Two Days Before 9/11, Military Exercise Simulated Suicide Hijack Targeting New York
by Kevin Fenton
historycommons.org

The US military conducted a training exercise in the five days before the September 11 attacks that included simulated aircraft hijackings by terrorists, according to a 9/11 Commission document recently found in the US National Archives. In one of the scenarios, implemented on September 9, terrorists hijacked a London to New York flight, planning to blow it up with explosives over New York.

The undated document, entitled “NORAD EXERCISES Hijack Summary,” was part of a series of 9/11 Commission records moved to the National Archives at the start of the year. It was found there and posted to the History Commons site at Scribd by History Commons contributor paxvector in the files of the commission’s Team 8, which focused on the failed emergency response on the day of the attacks. The summary appears to have been drafted by one of the commission’s staffers, possibly Miles Kara, based on documents submitted by NORAD.

In the September 9 scenario, the fictitious terrorists’ goal seems to have been to kill New Yorkers with the rain of debris following the plane’s explosion. However, in the exercise, the military intercepted the plane and forced it away from the city. When the terrorists realized they were not near New York, they blew the plane up “over land near the divert location,” leaving no survivors. The military unit most involved in this scenario was NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), which also played a key role in the air defense response to the 9/11 attacks, two days later.

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Debunking Popular Mechanics?: PM Book Alleges FAA Source For Statistical Data; FAA Concedes No Such Data Records Exist.

by Aidan Monaghan

Beginning on page 22 of a Popular Mechanics 2006 book entitled Debunking 9/11 Myths, containing a forward comment by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, an attempt is made to clarify the role played by potential military aircraft intercepts during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Citing unnamed sources, part of this section reads as follows:

When contacted by Popular Mechanics, spokesmen for NORAD and the FAA clarified their remarks by noting that scrambles were routine, but intercepts were not – especially over the continental United States.

However, according to a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Freedom of Information Act response dated March 3, 2008, the FAA concedes that records for the information alleged in part by Popular Mechanics’ unnamed FAA source, do not exist.

Unraveling Of The Official 911 Story Continues
By Mark H. Gaffney
2-22-8

Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Today in America, we are witness to a great unraveling, the likes of which we have never seen before. There are no historical precedents. For many months now the official narrative about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America has been coming apart, and I mean: at the seams. The official story about that terrible day is disintegrating. The trend shows no sign of abating and in recent weeks it even appears to have accelerated. At the present rate, soon there will be nothing left of the official version of events but a discordant echo and a series of extremely rude after shocks.

Is our nation prepared to face those rude shocks?

The unraveling began within weeks of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report (in July 2004) with the shocking revelation that members of the 9/11 commission were convinced that government officials, including NORAD generals, had deceived them during the investigation­­­in essence, had lied to their faces during the hearings.[1] According to the Washington Post the members of the commission vented their frustrations at a special meeting in the summer of 2004. The panel even considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.

The unraveling continued in 2006 with the release of a follow-up volume, Without Precedent, authored by the two men who had co-chaired the commission, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton. The men had come under increasing fire ever since the release of their final report for presiding over what many now believe was a failed investigation. Stung by so much criticism, Kean and Hamilton felt the need to explain (and defend) themselves. The gist of their 2006 book is easily summarized. They write: “We were set up to fail.”

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Lone Gunmen Producer Questions Government on 9/11
Wonders why TV writers could accurately predict the attack while the government couldn’t
James Corbett
The Corbett Report
February 25, 2008

Cast and crew of the X-Files attended “WonderCon 2008″ in San Diego this weekend to discuss the upcoming X-Files movie. During the question and answer, one intrepid audience member asked Chris Carter, creator of X-Files and The Lone Gunmen, about the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, which eerily predicted the events of 9/11 that took place in New York mere months after the episode aired on tv. Carter, looking slightly flustered, turned the question over to the Lone Gunmen producer, Frank Spotnitz. Video of the response is available from YouTube:

After Carter’s bizarre and awkward joke about turning the question over to his producer because he had “a special underground connection” that made him better qualified to answer it, Spotnitz admits he was “disturbed that if we could imagine it [crashing planes into the World Trade Center] our government didn’t, and I didn’t understand why we weren’t prepared for a tragedy like that.” After raising this very valid point about the government and military’s complete lack of response on the morning of 9/11, he then quickly dismisses any suggestion that the pilot episode’s uncanny prediction of that attack was anything more than a coincidence, as the story was produced merely from an “active imagination.”

The episode in question featured rogue elements of the government hijacking a plane by remote control and attempting to fly it into the World Trade Center in order to launch wars in the Middle East. Highlights of the episode can be seen here:

That Spotnitz dismisses the incredible similarities of the episode to the events of 9/11 is perhaps unsurprising, given that he was featured prominently in the BBC Conspiracy Files documentary which attempted—albeit hamhandedly—to discredit the 9/11 “conspiracy theorists”…that is to say, anyone who doesn’t believe that the government is not telling us the truth about 9/11, which just happens to be the majority of the population.

Of course, many serious people have questioned just how the writing team was able to dream up a plot of a government staging an event to launch wars in the Middle East which actually happened six months later only for the government to use it as an excuse to launch wars in the Middle East.

This may well be coincidence, as Spotnitz asserts, but it’s worth questioning whether the writers of that episode were also correct about the supposition that the attacks were carried out by a rogue element within the government itself. Although Spotnitz is quick to dismiss this as “conspiracy theory” some of the crazed conspiracy wingnuts who believe it include ex-CIA field agents, ex-FBI translators, the former German Defense Secretary, the head of the largest victims family group (and the majority of its members) and many others, including Dean Haglund, star of The Lone Gunmen. For more information on these people and their reasons for questioning the government’s account of 9/11, please listen to this Corbett Report documentary:

Click here to download the mp3.

Original article here

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The Military Drills of September 11th: Why a New Investigation is Needed
by Elizabeth Woodworth
Global Research, September 27, 2007

Information regarding military exercises is classified and difficult to research. Though there was unusually high and confusing drill activity on 9/11, this strange coincidence has not gained much public notice. This essay quotes military officials from their own magazines, and compares their statements to what the 9/11 Commission wrote about the so-called surprise factor, and also to the Commission’s position that the drills aided the response.

Though both the 9/11 Commission Report and members of the Bush Administration repeatedly stated that the use of planes as weapons could not have been predicted, other official sources indicate that military exercises had been underway to counteract this very possibility.

1. Was it a Surprise that Hijacked Planes Were Used as Weapons on 9/11?

The element of surprise has been widely given (and quoted) as the reason why the 9/11 attacks were so successful against the world’s greatest military power.

Before proceeding to the statements on both sides of the issue, the context for these attacks should be understood in light of three defense procedures which were unusually and significantly changed in the months preceding 9/11:

1. A May 8^th 2001 Statement by the President gave responsibility for coordinating, training and planning all national defense programs related to weapons of mass destruction to Vice President Cheney, whose office was not part of the National Command Authority. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta testified before the 9/11 Commission that he was present and observed Dick Cheney in the Presidential Emergency Operating Center tracking the position of Flight 77 for many miles as it approached the Pentagon.¹ “Based on Norm Minetta’s testimony and other information, it appears that the military have regarded Cheney as a ‘Deputy Commander-in-Chief’. They also understand that he is the real power behind the throne…It appears that Vice President Dick Cheney was in charge of all the many air defense exercises that took place on the morning of September 11, 2001.”²

2. The 1997 hijacking scramble protocol CJCSI 3610, which distinguished emergent situations (requiring immediate action between the FAA and the military) from non-emergent situations (requiring decision input from the highest levels of the DoD) was rewritten June 1, 2001, as ordered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.³ As a result, the number of fighter-interceptor scrambles fell from the usual average of 7-8 per month before the rewrite, to zero during the 3.3 months before September 11^th, and to zero on September 11^th itself.⁴

3. Changes in the dates of annual and semi-annual military air defense exercises resulted in an unprecedented concentration of air drills on September 11th, and included hijackings and drills in which planes hit buildings. These will be explored later.

The transfer of two line defense roles to senior members of the Bush-Cheney Administration, paired with the concentration of air drills on the day itself, raise serious questions regarding the success of the attacks.

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