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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New revelations in attack on American spy ship
Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn’t tell full story of deadly ’67 incident

By John Crewdson |Tribune senior correspondent

October 2, 2007

Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister, is shouting into the phone.

“I’m angry! I’m seething with anger! Forty years, and I’m seething with anger!”

Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would become known as the Six-Day War.

For Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with incredulity: that Israel would attack an important ally, then attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots who had confused the U.S. Navy’s most distinctive ship with an Egyptian horse-cavalry transport that was half its size and had a dissimilar profile. And they’re also incredulous that, for years, their own government would reject their calls for a thorough investigation.

“They tried to lie their way out of it!” Lockwood shouts. “I don’t believe that for a minute! You just don’t shoot at a ship at sea without identifying it, making sure of your target!”

Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping.

Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the first time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency’s position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots — communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.
The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel’s reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.

In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country’s chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had “become the center of considerable controversy and debate.” It was not the agency’s intention, it said, “to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material,” available athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty .

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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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NORAD Live and Un-Cut
Official Loose Change Blog

In August, 2006, Michael Bronner, a writer for Vanity Fair Magazine, received 30 hours of audiotape from the Northeast Air Defense Sector that chronicled their response on 9/11. Mr. Bronner released 10 minutes of audio from them in MP3 format.

In August, 2007, we received 120 hours of audio, and are proud to release them in their entirety to the public.

There are 18 WAV files, each one approximately 180 megabytes in size and six hours in length. To download them, you will need a Bittorrent program. BitLord is recommended for PC and Azereus is recommended for Mac.

Download the torrent file here.

Many thanks to NORAD for sending us this material.

Loose Change Blog posting here.

The Pentagon Flight Path Misinformation, Stand-Down, War Games, and the Three Mysterious Planes
By Arabesque

Many 9/11 researchers including even Jim Hoffman and Pentagon research have made reference to a flight path map of alleged flight 77 by Former Air Force Pilot Steve Koeppel.[1] Unfortunately, this map is wrong. Any doubt of this fact has been removed in an excellent research piece by Caustic Logic:“More people had fallen for [this map] at some point (besides me, not that I even looked close until now): Jim Hoffman at one point used Koeppel’s map to illustrate a ‘Spiral Attack Maneuver Avoids Top Brass.’”[2]

As indicated on the map below, there is no way that the plane could have approached from the north without radically altering its flight path from the east.[3]

In other words, the plane would have had to flown in an incredibly impractical direction before the approach as seen in Koeppel’s flight path map.

Koeppel relied on a single, error filled source as Caustic Logic explains:

“As an ill-fated aside before explaining his sources, Koeppel pointed out “what’s surprising is how many news sources got the information wrong. For example, look at this graphic from Reuters, which has the attack on the wrong side of the Pentagon:”[4]

“[Below] is the graphic he used, labeled “The Pentagon Attack” and featuring a six-point timeline of events, along with a grossly incorrect impact point shown. What’s at least as surprising, in my opinion, is where Koeppel explains

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