http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/08/why_is_alec_baldwin_alluding_t.html
8/24/11 at 10:27 AM

Photo: Twitter

The actor and potential mayoral hopeful had a late Twitter session overnight, as he's been known to do, in which he answered questions from followers. At the end, he went on a particularly uncomfortable tangent. "Do you think Bin Laden was behind 9-11?" he wrote, followed by two messages about the counter-terrorist exercise Amalgam Virgo, a favorite talking point of the truther movement. When Baldwin was asked if it was "a little late to make that accusation" by a follower, he replied, "what 'accusation?'" and concluded: "9-11 ........ what have we learned?"

For one, we've learned that people are not generally thrilled when September 11 is invoked with doubt as to its perpetrators, whether it's a joke or not. Baldwin, who's hosting a public forum next month about 9/11, is a noted provocateur and a master with the press, so it's possible that he's poking fun at the truther contingent or just getting himself some attention. But even if that's the case, he's doing so in a way ambiguous enough to raise eyebrows.

New details of a NORAD exercise called Amalgam Virgo 01-02 have been found in a document at the National Archives. The exercise involved a suicide pilot attacking a military installation in the US. It was run in early June 2001, just three months before 9/11.

The document was found in the 9/11 Commission’s files at the National Archives by History Commons contributor Erik Larson (a.k.a. Paxvector) and uploaded to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd. Some information about the exercise was revealed at the History Commons Groups blog in June, when we publicised a commission document summarising a group of military exercises designed to help the military deal with suicide hijackings. However, the newly-found three-page scenario provides more detail.