the stories of the patsies are those singularities which show them for what they are, and which point beyond the superficial world of the patsies towards the underlying reality shaped by intelligence agencies and moles. Five of the persons accused by the FBI of being implicated in the 9/11 actions apparently turned out to be alive; the FBI has never provided any proof that those accused were actually involved. Indeed, FBI Director Muller has admitted that his case against the notorious nineteen would never stand up in a real court of law. It would therefore be perfectly proper to reject the entire list of nineteen out of hand as just another effluvium of the FBI molehill -- and, in effect, we do. At the same time, we find that at least some of the nineteen are double agents and tainted by criminal intent. But we also wish to examine the list of nineteen to discover the inherent complicities and contradictions in the government's case. In this way, the list of the nineteen can be used to cast light upon the operations of moles and terrorist controllers. The FBI and the 9/11 commission have uniformly alleged that the leader of the mythic 19 hijackers who commandeered the aircraft was Mohammed Atta, a well-to-do Egyptian who they say was a very intolerant, puritanical, and doctrinaire Moslem. Reality looks much different, and rules out any notion that Atta could have accepted the mission of a suicide pilot because of profound religious convictions. He was in fact not a practicing Moslem, but rather a devotee of alcohol, cocaine, call girls, and pork chops. These biographical details are vital because they demolish any notion of Atta as a fanatic kamikaze. He was a sybaritic playboy or worse, addicted to the pleasures of the flesh, and no ascetic to immolate himself for a cause of faith. He emerges rather as a much more complicated figure, surely a sociopath, and in all probability a patsy who was being told one thing by his patrons and controllers while he was steered to act in ways which set him up in the role he played, and in all probability for liquidation. In order to be accused of playing the role of suicide pilots, the 9/11 patsies needed to have a smattering of flight training. What actual expertise they were able to acquire in this process is something that we will examine, but it is already clear that the flight lessons were mostly for show. Ironically, they were conducted in south Florida, in a neighborhood which is redolent of the CIA covert operations of yesteryear, from the Bay of Pigs to Watergate to Iran-contra. The school for patsies was located in the back yard of CIA Miami station, and just down the road from the US Central Command. These matters have been illuminated by the reporting of former network newsman Daniel Hopsicker of the Mad Cow Morning News, who has shown much more real interest in the behavior and personality of Atta and his associates than the FBI ever has. Hopsicker has documented that Atta in particular was a piece of human refuse, a mixture of bungling ineptitude with psychopathic rage. Atta's mental impairment is such that it is very hard to attribute to him the remarkable feats of aviation skill which are ascribed to him by the mythmakers of the FBI and the 9/11 commission. Yet Hopsicker insists that Atta was indeed capable of flying his plane into the WTC north tower by the seat of his pants. Hopsicker also appears focused on the Saudi Arabian track, which leads away from the essential role played by the network of moles operating within the US government. Atta, along with Shehhi, trained at the Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Florida, a small town on the Gulf coast between Tampa and Naples, where most of the population consists of retired persons. Ramzi Binalshibh, who the official version claims was destined to be the twentieth hijacker, was on his was to Venice when he was stopped because of visa problems. Venice had two flight schools, and both of these flight schools were owned and operated by newly emigrated Netherlands nationals. Huffman Aviation was run by Rudi Dekkers, while Florida Flight Training Center, another school located at Venice airport, was run by Arne Kruithof, also from the Netherlands. The third accused suicide pilot, Siad al Jarrah, trained at Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center. Kruithof claimed privately that he had been trained at a US military installation in southeast Missouri. Atta and al Shehhi supposedly paid Dekkers more than $:38,000, hardly the bargain rates that supposedly drew the two to Huffman in the first place. Two Dutch nationals running flight schools at the same small airport which were attended by three out of the four alleged hijackers is a remarkable pattern. Both Dutchmen arrived in Venice in 1998. According to intelligence sources quoted by Hopsicker, "two Dutch boys buying adjacent flight schools which shortly thereafter get overrun by terrorists is one Dutch boy too many." Three alleged terrorists at two flight schools located at one small airport, when there are some 200 flight schools in Florida, is also a curious circumstance. (Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News 2, 7, 8) On March 6, 2002 the US Immigration and Naturalization Service sent Dekkers letters telling him that Atta and Shehhi - -now allegedly deceased -- had met the necessary requirements and were now eligible to apply for extensions of their visas in to stay in the US. How had the INS made this blunder in two of the best-known cases having to do with 9/11? "The error seemed particularly difficult to explain, sniffed the New York Times, because Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi were among the most infamous of the 19 hijackers." Media coverage focused on the "troubled" INS, but this incident totally consistent with the hypothesis that the names of Atta and Shehhi had been flagged in government computers with national security overrides, which had served to make them virtually immune from watch lists, criminal checks, and the like. A lazy mole had evidently neglected to remove the override when the usefulness of these two patsies had come to an end, and so the posthumous visa approval forms were sent out. A similar case is the CIA cable announcing the presence of accused hijacker Al Hazmi in the US in March 2000, which was marked "Action Required: None." (JICI, September 20, 2002) Atta's name had been on the CIA-FBI-INS watch list for many years, since an older person with the same name bombed an Israeli bus in the occupied territories of the West Bank on October 12, 1986. (Hopsicker 144-145) This indicates that the name was flagged with a national security override to allow him to enter the country. Atta was stopped by police for a traffic violation in Broward County, Florida on the night of April 26, 2001; he was even arrested for not having a drivers license. But he was soon released on bail - presumably the national security override again. The FBI arrived at Venice airport no later than 2:30 AM in the morning of September 12, which indicates that they had known something about Atta's and Shehhi's being there. According to some accounts, the FBI arrived within a few hours, by the middle of the afternoon. According to an aviation businessman and employee of Huffman interviewed by Hopsicker, "They [the FBI] were outside my house four hours after the attack." This suggested that the FBI had known where Atta and Shehhi were all along. Hopsicker adds: "Like many eyewitnesses we spoke with, this longtime aviation executive spoke of being intimidated and harassed by FBI agents. They didn't strong-arm him to make him think harder and cough up some useful leads, but to ensure he kept his mouth shut. We've heard about this from other people, haven't we? It's becoming a refrain." This source had the following to say about Atta and his friends: "I thought these guys [Atta & Co.] were double agents." (Hopsicker 150) But Dekkers, who might easily have been arrested as a material witness, instead became a media personality, appearing on the Larry King interview program on CNN. According to some press accounts, as many as 27 al Qaeda operatives took flying lessons in the US in the months before 9/11. Before 2001, Dekkers had launched an aggressive marketing campaign in Europe to get foreigners to come to his flight school for training. One of his selling points was that it cost less to learn to be a pilot in the US than in Europe. Soon 80% of the students enrolled at Huffman Aviation were from abroad, and many were Arabs. About 400 foreign nationals were graduating every year from Huffman. According to some reports, some Arab flight trainees who had been taking lessons at Huffman disappeared around the time of 9/11 -- either a few days in advance or more or less simultaneously with the terror attacks. This is a hint of the hidden hands pulling the strings: intelligence agencies love to have a few spare patsies around who can be thrown into action at a moment's notice if some other patsy is arrested, killed, or incapacitated. After John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to kill President Reagan in 1981, more than a dozen deranged loners with obsessions similar to Hinckley's were reported from police blotters in various parts of the US, according to intelligence reports at that time.. The organizers of that hit, like the organizers of 9/11, took no unnecessary chances; they had redundant backup echelons of patsies ready to go in case they were needed. Working with Dekkers and providing most of the funds was Wally J. Hilliard, who also had an interest in a nearby Lear Jet rental service. Hilliard had a special interest in Rum Cay in the Bahamas, a suspicious island patrolled by a single policeman. This island was said to be the scene of operations linked to Saudi moneybags Adnan Kashoggi, who figured prominently in Bush 41's and Oliver North's Iran-contra gun-running operations during the 1908s. A Lear jet belonging to Hilliard was seized by the DEA in July 2000 when it was found to be carrying 15 kilos of heroin on a flight back from Venezuela -- a sizable amount. Hilliard and his company alleged that they were unaware of the narcotics, which they said had been brought on board by a passenger without their knowledge. Hilliard appeared also to have operated a more or less regular commuter air link with Havana, Cuba, something that is theoretically illegal because of the US embargo on all trade and other contacts with Castro's island -- suggesting an operation sanctioned by the shadow world. (Mad Cow Morning News 32) General aviation and commuter air services between Florida and the nearby islands are inextricably linked with drug-running, which was highlighted during the Iran-contra hearings of the late 1980s, and which of course has never ceased. These operations are associated in the popular mind with Oliver North, but it should be recalled that the covert operations czar of the Reagan administration was of course Vice President George Bush, who directed every phase of Iran-contra with the help of figures like Felix Rodriguez. (Tarpley 1992) This pattern was later confirmed by former DEA agent Celerino Castillo, who personally confronted Bush about drug running, but got no response. The DEA estimates that two thirds of the illegal drugs coming into the US pass through the Bahamas. Journalists have speculated that Dekkers and Kruithof were cut-outs for a US intelligence operation at the Venice airport. Huffman Aviation was also the location of offices of Britannia Aviation, a small and undercapitalized company which surprisingly beat out better-known and better-connected firms to win a contract to provide maintenance services at Lynchburg Regional Airport in Virginia. At a hearing, one of Britannia Aviations executives, Paul Marten, said that one of his main customers was Caribe Air, a reputed CIA proprietary which reportedly took part in Iran-contra drug smuggling. Aircraft belonging to Caribe Air were seized by prosecutors at the airport in Mena, Arkansas, during that phase. Caribe Air had moved its headquarters to the island of Dominica. A source said that Britannia Aviation was a firm favored by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, from which it had received "a green light." In the summer of 2002, Kruithof narrowly escaped death when the Twin Beech E 18 aircraft in which he was flying to Cancun, Mexico, crashed. At the same time, deportation procedures and fraud charges were in progress against Dekkers, who was involved in a helicopter crash in January 2003. Efforts were clearly being made to intimidate these two key witnesses, or to silence them. The Kean-Hamilton Commission had no time for Dekkers and Kruithof. (Mad Cow Morning News) The accused hijackers' choice of Venice, Florida also allows us to locate them better in the recent history of covert operations. If we take the Bay of Pigs (1961), the Kennedy assassination (1963), Watergate (1972-74), Iran-Contra (exposed in 1986), and 9/11, we find that there is a single common denominator: Florida, the Miami Cubans, and Cuba generally. For the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, and Iran-contra, the links are obvious: there is a continuity of people who populate these scandals, people like Felix Rodriguez who was part of the Bay of Pigs and then served as Bush 41 's operative in Iran-contra, or Frank Sturgis and his crew who link Howard Hunt's role in the Bay of Pigs with Watergate. In the case of the Kennedy assassination the links are not quite so evident, but evident enough: Oswald was an activist of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the Bay of Pigs survivors hated Kennedy, and there is a persistent connection between Operation Mongoose, the US government plan to assassinate Castro, and the killing of JFK. George Bush 41 allegedly chartered the ships used by the CIA in the Bay of Pigs invasion, was part of the Kennedy assassination coverup, was a leading Watergate figure, and directed most of what is known as Iran-contra. Underlying many of these connections is the sinister presence of CIA Miami Station, which was created in the early 1960s as the CIA's large-scale domestic facility. This is the infamous JM/WAVE which is described in the unauthorized biography of George Bush. (Tarpley 1992) Not far away is the Hobe Sound/Jupiter Island complex, the wintering place for some of the most prominent oligarchical masters of human destiny. Venice Airport was built by the government during World War II for pilot training. Not far away in Tampa is the headquarters of US Central Command, which wages the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Central Command is located at McDill Air Force Base. There are indications of an NSA presence in Venice, as well. The legendary Mena, Arkansas airport was one of the airports used for gun running and drug running, but so was Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. In fact, there was hardly an airport in Florida and in the southern US generally that was not involved, and there is every reason to think that Venice was as well. According to Hopsicker, "many of the flight trainers who had trained the Arab terrorist pilots had also flown missions out of the Venice-Sarasota airport for such Christian missionary services as televangelist Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing." One of the pilots who did the training at Huffrnan was Mike Mikarts, also a pilot for the fundamentalist "Agape Flights" of Sarasota which runs air missionary activity with obvious destabilization overtones in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After Venice, Atta and Shehhi rented planes from Kemper Aviation at North Palm Beach Airport near Miami in August 2001. Owner Joe Kemper spent 20 years in Peru and Bolivia as a "missionary pilot" for the evangelical-run SAMAlR (South American Mission Air) which worked to bring fundamentalism to Andes mountains Indio tribes. SAMAIR is a part of an international evangelical/Pentecostal air wing, often drawing on former military pilots, who are not accidentally often found in areas in the middle of civil wars, drug gangs, and mercenary intelligence operations in Third World countries. Additionally, Joe Kemper's chief pilot trainer between 1989 and 1999 was Jean-Francois Buslik, who was later arrested on murder charges filed in Belgium, Buslik was implicated in the 1982-85 Brabant killings, a wave of serial killings and de facto strategy of tension which claimed the lives of over 30 victims at supermarkets in the Brussels suburbs. These were no ordinary flight schools. (Mad Cow Morning News 41; EIR, October 26, 2001) MOHAMED ATTA, PORK CHOP FUNDAMENTALlST Atta's father was a well-to-do Egyptian lawyer. Atta was a mediocre student of architectural engineering at Cairo University, and his family wanted him to obtain an advanced degree. Atta's life changed when he was selected to participate in an elite exchange program originally set up between the US and Germany which had been expanded to include engineers from other countries as well. Atta was befriended in Cairo in 1992 by an obscure German couple who had taken him under their wing. Between 1995 and 1997, Atta was a member of the Congress-Bundestag Program, a joint project of the US State Department and the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development. This program was administered by the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft. located in Koln. (FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, "Atta Was Tutor For Scholarship Holders," October 18, 200 I; Chicago Tribune, March 7, 2003) Later, as a student in Hamburg, Atta had worked along with Shehhi and Binalshib for Hay Computing Service GmbH in Hamburg, Germany. There has been speculation that this company was a front for intelligence agencies. Atta arrived in Venice in late April or early May 2000. Hopsicker shows that during his time in Venice, Atta did not behave like a puritanical Wahabite Islamic fundamentalist of the Bin Laden school. He rather appeared as a sybaritic hedonist and promiscuous playboy. He loved to attend topless bars, where he would order lap dances at the Pink Pony, or else stuff twenty dollar bills into the g-strings of the dancers at the Olympic Garden nightclub. He was also a regular at Harry's Bar in Naples. Atta's favorite nightspots were the Cheetah in Venice, and Margarita Maggie' s in Sarasota. FBI investigators showing pictures of Atta after 9/11 found that he had been drinking Stolichnaya vodka for three hours recently; with him was accused suicide pilot Marwan al Shehhi, who preferred rum. Atta was also a frequent cocaine user. He would habitually snort rows of cocaine with a dollar bill. His source of cocaine was apparently located at or near Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center at Venice airport. When Atta went back to Hamburg, he was under surveillance by the CIA. (Mad Cow Morning News 27) On one occasion Atta took Amanda and two other friends on a three-day orgy and bender of nightclubs, drinking, and cocaine in Key West. A waitress recalled seeing Atta wearing lots of jewelry, perhaps including a large crucifix -- "a big gaudy gold cross" and a "big watch." The waitress said that the conversation she overheard involving Atta and some others involved references to $200,000 and the need to answer to the "Family." Atta was also an eager eater of pork chops, another explicit violation of Islamic law. Atta's musical tastes inclined to the Beastie Boys. (Mad Cow Morning News 20, 30) Atta also cohabited with a 22-year old call girl who may also have been a sex operative for one of the intelligence agencies. Amanda Keller worked for a "lingerie model escort service" in Sarasota called Fantasies & Lace. Her personal appearance was described as "slutty;" she dressed "like a hooker," according to published reports. Her hair was dyed hot pink during the time she was with Atta. This was Amanda Keller, who was inexplicably ignored by the tabloids and intimidated by the FBI. Her constant refrain was: "I can't really discuss anything. I'm afraid I'll get in trouble." Not just Keller, many witnesses in and around Venice have been harassed and intimidated by the FBI. (Hopsicker 63-68) Atta and Amanda Keller lived together for two months. Keller says that her breakup with Atta began when he embarrassed her at the night club Margarita Maggie's in Sarasota. She recalled bitterly that "Mohammed, like a dumbass, was standing on top of a speaker dancing. The man could not dance to save his life. He was real stiff, just kind of shaking, doing the 'Roxbury head bob' thing. He just embarrassed me instantly with the people there, and I just pretended I didn't know him." Keller's attraction of Atta probably had something to do with money. Although he seemed to live in modest circumstances, Atta always had plenty of cash. He thought nothing of leaving a twenty dollar bill to cover a bar tab of $4. According to Amanda Keller, Atta was also a cat-torturer. After she had thrown him out of the apartment they shared, Atta got back in and disemboweled her pet cat, leaving the remains on her kitchen table. He also dismembered five out of six kittens. As Keller remembered, "There were baby cat parts all over the place." Atta was in Venice at least three times during the six weeks immediately before 9/11. He was seen in friendly conversation with Dekkers. Atta in particular had mastered the fine art of getting himself noticed and remembered when he wanted to. One witness spoke of Atta as a menacing presence: "He just stood back and glared at you with his dark eyes. It gave me a frightening feeling you wouldn't want to be caught in the parking lot at night with him." Another specialty was a nasty shout of "You do not speak to me unless I speak to you first" for anyone who approached him. Atta exchanged emails with employees at companies like Virtual Prototypes, a Canadian firm which works on sensitive projects for the Pentagon. He sent another email complaining that the American University in Cairo had dismissed a female student who had insisted on coming to class in her niqab, or face veil. TERRORISTS FROM US MILITARY BASES The other peculiarity about the alleged hijackers of 9/11 is that so many of them were directly linked to US military bases. According to press accounts, Atta attended the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Abdulaziz Alomari had attended the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. Saeed Alghamdi had been to the Defense Language Institute at Monterrey, California. (Washington Post, September 15 and 17, 2001) According to Newsweek three of the FBI's group of 19 terror suspects had received training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, and listed their address as locations on that base. Most foreign students at these facilities are there because they are sponsored by governments within the US orbit. But some may be sponsored by the US directly¬ especially if agent recruitment is the object. The Newsweek coverage, entitled "Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases: The Pentagon has turned over military records on five men to the FBI," by George Wehrfritz, Catharine Skipp and John Barry, is especially instructive, and reads in part: Sept. 15 -- U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday's terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s. Three of the alleged hijackers listed their address on drivers licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla -- known as the "Cradle of U.S. Navy Aviation," according to a high-ranking U.S. Navy source. Another of the alleged hijackers may have been trained in strategy and tactics at the Air War College in Montgomery, Ala" said another high- ranking Pentagon official. The fifth man may have received language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Tex. Both were former Saudi Air Force pilots who had come to the United States, according to the Pentagon source. But there are sli~1ht discrepancies between the military training records and the official FBI list of suspected hijackers- either in the spellings of their names or with their birthdates. One military source said it is possible that the hijackers may have stolen the identities of the foreign nationals who studied at the U.S. installations. The five men were on a list of 19 people identified as hijackers by the FBI on Friday. The three foreign nationals training in Pensacola appear to be Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, who were among the four men who allegedly commandeered United Airlines Flight 93, That flight crashed into rural Pennsylvania. The third man who may have trained in Pensacola, Ahmed Alghamdi, allegedly helped highjack United Airlines Flight 175, which hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. Military records show that the three used as their address 10 Radford Boulevard, a base roadway on which residences for foreign-military flight trainees are located. In March 1997, Saeed Alghamdi listed the address to register a 1998 Oldsmobile; five months later he used it again to register a second vehicle, a late model Buick. Drivers licenses thought to have been issued to the other two suspects in 1996 and 1998 list the barracks as their residences. (Newsweek, September 15, 2001) US government spokesmen issued less than ironclad denials, alleging that because of confusion among Arabic names, the accused hijackers had "probably" not been part of activities on the military bases cited. They were being confused with other Arabs with the same names, the military spokespersons suggested. The controlled corporate media soon stopped paying attention to this story. The Newsweek story quoted a former Navy pilot's comment that, during his years on the base, "we always, always, always trained other countries' pilots. When I was there two decades ago, it was Iranians. The shah was in power. Whoever the country du jour is, that's whose pilots we train." The country dujour was now, by implication, the "al Qaeda." The intelligence community record in regard to two accused 9/11 suicide operatives was less than sterling. According to Michael Isikoff, these two were for a time the roommates of a seasoned informer. The two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, had been known to the CIA since January 2000, when the two Saudi nationals showed up at a Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. One had been a part of the attack on the USS Cole. As Isikoff reports: Upon leaving Malaysia, Almihdhar and Alhazmi went to San Diego, where they took flight-school lessons. In September 2000, the two moved into the home of a Muslim man who had befriended them at the local Islamic Center. The landlord regularly prayed with them and even helped one open a bank account. He was also, sources tell Newsweek, a 'tested' undercover 'asset' who had been working closely with the FBI office in San Diego on terrorism cases related to Hamas. (Newsweek, September 15, 2001) The FBI, of course, came up with the cover story that their paid informer had failed to inform the Bureau of the true identity of his two mysterious houseguests. The informant's name was Abdusattar Shaikh. The FBI later refused to let the JICI Congressional investigators talk to him, claiming that he could not add anything of interest. The JICI did not exercise its power of subpoena in order to hear this important witness. Nor did the 9/11 commission. But the FBI also had to admit that the San Diego case agent involved knew that visitors were renting rooms in the informant's house. On one occasion, a source reported, the case agent called up the informant and was told he couldn't talk because 'Khalid' -- a reference to Almihdhar -- was in the room. This makes it look like the case officer knew precisely who Khalid was. Isikoff cited I. C. Smith, a former top FBI counterintelligence official, as commenting that the case agent should have been more carefully supervising the people with whom his informant was fraternizing with -- among other things, to recruit the houseguests as possible informants. "They should have been asking, 'Who are these guys? What are they doing here?' This strikes me as a lack of investigative curiosity." He is on firm ground there; other counter-intelligence people were "stunned" by the FBI's lassitude. About six weeks after moving into the house, Almihdhar left town, explaining to the landlord he was going back to Saudi Arabia to see his daughter. Alhazmi moved out at the end of 2000. It was not until August 23, 2001, that the CIA sent out an urgent cable to U.S. border and law- enforcement agencies identifying the two men as possible terrorists. By then it was too late. The FBI did not realize the San Diego connection until a few days after 9-11, when the informant heard the names of the Pentagon hijackers and called his case agent. "I know those guys," the informant purportedly said, referring to Almihdhar and Alhazmi. "They were my roommates." FBI Director Mueller has repeatedly insisted there was nothing the bureau could have done differently to penetrate the 9-11 plot. That claim is patently absurd. In addition to the FBI, the alleged future hijackers were also under the scrutiny of the Israeli Mossad. The Mossad maintained a stakeout in Hollywood, Florida, and operated a safe house of their own close to the apartment where Atta and Shehhi lived. (Die Zeit, October 1, 2002) COULD ATTA, SHEHHI, HANJOUR AND JARRAH PILOT LARGE AIRLINERS? In addition to whether they were US agents or not, the big question regarding Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah, just as it was in regard to Lee Harvey Oswald and Timothy McVeigh, is still: were they physically and mentally capable of carrying out the criminal actions ascribed to them? Patsies can always talk the talk -- but can they walk the walk, meaning, is it within their power, above and beyond all criminal intent, to create the effects observed? If not, we have a case of physical impossibility -- as we had in the cases of Oswald and McVeigh -- and we must look further for the true culprits. Here is an account from the mainstream press: Atta, the alleged hijacker of Flight 11, and Shehhi, alleged hijacker of Flight 175, both of which crashed into the World Trade Center, attended hundreds of hours of lessons at Huffman Aviation. They also took supplementary lessons at Jones Aviation Flying Service Inc., which operates from the Sarasota Bradenton International Airport. According to the Washington Post, neither experience was successful. A flight instructor at Jones who asked not be identified said Atta and Al Shehhi arrived in September or October [2000] and asked to be given flight training. Atta, the instructor said, was particularly difficult. "He would not look at your face," the instructor said. "When you talked to him, he could not look you in the eye. His attention span was very short." The instructor said neither man was able to pass a Stage I rating test to track and intercept. After offering some harsh words, the instructor said, the two moved on "We didn't kick them out, but they didn't live up to our standards." (Washington Post, September 19, 2001) Could these substandard pilots execute the difficult feat of hitting the towers at high speed, flying by the seat of their pants? So far we have heard little of Hani Hanjour, who is accused by the FBI of piloting American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. According to press reports, Hanjour had visited Bowie's Maryland Freeway Airport just north of Washington DC three times since mid-August 2001 as he attempted to get permission to use one of the airport's planes. But Hani Hanjour was simply too clumsy, too inept. The question is crucial, because the plane that hit the Pentagon performed a stunning maneuver of which many a seasoned pilot would have been proud. But instead, Hani Hanjour turns out to have been a pathetic misfit. The following account is from The Prince George's Journal (Maryland), September 18, 2001: Marcel Bernard, the chief flight instructor at the airport, said the man named Hani Hanjour went into the air in a Cessna 172 with instructors from the airport three times beginning the second week of August and had hoped to rent a plane from the airport .... Hanjour had his pilot's license, said Bernard, but needed what is called a 'check-out' done by the airport to gauge a pilot's skills before he or she is able to rent a plane at Freeway Airport, which runs parallel to Route 50. Instructors at the school told Bernard that after three times in the air, they still felt he was unable to fly solo and that Hanjour seemed disappointed ... Published reports said Hanjour obtained his pilot's license in April of 1999, but it expired six months later because he did not complete a required medical exam. He also was trained for a few months at a private school in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1996, but did not finish the course because instructors felt he was not capable. Hanjour had 600 hours listed in his log book, Bernard said, and instructors were surprised he was not able to fly better with the amount of experience. Pete Goulatta, a special agent and spokesman for the FBI, said it is an on- going criminal investigation and he could not comment. Hani Hanjour is supposed to have executed a breathtaking 270 degree turn while descending from an altitude of 7,000 feet to below treetop level to hit the Pentagon, probably the most difficult maneuver performed by any of the kamikaze planes on 9/11. But he was not considered capable of flying solo in a Cessna! And what of Jarrah, the accused suicide pilot of United Airlines flight 93, the plane that was destroyed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania? He was not much better as a pilot. Arne Kruithof later explained that, when Jarrah arrived to start taking lessons, "We had to do more to get him ready than others. His flight skills seemed to be a little bit out there." Jarrah did succeed in getting a pilot's license, but he was never able to qualify as a commercial pilot, despite 200 hours of flight time logged. According to Kruithof, "he was a guy who needed some more." Jarrah's roommate was Thorsten Biermann of Germany. Although Biermann got along fairly well with Jarrah, he soon refused to fly anywhere if Jarrah was to be at the controls. This was because of Jarrah's foolhardy refusal to refuel before a flight in bad weather. When they landed, the tank was almost empty. Biermann: "I decided I did not want to fly with him any more. Everyone I knew who flew with him felt the same way." (Longman 91-92) AL QAEDA STALWARTS: DUMB AND DUMBER Alleged hijackers Nawaq al-Hazmi (Flight 77), Khalid AI-Midhar (Flight 77) and Hani Hanjour (Flight 77) all spent time in San Diego, where they sought flight training. According to published accounts, "Two of the men, Alhazmi and Al-Midhar, also briefly attended a local fight school, but they were dropped because of their limited English and incompetence at the controls [In the spring of 2001], two of the men visited Montgomery Field, a community airport ...and sought flying lessons. They spoke to instructors at Sorbi's Flying Club, which allowed them to take only two lessons before advising them to quit. 'Their English was horrible, and their mechanical skills were even worse,' said an instructor, who asked not to be named. 'It was like they had hardly even ever driven a car ... They seemed like nice guys,' the instructor said, 'but in the plane, they were dumb and dumber."' (Washington Post, September 24, 2001) Rick Garza, Sorbi's chief flight instructor, told Al Midhar and AI Hamzi after two flights: "This is not going to work." Garza later said that the two "had no idea what they were doing." (Washington Post, September 30,2001) They were always prattling about flying big jets, but when Garza asked one of them to draw a picture of a plane, "He drew the wings on backwards." (Chicago Tribune, September 30, 2001) "It was clear they weren't going to make it as pilots." (London Observer, October 7, 2001) These two would-be pilots, although they were allegedly the most experienced and hardened terrorists in the entire group of 19, were subject to panic attacks in the cockpit, at which time they would begin praying out loud. The official version does not assert that they acted as pilots, but the basis of this part of the official story is wrapped in mystery, like the rest of it. In addition to the supposed four suicide pilots, the story told by the 9/11 commission also includes some 15 "muscle hijackers." These were the members of the suicide teams whose task it would be to break into the cockpits, overpower the pilot, copilot and other flight personnel using box cutters and knives, keep the passengers under control, and guard the door to the cockpit once it had been seized. According to the 9/11 commission, "the so-called muscle hijackers actually were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5'5" and 5'7" in height and slender in build." (Staff Statement No. 16, 8) These, then, were the ferocious fighters that were expected to quell the resistance of US airline pilots, most of whom come from military aviation, and many of whom are war veterans, to say nothing of flight attendants, stewardesses, and the general public. What was the caliber and actual effectiveness of these figures? US propaganda has a vested interested in building them up as capable, even formidable individuals who had the ability to carry out the spectacular terrorism of 9/11. But sometimes the pathos of the patsies comes through. In Staff Report 16, "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," we read that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM, touted by the Bush regime as the "mastermind of the entire plot) "and Binalshibh have both stated that, in early 2000, Shehhi, Atta, and Binalshibh met with KSM in Karachi for training that included learning about life in the United States and how to read airline schedules." If they were still unable~ to read airline schedules on their own in the spring of 2000, these strange figures had a long way to go before 9/11. Be that as it may, the eyewitness accounts collected just after 9/11 seem to converge on the diagnosis that they were bunglers. According to one wag, they were the sort of people who could probably not obtain a drivers license in any state except New Jersey. Accounts inspired by the official story generally try to portray the feats of Atta, Shehhi, and Hanjour as relatively easy. But when it comes to United 93 over Shanksville, the tone suddenly changes. Now the official version has to explain why the passengers, assuming they had already succeeded in taking back the cockpit from Jarrah & Co., were not able to land the plane. One of the passengers on United 93 was an experienced pilot of light planes who had also trained on a Falcon corporate jet simulator. Could this passenger have landed United 93? In his book on United 93, Jere Longman of the New York Times quotes Hank Krakowski, a 737 captain who was responsible for United's flight operations on 9/11. According to Krakowski, "If the guy was a professional pilot flying all the time, it would have been possible. If he was an occasional pilot, it would have been a pretty big challenge. You can get a boat into a dock, but it's a lot harder getting a cruise ship into a dock. The problem is the mass of the machine, the energy, the feel. It doesn't have the response of a smaller plane. It has much more kinetic energy. It takes training to get a feel for that." (Longman 188) These are of course the same problems that would have been faced by the hijackers, not in landing, but in hitting their targets. The prognosis for success in their case, without some form of outside help, could hardly have been much better. During the summer of 2001, US intelligence agencies received numerous warnings from their foreign counterparts about the danger of coming terror attacks. MI-6 says that it alerted the US in 1999 to al Qaeda plans to use commercial aircraft as "flying bombs." In early August 2001, this warning was reiterated, this time specifying multiple airliner hijackings. Around the same time, the Cayman Islands told the us that al Qaeda was "organizing a major terrorist act against the US via an airline or airliner." In late July, Egypt informed the US that 20 al Qaeda agents were in the US, and that four had received flight training. In June, Germany warned the US that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to use commercial airliners as weapons to attack "American and Israeli symbols which stand out." On September 7, Italy sent word of an attack on the US and UK using airplanes as weapons; the source was Father Jean Marie Benjamin, a leading expert on the Moslem world. In the late summer, Jordan sent the contents of an intercepted message, according to which a major attack, code named the Big Wedding, was imminent. It was to take place inside the US and employ aircraft, says this report. In August, Russia alerted the US to an attack by about 25 terrorists, including suicide pilots, who would attack "important buildings like the Pentagon." In July, Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed, Muttawikil discovered that Bin Laden is planning a "huge attack" inside the US. He sent an emissary to convey this information to the US consul general, and also to a US intelligence officer. In late July 2001, the Argentine Jewish community obtained news of a coming big attack against the US, Argentina, or France. This was passed on to the US. On July 16, MI-6 report to Tony Blair that al Qaeda is "in the final stages" of a serious terrorist attack against the west. This was based on a reading of information from GCHQ, the British NSA, and also from the CIA and the NSA, which the British share according to a long- standing agreement with the US. In June, three Pakistani men in the Cayman Islands were overheard discussing a hijacking attack on New York. US intelligence was alerted. At the end of August, Egyptian President Mubarak personally warned US officials that Bin Laden was about to attack an American target inside the US. France sent a generic warning in late August that something big was up. India adds its own warning in mid-July. Israel, in early August, said that 50 to 200 al Qaeda terrorists are inside the US and intended "a major assault" aimed at "a large scale target." On August 23, Israel sent a list of 23 terrorists which contained the names of four later fingered by the FBI, including Atta. Also in August, Morocco warned of large scale operations in New York in the autumn, possibly targeting the World Trade Center. Also in August, a Gulf prince told CIA veteran Robert Baer that a "spectacular terrorist operation" would take place shortly. Baer tells a senior CIA official and the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center. ( www.cooperativeresearch.org ) Naturally, every government that could do so wanted to look good after 9/11, and putting out a report that they had tipped off the US in advance did wonders for the amour-propre of MI-6, Mossad, SDECE, SISMI, FSB, and the other agencies involved. So we have to take these reports cum grano salis. US officials deny that some of these reports were ever delivered, even the one than came from Mubarak personally, and that might even be true in some cases. But if even a quarter of these after the fact claims are true, that is a damning revelation for CIA, FBI, NSA, and the rest of the bloated, $40 billion per year intelligence community. And of course the 9/11 commission had no interest in foreign intelligence warnings; their report has no mention whatever of the intelligence superpowers MI-6 and Mossad, two of the most formidable and dangerous organizations on the planet, which any serious report would carefully scrutinize. The reader should not be confused by the fact that many of their reports refer to al Qaeda and/or Bin Laden. This organization exists after a fashion, but it exists in the specific form of a false flag operation: the sign above the door and the badges of the members, so to speak, say al Qaeda, and the ranting motivational speaker more often than not Bin Laden. It is therefore perfectly possible for a witting mole, sitting in the CIA or FBI offices, to be edified by reading incoming reports about what his own patsies have been observed preparing. And we must remember that one of the specialties of patsies is getting noticed. In the spring of 2002, the Bush regime went through an orgy of breast-beating about how impossible it would have been to stave off the 9/11 attacks. "I don't think that 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," said the scowling Miss Rice. (May 16, 2002) Bush chimed in that "based on everything I've seen, I do not believe that anyone could have prevented the horror of September the 11th." (June 7, 2002) This is self-serving rhetoric. However, in the summer of 2001, the Italian government received and acted on a similar series of warnings. At the time of the July 2001 world economic summit of the G-8 countries, the Italians cordoned off large areas of downtown Genoa which were declared off limits to unauthorized persons. Fighter jet patrolled overhead, while brigades of riot police dominated the streets. One can be sure that all leaves were cancelled for Italian police and troops in the area, and that no maneuvers were scheduled during those days to compete for manpower and attention with the anti- terror deployment. The entire air space above Italy's busiest port city was closed. Bush for his part stayed overnight on a US warship offshore. Some approximation of these measures might have materially altered the outcome on September 11. WHAT DID THE HIJACKERS THINK THEY WERE DOING'? Patsies are led by deception, and deception is the art of making a person do something for one reason when the real reason is something quite different. If we are willing to make the rather large assumption that the 19 hijackers indeed boarded the four lost planes, of which there is no proof: they must have thought they were doing something. That is, they must have had some subjective intent of some kind. Did they believe that they were on a suicide mission? We are in the realm of pure speculation here, but there is no real proof that they thought they were on a suicide mission. Quite to the contrary: it is hard to imagine Atta, the assiduous drinker of vodka and frequenter of strip clubs, as a suicide operative, and the same goes for his confreres. Perhaps they thought this was going to be a traditional hijacking of some kind, from which they could hope to escape alive. In any case, they took care to leave an abundant trail of evidence designed specifically to be found. This applies to the contents of the rented car found at the airport in Maine, and of the luggage supposedly left behind by Atta when his flight took off. Here the inventory includes an alleged last will and testament by Atta, which betrays the amateurish attempt of some half-baked area specialist to sound Islamic, as Robert Fisk and others have shown. We will not attempt to explain the miraculous discovery of Atta's passport, which was alleged to have been found near the World Trade Center after the fact. In order to fulfill their function, patsies must be directed to leave a trail of clues and evidence which will tie them and the larger target group they supposedly represent to the heinous actions they will be accused of having committed. But in the 9/11 case, none of this material rises to the level of being convincing. We are left with the enigmatic question: what did the hijackers, assuming that there were any, think they were doing on 9/11? WERE THE ACCUSED HIJACKERS PHYSICALLY CAPABLE OF PILOTING THE PLANES? The best opinions on whether or not the official story of hijackers piloting the airliners in to buildings might come from experienced commercial airline pilots. There are few available opinions on this matter, as is understandable. The hegemony of the 9/11 myth has been very great among the population in general, and airline pilots as a group have special problems. Most of them are retired military officers, and they often move in circles where people with military backgrounds are common. If they are employed, they have to worry about their jobs. If they are retired, they may see no reason to get involved in a controversy that promises no gain, but only needless trouble for them personally. Nevertheless, there is enough evidence to substantiate the doubt that the four inept persons named in the official version would have been able to operate the aircraft in the way the observed phenomena indicate. Flying a large modern commercial airliner is not especially demanding as long as the plane is taking advantage of its built-in guidance systems and computerized automatic pilot, which depend in turn on radio beacons, navigation aids, Global Positioning Satellites, and the like. As long as the plane sticks to its pre-arranged flight path, the pilot acts more like a superintendent than a driver. But the enterprise attributed to the hijackers changes all this. The hijackers are supposed to have abruptly wrenched the airliners out of the influence of all navigation aids, beacons, and positioning systems, and flown them by the seat of their pants to hit three demanding targets under conditions of conflict and stress inside the planes, and with the constant fear that fighter aircraft would soon pull up alongside, demanding to be followed. The issue is the transition from instrument flight techniques to visual flight rules and techniques in a context where all the usual instrument aids would have been in operative. Apart from the operation of the controls, there is also the question of how the hijackers could have navigated. On a fine clear day like September 11, 2001, it might be possible to follow certain natural features from one point to another, using landmarks for additional guidance. For the planes coming from Boston, one obvious expedient would have been to fly west, find the Hudson River, and then turn left towards New York City. But this is not what is shown on the maps offered by newspapers at the time. Instead of orienting towards natural features and landmarks, the planes fly strange detours, ignoring rivers and related navigation reference points. Real hijackers would have been concerned with reaching their targets as fast as possible, before they were overtaken by air defenses. But the 9/11 aircraft think nothing of deviating 50 miles in the wrong direction. All of this makes the official story implausible. The 9/11 commission provided its own maps of the flight routes flown by the hijacked planes. Here there are pervasive anomalies that should have attracted the commission's curiosity, but did not. The hijackers did not choose the most direct routes to their targets, but flew long and dangerous detours. Real hijackers would have known that the greatest danger to their project was interception of their hijacked planes by us military aircraft. They could not have tolerated even the most minimal deviations from the direct path towards their goal. Another obvious course for American 11 would have been southwest across Rhode Island and Connecticut to the shore of Long Island Sound and thence down the East River to hit the North Tower. This would also have simplified navigation because of the constant orientation provided by the Connecticut coast, the Sound, and the north shore of Long Island. Instead, when it left its prescribed course, American 11 turned northwest, and came close to clipping the southwest corner of Vermont. It went well north of Albany before carrying out a 270 degree turn to then head approximately south, more or less following the Hudson River to New York City. For United 175, the same course over Rhode Island, Connecticut, along Long Island Sound, and down the East River would have been the most direct and the most practical for amateur pilots of light planes. But according to the 9/11 commission's own map, this plane supposedly flew across southern New York state, across northern New Jersey, and entered Pennsylvania before finally turning back onto a northeasterly course towards the WTC south tower. The case of American 77 is even more difficult to discuss, because of the numerous anomalies it offers. But, according to the 9/11 commission's own map, this plane is alleged to have flown all the way out to the meeting point of southern Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia before allegedly turning back towards Washington DC. The 9/11 commission map suppresses a five-minute jug- handle detour by this flight over the West Virginia panhandle along the way, which had attracted much curiosity and suspicion when it appeared in USA Today and other papers. Finally, United 93, which took off last, went all the way across Pennsylvania, entered northern Ohio, and was west of Cleveland when it finally turned back towards the east. Real hijackers could never have indulged in these interminable detours. For the success of their crimes, time was of the essence, and they would have had to choose far more direct routes in the case of each and everyone of the 9/11 aircraft. This pattern raises the level of suspicion about the coherence of the official version, and suggests that reality was not what the 9/11 commission and its predecessors claimed it was. In a CNN interview on September 15, 2001, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak commented about the 9/1l events. His testimony is of interest because he spent his military career as a fighter pilot in the Egyptian Air Force. Mubarak was also one of the world leaders who had tried to warn the US government about what was coming in the summer of 2001. Mubarak said first of all that he found the US government's official version, which was then taking shape, technically implausible. Mubarak: "Not any intelligence in the world could have the capability in the world to say they are going to use commercial planes with passengers on board to crash the towers, to crash the Pentagon, those who did that should have flown in the area for a long time, for example. The Pentagon is not very high, a pilot could come straight to the Pentagon like this to hit, he should have flown a lot in this area to know the obstacles which could meet him when he is flying very low with a big commercial plane to hit the Pentagon in a special place. Somebody has studied this very well, someone has flown in this area very much." Sensing a challenge to the orthodoxy of the official version, the CNN reporter countered: "Are you suggesting it was an inside operation? I may ask, who do you think was behind this?" Mubarak: "Frankly speaking, I don't want to jump to conclusions...something like this done in the United States is not an easy thing for pilots who had been training in Florida, so many pilots go and train just to fly and have a license, that means you are capable to do such terrorist action? I am speaking as a former pilot, I know that very well, I flew very heavy planes, I flew fighters, I know that very well, this is not an easy thing, so I think we should not jump to conclusions for now." (Meyssan 2002 26) One senses that Mubarak is restraining his skepticism for diplomatic reasons; he does not believe the official story, and he has good reasons for not doing so. ( www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/557/intrvw.htm ) NIKKI LAUDA: ACTUAL FLIGHT EXPERIENCE ON BOEINGS WAS REQUIRED On the day after 9/11, two experienced German airline pilots, both veterans of many hours at the controls of Boeing 757s and 767s, agreed in the course of a September 12 prime time television broadcast that neither a real professional flight simulator and even less flight simulation software on a PC could ever suffice to impart the skills demonstrated by the supposed 9/11 suicide pilots. They were asked by host Guenter Jauch whether the hijackers could have flown the planes. Captain Joerg Kujak's evaluation: "No. It's not that simple," whatever many laymen might think. "That wouldn't work. An amateur is not capable of steering a large commercial airliner anywhere with accuracy, neither with the automatic pilot, nor, with his hands on the controls. He would need training for that, and that does not necessarily have to last three years, the way normal pilot training in a flight school goes, but it has to go on for a certain amount of time. He needs basic training in the specific type of plane or on a jet in general, and through that he has to learn how to fly manually. With a PC you don't get the same feeling, for example for the trim tabs, for the steering yoke, for the change of situations. If you put your foot on the gas, then a jet rears up, because it has its engines under the wings, and that would be too much for an amateur, that can't be done without training." Nikki Lauda, a legendary Formula One race driver, was a pilot and the founder of his own airline. He was asked by Jauch: "Is it easy to learn, we've seen that a video was found in a car near the Boston airport, and people think that the car belonged to a kidnapper, who had used it to bone up in advance on what the inside of a cockpit looks like. Is it so simple, for example, to learn that with the help of a computer simulator?" Laud a judged that "these gentlemen were properly trained to fly a plane like that." In particular, he stressed that "you have to know exactly what the turning radius of a plane like that is, if I am trying to hit the World Trade Center. That means, these had to be fully trained 767 or 757 pilots, because otherwise they would have missed. It certainly could not be the case that some half-trained pilot tries it somehow, because then he will not hit it. That's not so easy, coming out of a curve ... If he's coming out of a curve, then he has to know precisely the turning radius that derives from the speed of the plane in order to be able to calculate it, so that he will hit right there." Jauch asked which was harder to hit, the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Lauda: "Well, what impressed me is the organization of this whole operation, since without good weather it would have not been possible at all, because then you can't see anything. These were visual flights, using VFR [visual flight rules] as we call them. And so the World Trade Center is relatively easy to find, because it is stands out so tall ... The Pentagon is another matter again, because it is a building that is relatively flat. That means, they had to be trained well enough that they had flown around in the air in the New York area, I would speculate, so they could see the scene from above of where the building is located and how you could best reach it." To hit a flat building like the Pentagon is "an even more difficult case" than the World Trade Center. Lauda: "That means, to fly downwards out of a curve, and still hit the building, in its core, I would have to be the best trained of all. I would speculate that a normal airline pilot would have a hard time with that, because you are simply not prepared for things like that. That means, they must have had some super-training to have been able to handle an airliner so precisely." Could this have been done with the best, most expensive professional flight simulator, asked Jauch. For Lauda, the flight simulator was only a prerequisite. "I don't think a simulator by itself would be enough to know all the New York landscapes, and to know exactly what angle to use to fly in there. I believe that these people had actually flown these airliners; they could have been pilots from some airline or the other, just to get this feeling for the plane -- in real flight, not on a simulator -- so they could then carry out this act of terror." (Wisnewski 38-40) Of course, not even the FBI has ever ascribed such thorough training to the accused suicide pilots; practice on a 757 or 767 was not available at Huffman Aviation. In the days after 9/11, a private group of US military and civilian pilots held a seminar to evaluate this crucial feature of the official story -could the hijackers have flown the planes with the requisite accuracy? After 72 hours of deliberation and discussion, they issued a press release summarizing their findings: "The so-called terrorist attack was in fact a superbly executed military operation carried out against the USA, requiring the utmost professional military skill in command, communications and control. It was flawless in timing, in the choice of selected aircraft to be used as guided missiles and in the coordinated delivery of those missiles to their pre-selected targets." The seminar report expressed grave doubt as to whether the alleged hijackers, supposedly trained on Cessna light aircraft, could have located a target dead-on 200 miles or more from their takeoff point. The participants also called into question the ability of the hijackers to operate within the intricacies of the instrument flight rules (IFR) during the interval between their takeover of the planes and the moment of impact. One of the organizers of the seminar, retired Colonel Donn Grandpre, said that it would be impossible for novices to have taken control of the four aircraft and orchestrated such a complicated operation, which obviously had as a prerequisite military precision of the highest order. The seminar concluded that it was likely that the hijackers were not the ones in control of the aircraft. One participant in the seminar was a US Air Force officer who flew over 100 sorties during the Vietnam war. This experienced combat pilot concluded that "Those birds either had a crack fighter pilot in the left seat, or they were being maneuvered by remote control." Another spokesman for the group was identified as Captain Kent Hill (USAF retired), who was reportedly a friend of Chic Burlingame, the pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Hill recalled that the US had already carried out multiple flights of an unmanned aircraft, similar in size to a Boeing 737, between Edwards Air Force base in California across the Pacific to South Australia. Hill said this plane had flown on a pre- programmed flight path under the supervision of a pilot in an outside station. Other expert witnesses at the inquiry were of the opinion that airliners could be controlled by electro-magnetic pulse or radio frequency instrumentation from command and control platforms based either in the air or at ground level. Captain Hill maintained that the four airliners must have been choreographed by an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). This system can engage several aircraft simultaneously by knocking out their on-board flight controls. According to press accounts, the pilot seminar also pointed to the inherent problems of the official account. In this, they drew on their own experience and the likely reactions of pilots like themselves. "All members of the inquiry team agreed that even if guns were held to their heads, none of them would fly a plane into a building. Their reaction would be to ditch the plane into a river or a field, thereby safeguarding the lives of those on the ground. A further question raised by the inquiry was why none of the pilots concerned had alerted ground control. It stated that all pilots are trained to punch a four-digit code into the flight control's transponder to warn ground control crews of a hijacking -- but this did not happen." The veteran pilots were also surprised by what had not happened. They noted that the pilots and crews of the hijacked aircraft had not taken any evasive action to resist the supposed hijackers. They had not attempted any sudden changes in flight path or nose-dive procedures -- which led them to believe that they had no control over their aircraft. A reporter from the Portugal News, the largest English language publication in that country, sought an independent evaluation of these findings from Captain Colin McHattie of Algarve, Portugal. McHattie, a pilot with 20 years' experience, was then currently working for Cathay Pacific. He agreed with the independent commission's findings. He added that, while it is possible to fly a plane from the ground, the installation of the necessary equipment is a time-consuming process, and needs extensive planning. The pilots' seminar sent a copy of their findings to the White House, but there was no response. (Portugal News, August 3, 2002) The insuperable problems posed by the notion that the four misfits and patsies of the official version actually flew the planes can, however, be satisfactorily explained with the help of a hypothesis involving the application of a technology which is known to exist. This is Global Hawk, a guidance system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the Pentagon. Global Hawk is a robot plane, the modern form of remote control, which has been a familiar concept for decades -- at the very least since the 1950s, when Nike missiles and Skysweeper radar-controlled antiaircraft guns used remote control drones for testing. Global Hawk is a somewhat more advanced and sophisticated version of the guidance system of the Predator drone, which has been used to attack supposed targets (and a wedding party) in Afghanistan. Predators were available during the later years of the Clinton administration. Global Hawk became widely know as a result of its first transpacific flight, which took place in April 2001. The new weapons system was touted by the media in glowing terms: The Global Hawk, a jet-powered aircraft with a wingspan equivalent to a Boeing 737, flew from Edwards Air Force Base in California and landed late on Monday at the Royal Australian Air Force base at Edinburgh, in South Australia. The 8600 mile (13840 km) flight, at an altitude of almost 12.5 miles (20 km), took 22 hours and set a world record for the furthest a robotic aircraft has flown between two points. The Global Hawk flies along a pre-programmed flight path, but a pilot monitors the aircraft during its flight via a sensor suite which provides infra-red and visual images. According to Rod Smith, who managed the Australian end of the Global Hawk project, "The aircraft essentially flies itself, right from take-off, right through to landing, and even taxiing off the runway." The robot plane version of Global Hawk reportedly could fly non-stop for 36 hours. "Emerging systems such as the Global Hawk offer Australia great potential for surveillance, reconnaissance and ultimately the delivery of combat power," crowed Brendan Nelson, parliamentary secretary to the Australian defence minister. (ITN Entertainment April 24, 2001) The existence of this technology in a fully operational form raises the possibility that it might have been installed in commercial airliners, and further that it may have been such airliners under the control of a Global Hawk equivalent which crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon. This entire matter is covered with secrecy, but it is clear that it is technically quite feasible that commercial jets were equipped with remote control systems capable of piloting them to landings (or to crashes) under the pretext of an anti-terrorism measure. The rationale would have been that, if terrorist had taken over the plane, authorities on the ground would have been able to frustrate the terrorists by seizing control of the hijacked airliners and flying them to safety. However, for such a system to be effective, it would have to include the ability of ground controllers to deny the personnel occupying the cockpit -the terrorists and the pilots under their control-any ability to steer the plane. To be effective, Global Hawk would presuppose that activating it would simultaneously deactivate the cockpit controls, making them useless. Otherwise, the hijackers might find ways to override the commands to the servomechanisms, flight surfaces and avionics being issued through Global Hawk from the ground. Total control of the plane, in other words, would have to be on the ground. The advantages of such a system against classical hijack scenarios are clear. If the hijackers tell the pilot, "Fly to Cuba," and threaten to kill him if he does not do so, the plane can be landed in Miami no matter what the hijackers do or do not do, all thanks to Global Hawk. But what happens if the Global Hawk ground control center falls into the hands of a group of moles bent on insurrection and subversion, and determined to use aircraft as missiles in support of their attempt to re-order world affairs along the lines of the clash of civilizations doctrine? Here we can see that Global Hawk has an enormous potential for abuse. There is every reason to believe that the events of 9/1l were rendered possible, not by superhuman piloting skills on the part of the patsies, but by competent professionals using Global Hawk and operating out of a ground control center or an airborne command center such as AWACS. There would be nothing new about any of this. Modern aircraft are equipped with a "Flight Control System" or FCS, which is integrated with sophisticated avionics capable of automatically landing the aircraft in zero visibility conditions. Even the takeoff and landing of large jets in largely automated, and the role of the pilots is more and more that of standing by for the unlikely eventuality that the guidance systems fail. To produce events of the type seen on 9/11, it would only be necessary for the computer access codes of an aircraft equipped with Global Hawk to fall into the hands of moles and professional experts with treasonous designs. As aeronautical engineer Joe Vialls has pointed out, the main prerequisite for the use of Global Hawk in the manner suggested would be the installation of a back door on a plane's computer system so as to allow an interface with the Global Hawk command post located elsewhere. Vialls says that DARPA has indeed provided these back doors on certain aircraft. These aircraft came to be equipped with "a primary control channel for use in taking over the flight control system and flying the aircraft back to an airfield of choice, and secondly a covert audio channel for monitoring flight deck conversations. Once the primary channel were activated, all aircraft functions came under direct ground control, permanently removing the hijackers and pilots from the control loop." Vialls is a former member of the Society of Licenced Aeronautical Engineers and Technologists, London. The Global Hawk hypothesis also helps explain one of the singularities of 9/11, which is that none of the transponders in the hijacked planes ever broadcast the coded message telling ground controllers that the planes had been hijacked. The transponder is a combined radio transmitter and radio receiver which sends out signals announcing each flight's airline name and flight number, and thus indicating the plane's position. This is a supplement to radar, and becomes more important than radar for flight controllers in busy aviation corridors. Vialls' hypothesis is that Global Hawk operated by taking over the transponder channel and monopolizing it for the purpose of controlling the plane. So no airliners signaled that they had been hijacked, because the transponder channel which could have sent this code had been usurped for purposes of remote control. Vialls regards the lack of such coded hijack warning signals as "the first hard proof that the target aircraft had been hijacked electronically from the ground, rather than by motley crews of Arabs toting penknives." According to Vialls, the remote control "listening device on the flight deck utilizes the cockpit microphones that normally feed the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), one of two black boxes armored to withstand heavy impact and thereby later give investigators significant clues to why the aircraft crashed." But once the remote control protocol has been activated, the "CVRs are bypassed and voice transmissions are no longer recorded on the 30-minute endless loop recording tape." In this case, after 30 minutes the CVR, which is designed to record the last minutes before a crash, will end up totally blank. This would explain the fact that the CVRs from the Pentagon and Pittsburgh aircraft were both claimed by the FBI to have been blank. For Vialls, this would be an additional indication that remote control had been employed. It is not known if other US commercial aircraft have been equipped with back doors and interfaces permitting remote control by means of a technology cognate with Global Hawk. Vialls tells the story of a European carrier, possibly Lufthansa, which removed the flight control computers which had come with its Boeings as original equipment, and replaced them with computers impervious to Global Hawk, but this has yet to be confirmed. He also speculates that up to 600 US aircraft may still be vulnerable to Global Hawk. ( www.Qratyeka.org/wtc/wot/home-run.htm ) After 9/11, a special aviation radio was found in a safe in the Millennium Hilton Hotel near the World Trade Center. The radio was a transceiver of the type used by pilots to communicate air- to-air and air-to-ground. The FBI detained Abdallah Higazy, the son of an Egyptian diplomat, who was staying in the room in which the safe with the transceiver was located. Higazy was released on January 17, 2002 when it was established that the transceiver belonged to another hotel guest who was a private pilot. Since this pilot was neither Egyptian nor Arab, he was automatically exempted from suspicion -another example of the racist incompetence of the FBI. This transceiver might have been a radio beacon or a positioning or homing device of some kind. During the 1999 bombing of Serbia, the government there had accused NATO agents of placing radio beacons at key points in Belgrade to aid in the bombing campaign. (Associated Press, January 17, 2002) THE SCENARIO FOR 9/11 ON FOX ENTERTAINMENT As so frequently happens in the world of US intelligence, the concept for this operation was popularized before the fact in a scenario film. This drama was entitled "The Lone Gunmen," and was broadcast by the Fox Entertainment Network on March 4, 2001. The writers were John Shiban, Vince Gilligan, and Frank Spotnitz, the director Rob Bowman. The filming was done in New York City and Vancouver , Canada between March 20 and April 7, 2000. Among the stars were Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund, Bruce Harwood, and Zuleikha Robinson. This was the pilot for a series of thirteen episodes, after which Fox cancelled the series. In this film, the good guys board Atlantic National Flight 265 for its 6:50 PM takeoff from gate 34 at Boston's Logan Airport -- just like Atta and Shehhi in the official story. The good guys are fighting a governmental power named Overlord which they believe is going to try to destroy Atlantic National 265. The good guys think they are dealing with a bomb, so they bring along some mini hydrocarbon sniffers to locate the explosives. But Overlord is not using bombs this time: the airplane is seized by a mysterious remote control system against which the pilot is helpless; the controls do not respond. The plane seems headed towards New York City, and soon the twin towers of the World Trade Center loom ahead. Realizing what is happening, the good guys use their laptop to attempt to hack into the Overlord computer. At first it seems like it will take seven to ten days to defeat Overlord's defenses, but the good guys access the remote control system just in time with the help of the new Octium IV computer chip. They take back control of the airplane, which misses the World Trade Center towers by a hair. ( http:/www.tvtome.com/servlets/EpisodeGuideSummary/showid-38/ .) DOPPELGANGER, PHANTOMS, AND APPARITIONS In 1995, Ziad Jarrah rented an apartment in Brooklyn, and reportedly worked as a photographer. The signed and dated lease is convincing proof of the presence of this Ziad Jarrah in New York. But there was another Ziad Jarrah, who was 20 years old and living with his family in Beirut, Lebanon. This Jarrah left home in 1996, when he went to study in Germany, where he found an ethnic Turkish fiancee to whom he was engaged to be married; their engagement was cut short by 9/11. One Ziad Jarrah was questioned on January 30, 2001 at Dubai Airport at the request of the CIA on suspicion of involvement in terror activities. The other Ziad Jarrah, a student at Kruithofs Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, was visiting his family and sick father in Beirut. Jarrah was among the more convivial of the accused terrorists, and would go for beer~; with KruithoL It would appear that the fake (Brooklyn) Jarrah obtained a pilot's license in Hamburg before the real (Beirut) Jarrah got his in Florida. Jarrah clearly had a double -- or Doppelganger, from the German -- who resembled him to some extent. The presence of doubles is an infallible signal for the presence of an intelligence agency. ( www.cooperativeresearch.org/essay.jsp?article=essayjarrah ) During the month of August 2001, the San Diego trio of Al-Hamzi, Al Midhar and Hanjour went traveling. One or two of them were at various times reported as sighted in Falls Church, Virginia getting illegal drivers licenses. They were in Las Vegas, and then in Baltimore, followed by ten days in New Jersey. Sightings were then reported in southern Maryland. However, their neighbors at the Parkwood Apartments in San Diego said that Al Hazmi, Al Midhar, and Hanjour had all stayed put in San Diego until about September 1, or perhaps as late as September 8. The use of doubles is standard intelligence practice in synthetic terrorism. If there is something the terrorist controllers need a patsy to do, but which the patsy is unwilling or incapable of accomplishing, then a double will step in to see that the necessary action is indeed carried out. At times in 1963 there were two or perhaps even three Lee Harvey Oswalds. In the spring of 2002, it was announced that a certain Khalid Sheikh Mohamed had been the "mastermind" of 9-11. When this same KSM was allegedly captured by the US, this event was hailed by Porter Goss as an event equal in world-historical importance to the liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 1944. From the very beginning, the overblown KSM story has been a magnet for world skepticism. When the US media showed a video tape of what was supposed to be the capture of KSM, Geraldo Rivera reported that "foreign journalists looking at it laughed and said this is baloney." (Fox News, Hannity and Colmes, March 10,2002) Gerhard Wisnewski has shown that the account of KSM presented by Nick Fielding and Yosri Fouda in their study Masterminds of Terror -- billed as the last word on KSM -- lacks all probative elements. (Wisnewski 203 ff) The US government has never produced KSM for a trial, so everything that is alleged about him is pure hearsay, and thus to be discounted. One of the glaring incongruities of the 9/11 commission report is the degree to which unsubstantiated allegations about al Qaeda operations are regarded as proven simply because they allegedly came from KSM, who ranks as one of the star witnesses of the final report. There is also the possibility that Nawaf AI Hazmi and Salem Al Hazmi are still alive. According to press accounts, accused hijackers Salem Al Hazmi was reported alive and well and working at a petrochemical plant in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia after 9/11. (Guardian, September 21, 2001) Of the others on the FBI's list, a Waleed al-Shehri turned out to be alive in Casablanca, Morocco, working as a pilot with Saudi Arabian Airlines. An Abdulaziz al-Omari was also reported alive, and complaining that he had lost his passport in Denver. A Saeed al-Ghamdi was also alive and working as a pilot in Saudi Arabia. Khalid al-Midhar was also reported alive. (Marr 17-18) Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal noted that "it was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened" after his meeting with Bush on September 20, 2001. The FBI, contemptuous as always of both the truth and world public opinion, has stubbornly refused to revise the list of accused hijackers. BEHIND THE AIR DEFENSE DEBACLE: 9/11 MANEUVERS On 9/11, US air defense collapsed. Before and after 9/11, US air defense functioned more or less normally. What happened on 9/11 to create this paralysis, and why was that date such an anomaly in comparison to the previous and subsequent operation of the Federal Aeronautics Administration/North American Aerospace Defense Command tandem? The heart of the coverup of these events performed by the 9/11 commission can be found in the section sub-headed "Clarifying the Record," on page 31. The 9/11 commission here concedes that "the defense of US airspace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with pre- existing training and protocols." (31) Why then were the well-established procedures suddenly abandoned, for that one day? On this crucial point the 9/11 commission's sense certainty empirical account is silent. What the 9/11 commission should have done, but did not do, was to prepare an honest timeline and then compare that timeline to the notification times as they would have been had the standard procedures been followed, rather that mysteriously thrown out the window. They would have found that American 11 (North Tower) at 8:20 AM stopped transmitting its IFF beacon and veered sharply off course. It was thus at 8:20 that F AA should have notified NORAD, and NORAD should have scrambled interceptors. Instead, the F AA waited until 8:38, and NORAD pilots at Otis AFB on Cape Cod were not informed of the emergency until 8:40, were not ordered to take off until 8:46, and did not actually get into the air until 8:52. By this time American 11 had already hit the World Trade Center, at 8:46. The pilots flew slowly and did not arrive over New York in time to protect the WTC South Tower, which was hit at 9:03. At this time the Otis jets were still 71 miles away. Similarly, the hijacking of United 175 was evident at 8:42, when the aircraft went off course and its transponder was turned off This time NORAD was told within a minute, by 8:43, but was unable to scramble any additional planes from bases in New Jersey, despite the fact that multiple hijackings were now evident. The 9/11 commission also found that on that day US air defense "was improvised by civilians who had never handled a hijacked aircraft that attempted to disappear, and by a military unprepared for the transformation of commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction. " (31) This is dishonest in the extreme. The long-established defenses against traditional, classical, or normal hijacking would also have been effective against the suicide hijacking that the 9/11 commission claimed was involved this time. One suspects that Philip Zelikow, the controversial Executive Director of the 9/11 commission, is attempting to provide cover for his former business partner Condoleezza Rice, who had made that absurd remark on precisely this subject ("I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." [May 16, 2002]) As Miss Rice knew or should have known, these scenarios had been prominent since the mid-1990s, since the Atlanta Olympics, since the threatened attack on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, since the 2001 Genoa summit, and were routinely one of the main themes of military exercises on various levels. Why was it necessary to improvise US air defense? Before and after 9/11, the air defense system was noted primarily for its stability and regularity in responding to any emergency. An emergency was defined objectively as a plane that went off course, a plane that did not respond to radio communication, a plane whose transponder went off: or a plane that refused to obey the instructions of an air traffic controller. If anyone of these conditions were fulfilled, an emergency had to be declared, and fighters had to be scrambled for intercept. Intercept did not mean shooting down any aircraft; intercept simply meant that fighters would join the aircraft in trouble, carry out visual observation, and signal the pilot to follow them to a landing place. Only if these attempts failed, would shooting down an aircraft become an option. And shooting down would have to be approved by the President. The great virtue of its system was its automatic functioning, which was recognized by all concerned. The criteria were all objective. If there were any doubt that an incident had to be treated as an emergency, it was automatically upgraded to an emergency. Nothing fell between the chairs as long as the guidelines were observed. Before and after 9/11, the FAA/NORAD link worked like a well-oiled machine. Sixty-seven cases of successful intercept were carried out by the FAA-NORAD combination between January 1 and September 10, 2001. STANDARD PROCEDURES: PAYNE STEWART, 1999 On October 26, 1999, a Lear jet carrying the famous golfer Payne Stewart veered off course and traveled for 1500 miles cross the United States before crashing into a field near Mina, South Dakota. Stewart had intended to fly to Love Field in Dallas for a business meeting. Stewart took off from Orlando, Florida at 9: 19 in the morning. His plane apparently lost oxygen pressure, leading to the deaths of the passengers. The plane proceeded on automatic pilot. The air traffic controllers stopped getting responses to their radio contacts with Stewart's plane. Following established procedures, FAA air traffic controllers called NORAD to inform them that something had gone wrong with a plane in the air. As soon as it was clear that Stewart's plane was in distress, the US Air Force scrambled two F-15s from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, which intercepted the plane and followed it to Missouri. According to published accounts, fighter jets intercepted Stewart's jet in either 15 or 21 minutes after his plane first lost contact. An F-16 fighter aircraft came up behind it and did a visual inspection. The pilot said the windows of Stewart's plane were frosted over. Two F-15s from Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida had been also sent to track the Lear jet, but they turned away when the Eglin planes got there first. After the Lear jet reached the Midwest, the two Eglin F-16s returned to base and four F-16s and a midair refueling tanker from the Tulsa National Guard followed it. Finally, four F-16s from Fargo, North Dakota moved in; they also helped to clear air space. According to the Air Force, additional F-16s were also scrambled from the Oklahoma Air National Guard unit in Tulsa, but were not used because the Fargo planes arrived first. Two additional F-16s on "strip alert" at Fargo, South Dakota, were armed, but never took off. This is a fair sample of the capabilities NORAD could normally deploy if it wanted to. The Pentagon said it never came close to shooting down Stewart's plane in order to prevent a crash into a heavily populated area. Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon said, "Once it was determined it was apparently going to crash in a lightly populated area, we didn't have to deal with other options, so we didn't." The FAA routed air traffic around the Lear jet and prevented other planes from flying underneath it, in case it should suddenly lose altitude. (CNN, ABC, October 26, 1999) Andrews Air Force Base is 12 miles from the White House, and on 9/11 was the home of a fighter squadron of F-16s as well as a fighter squadron of FA-18s. A change in the standard operating procedures was introduced on June 1, 2001; this inserted the Secretary of Defense into the bureaucratic chain. This marked a radical departure from procedures which had been in relatively successful operation for some 35 years. Now, the approval of the Secretary of Defense was required for the scrambling of aircraft. The authority to order the shooting down of an aircraft remained with the president. There may have been something more afoot here than simply adding another layer of bureaucracy. The authors of this change may have been seeking to introduce that element of disorder and uncertainty which might be necessary in order to allow the success of the upcoming operation. Who was responsible for this needless change? The 9/11 commission, as usual, is silent. THE 9/11 COMMISSION'S FUDGED TIMELlNES The 9/11 commission was also guilty of doctoring the time lines of the key events of the day. These timelines had been established and empirically validated by a number of researchers, including Mike Ruppert, Paul Thompson, and others. The timelines had been assembled by an exhaustive collation of media reports, and, apart from a detailed analysis which need not detain us here, they provided conclusive demonstration that NORAD had had ample time to scramble fighter jets to intercept America 77 (Pentagon) and United 93 (Shanksville). If the system had performed according to its own strict protocols, there would also have been a fighting chance to intercept American II (North Tower) and United 175 (South Tower). But the 9/11 commission, in a sweeping and breathtaking revision of everything that was known about the chronology of the day, writes: "As it turned out, the NEADS air defenders had nine minutes' notice on the first hijacked plane, no advance notice on the second, no advance notice on the third, and no advance notice on the fourth." (31) For the 9/11 commission, it would appear that the longer the crisis went on, the less the lead time available for NORAD. During the time between 8:55 and 9:41 the whole world knew ( or thought it knew) that American 77 was headed east towards Washington; when even the Washington news stations were warning that the capital was a likely target, NORAD was incapable of providing two planes over Washington DC to provide a minimal screen against the threatened decapitation of the federal government. The 9/11 commission hypocritically pretended that it was setting the record straight: "More than the actual events, inaccurate government accounts of those events made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond to two of the hijackings, raising questions about the adequacy of the response. Those accounts had the effect of deflecting questions about the military's capacity to obtain timely and accurate information from its own sources. In addition, they overstated the FAA's ability to provide the military with timely and useful information that morning." (34) Underlying this obfuscation is a strategic decision by the 9/11 commission to scapegoat the F AA, while attempting to lead investigators away from NORAD track, which in reality is likely the more important one. The 9/11 commission cites the testimony of NORAD officers that NEADS had learned from the FAA of the hijacking of United 93 at 9: 16. The 9/11 commission report claimed that there had been no such notification, since United 93 had not yet been hijacked at that time. In the last sessions of the 9/11 commission, we had the absurd spectacle of NORAD officers thanking the commissioners for helping them to straighten out their own erroneous and fragmentary in-house chronologies. Perhaps NORAD had decided early in the game to spread the chaff of disinformation as a means of foiling the radar of any future inquiries. If so, it appeared to have worked. One of the more obvious absurdities recounted by NORAD personnel during the 9/11 commission hearings was their fairy tale to the effect that NORAD radar was only able to look outwards from US coasts, and that their radar capability for tracking events in US airspace was zero. NORAD, they claimed, could look out, but could not look in. In the May 2003 hearings, we have this exchange: Mr. Ben-Veniste: And so on the day of September 11th, as you can see these dots -- I know it may be difficult to see -- NORAD was positioned in a perimeter around the United States, but nothing in the central region, nothing on the border with Canada? Gen. McKinley: That's correct, sir. This is a crude subterfuge. The NORAD generals would have us believe, for example, that a Russian submarine-launched cruise missile, once it had penetrated the US coastline in New Jersey, would have nothing more to fear from NORAD and could proceed on its leisurely way to Detroit or St. Louis, without any risk of further interference? Or, would they have us believe that a Russian Bear bomber, having once gotten into Minnesota, could fly on unmolested to destroy Chicago, because NORAD could no longer detect it? These nonsensical arguments refute themselves. NORAD was known to possess phased array warning system radars (PAWS) of various types which provided a comprehensive overview of US airspace and beyond. In May of 2001, one week before the execution of Timothy McVeigh, Bush issued an Executive Order making Cheney the leader of a new terrorism task: force. According to Bush, Cheney's job was to consist in the development of "a coordinated national effort so that we may do the very best possible job of protecting our people from catastrophic harm," Bush said. The threat of chemical biological or nuclear attack on the U.S. "while not immediate -- is very real," Bush added. "Should our efforts to reduce the threat to our country from weapons of mass destruction be less than fully successful, prudence dictates that the United States be fully prepared to deal effectively with the consequences of such a weapon being used here on our soil." The executive order gave Cheney authority over the anti-terror operations of 46 government agencies. Cheney said that his new task force would "figure out how we best respond to that kind of disaster of major proportions that in effect would be manmade or man-caused." Cheney said the threats under his purview would include "a hand-carried nuclear weapon, or biological or chemical agent." "The threat to the continental United States and our infrastructure is changing and evolving and we need to look at this whole area oftentimes referred to as homeland defense," said Cheney. Cheney also announced in an interview with CNN television that Bush was creating an office within the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate the government's response to any biological, chemical or nuclear attack. Cheney added that his task force would cooperate with FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh. Cheney's task force was supposed to report to the Congress and the National Security Council by October 1, 2001, according to press reports. (AP, CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg May 8, 2001) Many observers have concluded that Cheney's supposed terrorism task force was nothing but a boondoggle, and that this group never did anything; references to a "do-nothing: anti-terror task force abound. But perhaps Cheney's task force was a good deal more sinister. Since Cheney is a candidate for witting participation in the rogue network in a way that Bush himself can hardly be, we must wonder about how Cheney may have deliberately abused his authority over the anti- terrorism capabilities of those 46 agencies. Did his sweeping authority extend to military maneuvers as well? If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then we must conclude that Cheney must bear a good deal of the responsibility for the total disarray of the US anti-terror posture on the morning of 9/11. Indeed, Cheney's task force appears to be the universal common denominator for that pattern of chaos and confusion. COVERT USES OF MILITARY EXERCISES In addition to being a day of terrorism, 9/11 was also a day of military and civilian maneuvers. These may turn out to have been more closely connected than many people might think. Let us recall a recent coup d'etat of US history, that of March 30, 1981. On that day John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Reagan. Scott Hinckley, the elder brother of the would-be assassin, was a personal friend of Neil Bush, the son of the Vice President who would have assumed the presidency if Reagan had died that day. George H. W. Bush presided over a cabinet meeting that same day which declared it to be the official policy of the US government that Hinckley was a lone assassin who had acted by himself, without any accomplices. But the question of the close relations between the Bush and Hinckley families has never been cleared up. (Tarpley 1992) The aspect of the attempted assassination of Reagan which concerns us here is the fact that the shooting had occurred on the eve of two important maneuvers, one military and one civilian. As I described these events in my 1992 Unauthorized Biography of Bush the elder; Back at the White House, the principal cabinet officers had assembled in the situation room and had been running a crisis management committee during the afternoon. Haig says he was at first adamant that a conspiracy, if discovered, should be ruthlessly exposed: "It was essential that we get the facts and publish them quickly. Rumor must not be allowed to breed on this tragedy. Remembering the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, I said to Woody Goldberg, 'No matter what the truth is about this shooting, the American people must know it.'" But the truth has never been established. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger's memoir of that afternoon reminds us of two highly relevant facts. The first is that a "NORAD [North American Air Defense Command] exercise with a simulated incoming missile attack had been planned for the next day." Weinberger agreed with General David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that this exercise should be cancelled. Weinberger also recalls that the group in the Situation Room was informed by James Baker that "there had been a FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Administration] exercise scheduled for the next day on presidential succession, with the general title 'Nine Lives.' By an immediate consensus, it was agreed that exercise should also be cancelled." (Tarpley 1992, Chapter -XVII -- The Attempted Coup D'Etat of March 30, 1981) The FEMA exercise was much more than an uncanny coincidence -- that a presidential succession exercise was planned for the day after a real presidential succession was supposed to take place. It is very unlikely that Hinckley acted alone, and it is likely that whoever prodded him to act when he did could well have been aware of the upcoming presidential succession exercise. This suggests that we need to think about the ways in which military maneuvers which seem to be coincidental and routine events can prepare and promote other types of actions, including important terrorist attacks. Military exercises come in two varieties -- there are the field exercises or live-fly exercises, war games in which real tanks or real planes move around in the fields or the sky. There are also staff exercises, which mainly involve officers assigned to the headquarters, who move markers in a sandbox, map grid, or computer screen. The classic use of war games has been to prepare a sneak attack. The aggressor army announces that it is holding its summer maneuvers near the border of the target state. The deployment takes place under the cover of press releases announcing that these are merely maneuvers. When the troops are in position, they receive an order for a real attack. If field exercises can be used for fooling the adversary, then staff exercises are more useful for deceiving ones own side. In December 1975, in the wake of the US defeat in Vietnam, when the Pentagon was smarting from the reverse and looking for ways to redress the balance, there were certain circles in NATO who considered using the staff exercise HILEX 75 to set up a confrontation with the Warsaw Pact in Europe. Staff officers of countries who were not party to that plan were told not to be alarmed by the war preparations they saw; after all, those were only part of a staff exercise. Fortunately, due to the efforts of a network of alert citizens in a number of NATO countries, word got out about the really explosive potential of HILEX 75, and the confrontation option was abandoned. But these are at least two models of how maneuvers can be used for deception that we should keep in mind; there are more. Staff exercises or command exercises are perfect for a rogue network which is forced to conduct its operations using the same communications and computer systems used by other officers who are not necessarily party to the illegal operation, coup or provocation as it may be. A putschist officer may be working at a console next to another officer who is not in on the coup, and who might indeed oppose it if he knew about it. The putschist's behavior is suspicious: what the hell is he doing? The loyal officer looks over and asks the putschist about it. The putschist cites a staff maneuver for which he is preparing. The loyal officer concludes that the putschist's activities are part of an officially sanctioned drill, and his suspicions are allayed. The putschist may even explain that participation in the staff exercise requires a special security clearance which the loyal officer does not have. The conversation ends, and the putschist can go on with his treasonous work. Most civilians would assume that a military exercise or drill, be it a field or live fly exercise, or a staff drill, would tend to enhance the readiness of the military units taking part. This was the view expressed by 9/11 widow Mindy Kleinberg to 9/11 commission in March 2003, when she remarked that: "... on September 11, NEADS (of the North East Air Defense System of NORAD) was several days into a semiannual exercise known as 'Vigilant Guardian.' This meant that our North East Air Defense System was fully staffed. In short, key officers were manning the operation battle center, "fighter jets were cocked, loaded, and carrying extra gas on board."' (Testimony to 9/11 commission, March 31, 2003) But in reality the maneuvers may have introduced confusion and scattered available resources. The drills included false radar blips, military aircraft pretending to be hijacked, and the transfer of many NORAD fighters to northern Canada and Alaska. AMALGAM VIRGO: COVER STORY FOR 9/11 The military exercise called Amalgam Virgo bore a close relationship to the events of 9/11. Amalgam Virgo was a military drill that had to do with hijacked airliners, sometimes from inside the United States, and sometimes used as weapons. A cruise missile was included at least once. The best working hypothesis is that Amalgam Virgo was the cover story under which the 9/11 attacks advanced through the bureaucracy. Preparations for carrying out 9/11 were conducted under the cover of being preparations for Amalgam Virgo. Most of those who took part in Amalgam Virgo could hardly have been aware of this duplicity. One of the military officers who had been responsible for organizing Amalgam Virgo '01 was Colonel Alan Scott. Scott testified on May 23, 2003 at the 9/11 commission hearings: ... MR. ALAN SCOTT: Yes, sir. Specifically Operation Amalgam Virgo, which I was involved in before I retired, was a scenario using a Third World united -- not united -- uninhabited aerial vehicle launched off a rogue freighter in the Gulf of Mexico. MR. BEN-VENISTE: That was Operation Amalgam Virgo. In fact, this exercise -- in this exercise we used actual drones -- NQM-107 drones, which are about the size of a cruise missile, to exercise our fighters and our radars in a Gulf of Mexico scenario. ... MR. BEN-VENISTE: You are referring to Amalgam 01, are you not? MR. SCOTT: Yes, sir, Amalgam 01. MR. BEN-VENISTE: I am referring to Amalgam 02, which was in the planning stages prior to September 11th, 2001, sir. Is that correct? MR. SCOTT: That was after I retired, and I was not involved in 02. MR. BEN-VENISTE: Will you accept that the exercise involved a simultaneous hijacking scenario? MR. SCOTT: I was not involved in 02. GEN. MCKINLEY: Sir, I do have some information on 02, if you would allow me to read it for the record. MR. BEN-VENISTE: Please. GEN. MCKINLEY: [Reads from briefing book.] Amalgam Virgo in general, 02, was an exercise created to focus on peacetime and contingency NORAD missions. One of the peacetime scenarios that is and has been a NORAD mission for years is support to other government departments. Within this mission falls hijackings. Creativity of the designer aside, prior motivations were based on political objectives -- i.e., asylum or release of captured prisoners or political figures. Threats of killing hostages or crashing were left to the script writers to invoke creativity and broaden the required response of the players. What this means is that the scenario papers prepared for the officers participating in the drill by collaborating writers included crashing planes into targets; these papers were evidently an integral part of the drill. McKinley is explicitly acknowledging that the drills did indeed include the concept of hijacked aircraft being used as weapons. Ben-Veniste, feigning not to understand this, thought McKinley's answer was "fatuous," and added ironically "It wasn't in the minds of script writers when the Algerians had actually hijacked the plane, when they were attempting to fly into the Eiffel Tower .... Don't you agree we could have been better prepared?" But Amalgam Virgo was not fatuous, it was sinister. Here was an exercise which included many of the elements which were put into practice on 9/11. Amalgam Virgo thus provided the witting putschists with a perfect cover for conduiting the actual live fly components of 9/11 through a largely non-witting military bureaucracy. Under the cover of this confusion, the most palpably subversive actions could be made to appear in the harmless and even beneficial guise of a drill. In addition, a red herring was built in for the purpose of confusing investigators arriving after the fact: the hijacked planes involved were generally imagined as coming from abroad. But even that covering detail was dubious. These exercises came up again in the April 2004 hearings of the 9/11 commission. In her much- touted appearance, NSC director Condoleezza Rice repeated her well-known and discredited contention that the White House had not contemplated hijacked airliners being used as weapons. Bush himself had chimed in, asserting that "Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale." As the hearings showed, during the two years before the 9/11attacks, NORAD conducted exercises using hijacked airliners as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. Another scenario involved crashing an airliner into the Pentagon, but this was not conducted after the Defense Department objected that it was too unrealistic. But it was done as a staff exercise -- one might say, as a rehearsal. Perhaps it was realistic, but too revealing. One drill, planned for July 2001 but not conducted until later, involved planes from airports in Utah and Washington which were hijacked for the purposes of the drill. These aircraft were then escorted by US and Canadian interceptors to airfields in British Columbia and Alaska. A NORAD statement issued in April 2004 confirmed that "Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft. These exercises test and track detention and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures." According to NORAD, these were regional drills, not regularly scheduled continent-wide drills. (USA Today, April 18, 2004) Not surprisingly, there is absolutely no mention of Amalgam Virgo in the report of the 9/11 commission. Mike Ruppert has contributed much to illuminating the causes of the "complete paralysis of fighter response on 9/11 ..." Ruppert wrote in June 2004 that he had "obtained an on-the-record statement from someone in NORAD, which confirmed that on the day of 9/11 the Joint Chiefs (Myers) and NORAD were conducting a joint, live-fly, hijack Field Training Exercise (FTX) which involved at least one (and almost certainly many more) aircraft under US control that was posing as a hijacked airliner." Ruppert also concluded that "There never was a stand down order issued. That would have been way too incriminating and risky a piece of evidence." (From the Wilderness, June 6, 2004) The exercises that were conducted on 9/11 were these: From what is known about Vigilant Guardian, it is clear that it closely mimicked the actual events of 9/11. Vigilant Guardian was thus the source of much confusion among the non-witting NORAD personnel. As we will see, NORAD personnel were bewildered as to whether the reports they were getting represented fictitious events within the exercise, or whether they were dealing with a real emergency. (Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 3, 2002) This was a joint US-Canada exercise, and was designed to test the coordination of the two defense establishments. According to GlobalSecurity.org: "The VIGILANT GUARDIAN (VG) is a VIGILANT OVERVIEW Command Post Exercise (CPX) conducted in conjunction with USCINCSTRAT -- sponsored GLOBAL GUARDIAN and USCINCSPACE -- sponsored APOLLO GUARDIAN exercises. The exercise involves all HQ NORAD levels of command and is designed to exercise most aspects of the NORAD mission. One VG is scheduled each year and the length will vary depending on the exercise scenario and objectives." ( www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/vigilant-guardian.htm ) According to another source, "The planning for Vigilant Guardian Exercise-2001 probably began in 2000; and it was responding to a growing uneasiness of the US government and intelligence reports, world-wide -- including NORAD -- about plans for terrorist seizure of commercial air planes to be used as missiles against American targets." ( www.911teachin.net/L5A.html ) The 9/11 commission had this to say about Vigilant Guardian: "On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union." This is a very narrow definition of the drill in question, and is probably intended to mislead. The 9/11 commission continues: "We investigated whether military preparedness for the large-scale exercise compromised the military's response to the real-world terrorist attack on 9/11. According to General Eberhart, 'it took about 30 seconds to make the adjustment to the real-world situation.' (Ralph Eberhart testimony, June 17, 2004). We found that the response was, if anything, expedited by the increased number of staff at the sectors and at NORAD because of the scheduled exercise. See Robert Marr interview (Jan. 23, 2004)" (911 commission 458 n. 116) Eberhart's braggadocio was transparent, and the commission's verdict was a lie. Here is one example of the profound confusion engendered by the simultaneous occurrence of drill and real emergency: FAA: Hi. Boston Center TMU [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out. NEADS: [Staff Sergeant Jeremy Powell, Air National Guard] Is this real-world or exercise? FAA: No, this is not an exercise, not a test. (9/11 commission report 20) Here is the same scene of confusion as described from the standpoint of another participant: On Sept. 11, as Americans watched horror rain upon New York and Washington, command teams at a little-known military outpost in Rome, N.Y., worked feverishly to restore safe skies and rouse a slumbering homeland defense. At the Northeast Air Defense Sector, radar operators who constantly scan the continent's boundaries suddenly faced a threat from within and a race they could not win. Four months after the terrorist attacks, there are still untold stories. This is one. 6 A.M.: WAR GAMES Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins figured it would be a long day. Sept. 11 was Day II of "Vigilant Guardian," an exercise that would pose an imaginary crisis to North American Air Defense outposts nationwide. The simulation would run all week, and Deskins, starting her 12-hour shift in the Operations Center as the NORAD unit's airborne control and warning officer, might find herself on the spot. Day I of the simulation had moved slowly. She hoped the exercise gathered steam. It made a long day go faster. 8:40 A.M.: REAL WORLD In the Ops Center, three rows of radar scopes face a high wall of widescreen monitors. Supervisors pace behind technicians who peer at the instruments. Here it is always quiet, always dark, except for the green radar glow. At 8:40, Deskins noticed senior technician Jeremy Powell waving his hand. Boston Center was on the line, he said. It had a hijacked airplane. "It must be part of the exercise," Deskins thought. At first, everybody did. Then Deskins saw the glowing direct phone line to the Federal Aviation Administration. On the phone she heard the voice of a military liaison for the FAA's Boston Center. "I have a hijacked aircraft," he told her. Three minutes later, the drill was still a factor of confusion for Lt. Deskins in the form of a simulated hijacked plane heading for JFK Airport in New York City: Deskins ran to a nearby office and phoned 1st Air Force Chief Public Affairs Officer Major Don Arias in Florida. She said NEADS had a hijacked plane no, not the simulation likely heading for JFK. "The entire floor sensed something wrong," Chief of Operations Control Lt. Col. Ian Sanderson said. "The way this unfolded, everybody had a gut sense this wasn't right." ("Amid Crisis Simulation, 'We Were Suddenly No-Kidding Under Attack,"' Newhouse News Service, January 25, 2002) It is not clear from this account whether the "simulation" in question was an artificial radar blip inserted on the NEADS screens, or an actual aircraft (piloted or remote controlled) going towards the New York airport. This drill was identified by Richard Clarke in his recently published memoir. Here is what he writes: "I turned to the Pentagon screen. 'JCS, JCS. I assume NORAD has scrambled fighters and AWACS. How many? Where?' 'Not a pretty picture, Dick. ' Dick Meyers, himself a fighter pilot, knew that the days when we had scores of fighters on strip alert had ended with the Cold War. 'We are in the middle of Vigilant Warrior, a NORAD exercise, but ... Otis has launched two birds toward New York. Langley is trying to get two up now. The AWACS are at Tinker and not on alert' Otis was an Air National Guard base on Cape Cod. Langley Air Force Base was outside Norfolk, Virginia. Tinker AFB, home to all of America's flying radar stations, was in Oklahoma." 'Okay, how long to CAP over DC?' Combat Air Patrol, CAP, was something we were used to placing over Iraq, not over our nation's capital. 'Fast as we can. Fifteen minutes?' Myers asked, looking at the generals and colonels around him. It was now 9:28." (Clarke 5) Operation Northern Vigilance involved deploying fighter interceptors to air bases in northern Canada and Alaska. It undoubtedly reduced the number of interceptors available to defend the lower 48. Northern Vigilance was supposedly mounted by NORAD to counter a Russian maneuver going on at the same time. It could have been planned in advance, provided the timing of the Russian drill had also been known in advance. It was announced publicly in a NORAD press release of September 9, 2001 under the headline "NORAD Maintains Northern Vigilance." Here we read: CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN AFS, Colo. -- The North American Aerospace Defense Command shall deploy fighter aircraft as necessary to Forward Operating Locations (FOLS) in Alaska and Northern Canada to monitor a Russian air force exercise in the Russian arctic and North Pacific ocean. "NORAD is the eyes and ears of North America and it is our mission to ensure that our air sovereignty is maintained," said Lieutenant-General Ken Pennie, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of NORAD. "Although it is highly unlikely that Russian aircraft would purposely violate Canadian or American airspace, our mission of vigilance must be sustained." NORAD- allocated forces will remain in place until the end of the Russian exercise. NORAD conducted operation Northern Denial from December 1 to 14, 2000 in response to a similar, but smaller scale, Russian deployment of long-range bombers at northern Russian air bases. NORAD-allocated forces were deployed to three FOLS, two in Alaska and one in Canada. More than 350 American and Canadian military men and women were involved in the deployment. The net effect of Northern Vigilance was drastically to reduce the number of fighter interceptors available at airports in the lower 48 states of the continental US. It is not known exactly how many planes moved north. This drill is the least documented. It may have involved a complement to Northern Vigilance; one group of planes might have played the attackers, while another group played the defenders. A reference to this drill was found in the Toronto Star, December 9, 2001. At the very minimum, it appears to have been a northern Canada-Alaska-centered drill, which would have siphoned off planes from the lower 48 towards those areas. 5. National Reconnaissance Office Drill This drill simulated an airplane crashing into the headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Chantilly, Virginia, near Dulles Airport. It meant that the employees of the NRO were evacuated from their buildings just as the 9/11 attacks were actually taking place. The AP ran a story about this drill under the headline "Top US Intelligence Agency was to simulate plane crash into government building on September 11, 2001." The story stated that "a US intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings." (AP, August 21, 2002) The NRO was a supersecret agency responsible for spy satellites and other eavesdropping from space. It was created in 1960, and its existence was not officially acknowledged for some 32 years. The NRO draws its personnel from the military and the Central Intelligence Agency and has a budget equal to the combined budgets of both the CIA and the National Security Agency. On 11 September 2001, the NRO director was Keith R. Hall, who had headed the agency since 1996. In his capacity as DNRO, Hall was responsible for the acquisition and operation of all United States space-based reconnaissance and intelligence systems. At the same time Hall also served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space. As Nico Haupt has pointed out, Booz Allen Hamilton is a prominent subcontractor for the NRO. The obvious effect of evacuating the NRO was at least temporarily to blind institutional US intelligence to events which could have been monitored from space. NRO could have provided a real time view of the air space over North America; as a result of the evacuation, this may not have been available. The advantages for the perpetrators are obvious. Tripod II was a biological warfare exercise conducted jointly by the US Department of Justice and the City of New York; it was scheduled for September 12, 2001, and formally speaking never took place. Its obvious relevance was to provide a cover for various pre- 9/11 activities in New York City. It would seem that the code name "Tripod II" was revealed for the first time in testimony by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the 9/11 commission; however, the basic facts about this exercise had been described by Giuliani in his self-serving memoir, Leadership, published in 2002. Here the former Mayor wrote: For months, we had in place an exercise in which we'd drill on our response to a biochemical attack, specifically practicing for the distribution of medication. The planned date: Wednesday, September 12. We had stored much of the materials for that drill at Pier 92. Pier 92 offered 125,000 square feet of open space and easy transportation to and from Ground Zero by way of boat and the West Side Highway. Moreover, because it was already in use by the military, the points of access were relatively easy to guard." (Giuliani 355) After Giuliani's unusable command center in WTC 7 had been destroyed by the inexplicable collapse of that large building, he transferred his command post to Pier 92. The ease of the transition is suspicious in and of itself: had Giuliani known in advance that he would need this fallback option? Vigilant Guardian in particular compels our attention because it appears to have been transformed from a staff or command post exercise to a live fly exercise. Specifically, VG had all the earmarks of an anti-terrorism live fly exercise. According to research by Mike Ruppert presented at the Toronto 9/11 Inquiry, Vigilant Guardian included the use of military aircraft to simulate hijacked commercial airliners. In his book, Richard Clarke recalls being told by an official on the morning of 9/11, "we have reports of eleven aircraft off course or out of communication, maybe hijacked." Clarke said he repeated this number, "Eleven." (Clarke 4) This figure of eleven has come to be seen as the canonical maximum of the aircraft reported hijacked for whatever reason at the height of the emergency. Because of the post-Cold War defense build-down initiated by Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense under Bush 41, the air defenses of the US had been drastically denuded. Ruppert's best estimate is that, on 9/11, there were just 8 fighter jets at the ready in the northeast US. Since these jets generally fly in pairs, this meant that there were four pairs of aircraft ready to be scrambled to intercept four aircraft. Therefore, there were at least 11 possible targets as compared to a total of four defensive asset packages available to cover them. According to Ruppert, leaks of classified information suggest that the number of airliners reported or feared hijacked had at one point risen to 21. Some of the extra hijacks were represented by false blips made to appear on FAA and NORAD radar screens as part of the exercises that have been discussed. Other hijacks would have been accounted for by the actual military aircraft which were playing the roles of hijacked aircraft in the drills. Blips and dummy hijacks combined to create an insuperable confusion. This would have made the predicament of any loyal air defense commanders even more difficult. Who in the Pentagon coordinates military maneuvers, be they of the command post or live fly variety? There must be some focal point where alternative dates are weighed, conflicts foreseen, and the need of maintaining a minimum distribution of assets so as not to compromise defense capabilities calculated. Whatever office in the bowels of the Pentagon does this, it is an urgent candidate for being swept for the presence of moles. However, even these insights do not by any means explain the failure to deploy fighter interceptors on 9/11. Any military commander would have realized that all available assets had to be scrambled, at the latest by the point at which the second WTC tower was hit. In particular, any military commander would have been alert to the imminent threat of the decapitation of the national command structure centered in Washington. All the commanders running the show had been schooled in the Cold War, when a Soviet submarine- launched ballistic missile detonating over Washington was regarded as the most plausible overture for the third world war. The eight lanes of superhighway leading from Washington DC to Dulles Airport are monuments to the all-encompassing concern of the US federal bureaucracy for its center in Washington. The autonomic reaction of the military establishment would normally have been to place at least one pair of jets over Washington, whatever else was done or not done. The fact that even this was not done until well after the Pentagon had been hit indicates a remarkable density of moles at high levels of the US command structures. AL QAEDA MOLES OR US GOVERNMENT MOLES? The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the maneuvers enumerated above all took place on the same day. Some of the exercises were public knowledge, but some were not. If the actions of the hijackers (assuming there were hijackers) and the US military maneuvers were coordinated, what does this suggest? Did al Qaeda have a spy inside the US government, or was the US government directing or influencing the actions of al Qaeda? One who believes that al Qaeda had penetrated the US government in order to learn the day of the many simultaneous maneuvers is Barbara Honegger, the former Reagan Administration official and author of October Surprise, an account of Bush 41's secret negotiations with Iran during the 1980 election campaign. Ms. Honegger is currently with the US Naval Postgraduate School. She rightly calls attention to the salient fact that the terror attacks and the US government exercises took place on the same day. She argues for the growing reasons to believe that the date for the attack was not 'chosen' by the hijackers at all, but that one of them learned that a counter-terror war-game/exercise simulating a scenario like the one that actually took place on 9-11 was planned for that morning, and then 'piggybacked' the 'real thing' on top of it. But for Ms. Honegger, all of this does not point to the obvious reality that al Qaeda, notorious as the CIA's Arab Legion, was marching to the tune of a rogue network of rebel moles inside the US state apparatus. In order to avoid this evident conclusion, she reaches for a deus ex machina in the person of the myth-drenched Khalid Sheikh Mohamed. Not only does she mobilize KSM; she presents him as a wily triple agent who has successfully bamboozled the chief personalities of the US regime. After describing the question of the coordination of the terrorist attacks with the day of drills, Ms. Honegger writes that "... for all of this to 'work', the bad guys had to have at least one person among them who had fooled U.S. intelligence into believing that he was 'one of us.' That person, almost certainly, is Khalid Shaikh Muhammed -- the only person about whom all information is still classified, even his name, even though reams have already been written about him in the open press. And for good reason. Vice President Cheney, President Bush, CIA Director George Tenet, CIA officer and chief of NRO's strategic gaming division for their 9/11 'plane-into- building' exercise, John Fulton, and all the others who were so stupid as to risk thousands of innocent American lives on the bet that their star 'informant', Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, had really been 'turned' to the U.S. 'side' -- don't want him to talk about what he knows. And he knows a lot. On Sept. 10, 2002, Knight Ridder quoted a top U.N. counter-terror expert that Mohammad is probably the only person who has all the pieces to the 9/11 puzzle." At this point 9/11 the day of the drills becomes 9/11 the day of the dupes. In reality KSM, to the extent that he exists at all, does so as a patsy and operative of US intelligence. The orchestration of the terror attacks and the 9/11 drills was the handiwork of the rogue network inside the US government, and not a product of an Afghan cave or the teeming slums of Karachi. In support of her thesis, Ms. Honegger also over-interprets the term "match" as used in the supposed communication between Atta and the phantomatic Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on September 10, 2001, but not translated until after the attacks. The text of this message was: "The Match is about to begin. Tomorrow [i.e., 9/11] is zero hour." (AP February 8, 2003) Ms. Honegger notes that Cheney was so incensed when this became public that he ordered an FBI investigation of members of the JICI to find out who might have leaked it. According to Ms. Honegger, "match' is "what you would expect if the speaker were referring to his discovery of the date that the U.S. Government had selected to conduct its counter-terror simulation/exercise on the scenario of plane(s) crashing into government buildings -- one that was about to turn very real when the terrorists 'piggybacked' their long-planned plot onto it." But this interpretation is strained. If the speaker was speaking English, he might have been speaking the British English which is still prevalent in the Middle East, and in British English "match" would simply mean "game." If the speaker was speaking Arabic, then we need to be aware of the multiple problems faced even by competent Arabic translators. So the philological and linguistic problems involved with this term "match" finally appear insuperable; it tells us nothing reliable. (Barbara Honegger, "The U.S. Government, Not the Hijackers, 'Chose' the Date of the 9/11 Attacks.") The obvious lack of any air defense on 9/11 , combined with the flagrant disregard for well- established and long institutionalized procedures involving the FAA air traffic controllers and NORAD, led soon after 9/11 to the notion that an order or guideline must have been issued that was responsible for the paralysis of the usual intercept routine. A written "stand down" order per se has never been found, but this does not mean that it did not exist, possibly in some non-written form. Orders can be conveyed in verbal form, or better yet the expectations of a superior can be conveyed by indirection. But the surest way to make sure that nothing gets done is to make sure that moles, more or less witting partners in the covert operation, occupy the key nodal points in the bureaucracy on the day of the big event. And since we ascribe responsibility for 9/11 to precisely such a network of moles, this is the conclusion that is offered here. If the FAA guidelines had been observed, an exchange like this one between the FAA Command Center and the FAA headquarters from 9:49 AM would have been simply unthinkable: FAA Headquarters: They're pulling Jeff away to go talk about United 93. Command Center: Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft? FAA Headquarters: Oh, God, I don't know. Command Center: Uh, that's a decision somebody's gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes. FAA: Uh, ya know everybody just left the room. (9/11 commission 29) Was one or both of these speakers a mole? As they knew well, since the plane was off course, not responding to the radio, not following orders, and had its transponder turned off, there was absolutely no doubt that fighters had to be scrambled automatically and immediately, and not in ten minutes. In fact, anyone of these conditions would have been enough to scramble fighters. Another example of extremely suspicious behavior on 9/11 -- this time from the private sector rather than the government -- became known after June 4, 2004, when the FBI finally allowed a group of victims' families gathered at Princeton, New Jersey to hear tapes of the responses of managers and officials of American Airlines to the obvious fact that American 11 and United 175 had been hijacked. The FBI had tried as usual to intimidate the families with nondisclosure agreements and a ban on note-taking. However, some of the content of this tape seeped out, and was reported by Gail Sheehy of the New York Observer. One crucial passage recorded at the headquarters of American Airlines in Fort Worth, Texas, beginning about 8:21 AM on September 11, showed that American Airlines managers had done everything possible to prevent the news of a hijacking from leaking out. Here is a segment, according to the best recollection of family members of the deceased: Don't spread this around. Keep it close. Keep it quiet. Let's keep this among ourselves. What else can we find out from our own sources about what's going on? These were the words of two managers at American Airlines Systems Operations Control. According to the recollection of another family member, their words were: "Do not pass this along. Let's keep it right here. Keep it among the five of us." When a United Airlines dispatcher was told by his superiors to transmit the order that all planes had to land, he was also told, "Don't tell the pilots why we want them to land." We cannot know if the unnamed speakers were moles within the American Airlines bureaucracy, but this is certainly what moles would have done on such an occasion. Family members noted that if the news of the hijack of American 11 had been transmitted with the necessary rapidity, United 93 might never have taken off from Newark Airport. When Gerald Arpey, the president of American Airlines, testified before the 9/11 commission, he never mentioned the existence of the tapes played in Princeton on June 4. Clearly Arpey had not been served with a duces tecum subpoena, instructing him to present the 9/11 commission with all relevant records and exhibits. ("9/11 Tapes Reveal Ground Personnel Muffled Attacks," New York Observer, June 17, 2004) As for the FBI, they were indignant that their non-disclosure had been violated, not that airline officials blocked timely notification about a hijack. This was another example of the FBI's abuse of the Moussawi case to withhold vital information from the public. As for the FAA, it issued an official gag order for all of its employees in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and for a long time what little was known had been divulged in violation of that gag order. Even some twelve FAA directives and warnings sent out during the summer of 2001 were reportedly classified. The mystery enveloping the actions of the FAA on 9/11 was made deeper by the notorious Kevin Delaney, the FAA official who deliberately destroyed audio tapes of the reports and recollections of New York air traffic controllers about what they had done on the morning of 9/11. (New York Times, June 6, 2004) If those tapes still existed, they might shed some more light on the air defense stand down of 9/11. Using documentation from press reports, Woody Box and Nico Haupt have concluded that two distinct aircraft took off from Boston on the morning of September under the designation of American Flight 11. "Where did Flight 11 start?," writes Box. "There are two answers: Gate 26 and Gate 32. And both answers resist any attempt to refute them." American 11's departure was regularly scheduled for 7:45 AM from Terminal B, Gate 32 of Boston's Logan Airport. This was American 11's departure gate on 9/11, as shown in a transcript of radio communications between American 11 and the Logan tower published in the New York Times: "7:45:48 -- Ground Control 1: American eleven heavy Boston ground gate thirty two you're going to wait for a Saab to go by then push back" (New York Times, October 16, 2001) But many press reports indicate that passengers on American 11 embarked at Gate 26 (Washington Post, September 15, 2001, and other newspapers) Gate 26 is located in another wing of Terminal B, and is about 1000 feet away from Gate 32. Gate 26 is the majority view. One paper, the Boston Globe, mentioned both gates on successive days. In an extra of the Boston Globe published on September 11, we find: "One airport employee, who asked not to be identified, said the American flight left on time from Gate 32 in Terminal B, and that nothing unusual was apparent." One day later, in the Boston Globe article entitled "Crashes in NYC had grim origins at Logan", we read: "The American flight left from Gate 26 in Terminal B, and the United flight from Gate 19 in Terminal C. One airport employee said nothing unusual was apparent when the American flight left." Was this the same employee as the day before? The Gate 26 flight pushed back later than its scheduled departure time of 7:45 AM. Was one of these two flights a dummy flight, a decoy being used in one of the live fly hijacking exercises described above? Did its unannounced presence contribute even more to the confusion that reigned in US airspace on the morning of 9/11? Or was there some other, more devious purpose? There are also reports of another mystery flight landing in Cleveland. And then there is a cryptic remark by Richard Clarke in his White House narrative of the morning of 9/11. Clarke reports hearing: "We have a report of a large jet crashed in Kentucky, near the Ohio line." (Clarke 13) |