Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Atta's new bag.

* "President George W. Bush is the Republican Party’s Vietnam." (link)
lol.

* hopsicker finds a link between a massive drugbust (5.5 tons of cocaine) , Tom DeLay and the NRCC. (with some 911 thrown in for fun) (link)
(thnx damien)

* xymphora:
"In order to believe the Official Story of September 11, you have to believe that a man about to embark on a suicide mission would carry a bag with him containing information on the entire terrorist plot (why?), a bag he had to believe would be destroyed along with him, and a bag which miraculously never made it onto the hijacked plane and conveniently fell into the hands of the FBI, who used the information in it to solve the crime in a suspiciously short time period. This miracle bag is the second miracle bag; the first miracle bag was Atta’s other bag found at Logan, the one containing his unlikely Muslim will and some bizarre terrorist instructions. It’s funny we’re just hearing about the Rosetta stone bag now, from a former FBI agent who was retired at the time of 9–11, who heard about it at John O'Neill’s funeral from another now retired FBI agent, who now works in private industry in Dubai. Is someone in the FBI feeling uneasy about the short time-frame in which the crime was solved?"
Read Newsday's "An Untold Story of 911"

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Huffman Aviation was running drugs - with either DEA or CIA approval- when the 9/11 terrorists went to train there. Hopsicker's claim is that this was not an accident and that they were known to one or more US regulatory agencies.

There's an interesting theory by Michael Wright. He claims David Boren and George Tenet were conducting a CIA terrorist sting operation on 9/11 and that they expected the terrorists to land and negotiate the release of Palestinian prisoners - not to fly into buildings. The idea hangs together quite well and would account for the failure of government agencies to act on pre-9/11 warnings. It could also explain NORADs failure to intercept the hijacked planes and their subsequent nonsense explanations.

So events could have been on three levels on 9/11: the suicide terrorists themselves (and what they believed), the badly judged sting operation and, finally, some third group that knew everything and put bombs in the WTC (if you believe that). It's a more nuanced alternative to the usual 9/11 conspiracy theories and explains some of the data discrepancies quite well.

lukery said...

am happy to have you here chatting :-)

i need to do more open threads ;-)

Anonymous said...

The radar (1)(2) issues of 9/11 are very interesting. Team8plus covers this very well. Also, here.

Basically, the hijacked planes had their transponders turned off by the hijackers. This has created the false impression that the planes were somehow then invisible and lost to radar. This is not true. Only the plane ID tag and height details were lost. The horizontal location and movement of the planes were apparent to FAA authorities wherever primary radar coverage occured. (But they just looked like green globs on the screen).

NORAD had it even better. Their advanced radar systems could record the heights of the planes as well. Private company radar records on the Internet also show the paths of the hijacked planes.

(The 9/11 Commission said that NORAD couldn't follow the hijacked planes because their radar was "pointing the wrong way"! NORAD also provided three different unsatisfactory accounts that put the blame on the FAA. David Ray Griffin demolished those accounts. Essentially NORAD either stood down on 9/11 or was confused by the war games that occurred.)

Planes can disappear from primary radar coverage if they fly under 4000 feet, down mountain valleys or in any "gaps" that sometimes exist between the radar coverage of adjacent airport control towers - apparently there were such radar gaps on 9/11. This has prompted some critics to claim that a number of 9/11 flights were "switched" by turning off their transponders and flying across the flight paths of dummy planes which then assumed the identities of the original planes and flew on to the 9/11 targets. Transponders are programmable devices and their id numbers are assigned to particular flights. The claim is that the dummy aircraft could simply punch in the new id and turn on their transponders or just continue in the flight path of the original plane.

Team8plus summarised some basic facts:

* Within the area that the hijackings took place, there are two areas with no primary radar coverage that stretch up towards Canada.
* Flight 11 switched off its transponder right next to an area with no primary radar coverage.
* Flight 77 switched off its transponder right next to an area with no primary radar coverage.
* Flight 93 switched off its transponder right next to an area with no primary radar coverage.
* United Flight 175 switched off its transponder next to United Flight 93.
* We have two incidences where a hijacked plane came very close to a non-hijacked plane.
Flight 11(hijacked) meets Flight 175 (while not yet hijacked).
Flight 175 (hijacked) meets Flight 93 (while not yet hijacked)

Did the hijackers know where these radar gaps were located? Why would they go out to the countryside? Why not hijack planes from nearby airports (Dulles/Newark) and crash them straight away? Didn't they understand NORAD would likely send up fighter aircraft to intercept them?

Also keep in mind that the hijacked flights went through some of the most heavily militarized (1) parts of the country (2) so, again, you have to ask yourself why no fighter intercepts occured.

AK Dewdney has discussed a plane switching scenario in detail as has Nick Haupt.

It is a well-known fact that the transponder of UA 93 - like the ones of the other hijacked airplanes - was switched off. But much less known are two further incidents: the transponder was back on at a later point, and the airplane's radar blip vanished from the controller's radar screens several minutes before the crash.

Woody Box has studied this aspect and has argued (somewhat contentiously) that two flights, a Delta flight1989 and a "dummy" flight 93 landed at Cleveland Airport between 10 and 11am and were part of a 9/11 conspiracy. He says there was a duplicate Flight 93 which he also discusses here. And here.

Woody, and others, have argued that there were two Flight 11s, from Gates 26 and 32.

[The AK Dewdney article is the best. The other stuff is not so easy to follow and is arguable].

Commercial pilot Russ Wittenberg also has some good details on the 9/11 flights.

There are anomalies arising from what the FAA radar operators saw. Flight 11 crashed into the north WTC tower about 8:48 am. Yet it's radar blip persisted right up until 9:20 when it disappeared from the FAA radar screens (think about that...) The 911 Commission confirms this. Various media reports after 911 also claimed that, at one stage, authorities believed up to 11 airliners had been hijacked.

NORAD serviced FAA radar and they had conducted live data feeds on FAA radar screens as part of war gaming exercies. Software developer Indira Singh has claimed that the FAA radar software was managed by a CIA front company called Ptech that had close connections to a major Al Qaeda financier and top level US govt agencies.

Many critics believe that live data feeds of hijacked commercial airliners occured on 9/11 as part of the war games and this was one reason why NORAD was not in a position to respond effectively.

(Briefly, on the issue on the issue of wargames (or more properly "terror drills") involving hijacked commercial airliners there was Mascal, Amalgam Virgo and, on 9/11 itself, the NR0 hijack simulation.)

VP Cheney seemed to be having no radar problem however. He was continuously advised of Flight 77 as it approached the Pentagon from 50 miles out and, by all appearances, allowed the attack to occur. So radar difficulties were not apparent there.

It is also worth remarking that President Bush’s limousine contained advanced communications systems connecting him to all defence agencies. And Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies, records that the Secret Service monitored FAA radar screens in real time. So they knew from 8.30am that Flight 11 had been hijacked. (Even the reporters with Bush knew this shortly after).

So we don't have any answers at all about what radar difficulties NORAD may have faced on 9/11. The 9/11 Commission was not prepared to discuss the various NORAD war games occurring on September 11 - largely because it appears that the Commission itself was excluded from examining these matters on security grounds. But it is not credible that no defence aircraft were available over Washington, or none could be brought there in the 55-minute window NORAD had available.

It had been established FAA policy for many years that any plane that strayed off course by 15 degrees or two miles constituted an emergency requiring a military aircraft to intercept and accompany the plane until the difficulty could be resolved. Normal time from notice to intercept was 10 -15 minutes(guidelines). This process had been initiated 67 times in the six months prior to 911, and over 120 times in the year 2000, but not on 9/11.

Why not?

In June 2001 NORAD, charged with protecting the skies over America, changed its rules in a critical way. Instead of the interception of potentially hostile planes being automatic, interception now required the approval of the Secretary of Defense.

Where was Rumsfeld to give this approval on the morning of the attacks?

No one could find him. According to the official story he was in the Pentagon (addressing Congressman on security issues!) blissfully unaware of anything happening until after all the planes had crashed. [Note: Richard Clarke has Rumsfeld and Myers in a WH videoconference at 9:10 am].

This policy restriction, together with the unaccounted absence of Rumsfeld during the attacks, constituted the single most enabling feature of the 911 attacks. Without this policy change, and Rumsfeld's absence, all of the hijacked planes would have been intercepted by US fighter aircraft.

In summary:

(1) The idea of turning the transponders off fits in very well if you want to fly another plane close by and "steal" its identity.

(2) Apparently there were radar gap areas where contact with some of the flights was briefly lost.

(3) A lot of odd flight patterns, duplicate flights, departure gate anomalies etc are consistent with duplicated or "dummy" 9/11 flights.

(4) What the FAA and NORAD radar operators saw has never been made clear, but altered data feeds have been done in the past in war games and there were plenty of those on 9/11.

(5) The Secret Service monitored FAA radar screens in real time so they knew VERY early on that hijackings were taking place. Keeping Bush at Sarasota when they KNEW commercial hijackings were taking place was totally against established security practices.

(6) We can assume the same level of high tech clarity for Cheney at the White House. In this context the actions of Cheney in allowing Flight 77 to approach the Pentgon unobstructed demands answers.

(7) Rumsfeld and Myers testimony about when they were informed and what NORAD knew is just outrageous and should be rejected entirely. These guys knew EARLY ON (like 9.00 am!!)

These planes were breaking established FAA and NORAD rules left, right and centre. They may just have been green globs on the screen but they should have been intercepted. The must reads in all of this are David Ray Griffin and Russ Wittenberg

Finally, keep in mind that 9/11 was several years in the planning (for whoever did it). If it was an internal (US) job then the implementation may have been at several levels with different groups either misdirected or only partly informed. I refer you to the link above: Michael Wright.

Thanks for the question oldschool :)
Thanks for the invite Lukery ;)
Hope it helps.

lukery said...

olschool, it won't surprise you to learn that damien has an answer for that one too :-)

Anonymous said...

Hi guys!
I hope its ok that I pop up here. Thanks a lot for good information about 9/11!

About your last question, on how to cover up such a big job, I would like to refer to David Ray Griffin`s speach in Wisconsin. Its better if you listen to it yourself than me to wright it down since Im Norwegian ;)

Follow this link: http://www.apfn.org/Movies/griffin_madison_full_25.wmv

I dont know if its possible to forward unless you download the speach, but anyway, go to 1hour2mins40second into the speach.
A guy asks Griffin the same question, and he gives a great answer to it on how to cover it or why people with any knowledge doesnt speak, which I have been giving a lot of thoughts myself.

Hope you find it useful!

Erik.

lukery said...

thanks erik - i'll take a look at that

and welcome to my place :-)

thanks for dropping by