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9-11 Archive 2003

Cover-Up: The 9-11 Commission

July 10, 2003

The controlled media and the seriously compromised 9-11 commission are seemingly complicit in concealing the truth - while writing the history - for the worst terrorist attack in American history. The truth about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is unlikely to emerge from the politically appointed National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The integrity of the so-called “independent” 9-11 commission is compromised by, among other things, the connections of its staff and key members to the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the White House, and domestic and foreign intelligence agencies.

The mainstream media has reported that the commission’s investigation has been hampered by the failure of the executive branch agencies, especially the Pentagon and the Justice Department, to provide requested documents and testimony. The heads of the commission recently reported that federal agencies under the president’s control were not cooperating quickly or fully. The commission also complained about the fact that, like Iraq, the U.S. government requires an agency “minder” to be present during interviews with officials. The commission’s chairman Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said the presence of an agency “minder” amounted to “intimidation” of the witnesses.

The fact that key members and staff of the commission belong to globalist groups and secret societies that have un-American agendas has not been reported in the controlled press. Kean and vice-chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, are both long-standing members of the CFR, as is commission member Jamie Gorelick and Philip Zelikow, its executive director. Zelikow is also a member of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), an appendage of British intelligence. Members of the CFR, IISS, and the Yale secret society Skull and Bones are found like threads running through the cloth of 9-11.

For example, Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the CFR and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced that his Blackstone Group had purchased, in October 2000, the mortgage on 7 World Trade Center, the 47-story building built by Larry Silverstein in 1987. Silverstein is the person who obtained 99-year leases on the twin towers shortly before 9-11 and who insured the property and its future income against terrorism. He is seeking some $7.2 billion claiming the attacks were two separate events.

WTC 7 mysteriously collapsed at 5:25 p.m. on 9-11, in what appears to have been a controlled demolition. John Wholihan, a firefighter with Rescue 5 from Staten Island was near WTC 7 when it collapsed. Wholihan told me that he heard “many explosions” just before the building collapsed neatly within the perimeter of its foundation. Silverstein received some $441 million in insurance money for WTC 7 although the cause of the collapse remains officially unexplained.

Peterson co-founded the Blackstone Group with Stephen A. Schwarzman, a member of the CFR and Skull and Bones. Both George W. Bush and his father are also Skull and Bones, as is John F. Kerry, the Democrat presidential candidate. Commission spokesman Alvin Felzenberg and commission member Fred Fielding served on the Bush transition team in 2001. Felzenberg was executive director of the President's Commission on the Federal Appointments Process.

Most of the commission’s work is done behind closed doors; it has only held three open sessions. The third session, “Terrorism, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim World” on July 9, concluded with Steven Emerson, the self-styled terrorism “expert” whose anti-Muslim rants appear often in the controlled press, particularly on Fox News and NBC News, where he is a consultant. The controlled media generally accepts the government’s version of 9-11 events as doctrine ignoring the numerous contradictions and unanswered questions.

CHENEY IN CHARGE

Intriguing testimony was heard during the commission’s second open session on May 23 when officials from the Department of Transportation and the Air Force appeared.

While two planes had already smashed into the WorldTradeCenter and with two other rogue aircraft - one headed for Washington - being tracked by civil and military aviation authorities, President George W. Bush continued to calmly read and discuss a story of a goat with school children in Florida. Rather than leaving to take charge of the national emergency, Bush continued to read for another thirty minutes. The only explanation for this bizarre behavior is that Bush had anticipated the event and knew it was being controlled by Vice President Dick Cheney.

The testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta on May 23 about Cheney’s actions is revealing. Mineta said he arrived at the Presidential Emergency Operating Center (PEOC) at 9:20 a.m. where he observed the Vice President taking charge:

Mineta: There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, “The plane is 50 miles out…The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to, “The plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the vice president, “Do the orders still stand?” And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?” Well, at the time I didn’t know what all that meant. And…

Hamilton: The flight you’re referring to is the…

Mineta: The flight that came into the Pentagon.

After some discussion of whether Cheney’s orders meant to shoot down the hijacked aircraft, it was clearly stated on the record that there were no such orders to do so, which raises the obvious question of what “the orders” were:

Hamilton: And so there was no specific order there to shoot that plane down.

Mineta: No, sir.

Hamilton: But there were military planes in the air in position to shoot down commercial aircraft.

Mineta: That’s right. The planes had been scrambled, I believe, from Otis at that point.

Mineta is referring to two F-15 fighter jets from the 102 Fighter Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base, near Cape Cod, Mass. As the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) responded to the hijackings, these planes reportedly flew to New York City in order to intercept the two planes that had been hijacked after leaving Boston’s LoganAirport. There are numerous unanswered questions about the actions taken by NORAD aircraft and why they were unable to intercept any of the hijacked passenger planes.

HOW FAST IS FAST?

The two F-15s were scrambled at Otis ANGB at 8:46 a.m. as the first tower at the WorldTradeCenter was struck. By 8:52 they were airborne and according to one of the pilots flying at full speed to New York City. “This looks like the real thing,” Lt. Col. Timothy Duffy was told as he jammed the F-15’s throttles into afterburner and the two planes flew the 153 miles to New York City at “supersonic speeds,” according to an Aviation Week & Space Technology (AW) article of June 3, 2002. “It just seemed wrong. I just wanted to get there. I was in full-blower all the way,” Duffy said. The F-15 Eagle is capable of flying 1,875 mph (Mach 2.5+) and has a range of 3,000 nautical miles. At full speed the Otis F-15s should have reached New York City in about 5 minutes, by 8:58 a.m. The armed fighter jets would then have been in position to intercept the second hijacked plane, which struck the south tower at about 9:02 a.m.

The F-15s from Otis were “cocked and loaded, and even had extra gas on board,” according to Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) commander Col. Robert K. Marr. I spoke to Air Force Capt. Wes Ticer, spokesman for Air Combat Command, who said an F-15 at “full power” reaches 1,875 mph, although its velocity varies depending on the plane’s weight and altitude.

Col. Alan Scott (Ret.) presented NORAD’s timeline to the commission on May 23. In this timeline the F-15 fighter jets are said to be 71 miles, “about eight minutes out,” from the WorldTradeCenter at 9:02 a.m. when the second tower was struck. This indicates the fighters had traveled only 83 miles in some nine minutes, flying about 550 mph (Mach 0.9). Scott told the commission that the interceptors jets, which would have been flying at less than 30 percent of their full speed, were “going very fast” - and nobody questioned it.

VIGILANT GUARDIAN

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, commander of the Continental U.S. NORAD Region (CONAR) at Tyndall AFB, Fla., was informed by Marr about the suspected hijacked aircraft shortly after 8:40 a.m. Arnold, who then headed the 1st Air Force for Air Combat Command, was in Air Operations Center preparing for another day of a major NORAD counter-terrorism exercise that morning called “Vigilant Guardian.”

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Chantilly, Va., a branch of the military intelligence community that operates the nation’s spy satellites was engaged in a similar exercise in which a passenger jet leaving the nearby DullesAirport would crash into the NRO building.

“I told him to scramble; we'll get clearances later,” Arnold said. On Sept. 11, a time-consuming bureaucratic procedure was required before scrambling defensive interceptor jets. FAA officials had to contact the National Military Command Center (NMCC) and request Pentagon air support. The NMCC then had to call NORAD's command center and ask about availability of aircraft and finally approval had to come from the Defense Secretary - Donald H. Rumsfeld – before launching fighters. This time-consuming procedure was the result of a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction dated June 1, 2001.

CANADIAN COMMANDERS?

However, rather than getting approval from Rumsfeld, two Canadian officers, serving as NORAD directors on the morning of 9-11, approved the fighters’ launch according to the Aviation Week article. Capt. Michael H. Jellinek, a British-born Canadian officer was serving as NORAD command director and another Canadian, Maj. Gen. Eric A. Findley was NORAD’s director of operations. Findley, positioned at NORAD headquarters in Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station for the Vigilant Guardian exercise “quickly approved the fighters’ launch,” according to the article. While NORAD has been faulted for its failures on 9-11, it should be noted that it was the Canadian officer Jellinek who was NORAD’s “director of plans, requirements and readiness” on Sept. 11, 2001.

I filed a written request with NORAD asking for clarification of who was in the chain-of-command and who actually approved the launching of the fighter jets on 9-11 and why foreign officers were making decisions during a national crisis in the United States. A NORAD spokesman said that an answer would not be readily available.

A year after 9-11, Arnold told ABC News that when he heard of the hijacking, “The first thing that went through my mind was, ‘Is this part of the exercise? Is this some kind of screw-up?’” In a 23 September 2001 interview with Mike Taibbi of Dateline NBC, Arnold said the F-15s from Otis were travelling about 1,200 mph:

ARNOLD: In the meantime, our pilots were coming at about 1.5 Mach, which is, you know, somewhere -11 or 12 hundred miles an hour.

TAIBBI: And they know where they're going at that point? The first...

ARNOLD: They're coming to New York. They're coming to New York. That's exactly right.

Because of the different reports concerning the speed of the Otis F-15s bound for New York City, I sent a written inquiry to NORAD requesting clarification of their velocity. Sgt. Gary Carpenter said that “based on the nature of the questions” NORAD’s responses would take considerable time.

The Secretary of Defense was supposed to approve the launching of interceptor jets. However, while the vice president was in the PEOC monitoring the approach of the aircraft that struck the Pentagon, Rumsfeld told ABC News’ Sam Donaldson shortly after 9-11 that he had been completely unaware of the approaching plane:

Donaldson: On Tuesday I am told the FAA notified someone in the Pentagon that there was a rogue plane apparently headed toward Washington. But you didn't know it, am I correct? -- until it hit?

Rumsfeld: I was in the Pentagon and felt the shock of the attack, and…

Donaldson: What did you think it was?

Rumsfeld: A bomb? I had no idea. I looked out the window and raced down the corridors till the smoke was too bad and then went outside, and saw the devastation and talked to an eyewitness who told me that he had seen an aircraft plow into the Pentagon between the first and second floor.

Donaldson: Could you believe it?

Rumsfeld: No. It's just -- it was a sight -- just amazing.

Richard Ben Veniste of the commission asked NORAD’s Major General Craig McKinley if the “concept of terrorists using airplanes as weapons was not something which was unknown to the U.S. intelligence community on September 10, 2001?” McKinley did not answer the question directly saying, “I’d like the intelligence community to address that.” When Ben Veniste read a list of attempts to crash planes into buildings, including the White House, McKinley said NORAD was “not postured” for what occurred on 9-11. “Threats of killing hostages or crashing [planes] were left to the script writers,” McKinley said.

Indeed, in early 2000 a writer working for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV wrote a screenplay that was an uncanny premonition of what occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. In the Murdoch film, a passenger airliner was hijacked remotely by a computer hacker and flown into the WorldTradeCenter. The pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, a spin off of the X-Files, was broadcast on March 4, 2001 on Fox TV.

In the Murdoch-financed film, the ground-based staff of a small Washington-based independent newspaper is able to prevent the plane from hitting the tower at the last second by restoring manual control to the pilots, who are then able to avoid hitting the building by mere feet. The “hijackers” in the film were corrupt elements in the U.S. Air Force and Defense Department who “hacked” into the plane’s navigation system in order to commit a horrible “terrorist” act in order to promote weapons sales and wars against “crack-pot dictators around the world begging to be smart bombed.”

I spoke with Andrew Butcher, a spokesman for Fox TV, who said that The Lone Gunmen was produced and financed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The commission’s spokesman Felzenberg has also written articles for Rupert Murdoch’s magazine, the Weekly Standard. Murdoch, the media magnate, openly used his 175 newspapers and Fox television network to promote the war policy of President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The left-leaning Guardian (UK) wrote in February: “You have got to admit that Rupert Murdoch is one canny press tycoon because he has an unerring ability to choose editors across the world who think just like him. How else can we explain the extraordinary unity of thought in his newspaper empire about the need to make war on Iraq?”