American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [92]
Bamford tells us: “Among the most elaborate schemes was to ‘create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner.’... An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft.... At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida.
“From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the internal distress frequency a ‘May Day’ message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal.”23 If you’re interested, you can read the whole plan on the Web site of the National Security Archive.
Now let’s examine the anomalies around the last plane, United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, reportedly at 10:03 AM and 20 minutes away from Washington. The official story made me proud to be an American: The passengers overcame the hijackers and sacrificed their lives, so that others might be spared. Back to Charles Lewis again at LAX that morning: “They said fighter jets had been scrambled from two different military bases, and that they had shot down the plane over Pennsylvania. And that was way before we got the hero story.”24
The first news reports expressed surprise at how little debris was visible at the crash site. The Pennsylvania state Web site even said it was hard to believe that a 757 plunged into the ground with such force that it literally disintegrated and created a still-smoldering crater in the ground. Then, five days later, CNN News reported “apparently another debris site” that had been cordoned off six to eight miles away. This, the commentator said, “raises a number of questions, why ... could it have blown that far away?”25
The FBI immediately took over the investigation, and for a long time wouldn’t honor family members’ requests, asking if they could listen to the cockpit voice recorder. This was finally allowed on April 18, 2002, provided they’d agree not to reveal anything about what they heard. And, for some reason, the last three minutes weren’t on there. Barry Lichty, the mayor of the nearby town of Indian Lake, says he heard what sounded like a missile fire that morning. The military did admit, some years later, that it was tracking Flight 93 and a Colonel Robert Marr recalled hearing that “we will take lives in the air to preserve lives on the ground.” He then ordered the air controllers to have fighter jets intercept the plane. But supposedly, the commercial flight crashed before that could happen. “Of course we never fired upon the plane,” said Dick Cheney, “we just witnessed an act of heroism.”26
The official story is that, for the first time in history, the black boxes were not recovered. Not from any of the four planes. For the TV pilot I did about 9/11 on truTV, we spoke to a guy who knew about the existence of three black boxes. He physically saw one, and his partner saw two more. He says they were taken away in a black government van. Another thing I find very interesting: Also for the first time in history, no attempt was made to reconstruct the planes with whatever parts they could find. They even did this with TWA Flight 800 that went down in 1996 in the Atlantic, and