American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [87]
It turns out there were some “war games” taking place that morning. September 11 was the second day of Vigilant Guardian, an exercise of the Joint Chiefs and NORAD that simulated planes being hijacked in the Northeastern United States. Another drill, called Northern Vigilance, had shifted some fighter jets to Canada and Alaska to monitor Russian MIGs flying training missions. This one put “phantoms” on military radar screens that would look real to the participants in the exercise. “We fought many phantoms that day,” Richard Myers of the Joint Chiefs later testified to Congress.
But could the attack have been scheduled intentionally to coincide with those war games? If so, this raises a couple of questions. Either there was a major intelligence leak, whereby the terrorists realized the war games would be a good cover for their operation. Or else some people in the administration knew of the attack ahead of time and let it proceed simultaneously, knowing the confusion this would cause.
Between September 2000 and June 2001, on 67 different occasions fighter jets were sent to intercept aircraft that had lost radio contact or their transponder signal or were flying off course, usually within ten minutes of any sign of a problem.3 (Contrary to what some people think, presidential approval wasn’t needed to intercept or even shoot down an aircraft.) Then, on June 1, 2001, the existing hijacking response procedures were changed to require approval by the secretary of defense before responding to a situation with lethal force.4 And when the call came into the Pentagon on 9/11, nobody answered the phone!
The stand-down order that Charles Lewis heard about was confirmed by none other than Norman Mineta, transportation secretary at the time. According to the 9/11 Commission, Cheney didn’t arrive underground at the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) until almost 10 AM. Mineta, however, said the Vice President was already down there when he arrived at about 9:20 AM. Richard Clarke and Cheney’s photographer indicated the same thing. That was before the Pentagon had been hit, and Mineta recalled a young man coming into the PEOC three times to tell Cheney how far out the plane was from Washington. After the third report, according to Mineta, the young fellow asked, “Do the orders still stand?” and Cheney responded, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?” The 9/11 Commission chose to ignore Mineta’s testimony and went so far as to remove it from the video archive. Instead, they had Cheney ordering, almost 45 minutes later than Mineta said, the inbound aircraft be shot down. Except, by then, all four planes had already gone down.5
That was cover-up number one by the 9/11 Commission. Now let’s look at whether it was actually those two planes that were responsible for the falling towers. I was amazed, watching the 2007 version of the documentary Loose Change (which I urge everyone to see), at the many firefighters and other eyewitnesses who talked about a whole series of explosions before and during the collapse of the buildings. All of this was reported on the news at the time. Before the South Tower collapsed, video footage clearly shows sizable amounts of white smoke starting to pour out of the base. There was described a “giant rolling ball of flame”