The Sun News - Editor, Leland Lehrman

Conspicuously absent from the History Channel presentation, 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction? is any mention of the eight military drills simultaneously occurring on September 11, 2001 and on that day only. Also conspicuously absent is acknowledgement that the usual protocols for scrambling jets was jettisoned on 9/11 and on that day only. They did show footage of Air Force Colonel Robert Bowman (interceptor pilot, head of the Star Wars program and former head of the Department of Aeronautical Engineering) asking why the usual protocols were not observed on 9/11, but they didn’t allow him to elaborate and say what he’s said in books and videos, “…if our government had merely done nothing and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of Americans would still be alive.”

The only other reference to the lack of Air Force response was Meigs (Editor of Popular Mechanics) saying, “NORAD is not geared to protecting us from domestic aircraft – quite the contrary.” This is utter nonsense as Webster Tarpley so aptly points out in his book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA. Tarpley observes that, “One of the more obvious absurdities recounted by NORAD personnel during the 9/11 Commission hearings was their fairy tale to the effect that NORAD radar was only able to look outwards from US coasts, and that their radar capability for tracking events in US airspace was zero….”These nonsensical arguments refute themselves. NORAD is known to possess phased array warning system radars (PAWS) of various types which provides a comprehensive overview of US airspace and beyond.”

The only ongoing military exercise that took place before and during 9/11 was Amalgam Virgo, which Tarpley thinks may be the cover story for 9/11 because it was a drill that had to do with hijacked airliners, drones and cruise missiles, sometimes from inside the US and sometimes used as weapons. Preparations for carrying out 9/11 could have easily been conducted under the cover of preparations for Amalgam Virgo (not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report).

Vigilant Guardian also closely mimicked the actual events of 9/11 and included plans for terrorist seizure of commercial airplanes to be used as missiles. Vigilant Guardian is the reason that air traffic controllers and pilots kept saying on the NORAD tapes, “Is this real time, or is this the exercise?” The other military exercises carried out on 9/11 were: Vigilant Warrior, Northern Vigilance, Northern Guardian, National Reconnaissance Office Drill (simulated an airplane crashing into the headquarters of the NRO), and Tripod II, which was a biological warfare exercise conducted jointly by the US Department of Justice and the City of New York. Giuliani had stored much of the materials for that drill at Pier 92 and after WTC 7 had been destroyed, Giuliani conveniently transferred his command post to Pier 92. Also, a number of jets from the Washington DC area were on an informal training flight over North Carolina on 9/11. All of these exercises reduced the number of available military airplanes.

Some of the real hijacks were represented by false blips and made to appear on FAA and NORAD radar screens as part of the exercises discussed above. Blips and dummy hijacks combined to create an insuperable perplexity. Another obfuscating factor in the general confusion was that in June of 2001, a new directive came out of the Pentagon stating that all requests to NORAD for intercepting hijacked airliners had to be approved by the Secretary of Defense (at the time, Donald Rumsfeld).

Once it learned that Flights 11 and 175 were headed for New York City, NORAD failed to scramble interceptors from nearby Fort Dix or LaGuardia, choosing instead the distant Otis AFB in Falmouth, MA. Once it learned that Flights 77 and 93 were headed to the Capitol, NORAD failed to scramble interceptors from Andrews AFB (just 11 miles from the Pentagon), choosing instead the distant base in Langley, VA. And once the crashes had occurred, the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Bureau), the agency that normally investigates aviation disasters, was not allowed to study the crashes. Further, recordings of interviews with air traffic controllers were destroyed. Popular Mechanics had stated that no interceptions had occurred before 9/11 when the truth is that from January 1 to September 10, 2001, there had already been 67 intercepts reported carried out by the FAA/NORAD combination. All of the above is information that the History Channel left out of their report.

They show Meigs with his supercilious smile saying that there is a “Myth of a hyper-competent government. They think that every minute of the day, we are being protected; that’s not the way the real world works.” Newsflash, Mr. Meigs. Our trillion-dollar space and ground-based air defense system, by far the most sophisticated on the planet, was blindsided by conflicting commands. True patriots within the Air Force and the military as a whole are furious. Take a look at http://patriotsquestion911 and you’ll see. But those in the military who are still on active duty are under gag orders and constrained from telling what they know and what they suspect.

Incredibly, General Ralph Eberhart, in charge of NORAD on 9/11, was promoted, as was General Richard Myers after he had ordered the 40 high-resolution TV security cameras mounted along the roofing around the perimeter of the Pentagon to be turned off and ordered that tapes be confiscated from the security cameras at the nearby Citgo gas station, the Sheraton Hotel, and atop a pole on highway I-135 – all of which would have recorded exactly what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11. Also promoted (to Intelligence Czar) after 9/11 was Porter Goss, who, with Senator Bob Graham, had attended a breakfast on the morning of 9/11 with General Mahmoud Ahmad, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Chief (ISI). General Ahmad had been involved in ordering the wire transfer of $100,000 to ringleader Mohammed Atta a month before 9/11.

These people, along with such officials as, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Mueller, Karl Rove and Tony Blair (to name only a few) are high-level moles, while the patsies are the hijackers, Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Atta and Moussaoui. The key mission of the moles, according to Tarpley, is to protect the patsies, who are not the authors of the crime but their presence as scapegoats is indispensable to the entire operation; they are needed for its propaganda exploitation. Now we have a whole nation of unwitting and unwilling patsies – Iraq.

The whistleblowers in the FBI, CIA, and the military have been summarily silenced. Lt. Col Steven Butler is enraged over the fact that he was forced to train the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, in the Defense Language School in the late 1990s. That’s the same Mohammed Atta who was given training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station with two other principal hijackers. People ask why nobody has come forward. Hundreds of people have come forward and have been threatened, dismissed from their jobs, humiliated and trivialized. Two months prior to September 11, George W. Bush released a secret FBI document, 1991IWF213589, threatening FBI agents with arrest if they didn’t cease investigation of Al-Qaeda.

I have often noticed that those who have not examined the evidence about 9/11 think that the Truth Movement is maintaining that there were no Arab hijackers and that no planes hit the buildings. Of course there were hijackers (trained in U.S. flight schools under the protection of the CIA and FBI) and of course some kind of aircraft hit all of the buildings. But we do think that the hijackers were patsies and that the aircraft that hit the buildings were not necessarily American and United Airlines passenger planes. Conveniently, there are no black boxes or transponders to examine. Perhaps absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but if so, why is all the pertinent evidence so classified that not even members of the 9/11 Commission were allowed to see it?

Newsman Dan Rather observed that, “…there was a time in South Africa when flaming tires were put around people’s necks if they dissented, and in some ways, the fear is that you’ll be necklaced here. You’ll have a flaming tire of ‘lack of patriotism.’ It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.”

It’s high time for all patriotic Americans to ask the tough questions.

Flight 93, cell phone calls and families of victims in Part IV of “Debunking the Debunkers.”