Flight 77, the Fake War on Terror, and the Dubai Port Deal

[Time for change]

On 9-11-01, I was in the habit of receiving my news through the corporate U.S. news media (CM). So I naturally accepted the standard CM story of a terrorist attack on our country until later that day when my son, a DU member (EOTE), pointed out to me the absurdity of the most powerful and technically advanced military in the history of the world being so vulnerable to the attacks that occurred on that day.

Since that time I have read several books that have pointed out the numerous inconsistencies in the CM story, the best one IMO being The 9/11 Commission Report – Omissions and Distortions” by David Ray Griffin. This book not only lucidly and thoroughly points out the many inconsistencies in the standard version of the events of 9/11, but just as important, it shows how the 9/11 Commission systematically ignored any evidence that seriously disputed the official version and tended to suggest that the Bush administration was complicit in the attacks. The Commission didn’t dispute most of these claims, they simply ignored them. And those that they did dispute were disputed with incomplete and implausible explanations.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” seems much more calculated to enhance its power and enrich itself and its friends than to protect us against terrorism. For example:
On September 19th, more than ten members of the bin Laden family were allowed to fly out of the country without being interviewed.
The war in Afghanistan was contemplated long before 9-11, and seemed to be aimed much more at occupying the country than at capturing top al Qaeda members.
Our prisoners of war are held indefinitely, subjected to a wide range of appalling conditions and abuses including torture, and don’t even have to be charged with a crime in order to justify their indefinite imprisonment – and yet, of 505 prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay as of November 2005, only four had been charged with a crime.
Of thousands of cases every year of warrantless spying by NSA on American citizens within the United States, only about ten per year have merit.
Finally, the war in Iraq was contemplated and very much desired by the Bush administration long before the 9/11 attacks, which were used by the administration to justify the war to the American people and to Congress, despite the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks.

And now we have the Dubai port deal, which would allow a corporation from a country with strong ties to the enemy that we are supposed to be fighting in our “War on Terror” to provide security for our ports. This may not be the best evidence that the Bush administration’s ”War on Terror” has been a fake all along, but it seems to provide the evidence that is the most transparent to a large number of people.

To drive home the point of a fake pretext for our “War on Terror”, I’ll briefly summarize some of the most striking evidence for administration complicity in the 9/11 attacks, as discussed in Griffin’s book, and then talk about how our military couldn’t get a single airplane up in the air to defend our nation’s capital, despite more than an hour’s warning.


Summary of some striking problems with the standard version of the 9/11 attacks

Short selling of stock in United and American Airlines
Shortly before the 9/11 attacks there was an extremely high volume of short selling of stock in United and American Airlines, resulting in profits of up to $15 billion – thus suggesting advance knowledge of the attacks. Though the 9/11 Commission mentions this in their report, they claim that these transactions were innocuous, and yet the American public has never been informed of the results of investigations into this matter by the SEC, the FBI, or the 9/11 Commission.

Collapse of the World Trade Center Buildings
The standard account of the collapse of the buildings says that the collapse was due to a fire that melted the steel framework. But this has never been known to occur in the past. Also, there was very little fire in the South Tower, and even if there had been it couldn’t have exceeded 1700 degrees F, whereas steel doesn’t melt until 2770 degrees F.

Furthermore, all three collapsed buildings demonstrated much evidence of controlled demolition collapses, including collapsing straight down at free fall speed, the turning of concrete into dust, absence of remaining steel columns after the collapse, video evidence of demolition waves, witnesses claiming explosions within the buildings, and much more.

Evidence for the existence of the 19 alleged hijackers
What evidence do we have that the 19 hijackers whose names were released to the American public did in fact hijack those planes? We’ve been told that their names were on the flight manifests, yet those that have been released have no Arab names on them. And furthermore, at least six of these men have showed up alive after 9/11.

Evidence for the strike on the Pentagon
We have three lines of evidence to support the idea that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon: 1) The Pentagon told us that it did; 2) there are some eyewitness reports claiming that it did (I even know one such witness); and, 3) it seems like a good explanation for the fact that none of the passengers on Flight 77 were ever heard from again.

Compared with the above evidence, consider the evidence against Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon: A photograph taken shortly after the strike on the Pentagon shows that the hole made by the strike was far too small to admit the entry of a commercial airliner. Of course that doesn’t rule out the possibility that the plane only partially entered the hole. But then, where did the plane go to? No plane is visible in photographs taken immediately after the strike, nor was any plane or large pieces of a plane found in the Pentagon or anywhere in the vicinity. The 9/11 Commission doesn’t even mention this embarrassing fact, though some have suggested that the plane was vaporized. But as with the WTC buildings, the fire could not have been hot enough to do that. Also, other witnesses noted a missile hitting the Pentagon, and the FAA noted rumors of Flight 77 crashing in Ohio or Kentucky.


How super-Flight 77 evaded the most powerful military in world history

Griffin goes into great detail on the inconsistencies and implausibility of the standard CM story regarding each of the hijacked flights, and why our military should have been able to prevent any of the airliners from hitting the WTC buildings or the Pentagon. I will talk here about the story of Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon because that is the most absurd of all the stories surrounding the 9/11 attacks. To do that, I’ll: 1) Note the original timeline for that flight, which strongly suggested government complicity; 2) Discuss how NORAD changed the original story to establish their innocence; and 3) Discuss how the 9/11 Commission further changed the story, and what one would have to believe in order to make sense of that story.

The original account of the events surrounding Flight 77
8:20 – Leaves Dulles Airport in Washington D.C., headed West.
Sequence of events leading to disappearance of plane:
 8:46 – Flight goes significantly off course.
 8:50 – Radio contact lost, FAA learns that flight is hijacked.
 8:56 – Transponder is turned off.
 8:57 – Flight is lost to FAA controllers.
Interval from 8:57 to 9:24 – Hmmm, seems like a long time for nothing to be happening
9:24 – NORAD gives order to scramble fighter jets for Langley AFB.
9:30 – Fighter jets from Langley become airborne.
9:38 – Pentagon is struck.


How the original account implicates the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and how NORAD tried to explain the problems away
The original version of events indicates several problems, suggesting gross negligence at best on the part of NORAD, and complicity at worst, for the following reasons:

1) Certainly the FAA would have notified NORAD once they confirmed that the flight was hijacked, if not four minutes earlier, when they first noted the flight having gone off course, as prescribed by standard operating procedures. That would have given our military all the time in the world to protect our capital. NORAD gets around this problem by claiming, incredibly, that they weren’t notified of Flight 77 until about 9:24.

2) But even if the FAA was totally negligent in its duty to warn NORAD of the hijacking of Flight 77, shouldn’t the military have sent up fighter jets anyhow, given that they knew that our country was under attack for almost an hour before the Pentagon was hit? And even if they didn’t get a plane up in the air long before they did, shouldn’t they have been watching closely and have been able to track Flight 77 heading for Washington D.C. (IF indeed that flight did head for Washington D.C.) long before it hit the Pentagon at 9:38?

3) NORAD claims that it issued an order to scramble fighter jets from Langley AFB immediately after being notified at 9:24. It is supposed to take two and a half minutes for a fighter plane to get to 29,000 feet after receiving a scramble order. Yet, even if NORAD is telling the truth about not being notified until 9:24, it still took six minutes for the fighter planes to become airborne.

4) Why would NORAD issue the scramble order to Langley, which is 130 miles away, when Andrews AFB is only 10 miles away? NORAD explains this away by claiming that there were no fighter jets on alert at Andrews AFB at the time. This claim is incredible, based both on common sense and historical documentation.

5) Even if we assume that there was no choice other than to issue the order to Langley rather than to Andrews AFB, and even if we assume that the fighter planes didn’t become airborne until 9:30, they still ought to have arrived in Washington, D.C. within 5 minutes, given a flight speed of 1,500 mph. Yet, according to NORAD’s account, the fighter jets were still 105 miles away when the Pentagon was struck. The math just doesn’t add up.


How the 9/11 Commission took the blame off the military (NORAD), and what you’d have to swallow to believe their revisionist account

Thus, there were so many problems with NORAD’s attempt to rationalize its actions within the framework of the accepted events surrounding Flight 77 that a reasonable person might suspect that NORAD had been given orders from above to stand aside and allow the attack to take place. Here is how the 9/11 Commission explained the situation in a manner so as to let the military off the hook:

1) As being notified of the attack by 9:24 would still have given the military plenty of time to get fighter planes up to defend the capital, the 9/11 Commission claimed that they were not notified by the FAA until 9:34, just four minutes before the attack on the Pentagon took place.

There are several problems with this account. First, it requires us to believe that the FAA personnel were so incompetent on that day that they couldn’t follow standard operating procedures which, as far as anyone knows, they had never previously so completely failed at. Second, there is a memo from an FAA employee, Larua Brown, which states that a phone bridge was established between NORAD and FAA within minutes of the first strike, and that the FAA shared information continuously with NORAD about all flights of interest during this teleconference, including Flight 77, as discussed in this NY Times article. And thirdly, Richard Clarke describes another teleconference which included the White House and the FAA, also initiated long before 9:24.

2) As for why the military was not able to track Flight 77 despite not being notified about it by the FAA, the 9/11 Commission explains this by saying that the transponder on the plane was turned off. So if it’s that easy to make airplanes escape our military’s ability to track them, how did we protect ourselves against the Soviet Union for 44 years?

3) But even assuming that our military knew nothing of the attack until 9:34, the fact that we had fighter planes from Langley up in the air by 9:30 still has to be explained. The 9/11 Commission explains this by saying that NORAD was notified of a phantom plane. This phantom plane was Flight 11, the one that struck the North Tower of the WTC at 8:46. According to this version, someone in the FAA (for which no publicly available evidence exists) notified NORAD that Flight 11 was still in the air and headed toward Washington. Consequently, the order went out to Langley to get fighter planes up into the air and headed towards Baltimore to intercept Flight 11 coming from New York. In other words, despite the fact that there were four hijacked planes reported on 9-11, the only one to which we responded by scrambling fighter planes, according to the 9/11 Commission, was a phantom plane. The absurdity of that notion requires no further comment.

4) But if we had fighter planes up in the air by 9:30, headed towards Baltimore, and since the 9/11 Commission admits at least that the military knew of Flight 77 headed to Washington by 9:34, then why couldn’t have those planes been directed to defend the capital? The 9/11 Commission explains this by saying that the lead pilot misunderstood the orders he received and headed east, towards the Atlantic Ocean, instead of north. Therefore, by the time NORAD became aware of the impending attack on the capital, those fighter planes were too far away to respond. Again, we are presented with no evidence to support this view.

Norman Minetta’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission
Supporting evidence for the theory that orders were given to prohibit any military response to Flight 77 comes from testimony before the 9/11 Commission of Norman Minetta, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, regarding a meeting he was having with Dick Cheney shortly before the Pentagon was hit. Here is Mineta’s account:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say 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?”

The 9/11 Commission interpreted this statement to indicate that Cheney had ordered the shooting down of Flight 77. But if that was the case, then why wasn’t it shot down, and even more important, how can NORAD claim that it hadn’t even been notified about Flight 77 until four minutes before the Pentagon was hit?


Conclusion

The 9/11 Commission accounts of all four flights involved in the attacks on our country of 9/11/01 attempt to rationalize how the most technologically advanced military in the history of the world could have failed to protect our country on that day. By utterly failing in their attempt to provide a plausible explanation, their accounts simply lend credence to the view, supported by a great amount of evidence, that our administration was complicit in those attacks.

Thus the pretext for our “War on Terror” appears to have been a sham. And the conducting of that war appears to be a sham too. Perhaps the Bush administration’s pushing of the Dubai port deal may be the nail in its coffin that exposes to the American people the whole sordid mess as a sham.