William Thomas. "Covering up America´s day of deception. Questions the 911 commission dared not ask"

[link to www.willthomas.net]

COVERING UP AMERICA’S DAY OF DECEPTION
QUESTIONS THE 911 COMMISSION DARED NOT ASK

Published | Monday June 21st 2004




National Commission On Terrorist Threats Upon The United States

The audio clips were riveting. Presented during the last morning of the 911 Commission’s public hearings, tape of the hijackers’ cabin announcements picked up by air traffic controllers left no doubt of their Middle Eastern origins. Even more telling was a clip of a phone conversation between a dithering controller and his military contact as they debated scrambling interceptors.

But why were they confused? Routine procedures in place for decades saw fighters launched to intercept stray aircraft 67 times - or every five days on average - in 10 months leading up to June 2001. [Stand Down]

Ken Smith was one of the first tenants in the World Trade Center in 1979. Smith told Radio Free America, “It was known to all the tenants of the WTC that the WTC was a ‘No Fly’ zone. If you came within 12 miles of the WTC, flying outside of a pattern where you were supposed to be, you were warned to back off. If you came within five miles, they would threaten to shoot you down. If you came within three miles, they could shoot you down.”

Smith recounted how a friend flying a small plane “got warned away and they almost blew him out of the sky 20 years ago, because he was showing somebody a close view of the towers.” [All Fall Down]

Other worrying discrepancies, as well as outright lies told by key military witnesses to the media and the commission complete a long-delayed whitewash of events that have brought death and misery to hundreds of thousands of people, including the victims of some 40 nations murdered in the World Trade Center and Pentagon - as well as innocent Afghan and Iraqi families still dying from US gunfire, aerial bombing and the lingering lethality of radioactive munitions.
The Twelfth Public Hearing of the 9/11 Commission was held on June 17, 2004. Five hours was devoted to the last big question regarding the military and FAA response to the rapidly unfolding events of 911. Let’s answer some of them now:

FBI Phoenix memo and German news account of BND intelligence warnings of impending hijack attacks against key US landmarks

1. Having spent hundreds of billons of tax dollars on homeland defenses – and with warnings of impending aerial hijacking attacks coming in for months from intelligence agencies around the world - why did it take so long to launch fighters on Sept. 11?

Despite many unheeded warnings, says the US victims’ Families Steering Committee (FSC), “Our country should have been able to defend itself from an air attack. One cause may have been the deviations from normal hijacking protocols by the FAA and NORAD. Standard intercept protocols were fatally delayed.”

Another problem cited by the FSC and my audio book, Stand Down, is that the acting head of the Joint Chief of Staff gave orders not to be interrupted from a routine meeting on the Hill. General Myers was not notified that the country he was in charge of defending was under attack – until the last strike on the Pentagon was carried out.

Stand Down and the FSC also point out that numerous military exercises held on Sept. 11 ensured that “mass confusion ensued when these exercises coincided with the terrorist attacks.”

The commission also failed to ask why 9 of the alleged hijackers pulled aside and questioned for suspicious ID and other irregularities were allowed to board their flights.
[FSC]
2. Did the 911 Commission receive full cooperation from NORAD and the FAA?

On the contrary, the 911 commissions investigating the Sept. 11 attacks was forced to issue subpoenas to both government agencies. Members of the 10-member panel complained that they had encountered "serious delays" in obtaining information from the Defense Department. "We are especially dismayed by problems in the production of the records of activities of NORAD and certain Air Force commands on Sept. 11," the panel reported. [New York Times Nov8/03]

A second subpoena served on the Pentagon was similarly unsuccessful in attaining records concerning whether NORAD responded quickly enough in dispatching interceptors on Sept. 11. [Washington Post Nov8/03]



ARSR-4 RADARS

3. What about this unanswered question from the FSC: “Was NORAD aware of the four hijacked planes veering off course even before being reported by the FAA? If not, please explain why NORAD, which monitors 7000 flights a day, was unable to track the four aberrant flights.”

Top military commanders insist that the hinterlands of the USA were “terra incognita” on Sept. 11. As the man in charge of tactical air defenses, Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, told the 911 commission: “We couldn’t see into the interior of the country, we couldn’t talk to our aircraft that were airborne to the interior of the country and we did not have a command and control system that would absorb the number of radars.”

Maj. Gen. Craig McKinley reassuringly added that since 911, “We have incorporated the radars that were there all along so that our military controllers can now see them, see those tracks of interest.”

Both statements are false.

In fact, US military defenders and air traffic controllers in the United States share the same radars. Known as the Joint Surveillance System, this billion-dollar network of long range Air Route Surveillance Radars provides total air defense and air traffic control for the continental United States. On Sept. 11, “real time” radar coverage of the entire US eastern seaboard and its approaches were available at all times to both FAA and USAF control centers using an overlapping mix of older ARSR radars with a range of 200 nautical miles and their Model 4 replacements that can locate and track aircraft out to 250 sea miles. [Stand Down]





East Coast air route radars on Sept. 11

8:14
Two controllers discuss the fact that the pilot of American Airliners Flight 11 is out of contact. There is silence for 10 minutes until a hijacker's voice is heard. "We have some planes," it says. "Just stay quiet and you will be OK. We are returning to the airport."

8:19
The transponder transmitting identification and flight data from Fl 11 suddenly stops transmitting.



4. What happens when transponders fail in flight?

At jet speeds, the specter of mid-air collision makes every second of response time is vital. Automatic alarms on every radar screen within range would have alerted FAA controllers – as well as NORAD and NEADS battle staffs sharing the same scopes – that something was seriously wrong onboard Fl 11.

Already in progress on the morning of Sept. 11, a nationwide defense drill against simulated air attack would have picked up the loss of Fl 11’s radar “data block” immediately. Charged with protecting America’s industrial, political and population heartland, the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) commanded eight armed alert fighters on 15-minute stand-by to escort wayward aircraft. But many more fighter jets were available to fly interceptions for the day’s practice drill.




Because of what the Pentagon calls, “bizarre coincidence,” on Sept. 11, 2001 NORAD was three days into Operation Vigilant Guardian. Held twice a year to tweak NORAD’s continent-spanning surveillance and interception web, North American air defenses that morning were aggressively alert and battle staffed, with key officers needed to make immediate decisions stationed in the "battle cabs" of each interlinked US Air Force command post.

The same officers were also perfectly placed to issue orders blocking US air defenses. According to the FSC and other sources, some air bases and military pilots pleading for orders to intercept the developing attacks were told to stand down.

We also know that despite the end of the Cold War and close ties with America’s new Russian ally, Operation Vigilant Guardian directed the attention of US air defenders to a simulated Soviet threat coming in over the North Pole.

Richard Ben-Veniste, one of 10 members of the 911 commissions, earlier pledged to pursue this suspiciously timed air defense exercise, “very, very diligently,"

And the former Watergate prosecutor did so, asking Gen. Arnold under oath on May 23, 2003:
“ Sir, given the awareness of the terrorists’ use of planes as weapons, how was it that NORAD was still focusing outward in protecting the United States against attacks from the Soviet Union or elsewhere and was not better prepared to defend against the hijackings scenarios of a commercial jet, laden with fuel, used as a weapon to target citizens of the United States?” [911 Commission Testimonies: Remarks of NORAD Personnel May 23, 2003]

Maj. Gen. Arnold admitted that “back to 1998” the Pentagon’s top brass were calling Osama bin Laden “the most dangerous man in the world. And our focus, with the demise of the Soviet Union Warsaw Pact, was that we felt like the greatest threat to the United States would come from a terrorist…or rogue nation.”

As Major Arias told the News Herald in June 2001, “The Cold War is over.” So who gave the orders for focusing US air defenses on the North Pole on Sept. 11?

5. Isn’t it true that America’s air defenses looking out for external threats were not expecting an attack from within the continental USA?
" It was initially pretty confusing," Gen. Myers later told the military press. "You hate to admit it, but we hadn't thought about this." [American Forces Press Service Oct23/01]

But they had.



Pentagon crash drill, Oct. 24-26, 2000

As John Arquilla, a Special Operations expert at the Naval Postgraduate School put it, “The idea of such an attack was well known. It had been wargamed as a possibility in exercises before Sept. 11, 2001.”

Just 11 months before - between October 24 and 26, 2000 - NORAD had trained “for a passenger plane crashing into the Pentagon". [Mirror Nov13/03; Associated Press Aug22/02; Monterey Herald July18/02]

The FSC investigation also found that NORAD exercise Amalgam Virgo One, which took place in June 2001, featured a picture of Bin Laden on its cover.

Col. Alan Scott told the commission that Operation Amalgam Virgo simulated a cruise missile “launched off a rogue freighter in the Gulf of Mexico.” But the 911 investigators believed that Amalgam ’02 - which was in the planning stages prior to September 11th - 2001, involved a “hijacking scenario.”

In another “bizarre coincidence”, even as the doomed Flight 77 took off from Dulles International on the morning of Sept. 11, the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office operating all U.S. spy satellites was conducting a simulated emergency drill in which a plane from Dulles International crashed into their building. [AP Aug 22/03]