- I am indebted to Sander Hicks for much of the research
for this article.
-
- "Without superior air power, America is a bound
and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey for any yellow dwarf with a
pocket-knife." - Lyndon Baines Johnson
-
- For 50 minutes, from 8:15 a.m. until 9:05 a.m. on the
morning of Sept. 11, 2001, it became widely known within the FAA and the
Department of Defense that four domestic passenger airplanes had been hijacked.
-
- New York and Washington DC 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. Air traffic controllers
are taught to assume that a hijacking is underway, if there is any doubt
at all.
-
- Flight 11, out of Logan airport in Boston, deviated from
its path at 7:45 a.m. It hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center
at 8:46 a.m.
-
- No fighter jets intercepted any of the three off-course
aircraft that hit the World Trade Center in New York and a section of the
Pentagon that was under repair in Virginia. It is estimated that 116 different
safeguards simultaneously failed on that fateful day.
-
- Did officials of the U.S. government know ahead of time
of plans to hijack these planes and for various reasons did they allow
that to happen? There is evidence that these same officials not only allowed
9-11 to occur, but facilitated the hijackings.
-
- The Stand-Down of U.S. Defenses
-
- When professional golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet stopped
responding to radio contact on October 23, 1999, an F-16 was by that plane's
side within 18 minutes. The F-16 "intercepted" the off course
Learjet, caught up with it, and attempted to make visual contact with the
crew. All of this was in line with the procedures published by the FAA.
This is standard operating procedure. Deviations from this procedure require
direct orders to stand-down. The question is not whether or not such orders
occurred, but who gave them.
-
- Was this question ever asked of the powers that be? Actually,
it WAS.
-
- On September 13, 2001, acting head of the Joint Chiefs
of staff, Air Force General Richard B. Myers issued contradictory statements
about why no fighters were dispatched on 9-11 to protect Washington D.C.
and the Pentagon. Florida Senator Bill Nelson demanded an explanation.
-
- 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 round 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
US air defenses responded or not; it simply provides an excuse for whatever
else they say. 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? The
Senator asked point-blank: Why did you wait so long to launch planes? and
Myers responded: We decided to launch planes after the second WTC had been
hit, and we didn't actually launch them until after the Pentagon was hit.
This is a non-response.
-
- As we saw with the Payne Stewart incident, 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.
-
- 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.
-
- Why did Myers not report this in his testimony the preceding
day?
-
- Of course, this information raises new questions: Why
were the fighter jets sent from that particular base which was relatively
distant, from the location of the hijacked airlines? But even 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.
-
- So what do we have? According to the first version of
the official story, no planes were scrambled. 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,"
that "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 ... "
-
- Cheney cut himself off mid-sentence. Why? Because if
he admits 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 would have been
informed BEFORE HE EVEN BEGAN TRAVELING TO THE SCHOOL TO READ TO CHILDREN,
in contradiction to the official story.
-
- This is supported by two journalists who were with Bush
on 9-11: ABC's Jon Cochran and Associated Press' Sonya Ross, who reported
that the President stated that he knew of the terrorist attacks before
he left his hotel.
-
- Were the US defense planes ordered to stand down? I believe
there is sufficient evidence to indicate that that is indeed the case.
-
- There are certainly many crucial questions about the
sequence of events on the morning of 9-11 that remain to be answered. Unfortunately,
the official commission investigating 9-11 did not ask them.
-
- Additional questions that need to be asked:
-
- - 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?
-
- - Was a war against Iraq already "in the cards,"
awaiting the right pretext? Ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil states in
his new book that the war in Iraq was planned from the first day of the
Bush Administration and that there was no evidence then, and there is no
evidence now, that Iraq was involved in 9-11. Former "terrorism czar"
Richard Clarke says that after 9-11, Donald Rumsfeld instantly wanted to
attack Iraq. And so 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 and 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? [This information
is raised in the 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? (He claims he became angry because the Carnivore
email monitoring system had somehow mixed what he called "innocent
emails" with those allegedly belonging to Al Qaeda. Shouldn,t investigatory
bodies be the ones to make such a decision? What exactly were these "innocent
emails? Who sent them? What did they contain?)
-
- - What was the involvement of Pakistan,s secret police,
which had close relations with the U.S. government? On Sept. 10, 2001,
the day before the attacks, the head of the Pakistani ISI, General Ahmad,
wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, who the US government says was the ringleader
of the hijackers. (The Times of India reports that the total amount transferred
was actually around $325,000. We'll ignore for now the statements from
Atta's father that his son is alive and that unspecified "others"
had used his identity, along with that of several of the other alleged
hijackers.) A Federal News Service reporter questioned National Security
Advisor Condoleeza Rice 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?"
-
- That was the actual question. The White House provided
the press with the following written transcript: "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 message, according to the White House transcript, that was
"inaudible".
-
- - Why were 29 pages of the US Congressional 9-11 committee
reports (on Saudi/US connections) censored and 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,
Israel, Iraq and other countries in the region?
-
- - 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 Center, enabling US government officials
to establish the identity of the hijackers?
-
- - Why would seismographs in the NYC area register two
small quakes at Ground Zero many moments after the planes hit but just
each tower began to collapse? This leads to speculation that -- as hard
as this is to believe -- the twin towers suffered explosions apart from
the impact of the two passenger jets.
-
- - How did building #7 at the World Trade Center "collapse"?
-
- This latter is terribly important, and it may turn out
to be the key to the whole mess. That building housed, among other things,
Mayor Giulianis 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.
-
- Building #7 was not hit by any airplane. It was a large
office building, 47 stories tall. To date, however, the common view is
that the building somehow caught fire and collapsed along with the two
towers. No investigating committee has been examining its "collapse."
-
- Originally, it was claimed tha 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 Federal Emergency Management
Agency report stresses that the fuel tanks remained fully intact. In pictures
of building 7 at 3 pm on September 11, two and a half hours before it collapsed,
the only fires are on the 7th and 12th floors; they are considered small
and containable and could have been forseeably put out by the building's
sprinkler system. FEMA was puzzled in its report about what happened to
building #7 and could only conclude, The specifics of the fires in WTC
7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time.
-
- The 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 but a short time before the attacks,
states 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 Building #6 in December, 2001, when he says, "...we're
getting ready to pull the building six."
-
- Silverstein's remarks are critical here in understanding
what occurred. Why would FEMA commission a report into how building #7
collapsed if it was already known that the owner, presumably in conjunction
with the government, made the decision to destroy it on the evening of
9/11?
-
- Thus, it is crucial to establish what exactly happened
to building #7: Did Silverstein (and the government?) make the decision
to 'pull' the building on September 11, 2001 as Silverstein indicated a
year later in the PBS interview, amidst the ongoing chaos, endangering
rescue workers and equipment? If so, when was this decision made?
-
- And 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 in the
middle of the chaos on 9-11? Could explosives could 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. The implications of THAT scenario
are even scarier and profound - the entire official story about what happened
on 9-11 would have to be discarded.
-
- Silverstein Properties' estimated investment in WTC 7
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 alone resulted in a profit of about $500 million!
-
- One would think that 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?
-
- Mitchel Cohen
-
- © Mitchel Cohen
-
- 2652 Cropsey Avenue, #7H
- Brooklyn, NY 11214
- (718) 449-0037
- mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
-
-
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