George W Bush Authorized 911 Attacks Says Government Insider

Keep in mind when reading this, that the man being interviewed is no two-bit internet conspiracy buff.

Stanley Hilton was a senior advisor to Sen Bob Dole (R) and has personally known Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz for decades. This courageous man has risked his professional reputation, and possibly his life, to get this information out to people.

The following is from his latest visit to Alex Jones' radio show.

Note: All honor to Stanley Hilton for risking his life so that we may know the truth of 9/11.

The Bush Junta Unmasked

"This (9/11) was all planned. This was a government-ordered operation. Bush personally signed the order. He personally authorized the attacks. He is guilty of treason and mass murder." --Stanley Hilton

Alex Jones interview of Stanley Hilton, attorney for 911 taxpayers' lawsuit

AJ: He is back with us. He is former Bob Dole's chief of staff, very successful counselor, lawyer. He represents hundreds of the victims families of 9/11. He is suing Bush for involvement in 9/11. Now a major Zogby poll out - half of New Yorkers think the government was involved in 9/11. And joining us for the next 35 minutes, into the next hour, is Stanley Hilton. Stanley, it's great to have you on with us.

SH: Glad to be on.

AJ: We'll have to recap this when we start the next hour, but just in a nutshell, you have a lawsuit going, you've deposed a lot of military officers. You know the truth of 9/11. Just in a nutshell, what is your case alleging?

SH: Our case is alleging that Bush and his puppets Rice and Cheney and Mueller and Rumsfeld and so forth, Tenet, were all involved not only in aiding and abetting and allowing 9/11 to happen but in actually ordering it to happen. Bush personally ordered it to happen. We have some very incriminating documents as well as eye-witnesses, that Bush personally ordered this event to happen in order to gain political advantage, to pursue a bogus political agenda on behalf of the neocons and their deluded thinking in the Middle East. I also wanted to point out that, just quickly, I went to school with some of these neocons. At the University of Chicago, in the late 60s with Wolfowitz and Feith and several of the others and so I know these people personally. And we used to talk about this stuff all of the time. And I did my senior thesis on this very subject - how to turn the U.S. into a presidential dictatorship by manufacturing a bogus Pearl Harbor event. So, technically this has been in the planning at least 35 years.

AJ: That's right. They were all Straussian followers of a Nazi-like professor. And now they are setting it up here in America. Stanley, I know you deposed a lot of people and you've got your $7 million dollar lawsuit with hundreds of the victim's families involved.

SH: 7 billion, 7 billion

AJ: Yeah, 7 billion. Can you go over some of the new and incriminating evidence you've got of them ordering the attack?

SH: Yes, let me just say that this is a taxpayers' class action lawsuit as well as a suit on behalf of the families and the basic three arguments are they violated the Constitution by ordering this event. And secondly that they [garbled] fraudulent Federal Claims Act, Title 31 of the U.S. Code in which Bush presented false and fraudulent evidence to Congress to get the Iraq war authorization. And, of course, he related it to 9/11 and claimed that Saddam was involved with that, and all these lies.

AJ: Tell you what, stay there. Stanley, we've got to break. Let's come back and get into the evidence. BREAK

AJ: All right my friends, second hour, the anniversary of the globalist attack coming up. It's an amazing individual we have on the line. Bob Dole's former chief of staff, political scientist, a lawyer, he went to school with Rumsfeld and others, he wrote his thesis about how to turn America into a dictatorship using a fake Pearl Harbor attack. He's suing the U.S. government for carrying out 9/11. He has hundreds of the victims' families signing onto it - it's a $7 billion lawsuit. And he is Stanley Hilton. I know that a lot of stations just joined us in Los Angeles and Rhode Island and Missouri and Florida and all over. Please sir, recap what you were just stating and then let's get into the new evidence. And then we'll get into why you are being harassed by the FBI, as other FBI people are being harassed who have been blowing the whistle on this. So, this is really getting serious. Stanley, tell us all about it.

SH: Yeah, we are suing Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Mueller, etc. for complicity in personally not only allowing 9/11 to happen but in ordering it. The hijackers we retained and we had a witness who is married to one of them. The hijackers were U.S. undercover agents. They were double agents, paid by the FBI and the CIA to spy on Arab groups in this country. They were controlled. Their landlord was an FBI informant in San Diego and other places. And this was a direct, covert operation ordered, personally ordered by George W. Bush. Personally ordered. We have incriminating evidence, documents as well as witnesses, to this effect. It's not just incompetence - in spite of the fact that he is incompetent. The fact is he personally ordered this, knew about it. He, at one point, there were rehearsals of this. The reason why he appeared to be uninterested and nonchalant on September 11th - when those videos showed that Andrew Card whispered in his ear the [garbled] words about this he listened to kids reading the pet goat story, is that he thought this was another rehearsal. These people had dress-rehearsed this many times. He had seen simulated videos of this. In fact, he even made a Freudian slip a few months later at a California press conference when he said he had, quote, "seen on television the first plane attack the first tower." And that could not be possible because there was no video. What it was was the simulated video that he had gone over. So this was a personally government-ordered thing. We are suing them under the Constitution for violating Americans' rights, as well as under the federal Fraudulent Claims Act, for presenting a fraudulent claim to Congress to justify the bogus Iraq boondoggle war, for political gains. And also, under the RICO statute, under the Racketeering Corrupt Organization Act, for being a corrupt entity. And I've been harassed personally by the chief judge of the federal court who is instructing me personally to drop this suit, threatened to kick me off the court, after 30 years on the court. I've been harassed by the FBI. My staff has been harassed and threatened. My office has been broken into and this is the kind of government we are dealing with.

AJ: Absolutely and now it has come out - five separate drills of flying hijacked jets into buildings that morning - which you told us about before it even broke in the Associated Press. They were trying to get out ahead of you. You talked about how you interviewed military people who were told it was a drill that morning. Then to get out ahead of that, the news finally reported on it. Now, we've learned that all these operations - I want to get into that, I want to talk about the new incriminating evidence of ordering it and how they had drilled on this, how Cheney was in the bunker controlling this. That has even come out in the mainstream news but they won't release the details of that, Stanley. But what type of FBI harassment are you going through? SH: First of all, my office was burglarized in San Francisco several months ago. Files were gone through and some files were seized - particularly the ones dealing with the lady that was married to one of the hijackers. Fortunately, I had spare copies in a hidden place so nothing disappeared permanently. But more significantly, FBI agents have been harassing one of my staff members and threatening them with vague but frightening threats of indicting them. And it's just total harassment. They have planted a spy, an undercover agent, in my organization, as we just recently discovered. In other words, these are Nazi Germany tactics. This is the kind of government you have in this country. This is what Bush is all about.

AJ: Stay there, Stanley, Bob Dole's former chief of staff. We'll come back after this quick break. Please stay with us. BREAK

AJ: All right, eight minutes, 25 seconds into the second hour. Stanley Hilton, political scientist, lawyer, Bob Dole's former chief of staff, is suing the government for 7 billion dollars for carrying out 9/11 and for racketeering. And he joins us now. During the break, I first really did the big interview with Stanley Hilton after I saw him attacked on Fox News. And that interview got massive attention. And then he kind of went underground for a while because a judge, we're going to talk about that, ordered him to not do any more interviews. And now he's back doing interviews. He's had his office broken into, FBI threats and harassment. Bottom line, he has deposed military individuals, wives of hijackers, you name it, it was a government operation. It has even come out in mainstream news, a piece here, a piece there. They had drills on 9/11, that's why NORAD stood down. Cheney was in control of the whole thing. Stanley Hilton has now gotten documents about how Bush ordered the whole operation. And I'll tell you right now, his life is in danger, folks. And he's got so much courage. He went to school with these neocons at the University of Chicago. He wrote his thesis on how the government could use terrorist attacks to set up martial law. He is the man for the time and folks wondered why he disappeared for a while and just did his lawsuit and wasn't doing interviews, it was because he was ordered to. Stanley, can you get into that for us?

SH: I did an interview with you, Alex, about a year and a half ago, and literally two weeks after that, I was contacted by the emissary of the chief judge of the federal court where I have the lawsuit. And I was warned not to publicize it but to keep it quiet and threatened with discipline. And it remained quiet until a couple of months ago and then I got on the air on some programs and some publicity and July 1st, I was threatened directly by the chief judge here, threatened with court discipline. This particular judge has been circulating communiqués to the other federal judges seeking anything negative she can get against me to try and discipline me after I've been on the court here for 30 years with no disciplinary problems at all. This is suddenly happening. And her assistants who are on the committee of the court met with me on July 1st in Palo Alto, California, and threatened me directly. They handed me a copy of the lawsuit and said that the judge wants me to dismiss this. What's this? She doesn't like the content of it. This is politically incorrect. This is outside the norm. I said I represented more than 400 plaintiffs, how am I going to dismiss this case? And they threatened me directly and they said, "the next time you'll be disciplined." And also they've threatened me not to go public, etc. And this is just outrageous.

AJ: It's all color of law. No direct orders, just all in your face.

SH: They sent a letter out, and of course they deny it's because of the political content of the suit but they told me directly on the phone that it is because of this suit and this judge is very, very angry, apparently has been in contact with Ashcroft's Justice Department. I got a call from Ashcroft's Justice Department a few months ago about this, demanding that I drop the suit, threatening sanctions and all kinds of things. I refused to drop it. AJ: Now let's go back over, you had them break into your office, harassment. Let's go over that in detail.

SH: My office was broken into about 6 months ago. The file cabinets - it was obvious they had been rifled through. Files were stolen. Files dealing with this particular case and particularly with the documents I had regarding the fact that the - some of these hijackers, at least some of them were on the payroll of the U.S. government as undercover FBI, CIA, double agents. They are spying on Arab groups in the U.S. And, in effect, all this led up to the effect that al Qaeda is a creation of the George Bush administration, basically. That the entity that he called al Qaeda is directly linked to George Bush. And all this stuff was stolen. Fortunately, I had copies. But this was just part of the harassment. The FBI has also been harassing some of my assistants and has planted a spy in our midst. And it is just outrageous that these Nazi tactics are being used - and the obstruction of justice, these people are criminals. And that's what's happening under the tremendous pressure here to just drop it. Or to shut up now and just go away.

AJ: Now, let's talk about what they want you to drop. Let's talk about, without giving names, the people you deposed, what really happened, the picture you've got. You said earlier that Bush ordered this, they were simulating this which they now admit there were simulations on that morning. Let's go over what they don't want you to talk about, Stanley.

SH: We have evidence both documentary as well as witness sworn statements from undercover former FBI agents, FBI informants, etc., that other officials in the Pentagon and the military and the Air Force that deal with the fact that there were many drills, many rehearsals for 9/11 before it happened. Bush had seen this simulated on TV many times. He blurted this out at a press conference in California a few months after 9/11 where he said he had, quote, seen the first plane hit the first building on the video. And that's not possible because there was no official video of that. There was one of the second plane not the first one. He had seen the first one. We do have some incriminating documents that Bush personally ordered 9/11 events. It was well planned. A FEMA official has admitted on tape that he was there the night before - September 10th, that is

AJ: And now Mayor Giuliani, a few months ago in the 911 Commission, admitted that - Tripod II. They had their whole command post already moved out of Building 7. Now, this is very, very important. This is a key area of this whole event. You said months before it came out on the CIA's own website and the Associated Press, you said I deposed people. They said there were drills that morning and exactly what happened, happening - that was the smoke-screen for the stand-down. And then to get out ahead of it, the CIA comes out and said yeah we were running a drill that morning. Now, we've learned that five, possibly six, were confirmed. Five of these - one drill with the exact same thing happening that actually happened, at the exact same time in the morning. That's why NORAD stood down with 24 different blips on the screen. You've said this. You brought this up first. Now, I know you can't get too much into detail but can you tell us how you learned of this?

SH: I have interviewed individuals in NORAD and the Air Force. I personally toured NORAD many years ago around the time that I worked for Dole. I'm very familiar with the operations at Cheyenne Mountain at Colorado Springs, where NORAD is. Individuals that work in NORAD as well as the Air Force have stated this, off the record, but the point is, yes, this was not just five drills but at least 35 drills over at least two months before September 11th. Everything was planned, the exact location

AJ: But five drills that day.

SH: That day, that day, and Bush thought it was a drill. That's the only explanation for why he appeared nonchalant

AJ: We also had NORAD officers and civilian air traffic controllers going, "Is this part of the exercise? Is this a drill?"

SH: Yes.

AJ: On the tapes and in TV interviews, they thought it was, quote, a drill.

SH: That's right. That's exactly what I said long before it became public. I've known about this since earlier in March of '03, as I stated before. This was all planned. This was a government-ordered operation. Bush personally signed the order. He personally authorized the attacks. He is guilty of treason and mass murder. And now, obstruction of justice by attempting to use a federal judge and FBI agents to inhibit a legitimate civil lawsuit in this country, in federal court. Even a chief judge in this court tried to harass and threaten me personally for representing legitimate plaintiffs. And they got Clinton for allegedly lying under oath about Paula Jones and now - look what's happening now. And Ken Starr used to be across from me in Duke Law School in the early `70s and it´s interesting that he got away with trying to get Clinton impeached, so we have a far worse criminal sitting in the oval office today - somebody guilty of mass murder as well as obstruction of justice.

AJ: Well, I mean look, they say they never heard of a plan to fly planes into buildings - said it all over television - Rice, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft. And then we find out they were running all these drills that morning. Even if they weren't involved, that proves they were liars about ever hearing of such a plan.

SH: Well, I'm trying to take their depositions - I've been trying to take their depositions for months. They've been trying to object to it. They will have to admit they were either lying then or now. It's clearly perjury either way. They are liars and perjurers; that's what they are. These are the people that we have running this government and, of course, they knew about it. How are they going to claim now that they didn't know about these drills? Their idea is that nobody knew anything. It's the old know-nothing mentality. And how anybody considers this believable is beyond me.

AJ: All right, now people ask how could a huge organization, how could the AWACs, how could the military let this happen; whereas before, if your Cessna got off course for five minutes, they would launch F-16s on you. It's real simple. It's what Stanley Hilton said here a year and a half ago. It's what came out in the news after that. The military, good people, were told this was all a drill. And it was not a drill. And ABC News admits that Cheney was in control of [?] out of the White House [?] and that he ordered the military to quote "do something." Our inside sources from Hilton and others say it was a stand down and they admit they will not release that under national security. Stanley?

SH: Well they are going to admit it, they're going to release it in the court case because if you demand it under subpoena powers and they must release it. And part of our lawsuit is brought in the name of the U.S. because under the federal fraudulent [Claims Act], we accuse the Bush Administration of presenting a fraudulent claim to Congress. And under the statutes of Title 31 of the U.S. code, they must release this information. That's why they are trying to threaten me, harass me, invade my office, steal my files, commit blatant obstruction of justice and other crimes to try and prevent a legitimate civil suit from exposing these criminals and their acts of treason and mass murder.

AJ: I think you need to publicly tell folks that you are not planning suicide. Would you like to tell folks that?

SH: (laughs) I'm not planning suicide. I've got family and I'm not planning that but I don't like the threats I'm under - but I can tell you this, it's taking a toll emotionally on me and my staff. And particularly, when you get a threat from the chief judge of your own court.

AJ: Why have you decided to go public again after a year of being under the radar? SH: Because the more and more evidence that I've been adducing over a year and a half has made it so obvious to me that this was now without any doubt a government operation and that it amounts to the biggest act of treason and mass murder in American history. I mean George Bush makes Benedict Arnold look like a patriot. He makes Benedict Arnold look like George Washington. I mean that's what we have - a criminal and a traitor sitting in the White House pretending he's a patriot, wrapping himself in the flag. And it's pretty disgusting because the other side of the so-called opposition, the Kerry camp is just saying nothing because they're afraid to speak.

AJ: Stay right there. We'll be right back.

BREAK

AJ: Stanley Hilton will be with us for another 15 or 16 minutes. Then he's got to go into court. Bob Dole's former chief of staff, political scientist, lawyer, represents 400 plus plaintiffs - most of them victims of 9/11. When I was in New York last week, everybody I was talking to, I mean 90 plus percent of them at ground zero - "I had family, I worked in the buildings, my son's a Navy Seal - he called the night before and said don't go to work." You know, all of this, and then now they never had any idea - and it turns out they had all these drills - and one drill of hijacked jets flying into the World Trade Center and Pentagon at 8:30 in the morning. That morning - come on people! And Stanley Hilton brought all this out on this show before it was in the mainstream news. And I was talking to him during the break. I mean, the harassment, the moles, the threatening of his staff, the judge threatening him. Stanley, let's get specifically into the documents that you have now got that they have now been robbing you for, that you luckily, thank God had copies. Specifically, Bush ordering this. Can you get into that for us - ordering 9/11? SH: National Security Council classified documents which [garbled] and it's was part of a series of documents that were involved with the drill documents. This was all planned - they had it on videotape. These planes were controlled by remote control, as I stated previously a year and a half ago, there's a system called Cyclops. There is a computer chip in the nose of the plane and it enables the ground control, the military ground control, to disable the pilot's control of the plane and to control it and to fly it directly into those towers. That's what happened. It's also a technology used on what's called the Global Hawk, which is an aircraft drone - a remote- controlled aircraft. And they were doing it. We are talking about National Security Council classified documents that clearly indicated that [garbled] had a green light to order this to go and this is no drill. These drills that were running were clearly a dress rehearsal and this was a government operation. You wonder why these people are trying to threaten people and trying to intimidate people who have written this suit, I guess if you murdered 3000 of your own citizens, in conjunction with the corrupt Royal family of Saudi Arabia as Bush did. And if you then waste billions more on a worthless garbage war in Iraq, I guess you've got something to worry about and you want to threaten people to prevent it from coming out.

AJ: I mean let's look at this. Not only are there dress rehearsals, they are smoke screens so the good military stands down and doesn't know what's happening. But it's now coming out, even in mainstream news, that yes these drills were going on. Yes, and some of these drills, quote, passenger-type jets were under remote control - this is decades old technology. In 1958, NORAD was [ ] old jets and using them for target practice. Decades ago they flew jumbo jets from LA to Sidney Australia. So since that's going on, everybody knows that. And it's the same MO. Just like the first World Trade Center [bombing] where they get two retarded men who followed this blind sheik who had a tiny mosque above a pizza parlor. And they set them up as the patsies. Then the FBI cooks the bomb, trains the drivers. This informant goes, "You're not going to bomb the building? They go "Yeah, we're letting it go forward." He tapes them to protect themselves. The two retarded gentlemen, thank God, didn't park it up against the column, as the FBI instructed them to do, so it didn't bring down the tower - because you have to be right up against the column. That doesn't happen. Yet, it's the same thing with 9/11. You've got these CIA agents, these Arabs, who were trained at U.S. military bases, Pensacola Naval Air Station - mainstream media, out creating their legends for this background. They're on board the aircraft. My military sources say nerve gas kills everybody on board the plane - nerve gas packets. Then they fly the planes into buildings. From your inside sources, is that accurate?

SH: It's one of the things that we are looking into - that nerve gas or something else disabled people. It's possible. I can't say for sure to be honest with you

AJ: All you know is they were government agents and they were on board and the planes were remote controlled.

SH: Yeah, it was basically a smokescreen. I mean, the events of the hijackings, how someone snuck in those cutters, it was a plant. It was like a classic decoy. I've got some military background. And it's called decoy. It's a decoy operation. You make the people focus on the decoy to avoid looking at the real criminals. So they are focusing on these so-called nineteen hijackers and saying, "Oh, it must have been these Arabs. When, in fact, the guilty person is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - sitting in the oval office. That's the guilty person. That's the one who authorized it. There is only one man who could have authorized this operation and that's Bush. And anyone at NORAD will tell you as I have been told personally at NORAD in the war control room, there is only one man who has the power to do this kind of thing and that's Bush. Even though many believe he's a puppet. And I think in many ways he is. The fact of the matter is where was [ ] Cheney, Rumsfeld and these other traitors. The fact is Bush personally ordered and he's guilty and liable and he's going to be re-elected apparently because the media's asleep and [garbled] for Bush. AJ: Well, the media is owned by the same military industrial complex that carried out the attacks.

SH: Yeah, the media is only interested in maintaining the official government fantasy that this was a little lone Arab. These Arabs couldn't even steer that plane down a runway.

AJ: Stay there Stanley, final segment coming up. BREAK

AJ: Mr. Hilton, when you talk to these FBI agents, when you talk to these military men and women, what's their attitude? They've got to be pretty freaked out to have the big picture and know what actually happened on 9/11.

SH: Yes, you know it's like clouds just before a thunderstorm in the sense that they are sort of pregnant with rage. They are just enraged at the criminal politicians who have perverted and misused the government to murder its own citizens and pursue these dubious political ends. And many of them, in increasing numbers, are willing to talk and will talk under subpoena - but only under subpoena because the official party line of the government is shut up and don't talk to the trial lawyer. But more and more, they are very outraged that part of the government has done this to its own people, to its own people. I mean you have to go back to Stalin to see something - not even Hitler did this to his own people. You have to look at Stalin who murdered the Kulaks, the Russians for his own dubious gains. Also we've got - we have a Stalinist mentality in this country. And, if these people pose as patriots and wrap themselves in the flag, it's disgusting. I wanted also to point out that the Japanese television network, Asahi, is going to be airing a special on primetime tomorrow, on September 11th. They interviewed me for eight hours a couple of weeks ago. I'll be on that. I wish - of course, the America media don't care so they are not going to care. But in Japan, people are very serious in interviewing me and others. And we have a website now, called deprogram.info, if more people are interested: www.deprogram.info. But the other thing, I just wanted to say that if anything happens to me - and I don't know why - because I'm being threatened here now. And it seems you can't bring a case in this country anymore against criminals in power without being threatened. And this is how they operate. The stakes are pretty high when you've got a world historical level of treason and fraud by this government against it's own people. I guess this is what you have to expect.

AJ: Stanley, the globalists, the new world order crowd, definitely intend to carry out more terror attacks. I know they would have carried out more attacks if we wouldn't have done what we've been up to, if you wouldn't have been out there boldly speaking out and many others. And then their electronic Berlin wall has a bunch of cracks in it now. Thanks to good people like yourself and many others who are speaking out and telling the truth. But do you think that they may carry out what they've been hyping - a suitcase nuke attack, a biological release to try to smokescreen all of this? I know it's a catch 22, you've got to expose the murderers. We've got to get the word out on this but some government people that I've talk to say, "Yeah, but if you do that, they are going to go even more hard core and must totally try to take over." But I say regardless, they are already doing that. So what do you say to that?

SH: Well, yeah, I think they have an agenda. They have contingency plans. I think they are laying low now because there are an increasing number of people, like myself, who are openly challenging them and accusing them of criminal conduct. I think they would have done it again if we had not spoken up. I think they're planning, what they would like to do is silence any dissenters. That's why we are trying to get the Patriot Act declared unconstitutional in this lawsuit also.

AJ: Let's talk about polls. In the beginning a patriot is a scarce man, hated and feared, but in time when his cause succeeds, the timid join him, because then it costs nothing to be a patriot. You are one of those guys who hit the barbwire for us, or figuratively jumped on the hand grenade for America. But when you've got a Zogby poll, who is highly respected, half of New Yorkers believe that the government was involved. When you have a Canadian poll, 63% on average believe that the U.S. government was involved. And some groups, as high as 76% in polls believe the government was involved. European polls, two- thirds show the same thing. We have German defense ministers and technology ministers and another member of their government now, three of them going public, known conservatives, and progressives. You have an environment minister, Michael Meacher, saying that if they didn't do it, they sure as hell knew what was going on. Look, if anybody who is a thinking person looks at the evidence, their official story is impossible. Then you investigate and they are involved in it. Comments to this massive awakening and what's happening.

SH: Well, I think that's why they want the Patriot Act to suppress political dissent. They have to, they're anticipating, they are not dumb individuals. I know these people personally, Wolfowitz. These are criminal individuals but they are smart and so they anticipated political dissent. And that's why, like the Nazis, their forebears, and their blood brothers, the Nazis and the Stalinists, they're all for political repression. Every corrupt and criminal government has done this - they suppress their own people: Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Mao Tse-Tung, that's why we have the Patriot Act. So it's hand in hand. They had it planned to go right up to September 11th, this was all part of the plan. You have to do it. It was part of my senior thesis. You must follow through the terrorists attacks with a political suppression mechanism in the law. And that's why they want Patriot I and Patriot II and their plans are to continue launching more terrorist attacks to justify even more repression. The goal is to make this a one party dictatorship in this country, to pursue their dubious ends with their blood brothers like the Saudi Royal family. And also, historical blood brothers, such as the Nazi Germany and the Communist Russian. That's the goal

AJ: You've got to go in just a minute or two. But I wanted to also tell you about New York. Sound cannons that are used in Iraq, they're against us. Men in black ski masks. 41,000 police, accredited media being arrested randomly. Children being arrested, people in wheelchairs, 2000 plus people put in a camp with barbwire fences inside with no bathrooms. You had to have permission to go to the porta-potties. Police screaming at you. It had nothing to do with terrorism. They are openly setting the precedent for martial law.

SH: Well, that's right, the word terrorist is now being overly broad and overly defined [garbled] and also, you know, it's like the word communist was used for anything during the McCarthy witch hunt. And anybody can be called a terrorist by Bush's definition. But the irony is that the number one terrorist in the world is living at the White House at the oval office today. That's the real irony. For sheer hypocrisy, I think he deserves the world prize and ought to be in the Ripley book, Believe It or Not, and the Guinness book of world records for sheer brazen chicanery and fraud.

AJ: Let me ask you a question on this because this is the experience that I had. Watching television, watching the killers, watching those that are guilty, stand up there as our saviors is incredibly painful. It's like watching Ted Bundy being the judge at his own trial. I mean it is just painful to know who these people are. To see them putting America in a shredder. Now we are going to have forced psychological testing of every American, forced drugging, you know Pan-American unions, I mean it's just all happening, it's in our face, Stanley.

SH: Yeah, it's very disturbing and as one who has studied the theory and concept of dictatorships, I personally interviewed Albert Speer, who was Hitler's armaments minister. I interviewed him in 1981 in Munich. And I've studied the psychology and history of totalitarianism and there is no question that it's very frightening. And it has, today, with high technology, albeit for the first time in history, the chance of having a world empire dominated by corrupt, technologically oriented government - an elite government. And they've got now what people like Napoleon and Hitler didn't have, which is the technological means to dominate not only their own country but others - the world.

AJ: The answer is to expose them as the terrorists, to show how PNAC [Project for the New American Century] said we need helpful Pearl Harbor events, to show how Northwoods called for the exact 9/11-style attacks, to show their own plans. And to force people to face this horror. What are they going to do in a year or two when 80% of us, not half of us, know the truth?

SH: Well, that's why they want repression and, then again, the ancient old diversion, launch another terrorist attack to get people to pitch it away. I mean who knows what they'll do next. I mean their capacity for ingenious creation of these events is sort of unraveled. I mean there is no limit. My guess is they are going to try another stunt - maybe a stunt just before the election to justify getting Bush reelected. Although it seems like he is running against a straw man or a ghost right now, anyway. But, my guess is they'll try some other tactic to get people's attention away from 9/11 if it gets to be too much attention. What you really want is for the public to just lose interest because the public - and it's like remember the Alamo, you know, people don't forget things like that. To me it's like the Alamo, remember 9/11, that ought to be the slogan for this outrageous act of treason. That's what it is. It's not

AJ: We are at a crossroads, I don't think they anticipated this much resistance, Stanley.

SH: Yeah, I hope they are truly wrong and as incompetent as they are corrupt and guilty. That means their incompetence is exceeded only by their corruption and their guilt. And eventually, if enough people are going to get outraged enough, these people in the bureaucracy and in the civil service and our military, and eventually we can get people under subpoena these individuals will be exposed.

AJ: Stanley, their whole operation hinges on us being naïve and not recognizing evil. This is what they got with Hitler and others. People couldn't recognize evil so they continued to repeat succumbing to it. We are recognizing it this time. We are putting our lives, our treasure, our future on the line for freedom because we cannot let these blood-thirsty control freak terrorists capture us and use us and turn us into the empire and have a draft and use us as their slaves to invade the planet. And that's their PNAC plan. Stanley Hilton, I know you've got to get to court. God bless you. I want to thank you for being here with us today. Can we get you back on next week?

SH: Sure, just give me a call.

AJ: God bless you my friend. Any closing comments?

SH: My closing comments would be, I think people ought to just think about the consequence of having someone like Bush in the White House and the danger for the future that these sorts of individuals pose. This is not just a historical event of the past. This is part of the plan and the camera is still rolling. They have an agenda. These individuals are extremely dangerous. They are armed and dangerous. They pose a clear and dangerous threat to every freedom-loving person not only American but in the whole world.

AJ: You are absolutely right Stanley Hilton. They have captured the government. They have not captured the peoples' minds and they are counting on us not facing up to it.

SH: And they are counting on the repressive Patriot Act and threats and chief judges and FBI agents threatening people who are exposing them. That's what they are counting on.

AJ: But you're not backing down are you, my friend.

SH: No, I'm not

AJ: Well, we all stand with you, my brother, and God bless you.

SH: All right. Thank you.

USA Military Officers Challenge Official Account of September 11

We Did 911

Former Governor Jesse Ventura went further in his 9/11 skepticism than ever before today when he told the Howard Stern Show of his fear that elements of the U.S. government carried out the attack, stating, "I hate to fear....that we possibly did it to ourselves."

"There's a lot of very difficult questions that have not been answered and no one seems to want to provide any answers," Ventura told Stern, adding that the most prescient was, "That a third building could fall into its own footprint five hours later having not been struck by much of anything....the 9/11 Commission didn't even address the issue.

Pressed by Stern as to what he thought had happened, Ventura stated, "I hate to fear what could have happened that possibly we did it to ourselves," to which Stern responded "you're kidding me".

Ventura explained that he worked in demolitions when he was in the Navy and questioned how the buildings could fall at the rate of gravity.

The former Governor countered skepticism on behalf of Stern and his co-hosts by pointing out that the WTC towers were built to withstand a jetliner impact.

Stern said it was "unthinkable" that our own government could have perpetrated the attack, to which Ventura reasoned, "Nothing is unthinkable - you're talking about power, you're talking about foreign policy changing over this event, you're talking about getting control over the middle eastern oil."

Stern's co-host then attempted to throw Ventura by asserting that Bush could not be capable of organizing the attack, to which Ventura responded, "I don't know if he is, but I certainly think there are people capable of doing it."

Ventura then pointed out that kerosene does not burn hot enough to melt steel girders and asked why the buildings came down as powder and not in big chunks. Stern's co-host regurgitated the tired old debunker line of claiming the steel weakened and sagged, causing the building to collapse.

"OK if that's the case, if you use that analogy, then when you go camping and use a propane stove, which propane burns hotter than kerosene does, if you leave it on for two hours and you put a big can of beans on your grill, shouldn't the grill collapse?" asked Ventura.

"This is crazy!" exclaimed Stern, without explaining why Ventura's citation of basic physics had Stern and his team so baffled.

"These two buildings were white elephants, they were losing money, they had asbestos in them, and they were being required by law to do over a billion dollars worth of asbestos removal," said Ventura, pointing out that WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein made $7 billion dollars from his insurance claim after the attacks.

Ventura first went public with his questions about 9/11 during an on camera interview with Alex Jones in June 2006. He expanded on his thoughts during two subsequent radio interviews in April and May of this year.

Philadelphia lawyer Phil Berg has never tried to climb Mt. Everest. In the past, he�s always attempted �legal mountains??? within his reach. But since filing a 2004 federal RICO lawsuit against President Bush and others for complicity in 9-11, the Pennsylvania attorney finally knows what it�s like to try to scale the world�s tallest peak.

�I thought it was going to be tough, but I didn�t think this tough,??? Berg told AFP from behind a mountain of legal paperwork in his one-man Philadelphia office. �I am undermanned, overworked and under-financed, but still optimistic that justice will prevail.

�Either our government made 9-11 happen or let it happen. I am going after them for foreknowledge, failure to warn and actively covering up the crimes they committed.

Remember, Nixon was thrown out of office only for a coverup. These people, including Bush, have done much more,??? said Berg in an exclusive interview.

�We need to bring these criminals in government to justice for killing over 3,000 Americans [and] the thousands who have needlessly died in Iraq and Afghanistan.???

Without much support or media attention at home, Berg has left on a seven-stop European tour to try and raise money and awareness about the U.S. government�s involvement in 9-11. The speaking tour begins in Amsterdam then continues to Berlin, Paris, Madrid, London and Vienna.

Berg is joining American entrepreneur Jimmy Walter, the tour�s sponsor, who has taken up residence overseas after spending millions here to alert the public about the truth behind 9-11. Berg and Walter together hope to combine efforts to raise needed money for the 9-11 lawsuit, as well as showing Europeans that many Americans disagree with

Bush and his imperialistic foreign policy agenda. AFP correspondent Christopher Bollyn is also traveling with them. Although millions of Americans now agree with Berg about the U.S. government�s complicity in 9-11, Berg said the movement hasn�t gained momentum because the mainstream media together with the government has hidden the truth from the American people.

�Hopefully the foreign press will be more receptive to our cause, and the word will get back home,??? said Berg, who claims the American media has purposely ignored his lawsuit against Bush in order to protect the administration against any type of public backlash.

�This is a major lawsuit with worldwide implications, but the media has chosen to ignore it. Why???? asked Berg, saying the lack of public attention has not damped his efforts at getting at the truth behind 9-11.

And the extensive 237-page complaint, filed in November 2004 on behalf of WTC maintenance worker William Rodriguez, attempts to get at the truth while unraveling the complicated fact-scenario involving the government�s hand in 9-11 before, during and after the attacks.

Although Rodriguez doesn�t claim to know everything about the government�s complicity, he is going to testify that he heard strange explosions before and after the jetliner struck one of the towers.

Rodriguez, working at the WTC on the morning of 9-11, claims to have heard detonated bomb explosions. Besides the timing of the suspicious bomb blasts, Rodriguez claims they occurred on lower floors of the high-rise.

Independent investigators said both towers suspiciously fell �like a house of cards,??? claiming that Rodriguez probably heard pre-arranged detonated bomb blasts, strategically placed and timed to make it appear that the jetliner was the cause of the collapse.

From the beginning, the government has always held firm to the story that burning jet fuel after impact brought down the towers. However, critics claim the government�s theory is impossible since much more was needed in order to bring the towers down so quickly. They claim it is more likely that explosive devices were placed in the towers and detonated when the jetliners made impact.

Besides trying to disprove the government�s theory behind the WTC collapse, Berg�s suit goes much further, attempting to prove that a 9-11 conspiracy began years before the incident.

�The beauty behind a RICO case is that we are allowed to use as admissible evidence facts and events that occurred many years before and even years after 9-11,??? said Berg about his choice to use the federal RICO laws against Bush and his cronies. �The government normally uses RICO for Mafia probes, but in this case it�s a conspiracy within the government itself that the RICO laws can help expose.???

After filing the case, government lawyers were quick to go on the offensive, filing a motion to dismiss on grounds of national security, among a number of other legal maneuvers in order that the case never see the light of day.

�They have tried everything to stop this case from being heard,??? added Berg.

The case now is still in the early stages with full-blown discovery and depositions not yet taking place. However, Berg said he �can�t wait to depose??? Bush and other higherups regarding the tough questions about 9-11 never asked or answered previously.

�I just got word the judge didn�t dismiss the case, but has changed venue to New York,??? said Berg, who finally received notice from the court regarding the hearing to dismiss the case held several weeks ago in Philadelphia.

Asked what motivated him to take on such an enormous challenge, he said:
�I never realized I would get this involved, but the more research I did, the more it became clear that Bush and his cronies knew about 9-11, then actively covered up their participation and foreknowledge.

�Right after 9-11 occurred, I knew something was strange when I saw [Chief of Staff] Andy Card tell Bush about the second plane hitting the towers. There was absolutely no reaction on the president�s face, and it was then I understood he must have known about the plan all along.???

In order to raise money at home for the lawsuit and raise public awareness, Berg operates a web site at 911forthetruth.com, a site where a transcript of the entire RICO complaint can be found as well as updating viewers about
the latest news about the 9-11 truth movement.

Berg�s extensive complaint seeks relief for Rodriguez based on 13 counts, including misprision of a felony, misprision of treason, relief under the Anti-Terrorism Act, relief under the War Crimes Act and relief for and from crimes against humanity.

Specifically, it attempts to show a web of government conspiracy dating back to the late 1970s when the CIA helped Osama bin Laden fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Berg claims this web of government deceit and financial backing continues all the way up to the days just preceding 9-11 as witnesses will testify and records will reveal.

The complaint goes on to say that the defendants deliberately concealed the fact that they had ample warnings of terrorist attacks and failed to act on them in order to carry out a full-blown war on terrorism as a means to justify their neo-conservative political goals.

�It is time for a non-violent revolution by the millions of Americans who are tired of their rights being diminished by the Bush administration, tired of the lies of the Bush administration, tired of the lies about Iraq and tired and disgusted with the lies about 9-11,??? said Berg.

The Rodriguez action aims to prove that the defendants conspired to allow and did allow the attacks to happen by delaying military interceptions of the hijacked planes. It also seeks to show that the WTC was taken down by explosives in a controlled demolition.

�Now is the time to stand tall together and bring back our freedoms as they stood under the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the United States,??? said Berg.
�

by Jeffrey Steinberg http://larouchepac.com/node/10997

July 10, 2009(LPAC)--In the report that follows, you will discover that some of the most fundamental assumptions that you have been clinging to since Sept. 11, 2001--

assumptions that Lyndon LaRouche warned against--have been a total fraud. Much of what you have been told about the events of 9/11 have been a hoax.

The truth, which is clearly revealed in newly declassified documents, available through the National Archives, is that two leading presumed U.S. allies--Saudi Arabia and Great Britain--

were up to their eyeballs in the attacks on New York City and Washington. The United States was betrayed by leading elements within the Saudi Arabian Royal Family and intelligence services, in league with the British Empire. And top officials of the Bush-Cheney White House, the Justice Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were both aware of, and fully complicit in the coverup of the crime of the century.

The Anglo-Saudi alliance behind the 9/11 atrocity is represented, most graphically, by a 25-year-old secret intelligence arrangement, concealed beneath a lucrative arms-for-oil barter deal called ``al-Yamamah.'' There is now sufficient, credible evidence that funds from the offshore al-Yamamah accounts were funneled to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers, to warrant a high-profile Justice Department probe, without delay.

The newly released documents, when cross-gridded with other evidence already in the public domain, confirm the Anglo-Saudi hand behind 9/11, and debunk nearly eight years of conspiracy rubbish, that portrayed the attacks as a scheme by cave-dwellers and ``under the floorboard'' mysterious forces. The writings of a former LaRouche associate, Webster Tarpley, more or less typify the kind of off-course conspiracy mongering that is now thoroughly discredited by the new material and the larger picture assembled by EIR researchers.

Elements of the story have already been reported in EIR, and LaRouche instinctively pointed to the true nature of the operation, in a now-famous radio interview that he gave to the Salt Lake City-based syndicated radio host Dr. Jack Stockwell, as the hijacked planes were crashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

If the full implications of the new, confirming evidence of the Anglo-Saudi hand in the 9/11 attack are comprehended and acted on, by the appropriate U.S. and other government services, one of the root sources of global asymmetric warfare can be wiped out--with many other side benefits as well.

The New Evidence

Early this year, the National Archives released documents from the files of the 9/11 Commission, which were previously classified. Three of those documents, recently obtained by EIR, provide the ``smoking gun,'' proving the central role of Saudi intelligence, and the critical support role of British intelligence in the preparation, execution, and coverup of 9/11. The most significant of the documents, still partly classified, is a ``Memorandum for the Record,'' summarizing an April 23, 2004 interview with a Southern California-based FBI informant, who rented a room in his home to two of the 9/11 hijackers during 2000. Although the memorandum redacted the informant's name, other public sources have identified the man as Abdussattar Shaikh. His FBI handler has also been publicly named as Steven Butler.

In the interview, Shaikh provided a detailed account of his first encounter with the two 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. In April 2000, Shaikh posted an announcement on the bulletin board at the Islamic Center of San Diego (ICSD), offering to rent rooms in his home to ``devout Muslims.'' At the time he posted the ad, Shaikh was already acting as a paid informant for the FBI. According to his account to 9/11 Commission investigators Quinn John Tamm, Jr. and Dietrich Snell, Shaikh was approached after Friday prayers by al-Hazmi, who said he and al-Mihdhar urgently needed housing. By Shaikh's account, the two men moved into his home on May 10, 2000. Al-Mihdhar left after six weeks, claiming that he was returning to Saudi Arabia to visit his wife and young child. Al-Hazmi lived in the room until Dec. 10, 2000, when he moved out to attend pilot school in Arizona.

At one point in the interview, the 9/11 investigators asked Dr. Shaikh about another Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi. From the Commission document:

``Dr. Xxxxxx[Shaikh] noted that Omar al-Bayoumi also visited al-Hazmi at his house. Dr. Xxxxxx knew al-Bayoumi as a Saudi national who Dr. Xxxxxx met at the ICSD. Al-Bayoumi stated to Dr. Xxxxxx when he visited, that `I referred them (al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar) to you.' Dr. Xxxxxx restated that this was not the case and that he met the two in the hallway of the ICSD after the Friday prayer service.''

The report continued:

``Al-Hazmi did not like al-Bayoumi and told Dr. Xxxxxx that al-Bayoumi was `an agent for the Saudis.' Al-Hazmi complained to Dr. Xxxxxx that al-Bayoumi video taped people associated with the ICSD constantly. Dr. Xxxxxx noted that was his experience when he attended events at the ICSD. Dr. Xxxxxx said that al-Bayoumi always had his videotape recorder and sought comment to the open mike on the videotape recorder. Dr. Xxxxxx stated that, `I have heard that al-Bayoumi is an agent (of the Saudis).''

Dr. Shaikh's candid description of Omar al-Bayoumi as a Saudi intelligence agent, in regular contact with one of the 9/11 hijackers, is stunning in its own right. The fact that Dr. Shaikh was an FBI informant, who, according to several U.S. intelligence sources, regularly received payments from the Bureau to keep tabs on the Muslim community in the San Diego area, and hosted two of the hijackers, is equally stunning. But the full extent of the al-Bayoumi dossier, as known to the FBI and other U.S. government agencies, goes well beyond the surface scandal.

Al-Bayoumi was far more than a ``frequent visitor'' to Dr. Shaikh's home, while al-Hazmi was living there. The essential facts are as follows.

On Jan. 15, 2000, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on a flight from Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, where they had attended a meeting of a number of al-Qaeda members and allies. The two men were met at the airport by al-Bayoumi, who brought them to San Diego, rented them an apartment, co-signed the lease, and even put down $1,500 in deposit and rent. Al-Bayoumi would later arrange for the two men to enroll in flight training school.

Al-Bayoumi's links to three of the 9/11 hijackers

(he hosted a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour, at his apartment on a number of occasions in the Spring of 2000, according to FBI and Congressional documents)

 prompted one Federal government source to tell reporters, ``Some Federal investigators suspect that al-Bayoumi could have been an advance man for the 9/11 hijackers.''

But al-Bayoumi was also, undisputedly, an agent of Saudi intelligence! According to the FBI and CIA dossier on him, and records from both the House-Senate joint intelligence probe and the 9/11 Commission, al-Bayoumi came to the United States in August 1994. He was previously employed by the Saudi Ministry of Defense, and continued to draw a salary of $3,000 a month from the Ministry after he moved to the United States, through 2002. In the U.S., he was formally listed as an employee of Dallah Avco, a Saudi defense company that held lucrative contracts with the Ministry of Defense and Aviation, and was owned by members of the Saudi Royal Family. According to U.S. Federal investigators, al-Bayoumi never actually did any work for Dallah Avco. However, his monthly salary from the firm increased to $3,500 right after al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar arrived in the U.S.A.

Further adding to al-Bayoumi's considerable personal finances, in June 1998, an anonymous contribution arrived from Saudi Arabia.

The $500,000 was a down-payment on a new mosque, to be built in San Diego--with the proviso that Omar al-Bayoumi be appointed as director of maintenance, with an office and a guaranteed salary. Eyewitnesses told the FBI and the 9/11 Commission that al-Bayoumi was rarely seen at the mosque.

Al-Bayoumi was, however, in constant communication with top Saudi government officials in the United States and in Riyadh.

According to the records of the joint Congressional investigation and the 9/11 Commission, between January 2000--when al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar arrived in California--

and May 2000, al-Bayoumi made 32 calls to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., 37 calls to the Saudi Cultural Mission in Washington, and 24 calls to the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.

 His contact at the Consulate was Fahad Thumairy, who held diplomatic credentials, but was one of the most virulently anti-American imams in the area. He would be deported from the United States after 9/11.

In late June or early July 2001, al-Bayoumi and his wife, Manal Ahmed Bagader, suddenly left San Diego, and moved to England, where al-Bayoumi ostensibly entered business school at Aston University. Within days after the 9/11 attacks, he was detained by Scotland Yard and held for one week. However, he was released for lack of evidence, and he immediately left England for Saudi Arabia.

Osama Basnan

Omar al-Bayoumi was not alone in his liaison work between Saudi intelligence and some of the 9/11 hijackers. He worked closely with another Saudi intelligence officer, Osama Basnan, who entered the United States in 1980 on a short-term tourist visa, but remained in the country until October 2002, when he and his wife were deported as illegal aliens.

An FBI report, written shortly after 9/11, warned that evidence gathered on Osama Basnan ``could indicate that he succeeded Omar al-Bayoumi and may be undertaking activities on behalf of the Government of Saudi Arabia.'' An FBI classified report, dated Oct. 3, 2001, noted that Basnan was in contact with members of the bin Laden family, living in the United States. In the days immediately following 9/11, members of the bin Laden family in the United States, along with other top Saudis, were quietly flown home--at a time when no other non-military flights were being allowed.

Basnan was a subject of FBI interest long before Sept. 11. In 1992, according to news accounts, Basnan was investigated by the Bureau for ties to Eritrean Islamic Jihad (EIJ), an organization that was closely linked to al-Qaeda by no later than 1996. On Oct. 17, 1992, Basnan, then living in Washington, D.C., hosted a party at his home for Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the so-called ``blind sheikh'' now in jail for plotting terrorist attacks in New York City. At the time, according to U.S. intelligence sources, the FBI produced a still-classified report, detailing Basnan's work for the Saudi government, despite his ties to Islamic radicals.

Indeed, U.S. intelligence sources report that Basnan was arrested on drug charges in the Los Angeles area, but the charges were dropped, after intensive pressure from the Saudi Embassy.

The Ambassador and the Princess

If Omar al-Bayoumi's ties to the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation are firmly established, his personal ties to the former Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and his wife, Princess Haifa, are even less in dispute. In April 1998, Prince Bandar, who is also the son of the Saudi Defense Minister, Prince Sultan, sent a check to Basnan in the amount of $15,000. Bandar claims that the check was an ``act of charity,'' in response to a written appeal by Basnan for help in paying medical bills for his wife. Beginning in November 1999, just weeks before the two 9/11 hijackers arrived at the Los Angeles Airport, Princess Haifa began sending monthly cashiers checks, from her account at Riggs National Bank in Washington, to Basnan's wife, Majida Ibrahim Ahmad Dweikat. The checks continued until May 2002. The royal couple sent a total of $53-72,000 to Basnan and his wife. According to the House-

Senate joint investigation, many of the cashier checks from Princess Haifa to Basnan's wife were signed over to the wife of Omar al-Bayoumi. Most of these transactions took place while Basnan and al-Bayoumi were ``handling'' the financial affairs of at least two of the 9/11 hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. And the pair of Saudi intelligence officers also had some, as yet not-fully-known ties to a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour.

Prince Bandar's BAE Bounty

At the time that Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa were making their ``charitable'' contributions to Basnan and al-Bayoumi, the then-Saudi Ambassador to the United States was on the receiving end of at least $2 billion in kickbacks from Great Britain's premier defense firm, BAE Systems. The BAE scandal exploded into the public view several years ago, when BBC, the London Guardian, and other publications revealed that BAE was making tens of billions of dollars in payouts to Saudi Defense Ministry officials, and other members of the Saudi Royal Family, in return for arms contracts worth a fortune.

The BAE-Saudi scandal dated all the way back to 1985, when Prince Bandar personally brokered a deal with then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to sell an initial $40 billion in BAE military hardware and services to Saudi Arabia, in return for Saudi crude oil. The deal, cynically known as ``al-Yamamah'' (``the Dove'')

 was far more than a barter arrangement. BAE padded the costs of the fighter jets, training planes, air defense systems and support services by an estimated one-third, to launder payoffs to top Saudis--

including Prince Bandar. In return, Saudi Arabia delivered the equivalent of one super-tanker of oil per day (on average)

 to BAE, which had a contract with British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell, to immediately sell the oil on the spot market. For the Saudis, it was a lucrative deal. Even aside from the kickbacks that lined the pockets of many a Saudi prince and ministry official, the crude oil cost the Saudis under $5 a barrel. BP and Royal Dutch Shell sold the oil at fantastic markups.

As the result of this unique arrangement, an offshore Anglo-Saudi intelligence slush fund was amassed, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, starting in 1985. In a semi-official biography of Prince Bandar, published several years ago, author William Simpson candidly wrote that al-Yamamah was, first and foremost, a geo-strategic partnership between London and Riyadh, which funneled money covertly to the Afghan mujahideen who were battling the Soviet Army in the 1980s, funded Chad in its border war with Libya, and bypassed the U.S. Congress to deliver American military hardware to the Saudi Air Force.

Some senior U.S. intelligence officials insist that a full investigation of Prince Bandar's role in the al-Yamamah scheme would reveal that some of the BAE payoffs went from the Bank of England, to Bandar's account at Riggs National Bank--

into the hands of Basnan, al-Bayoumi, and the California 9/11 hijackers cell. By Aug. 2, 2003, so many questions had been raised about the Bandar payoffs to Basnan, that the Ambassador was forced to issue a personal statement, through the Saudi Embassy, branding the allegations ``baseless and not true,'' nothing more than ``rumor, innuendo, and untruths.'' He cited President George W. Bush, who ``praised the Saudi commitment to fighting terrorism.''

Bandar's efforts to cover up the Saudi government hand in 9/11 by invoking the words of President Bush only served to further infuriate those U.S. officials who were actually trying to get to the bottom of the Sept. 11 plot. House and Senate intelligence committee investigators knew, for example, that when their final ``Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of Sept. 11, 2001'' was submitted to the White House for final review before publication, the entire text of a 28-page chapter, documenting evidence of Saudi government support for the hijackers--including the Bandar payments to Basnan--was blocked from publication and remains classified to this day. In a recent meeting with the families of the 9/11 victims, President Barack Obama was pressed to declassify the chapter.

Both Presidents Bush were so close to Prince Bandar that the longtime Saudi Ambassador was widely referred to as an ``honorary member of the Bush family.'' The G.W. Bush White House commitment to brutally suppress the evidence of the Anglo-Saudi hand in 9/11 was so deep that Osama Basnan, the Saudi intelligence officer, felt confident enough to be in Houston, Texas, on April 24-25, 2002, when then-Saudi Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah, along with Prince Bandar, visited President Bush at his Crawford, Texas ranch. The Crown Prince's entourage was massive--eight planeloads of aides and hangers-on. Among the crowd were three Saudi officials suspected of ties to al-Qaeda.

The "embarrassing'' incident was suppressed, along with Basnan's presence in nearby Houston, where he was reportedly meeting with a billionaire Saudi prince who was part of the Crawford entourage.

Four months later, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which conducted the joint Congressional 9/11 probe along with the House Intelligence Committee, declared that, to his knowledge, the CIA had ``incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government.'' He would later emphasize the point in his book on the joint Congressional probe, Intelligence Matters.

Britain: State Sponsor of Terrorism

In December 2000, the Editors of EIR submitted a lengthy memorandum to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, seeking an investigation of British government sponsorship of international terrorism. The memo, prepared with the assistance of State Department attorneys, who provided EIR with the official criteria for placing a nation on the list of ``state sponsors of terrorism,'' relied exclusively on official government documents, from no fewer than nine nations, that had formally protested British government protection, and, in some cases, financing of active terrorist cells on British soil. The EIR memo was triggered by a rash of asymmetric warfare attacks, many by groups spawned out of the 1979-89 Afghanistan War against the Soviets, a war covertly bankrolled and logistically backed by British, French, American, Saudi, and Israeli intelligence services.

The British government's protection was extended to such terror groups as the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which had a radio transmitter in Britain that beamed marching orders for terrorist attacks into eastern Turkey; the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which carried out a brutal 1997 attack on Japanese tourists at Luxor, Egypt, and had earlier assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat; the Indian terrorist group Lashkar e-Taibi, which carried out assassinations and hijackings in 1999; and Chechen terrorists, who were recruited out of mosques in England.

Among the charges against the British government: British intelligence had looked the other way, throughout the 1990s, as Osama bin Laden moved between Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, and England. The London Times admitted that, throughout the second half of 1996, bin Laden made frequent trips to London, ''clearly under the protection of British authorities.'' The Times had spotted bin Laden, earlier in the 1990s, at the London estate of Khalid bin Mahfouz, a wealthy Saudi banker who was a leading Muslim Brotherhood funder of a wide array of Jihadist groups, and was a major shareholder in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

 In 1994, the French and Algerian governments filed diplomatic demarches with the British Foreign Office, charging that Osama bin Laden had met with leaders of the Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA),

which was then in the middle of a blind terror bombing campaign in both countries. French intelligence tracked the bin Laden/GIA meetings to a bin Laden-owned estate in Wembley. For three months in 1994, according to other French sources, including investigator Roland Jacquard, Osama bin Laden lived on Harrow Road in London. Even after he left the country, bin Laden's leading propagandists operated out of London.

According to ``conventional wisdom,'' the British protection of a worldwide nexus of terrorist organizations was based on an understanding that the groups would not operate on British soil, or target British interests abroad. But, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of the British Empire, from the early days of the British East India Company, through Lord Palmerston's sponsorship of the Young Europe, Young America, and Young Turk operations of the 19th Century, realizes immediately that this is a fraud. Sponsorship of asymmetric warfare is at the very heart of the British/Venetian method. And the Anglo-Saudi al-Yamamah project is the 20th- and 21st-Century equivalent of the British East India Company's sponsorship of legions of ethnic and religious separatist groups, assuring a ready stable of political assassins and perpetrators of ``chaos on demand'' around the globe.

Will the Bush League Coverup End?

Even as investigators for the joint Congressional inquiry and the 9/11 Commission attempted to get at the role of Saudi intelligence in 9/11, a vicious coverup was being imposed directly from the White House, and with full complicity of elements within the FBI and Department of Justice. It became so blatant, that three 9/11 Commission investigators--Kevin Scheid, Col. Lorry Fenner, and Gordon Lederman--

drafted a memo to their staff supervisors, Dan Marcus and Steve Dunne, proposing guidelines for FBI and other ``minders.'' The memo bitterly complained that FBI and other ``minders'' sitting in on interviews with Commission witnesses, interfered in the questioning and intimidated the witnesses:

``Minders have positioned themselves physically and have conducted themselves in a manner that we believe intimidates witnesses from giving full and candid responses to our questions.

Minders generally sat next to witnesses at the table and across from Commission staff, conveying to witnesses that minders are participants in interviews and are of equal status to witnesses.

Moreover, minders take verbatim notes of witnesses' statements and may engage in retribution. We believe that the next effect of minders' conduct, whether intentionally or not, is to intimidate witnesses and to interfere with witnesses providing full and candid responses.''

The memo concluded with a plea:

``We request that you raise the subject of minders' conduct with the Executive Branch in order to prevent minders from comporting themselves in these ways in the future.''

Attached to the memo were ten proposed rules of conduct, to block the intimidation. Apart from the fact that the memorandum was declassified and released at the National Archive earlier this year, no action was taken and the Bush White House coverup--

typified by the suppression of the Congressional report section dealing with Saudi government complicity in 9/11--continued to the end.

Condoleezza Rice Lied

The coverup, in at least one case, may have involved contempt of Congress. When a battle erupted between the 9/11 Commission and the White House over the public disclosure of segments of a Presidential Daily Briefing from August 2001, in which President Bush was explicitly warned about a high-probability al-Qaeda attack against the continental United States, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified before Congress that there was no ``actionable intelligence'' provided by the intelligence community, and that no one could have anticipated the events of 9/11.

In stark contrast to Rice's sworn testimony, U.S. intelligence had strong indications that, not only was al-Qaeda planning to hijack planes, but was planning to use them as weapons. According to the third document released this year by the 9/11 Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted a series of exercises, as early as October 1998--shortly after the attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa--

involving hijackings. The last of the exercises, ``Vigilant Guardian I,'' took place between Sept. 6-10, 2001. In one of the scenarios, described in a 9/11 Commission summary chronology, a London-to-New York flight is hijacked by ``terrorists with explosives who plan to detonate them over NYC.''

 Clearly, the idea that terrorists were planning to use aircraft as a weapon against New York City, was on the minds of some Federal counter-terror officials prior to 9/11.

Basnan's Free Ride Home

On Oct. 21, 2002, a Federal judge in California ordered Osama Yousef Basnan and his wife, Majida Ibrahim Ahmad Dweikat, to be deported from the United States--for immigration violations! The Saudi intelligence officer who had been in the country illegally since the early 1980s, who had bankrolled, along with Omar al-Bayoumi, at least two of the 9/11 hijackers, was so pleased with the judge's order to send him back to Saudi Arabia, that he walked up to the Federal prosecutor at the end of the hearing and shook his hand, thanking him profusely for the free ride home.

The message delivered that day in court could not have been clearer: The Anglo-Saudi terror nexus was off limits. The idea that two of America's most trusted so-called allies--

Great Britain and Saudi Arabia--had betrayed the United States, and played an indispensible role in the worst terrorist atrocity in history on American soil, was to be buried.

 How did the U.S. Air Force respond on 9/11? Could it have shot down United 93, as conspiracy theorists claim? Obtaining 30 hours of never-before-released tapes from the control room of NORAD's Northeast headquarters, the author reconstructs the chaotic military history of that day�and the Pentagon's apparent attempt to cover it up.

VF.com exclusive: Hear excerpts from the September 11 NORAD tapes. Click PLAY after each transcript to listen

By MICHAEL BRONNER Tucked in a piney notch in the gentle folds of the Adirondacks' southern skirts�just up from a derelict Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern rail spur�is a 22-year-old aluminum bunker tricked out with antennae tilted skyward. It could pass for the Jetsons' garage or, in the estimation of one of the higher-ranking U.S. Air Force officers stationed there, a big, sideways, half-buried beer keg. As Major Kevin Nasypany, the facility's mission-crew commander, drove up the hill to work on the morning of 9/11, he was dressed in his flight suit and prepared for battle. Not a real one. The Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), where Nasypany had been stationed since 1994, is the regional headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the Cold War�era military organization charged with protecting North American airspace. As he poured his first coffee on that sunny September morning, the odds that he would have to defend against Russian "Bear Bombers," one of NORAD's traditional simulated missions, were slim. Rather, Nasypany (pronounced Nah-sip-a-nee), an amiable commander with a thick mini-mustache and a hockey player's build, was headed in early to get ready for the NORAD-wide training exercise he'd helped design. The battle commander, Colonel Bob Marr, had promised to bring in fritters. NEADS is a desolate place, the sole orphan left behind after the dismantling of what was once one of the country's busiest bomber bases�Griffiss Air Force Base, in Rome, New York, which was otherwise mothballed in the mid-90s.

NEADS's mission remained in place and continues today: its officers, air-traffic controllers, and air-surveillance and communications technicians�mostly American, with a handful of Canadian troops�are responsible for protecting a half-million-square-mile chunk of American airspace stretching from the East Coast to Tennessee, up through the Dakotas to the Canadian border, including Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It was into this airspace that violence descended on 9/11, and from the NEADS operations floor that what turned out to be the sum total of America's military response during those critical 100-some minutes of the attack�scrambling four armed fighter jets and one unarmed training plane�emanated. The story of what happened in that room, and when, has never been fully told, but is arguably more important in terms of understanding America's military capabilities that day than anything happening simultaneously on Air Force One or in the Pentagon, the White House, or NORAD's impregnable headquarters, deep within Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado. It's a story that was intentionally obscured, some members of the 9/11 commission believe, by military higher-ups and members of the Bush administration who spoke to the press, and later the commission itself, in order to downplay the extent of the confusion and miscommunication flying through the ranks of the government.

The truth, however, is all on tape. Through the heat of the attack the wheels of what were, perhaps, some of the more modern pieces of equipment in the room�four Dictaphone multi-channel reel-to-reel tape recorders mounted on a rack in a corner of the operations floor�spun impassively, recording every radio channel, with time stamps. The recordings are fascinating and chilling. A mix of staccato bursts of military code; urgent, overlapping voices; the tense crackle of radio traffic from fighter pilots in the air; commanders' orders piercing through a mounting din; and candid moments of emotion as the breadth of the attacks becomes clearer. For the NEADS crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings�some real, some phantom�that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening. At one point, in the span of a single mad minute, one hears Nasypany struggling to parse reports of four separate hijackings at once. What emerges from the barrage of what Nasypany dubs "bad poop" flying at his troops from all directions is a picture of remarkable composure. Snap decisions more often than not turn out to be the right ones as commanders kick-start the dormant military machine. It is the fog and friction of war live�the authentic military history of 9/11.

"The real story is actually better than the one we told," a NORAD general admitted to 9/11-commission staffers when confronted with evidence from the tapes that contradicted his original testimony. And so it seems. Subpoenaed by the commission during its investigation, the recordings have never been played publicly beyond a handful of sound bites presented during the commission's hearings. Last September, as part of my research for the film United 93, on which I was an associate producer, I requested copies from the Pentagon. I was played snippets, but told my chances of hearing the full recordings were nonexistent. So it was a surprise, to say the least, when a military public-affairs officer e-mailed me, a full seven months later, saying she'd been cleared, finally, to provide them. "The signing of the Declaration of Independence took less coordination," she wrote. I would ultimately get three CDs with huge digital "wav file" recordings of the various channels in each section of the operations floor, 30-some hours of material in full, covering six and a half hours of real time. The first disc, which arrived by mail, was decorated with blue sky and fluffy white clouds and was labeled, in the playful Apple Chancery font, "Northeast Air Defense Sector�DAT Audio Files�11 Sep 2001." "This is not an exercise" At 8:14 a.m., as an Egyptian and four Saudis commandeered the cockpit on American 11, the plane that would hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, only a handful of troops were on the NEADS "ops" floor.

That's the facility's war room: a dimly lit den arrayed with long rows of radarscopes and communications equipment facing a series of 15-foot screens lining the front wall. The rest of the crew, about 30 Americans and five or six Canadians, were checking e-mails or milling around the hall. A briefing on the morning's training exercise was wrapping up in the Battle Cab, the glassed-in command area overlooking the ops floor. On the Dictaphone decks, an automated voice on each channel ticked off, in Greenwich Mean Time, the last few moments of life in pre-9/11 America: "12 hours, 26 minutes, 20 seconds"�just before 8:30 a.m. eastern daylight time. The first human voices captured on tape that morning are those of the "ID techs"�Senior Airman Stacia Rountree, 23 at the time, Tech Sergeant Shelley Watson, 40, and their boss, Master Sergeant Maureen "Mo" Dooley, 40. They are stationed in the back right corner of the ops floor at a console with several phones and a radarscope. Their job in a crisis is to facilitate communications between NEADS, the civilian F.A.A., and other military commands, gathering whatever information they can and sending it up the chain. Dooley�her personality at once motherly and aggressive�generally stands behind the other two, who are seated.

The tapes catch them discussing strategy of an entirely domestic order: 08:37:08O.K., a couch, an ottoman, a love seat, and what else � ? Was it on sale � ? Holy smokes! What color is it? In the background, however, you can make out the sound of Jeremy Powell, then 31, a burly, amiable technical sergeant, fielding the phone call that will be the military's first notification that something is wrong. On the line is Boston Center, the civilian air-traffic-control facility that handles that region's high-flying airliners.

08:37:52BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.

POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?

BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.PLAY | STOP Powell's question�"Is this real-world or exercise?"�is heard nearly verbatim over and over on the tapes as troops funnel onto the ops floor and are briefed about the hijacking. Powell, like almost everyone in the room, first assumes the phone call is from the simulations team on hand to send "inputs"�simulated scenarios�into play for the day's training exercise. Boston's request for fighter jets is not as prescient as it might seem. Standard hijack protocol calls for fighters to be launched�"scrambled"�merely to establish a presence in the air. The pilots are trained to trail the hijacked plane at a distance of about five miles, out of sight, following it until, presumably, it lands. If necessary, they can show themselves, flying up close to establish visual contact, and, if the situation demands, maneuver to force the plane to land. At this point, certainly, the notion of actually firing anything at a passenger jet hasn't crossed anyone's mind. In the ID section, the women overhear the word "hijack" and react, innocently enough, as anyone might with news of something exciting going on at work: 8:37:56

WATSON: What?DOOLEY: Whoa!

WATSON: What was that?

ROUNTREE: Is that real-world?

DOOLEY: Real-world hijack

.WATSON: Cool!PLAY | STOP For the first time in their careers, they'll get to put their training to full use. Almost simultaneously, a P.A. announcement goes out for Major Nasypany, who's taking his morning constitutional. 08:37:58P.A.: Major Nasypany, you're needed in ops pronto. P.A.: Major Nasypany, you're needed in ops pronto.[Recorded phone line:]

SERGEANT MCCAIN: Northeast Air Defense Sector, Sergeant McCain, can I help you?

SERGEANT KELLY: Yeah, Sergeant Kelly from Otis, how you doing today?

SERGEANT MCCAIN: Yeah, go ahead.

SERGEANT KELLY: The�I'm gettin' reports from my TRACON [local civilian air traffic] that there might be a possible hijacking.

SERGEANT MCCAIN: I was just hearing the same thing. We're workin' it right now.

SERGEANT KELLY: O.K., thanks.PLAY | STOP "When they told me there was a hijack, my first reaction was 'Somebody started the exercise early,'" Nasypany later told me. The day's exercise was designed to run a range of scenarios, including a "traditional" simulated hijack in which politically motivated perpetrators commandeer an aircraft, land on a Cuba-like island, and seek asylum. "I actually said out loud, 'The hijack's not supposed to be for another hour,'" Nasypany recalled. (The fact that there was an exercise planned for the same day as the attack factors into several conspiracy theories, though the 9/11 commission dismisses this as coincidence. After plodding through dozens of hours of recordings, so do I.) On tape, one hears as Nasypany, following standard hijack protocol, prepares to launch two fighters from Otis Air National Guard Base, on Cape Cod, to look for American 11, which is now off course and headed south. He orders his Weapons Team�the group on the ops floor that controls the fighters�to put the Otis planes on "battle stations." This means that at the air base the designated "alert" pilots�two in this case�are jolted into action by a piercing "battle horn."

They run to their jets, climb up, strap in, and do everything they need to do to get ready to fly short of starting the engines. Meanwhile, the communications team at NEADS�the ID techs Dooley, Rountree, and Watson�are trying to find out, as fast as possible, everything they can about the hijacked plane: the airline, the flight number, the tail number (to help fighter pilots identify it in the air), its flight plan, the number of passengers ("souls on board" in military parlance), and, most important, where it is, so Nasypany can launch the fighters. All the ID section knows is that the plane is American Airlines, Flight No. 11, Boston to Los Angeles, currently somewhere north of John F. Kennedy International Airport�the point of reference used by civilian controllers. ID tech Watson places a call to the management desk at Boston Center, which first alerted NEADS to the hijack, and gets distressing news. 08:39:58

WATSON: It's the inbound to J.F.K.?

BOSTON CENTER: We�we don't know.

WATSON: You don't know where he is at all?

BOSTON CENTER: He's being hijacked. The pilot's having a hard time talking to the�I mean, we don't know. We don't know where he's goin'. He's heading towards Kennedy. He's�like I said, he's like 35 miles north of Kennedy now at 367 knots. We have no idea where he's goin' or what his intentions are.

WATSON: If you could please give us a call and let us know�you know any information, that'd be great.

BOSTON CENTER: Okay. Right now, I guess we're trying to work on�I guess there's been some threats in the cockpit. The pilot�

WATSON: There's been what?! I'm sorry.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Threat to the � ?

BOSTON CENTER: We'll call you right back as soon as we know more info. Dooley is standing over Watson, shouting whatever pertinent information she hears to Nasypany, who's now in position in the center of the floor. 08:40:36

DOOLEY: O.K., he said threat to the cockpit!PLAY | STOP This last bit ratchets the tension in the room up considerably. At Otis Air National Guard Base, the pilots are in their jets, straining at the reins. ("When the horn goes off, it definitely gets your heart," F-15 pilot Major Dan Nash later told me, thumping his chest with his hand.) But at NEADS, Nasypany's "tracker techs" in the Surveillance section still can't find American 11 on their scopes. As it turns out, this is just as the hijackers intended. Radar is the NEADS controllers' most vital piece of equipment, but by 9/11 the scopes were so old, among other factors, that controllers were ultimately unable to find any of the hijacked planes in enough time to react. Known collectively as the Green Eye for the glow the radar rings give off, the scopes looked like something out of Dr. Strangelove and were strikingly anachronistic compared with the equipment at civilian air-traffic sites.

(After 9/11, NEADS was equipped with state-of-the-art equipment.) In order to find a hijacked airliner�or any airplane�military controllers need either the plane's beacon code (broadcast from an electronic transponder on board) or the plane's exact coordinates. When the hijackers on American 11 turned the beacon off, intentionally losing themselves in the dense sea of airplanes already flying over the U.S. that morning (a tactic that would be repeated, with some variations, on all the hijacked flights), the NEADS controllers were at a loss. "You would see thousands of green blips on your scope," Nasypany told me, "and now you have to pick and choose. Which is the bad guy out there? Which is the hijacked aircraft? And without that information from F.A.A., it's a needle in a haystack." At this point in the morning, more than 3,000 jetliners are already in the air over the continental United States, and the Boston controller's direction�"35 miles north of Kennedy"�doesn't help the NEADS controllers at all. On tape, amid the confusion, one hears Major James Fox, then 32, the leader of the Weapons Team, whose composure will stand out throughout the attack, make an observation that, so far, ranks as the understatement of the morning.

08:43:06FOX: I've never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise.PLAY | STOP Less than two minutes later, frustrated that the controllers still can't pinpoint American 11 on radar, Nasypany orders Fox to launch the Otis fighters anyway.

08:44:59FOX: M.C.C. [Mission Crew Commander], I don't know where I'm scrambling these guys to. I need a direction, a destination�

NASYPANY: O.K., I'm gonna give you the Z point [coordinate]. It's just north of�New York City.

FOX: I got this lat long, 41-15, 74-36, or 73-46.

NASYPANY: Head 'em in that direction.

FOX: Copy that.PLAY | STOP Having them up, Nasypany figures, is better than having them on the ground, assuming NEADS will ultimately pin down American 11's position. His job is to be proactive�to try to gain leverage over the situation as fast as possible. His backstop is Colonel Marr, the battle commander and Nasypany's superior up in the Battle Cab, whose role is more strategic, calculating the implications of each move several hours down the line. Marr, 48 at the time (and since retired), is a well-liked leader. Most of his conversations on 9/11 are unrecorded: he speaks over a secure phone with his superior, Major General Larry Arnold, stationed at NORAD's command center at Tyndall Air Force Base, in Florida, or over an intercom with Nasypany. In the latter case, only Nasypany's side of the conversations is recorded. In the last lines of his first briefing to Marr, Nasypany unwittingly, in his last line, trumps Fox in the realm of understatement.

08:46:36NASYPANY: Hi, sir. O.K., what�what we're doing, we're tryin' to locate this guy. We can't find him via I.F.F. [the Identification Friend or Foe system]. What we're gonna do, we're gonna hit up every track within a 25-mile radius of this Z-point [coordinate] that we put on the scope. Twenty-nine thousand [feet] heading 1-9-0 [east]. We're just gonna do�we're gonna try to find this guy. They can't find him. There's supposedly been threats to the cockpit. So we're just doing the thing � [off-mic conversation] True. And probably right now with what's going on in the cockpit it's probably really crazy. So, it probably needs to�that will simmer down and we'll probably get some better information.PLAY | STOP American 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center four seconds into this transmission.

More than 150 miles from Manhattan, within the same minute as American 11 hits the tower, the stoplight in the Alert Barn at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod turns from red to green, Colonel Marr and General Arnold having approved Nasypany's order to scramble the fighters. The pilots taxi out and fire the afterburners as the planes swing onto the runway. NEADS has no indication yet that American 11 has crashed. Five minutes later, Rountree, at the ID station, gets the first report of the crash from Boston Center (as her colleagues Watson and Dooley overhear).

08:51:11

ROUNTREE: A plane just hit the World Trade Center.

WATSON: What?ROUNTREE: Was it a 737?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (background): Hit what?

WATSON: The World Trade Center�

DOOLEY: Who are you talking to? [Gasps.]

WATSON: Oh!

DOOLEY: Get�pass�pass it to them�

WATSON: Oh my God. Oh God. Oh my God.

ROUNTREE: Saw it on the news. It's�a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.

D OOLEY: Update New York! See if they lost altitude on that plane altogether. Watson places a call to civilian controllers at New York Center.

WATSON: Yes, ma'am. Did you just hear the information regarding the World Trade Center?NEW YORK CENTER: No.

WATSON: Being hit by an aircraft?

NEW YORK CENTER: I'm sorry?!

WATSON: Being hit by an aircraft.NEW YORK CENTER: You're kidding.

WATSON: It's on the world news.PLAY | STOP In light of this news, someone asks Nasypany what to do with the fighters�the two F-15s from Otis Air National Guard Base�which have now just blasted off for New York at full afterburner to find American 11. (The flying time at full speed from Cape Cod to New York is about 10 minutes.) Pumped with adrenaline, Nasypany doesn't miss a beat.

08:52:40

NASYPANY: Send 'em to New York City still. Continue! Go!

NASYPANY: This is what I got. Possible news that a 737 just hit the World Trade Center. This is a real-world. And we're trying to confirm this. Okay. Continue taking the fighters down to the New York City area, J.F.K. area, if you can. Make sure that the F.A.A. clears it� your route all the way through. Do what we gotta do, okay? Let's press with this. It looks like this guy could have hit the World Trade Center.PLAY | STOP "I'm not gonna stop what I initially started with scrambling Otis�getting Otis over New York City," Nasypany recalled when I played him this section of his tape. "If this is a false report, I still have my fighters where I want them to be." Meanwhile, confusion is building on the ops floor over whether the plane that hit the tower really was American 11. Rumors that it was a small Cessna have started to circulate through the civilian air-traffic system. ID tech Rountree is on the phone with Boston Center's military liaison, Colin Scoggins, a civilian manager, who at first seems to confirm that it was American 11 that went into the tower.

08:55:18

BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yeah, he crashed into the World Trade Center.

ROUNTREE: That is the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center?BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yup. Disregard the�disregard the tail number [given earlier for American 11].

ROUNTREE: Disregard the tail number? He did crash into the World Trade Center?

BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): That's�that's what we believe, yes.PLAY | STOP But an unidentified male trooper at NEADS overhears the exchange and raises a red flag.

08:56:31

MALE NEADS TECH: I never heard them say American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center. I heard it was a civilian aircraft. Dooley, the ID desk's master sergeant, takes the phone from Rountree to confirm for herself, and the story veers off course �

DOOLEY (to Boston): Master Sergeant Dooley here. We need to have�are you giving confirmation that American 11 was the one�

BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): No, we're not gonna confirm that at this time. We just know an aircraft crashed in and �

DOOLEY: You�are you�can you say�is anyone up there tracking primary on this guy still?

BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): No. The last [radar sighting] we have was about 15 miles east of J.F.K., or eight miles east of J.F.K. was our last primary hit. He did slow down in speed. The primary that we had, it slowed down below�around to 300 knots.

DOOLEY: And then you lost 'em?

BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yeah, and then we lost 'em.PLAY | STOP The problem, Scoggins told me later, was that American Airlines refused to confirm for several hours that its plane had hit the tower. This lack of confirmation caused uncertainty that would be compounded in a very big way as the attack continued. (Though airlines have their own means of monitoring the location of their planes and communicating with their pilots, they routinely go into information lockdown in a crisis.) Amid the chaos, Nasypany notices that some of his people are beginning to panic, so he makes a joke to relieve the tension.

08:57:11

NASYPANY: Think we put the exercise on the hold. What do you think? [Laughter.] Just at that moment, in one of the dark, U-shaped air-traffic-control areas at New York Center, on Long Island, a half-dozen civilian controllers are watching a second plane that's turned off course: United 175, also scheduled from Boston to Los Angeles. As the controllers try to hail the pilots, a manager comes running in and confirms that the plane that hit the first tower was, indeed, a commercial airliner, rather than a small Cessna. It's just at that moment that United 175, 38 minutes into its flight and now near Allentown, Pennsylvania, moving southwest farther and farther off course, makes a sudden swing northeast toward Manhattan. Suddenly�instinctively�the civilian controllers know: it's another hijacking, and it's not going to land. The controllers start speculating what the hijacker is aiming at�one guesses the Statue of Liberty�and the room erupts in profanity and horror. One controller is looking at his scope, calling out the rate of descent every 12 seconds as he watches the radar refresh. It is not until the last second, literally, that anyone from New York Center thinks to update NEADS. ID tech Rountree fields the call.

09:03:17

ROUNTREE: They have a second possible hijack!PLAY | STOP Almost simultaneously, United 175 slams into the south tower of the World Trade Center, something several NEADS personnel witness live on CNN, including Colonel Marr, the commanding officer. (Dooley told me she remembers looking up toward the Battle Cab and, for a long moment, seeing Marr's jaw drop and everyone around him frozen.) On the ops floor, there is considerable confusion as to whether the second hijacking New York Center just called in is the same plane that hit the second tower, or whether there are now three missing planes.

09:03:52

NASYPANY (to Marr): Sir, we got�we've got unconfirmed second hit from another aircraft. Fighters are south of�just south of Long Island, sir. Right now. Fighters are south of Long Island. There's seemingly enough commotion in the Battle Cab that Nasypany needs to clarify: "Our fighters � " The two F-15s, scrambled from Otis, are now approaching the city. In the background, several troops can be heard trying to make sense of what's happening. 09:04:50�Is this explosion part of that that we're lookin' at now on TV?�Yes.�Jesus ��And there's a possible second hijack also�a United Airlines ��Two planes?��Get the [censored] out ��I think this is a damn input, to be honest.PLAY | STOP The last line�"I think this is a damn input"�is a reference to the exercise, meaning a simulations input. It's either gallows humor or wishful thinking. From the tape, it's hard to tell. "We've already had two. Why not more?" Meanwhile, flying southwest over the ocean, the two fighters from Otis Air National Guard Base are streaking toward Manhattan. The pilots are startled, to say the least, when they see billowing smoke appear on the horizon; no one's briefed them about what's going on. They were scrambled simply to intercept and escort American 11�a possible hijacking�and that is all they know. "From 100 miles away at least, we could see the fire and the smoke blowing," Major Dan Nash, one of the F-15 pilots, told me. "Obviously, anybody watching CNN had a better idea of what was going on. We were not told anything. It was to the point where we were flying supersonic towards New York and the controller came on and said, 'A second airplane has hit the World Trade Center.' � My first thought was 'What happened to American 11?'" With both towers now in flames, Nasypany wants the fighters over Manhattan immediately, but the weapons techs get "pushback" from civilian F.A.A. controllers, who have final authority over the fighters as long as they are in civilian airspace. The F.A.A. controllers are afraid of fast-moving fighters colliding with a passenger plane, of which there are hundreds in the area, still flying normal routes�the morning's unprecedented order to ground all civilian aircraft has not yet been given. To Nasypany, the fact that so many planes are still in the sky is all the more reason to get the fighters close. ("We've already had two," he told me, referring to the hijackings. "Why not more?") The fighters are initially directed to a holding area just off the coast, near Long Island. Nasypany isn't happy, and he makes sure that's duly noted for posterity as he calls out to Major Fox, the leader of the Weapons Team.

09:07:20

NASYPANY: Okay, Foxy. Plug in. I want to make sure this is on tape.� This is what�this is what I foresee that we probably need to do. We need to talk to F.A.A. We need to tell 'em if this stuff's gonna keep on going, we need to take those fighters on and then put 'em over Manhattan, O.K.? That's the best thing. That's the best play right now. So, coordinate with the F.A.A. Tell 'em if there's more out there, which we don't know, let's get 'em over Manhattan. At least we got some kinda play.PLAY | STOP He tells the Battle Cab he wants Fox to launch two more fighters from Langley Air Force Base, in Virginia, to establish a greater presence over New York, but the request is refused. The order from the Battle Cab is to put the Langley jets on battle stations only�to be ready, but not to launch. "The problem there would have been I'd have all my fighters in the air at the same time, which means they'd all run out of gas at the same time," Marr later explained. Incredibly, Marr has only four armed fighters at his disposal to defend about a quarter of the continental United States. Massive cutbacks at the close of the Cold War reduced NORAD's arsenal of fighters from some 60 battle-ready jets to just 14 across the entire country. (Under different commands, the military generally maintains several hundred unarmed fighter jets for training in the continental U.S.) Only four of NORAD's planes belong to NEADS and are thus anywhere close to Manhattan�the two from Otis, now circling above the ocean off Long Island, and the two in Virginia at Langley. Nasypany starts walking up and down the floor, asking all his section heads and weapons techs if they are prepared to shoot down a civilian airliner if need be, but he's jumping the gun: he doesn't have the authority to order a shootdown, nor does Marr or Arnold, or Vice President Cheney, for that matter. The order will need to come from President Bush, who has only just learned of the attack at a photo op in Florida. On the ops floor, you hear Nasypany firmly pressing the issue. He briefs Marr on the armaments on board the F-15s, and how he sees best to use them "if need be":

9:19:44

NASYPANY: My recommendation, if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft, we use AIM-9s in the face.� If need be.PLAY | STOP If there's another hijacking and the jets can engage, Nasypany is telling Marr, a missile fired into the nose of the plane will have the greatest chance of bringing it down. But the prospect soon becomes real. Mo Dooley's voice erupts from the ID station on the operations floor.

9:21:37

DOOLEY: Another hijack! It's headed towards Washington!

NASYPANY: [censored]! Give me a location.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Okay. Third aircraft�hijacked�heading toward Washington.PLAY | STOP This report, received from Colin Scoggins at Boston Center, will set off a major escalation in the military response to the attack, resulting in the launch of additional armed fighter jets. But 20 months later, when the military presents to the 9/11 commission what is supposed to be a full accounting of the day, omitted from the official time line is any mention of this reported hijacking and the fevered chase it engenders. It was the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, 2003, and the hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building, in Washington, was half empty as the group of mostly retired military brass arranged themselves at the witness table before the 9/11 commission. The story the NORAD officers had come to tell before the commission was a relatively humbling one, a point underscored by the questions commission chairman Thomas Kean introduced during his opening remarks: How did the hijackers defeat the system, and why couldn't we stop them? These were important questions. Nearly two years after the attack, the Internet was rife with questions and conspiracy theories about 9/11�in particular, where were the fighters? Could they have physically gotten to any of the hijacked planes? And did they shoot down the final flight, United 93, which ended up in a Pennsylvania field? On hand, dressed in business suits (with the exception of Major General Craig McKinley, whose two stars twinkled on either epaulet), were Major General Larry Arnold (retired), who had been on the other end of the secure line with NEADS's Colonel Marr throughout the attack, and Colonel Alan Scott (retired), who had been with Arnold at NORAD's continental command in Florida on 9/11 and who worked closely with Marr in preparing the military's time line. None of the military men were placed under oath.

Their story, in a nutshell, was one of being caught off guard initially, then very quickly ramping up to battle status�in position, and in possession of enough situational awareness to defend the country, and the capital in particular, before United 93, the fourth hijacked plane, would have reached Washington. Major General Arnold explained to the commission that the military had been tracking United 93 and the fighters were in position if United 93 had threatened Washington. "It was our intent to intercept United Flight 93," Arnold testified. "I was personally anxious to see what 93 was going to do, and our intent was to intercept it." Colonel Marr, the commanding officer at NEADS on 9/11, had made similar comments to ABC News for its one-year-anniversary special on the attacks, saying that the pilots had been warned they might have to intercept United 93, and stop it if necessary: "And we of course passed that on to the pilots: United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington, D.C." When I interviewed him recently, Marr recalled a conversation he had had with Arnold in the heat of the attack. "I remember the words out of General Arnold's mouth, or at least as I remember them, were 'We will take lives in the air to save lives on the ground.'" In actuality, they'd never get that chance. In the chronology presented to the 9/11 commission, Colonel Scott put the time NORAD was first notified about United 93 at 9:16 a.m., from which time, he said, commanders tracked the flight closely. (It crashed at 10:03 a.m.) If it had indeed been necessary to "take lives in the air" with United 93, or any incoming flight to Washington, the two armed fighters from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia would have been the ones called upon to carry out the shootdown.

In Colonel Scott's account, those jets were given the order to launch at 9:24, within seconds of NEADS's receiving the F.A.A.'s report of the possible hijacking of American 77, the plane that would ultimately hit the Pentagon. This time line suggests the system was starting to work: the F.A.A. reports a hijacking, and the military reacts instantaneously. Launching after the report of American 77 would, in theory, have put the fighters in the air and in position over Washington in plenty of time to react to United 93. In testimony a few minutes later, however, General Arnold added an unexpected twist: "We launched the aircraft out of Langley to put them over top of Washington, D.C., not in response to American Airlines 77, but really to put them in position in case United 93 were to head that way." How strange, John Azzarello, a former prosecutor and one of the commission's staff members, thought. "I remember being at the hearing in '03 and wondering why they didn't seem to have their stories straight. That struck me as odd." The ears of another staff member, Miles Kara, perked up as well. "I said to myself, That's not right," the retired colonel, a former army intelligence officer, told me. Kara had seen the radar re-creations of the fighters' routes. "We knew something was odd, but we didn't have enough specificity to know how odd." As the tapes reveal in stark detail, parts of Scott's and Arnold's testimony were misleading, and others simply false. At 9:16 a.m., when Arnold and Marr had supposedly begun their tracking of United 93, the plane had not yet been hijacked. In fact, NEADS wouldn't get word about United 93 for another 51 minutes. And while NORAD commanders did, indeed, order the Langley fighters to scramble at 9:24, as Scott and Arnold testified, it was not in response to the hijacking of American 77 or United 93. Rather, they were chasing a ghost. NEADS was entering the most chaotic period of the morning. "Chase this guy down"

At 9:21 a.m., just before Dooley's alert about a third hijacked plane headed for Washington, NEADS is in the eye of the storm�a period of relative calm in which, for the moment, there are no reports of additional hijackings. The call that sets off the latest alarm ("Another hijack! It's headed towards Washington!") comes from Boston and is wholly confounding: according to Scoggins, the Boston manager, American 11, the plane they believed was the first one to hit the World Trade Center, is actually still flying�still hijacked�and now heading straight for D.C. Whatever hit the first tower, it wasn't American 11. The chase is on for what will turn out to be a phantom plane.

9:21:50

NASYPANY: O.K. American Airlines is still airborne�11, the first guy. He's heading towards Washington. O.K., I think we need to scramble Langley right now. And I'm�I'm gonna take the fighters from Otis and try to chase this guy down if I can find him.PLAY | STOP Arnold and Marr approve scrambling the two planes at Langley, along with a third unarmed trainer, and Nasypany sets the launch in motion. It's a mistake, of course. American 11 was, indeed, the plane that hit the first tower. The confusion will persist for hours, however. In Boston, it is Colin Scoggins who has made the mistaken call. "When we phoned United [after the second tower was hit], they confirmed that United 175 was down, and I think they confirmed that within two or three minutes," Scoggins, the go-to guy at Boston Center for all things military, later told me. "With American Airlines, we could never confirm if it was down or not, so that left doubt in our minds." An unwieldy conference call between F.A.A. centers had been established, and Scoggins was monitoring it when the word came across�from whom or where isn't clear�that American 11 was thought to be headed for Washington. Scoggins told me he thinks that the problem started with someone overheard trying to confirm from American whether American 11 was down�that somewhere in the flurry of information zipping back and forth during the conference call this transmogrified into the idea that a different plane had hit the tower, and that American 11 was still hijacked and still in the air. The plane's course, had it continued south past New York in the direction it was flying before it dipped below radar coverage, would have had it headed on a straight course toward D.C.

This was all controllers were going on; they were never tracking an actual plane on the radar after losing American 11 near Manhattan, but if it had been flying low enough, the plane could have gone undetected. "After talking to a supervisor, I made the call and said [American 11] is still in the air, and it's probably somewhere over New Jersey or Delaware heading for Washington, D.C.," Scoggins told me. Over the next quarter-hour, the fact that the fighters have been launched in response to the phantom American 11�rather than American 77 or United 93�is referred to six more times on Nasypany's channel alone. How could Colonel Scott and General Arnold have missed it in preparing for their 9/11-commission testimony? It's a question Arnold would have to answer later, under oath. In the middle of the attack, however, the hijackers' sabotaging of the planes' beacons has thrown such a wrench into efforts to track them that it all seems plausible. 9:23:15

ANDERSON: They're probably not squawking anything
anyway. I mean, obviously these guys are in the cockpit.

NASYPANY: These guys are smart.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, they knew exactly what they wanted to do.PLAY | STOP Another officer asks Nasypany the obvious question.

9:32:20

MAJOR JAMES ANDERSON: Have you asked�have you asked the question what you're gonna do if we actually find this guy? Are we gonna shoot him down if they got passengers on board? Have they talked about that?PLAY | STOP Approval for any such order would have to come from the commander in chief. Just after 9:30, however, the president was in his motorcade preparing to leave the Emma Booker Elementary School, in Sarasota, for the airport and the safety of Air Force One. The 9/11 commission determined that the president had not been aware of any further possible hijackings and was not yet in touch with the Pentagon. But a clear shootdown order wouldn't have made a difference. The Langley fighters were headed the wrong way�due east, straight out to sea into a military-training airspace called Whiskey 386, rather than toward Washington, which NEADS believed was under attack.

According to the 9/11 commission, the Langley pilots were never briefed by anyone at their base about why they were being scrambled, so, despite having been given the order from NEADS to fly to Washington, the pilots ended up following their normal training flight plan out to sea�a flight plan dating from the Cold War. As one pilot later told the commission, "I reverted to the Russian threat�I'm thinking cruise-missile threat from the sea." At NEADS, a 28-year-old staff sergeant named William Huckabone, staring at his Green Eye, is the first to notice that the Langley jets are off course. His voice is a mix of stress and dread as he and the controller next to him, Master Sergeant Steve Citino, order a navy air-traffic controller who's handling the fighters to get them turned around toward Baltimore to try to cut off the phantom American 11. The navy air-traffic controller seems not to understand the urgency of the situation.

9:34:12

NAVY A.T.C.: You've got [the fighters] moving east in airspace. Now you want 'em to go to Baltimore?

HUCKABONE: Yes, sir. We're not gonna take 'em in Whiskey 386 [military training airspace over the ocean].

NAVY A.T.C.: O.K., once he goes to Baltimore, what are we supposed to do?

HUCKABONE: Have him contact us on auxiliary frequency 2-3-4 decimal 6. Instead of taking handoffs to us and us handing 'em back, just tell Center they've got to go to Baltimore.NAVY A.T.C.: All right, man. Stand by. We'll get back to you.

CITINO: What do you mean, "We'll get back to you"? Just do it

!HUCKABONE: I'm gonna choke that guy!

CITINO: Be very professional, Huck.

HUCKABONE: O.K.CITINO: All right, Huck. Let's get our act together here.PLAY | STOP All hell is breaking loose around them. Boston Center has called in with another suspected hijacking�the controllers there don't know the call sign yet�and ID tech Watson is speed-dialing everyone she can to find a position on the resurrected American 11. In the course of a call to Washington Center, the operations manager there has sprung new information about yet another lost airplane: American 77.

9:34:01

WASHINGTON CENTER: Now, let me tell you this. I�I'll�we've been looking. We're�also lost American 77�

WATSON: American 77?DOOLEY: American 77's lost�

WATSON: Where was it proposed to head, sir?

WASHINGTON CENTER: Okay, he was going to L.A. also�WATSON: From where, sir?

WASHINGTON CENTER: I think he was from Boston also. Now let me tell you this story here. Indianapolis Center was working this guy�

WATSON: What guy?

WASHINGTON CENTER: American 77, at flight level 3-5-0 [35,000 feet]. However, they lost radar with him. They lost contact with him. They lost everything. And they don't have any idea where he is or what happened.PLAY | STOP This is a full 10 minutes later than the time Major General Arnold and Colonel Scott would give in their testimony; reality was a lot messier. Forty minutes prior, at 8:54 a.m., controllers at Indianapolis Center had lost radar contact with American 77, flying from Washington Dulles to LAX, and assumed the plane had crashed because they weren't aware of the attack in New York. Though they soon realized this was another hijacking and sent warnings up the F.A.A. chain, no one called the military; it was only by chance that NEADS's Watson got the information in her call to Washington Center. As Watson takes in the information from Washington Center, Rountree's phone is ringing again. By this point, the other ID techs have taken to calling Rountree "the bearer of death and destruction" because it seems every time she picks up the phone there's another hijacking. And so it is again. At Boston Center, Colin Scoggins has spotted a low-flying airliner six miles southeast of the White House.

9:35:41

ROUNTREE: Huntress [call sign for NEADS] ID, Rountree, can I help you?

BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Latest report, [low-flying] aircraft six miles southeast of the White House.

ROUNTREE: Six miles southeast of the White House?

BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yup. East�he's moving away?

ROUNTREE: Southeast from the White House.

BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Air�aircraft is moving away.

ROUNTREE: Moving away from the White House?BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Yeah.�

ROUNTREE: Deviating away. You don't have a type aircraft, you don't know who he is�

BOSTON CENTER (Scoggins): Nothing, nothing. We're over here in Boston so I have no clue. That�hopefully somebody in Washington would have better�information for you.PLAY | STOP This will turn out to be American 77, but since the hijackers turned the beacon off on this plane as well, no one will realize that until later. Depending on how you count, NEADS now has three reported possible hijackings from Boston (the phantom American 11 and two unidentified planes) as well as Washington Center's report that American 77 is lost. Of these four vague and ultimately overlapping reports, the latest�word of a plane six miles from the White House�is the most urgent. The news sets off a frenzy.

9:36:23

NASYPANY: O.K., Foxy [Major Fox, the Weapons Team head]. I got a aircraft six miles east of the White House! Get your fighters there as soon as possible!MALE VOICE: That came from Boston?HUCKABONE: We're gonna turn and burn it�crank it up�

MALE TECH: Six miles!

HUCKABONE: All right, here we go. This is what we're gonna do�

NASYPANY: We've got an aircraft deviating eight [sic] miles east of the White House right now.

FOX: Do you want us to declare A.F.I.O. [emergency military control of the fighters] and run 'em straight in there?

NASYPANY: Take 'em and run 'em to the White House.

FOX: Go directly to Washington.CITINO: We're going direct D.C. with my guys [Langley fighters]? Okay. Okay.

HUCKABONE: Ma'am, we are going A.F.I.O. right now with Quit 2-5 [the Langley fighters]. They are going direct Washington.

NAVY A.T.C.: Quit 2-5, we're handing 'em off to Center right now.

HUCKABONE: Ma'am, we need to expedite that right now. We've gotta contact them on 2-3-4-6.PLAY | STOP "Six miles south, or west, or east of the White House is�it's seconds [away]," Nasypany told me later. "Airliners traveling at 400-plus knots, it's nothing. It's seconds away from that location." The White House, then, is in immediate danger. Radar analysis in the following weeks will show that the plane abruptly veers away and turns toward the Pentagon, though the controllers at NEADS have no way of knowing this in the moment. Looking in the general capital area, one of the tracker techs thinks he spots the plane on radar, then just as quickly loses it.

9:37:56

MALE TECH: Right here, right here, right here. I got him. I got him.

NASYPANY: We just lost track. Get a Z-point [coordinate] on that.� O.K., we got guys lookin' at 'em. Hold on.� Where's Langley at? Where are the fighters?PLAY | STOP The fighters have no chance. They're about 150 miles away, according to radar analysis done later. Even at top speed�and even if they know the problem is suicide hijackings of commercial airliners rather than Russian missiles�it will take them roughly 10 minutes to get to the Pentagon.

9:38:50

NASYPANY: We need to get those back up there�I don't care how many windows you break!� Goddammit! O.K. Push 'em back! But the Pentagon is already in flames, American 77 having plowed through the E-ring of the west side of the building seconds before, at 9:37:46. The Langley fighters will not be established over Washington for another 20 minutes. "You were just so mad" On the ops floor, everyone is staring at CNN on the overhead screen. Seeing the first pictures of the Pentagon in flames is gut-wrenching. Nasypany's voice can be heard cursing in frustration: "Goddammit! I can't even protect my N.C.A. [National Capital Area]." You hear troops prod one another to stay focused.

CITINO: O.K.�let's watch our guys, Huck. Not the TV. "The more it went on, the more unbelievable it got, and then the one that did the Pentagon," Dooley told me, "we just couldn't believe it. You were just so mad that you couldn't stop these guys and so you're looking for the next one. Where are they going next?" It looks like Washington again. Three minutes after the Pentagon is hit, Scoggins, at Boston Center, is back on the phone. The Boston controllers are now tracking Delta 1989�Boston to Las Vegas�which fits the same profile as the other hijackings: cross-country, out of Boston, lots of fuel, and possibly off course. But this one's different from the others in one key respect: the plane's beacon code is still working. In this chase, NEADS will have a chance, as the excitement in Dooley's last line reflects:

9:40:57

ROUNTREE: Delta 89, that's the hijack. They think it's possible hijack.

DOOLEY: [censored]!

ROUNTREE: South of Cleveland. We have a code on him now.

DOOLEY: Good. Pick it up! Find it!

MALE TECH: Delta what?

ROUNTREE: Eight nine�a Boeing 767.

DOOLEY: [censored], another one�PLAY | STOP They quickly find the plane on radar�it's just south of Toledo�and begin alerting other F.A.A. centers. They're not sure where the plane is headed. If it's Chicago, they're in big trouble, because they don't have any planes close enough to cut it off. Marr and Nasypany order troops to call Air National Guard bases in that area to see if anyone can launch fighters. A base in Selfridge, Michigan, offers up two unarmed fighters that are already flying, on their way back from a training mission.

9:54:54

SELFRIDGE FLIGHT OFFICER: Here�here's what we can do. At a minimum, we can keep our guys airborne. I mean, they don't have�they don't have any guns or missiles or anything on board. But we�

NEADS TECH: It's a presence, though.PLAY | STOP But NEADS is victim again to an increasingly long information lag. Even before Rountree gets the urgent call that Delta 1989 is hijacked, a civilian air-traffic controller in Cleveland in contact with the pilot has determined that the flight is fine�that Delta 1989 isn't a hijacking after all. Meanwhile, however, NEADS has gotten a call from a NORAD unit in Canada with yet another suspected hijacking headed south across the border toward Washington. In the barrage of information and misinformation, it becomes increasingly difficult for the controllers to keep count of how many suspected hijackings are pending. So far, it is known that three have hit buildings, but given the uncertainty about the fates of American 11 and American 77�no one knows yet that this is the plane that hit the Pentagon�the sense at NEADS is that there are possibly three hijacked jets still out there, and who knows how many more yet to be reported. At this point, no one on the military side is aware that United 93 has been hijacked. Then, over a crackly radio, one of the Langley fighter pilots, now in a combat air patrol over Washington, is calling in urgently.

10:07:08

PILOT: Baltimore is saying something about an aircraft over the White House. Any words?

CITINO: Negative. Stand by. Do you copy that, SD [Major Fox]? Center said there's an aircraft over the White House. Any words?

FOX: M.C.C. [Nasypany], we've got an aircraft reported over the White House.PLAY | STOP A fourth hijacking? Nasypany, who's running full throttle, replies instinctively.

NASYPANY: Intercept!

FOX: Intercept!

NASYPANY: Intercept and divert that aircraft away from there.PLAY | STOP On one channel, you hear a weapons tech very dramatically hailing the fighters and ordering the intercept.

CITINO: Quit 2-5 [Langley fighters], mission is intercept aircraft over White House. Use F.A.A. for guidance.

FOX: Divert the aircraft away from the White House. Intercept and divert it.

CITINO: Quit 2-5, divert the aircraft from the White House

.PILOT: Divert the aircraft.�PLAY | STOP Meanwhile, Nasypany calls the Battle Cab. With a plane headed straight for the White House, Nasypany needs an update on his rules of engagement�fast.

10:07:39

NASYPANY: Do you hear that? That aircraft over the White House. What's the word? � Intercept and what else? � Aircraft over the White House.PLAY | STOP The "what else?" is the big question: do they have the authority to shoot? The request skips up the chain to Arnold. "I was in Vietnam," Arnold later told me. "When people are shooting at you, you don't know when it's going to stop. And that same thought went through my mind [on 9/11]. You begin to wonder, How can I get control of this situation? When can we as a military get control of this situation?" Arnold, in turn, passes the request for rules of engagement farther up the chain. It is in the middle of this, simultaneously, that the first call comes in about United 93. ID tech Watson fields it.

10:07:16

CLEVELAND CENTER: We got a United 93 out here. Are you aware of that?

WATSON: United 93?CLEVELAND CENTER: That has a bomb on board.

WATSON: A bomb on board?! And this is confirmed? You have a [beacon code], sir?

CLEVELAND CENTER: No, we lost his transponder. The information is shouted out to Nasypany.

NASYPANY: Gimme the c all sign. Gimme the whole nine yards.� Let's get some info, real quick. They got a bomb?PLAY | STOP 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 [regarding a hijacking] 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." In his bunker under the White House, Vice President Cheney was not notified about United 93 until 10:02�only one minute before the airliner impacted the ground. Yet it was with dark bravado that the vice president and others in the Bush administration would later recount sober deliberations about the prospect of shooting down United 93. "Very, very tough decision, and the president understood the magnitude of that decision," Bush's then chief of staff, Andrew Card, told ABC News.

Cheney echoed, "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before." And it wasn't on 9/11, either. President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which�though no one knew it at the time�was 15 minutes after the attack was over. But comments such as those above were repeated by other administration and military figures in the weeks and months following 9/11, forging the notion that only the passengers' counterattack against their hijackers prevented an inevitable shootdown of United 93 (and convincing conspiracy theorists that the government did, indeed, secretly shoot it down). The recordings tell a different story, and not only because United 93 had crashed before anyone in the military chain of command even knew it had been hijacked. At what feels on the tapes like the moment of truth, what comes back down the chain of command, instead of clearance to fire, is a resounding sense of caution. Despite the fact that NEADS believes there may be as many as five suspected hijacked aircraft still in the air at this point�one from Canada, the new one bearing down fast on Washington, the phantom American 11, Delta 1989, and United 93�the answer to Nasypany's question about rules of engagement comes back in no uncertain terms, as you hear him relay to the ops floor.

10:10:31

NASYPANY (to floor): Negative. Negative clearance to shoot.� Goddammit!�

FOX: I'm not really worried about code words at this point.

NASYPANY: [censored] the code words. That's perishable information. Negative clearance to fire. ID. Type. Tail.PLAY | STOP The orders from higher headquarters are to identify by aircraft type and tail number, and nothing more. Those orders�and the fact that the pilots have no clearance to shoot�are reiterated by NEADS controllers as a dramatic chase towards the White House continues. Two more problems emerge: the controllers can't find the White House on their dated equipment, and they have trouble communicating with the Langley fighters (which are referred to by their call signs, Quit 2-5 and Quit 2-6).

CITINO: Quit 2-6, Huntress. How far is the�suspect aircraft?

PILOT: Standby. Standby.� About 15 miles, Huntress.

CITINO: Huntress copies two-two miles.

PILOT: 15 miles, Huntress.

CITINO: 15 miles. One-five � noise level please � I t's got to be low. Quit 2-6, when able say altitude of the aircraft.� Did we get a Z-track [coordinates] up for the White House?

HUCKABONE: They're workin' on it.

CITINO: Okay. Hey, what's this Bravo 0-0-5 [unidentified target]?FOX: We're trying to get the Z-point. We're trying to find it.

HUCKABONE: I don't even know where the White House is.

CITINO: Whatever it is, it's very low. It's probably a helicopter.

MALE VOICE: It's probably the helicopter you're watching there.� There's probably one flying over the [Pentagon].

MALE VOICE: It's probably the smoke. The building's smoked. [They're seeing more pictures of the flaming Pentagon on CNN.]

HUCKABONE: Holy [censored].� Holy [censored] �

CITINO: Yes. We saw that. O.K.�let's watch our guys, Huck. Not the TV.� Quit 2-6, status? SD, they're too low. I can't talk to 'em. They're too low. I can't talk to 'em.

FOX: Negative clearance to fire.

CITINO: O.K. I told 'em mission is ID and that was it.FOX: Do whatever you need to divert. They are not cleared to fire.PLAY | STOP As it turns out, it's just as well the pilots are not cleared to shoot. Delta 1989 and the Canadian scare turn out to be false alarms. American 11 and United 93 are already down. And the fast-moving target near the White House that the armed fighters are racing to intercept turns out to be a friendly�a mistake by a civilian controller who was unaware of the military's scrambles, as weapons techs Huckabone and Citino, and their senior director, Fox, suddenly realize.

HUCKABONE: It was our guys [the fighters from Langley].

CITINO: Yup. It was our guys they saw. It was our guys they saw�Center saw.

FOX: New York did the same thing�.

CITINO: O.K., Huck. That was cool. We intercepted our own guys.PLAY | STOP At that point in the morning, Marr later told me, preventing an accidental shootdown was a paramount concern. "What you don't want happening is a pilot having to make that decision in the heat of the moment where he is bearing all that burden as to whether I should shoot something down or not," Marr said. It is 12 minutes after United 93 actually crashed when NEADS's Watson first hears the word. Her voice is initially full of hope as she mistakenly believes she is being told that United 93 has landed safely.

10:15:00

WATSON: United nine three, have you got information on that yet?

WASHINGTON CENTER: Yeah, he's down.

WATSON: What�he's down?

WASHINGTON CENTER: Yes.

WATSON: When did he land? Because we have confirmation�

WASHINGTON CENTER: He did�he did�he did not land. Here, on the tape, you hear the air rush out of Watson's voice.

WATSON: Oh, he's down down?

MALE VOICE: Yes. Yeah, somewhere up northeast of Camp David.

WATSON: Northeast of Camp David.

WAS HINGTON CENTER: That's the�that's the last report. They don't know exactly where.PLAY | STOP "I know what spin is" On June 17, 2004, a year after the 9/11 commission's initial public hearing, Major General Arnold and a more robust contingent of NORAD and Pentagon brass arrived to testify before the commission at its 12th and final public meeting. This time, they would testify under oath. The hearing began with an elaborate multi-media presentation in which John Farmer Jr., the commission's senior counsel, John Azzarello, and another staff attorney, Dana Hyde, took turns illustrating, in withering detail, the lag time between when the F.A.A. found out about each of the hijacked aircraft and the time anyone from the agency notified the military. Excerpts from the NEADS tapes and parallel recordings from the F.A.A., which show the civilian side in equal turmoil, were played in public for the first time. (Both sets of recordings were provided to the commission only after being subpoenaed.) The focus of the pointed questioning that followed wasn't on why the military didn't do better, but rather on why the story Major General Arnold and Colonel Scott had told at the first hearing was so wrong, in particular with respect to the phantom American 11, which the officers had never mentioned, and United 93, which they claimed to have been tracking. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, who cut his teeth 30 years earlier working for the Watergate special prosecutor, led off the questioning and came out swinging. "General, is it not a fact that the failure to call our attention to the miscommunication and the notion of a phantom Flight 11 continuing from New York City south in fact skewed the whole reporting of 9/11?" he asked Arnold, who replied that he had not been aware of those facts when he testified the year before.

"I've been in government and I know what spin is," Farmer, the senior counsel, told me. The military's story was "a whole different order of magnitude than spin. It simply wasn't true." Farmer says he doesn't understand why the military felt the need to spin at all. "The information they got [from the F.A.A.] was bad information, but they reacted in a way that you would have wanted them to. The calls Marr and Nasypany made were the right ones." Both Marr and Arnold bristled when I asked about the commission's suspicion that there had been an effort to spin the story. "I can't think of any incentive why we'd want to spin that," Marr said, his eyes tensing for the first time in what had been friendly interviews. "I'll be the first to admit that immediately after�in fact, for a long time after�we were very confused with who was what and where, what reports were coming in. I think with having 29 different reports of hijackings nationwide, for us it was next to impossible to try and get back there and figure out the fidelity [about the morning's chronology] that the 9/11 commission ended up being able to show." Azzarello, Farmer, and several other commission members I spoke to dismissed this fog-of-war excuse and pointed out that not only had the military already reviewed the tapes but that the false story it told at the first hearing had a clear purpose.

"How good would it have looked for the government in general if we still couldn't have stopped the fourth plane an hour and 35 minutes [into the attack]?" Azzarello asked. "How good would it have looked if there was a total breakdown in communication and nothing worked right?" If nothing else, it might have given the public a more realistic sense of the limitations, particularly in the face of suicide terrorism, of what is, without doubt, the most powerful military in the world. As one of its last acts before disbanding, in July 2004, the 9/11 commission made referrals to the inspector general's offices of both the Department of Transportation (which includes the F.A.A.) and the Defense Department to further investigate whether witnesses had lied. "Commission staff believes that there is significant evidence that the false statements made to the commission were deliberately false," Farmer wrote to me in an e-mail summarizing the commission's referral. "The false testimony served a purpose: to obscure mistakes on the part of the F.A.A. and the military, and to overstate the readiness of the military to intercept and, if necessary, shoot down UAL 93."

A spokesman for the Transportation Department's inspector general's office told me that the investigation had been completed, but he wasn't at liberty to share the findings, because the report had not been finalized. A spokesman at the Pentagon's inspector general's office said its investigation had also been completed, but the results are classified. Poring over time-stamped transcripts that undercut the Pentagon's official story, one is tempted to get caught up in a game of "gotcha." For those on the operations floor in the thick of it that day, however, the cold revelations of hindsight are a bitter pill to swallow. Listening to the tapes, you hear that inside NEADS there was no sense that the attack was over with the crash of United 93; instead, the alarms go on and on. False reports of hijackings, and real responses, continue well into the afternoon, though civilian air-traffic controllers had managed to clear the skies of all commercial and private aircraft by just after 12 p.m. The fighter pilots over New York and D.C. (and later Boston and Chicago) would spend hours darting around their respective skylines intercepting hundreds of aircraft they deemed suspicious.

Meanwhile, Arnold, Marr, and Nasypany were launching as many additional fighters as they could, placing some 300 armed jets in protective orbits over every major American city by the following morning. No one at NEADS would go home until late on the night of the 11th, and then only for a few hours of sleep. Five years after the attack, the controversy around United 93 clearly eats at Arnold, Marr, Nasypany, and several other military people I spoke with, who resent both conspiracy theories that accuse them of shooting the flight down and the 9/11 commission's conclusion that they were chasing ghosts and never stood a chance of intercepting any of the real hijackings. "I don't know about time lines and stuff like that," Nasypany, who is now a lieutenant colonel, said in one of our last conversations. "I knew where 93 was. I don't care what [the commission says]. I mean, I care, but�I made that assessment to put my fighters over Washington. Ninety-three was on its way in. I knew there was another one out there. I knew there was somebody else coming in�whatever you want to call it. And I knew what I was going to have to end up doing." When you listen to the tapes, it couldn't feel more horrendously true. When I asked Nasypany about the conspiracy theories�the people who believe that he, or someone like him, secretly ordered the shootdown of United 93 and covered it up�the corners of his mouth began to quiver. Then, I think to the surprise of both of us, he suddenly put his head in his hands and cried. "Flight 93 was not shot down," he said when he finally looked up. "The individuals on that aircraft, the passengers, they actually took the aircraft down. Because of what those people did, I didn't have to do anything." On the day, however, there was no time for sentiment. Within 30 seconds of the report that United 93 has crashed, killing everyone on board, once again, the phone is ringing.

10:15:30

POWELL: Southeast just called. There's another possible hijack in our area.�

NASYPANY: All right. [censored] �

Michael Bronner was an associate producer on the movie United 93.

His article about military recruiters appeared in the September 2005 issue of Vanity Fair.

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Bush's reaction to "America is under attack"

9/11: Missing Black Boxes in World Trade Center Attacks Found by Firefighters, Analyzed by NTSB, Concealed by FBI

TSA spokesman Darrin Kayser would not comment on Dzakovic's allegations that he was retaliated against for being a whistle-blower. He said in an e-mail, "While TSA transitioned functions out of FAA, many employees were doing work outside of their pre-9/11 duties. Once TSA was established, Mr. Dzakovic did find a productive position within the agency and has been a valued contributor in our efforts to provide the highest level of security in all modes of transportation."

 By Sheila Casey / Rock Creek Free Press

Pilots for 9/11 Truth has reported that the data stream from the flight data recorder (FDR) for American Airlines flight 77, which allegedly struck the Pentagon on 9/11, shows that the cockpit door never opened during the entire 90 minute flight. The data was provided by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which has refused to comment.

The FDR is one of two “black boxes” in every commercial airliner, which are used after accidents to help determine the cause of a crash. One black box records flight data, the other records voice data (everything said in the cockpit during the flight). With those two sets of data, NTSB investigators can usually piece together the events that led to a crash. The status of the door to the cockpit is checked every four seconds throughout a flight and relayed as a simple 0 or 1, where 0=closed and 1=open, with approximately 1,300 door status checks performed during AA77’s 90 minute flight. Every one of those door status checks shows as a 0, indicating that the door to the cockpit never opened during the entire flight.

Accident investigators monitor the cockpit door with the FDR because it may yield clues to pilot error in a crash. The FDR begins recording once the pilots are in their seats and readying for takeoff, and the plane cannot take off unless the FDR is working.

The official story about flight 77 is that five Muslim terrorists brandishing box cutters forced their way into the cockpit and herded two pilots, four flight attendants and all the passengers to the back of the plane. This story came into being via Ted Olson, US Solicitor General, who told CNN — that he received two phone calls from his wife Barbara Olson, a passenger on the doomed flight. Ted Olson’s story changed several times. Sometimes he claimed that the calls from his wife were made from seat back phones, other times that she used her cell phone.

According to American Airlines customer service, the American Airlines maintenance manual for that aircraft, and American Airlines Captain Ralph Kolstad, seatback phones on 757s had been deactivated prior to 9/11/01. (They were later removed entirely, as they never worked well.)

Barbara Olson couldn’t have used a cell phone either: numerous 9/11 researchers, most notably David Ray Griffin, have pointed out that cell phones did not work on airplanes on 9/11. The speed and altitude of a commercial airliner both present overwhelming obstacles to a cell phone’s need to lock onto a cell tower and then hand off to another tower in a new location.

It was the FBI that revealed the evidence that decisively disproves Ted Olson’s story. In the Zacarias Moussaoui trial in 2006, the FBI presented a report on the cell phone calls from all four 9/11 flights. Their report on AA77 shows that there was only one phone call from Barbara Olson, but that it was an unconnected call lasting zero seconds. So Ted Olson either lied about receiving calls from his wife or was deceived into believing he received calls from her.

According to the UK Telegraph, Barbara Olson delayed her flight on 9/11 so that she could have breakfast with her husband on his birthday. That delay put her on the doomed flight. Ted Olson remarried in 2006 to tax attorney Lady Booth, whom he reportedly met the year after Barbara died.

There are numerous oddities and contradictions about AA77’s black boxes.

The government claims that the voice data recorder was damaged during the crash and that no usable data was retrieved from it. If true, this would be the first time in aviation history that a solid-state data recorder was destroyed during a crash.

While it was widely reported in the media that the FDR for AA77 was found at 4 am on September 14, 2001, the file containing the FDR data was dated over four hours earlier. In other words, we are asked to believe that the data from the FDR was downloaded prior to the FDR being found.

Researcher Aidan Monagahan has established that the NTSB does not have either serial or part numbers for the FDRs from AA77. The NTSB’s own handbook indicates that the part number and serial number of the FDR are required for data readout of the FDR. The NTSB did not have this information, giving us another reason to question how the FDR data was created.

Structural engineer Allyn Kilsheimer claimed that he personally found AA77’s black box on 9/11. But in the Popular Mechanics book Debunking 9/11 Myths, Kilsheimer is quoted as saying, “I stood on a pile of debris that we later found contained the black box …”

Kilsheimer’s story changes again in August 2007 in a piece done by the History Channel, “The 9/11 Conspiracies,” where he claims “I tripped over something; it was the black box.”

In earlier work, Pilots for 9/11 Truth (P4T) has determined that the same data set provided by the NTSB shows the plane too high to hit the Pentagon, based on an altimeter that uses air pressure to calibrate altitude.

As reported in the April 2009 Rock Creek Free Press, Citizen Investigation Team, citizen journalists from southern California, has collected evidence from 14 eyewitnesses that shows that the plane seen that morning near the Pentagon did not hit the building, but flew over it at the moment explosives detonated in the Pentagon, leading observers to conclude that the plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

Questions about what happened at the Pentagon have intrigued 9/11 researchers for years, beginning with photos from the alleged crash scene which do not show the wreckage of a plane.

This new evidence, showing that the cockpit door never opened during flight, is another nail in the coffin of the official story about flight 77. Clearly, if the cockpit door never opened, then hijackers did not storm the cockpit and herd the pilots to the back of the plane. The data, which originated from the government, does not support the government’s story.

Why would the government release data which contradicts its own version of events? It is possible they were just sloppy, or that they never anticipated that anyone would parse the data as carefully as Pilots for 9/11 Truth have. They may have also felt secure, that regardless of what damning revelations were contained in the FDR data, no mainstream media outlet would give them ink or air time, keeping the official story intact for the vast majority of Americans who receive their news from mainstream sources.

Rob Balsamo, founder of Pilots for 9/11 Truth, stated: “We have not located any independently verified data which confirms the government’s story. The FBI and NTSB refuse to comment.” Founded in August 2006, Pilots For 9/11 Truth is an organization of aviation professionals from around the globe who are investigating the government’s claims about the attacks of 9/11.

Sheila Casey is a DC based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams.

Source

Jurors Vote To Charge Sixteen With 'Conspiracy To Commit Mass Murder' On 9/11/01

ON the evening of that Saturday the Jurors voted by majority for two Indictments and fourteen Presentments on the most consequential Charge offered them, that of 'Conspiracy to Commit Mass Murder'. The 'Mass Murder' in question pertains to the death of more than 2300 people due to the destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1 and 2 (the Twin Towers) on the morning of September 11, 2001. Jurors had seen much evidence that internal explosives must have caused the two 110--story skyscrapers to disintegrate into their footprints. They'd also seen records that more than incompetence had caused American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 to escape interception by U. S. Military on 9/11/01. Jurors called for a "heavier" Charge than any originally offered by Chief Prosecutor Paul. Their own initiative, based on their knowledge from and before the day's many hours of proceedings, produced a far greater number of individuals wanted through Presentment, fourteen, than the two posed by the Prosecutor as deserving further investigation through Indictment for the "heavier" or "stronger" Charge. A Presentment, acccording to the Columbia University Press Encyclopedia, is 'an accusation issued by the grand jury on its own knowledge, without any bill of indictment having been previously drawn up by the prosecutor.'

• RUDOLPH GIULIANII, Mayor of New York City on 9/11/01


• JEROME HAUER, Managing Director of Kroll, Inc. and Senior Adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services for National Security and Emergency Management on 9/11/01; former Director of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management (1996-2000).

• THOMAS PICKARD, Acting Director of the U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigation from June 25, 2001 to September 4, 2001


• MICHAEL CHERKASKY, Chief Executive Officer of Kroll, Inc. on 9/11/01; former investigator in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office from 1978 to 1994; current C.E.O. of the Marsh & McClennan insurance-firm


• GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States on 9/11/01


• LARRY SILVERSTEIN, C.E.O. of Silverstein Properties, primary lease-holder of the World Trade Center Twin Towers, and developer of the third skyscraper that disintegrated into its own footprint in lower Manhattan on 9/11/01, World Trade Building 7


• RICHARD CHENEYy, Vice-President of the U. S. on 9/11/01


• DONALD RUMSFELD, Secretary of Defense of the U. S. on 9/11/01


• MARVIN BUSH, member of Board of Directors of Securacom, a firm entrusted with security for the Twin Towers, from 1996 to 2000


• WIRT WALKER, C.E.O. of Securacom (later Stratasec) from 1999 to 2003


• RICHARD MYERS, Acting Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11/01


• RICHARD EBERHART, Commander of North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) on 9/11/01


• L. PAUL BREMER, Executive with Marsh & McClennan on 9/11/01; Chairman of the U. S. Congress' National Commission on Terrorism from 1999 to 2000; U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism from 1986 to 1989; Presidential Envoy to Irag and Adminstrator of the Coaltion Provisional Authority from May 2003 to December 2004


• PETER G. PETERSON, C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, parent corporation of one of three lease-holdersfor WTC 7 on 9/11/01; also Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ban New York and Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations on 9/11/01


• DAVID ROCKEFELLER, prime builder of the Twin Towers and all of the World Trade Center complex as Chairman of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association from 1958 to 1975; President or C.E.O. of the Chase Manhattan Bank from 1961 to 1981; Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1970 to 1985


• MAURICE GREENBERG, C.E.O. of the American International Group (A.I.G.) on 9/11/01; A.I.G. the 'leading U. S.-based insurance organization and the largest underwriter of commercial and industrial insurance in the United States', according to its website in February 2000; A.I.G. also a major share-holder in Marsh & McClennan (whose C.E.O. on 9/11/01 was Maurice Greenberg's son Jeffrey; a major investor (7%) in the Blackstone Group; and the leading investor in Kroll, Inc., which became a subsidiary of Marsh & McClennan in 2002.

The accompanying Endnotes with their 54 URLs provide supporting evidence that those sixteen who are charged deserve further investigation for the 'Conpiracy' that killed thousands on 9/11/01.

A TIMELINE SURROUNDING SEPTEMBER 11TH - IF CIA AND THE GOVERNMENT WEREN'T INVOLVED IN THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS HAT WERE THEY DOING? by Michael C. Ruppert

[� COPYRIGHT 2001, All Rights Reserved, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. May be copied and distributed for non-profit purposes only.]

Dear Mr. Carrol,

I am responding to your article slandering the legitimate questions posed by numerous scientists, engineers, pilots, even international (often Republican) politicians regarding the flaws in the "official account" of 9/11.

"Let us dip our toe again into" a couple of the bogus rebuffs posed by the "experts" at Popular Mechanics.

Pop Mech- "As the fires blazed and the temperatures rose within the buildings, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) believes, the remaining core columns (those not severed by the planes during impact) softened and buckled, transferring most of the load to the building's outer structural columns. The floors . . .

began to sag from the heat, pulling those columns inward and adding to the burden on the outer columns."

Debunking: For anyone who as actually watched the WTC video's carefully, you will note that the south tower was struck near the corner, almost insuring it sustained NO damage to the central core columns. It also had by far the largest fireball produced, indicating a substantially larger portion of the fuel was burned in the initial impact and for the most part outside the building. Oddly, it was the south tower which fell first after burning for only 55 minutes, and at a point when the fires had greatly diminished.

In addition, as given by Kevin Ryan who was responsible for the thermal testing of the WTC Steel when it was certified, the samples tested for the WTC were certified to withstand a temperature of 2,000 deg for 6 hours without failing their rated load characteristics. And that is without insulation. The WTC beams were insulated. Jet fuel burns at only 1200-1300 degrees with an ideal oxygen mixture, something not indicated by the black smoke that issued from the fires. There was nothing contained within the buildings that could have raised this figure, and those that use the example of ancient furnaces that tempered steel as a argument, again, do not understand the principles involved. I suggest that if you want the truth, and wish to actually act like a journalist for a change, you broach this subject with a real expert, Mr. Ryan. I can put you in touch with him upon request.

But more important than the issue of the likelihood of the steel failure, is the FACT (not conjecture) that ALL THREE buildings collapsed into their own footprint at FREEFALL SPEED (i.e. the unimpeded acceleration of gravity). That means, drop a rock off the roof, at the moment of collapse, and the roof would hit the ground at the same time as the rock. This implies,

(regardless of what happened at the fire zone) that the when the top section of the building began to fall it managed to plow through 70-80 odd floors of pristine and undamaged steel --

literally thousands of huge beams and concrete pads-- with absolutely NO RESISTANCE (i.e.. slowing of the rate of fall)

WHATSOEVER. And this sir, is physically impossible and verging on the absurd, and I (a physicist), and anyone with a shred of knowledge of engineering, physics, or just plain common sense can understand that.

And there is a $1,000,000.00 cash challenge

(to date unanswered) to anyone that can suggest a legitimate solution to this nagging little problem. And lastly, if the official pancake theory is correct, it lends no explanation whatsoever for why the central core of 47 HUGE beams, all connected together at numerous levels, would not be left standing like a spire as the floor connectors failed and the floors pancaked symmetrically around them. The less resistance to this collapse scenario exhibited by the building's design, the more likely the central core would remain virtually untouched. It is a paradox.

Watch the videos. Study the evidence. Talk to the experts and the scientists who simply can no longer tolerate an explanation so at odds with the physical evidence and the physical principles of the universe. And these experts I refer to are ready and willing to debate these issues with ANYONE you and your ilk choose, ANYTIME and ANYWHERE, as long as it can be videotaped for posterity.

I will not even get into the dozens of other patently absurd explanations that Popular Mechanics and other government shills and publicity hacks have posed to make the painfully obvious physical evidence at both the WTC and Pentagon fit the official fairy tale, while suppressing the numerous eyewitness accounts that disagree, but suffice to say that when "journalists"

(and I use that term EXTREMELY loosely with you), continue to disparage those who simply demand the truth, and not propaganda; who examine the evidence with open minds and simply request that the investigation of this murder of 3,000 innocents be pursued with the same objectivity and forensic vigor that a common mugging would be given; they only contribute to the ignorance pervasive and growing in this country, reduce the once noble journalistic trade to nothing more than corporate propaganda machines, and deface the sacrifice of the 3000 who were murdered.

As for your contemptuous tone of which I have tried to mimic in this reply, to quote Shakespeare, "Me thinks thou dost protest too much."

Sincerely,

Eric Harrington

Ojai, Ca