American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [91]
Then there’s the background on the pilot. His name was Charles “Chic” Burlingame, and he was not only well-schooled in martial arts, but a retired Top Gun pilot, the best of the best. All his friends said there’s no way he’d give up his plane, it wasn’t in the man’s makeup. Unless the hijackers got to him and killed him—but with box cutters? Supposedly, a hijacker named Hanjour got control of the plane. Except, later, his flight instructor described Hanjour as barely being able to handle a single-engine Cessna a month earlier. And Flight 77 is said to have made a complicated 330-degree turn, dropping 7,000 feet, executing a maneuver that experienced pilots say is nearly impossible.18
The section of the Pentagon that was struck happened to be the headquarters for naval operations and intelligence, as well as housing quite a few accountants and budget analysts. Important Pentagon financial information disappeared in the aftermath of the attack.19 So it’s quite a coincidence that, just the day before, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had announced publicly: “According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”20 That’s right, not million, not even billion, that was trillion.
Flight 77 disappeared from the FAA radar screen at 8:56 AM, when it made an unauthorized turn to the south somewhere near the Kentucky-Ohio border. The only evidence that the plane was still flying and headed toward Washington were two phone calls that Ted Olson said he received from his wife Barbara onboard, not long before the Pentagon strike. Ted Olson was a longtime Republican operative who spearheaded the legal effort for Bush in Florida after the disputed 2000 election, and then went to work in the Justice Department as Solicitor General. His wife was the only person who’s reported to have mentioned box cutters. According to Olson, she said that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers.” Yup, 60-some people (including a weightlifter pilot), being held off by a few short, slender guys holding knives and boxcutters.
At first, Olson said the calls were made from Barbara’s cell phone. Except, high-altitude cell phone calls were pretty much impossible in 2001. Olson then changed his story to claim she’d used an onboard phone to make a collect call. Except, American Airlines didn’t have such phones on the Boeing 757s. Here’s what the FBI reported in 2006, at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called twentieth hijacker): Barbara Olson made only one call, an “unconnected call” that lasted “0 seconds.”21
So what’s going on? Captain Wittenberg has said that, if Flight 77 was actually off the radar screen for 36 minutes, then it was no longer airborne. 22 Did it land in some remote field, while something else—maybe the missile Charles Lewis heard about at LAX—hit the Pentagon’s financial records area?
This probably sounds far-fetched, if not crazy, until you consider that elements of our military had an eerily similar plan ready to roll back in the early 1960s. It was called Operation Northwoods, first described in a book published in 2001, Body of Secrets by James Bamford. Operation Northwoods was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for action against Castro’s Cuba—“what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government,” as Bamford put it. The Kennedy brothers seemed to be going