Why did airplanes fly around for an hour and a half without interceptors being
scrambled from Andrews [Air Force Base] ... right next to the capital?

- Paul Hellyer, Canadian minister of national defense, 1963-1967

Many aircraft at a military base just outside Washington, DC, were taking part in training exercises around the time the terrorist attacks occurred on September 11, 2001, it has been revealed. But whether these exercises impaired the ability of the various units at the base to effectively respond to the attacks has never been properly investigated.

From the History Commons Groups blog:

9/11 Training Exercise Planned for Simulated Plane Crash Five Minutes before Pentagon Attack Took Place

Five minutes before the Pentagon was hit on September 11, 2001, a training exercise being run by a US intelligence agency just over 20 miles from the Pentagon was set to include the scenario of a small private jet plane crashing into a building. It is unclear whether the scenario was played out, or if the exercise had been called off by that time.

Important details of the exercise, which was being conducted by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) at its headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia, are revealed in a document obtained by the 9/11 Commission. The document, titled "Early Morning Flight Activity September 11, 2001," was part of a series of 9/11 Commission records moved to the US National Archives at the start of this year. It was found there, and posted online, by History Commons contributor paxvector.

Two military aircraft were flying at high altitude near the Pentagon around the time it was hit on 9/11, but the identities of these aircraft and what they were doing over the Pentagon are unknown.

The planes had the call signs "Bobcat 14" and "Bobcat 17." A partial transcript of air traffic controller communications reveals they were communicating with the control tower at Washington's Reagan National Airport, which is less than a mile from the Pentagon, between at least 9:31 a.m. and 9:40 a.m. on September 11. [1] (The attack on the Pentagon took place at 9:37 a.m. [2]) Radar data has shown that the two aircraft flew "in trail" (in single file, with one directly behind the other) at an altitude of 21,000 feet, and were overhead in the few minutes before the Pentagon was hit. [3]

LAUNCHED FROM DOVER AIR BASE

It has been widely reported that on September 11, 2001, four passenger aircraft were hijacked, and three of them subsequently hit their intended targets in New York and Washington. Less well known is that, during the two hours over which the 9/11 attacks occurred, air traffic controllers and military personnel had to devote significant time to a fifth plane that was incorrectly reported as hijacked. This aircraft was, in the words of one military official, "the first red herring of the day." [1]

The aircraft was Delta Air Lines Flight 1989, a Boeing 767 that had taken off from Boston. From around 9:30 a.m., it was repeatedly suspected of having been hijacked. Even though subsequent events had indicated the aircraft was fine, a police SWAT team and FBI agents were sent out to it after it made an emergency landing in Cleveland, Ohio, and it was not until about two hours after the plane landed that all its passengers had been allowed off.

Miles Kara, who was a professional staff member of the 9/11 Commission, has posted an entry on his Internet blog (copied below), in response to recent revelations about training exercises held by the U.S. military prior to the 9/11 attacks.

The new information about the training exercises appears in a 9/11 Commission document found in the U.S. National Archives by a contributor to the History Commons website. The document reveals that, among other things, two days before 9/11, NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) conducted an exercise scenario based around "Terrorists with explosives who plan to detonate them over NYC." Three days earlier, another scenario conducted as part of the same exercise involved a fictitious terrorist group hijacking a Boeing 747 and threatening to "rain terror from the skies onto a major U.S. city unless the U.S. declares withdrawal from Asian conflict."

Langley Air Force Base was the second military base that launched fighter jets to defend America in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Three of its F-16s were ordered to take off toward Washington at 9:24 a.m. that morning, but by the time they were airborne, more than 40 minutes had passed since the first attack on the World Trade Center, and almost half an hour since the second.

Furthermore, the pilots were hindered by an extraordinary combination of confusion, communications problems, conflicting orders, breaches of protocol, and other difficulties. Consequently, when the Pentagon was hit at 9:37 a.m., the jets were further away from it than they'd been when they took off. According to witnesses on the ground, fighters did not arrive over the Pentagon until around 10:40 a.m.--more than an hour too late to protect it from the attack.

A close examination of publicly available accounts raises the possibility that deliberate attempts were made to sabotage the ability of the Langley jets to respond to the 9/11 attacks, thereby paralyzing normal, well-practiced procedures. In this article, I focus on three particular aspects of the jets' response.

Osama bin Laden
Dead or Alive?
David Ray Griffin

“This book is part of a growing body of nonfiction that illuminates the cataclysmic gap between those with power, who do as they please, and those with knowledge, who are not heard. … President Obama [must] break out of the closed circle of power to connect with the kind of independent knowledge found in this book…”
—Robert David Steele Vivas, recovering spy, founder of the USMC Intelligence Center, CEO of OSS.Net, and CEO of Earth Intelligence Network

The US’s political discourse and foreign policy in recent years has been based on the assumption that Osama bin Laden is still alive. George W. Bush promised as president that he would get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” and has been widely criticized for failing to do so. The US’s present military escalation in Afghanistan is said to be necessary to “get Osama bin Laden.” The news media regularly announce the appearance of new “messages from bin Laden.” But what if Osama bin Laden died in December 2001—which is the last time a message to or from him was intercepted?

This information has recently been posted at the History Commons Groups blog:

... Another contributor, paxvector, is doing yeoman work posting a tremendous number of obscure but important 9/11 Commission documents online:

http://www.scribd.com/HistoryCommons

I'm going to make that one a permanent link in the sidebar.

Lots of new things coming down the pike, slowly but steadily. Don't forget, we're in need of any and all donations--financial and volunteer--that you can make.

A British hedge fund manager has revealed how, in the 15 minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, he was able to short sell key shares, thereby making a financial profit from the tragedy that was unfolding.

In part two of the BBC documentary series The City Uncovered with Evan Davis, which was broadcast on Wednesday 21st January, David Yarrow, the managing director of Clareville Capital, described how he made significant profits following the September 11 attacks, as well as the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the July 7, 2005 London bombings.* Presenter Evan Davis began the segment: "On 9/11, David Yarrow was watching television in a hotel room in America. In the minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, his trading instincts kicked in. Seeing the market was about to plummet, he shorted key vulnerable shares, like airlines." (Short selling is a technique used by investors who try to profit from the falling price of a share. It involves selling shares you don't already own, but instead only borrow, with the intent of purchasing them at a later date at a hopefully lower price, thereby netting a profit.)

The idea of such an attack was well known [and] had been
wargamed as a possibility in exercises before September 11.

- Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate
School, Monterey, California

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, senior U.S. government and military officials repeatedly claimed that what happened that day was unexpected. In May 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "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." [1] Two years later, President Bush stated, "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." [2] General Ralph Eberhart, the commander of NORAD on September 11, said, "Regrettably, the tragic events of 9/11 were never anticipated or exercised." [3]

In April 2006, journalist Michael Bronner received in the post 30 hours of recordings he had requested from the Pentagon. These recordings, which came as a series of computer audio files on three CDs, had captured events on the operations floor at NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector throughout the day of September 11, 2001. [1] NORAD--the North American Aerospace Defense Command--is the military organization responsible for monitoring and defending the airspace of North America. Its Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), based in Rome, New York, is responsible for monitoring and protecting 500,000 square miles of airspace above the northeast U.S., including the airspace over New York City and Washington, DC. [2] It was within this airspace that the 9/11 attacks occurred, and from the NEADS operations floor that the U.S. military's response originated. Evidence of what happened there that day is clearly in the public interest and of obvious importance for attempts to unravel how the attacks were able to succeed. In an August 2006 Vanity Fair article based on the recordings, Bronner therefore referred to these "NORAD tapes" as "the authentic military history of 9/11." [3]

In a recent interview, Assistant Chief James Schwartz of the Arlington County Fire Department (ACFD) revealed an intriguing detail relating to the 9/11 Pentagon attack. Just before the Pentagon was hit, ACFD responded to alarms going off at the USA Today building, located a few miles from there. Yet it is unclear whether there was actually any fire. Other evidence indicates that, as a result of this alarm, when the Pentagon was hit a significant number of fire and medical units were already on the road nearby and available to quickly respond to the attack. Curiously, the two buildings of the USA Today complex were known as the "Twin Towers." [1]

Several entries in the Complete 9/11 Timeline (copied below) describe what appear to have been individuals disguised as firefighters or military personnel, who were involved in the rescue and recovery efforts at the Pentagon following the attack there on September 11, 2001. What these individuals were doing is unknown, but possibilities need to be investigated, such as whether they were there to tamper with, plant, or remove evidence. That this may have been the case is given weight by the fact that some people who appeared to be members of the military were witnessed stealing crash debris from in front of the Pentagon.

Minutes after the Pentagon was hit on September 11, two aircraft were seen on the radar screen at a nearby Army airfield, circling the Pentagon and rapidly descending, with one of them emitting an emergency distress signal. The identities of these aircraft are unclear, as is the reason one of them was emitting the distress signal. These and other details about the 9/11 Pentagon attack were revealed by a supervisor of air traffic control at the airfield, in one of over 1,300 oral histories relating to the attack that were recorded by military employees. To date, only a small number of the oral histories have been publicly released, which raises questions about what important details might be in the other, unreleased interviews.

UNIDENTIFIED AIRCRAFT OVER THE PENTAGON

Here are the details of David Ray Griffin's important soon-to-be-released new book, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-up and the Expose. It is available for pre-order at Amazon.com here:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Pearl-Harbor-Revisited-Cover-Up/dp/1566567297

The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé
David Ray Griffin

"Thank God that guy's there! Where has he been?"

- Firefighter Mike Smith, upon seeing the first military fighter jetarriving over the Pentagon, 10:40 a.m., September 11, 2001

At the time the 9/11 attacks began, many of the pilots with the District of Columbia Air National Guard (DCANG) were in the headquarters of the 121st Fighter Squadron at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland. They had been suspicious upon learning of the first crash in New York, but when a second plane hit the World Trade Center the emergency became obvious. "We're under a terrorist attack!" someone yelled. One DCANG officer at the base exclaimed, "Well, holy shit, if this is a terrorist attack, we need to get something in the air!" According to Lt. Col. Steve Chase, who was at the operations desk there: "People just launched into action. There was a buzz in the unit." [1]

Most new entries this week again look at the 2001 anthrax attacks. In October 2001, the FDA only recommended Cipro for use against the disease, despite a plentiful supply of alternatives, and the FBI investigation into the attacks was hampered when it destroyed an original batch of Ames strain anthrax. In November, reports began emerging linking the USAMRIID lab to the attacks, although its head later claimed a "lot of good" had come out of them.

Most of the new entries published by the 9/11 Timeline this week deal with the anthrax scare. The main drug used to combat anthrax was Cipro, which a high government official advised some reporters to take shortly after 9/11. Although an inquiry was launched into a coverup of problems with it in May 2000, the FDA endorsed the drug two months later. Hoax letters similar to the later anthrax mailings were sent to Fox News from 2000, and one may have been received by a Florida tabloid in mid-September 2001.

A number of people received phone calls the morning of September 11, 2001 that they believed were made by individuals on board the planes that crashed in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Descriptions of these calls, however, reveal something odd. According to the official story we have been told, the callers were in an unprecedented crisis, stuck on planes under the control of murderous terrorists, and with no knowledge of whether they were going to be allowed to live or die. Yet in many of the phone calls, the caller appears to have been remarkably calm. Perhaps if just a few of them--for example, those with specific personal experiences, like the flight attendant who was a former police officer--had maintained their composure, then this would be less remarkable. Yet the large majority of the callers displayed this same calmness. In their recollections, some of the people who received the calls have indeed commented on this fact, apparently surprised by it. Some of them have also commented on the absence of panic, screaming, or other sounds of chaos in the background.

Here's a new article by Mike Rudin, that's been posted on the BBC News website. It mentions that NIST says "fire fighters could not fight the fires in Tower 7, because they didn't have enough water and focused on saving lives." However, NIST's claim is incorrect. There were in fact fireboats that had been moored near the WTC the morning of 9/11, to provide water to the site. See:
http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/17_Pharvey.html

One of the boats, the John J. Harvey, could reportedly "pump 16,000 to 20,000 gallons of water a minute. 'That's the equivalent of 15 [fire] engines drafting water,' explained 65-year-old FDNY retiree Bob Lenney, who spent 25 years piloting Harvey." See:
http://www.fireboat.org/press/time_out_092701.asp

In fact, one of NIST's earlier reports stated, "According to the FDNY first-person interviews, water was never an issue at WTC 7 since firefighting was never started in the building." See:
http://wtc.nist.gov/NISTNCSTAR1-8.pdf (p. 110).

9/11 third tower mystery 'solved'

By Mike Rudin
BBC, Conspiracy Files

The final mystery of 9/11 will soon be solved, according to US experts investigating the collapse of the third tower at the World Trade Center.

The 47-storey third tower, known as Tower Seven, collapsed seven hours after the twin towers.

Investigators are expected to say ordinary fires on several different floors caused the collapse.

Conspiracy theorists have argued that the third tower was brought down in a controlled demolition.

Unlike the twin towers, Tower Seven was not hit by a plane.