I'll be on Randi Rhodes show today to talk about 9/11

paulthompson

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Wed Aug-02-06 11:55 AM
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I'll be on Randi Rhodes show today to talk about 9/11

I just found out that Randi Rhodes wants me to be a guest on her Air America show today to talk about these latest 9/11 developments, mostly the Vanity Fair article about the military response on 9/11. The time is approximately 5:30 Eastern time and 2:30 Pacific time. I hope you'll listen in. If you have any thoughts on what I should say, please let me know.

Here's a post I made on another thread to give a sample of the kind of stuff I'm likely to discuss:

As the author of the 9/11 Timeline, I find this article very interesting as it probably contains new tidbits of truth, but it obviously is still mostly filled with spin to protect the guilty.

The author very carefully selects some facts and ignores others in an attempt to preserve the 9/11 Commission's account as much as possible. But even forgetting the conflicting facts not mentioned in the article, the article itself is self-contradictory. For instance, it says:

But by the time NEADS gets the report of a bomb on United 93, everyone on board is already dead. Following the passengers' counterattack, the plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m., 4 minutes before Cleveland Center notified NEADS, and a full 35 minutes after a Cleveland Center controller, a veteran named John Werth, first suspected something was wrong with the flight. At 9:28, Werth actually heard the guttural sounds of the cockpit struggle over the radio as the hijackers attacked the pilots.

Werth's suspicions about United 93 were passed quickly up the F.A.A.'s chain of command, so how is it that no one from the agency alerted NEADS for more than half an hour?

A former senior executive at the F.A.A., speaking to me on the condition that I not identify him by name, tried to explain. "Our whole procedures prior to 9/11 were that you turned everything over to the F.B.I.," he said, reiterating that hijackers had never actually flown airplanes; it was expected that they'd land and make demands. "There were absolutely no shootdown protocols at all. The F.A.A. had nothing to do with whether they were going to shoot anybody down. We had no protocols or rules of engagement."

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Yet earlier in the article it mentions how Boston flight control directly and immediately contacted NEADS without going through the FAA chain of command. In fact, it's not mentioned here, but Boston even directly called up military bases. So why couldn't Cleveland flight control do the same?! It also says earlier in the article that it was standard procedure to send up fighters at the first reasonable sign of trouble and investigate (in fact, there's a series of steps the fighter is supposed to take, for instance getting close enough to see into the cockpit of the hijacked plane to see if it's hijacked). But the quote from the FAA official above confuses the issue of sending up a fighter to investigate vs. permission to shoot down the hijacked plane. Just because you may not have permission to shoot down the plane yet is no reason to keep fighters on the ground! In fact, that's a violation of very clear protocols.

NORAD lied and lied, with something like five different accounts of what happened that day already, yet now we're supposed to believe they suddenly come clean with the release of these tapes? This is just one more level of spin to further confuse and hide the truth. There are so many other lies and half-truths in this article that I can't even begin to list them.

But there are some interesting tidbits of probable truth. For instance, the revelation that there was a war game of a hijacked plane scheduled an hour later - an important fact the 9/11 Commission never bothered to mention. Mike Ruppert and others have speculated that there were injects of false radar data that day as part of the wargame, and sure enough, we find out that as late as 9:04, one of the flight controllers says: "I think this is a damn input, to be honest." At the very least, this shows a lot of confusion relating to the war game, another thing denied by the 9/11 Commission and all official accounts.