FAILED AIR DEFENSE {masterlist}

AN AERIAL BALLET OF PERFECTLY SYNCHRONIZED FAILURES (updated 2/5/07)
“Is this part of the exercise? Is this some kind of a screw-up?”
- Larry Arnold, NORAD Commander, upon hearing of the first hijack
“That was news to me. I thought we were still chasing American 11.”
- F-15 pilot “Duff” on hearing a second plane had hit the WTC
“Holy smoke, that’s why we’re here.”
- F-16 pilot “Lou” upon seeing smoke from the Pentagon

This post is to organize and link together all the related sub-posts on the ridiculously inadequate air defense during the 9/11 attack. The air-based wargames, which are referred to often in these posts, are covered seperately in the wargames masterlist. People still argue about whether our fighter defenses could have done anything if they had been better integrated. The answer depends on the presumptions one makes, but basically the answer is yes - there were procedures to defend the nation from roughly the 9/11 threat of suicide hijackings, but they have been magnified, obscured, and muddled by both sides in the post-9/11 debate. And they seem to have not been followed that morning.

This is a chart I made of the timeline of the attack and overall air defense during it - click the image to get a full-size, readable view (can also be saved and printed, 8.5 x 11").

> Status of air terror readiness as of 9/11: Could it be this bad on accident?
- Payne Stewart and Standard procedure: We had standard procedures for intercepting stray planes
- Rumors of a Stand-Down: Unprepared or Stood Down? (neither - this dichotomy is a false one).
- Muzzling the Defense: Rumsfeld's recent changes to fighter scramble procedures - ultimately a red herring?
- Warnings ignored?
- Fighter deployments decided on to defend the known primary zone of terrorism threats: notably inadequate.
- Commercial pilots' right to bear arms in the air rescinded in 2001? Post in the works...


> A Hobbled Defense in Action on 9/11
- Federal Attack Assistance? {masterlist}: The FAA's role in "dropping the ball" on 9/11, in several sub-posts: Sliney, the phantom Flight 11, the mistaken memo, etc...
- Phantom flights/radar inserts
- Radar blind spots
- Otis and Langley: Scrambling against the clock
- Heading and Speed: slowly away from the attacks
- Information shared with the defending fighter pilots: RIDICULOUSLY inadequate

> Permission to use deadly force to protect America: Negligently (?) denied
- No Such order recieved by the five defending pilots.
- Bush at Booker: Isolated accidents require no defensive orders, and Bush insisted on pretending it was an isolated accident until the last possible minute - and then still refused to issue the order for at least another hour. By the official story.
- Cheney and the Shoot-Down Order

PRE-9/11 PENTAGON PREPAREDNESS

OF FORESIGHT AND ANCHOR CHAINS
Adam Larson/Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud, January 23 2007
reposted 4/23/07

Although most Pentagon workers in the area hit on 9/11 were still sitting at their desks doing their usual work as Flight 77 came crashing through their office doors, there were well-established and practiced procedures for “exactly” such an event. The Washington Post reported shortly after 9/11 the account of a Pentagon medic who was sitting and reading the just-printed emergency response manual for what to do in case the building was struck by a civilian airliner at the precise moment that happened. [1] But unfortunately these procedures don’t seem to have helped much, given no radar track of the incoming plane, no warning, and thus no time given to implement any such measures.

Dennis Ryan's photo of a mock-up used for MASCAL (slightly filtered for artsy effect)

Among the emergency drills they’d held was one in October 2000, less than a year prior as part of what the Military District of Washington News Service called at the time "several scenarios that emergency response teams were exposed to Oct. 24-26 in the Office of the Secretaries of Defense conference room." Author Dennis Ryan provided photographs as well for one of the scenarios, the "Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise" (MASCAL) the mock passenger plane crashed into the mock Pentagon courtyard appears to be a big one but probably not a 757 as Loose Change claims. One participant explained as far-fetched as the MASCAL scenario may have seemed, “you have to plan for this. Look at all the air traffic around here.” [2] Navy Capt. Charles Burlingame was allegedly part of this drill, though the charge is unsubstantiated. If you don't know the significance of that already, check this post.

Whether the MASCAL crash was supposed to be an accident or an attack didn't seem to matter - it was all about the aftermath. But in the next noteworthy drill conducted eight months later, the preparations were getting more specifically 9/11-related. As US Medicine magazine, "the voice of Federal medicine," reported in October 2001:

"Though the Department of Defense had no capability in place to protect the Pentagon from an ersatz guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner, DoD medical personnel trained for exactly that scenario in May. In fact, the tri-Service DiLorenzo Health Care Clinic and the Air Force Flight Medicine Clinic here in the Pentagon trained jointly in May to fine-tune their emergency preparedness, afterward making simple equipment changes that would make a difference Sept. 11 when the hypothetical became reality." [3]

This is amazing; according to this article, they were looking at a hijacked 757 strike four months before that happened on 9/11, preparations that "made a difference." Of course the best difference would have been to simply evacuate the building well before the plane arrived (35 minutes after it became clear the nation was under attack), or to have worked out air defense plans, perhaps with NORAD, to stop any such weaponized aircraft short of the building.

A possible third drill may have been planned to that end in conjunction with a proposed mid-2001 NORAD exercise simulating suicide hijacking attacks. USA Today famously reported on April 18, 2004 that "in the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, [NORAD] conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties." While nearly all of these focused on threats coming from across the Atlantic, they had the 9/11 targets in mind. earlier drills had focused on such an attack against the WTC, in this case “the target was the Pentagon – but that drill was not run after defense officials said it was unrealistic.” [4] The original source for this is an e-mail from a former NORAD official obtained by the Project On Government Oversight, which explained that NORAD "wanted to develop a response in the event that a terrorist group would use an airliner as a missile to attack the Pentagon, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the scenario as "too unrealistic." [5] This was in April 2001 POGO reports, a month before they prepared for defense against an unobstructed hijacked plane/missile hitting their building, and five months before 9/11, when they had no capabilities in place "to protect the Pentagon," but at least they had the aftermath covered well enough.

Buth even with just the two drills plus whatever else went in to the process, the Pentagon's bureaucracy had just enough time to get the emergency procedures ironed out and printed before the precise "unrealistic" scenario envisioned four months earlier came crushingly true. But there was apparently not enough time to fully integrate the plan with things like useful warning procedures - a tragically stalled process that would help illustrate Rumsfeld's charges that pre-9/11, the Pentagon was "tangled in its own anchor chain." How conveniently illustrative of his and his colleagues' known desire for a 21st Century "process of transformation" there.

Sources:
[1] Oil Empire. http://www.oilempire.us/wargames.html
[2] Ryan, Dennis. "Contingency planning Pentagon MASCAL exercise simulates scenarios in preparing for emergencies." Military District of Washington News Service. November 3 2000. Accessed at: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/linkscopy/ContPlan.html
[3] Mientka, Matt. Pentagon Medics Trained For Strike. US Medicine. October 2001. http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=272&issueID=31
[4] as passed on by US Rep. Jan Schakowski: http://www.house.gov/schakowsky/press2004a/pr4_20_2004mis.html
Also at 9-11 Research: http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/post911/commission/usatoday_noradx.htm
and the original still up at USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.htm
[5] Project on Government Oversight. "Joint Chiefs of Staff Rejected "Airplanes as Missiles" Scenario Five Months prior to 9/11." April 13 2004. http://www.pogo.org/p/homeland/ha-040401-homelandsecurity.html

THE HIJACKERS {masterlist}

This post is to link and organize all the posts dealing with the 9/11 hijackers. This does not claim to be a complete or comprehensive list by any means, just a few things I found in my research. Most of the research is a little old, and I'm less-versed in recent developments, but some observations herein are worthy of note. But really for me this is an afterthought - no matter where the attackers came from and how they really attacked, it was the US government and military that were tasked with defending America - and they failed with curious precision.

[click picture to enlarge - open in a new window to match names to faces as you read other posts]

> Identity: who are they and where did they come from?
- The Miracle Passports: Implausibly Tying the Attackers Directly to the Scene of the Crime
- The Three Abdul Almoaris: The cases of confused identity regarding the alleged hijackers are many and well-covered elsewhere. Here I'll cover one telling case I haven't seen anyone else take on. Not that I've really looked. I'd rather keep my illusion of a "hot exclusive story:"
- Strategy and Tactics: The Five Hijackers Trained by the US military?

> Immunity: how did they get here and how did they avoid arrest?
- The Hijacker Express Lane: How'd they get in the country? Through the wide open side door.
- The Buried Reports
- Mission Improbable: Violations of Operational Security that "miraculously" didn't unravel the plot.
- Atta Boy: The Man We Love to Hate and all his glorious idiocy
Applying for a USDA loan to finance the attack

> The Terrorland Connection: Florida and 9/11
- Terrorland I: Daniel Hopsicker reveals a Floida Perfect Bush Circle
- Terrorland II: The Dutchmen Come to Town/Government Work?
- Terrorland III: Learning to Fly
- Terrorland IV: The Dutch Boys Become an Embarrassment
- Terrorland V: Map of coincidence: Fly the Friendly Skies of Terrorland

> No Hijackers
- If not a sucide pilot, what else could have been flying the airplane missiles of 9/11? There's at least one possibility that is "remote" but plausible.
- The Evidence: the audio record is the only serious obstacle
- Ulterior Motives: De-blaming Arabs, blaming Jews, etc.
- The Dangers: Why the no-hijacker theory could be another baited honeytrap

THE BOJINKA COVER STORY {masterlist}

This is to link the few posts that will collectively explain a disturbing possibility that the US government essentially scripted out the 9/11 attacks nearly seven years before, planted the idea into the early body of knowledge about the terrorists later to be called al Qaeda, and then reported as a precedent once a similar attack was carried out on 9/11. The plan was again recycled, this time exactly, as the London terror threat of 2006 that banned all liquids from flights after fears of a ten-plane attack using liquid bombs - precisely the idea behind the original "Operation Bojinka," uncovered in early 1995.

Admittedly, this is a bit off the Let it Happen tangent of the blog here as a whole, integrating best with a MIHOP interpretation. But I'm not sure where else to put it, and I'm already covering the hijackers here, so here it goes.

Bojinka intro: From the "cover story" chapter IV of my book "Scenario 12-E: The Philosophy, the Technology, and the Cover Story Behind Shadow 9/11."


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The Perfect Story
Now we have clarified that at the flip of a few switches, it would be technically possible for otherwise ordinary commercial flights to be turned into flying tombs, sealed off from the outside world and locked into their final flight plan by people who would be sitting safely somewhere else, perhaps sipping lukewarm coffee. But what would the eyewitnesses say?

What was needed was the tactic, the fingerprint, to mask the operation and steer the blame in the desired direction. The cover story was already well-developed in advance, not by a government agency or think-tank, but by the natural flow of world events (or at least by some collaborative effort between the two). And the direction of the blame was towards Eurasia and the one enemy in particular who was safely camping out in the heart of that central continent – Afghanistan.

To all eyewitness accounts, Shadow 9/11 would appear like a bin Laden attack, fitting with preconceptions. Ah, the preconceptions… The writers of that Lone Gunmen pilot, as they scratched it out in 2000, had to wonder “if I were a right-wing-faction-type, and I wanted to convince people we’d been attacked by a “tin pot dictator” how would I do it?” When we disregard the PC bias on TV that filters out racial references, it’s pretty clear this would be an Arab dictator, probably bin Laden, maybe supported by Saddam Hussein. What did these sci-fi writers decide? Apparently the same thing the planners of Shadow 9/11 decided.

The cover stories for both Scenario 12-D and for Shadow 9/11 may have been lifted straight from al Qaeda’s famous Operation Bojinka, an early airliner-centered terrorist plot discovered in the former U.S. colony of the Philippines in early 1995. In an interview after the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed claimed that the 9-11 attacks he allegedly financed were a revived and streamlined version of this six year old plot. Like no other single story, this one looks like the taproot of September 11’s infamous tactic. But the exact degree of foresight, what was known by whom, is a matter of great contention, and the factual record is left fragmented. There are weird forces at work here.

- Bojinka I:Phase One: A Loud Bang in Manila Ramzi Yousef, a chance explosion, a pope spared, and the origins of the plot in the Philippines, early 1995.

- Bojinka II:Phase Two: The Evolution How Bojinks DIDN'T lead to a prediction of the 9/11 tactic - simultaneous suicide hijackings - even though it clearly should have.

- Bojinka III:Before Bojinka: Corder, the GIA, and Cetron’s Scenario The Pentagon report that laid out the Bojinka threat just days before it was discovered in terrorist minds.

- Bojinka IV:A Real and Repeated Threat Before 9/11, suicide hijackings were actually real and didn't need to be imagined. The only thing different about 9/11 is this one wasn't stopped.

- Bojinka V: Florida 2001: Bojinka Becomes 9/11?

- Bojinka VI: Brzezinski's Bombshell/What Was Left Out: A prominent article on bojinka by Zbigniew Brzezinski's nephew, and the general deletion or minimization of the suicide airliner hijacking element.

- Bojinka VII: Professed Ignorance, Maintaining the Focus "I don't think anyone could have predicted..."

- Bojinka VIII: Operation Brzezinski? the Brzezinski article and the word "Bojinka" get me thinking to a bizarre and probably useless observation that still gives me a chill and I thought it worth sharing. (coming soon)
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