http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/2002-08-22/usw_plane.aspAgency Was to Crash Plane on 9/11
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
Associated Press Writer
<WASHINGTON (AP) — In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. But the cause wasn't terrorism — it was to be a simulated accident.
Officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure. >
http://www.politrix.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=712<War On Error: US Army crashed a plane into the Pentagon in 2000
Posted on Friday, April 02 @ 18:51:56 EST
Topic: AmeriCONNED
Washington, D.C., — The fire and smoke from the downed passenger aircraft billows from the Pentagon courtyard. Defense Protective Services Police seal the crash sight. Army medics, nurses and doctors scramble to organize aid. An Arlington Fire Department chief dispatches his equipment to the affected areas. Don Abbott, of Command Emergency Response Training, walks over to the Pentagon and extinguishes the flames. The Pentagon was a model and the "plane crash" was a simulated one. The Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise, as the crash was called, was just one of several scenarios that emergency response teams were exposed to Oct. 24-26 in the Office of the Secretaries of Defense conference room. >
Here's an excerpt that was apparently removed from an Aviation Week website.
<"Part of the exercise?" the colonel wondered. No; this is a real-world event, he was told. Several days into a semiannual exercise known as Vigilant Guardian, NEADS was fully staffed, its key officers and enlisted supervisors already manning the operations center "battle cab." >
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_news&Number=303925&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1&t=-1On edit: here's the Aviation Week version of the impact of the exercise:
http://www.aviationnow.com/content/publication/awst/20020603/avi_stor.htmHere is an even weirder coincidence:
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/0514_coincidence.html<Barbara Honegger, who worked in the White House under Reagan, points out another coincidence. Rsearching press reports, she found a 9/16/01 Washington Post story about the pilot of AA flight 77 that, on the morning of 9/11, was said to have crashed into the Pentagon.
The pilot, Charles Burlingame, an ex- F4 Navy flyer, had, as his last Navy mission, helped craft Pentagon response plans in the event of a commercial ariliner hitting the Pentagon.
Pilot drafts plan for response to Pentagon hit. Pilot winds up on plane that hits Pentagon.
Honegger states that Dick Cheney was ultimately in charge of the NRO exercise on the morning of 9/11. He was in the White House Situation Room for that purpose.>
On edit: Cheney's actions per Mineta:
http://anderson.ath.cx:8000/911/pen11.html<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...>