Reply #164: Because the NSA wiretaps are secret, nobody's allowed to ...

[hack89]

talk about them - right? The CIA, Pentagon and the NSA have been leaking like sieves - you really think that the fact that the war games were secret would stop someone from anonymously leaking the information?

There is no evidence that false blips were injected into FAA ATC radars. NORAD command and control screens perhaps - that happens all the time. But not FAA radars - that is way too dangerous to even contemplate.

Besides, it would have made no difference - the NEADS radars were so old they would not display synthetic contacts, only raw video returns from actual aircraft.

Back at the NEADS Operations Center, identification technicians were sorting thousands of green dots on their radar scopes, looking for American Flight 11. Since terrorists had turned off the Boeing 767's transponder, FAA controllers could only tell NEADS technicians where the flight had last been seen. The NEADS radar screens showed "primary" or "skin-paint" returns, the raw radar pulses reflected from an aircraft's surface.

http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/defense/aviationnow_jumpstart.htm

Radar is the NEADS controllers' most vital piece of equipment, but by 9/11 the scopes were so old, among other factors, that controllers were ultimately unable to find any of the hijacked planes in enough time to react. Known collectively as the Green Eye for the glow the radar rings give off, the scopes looked like something out of Dr. Strangelove and were strikingly anachronistic compared with the equipment at civilian air-traffic sites. (After 9/11, NEADS was equipped with state-of-the-art equipment.)

In order to find a hijacked airliner—or any airplane—military controllers need either the plane's beacon code (broadcast from an electronic transponder on board) or the plane's exact coordinates. When the hijackers on American 11 turned the beacon off, intentionally losing themselves in the dense sea of airplanes already flying over the U.S. that morning (a tactic that would be repeated, with some variations, on all the hijacked flights), the NEADS controllers were at a loss.

"You would see thousands of green blips on your scope," Nasypany told me, "and now you have to pick and choose. Which is the bad guy out there? Which is the hijacked aircraft? And without that information from F.A.A., it's a needle in a haystack.

http://www.vanityfair.com/features/general/060801fege01