What you need to do is ask questions to get them to think about what they don't know. Then your question becomes their question and their retention rate of the information you give them is higher.
Try telling it like a story too.
Back in 1991, the Soviet Union fell. At the time, there were a number of very idealistic elite (Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perl, etc.) that saw an opportunity to make America the sovereign nation of the world. Then I ask something like; "If you were sure that you could put America at the helm of human destiny, and you had the connections and the resources to pull it off, wouldn't you go for it?"
So far, not one rightie I've talked to has frowned on the idea. Now you've got their interest.
That's when I go into what the PNAC is, what they wanted to accomplish, and how they planned on going about it.
Don't be afraid to paint the PNACers as ambitious with heroic goals for America and the world. That way you'll keep their involvement because they'll be genuinely interested in the whole story... and they won't be able to avoid certain conclusions. It works out to exchanging a brick for a jade.
Dance carefully around 9/11. Don't come right out and say they did it. Instead, give them the quote from the 1997 document "Rebuilding America's Defenses". I'm sure that by now someone else has linked to it, but here ya go anyway;
"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor. "I lead up to what the PNAC needs to accomplish; a foothold in the Middle East and strategic control of the world oil market. Then I give them the quote and say; did they get the catalyzing event they needed?
Every single one of them brought up 9/11. "Go to the head of the class", I say, "How convenient for them that bin Laden decided to attack us early in the new administration."
Now I just bring up one point; The rewriting of the air intercept protocols to bottleneck the chain of command;
The Department of Defense (DoD) protocol defining appropriate actions to be taken in the event of airspace emergencies and hijacked airplanes was rewritten after many years of successful application just three months before 9/11/01 - on June 1, under the direction of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Painstaking reviews of that protocol document (CJCSI 3610.10A)(2) and of its predecessor (CJCSI 3610.10)(3) have revealed no meaningful changes other than its relocation under the Joint Chiefs of Staff organizational flow chart. There are sentence rewrites, altered paragraph contents, etc., but careful flow charting of each protocol leads to identical sets of expected behaviors.
As will be explained below, despite the fact that the relocated protocol is functionally identical to the earlier version, the rewrite nonetheless played a significant role in the events of 9/11. As you digest this information, keep in mind that the FAA officially cataloged 67 North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) airspace scramble/intercepts between September 2000 and June 2001(4), yet between June 1, 2001, and September 10, 2001, there were none.(5a) Following 9/11, the number of scramble/intercept events again became quite common.(4)
Each protocol - old (CJCSI 3610.10)(3) and new (CJCSI 3610.10A)(2) - defined two action tracks: 1) EMERGENT - immediate action required, or 2) NON-EMERGENT - a slower process appropriate to a typical hijacking, where demands are issued and negotiations are expected to proceed.(2, 3)
The emergent track empowers air traffic controllers to communicate immediately and directly with the military to request assistance as needed, with no further authorization required.
The slower (hijack) track was designed to allow sufficient time to notify and synchronize the highest reaches of government as processes would unfold. In those cases, a contact chain of command was clearly defined, beginning with the FAA, then continuing across to the DoD chain of command -- headed by the Secretary of Defense -- whose authorization was finally required for any military assistance given.
If the relocated protocols are functionally identical, why were they rewritten three months before 9/11? And, how is it that the number of fighter-interceptor scramble orders dropped to zero for those three months(5a), after having been so common during the months and years preceding the rewrite? Robin Hordon(5b, 5c), an experienced past FAA Air Traffic Controller, who in former years helped write airspace protocols for the government, offers a cogent explanation: when newly (re)written protocols are released, a series of briefings are given to those who will be responsible to act on them. Briefings are personal, given on a one-to-one or small "need-to-know" group basis and can contain subtle biases regarding how those in upper levels expect the protocols to be implemented.
http://www.ringnebula.com/Oil/911/airspace_defense_911.htmI sum it up thusly; "In June of 2001, the DoD changed long-standing air intercept rules that allowed quicker action, to bottlenecking the authorization to the President, Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense. We went from having lots of people that could authorize an intercept to only a few."
And then I ask; "Can you think of
any good reason to make it
more difficult for commanders on the ground to scramble an intercept of a hijacked plane?"
Then I leave them with; "Well, there aren't many reasons I can think of except one; if I
wanted an attack on this country to succeed... it would be the one rule that
I'd absolutely have to change. Otherwise I'd have hundreds of commanders on the ground who might stop it."
But why would I want to do that?
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