The Vanity Fair article on 9/11 is up. And it’s good.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I find this all rather interesting now that we have all the rest of the things happening and could it be that this is all happening because of these articles coming out now? Curious minds want to know! Just watched a few nights ago, a program on questions on 9/11 from a panel of 4. Cant remember who and why they were doing this, but it sure was interesting, to say the least. It questioned the fall of the towers 1, 2 and 7. I find this all very interesting.
NORAD has some splain to do, if you ask me!..for real!
From the article it looks like NORAD simply couldn’t find the planes once they turned off their transponders and they were unprepared for the hijackers to actually be pilots.
They only had four planes available and didn’t want them all up in the air at the same time because they would all run out of fuel at the same time.
It looks like they just got their asses beat.
And then they covered that fact up.
Actually Bush and Cheney are lucky that NORAD was so unprepared because they did not give authorization to shoot down until 15 minutes after the last plane went down. So, even if they had scrambled the planes in time and gotten in the way, they would have just watched the planes crash into their targets.
NORAD used to brag that UFOs couldn’t exist because NORAD can see every cubic meter of air and space all the way to the moon.
I don’t think it’s plausible that they couldn’t find four airliners just because transponders were off.
And it really is terrifying if they claim to have only four planes ready for rapid response. Geez. Where do those billions go?
This should raise some fairly serious questions about the effectiveness of a military that American taxpayers spend 400 billion dollars on. This whole situation reminds me of when that German kid landed a plane in Red Square during the final years of the Soviet Union.
It appears our Department of Defense completed the transition to Department of Offense well before 9/11/01.
Suggestion to update your FAQ, or at least the intro.
😉
Oh dear…watch out Manny….before you know it you’ll be showered in (well-earned!) praise for your outstanding work in the development of the New Member section of the site … and then… before you know it (yet again :^)… you’ll find yourself heading up R&D for the rest of your bloglife…. in your newfound role as the project lead for Developing and Implementing BT FAQs…
….just sayin’ (or perhaps, warnin’) . . . ;^)
good night!
don’t take it personally if I run off screaming with my arms flailing in the air 😉
Well… I’m skeptical. Still reading. I was immediately put off by this comment, early in the article, by author Michael Bronner, referring to the fact that live hijacking exercises were part of the war games scheduled for 9/11:
When people join the CIA, they are trained to believe there are no coincidences of that magnitude. I think it is far more likely that someone leaked this info to the hijackers. As Major James Fox says, in a passage provided in text and in audio on the Vanity Fair site,
I’m also suspicious because the author was involved in the making of the film about Flight 93, which I do believe was shot down, from what I read in the 9/11 Commission’s own report, and from Cheney’s televised statement in which he said he had given an order to shoot it down and thought the order had been followed. That, the eyewitness testimony of a chase plane, the fact that the engine was found over a mile away (that’s some bounce for a crash!), and the lack of significant wreckage at the site, after seeing huge twisted piles of wreckage from planes that crashed, make the official explanation still implausible to me.
Btw – the date itself, 9/11, should not be considered coincidence. In E. Howard Hunt’s bio or Give Us This Day, I forget which, Hunt describes how intel operations pick their dates very carefully to maximize psychological damage to the target. By choosing the number of our help/emergency line, “9-1-1”, someone was really trying to do a sophisticated operation on the psyche of the American public, one that, by and large, worked magnificently.
The weirdness re Flight 11 and the “phantom jet” NEADS was trying to track reminds me of the ploy used in the Martin Luther King assassination. Shortly after the assassination, an older man, by his voice (reported in the press to be a teenager playing a prank – baloney, I’ve heard the tapes) starting broadcasting a phantom chase of a White Mustang leaving the scene, but going in the opposite direction to the one in which James Earl Ray was driving. In other words, someone wanted to make sure Ray got away undetected, and created a phony scenario to distract. So when I read about the search for the phantom plane, I couldn’t help but remember a similar episode.
I also think it was pretty wild that the planes that were scrambled from Langley were sent out to sea. They were ostensibly scrambled to head off a plane coming towards DC. As the article notes:
By this time, both towers were ablaze, and it was all over the news that the towers had been hit. I find it REALLY hard to believe the pilot is telling the truth. I know in a crisis people do weird things. But that weird? Reverting to a decades old and extinguished threat? I just don’t buy it. (Which doesn’t mean it might not be true. But I’ll need more than this guy’s word to believe it.)
No one, to my knowledge, has ever said NEADS gave a shootdown order. So clearing NEADS of that doesn’t change the original allegation. And the plane seen with UAL 93 shortly before it crashed/exploded/was shot down was a small white craft – not a typical military craft.
Lastly, I find it inconceivable that if the tapes used in the article are legit, unedited, and timecoded correctly, that the brass who talked to the 9/11 Commission would not have listened to the tapes, noted the times, and been able to testify accurately as to what happened. How do we know these tapes were edited so that more provocative passages are missing or blurred, or segments intercut from other places to prolong sequences, making it look like there was less time available?
In short, after seeing how evidence was deliberately misrepresented, altered, and perverted in the assassinations of the sixties, it’s going to take a heck of a solid chain of possession and verification to convince me this is how it all went down. If you had read what I have over the years, I’ve no doubt you’d be just as skeptical. Photographic evidence was destroyed and recreated in the JFK case to make it look like a shot from behind killed him, rather than a shot from the front. In the RFK case, tapes were either turned off prematurely, edited, or lost, because things are said in some places that refer to tapes nowhere in existence at this point, or nowhere public.
So proceed with caution here. I think the most this shows is that NEADS was as much a victim of the attack as anyone. But that means nothing in terms of the possible conspiracies being alleged, none of which put NEADS in the driver’s seat.
the tapes seem legit in the sense that they match up with the testimony of all the participants that are heard on the tapes (except the two commanders, who would be expected to be the ones whose story was corroborated by editing).
But, I have always wondered if there was a possible Russian role in 9/11. In effect, they could have been running the hijackers even without their knowledge. I go back to Zawahiri’s 1995 detention in Russia and his decision to join up with bin-Laden upon his release. Also look into the Baku cell of EIJ that coordinated the African Embassy bombings and the Cole bombing. They were in former Soviet territory.
It appears that the Russians run an arctic drill every year, and we run a corresponding drill everytime they run their drill. From past experience they would know that we were going to run the drill that day, and they probably even alert us in advance for safety reasons. As soon as they saw they second tower get hit they alerted us that they were cancelling the drill.
They would know that we would be running similations and have a good portion of our Air Force diverted to the northwest that day. They would know to tell them to turn of the transponders. They could even have moles in place to cause confusion and spread false reports.
It all seems rather sophisticated for a bunch of cave dwellers with no assistance from the inside.
Interesting theory, Booman. I think, bottom line, at the very least, someone tipped off the terrorists to the war games. Everything else was so well planned, so thoroughly thought through, that it does not seem possible that the timing of 9/11 was sheer coincidence.
I’m not convinced, either.
On June 4 Howard Dean was on a New York Times Magazine forum with Matt Bai. It was the first Sunday With The Magazine. They finally have the audio on this appearance up. It is a very good interview–well worth listening.
Click here for a partial transcript and a link to the audio of the interview.