Edited 19 July 2008
Franklin Freeman
copyright © the author 2002-8
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Al-Qaeda had developed as a fellow-traveller of the US-CIA effort to support the anti-communist guerrillas in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Despite agency denials, the CIA evidently recruited Arabs to fight in Afghanistan via the US's Jeddah consulate in Saudi Arabia. Recruits were trained in the United States through al-Khifa, the US interface of Qaeda and "'Operation Cyclone', the American effort to support the mujaheddin". Some training was conducted at a camp in Connecticut assisted by ex-CIA "consultants". ("The Breeding-Ground and Birth of al-Qaeda")
With the end of the Cold War, the whole basis of America's military-intelligence establishment began to come into question. Supporters appealed to the image of Pearl Harbor, effectively its founding event, and sought to ...
A new, deadlier image of Qaeda began to be developed by the US intelligence community in 1996. The CIA's new bin Laden unit — "Alex Base" — began to "find connections everywhere". Bin Laden, previously known to be a terrorist financier, now began to appear as an important organizer too. ("The CIA's Bin Laden Issue Station, founded Jan. 1996")
In 2000 the CIA, in conjunction with the USAF, developed a program for Predator reconnaissance drones, contolled from CIA HQ at Langley, to spy on Bin Laden in Afghanistan. ("The CIA and the Predator Drone") This encouraged Counterterrorist Center chief Cofer Black and others to press for a missile-armed version of the drone itself. Debates over technical and legal issues delayed the resumption of reconnaissance flights in 2001. At the Principals Committee meeting on al-Qaeda of 4 September 2001, CIA chief George Tenet warned of the dangers of using an undertested "armed robot". However, Tenet accepted a suggestion to resume reconnaissance missions with the drones now made weapons-capable. ...
In April 2001 the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was running a war game in which the Pentagon HQ was to become incapacitated. A NORAD planner proposed the simulated crash of a hijacked foreign commercial airliner into the Pentagon. But the Joints Chiefs of Staff "rejected" the scenario as "too unrealistic" and liable to consume the whole exercise. (Charles Aldinger, "Pentagon crash scenario rejected before Sept. 2001", Reuters, 14 April 2004)
It is interesting to compare this "rejected" suggestion with the CIA aircrash "simulation" of 9/11, which was perhaps part of a concurrent NORAD exercise (see below).
On 4 March, there had been another "strange omen". Fox TV screened the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen (appropriately, perhaps, an X-Files spin-off). It was seen by millions of Americans. Our heroes come across a plot, apparently by foreign terrorists, to crash a Boeing 727 into the World Trade Center (WTC). They later discover that the plane is in fact being remotely controlled; the plot is really an intra-government conspiracy to boost the arms trade. ("Jetliners Smashing into Tall Buildings? No Surprise", The7thFire.com; "Killtown's: The Lone Gunmen's "Pilot" Episode") Chris Carter, producer of the X-Files and The Lone Gunmen, said that by the time the former series was coming to an end, he was approached by government agencies and NASA with script ideas. ... The Lone Gunmen pilot was made in late 2000. (Alex Jones interview with Lone Gunmen actor Dean Haglund, Prison Planet, (?) Dec. 2004.)
The US Visa Express programme was inaugurated on 25 June 2001 "for expediting nonimmigrant visa applications throughout Saudi Arabia". Springmann remarked: "According to the Los Angeles Times, 15 of the 19 people who flew airplanes into buildings [on 9/11] got their visas at the CIA's consulate in Je[ddah]." Asked whether he thought "the CIA could have had its fingers in a terrorism directed towards the United States", Springmann replied: "Well, who knows? I've seen it suggested that it was one way of getting the Americans involved at bases not only in the Middle East but at bases surrounding Russia".
(Fox News interview with J. Michael Springmann, 18 July 2002, transcript on the "Center for Cooperative Research" website; extract from the 9/11 Encyclopedia on the 911 Review website; CBC interview with Springmann, 2 July 2002, transcript on 911review site. The 9/11 Commission states that 15 of the hijackers "were issued a total of 18 visas in Saudi Arabia, 14 of which were issued in Jeddah (11 by the same [anonymous] consular officer), and 4 in Riyadh" [pdf document, p.33].)
A list of the alleged airliner hijackers was provided by the FBI within days of 9/11. (E.g., "US hunt closes in on plotters", BBC news online, 18 Sept. 2001) Stories quickly surfaced in the media that some of these "suicide hijackers" were in fact alive and living outside the United States. (Nick Hopkins, "False identities mislead FBI", The Guardian, 21 Sept. 2001; David Harrison, "Revealed: the men with stolen identities", Daily Telegraph, 23 Sept. 2001; "Hijack 'suspects' alive and well", BBC News online, 23 Sept. 2001) FBI director Robert Mueller admitted that some of the identities might have been stolen. (Daniel Sieberg, "Expert: Hijackers likely skilled with fake IDs", CNN.com, 21 Sept. 04) But in November 2001 he claimed virtual certainty about the hijackers' identities — without providing details or evidence. ("FBI: We Know Who Hijackers Were", CBSNEWS.com, 2 Nov. 2001) And there the official story seems to have remained. (The "hijackers'" names listed in the 9/11 Commission's final report of July 2004 (Chapter 7, pp.238-9 [HTML version]) are virtually identical with the originals (though some photos are different).)
The supposed hijack pilots were amateur flyers. More than this, they were particularly incompetent at flying even light aircraft such as Cessnas. Such lack of skill may have been less of a problem in targeting such outstanding buildings as the Twin Towers of the WTC. But the targeting of the west wing of the Pentagon involved several highly-skilled manoeuvres (see below, "The Pentagon Strike"). This from grossly-incompetent putative pilot Hani Hanjour. As has been remarked in other connections; — perhaps they want us to figure it out.
The 9/11 Commission Report has tried to paint a picture of a Hanjour who, though his flying skills were poor, continuously improved by persistance over the period 1999-2000, subsequently attaining private and commercial aircraft pilot licences .... The Report cites (usually in its endnotes) earlier examples of Hanjour's bad performance in tests. But it also gives a further example as late as June 2001, when Hanjour ... Air Fleet Training Systems at Teterboro, New Jersey. And, according to the Washington Post, Hanjour also failed a certification test in a light aircraft in August 2001, at Freeway Airport in Bowie, Maryland.
(9/11 Commission Report, chapter 7, pp.225-7, 242, 248 [HTML version]; ibid, Notes, pp.521-2, note 64 and p.531, note 170[HTML version]. **, "Dulles Hijackers Made Maryland Their Home", Washington Post, 19 Sept. 2001; the report is no longer available at the Washington Post website [though the link confirms that it existed]; this is a Usenet copy.)
In 2004 Porter Goss replaced George Tenet as head of the CIA. Gen Ahmad had a different fate. He was soon to resign — though the official reason was not his supposed links with terrorism. ("Profile: Porter Goss", BBC News online, 10 Aug. 2004; "A Cloak But No Dagger: An Ex-Spy Says He Seeks Solutions, Not Scapegoats for 9/11", Washington Post, 18 May 2002)
(The story can be found at http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/cia-simulation.htm)
Fulton's "exercise" was scheduled to start within five minutes of Flight 77 deviating from its scheduled course and doubling back to Washington. ('Timeline in Terrorist Attacks of Sept. 11, 2001', Washington Post, 12 Sept. 2001) What are the chances of this being coincidence?
Fulton is described as in 2002 head of the "Strategic War Gaming Division" of the NRO (we may wonder why the National Reconnaissance Office would contain something with this title). He had also been "Director of the National Security Space Master Plan for the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Space Communities".
Barbara Honegger, who worked in the White House under Reagan, points out another coincidence. Researching press reports, she found a [16 Sept. 2001] Washington Post story about the pilot of AA Flight 77 that .. was said to have crashed into the Pentagon.There are several possibilities:The pilot, Charles Burlingame, an ex-Navy flier, had, as his last Navy mission, helped craft Pentagon response plans in the event of a commercial airliner hitting the Pentagon. [However, I doubt that Burlingame was a suicide pilot!] ...
Honegger [also] states that Dick Cheney was ultimately in charge of the NRO exercise on the morning of 9/11. He was in the White House Situation Room for that purpose.
(Jon Rappoport, "The Great 9/11 Coincidence", reproduced on questionsquestions.net. He refers to Barbara Honegger's useful but "excusist" article "The US Government, Not the Hijackers, 'Chose' the Date of the 9-11 attacks")
(A) Fulton's team were actually responsible for the Pentagon attack. It was subsequently thought they would be exposed (by Congressional investigation, etc) and it was decided to issue a cover story as close to the truth as possible without actual exposure. (This may have been the case too with the story of how the Bush administration "completed a plan to eliminate al-Qaeda exactly one week" before 9/11. This story appeared on 5 Aug. 2002. See "The Lead-up to 9/11".)
(B)The "exercise" was imposed on Fulton beforehand by someone else within the chain of authority, as a cover for his own remote handling of Flight 77. In this case Fulton and his team were set up as potential fall guys.
(C) The "exercise" was a genuine coincidence. But the chances of this seem very low.
Jon Rappoport suggests that the story was cooked up as a cover "to explain the otherwise mind-boggling communications traffic among intelligence and military and civilian agencies of the US government ..." on the morning of 9/11. (Jon Rappoport, "The Great 9/11 Coincidence", reproduced on questionsquestions.net)
Why would the Bush administration threaten its own position with potentially incriminating stories? In the summer of 2002, there loomed the danger of a genuinely-independent investigation of "intelligence failures" associated with 9/11. In the circumstances of that time, a pro-active stance may have seemed the best choice. Hence the stories of the "plan to eliminate al-Qaeda", and CIA man John Fulton's "airliner crashing exercise" of 11 Sept. 2001. These stories may have been set up in 2001, as potential cover, or retrospectively in 2002.(For comparison, the message text "The match is about to begin" was evidently made up in summer 2002. The US official who wrote this was evidently influenced by the soccer World Cup of summer 2002. "Match" is what a soccer game is called, a fact which may not be so glaringly obvious to the average American as it is to the British reader.)
Col. John Baxter, USAF, MC, commander of the Air Force clinic, told U.S. Medicine [in Sept. 2001] that at approximately 8:42 a.m. [sic] on Sept. 11 he neither heard nor felt anything while training personnel in the back room of the fourth floor clinic, though people in reception area heard an "explosion" and felt a movement in the building. The three physicians, three technicians and one nurse then grabbed their trauma packs ... when someone in the hallway shouted to evacuate. ...The Pentagon strike occurred at 9:37:46 a.m. (9/11 Commission Report, chapter 1, p.10 [HTML version]). "8:42 a.m." could easily be a simple typo, or a confusion over an hour. Or it could be a mental slip on the part of Col. Baxter, giving away his prior knowledge that the attack was initiated at that time — and possibly that it was an "exercise" in which he was passively involved.[Matt Mientka, "Pentagon Medics Trained For Strike", U.S. Medicine, October 2001]
The manoeuvre aligned the plane with the west wing of the Pentagon. This section was in the last stages of renovation — and its outer wall had recently been reinforced to protect it from truck-bomb attacks — in the first leg of an ongoing Pentagon programme. The section was consequently "under-populated". ("Strike Against the Pentagon" (maps, etc), Washington Post; story on Scoop (NZ) site; Rachel E. Sheeley, "Rebuilding Hope ...", Palladium-Item online) Whereas perhaps 4,500 people would normally have been working in the hardest-hit areas, in fact 800 were there. Of these, 125 were killed, mostly civilians, including some construction workers. None of the Pentagon's top civilian and military leaders were killed (one general died). (David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, Arris, 2nd edn. Aug. 2004, p.40. See Griffin's lecture-text "9/11 ... (Conclusion)", "The Strike on the Pentagon", including the section's notes, for most of this.)
The flyers had gone to some trouble to target the plane on this wing. They then directed the plane horizontally into the wing, as if taxi-ing to land — another highly-skilled manoeuvre, even at normal landing speeds, let alone the "530 mph" at which it struck the Pentagon (9/11 Commission Report, chapter 1, p.10 [HTML version]). All this from "pilot" Hani Hanjour, whose qualification even to fly a single-engined light aircraft was dubious.
This effort to minimize military casualties suggests military foreknowledge of, and complicity in, the strikes. Understandably, they wouldn't have been prepared to sacrifice their own personnel the way that thousands of business people were in the Twin Towers.
... "New" video of the Pentagon attack from a second security camera was released (after a lawsuit by Judicial Watch) by the US Defense Dept. in May 2006. (Released footage from two cameras is at the bottom of the page "Defense Department Releases September 11 Pentagon Video to Judicial Watch" [no date; I saw it on 17 May 2006].) ...
The idea of a cruise missile having been used in the Pentagon attack strikes me as misguided, and may even have been encouraged as disinformation to discredit (make look ridiculous) the idea of a 9/11 conspiracy in general. A cruise missile (even the "big-winged" version) flying across Washington to the Pentagon would obviously have been observed by many people. They could not have mistaken such an object for a Boeing airliner.(Another variation, stated to have been by Thierry Meyssan, was the US government's original statement that a truck-bomb was responsible.)
There may have been other — military? — efforts at disinforming on the Pentagon strike: the differing wings of the building said to have been hit in various versions of the story appearing in the news media may have been military efforts put out to sow confusion.
The cargo plane had taken off from Reagan National Airport, a mile south of the Pentagon, at about 9:30. Airport controllers (who had been informed by Dulles Airport of "a primary radar target tracking eastward at a high rate of speed") then "vectored" the Hercules to "identify and follow the suspicious aircraft". The pilot
spotted it, identified it as a Boeing 757, attempted to follow its path, and at 9:38 ... reported to the control tower, "looks like that plane crashed into the Pentagon, sir."The Hercules then resumed its scheduled flight "to Minnesota". Shortly after 10 a.m., crossing Pennsylvania, the plane "spotted black smoke", apparently from the crashed UAL 75. This was "1 minute and 37 seconds after the impact time as established" by various data; but also "more than a minute before the earliest impact time originally posited by the author of the seismic data report".
(9/11 Commission Report, chapter 1, pp.25-6, 30 [HTML version]; ibid, Notes, p.462, note 170 [HTML version])
"Flying platforms", with lines-of-sight to the targets, may have been deemed necessary for guiding the final approach of high-speed remote-controlled airliners. We may speculate that subsequent data, placing UAL 93's crash-time several minutes earlier than that of the "original" seismic report, was produced to "fudge" the presence of the C-130H just before the crash.
The Northeast [US] Air Defense Sector (NEADS) of NORAD (the joint US-Canadian air-defence command) had two bases on alert status that day: the Otis Air National Guard Base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia. Each had "one pair of ready fighters". But the 9/11 Report then says that (in order to intercept the apparently-hijacked airliner AA 11) NEADS scrambled two F-15 fighters from Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts (Ibid, chapter 1, pp.17, 20 [HTML version]), which is several miles down the coast from Cape Cod.
Was the report of the Air National Guard's C-130H an accurate one? Was the Air National Guard made into a cover for the USAF (which had collaborated with the CIA during the development of the — evident cover of the — Predator drone in 2000-1)?
The "mechanical" argument which such claimants have tended to ignore is the combined effect of airliner-impact and jet-fuel fire within the towers. This may well have been sufficient to undermine their supporting structure.
Some have argued that two impacts registered by seismic detectors, separated by about two seconds, is evidence of bombs exploding in a tower with imperfect synchronization with the airliner impact. But the time delay can roughly be accounted for by the different speeds of sound in steel/concrete, on the one hand, and air on the other. The speed of sound in steel is about 5000 km/hour, and that in air 1000 km/hour. The time difference for the two shock waves to travel the approx. quarter mile from impact site to ground (the latter by the interior of the central hollow steel shaft, containing the stairwells and elevators) accounts roughly for the effect.
A related matter. A man who worked underground in one of the towers was badly burned by a "bomb" explosion (which I believe he claimed was just before the airliner impact — how did he judge that?) The explosion was said to have erupted from an elevator shaft or something. This may well be part of the fireball from the jet-fuel explosion, funnelled down the central shaft-space. (Something of the reverse happened in the 1993 truck basement bombing, when smoke and heat from the bomb went up the shafts to fairly high storeys.
On the other hand, why did World Trade Center 7 collapse? It did not have combined major impact and fire, but collapsed hours later from the bottom up, in contrast to the two towers — the only steel-framed building to have done so "as a result of fire alone".
Originally, a reserve fuel store in the basement was supposed to have caught fire and undermined the building. However, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), after a seven-year investigation, has now substituted a different "hypothesis" — "ordinary building fires" on several floors of the building. ...(Mike Rudin, "9/11 Third Tower Mystery 'Solved'", BBC News online, 4 July 2008.)
After WTC 7's collapse, a claim was published that the CIA's New York station had been situated on the top floor(s) of the building.