INDEPENDENT NEWS

UQ Wire: The Role Of The U.S. Government On 9-11

Published: Mon 17 Jan 2005 11:01 AM
Distribution via the Unanswered Questions Wire
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/ .
For Oil & Empire: Unanswered Questions about the Role of the U.S. Government on 9-11
by Mitchel Cohen
co-editor "G" -- the newspaper of the New York State Greens / Green Party of New York
"Without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey for any yellow dwarf with a pocket-knife."
- U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson
(Yes, he really said that!)
For 50 minutes, from 8:15 a.m. until 9:05 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense were aware that four domestic U.S. passenger airplanes had been hijacked.
American Airlines Flight 11 out of Logan airport in Boston deviated from its path shortly after 7:45 a.m. It hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City at 8:46 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175, also out of Logan and en route to Los Angeles, deviated from its flight plan a short time later.
Meanwhile, American Flight 77 left Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. en route to Los Angeles. The plane reversed course over Ohio and is reported to have flown all the way back, passing the Pentagon and the White House before executing a complicated 270 degree turn. It crossed the Potomac and, the official story goes, plowed into a low-populated section of the Pentagon that was under repair.
NORAD tracked these planes all the way. Why didn't U.S. air defenses stop them before they hit their targets?
New York and Washington, D.C. are surrounded by airbases and defensive systems, and they have been used on numerous occasions to send fighter jets into the air within minutes of an "event" to intercept wayward aircraft. The FAA has published guidelines about what to do as soon as a plane deviates from its flight plan. If there is any doubt, air traffic controllers are taught to assume that a hijacking is underway.
Yet no fighter jets intercepted the off-course aircrafts. An accident? For that to be true, 116 different safeguards would have had to have failed simultaneously or been bypassed on that fateful morning.
Did officials of the U.S. government know ahead of time of plans to hijack these planes? Did they allow them to happen? There is growing evidence that U.S. government officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, made decisions before and during that morning indicating that they not only allowed the attacks to occur but facilitated them.
The Stand-Down of U.S. Defenses
In the year leading up to September 11, 2001, the U.S. military defense command issued 67 orders to intercept errant flights; the previous year there were more than 120 such commands.(1) Such orders constitute standard operating procedure. Deviations from this procedure require direct orders to withdraw from intercepting, i.e., to "stand-down."
Were U.S. defenses ordered to stand-down on 9-11 and, if so, who gave the order?
This was the question asked of acting head of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Air Force General Richard B. Myers, on September 13, 2001.
Florida Senator Bill Nelson asked Myers to explain contradictory statements about why no fighters were dispatched on 9-11 to protect Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon.
NELSON: "Perhaps we want to do this in our session, in executive session. But my question is an obvious one for not only this committee, but for the executive branch and the military establishment. If we knew that there was a general threat on terrorist activity, which we did, and we suddenly have two trade towers in New York being obviously hit by terrorist activity, of commercial airliners taken off course from Boston to Los Angeles, then what happened to the response of the defense establishment once we saw the diversion of the aircraft headed west from Dulles turning around 180 degrees and likewise, in the aircraft taking off from Newark and, in flight, turning 180 degrees? That's the question. I leave it to you as to how you would like to answer it. But we would like an answer."
MYERS: "You bet. I spoke, after the second tower was hit, I spoke to the commander of NORAD, General Eberhart. And at that point, I think the decision was, at that point, to start launching aircraft. One of the things you have to understand, senator, is that in our posture right now, that we have many fewer aircraft on alert than we did during the height of the Cold War. And so, we've got just a few bases around the perimeter of the United States. So it's not just a question of launching aircraft, it's launching to do what?"
This was a very strange non-response. Myers said: "We have many fewer aircraft." That does not answer the question of whether U.S. air defenses responded. Myers also threw in the important phrase, "At that point." "At that point ... after the second tower was hit." But the question was, What actions were taken up until that point? Why did Myers say that he had not decided until after the second WTC tower had been hit to launch the planes? No planes were actually launched until after the Pentagon was hit -- a non-response.
The FAA and military have rules for how an interceptor communicates to a wayward aircraft. The F-16 attempts to get the pilot's attention, using visual as well as electronic signals to determine if the aircraft is in distress and is being flown by the proper pilot. If necessary, it will force the wayward plane to land. If it refuses to do so, the U.S. Air Force may be instructed to shoot it down.
In his direct testimony, Gen. Myers provided no explanation for the U.S. government's failure to gear up defenses during the attacks on 9-11. The entire top chain of command (Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers, Winfield) all kept themselves pointedly out of the decision-making process during the actual time of the attacks. But instead of being sacked, Myers was promoted!
One day later, September 14, 2001, the official story changed. The FAA and the Defense Department claimed that fighter jets were launched -- from Otis Air National Guard base on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, contradicting Myers' testimony.
This information raises new questions: Why were the fighter jets sent from a base which was relatively distant from the location of the hijacked airlines? Even so, these should have been able to reach the Pentagon and the second World Trade Center plane before they hit.
According to Aviation Week and Space Technology, at the time of the first WTC crash, 8:46 a.m., three F-16s assigned to Andrews Air Force Base 10 miles from Washington were flying a training mission in North Carolina, 207 miles away from DC. They were already in the air. The F-16s top speed is 1,500 miles per hour -- 25 miles per minute. They could have been over DC airspace in 8.3 minutes. They could have been there at 8:55 a.m., a half hour before the Pentagon was hit. Instead, they were recalled. They are reported to have landed at Andrews Air Force base after Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
According to the first version of the official story it was not until 9:35 a.m. that planes were ordered up in the air. Yet Vice President Cheney made the following statement -- an apparent slip-up -- on Meet the Press: "The Secret Service has an arrangement with the FAA," and that around 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, "they had open lines after the World Trade Center was ..."
The interviewer, Tim Russert, interrupted Cheney mid-sentence and went on to a different line-of-thought. (2) Too bad, because if Cheney had developed the theme that the FAA was communicating with the Secret Service on "open lines" right after 8:46 a.m. when the first tower was hit, then this would be proof that George W. Bush and company in Florida had been informed before he even began traveling to the school to read with the childen, which seriously contradicts the official story. Bush's early knowledge of the attack is supported by two journalists who were with Bush on 9-11. ABC's Jon Cochran and Associated Press' Sonya Ross reported that the President stated that he knew of the terrorist attacks before he left his hotel.
Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney and U.S. air defenses were well aware of Flight 77's approach to the Washington D.C. area even though it had been lost on radar at one point, and then mysteriously reappeared. In the Meet the Press interview, Cheney said that they'd tracked the plane as it approached and then circled the White House before crashing a few minutes later into the Pentagon.(3)
Did Cheney order the US defense fighter planes to stand down? There is now a growing pile of crucial questions about the events themselves and government officials' involvement on the morning of 9-11 that remain to be answered. Unfortunately, there is no indication that the official commission investigating 9-11 asked them.
Additional Questions
* Who ordered aircraft to pick up the scores of bin-Laden family members in the United States and fly them out of the country when every other plane in the U.S. was "grounded," and why?
* Why were the extensive missile batteries and air defenses reportedly deployed around the Pentagon not activated during the attack?
* Was a war against Iraq already "in the cards," awaiting the right pretext? Ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil states in his book that the war in Iraq was planned from the first day of the Bush Administration and that there was no evidence then, nor now, that Iraq was involved in 9-11. Former "terrorism czar" Richard Clarke says that after 9-11, Rumsfeld instantly wanted to attack Iraq. The film "Hijacking Catastrophe," narrated by Julian Bond, documents the plans for war developed by Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Perle, Feith and others in the 1990s in a document titled "Plan for a New American Century." And, shortly after the World Trade Center was hit, what had been originally called "Operation Iraqi Liberation" (OIL) was launched.
* Two of the alleged hijackers were trained in Florida at the Hoffman School of Aviation. Why, immediately after 9-11, did Jeb Bush -- the President's brother, Governor of Florida -- seize the alleged terrorist pilots' records at Hoffman Aviation, order them placed onto a government cargo plane and have them flown out of the country? [from a lawsuit filed by Ellen Mariani, whose husband was a passenger on one of the planes that crashed on 9-11.]
* Why in March of 2000, did an FBI agent destroy all of the FBI's Denver-based intercepts of messages from bin Laden's colleagues who were under investigation?
* What was the involvement of Pakistan's secret police, which had close relations with the U.S. government? In the days before September 11, 2001, the head of the Pakistani ISI, General Ahmad, visited Washington. He also wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, whom the U.S. government says was the ringleader of the hijackers. (We'll ignore for now the statements from Atta's father that his son is alive and that unspecified "others" had used his identity, as well as the identities of several of the other alleged hijackers.)
A Federal News Service reporter questioned National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice on this subject as follows: "Are you aware of the reports at the time that the ISI chief was in Washington on September 11th, and on September 10th $100,000 was wired from Pakistan to these groups here in this area?" The White House provided the press with a self-serving transcript as follows: "Are you aware of the reports at the time that [inaudible] was in Washington on September 11th?" The words: "Pakistan's ISI chief" is the only part of the question, according to the White House transcript, that was deemed "inaudible."
* Why haven't authorities published the results of multiple investigations into stock market trading of United and American Airlines shares that strongly suggest foreknowledge of specific details of the 9-11 attacks, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of untraceable gains?
* Why were 29 pages of the US Congressional 9-11 committee reports (on Saudi/ US connections) censored, blanked out at Bush's request? Did these pages include the names of U.S. corporations and the weapons (including biological and chemical weapons) they sold to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel and other countries in the region? Did they also include information on the terrorist-funded P-tech and Promis computer software companies used by many U.S. government agencies, which whistleblowers say has provided "terrorists" with computer backdoor entry into top secret matters of government, military and corporate institutions?
* Why was the 9-11 WTC wreckage swiftly removed and sold off as scrap metal, and melted down within days of the attack, preventing federal investigators from being able to fully reconstruct the "crime scene" and determine the cause for the buildings' collapse?
* Why haven't the voice recorders and black boxes from Flight 11 and Flight 175 been made available to public officials and media so that they could be examined? * How did the passport of one of the alleged hijackers miraculously find its way unharmed to the top of a pile of rubble a short distance from the World Trade Cener, enabling Donald Rumsfeld et al. to claim to know the identity of the hijackers? (4)
* Why would seismographs in the NYC area register two small quakes at Ground Zero microseconds before each tower began to collapse? Could the World Trade Center have suffered explosions apart from the impact of the two passenger jets, as numerous eyewitnesses claim?
* Why hasn't a single person been fired, penalized or reprimanded for gross incompetence on 9-11?
* How did buildings #7 and #6 at the World Trade Center "collapse"?
This last question is terribly important; it may turn out to be the key to the whole mess. WTC #7 housed Mayor Giuliani's impenetrable bunker, established and originally run by Jerome Hauer and the Office of Emergency Management. It also housed the largest CIA offices outside of Langley, Virginia, and the Securities and Exchange Commission offices, in which were stored all of the records pertaining to the investigation of Enron as well as the "put options" traded on United and American Airlines stocks.
"We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it. And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."
- Larry Silverstein, WTC owner, about WTC #7
Neither Building #7 nor #6 was hit by airplanes. #7 was a large office building, 47 stories tall. Although it is commonly believed that the buildings were hit and somehow caught fire and collapsed along with the two towers, this is not the case. No investigating committee has been able to come up with an acceptable explanation.
Originally, it was claimed that illegally stored diesel fuel and emergency generators exploded in Building #7, setting fires that compromised its structural integrity. Mayor Giuliani had been warned repeatedly by fire marshals that storing thousands of gallons of fuel in that way was a serious violation of all fire codes. But the report on the collapse issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency stresses that the fuel tanks remained fully intact. At 3 pm on September 11, two and a half hours before the WTC #7 collapsed, the only fires were small ones on the 7th and 12th floors. FEMA puzzled over what happened to building #7 and concluded: "The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time." Its report is available at http://www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm.
In a September 2002 PBS documentary called "America Rebuilds," the owner of the World Trade Center Complex Larry Silverstein, who had bought the entire complex a short time before the attacks, stated in reference to World Trade Center Building #7:
"I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it. And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.' "
The term 'pull it' means to bring the building down by means of explosives. In the same documentary a cleanup worker refers to the demolition of WTC #6 in December, 2001, when he says, "...we're getting ready to pull the building Six."
Silverstein's remarks are critical to understanding what occurred. Did Silverstein make the decision to 'pull' the building on September 11, 2001 as he indicated a year later in the PBS interview? If so, when was this decision made? Who else was involved? And why didn't FEMA know about this?
If, as Silverstein says, he decided to "pull" the building, how did they manage to rig explosives in a matter of hours that would successfully and safely take down a 47 story building amidst the chaos on 9-11, endangering rescue workers and equipment? Could explosives be bought (and from whom? Where is the paper trail, the order receipts, etc.?), brought to the location and carefully put into place within a couple of hours on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and the 47-story building safely "pulled" at that time? If not, then the explosives would have had to have been in place for such an eventuality prior to 9-11.
And, if explosives had been placed in that building beforehand, might they have also been placed at a prior time in the Towers as well?
Silverstein Properties' estimated investment in WTC #7 alone was $386 million. In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties won $861 million from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC #7. This one building's collapse resulted in a profit for the owner of about $500 million!
So what exactly happened to WTC #7 and #6, and by implication to the twin towers? These are the sort of questions that any high school student would ask. The problem is, why haven't the official investigating bodies asked them?
For more information, please check out www.911truth.org.
Foot Notes
1. Nicholas Levis, of 911Truth.org, writes: The U.S. military has not released data about search times, alert times, scramble times, location of target (density of possible interceptors varies from region to region), distance of target, nor overall time from deviation to interception. A study of this data for the Northeast sector would tell us something useful about response times in general in that region.
2. Transcript from White House, Sept. 16, 2001.
3. See, for more information, the testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta on May 23, 2004 (Sidebar).
4. CBS News reported, meanwhile, that "a passport belonging to one of the hijackers, Satam al-Sugami, had been found on the street minutes after the plane he was aboard crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center and before the New York landmark collapsed." (Associated Press, Jan. 27, 2004)
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SIDEBAR #1
CHENEY'S WHEREABOUTS
Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta said he arrived at the Presidential Emergency Operating Center (PEOC) at 9:20 a.m. on 9-11 where he observed the Vice President taking charge:
Mineta: There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out.The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?"
And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant. And...
Hamilton: The flight you're referring to is the....
Mineta: The flight that came into the Pentagon.
After some discussion of whether Cheney's orders meant to shoot down the hijacked aircraft, it was clearly stated on the record that there were no such orders to do so, which raises the obvious question of what "the orders" were:
Hamilton: And so there was no specific order there to shoot that plane down?
Mineta: No, sir.
Hamilton: But there were military planes in the air in position to shoot down commercial aircraft.
Mineta: That's right. The planes had been scrambled, I believe, from Otis at that point.
Did Cheney order the intercepts to "stand down"? There is no record of that question being asked. In testimony before the "People's Omissions Hearings" in NYC on Sept. 9, 2004, Michael Ruppert indicted Dick Cheney for intentionally planning wargames for 9-11 and actually facilitating the attacks.
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SIDEBAR #2
NY 9-11 Truth' Demands Criminal Inquiry into 9/11 Crimes
Last month, a group of New Yorkers -- including 9/11 family members, survivors and a Ground Zero triage physician -- filed a Complaint with Eliot Spitzer, the Attorney General of New York, demanding that the AG open a criminal inquiry and/or grand jury investigation into the many still unsolved crimes of September 11, 2001 over which he has jurisdiction.
At the same time, an alliance of 100 prominent Americans and many family members of those killed on 9/11 released a 911-Truth Statement signed by notables spanning the political spectrum, from Presidential candidates Ralph Nader, Michael Badnarik, and David Cobb to Catherine Austin Fitts, a member of the first Bush administration, as well as Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern. The signatories also include Georgia Congress representative Cynthia McKinney, singers Michelle Shocked and Michael Franti, and actors Ed Asner and Mimi Kennedy.
The document calls for immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur. The Statement supports an August 31st Zogby poll that found nearly 50% of New Yorkers believe the government had foreknowledge and "consciously failed to act," with 66% wanting a new 9/11 investigation.
The NY complainants include Bob McIlvaine, who lost his son Robert in the World Trade Center collapse; Patricia Perry, who lost her son John, a New York City Police officer; William Rodriguez, a WTC maintenance worker and rescue effort hero; Jenna Orkin, Chair of the World Trade Center Environmental Organization; Dr. Faiz Khan, Ground Zero triage physician and ambulance first responder; and Megan Bartlett, founder of Ground Zero for Peace (who was recently hospitalized with malignant reactions to toxic WTC dust).
They urged Spitzer to finally investigate the victim families' questions that the 9/11 Commission would not touch. They further noted steadily accumulating evidence that belies the "official narrative" such as the breaking story on the "black box" recorders recovered from the WTC site, the existence of which the FBI and Kean Commission had insistently denied. http://tinyurl.com/4drr3
Jenna Orkin stated there was strong evidence suggesting that the Executive Office of the President and EPA chief Christy Whitman were responsible for confirming the safety of the air in lower Manhattan, in order to clear the way for the re-opening of Wall Street. "Here it appears that the government was willing to sacrifice the lives of New Yorkers for purely economic ends." She opened her remarks by predicting that those who will die of exposure to toxic dust from the destroyed twin towers will ultimately far exceed those who died on the day of the attacks. Yet this painful story was relegated to a minor footnote in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Attorney Carolyn Betts, legal consultant for the Complaint, noted this was the first Citizens' Complaint filed with a State's Attorney General that would become what she called a "living document" -- in other words, an evolving compilation of argument and evidence posted on the Internet in full public view. Organizers also noted that anyone could view the Complaint at justicefor911.org and those who wish to support it can sign a petition on the site.
The Justice for 9/11 Steering Committee includes representatives from 9/11 CitizensWatch http://www.911citizenwatch.org , http://www.911truth.org and the World Trade Center Environmental Organization http://www.wtceo.org.
Contact: David Kubiak, 207-967-2390, kubiak@nancho.net, or Kyle F. Hence, 401-935-7715, kylehence@earthlink.net
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SIDEBAR #3:
1983 Photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein
Who's Your Daddy?
Donald Rumsfeld greets his "good friend" Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1983 on behalf of the Bechtel corporation, seeking to build an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Gulf of Aqaba via Jordan.
The revolving door between Bechtel Corporation and the Reagan administration cabinet drove U.S.-Iraq interactions between 1983 and 1985. Today, as oil reaches $52 per barrel, this same cabal insists that oil has nothing to do with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Yet during the Reagan administration, and in the years leading up to the present war, these men shaped and implemented a strategy that has everything to do with securing Iraqi oil exports and expanding the U.S. empire. Along the way, the U.S. government and its allies that provided Iraq with nerve gas to use against Iran, along with many chemical and biological agents. Indeed, U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush knew full well the extent of that arsenal for it was Bush himself, in his former capacity as head of the CIA (and later as Vice President and President), who had PERSONALLY APPROVED shipments to Iraq of material needed to make biological and chemical weapons. These included toxic varieties of E.coli and Salmonella bacteria, and agents causing anthrax, gas gangrene and brucellosis, among other deadly microbes.
Iraq documented these shipments in a 12,000-page document submitted to the UN Weapons inspection team headed by Hans Blix. But the U.S. government "intercepted" the document en route, and "redacted" (censored) 8,000 of the pages. The media was not allowed to see the list of contracts for biological and chemical warfare with U.S. and European companies, all approved by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, in yet another example of one hand washing the blood off the other, Bechtel was given a multi-billion dollar contract last year to rebuild Iraq's destroyed drinking water system.
- Mitchel Cohen
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SIDEBAR #4:
CROSSING THE RUBICON
Crossing the Rubicon
In his new book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, Michael C. Ruppert argues that the attacks of September 11th, 2001 were accomplished through an orchestration of logistics and personnel. Ruppert names Vice President Dick Cheney as the prime suspect in the mass murders of 9/11 and shows that not only was Cheney a planner in the attacks, but also that on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate Command, Control and Communications system which was superseding any orders being issued by the FAA, the Pentagon, or the White House Situation Room. Cheney and others acted in concert to guarantee that the attacks occurred and produced the desired result.
In May of 2001, by presidential order, Cheney was put in direct command and control of all wargame and field exercise training and scheduling through several agencies, especially FEMA, and extended to all of the conflicting and overlapping NORAD drills -- some involving hijack simulations -- that Cheney scheduled to take place on that very morning.
Ruppert shows that the TRIPOD II exercise being set up on Sept. 10th in Manhattan was directly connected to Cheney's role in the above.
A number of public officials including then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani were aware that flight 175 was en route to lower Manhattan for 20 minutes and did nothing to order the evacuation of, or warn the occupants of the South Tower. One military officer was forced to leave his post in the middle of the attacks; he placed a private call to his brother -- who worked at the WTC -- warning him to get out. That was because no other part of the system was taking action.
To order this important book ($16+S), please call 1-866-222-7693.
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SIDEBAR #5:
THE NEW PEARL HARBOR
The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 By David Ray Griffin (Olive Branch Press, 2004) 214 + xxv, paperback, $15.00.
Reviewed by Patricia Adams Farmer
Facing a shocking truth is a hard thing. Turning the pages of The New Pearl Harbor requires a few deep breaths. Like opening the door to one's worst imaginings, we are able to go into these shadowy places only with the clean light of solid reasoning and meticulously well-documented research provided by the author, a distinguished American philosopher and theologian, David Ray Griffin.
Compiling the most compelling aspects of the arguments of several international critics of the "official story," Griffin offers a concise, well-organized, readable access into the most mysterious mass murder event of our time.
The title is based on a document entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses," published in 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, formed by several soon-to-be top officials in the Bush administration. This document predicted that the desired "revolution in military affairs" would be difficult without "a new Pearl Harbor." Griffin's book suggests that on 9/11, this need was fulfilled. Machiavelli is no stranger to American history, but still, could it be?
In the introduction, Griffin lays out several levels of ascending possibilities of official complicity. For example, did officials (in Intelligence Agencies, the Pentagon, or the White House) know about the attack ahead of time? Did they allow 9/11 to happen for political motives? Did they actually participate in the planning? Griffin does not implore us with personal opinion but simply lets the evidence speak.
He begins with the most egregious hole in the official account of that day: the fact that Standard Operating Procedures were not followed: "Military behavior completely contradicted standard procedures, which calls for jets to be scrambled as soon as a suspected hijacking is reported". These jet fighters normally intercept the airliner within 10 minutes, but on 9/11 several planes were allowed to fly for two or three times that long without being intercepted. Furthermore, the Pentagon, is "probably the most well-defended building on the face of the planet. How does the official account explain the fact that in this case it was not defended at all?" Most disturbing is that any cancellation of Standard Operating Procedure would require a command from on high. "Could a plan to hijack airplanes and crash them into the WTC have been successful without 'stand down' orders approved by Bush, Rumsfeld, and Myers?"
Evidence mounts, chapter by chapter, unraveling the massive inconsistencies in the official account, pointing sadly but inexorably to complicity in high places. If these questions are not dealt with in the current 9/11 commission proceedings, they will plague our national consciousness until they find resolution. One closes this chilling book with the awful realization that unless we suspend reasonable thinking and the laws of physics, some level of official complicity has probably taken place, and that unless we demand answers and accountability, our democracy may never recover.
****** ENDS ******
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