Air Defense 911 Anomalies

[Steven Gaal]

http://www.scribd.co...s-L-Kara-Sr-563

Miles Kara, a lifelong coverup man from the DOD.

##################################################

"Prior to 9/11, the procedures for managing a traditional hijacked aircraft, as I said, were in place and pretty well tested.... The most frustrating after-the-fact scenario for me to understand is to explain is the communication link on that morning between the FAA operations center and the NMCC (National Military Command Center).... The hijacking net is an open communication net run by the FAA hijack coordinator, who is a senior person from the FAA security organization, for the purpose of getting the affected federal agencies together to hear information at the same time.... It was my assumption that morning, as it had been for my 30 years of experience with the FAA, that the NMCC was on that net and hearing everything real-time..... I can tell you I've lived through dozens of hijackings in my 30-year FAA career, as a very low entry-level inspector up through to the headquarters, and they (the military brass) were always there. They were always on the net, and were always listening in with everybody else..... from my perspective there is no doubt in my mind that the FAA security organization knew what to do. There is no doubt in my mind that the air traffic organization knew what to do. They are the two key players in that type of scenario.... this is very, very important, in response to your question.... the NMCC was called. They were added to this open communication net. In my 30 years of history, there was always somebody listening to that net..... I truly do not mean this to be defensive, but it is a fact -- there were military people on duty at the FAA Command Center on the morning of 9/11, as Mr. Sliney said. They were participating in what was going on. There were military people in the FAA's Air Traffic Organization in a situation room. They were participating in what was going on."

- Monte Belger, FAA Acting Deputy Administrator on 911, 9/11 Commission, Twelfth Public Hearing, Oral Evidence.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

########################

BLOGGER CARL BANK pilotsfor911truth

Military Intercepts

In its final effort to debunk the idea that on 9/11 a stand-down order had been issued (which was not rescinded until shortly before the downing of Flight 93), PM disputes the 9/11 truth movement’s claim that NORAD’s fighter jets routinely intercepted planes and usually did so in a matter of minutes. PM’s contrary “fact” is that, “In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart’s Learjet in October 1999.”[1]

No “Routine” Interceptions: One impediment to their claim was a Boston Globe article, quoted in The New Pearl Harbor, in which the author, Glen Johnson, reported that NORAD spokesman Mike Snyder, speaking a few days after 9/11, said that NORAD’s fighters, in Johnson’s paraphrase, “routinely intercept aircraft.”[2] To rebut this claim, our authors do not cite any documentary evidence. They simply say: “When contacted by Popular Mechanics, spokesmen for NORAD and the FAA clarified their remarks by noting that scrambles were routine, but intercepts were not---especially over the continental United States.”[3] But these alleged “spokesmen” remain anonymous, a fact suggesting that PM could not find anyone in either NORAD or the FAA willing to have his or her name associated with this claim. PM has not really, therefore, undermined the statement made by NORAD spokesman Mike Snyder, a few days after 9/11, that NORAD makes interceptions routinely.

The idea that interceptions occur regularly has not, of course, been based solely or even primarily on Snyder’s statement. It has also been based on reports that fighters have been scrambled about a hundred times a year. A 2001 story in the Calgary Herald reported that NORAD had scrambled fighters 129 times in 2000; an Associated Press story in 2002 referred to NORAD’s “67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001.”[4] By extrapolation, one can infer that NORAD had scrambled fighters about a thousand times in the decade prior to 9/11. This figure makes it very hard for Popular Mechanics, by claiming that most scrambles do not result in interceptions (a claim made by Benjamin Chertoff during a radio show debate with me when he was still a PM spokesperson), to claim that only one civilian plane had been intercepted in North America during the decade before 9/11. As I argued in print, this claim could be true “only if in all of these cases, except for the Payne incident, the fighters were called back to base before they actually intercepted the aircraft in question. . . , a most unlikely possibility.”[5]

PM’s solution to this problem is to argue not only that interceptions are rare but also that scrambles are---at least scrambles within the continental United States. But this solution faced a problem: Major Douglas Martin, who on other issues has been quoted in support of PM’s position, was the person who had been quoted in the Associated Press story, mentioned above, about NORAD’s “67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001.” Martin himself had implied, in other words, that NORAD had been scrambling jets about 100 times a year. PM tries to neutralize this statement by saying:

However, the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service produced a more complete account, which included an important qualification. Here’s how the Knight Ridder story appeared in the September 28, 2002, edition of the Colorado Springs Gazette: “From June 2000 to September 2001 [sic][6], NORAD scrambled fighters 67 times but not over the continental United States. . . . Before September 11, the only time officials recall scrambling jets over the United States was when golfer Payne Stewart’s plane veered off course and crashed in South Dakota in 1999.”

Except for that lone, tragic anomaly, all NORAD interceptions from the end of the Cold war in 1989 until 9/11 took place in offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). . . . The planes intercepted in these zones were primarily being used for drug smuggling.[7]

There are several problems with this response. Two of them involve inconsistencies in PM’s argument. For one thing, PM is supposed to be defending its claim that in the decade prior to 9/11 there had been only one interception “over North America,” but the qualification in this Knight-Ridder story speaks only of “the continental United States.” The PM authors have thereby ignored Canada, that other North American country that is protected by NORAD, and Alaska. A second inconsistency is that, after having emphasized the distinction between scrambles and interceptions, the PM authors then conflate them. We can, however, set aside these inconsistencies in order to focus on more serious problems.

First, given the fact that the Knight-Ridder story not only appeared several months after the AP story but also appeared in a newspaper in Colorado Springs, near NORAD headquarters, it could be disinformation put out to provide the basis for exactly the case that PM is now making---that NORAD’s failure to intercept the airliners on 9/11 was not a failure to do something that it had been doing routinely.

Second, given this possibility, PM’s description of the Knight-Ridder story as a “more complete account” begs the question, because of the possibility that it is a distortion, rather than simply a more complete account, of the truth. An indication that it does involve distortion, moreover, is provided by the fact that Martin, in illustrating the increased number of scrambles after 9/11, said: “In June [2002], Air Force jets scrambled three times to intercept small private planes that had wandered into restricted airspace around the White House and around Camp David.” These clearly were over the continental United States. If the Knight-Ridder qualification were true, we would expect Martin to have said: “After 9/11, not only have there been more interceptions, but now some of them are within the continental United States.” But there is no indication in the AP story that he made any such statement. Also, although PM interviewed Martin in 2004, it gives no sign that he endorsed the Knight-Ridder qualification.

A third problem with PM’s defense is that, even if it were true that all the interceptions had been offshore instead of over American or Canadian soil, that would do little to defend the military against the charge that it had stood down on 9/11. The issue at hand is whether the military had regularly intercepted planes. It matters not whether these interceptions were over the land or over the water.

A fourth problem is the existence of reports that fighter jets had indeed intercepted civilian planes quite regularly in the decades prior to 9/11. I had quoted, for example, a 1998 document warning pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behavior “will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes.”[8] Also, the above-cited story in the Calgary Herald, which reported that NORAD had scrambled fighter jets 129 times in 2000, also said: “Fighter jets are scrambled to babysit suspect aircraft or ‘unknowns’ three or four times a day. Before Sept. 11, that happened twice a week.”[9] Twice a week would be about 100 times per year, and “babysitting” is not what jets would do with planes suspected of smuggling drugs into the country.

A fifth problem for PM’s claim---that in the decade before 9/11, all of NORAD’s interceptions except one were offshore and primarily involved drug smuggling---is a 1994 report from the General Accounting Office, which strongly contradicts this claim. It said:

Overall, during the past 4 years, NORAD's alert fighters took off to intercept aircraft (referred to as scrambled) 1,518 times. . . . Of these incidents, the number of suspected drug smuggling aircraft averaged . . . less than 7 percent of all of the alert sites' total activity. The remaining activity generally involved visually inspecting unidentified aircraft and assisting aircraft in distress.[10]

In the period from 1989 through 1992, according to this account, NORAD made an average of 379 interceptions per year, 354 of which “involved visually inspecting unidentified aircraft and assisting aircraft in distress,” not intercepting planes suspected of smuggling drugs. Besides the fact that 1992 was part of “the decade before 9/11,” it is doubtful that the pattern of interceptions would have changed radically after that.

With regard to NEADS in particular, Colonel John K. Scott, the commander from March 1996 to June 1998, said: "We probably 'scramble' fighters once a week. When unknowns come up you have to make the decision to launch or not.”[11]

PM has clearly not, therefore, debunked the idea that NORAD routinely intercepted planes over the continental United States. The question remains, therefore, why this routine activity did not occur on 9/11.

No Interceptions “Within Minutes”: “Some conspiracy theorists,” the PM authors say, “mistakenly believe the Stewart case bolsters their argument that fighters can reach wayward passenger planes within minutes.”[12] In attempting to refute this belief, they argue that, because of a crossing of a time zone, Stewart’s plane was not really intercepted within 19 minutes, as widely believed, but an hour and 19 minutes. Be that as it may (I have elsewhere suggested that the documents are too confused to make a firm judgment[13]), the important issue is whether, prior to 9/11, scrambled fighters regularly intercepted aircraft within minutes.

There is evidence that they did. Above, I quoted a 1998 document stating that fighters commonly intercept aircraft “within 10 or so minutes.” Also, in a 1999 story, a full-time alert pilot at Homestead Air Reserve Base (near Miami) was quoted as saying, “If needed, we could be killing things in five minutes or less.”[14]

These reports suggest that unless there had been a stand-down order on 9/11, any hijacked airliners would have been intercepted within 10 minutes or so. This contention is supported by former Air Force Colonel Robert Bowman, who was an interceptor pilot before becoming head of the “Star Wars” program during the Ford and Carter administrations. He has said:

If our government had merely done nothing---and I say that as an old interceptor pilot and I know the drill, I know what it takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are . . . ---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.[15]

No Armed Fighters on Alert: The PM authors argue at the end of their section on military intercepts---evidently intending this as their knockout punch---that between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the US did not even keep armed fighters on alert. To support this astounding claim, our authors again cite no documentary evidence. They do not even quote anyone from the U.S. military. They rely entirely on a statement from former Senator Warren Rudman (Republican from New Hampshire), who was quoted in Glen Johnson’s 2001 Boston Globe article as saying:

We don’t have capable fighter aircraft loaded with missiles sitting on runways in this country. We just don’t do that anymore. . . . [T]o expect American fighter aircraft to intercept commercial airliners . . . is totally unrealistic and makes no sense at all.[16]

However, although this quotation concludes PM’s section on intercepts, it is far from the final word in Johnson’s article. Rather, the very next paragraphs say:

Otis offers something close to that posture, however. Its 102d Fighter Wing is equipped with 18 F-15 Eagles, twin-engine, supersonic, air-to-air combat aircraft. . . .

The planes, which can fly at more than twice the speed of sound, . . . [have] responsibility for protecting Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington . . . .

To complete that mission, the unit has two armed and fueled aircraft ready to fly around the clock, each day of the year, a unit spokeswoman said.[17] (Emphasis added)

So much for PM’s knockout punch. And so much, once again, for its reportorial honesty.

The falsity of PM’s claim is also evident from other sources. For example, Major Steve Saari, an alert pilot at Tyndall Air Force Base, has been quoted as saying: “In practice, we fly with live missiles.”[18] Captain Tom “Pickle” Herring, an alert pilot at Homestead Air Reserve Base near Miami, has been quoted as saying: “[W]e have weapons on our jets. We need to be postured such that no one would dare threaten us.”[19]

Failing with all its claims, Debunking 9/11 Myths has done nothing to debunk the idea that the 9/11 attacks succeeded because there had been a stand-down order.

[1] Debunking 9/11 Myths, 22.

[2] Glen Johnson, "Facing Terror Attack's Aftermath: Otis Fighter Jets Scrambled Too Late to Halt the Attacks," Boston Globe, September 15, 2001 (http://www.fromthewi...lobe091501.html).

[3] Debunking 9/11 Myths, 24.

[4]Linda Slobodian, “NORAD on Heightened Alert: Role of Air Defence Agency Rapidly Transformed in Wake of Sept. 11 Terrorist Attacks,” Calgary Herald, October 13, 2001 (http://911research.w...1_scrables.html); Leslie Miller, “Military Now Notified Immediately of Unusual Air Traffic Events,” Associated Press, August 12, 2002 (http://911research.w...d/020812ap.html).

[5] Griffin, “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True.” This essay was first published in 2005 at 911Review.com (http://911review.com...iffin/nyc1.html). It was next published in Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006) and then in my Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11. The quoted statement is in note 35 of the first two versions and note 58 of the third one.

[6] In the statement from Martin cited in the AP story referred to above, the 67 scrambles occurred from “September 2000 to June 2001,” which would be nine months; here the months are reversed, making the period in question sixteen months. Having been unable to locate the Colorado Springs Gazette story, I do not know if PM introduced the error or if it simply did not notice the error in the Gazette story.

[7] Debunking 9/11 Myths, 24-25.

[8]Air Traffic Control Center, “ATCC Controller’s Red Binder” (available at www.xavius.com/080198.htm), quoted in Ahmed, The War on Freedom, 148.

[9] Slobodian, “NORAD on Heightened Alert.”

[10] General Accounting Office, “Continental Air Defense: A Dedicated Force Is No Longer Needed,” May 3, 1994 (http://www.fas.org/man/gao/gao9476.htm).

[11] Leslie Filson, Sovereign Skies: Air National Guard Takes Command of 1st Air Force (Tyndall, Fl.: First Air Force, 1999), 52.

[12] Debunking 9/11 Myths, 23.

[13] Griffin, 9/11CROD 323 n. 31.

[14] “Fangs Bared: Florida’s Eagles Stand Sentry Over Southern Skies,” Airman, December 1999 (http://www.af.mil/ne...n/1299/home.htm).

[15] “Retired Air Force Col: They Lied to Us About the War and About 9/11 Itself,” October 27, 2005 (http://www.benfrank....l_mafia_treason).

[16] Debunking 9/11 Myths, 25.

[17] Johnson, "Facing Terror Attack's Aftermath.”

[18] Filson, Sovereign Skies, 96-97.

[19] Airman, December, 1999 (http://www.af.mil/ne.../1299/home2.htm).

Edited November 22, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

This JUNK was NOT written by “BLOGGER CARL BANK” but rather by that dishonest and confused hustler David Ray Griffter. The 1^st line of the forum post, (not blog entry) is, “Here is the Section about it from David Ray Griffin's "Debunking 9/11 Debunking" –“

What a pile of drivel!! David Ray Griffin or more fittingly Grifter, consistently bends the truth, to call his claims about 9/11 ‘half-truths’ would be giving him too much credit. It’s quite ironic that he called his 2^nd 9/11 book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, because it, like the rest of his 9/11 opus is nothing but omissions and distortions. Some times this seems to be due to carelessness (he once admitted that he hadn’t checked a secondary source against the original) and at others intentional deception. I once compared Mr. Fetzer to “a corrupt cop or prosecutor who fakes evidence against people he believes to be guilty.” The same applies to Griffin but with a dozen or so books, plus innumerous DVD, articles and lectures in just 8 years he has become a professional 9/11 conspiracy monger. He has a vested interest in not examining the “Truth” Movement’s claims too closely. This passage from his 5th book is a ‘shining’ example. Grifter omits that most of his sources actually contradict him and distorts what they say to better fit his thesis.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

########################

BLOGGER CARL BANK pilotsfor911truth

Military Intercepts

In its final effort to debunk the idea that on 9/11 a stand-down order had been issued (which was not rescinded until shortly before the downing of Flight 93), PM disputes the 9/11 truth movement’s claim that NORAD’s fighter jets routinely intercepted planes and usually did so in a matter of minutes. PM’s contrary “fact” is that, “In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart’s Learjet in October 1999.”[1]

No “Routine” Interceptions: One impediment to their claim was a Boston Globe article, quoted in The New Pearl Harbor, in which the author, Glen Johnson, reported that NORAD spokesman Mike Snyder, speaking a few days after 9/11, said that NORAD’s fighters, in Johnson’s paraphrase, “routinely intercept aircraft.”[2] To rebut this claim, our authors do not cite any documentary evidence. They simply say: “When contacted by Popular Mechanics, spokesmen for NORAD and the FAA clarified their remarks by noting that scrambles were routine, but intercepts were not---especially over the continental United States.”[3] But these alleged “spokesmen” remain anonymous, a fact suggesting that PM could not find anyone in either NORAD or the FAA willing to have his or her name associated with this claim. PM has not really, therefore, undermined the statement made by NORAD spokesman Mike Snyder, a few days after 9/11, that NORAD makes interceptions routinely.

“Anonymous”? I’ll chalk that up to incompetence rather than dishonesty but either way this good example of the quality of Grifter’s ‘research’ if he’d bothered to have looked at the “Notes” at the back of the book he would have seen it cited "interview with Major Darren G. Steele, NORAD May 9, 2005" and though he was not clearly identified as the FAA ‘spokesman’ for that passage on the next page PM cited “FAA spokesman Bill Schumann” giving similar information. There was no real need to “undermine[] the statement made by NORAD spokesman Mike Snyder” because he, like Griffin’s other sources never indicated NORAD regularly intercepted domestic flights and the Globe article actually contradicts Griffin’s theories, more on these points below.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1588165477/ref=rdr_ext_tmb (pages 24, 25 and 197).

The idea that interceptions occur regularly has not, of course, been based solely or even primarily on Snyder’s statement. It has also been based on reports that fighters have been scrambled about a hundred times a year. A 2001 story in the Calgary Herald reported that NORAD had scrambled fighters 129 times in 2000; an Associated Press story in 2002 referred to NORAD’s “67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001.”[4] By extrapolation, one can infer that NORAD had scrambled fighters about a thousand times in the decade prior to 9/11. This figure makes it very hard for Popular Mechanics, by claiming that most scrambles do not result in interceptions (a claim made by Benjamin Chertoff during a radio show debate with me when he was still a PM spokesperson), to claim that only one civilian plane had been intercepted in North America during the decade before 9/11. As I argued in print, this claim could be true “only if in all of these cases, except for the Payne incident, the fighters were called back to base before they actually intercepted the aircraft in question . . , a most unlikely possibility.”[5]

While several scrambles may have been called off jets or failed to intercept their targets for various reasons, the balance would have been flights intercepted offshore. The key distinction has always been between flights coming in over the ocean instead of ones originating in the continental US. Griffin committed a childish logical error. PM indicated there were two types of scrambles that were not included in those statistics 1) those that do not lead to intercepts AND 2) those that were in ADIZs, he ignored the latter to construct his straw man. And despite the theologian’s huffing and puffing to the contrary none of his sources indicated there had been more than one intercept over the US in the decade preceding 9/11, most indicated otherwise. The emphasis on offshore flights was made in the PM article which formed the basis for the book:

In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999…Prior to 9/11, all other NORAD interceptions were limited to offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). "Until 9/11 there was no domestic ADIZ," FAA spokesman Bill Schumann tells PM.

I quoted Plane & Pilot magazine saying the same thing and as the Grifter was so kind as to point out so did the Colorado Springs Gazette.

PM’s solution to this problem is to argue not only that interceptions are rare but also that scrambles are---at least scrambles within the continental United States. But this solution faced a problem: Major Douglas Martin, who on other issues has been quoted in support of PM’s position, was the person who had been quoted in the Associated Press story, mentioned above, about NORAD’s “67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001.” Martin himself had implied, in other words, that NORAD had been scrambling jets about 100 times a year. PM tries to neutralize this statement by saying:

However, the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service produced a more complete account, which included an important qualification. Here’s how the Knight Ridder story appeared in the September 28, 2002, edition of the Colorado Springs Gazette: “From June 2000 to September 2001 [sic][6], NORAD scrambled fighters 67 times but not over the continental United States. . . . Before September 11, the only time officials recall scrambling jets over the United States was when golfer Payne Stewart’s plane veered off course and crashed in South Dakota in 1999.”

Except for that lone, tragic anomaly, all NORAD interceptions from the end of the Cold war in 1989 until 9/11 took place in offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). . . . The planes intercepted in these zones were primarily being used for drug smuggling.[7]

There are several problems with this response. Two of them involve inconsistencies in PM’s argument. For one thing, PM is supposed to be defending its claim that in the decade prior to 9/11 there had been only one interception “over North America,” but the qualification in this Knight-Ridder story speaks only of “the continental United States.” The PM authors have thereby ignored Canada, that other North American country that is protected by NORAD, and Alaska.

Grifter is really showing his desperation here. There was no “discrepancy”, PM’s claim was more inclusive than the Gazette’s and none of the 9/11 flights flew anywhere near Canada let alone Alaska. No intercepts over North America = none over the continental US. PM did NOT ignore “Canada…and Alaska,” they were not mentioned by that particular source. In his footnote Griffin claimed

A second inconsistency is that, after having emphasized the distinction between scrambles and interceptions, the PM authors then conflate them. We can, however, set aside these inconsistencies in order to focus on more serious problems.

PM did not ‘conflate’ or ‘set aside’ anything they got different information from different sources.

First, given the fact that the Knight-Ridder story not only appeared several months after the AP story but also appeared in a newspaper in Colorado Springs, near NORAD headquarters, it could be disinformation put out to provide the basis for exactly the case that PM is now making---that NORAD’s failure to intercept the airliners on 9/11 was not a failure to do something that it had been doing routinely.

Paranoid drivel, how does which cities a wire service article appears affect its credibility? Knight-Ridder was based in San Jose, CA. if it were CIA/PTB “disinformation” why wouldn’t it have been placed in higher circulation publications? The Gazette’s print circulation was 80 – 90,000 in 2002 and currently has less than 22,000 online subscribers (some of whom overlap with print subscribers, obviously there were less in 2002). Even if we assume all those 100,000 or so people read it and another 100,000 read it online, it would have been read by only one in 1400 Americans, even if we add in those who read the PM book only a minuscule number of people have been exposed to this information.

http://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/gazette-circulation-continues-decline-as-parent-emerges-from-bankruptcy/Content?oid=1699438

Actually PM seems to have made a mistake, the article was written by a member of the paper’s staff, my argument here is with Grifter’s ad hominem and paranoia. Seeing the actual article makes his speculation even more nonsensical, the sentences cited by PM were at the very end of the 1100 word fluff piece titled “NORAD on alert for routine, bizarre calls”. Amusingly in his footnote Grifter claim he had “been unable to locate the Colorado Springs Gazette story.” I found it in about a minute searching the paper’s archive.

http://daily.gazette.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Search&Key=TheGazette/2002/09/08/3/Ar00301.xml&CollName=TheGazette_APA3_2000-2010&DOCID=59391&PageLabelPrint=A1&Skin=GazetteA&AW=1353982803097&sPublication=TheGazette&sQuery=NORAD%20scrambled%20fighters%20&sSorting=%2549%2573%2573%2575%2565%2544%2561%2574%2565%2549%2544%252c%2564%2565%2573%2563&sDateFrom=%2530%2531%252f%2530%2531%252f%2531%2539%2530%2530&sDateTo=%2531%2532%252f%2530%2531%252f%2532%2530%2531%2532&RefineQueryView=&StartFrom=20&ViewMode=GIF (subscription required)

Second, given this possibility, PM’s description of the Knight-Ridder story as a “more complete account” begs the question, because of the possibility that it is a distortion, rather than simply a more complete account, of the truth. An indication that it does involve distortion, moreover, is provided by the fact that Martin, in illustrating the increased number of scrambles after 9/11, said: “In June [2002], Air Force jets scrambled three times to intercept small private planes that had wandered into restricted airspace around the White House and around Camp David.” These clearly were over the continental United States. If the Knight-Ridder qualification were true, we would expect Martin to have said: “After 9/11, not only have there been more interceptions, but now some of them are within the continental United States.” But there is no indication in the AP story that he made any such statement. Also, although PM interviewed Martin in 2004, it gives no sign that he endorsed the Knight-Ridder qualification.

Grifter conveniently ignores that journalists normally have to distill the information they receive, the point of the article was that scrambles became faster and more frequent after 9/11, there was no mention of any intercepts over the US before that. And while there is no evidence Martin seems said anything about the lack of intercepts over the US as noted above another NORAD officer did. It makes sense that they spoke to someone else. In the book PM identified him as the “FORMER public affairs officer for NORAD” and used quotes from 2004 when he was the spokesman, by 2006 he had been replaced by Maj. Steele.

A third problem with PM’s defense is that, even if it were true that all the interceptions had been offshore instead of over American or Canadian soil, that would do little to defend the military against the charge that it had stood down on 9/11. The issue at hand is whether the military had regularly intercepted planes. It matters not whether these interceptions were over the land or over the water.

What babble, NORAD’s primary mission was and always had been preventing unauthorized aircraft (and missiles) from other countries penetrating US and Canadian airspace. So the frequency with which they intercepted planes in the US is quite relevant, at least 3 sources have indicated such incidents were quite rare, truthers have yet to turn up an exception in the decade before 9/11 other than Payne Stewart’s Learjet. I can cite several incidents in which aircraft went astray in the US, at time for hour without being intercepted.

Since it was set up top intercept incoming aircraft it was much easier for them to do so. When planes are flying over the Atlantic or Pacific to the US they are flying in the general direction of alert bases but since they are located on or near the coasts domestic flights tend to be flying away from them, this of course makes it much easier to intercept the former. Additionally the rules in place on 9/11 forbade flying supersonic in US airspace; such rules did not apply to flights over open sea.

More importantly NORAD’s primary mission was defending North American airspace from intruders, that’s why even when there were 29 alert bases in the US all near oceans or borders, on 9/11 there were 8 (including 1 in Alaska), all on or near the ocean. That’s why they normally only monitored radar over the oceans. Thus there is more lead time especially since they wouldn’t depend on notification from the FAA. Major Douglas Martin, who Griffin takes as credible source made this very point in the PM book but the theologian ignored this and dishonestly claimed, “It matters not whether these interceptions were over the land or over the water.” From the PM book:

At the time no computer system or alarm network was in place to automatically alerted the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) of missing civilian planes. "They [civilian Air Traffic Control, or ATC] had to pick up the phone and literally dial us," says Major Douglas Martin, former public affairs officer for NORAD…

A fourth problem is the existence of reports that fighter jets had indeed intercepted civilian planes quite regularly in the decades prior to 9/11. I had quoted, for example, a 1998 document warning pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behavior “will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes.”[8]

LOL the 1998 “document” is the instruction for a computer game! An Air Traffic Control simulator. He had previously described it as an “Air Traffic Control document”, his backing off that to me indicates ‘consciousness of guilt’, he knew it did not prove anything but cited it anyway. Even so it contradicted rather than supported his claims:

The U.S. military has their own network of

radars looking over the U.S. borders, and out over the ocean

(NORAD). They are tied into the FAA computer to be able to get information on

incoming flights from overseas

, but if they see a target

over international waters headed toward the U.S.,

without flight plan information, they will call on the "shout" line to the appropriate Center sector for an ID. Sector 66 might get a call to ID a radar target, and if 66 has no datablock or other information on it, the military will

usually

scramble an intercept flight. Essentially always they turn out to be private pilots ("VFR") not talking to anybody, who stray too far outside the boundary, then get picked up on their way back in. But, procedures are procedures, and they will likely find two

F-18's

on their tail within 10 or so minutes.

So if he had read the actual source he would have known it was referring to “a target over international waters headed toward the U.S” but omitted that and distorted what the document was, fitting that he included a similar passage in his “Omissions and Distortions” book. Both these problems, the provenance and actual claims of the ‘document’ were pointed out in late 2005 or early 2006 by 911Myths, over a year BEFORE Griffin released this book, yet another example of his horrible research.

It’s not even clear he actually read the ‘document’, his citation ended “quoted in Ahmed, The War on Freedom, 148.” In response to a negative review of “New Pearl Harbor, Revisited” he admitted regarding ‘quotes’ about the Pentagon crash , “I had quoted those statements from secondary sources---three of them from Thierry Meyssan's "Pentagate"---without looking them up for myself to read them in context.” Amazing that this fraudster trades on his academic credentials to bolster his claims. If one of my high school teachers, let alone a college professor, discovered I had used secondary sources for quotes when the primaries were readily available and cited the primaries, they would have justifiably given me an ‘F’. Such behavior is academic fraud.

Ahmed’s substitution of “F-18s” in the original with “[jet fighters]” is interesting. In the US F-18s are used by the Navy and the Marines but NOT by the Air Force, let alone the Air National Guard (ANG) which is responsible for intercepts. Did Ahmed make this edit because it might tip people off that the source was bogus? Did Griffin use his version rather than the original for the same reason?

Also, the above-cited story in the Calgary Herald, which reported that NORAD had scrambled fighter jets 129 times in 2000, also said: “Fighter jets are scrambled to babysit suspect aircraft or ‘unknowns’ three or four times a day. Before Sept. 11, that happened twice a week.”[9] Twice a week would be about 100 times per year, and “babysitting” is not what jets would do with planes suspected of smuggling drugs into the country.

PM said such flight “were primarily” NOT entirely “being used for drug smuggling” and what makes the Grifter think any of “suspect aircraft or ‘unknowns’” originated in the US? Nothing in the Calgary Herald article indicated NORAD ever intercepted any planes over North America, if fact much of it contradicted this (emphasis added):

Where was Norad, the multimillion-dollar, 24-hour eyes and ears of North American skies, when the hijacked planes embarked on their sinister missions?

Ironically, Norad was doing its job: peering 300 kilometres out into the Air Defence Identification Zone ENCIRCLING NORTH AMERICA. Its task: to help assess, within two minutes, if each of the 7,000 INCOMING AIRCRAFT every day is friend or foe.

It was scanning space for something as tiny as a fleck of paint which at nearly 58,000 km/h can damage a shuttle.

It was on alert for intercontinental ballistic missiles which, if fired from rogue nations such as North Korea, will strike North America in 23 minutes.

Norad's 1,100 army, navy, marine and air force personnel -- 12 per cent of them Canadian -- WERE NEITHER EXPECTING, NOR TRAINED, TO DEAL WITH MANNED MISSILES LAUNCHED OUT OF BOSTON.

[…]

Norad learned in a harsh way the job it was doing was incomplete. Sept. 11 resulted in several changes adding a new dimension to Norad's job -- the ability to track enemy threats which military and intelligence officials warn still lurk from within.

[…]

Since that date, however, Norad's mission has expanded.

"IF IT (AN AIRCRAFT) TOOK OFF FROM WITHIN THE U.S. OR CANADA, NORAD ALWAYS ASSUMED the law enforcement, the Federal Aviation Authority, or the air force security people had done their jobs and IT WASN'T GOING TO BE A THREAT. That's why WE LOOKED OUT," says Hunter. "We are prepared now more than we were previously for internal threats from the sky."

[…]

Changes to Norad defence strategy as a result of Sept. 11:

[…]

- NORAD NOW MONITORS 40,000 DAILY FLIGHTS, ADDING DOMESTIC FLIGHTS TO THE 7,000 INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS IT FORMERLY TRACKED.

- New computers in Norad headquarters Command Centre identify every internal North American flight.

- Federal Aviation Administration officials moved into the Command Centre in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., to liaise round the clock with Norad.

- Now 100 fighter jets stand on constant alert as opposed to 14 in North America prior to Sept. 11.

- No inflight problem is considered routine. Fighter jets now scramble to "babysit" suspect aircraft several times daily as opposed to one or so a week before the attacks.

- About a dozen Norad MOBILE RADARS HAVE BEEN MOVED ACROSS THE U.S. TO EXPAND THE ABILITY TO MONITOR HOME SKIES.

The Boston Globe article Grifter cited also indicated NORAD’s primary mission was intercepting incoming aircraft and rarely (if ever) did so with domestic ones:

…The NORAD spokesman [Mike Snyder] … said the two F-15s on alert at Otis were not immediately ordered into the sky because A COLD WAR APPROACH TO AIR DEFENSE - PROTECTING US BORDERS FROM INCOMING MILITARY AIRCRAFT - DID NOT ANTICIPATE THE TERRORIST THREAT POSED BY HIJACKERS COMMANDEERING DOMESTIC, CIVILIAN AIRCRAFT.

That approach will be reviewed in light of Tuesday's events, which killed 266 people aboard four hijacked aircraft, as well as thousands more in and around the collapsed buildings.

"We scramble aircraft to respond to any aircraft that we consider a potential threat. The hijacked aircraft were normal, scheduled commercial aircraft on approved flight plans and we only had 10 minutes prior notice to the first attack, which unfortunately was not enough notice," said Marine Corps Major Mike Snyder, a spokesman for NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo.

"THIS IS AN UNPRECEDENTED EVENT, UNFORTUNATELY, AND WE'RE JUST GOING TO HAVE TO ADJUST ACCORDINGLY," Snyder said.

[…]

A Web site for the Cape Cod Air Show, which features aircraft from the unit, describes its duty this way: "Specifically, OUR MISSION IS TO PROTECT THE NORTHEAST UNITED STATES FROM ARMED ATTACK FROM ANOTHER NATION, TERRORIST ATTACK, AND ACTIVITIES SUCH AS SMUGGLING, ILLICIT DRUG ACTIVITY, AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION."

[…]

The delay in scrambling fighters was confirmed by Air Force General Richard B. Myers, a four-star officer who has been nominated to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday: "We're pretty good IF THE THREAT IS COMING FROM OUTSIDE; we're not so good IF IT'S COMING FROM THE INSIDE."

There is no way that Grifter missed all of the 20 or so indications in his cited sources that before 9/11 NORAD did not monitor or (normally) intercept “internal North American flight” he intentionally omitted what did not fit his pet theories.

A fifth problem for PM’s claim---that in the decade before 9/11, all of NORAD’s interceptions except one were offshore and primarily involved drug smuggling---is a 1994 report from the General Accounting Office, which strongly contradicts this claim. It said:

Overall, during the past 4 years, NORAD's alert fighters took off to intercept aircraft (referred to as scrambled) 1,518 times. . . . Of these incidents, the number of suspected drug smuggling aircraft averaged . . . less than 7 percent of all of the alert sites' total activity. The remaining activity generally involved visually inspecting unidentified aircraft and assisting aircraft in distress.[10]

In the period from 1989 through 1992, according to this account, NORAD made an average of 379 interceptions per year, 354 of which “involved visually inspecting unidentified aircraft and assisting aircraft in distress,” not intercepting planes suspected of smuggling drugs. Besides the fact that 1992 was part of “the decade before 9/11,” it is doubtful that the pattern of interceptions would have changed radically after that.

Griffin offers nothing but his credulity to contradict the possibility that “the pattern of interceptions would have changed radically after” 1989 – 1992. That was the tail end of the Cold War and according to a source Griffin cited (see below) “…almost without exception, the only thing FANG fliers shoot are photos — pictures to help identify aircraft or for evidence in drug smuggling cases.” But whether NORAD was intercepting inbound fights because they were suspected of carry drugs or for other reasons is not relevant to the distinction between such flights and domestic ones.

With regard to NEADS in particular, Colonel John K. Scott, the commander from March 1996 to June 1998, said: "We probably 'scramble' fighters once a week. When unknowns come up you have to make the decision to launch or not.”[11]

As with Griffin’s previous sources Col. Scott did not give any indications any of the scrambles were in response to domestic flights. I don’t have access to the cited book but assume it is also full of evidence which counter’s Griffin’s claims.

PM has clearly not, therefore, debunked the idea that NORAD routinely intercepted planes over the continental United States. The question remains, therefore, why this routine activity did not occur on 9/11.

Actually Grifter himself if one actually checks his sources buttressed te theory and various sources independently reported this, the “‘Truth’ Movement” has yet to turn up evidence NORAD regularly intercepted flights over the US or even cite any other instances “in the decade before 9/11”

No Interceptions “Within Minutes”: “Some conspiracy theorists,” the PM authors say, “mistakenly believe the Stewart case bolsters their argument that fighters can reach wayward passenger planes within minutes.”[12] In attempting to refute this belief, they argue that, because of a crossing of a time zone, Stewart’s plane was not really intercepted within 19 minutes, as widely believed, but an hour and 19 minutes. Be that as it may (I have elsewhere suggested that the documents are too confused to make a firm judgment[13]), the important issue is whether, prior to 9/11, scrambled fighters regularly intercepted aircraft within minutes.

No that’s another lie, “the documents are [NOT] confused, the NTSB report which is what truthers always cite clearly indicated that:

At 0933:38

E

DT…the controller instructed N47BA [stewart’s plane] to change radio frequencies and contact another Jacksonville ARTCC controller. The controller received no response from N47BA… About 0952

C

DT, a USAF F-16 test pilot from the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base (AFB), Florida, was vectored to within 8 nm of N47BA. About 0954

C

DT, at a range of 2,000 feet from the accident airplane and an altitude of about 46,400 feet, the test pilot made two radio calls to N47BA but did not receive a response. About 1000 CDT, the test pilot began a visual inspection of N47BA…

The time zone change was mentioned in a footnote, “about 1010 EDT, the accident airplane crossed from the EDT zone to the CDT zone in the vicinity of Eufaula,Alabama”, the confusion is limited to “Truthers”. The plane started missing radio calls at 9:33 EDT and missed a turn over Gainesville FL., but was only intercepted at 9:54 CDT i.e. 10:54 EDT, 81 minutes later. Media account also reported that the “F-16 caught up with the Learjet over Memphis, Tenn.” (hence the time zone change) there is no way a Learjet could have flown the 580 or so miles in 21 minutes it would had to have flown at over 1600 MPH to have done that, 2x the speed of sound and more than 3x the maximum speed of a Lear 35A.

http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/reports/2000/AAB0001.pdfport

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/102699/nat_102699081.shtml

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/golf/stewart/stewfs14.htm

There is evidence that they did. Above, I quoted a 1998 document stating that fighters commonly intercept aircraft “within 10 or so minutes.” Also, in a 1999 story, a full-time alert pilot at Homestead Air Reserve Base (near Miami) was quoted as saying, “If needed, we could be killing things in five minutes or less.”[14]

LOL does the elderly theologian really have no idea what bragging and hyperbole are? Remember that the “1998 document” was a game manual that actually contradicted Grifter. As for the “1999 story” once again he omits passages from an article which indicated that before 9/11 NORAD rarely (if ever) intercepted domestic flights:

One minute, he might be buzzing around his unit’s kitchen, baking up a batch of his famous chocolate brownies, and the next, he’s scrambling into the skies in an F-15 fighter, intercepting a “bogey”

zeroing in on our shores

… He is the first and last line of defense

against intruders

threatening American soil… Within minutes, the crew chiefs can launch the pilots and send them on their way to intercept “unknown riders,” whether they’re Cuban MiGs, drug traffickers, smugglers, hijackers, novice pilots who’ve filed faulty flight plans or crippled aircraft limping in on a wing and a prayer.

One could argue the last three categories could refer to domestic flights but a few lines later the author continued, “But almost without exception, the only thing FANG fliers shoot are photos — pictures to help identify aircraft or for evidence in drug smuggling cases. The typical scramble often reveals an inexperienced private pilot at the controls, flying off course after vacationing in the Bahamas.” And there were more indications domestic flights were NOT NORAD’s concern, according to it their radar did not even monitor continental airspace:

The Southeast Air Defense Sector, located at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, mobilizes the fighters whenever a mysterious blip shows up on radar that can’t be identified. The sector’s radar arrays sweep 60 to 120 miles

across the Atlantic, Caribbean, Florida Straits and Gulf of Mexico

. If a plane

penetrates the U.S. air defense identification zone

and tracking technicians can’t get a read on who it is, and why it’s there, the sector sounds the alarm at Homestead.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000303133300/http://www.af.mil/news/airman/1299/home.htm

The five minute claim does not even make sense. The post-Cold War standard was only launch planes with 15 minutes’ notice, though I read some where they often did so in closer to 10. To get fighters off the ground in 5 minutes the USAF had to maintain pilots in flight suits sitting in powered up jets 24/7 but the pilots cited in the article had to “[race] down two flights of stairs” and at times they are sleeping or showering “when that klaxon sounds.” It is not even likely they could intercept within 5 minutes of take-off. Even if we assume an average speed of 1000 MPH they could only reach a point 83 miles from the base.

These reports suggest that unless there had been a stand-down order on 9/11, any hijacked airliners would have been intercepted within 10 minutes or so. This contention is supported by former Air Force Colonel Robert Bowman, who was an interceptor pilot before becoming head of the “Star Wars” program during the Ford and Carter administrations. He has said:

If our government had merely done nothing---and I say that as an old interceptor pilot and I know the drill, I know what it takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are . . . ---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.[15]

A few months before making that statement Bowman spoke to a journalist who described him as “a combat pilot who flew 101 missions in the Vietnam War” but gave no indication he flew after the war. Two years later Bowman used very similar language to describe his experience, he said he was “an old fighter pilot (101 combat missions in Vietnam, F-4 Phantom, Phu Cat, 1969-1970)” and once again made no mention of flying let alone participating in air sovereignty missions after Vietnam. He pretty consistently limits his piloting to some variant of ‘101 missions in Vietnam’. So presumably some or all of those were interceptor missions. Are we to believe that response times in an Asian warzone over 30 years before 9/11 are applicable to what they should have been that day in the continental US? Dr. Bowman, who was born in 1934, made his comments in 2005; so what we have are the irrelevant 35-6 year-old recollections of a man in his early 70s. And even so Bowman said noting specifically about scramble or intercept times.

Bowman 2005: http://www.illinoistimes.com/Springfield/article-2107-star-warrior%92s-adieu.html

Bowman 2007: http://www.thepatriots.us/download/Duty.pdf

No Armed Fighters on Alert: The PM authors argue at the end of their section on military intercepts---evidently intending this as their knockout punch---that between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the US did not even keep armed fighters on alert. To support this astounding claim, our authors again cite no documentary evidence. They do not even quote anyone from the U.S. military. They rely entirely on a statement from former Senator Warren Rudman (Republican from New Hampshire), who was quoted in Glen Johnson’s 2001 Boston Globe article as saying:

We don’t have capable fighter aircraft loaded with missiles sitting on runways in this country. We just don’t do that anymore. . . . [T]o expect American fighter aircraft to intercept commercial airliners . . . is totally unrealistic and makes no sense at all.[16]

Neither Rudman nor PM said the planes were unarmed. The former’s point seems to have been there were few fighters on alert at the time at the end of the 1980s there were alert squadrons at 28 bases in the continental US by the late 90s that was reduced to 7, how would a lack of missiles have prevented interception? If anything fighters without missiles would have been able to have flown slightly faster and further because they would have been lighter and more aerodynamic.

.

However, although this quotation concludes PM’s section on intercepts, it is far from the final word in Johnson’s article. Rather, the very next paragraphs say:

Otis offers something close to that posture, however. Its 102d Fighter Wing is equipped with 18 F-15 Eagles, twin-engine, supersonic, air-to-air combat aircraft. . . .

The planes, which can fly at more than twice the speed of sound, . . . [have] responsibility for protecting Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington . . . .

To complete that mission, the unit has two armed and fueled aircraft ready to fly around the clock, each day of the year, a unit spokeswoman said.[17] (Emphasis added)

So much for PM’s knockout punch. And so much, once again, for its reportorial honesty.

I admit that if one wants to take Rudman’s comments literally, he was probably wrong about interceptor not being armed with missiles but it is richly ironic that given all of Grifter’s “omissions and distortions” that he would have the gall to accuse PM of ‘dishonesty’.

The falsity of PM’s claim is also evident from other sources. For example, Major Steve Saari, an alert pilot at Tyndall Air Force Base, has been quoted as saying: “In practice, we fly with live missiles.”[18] Captain Tom “Pickle” Herring, an alert pilot at Homestead Air Reserve Base near Miami, has been quoted as saying: “[W]e have weapons on our jets. We need to be postured such that no one would dare threaten us.”[19]

Failing with all its claims, Debunking 9/11 Myths has done nothing to debunk the idea that the 9/11 attacks succeeded because there had been a stand-down order.

LOL ‘Failing with all his claims, Griffin has done nothing to debunk the idea that’ before the 9/11 attacks that intercepts of domestic flights were rare events.

This review is already quite long but I’ll give two more examples of how deceptive Grifter was in this book.

One of Grifin’s most important sources for the book was “Robin Hordon, who was formerly an air traffic controller at the FAA's Boston Center.” Hordon was one of “four people” the theologian said “I must lift up for special thanks because of the extraordinary amount of time they devoted to this project, going far beyond any reasonable call of duty” and was the only person he thanked twice in the “Acknowledgments”. He repeatedly cited Hordon as an authority on how the FAA (especially Boston Center) and the USAF should have responded on 9/11. Griffin cited him over 40 times, he didn’t even cite Steve Jones that often. But in those dozens of citations he never told his readers that Hordon was one of the ATCs fired by Reagan in 1981, thus his recollections were over 25 years-old and 20 years out of date and he potentially had an ax to grind.

When Hordon was an ATC there were at least 28 bases in the continental US on 5 minute scramble alert and hijackings were fairly common, by 2001 there were on 7 bases on 15 minute scramble and the last successful hijacking over the US was in 1990.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Event=SEH〈=&page=8

But Grifter’s dishonesty was not limited to air defense issues. In chapter 3 he wrote:

NIST's third reason for dismissing the hypothesis of controlled demolition is that "there was no evidence (collected by NIST, or by the New York Police Department, the Port Authority Police Department or the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions in the region below the impact and fire floors."¹¹⁹

This statement, passed over quickly by the average reader, might be taken to mean that there was no evidence of explosions of any type. Thus interpreted, the statement would be a candidate for the most obviously false statement in the document. I have, for example, published an essay entitled "Explosive Testimony," which includes dozens of testimonies about explosions in the Twin Towers…

But the full quote from NIST was:

…there was no evidence (collected by NIST, or by the New York Police Department, the Port Authority Police Department or the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions in the region below the impact and fire floors

as the top building sections

(including and above the 98th floor in WTC 1 and the 82nd floor in WTC 2)

began their downward movement upon collapse initiation

.

http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/wtc_faqs_082006.cfm

So Griffter omitted NIST’s qualification limiting their comment to the period of “collapse initiation” and then went on to debunk his straw man, few if any of the ‘explosions’ he cited happened then. You can’t get any more intellectually dishonest than that but as we have seen misleading his readers is SOP for the Grifter.

[Len Colby]

http://www.scribd.co...s-L-Kara-Sr-563

Miles Kara, a lifelong coverup man from the DOD.

Classic example of an ad hominem, considered one the most egregious logical fallacies. See if you can actually refute anything he said in his trashing of the video.

"Prior to 9/11, the procedures for managing a traditional hijacked aircraft, as I said, were in place and pretty well tested.... The most frustrating after-the-fact scenario for me to understand is to explain is the communication link on that morning between the FAA operations center and the NMCC (National Military Command Center).... The hijacking net is an open communication net run by the FAA hijack coordinator, who is a senior person from the FAA security

[...]

years of history, there was always somebody listening to that net..... I truly do not mean this to be defensive, but it is a fact -- there were military people on duty at the FAA Command Center on the morning of 9/11, as Mr. Sliney said. They were participating in what was going on. There were military people in the FAA's Air Traffic Organization in a situation room. They were participating in what was going on."

- Monte Belger, FAA Acting Deputy Administrator on 911, 9/11 Commission, Twelfth Public Hearing, Oral Evidence.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

########################

I haven’t the slightest idea why you think this helps your case.

[Steven Gaal]

Classic example of an ad hominem, considered one the most egregious logical fallacies. See if you can actually refute anything he said in his trashing of the video. //end COLBY

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Mr. Colby doesnt KNOW that KARA is totally discredited ?? OR DOESNT WANT TO KNOW ??

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Tin Foil Hat Wearing Loons

Posted by John-Michael P. Talboo

RawStory.com has published an article about Jesse Ventura's 9/11 documentary and as one would expect the conspiracy nuts are coming out of the woodwork and squirming around. 911blogger.com user Robert Rice has the low down:

"Excellent debate raging over there in the comments section.

Please post, as a member or as a guest there when you have the opportunity, but present really compelling evidence without too much mud slinging, and we'll continue to utterly dominate and triumph in the debate, as our side has so far.

The whole climate really has changed, thanks to the Internet. We are no longer a fringe element - the OCT (Official Conspiracy Theory) Myth supporters are now. THEY are now the "tinfoil" hat wearing loons, for supporting and trying to defend the indefensible!

Good work all! Keep it up."

Speaking of defending the indefensible, 911blogger user "brian78046" shares his comment at RawStory:

"Contrary to what Popular Mechanics claims about NORAD (that NORAD monitored aircraft over American skies that originated outside of America only), NORAD and the Air Force says they didn't monitor the airspace of the United States at all on 9/11:

In 2004 the Air Force said, 'Before 2001, 1st Air Force was charged with keeping an eye on the nation’s borders, usually looking for threats in the form of Russian aircraft skirting too close for comfort to the mainland. In those few hours, the command’s mission went from looking outward to looking inward.'

In 2008 NORAD said, 'Since the tragic events of 9/11, NORAD’s role which previously was outward-looking now includes monitoring airspace within North America.'

However, in 1997 NORAD contradictorily said they insure, 'Aircraft flying over our air space are monitored seven days a week, 24 hours a day.'

And the April 2000 Air Force Instruction on air defense, as in effect on 9/11/01, said, 'The First Air Force Commander...provides SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL OF THE AIRSPACE OF THE UNITED STATES...'

Popular Mechanics and the military should get their stories straight on NORAD! As it is, we have caught Popular Mechanics and the military lying about NORAD's true capabilities on 9/11."

Dean Jackson/Editor-in-Chief DNotice.org

Washington, DC

Air Defense: The Changing Stories

Official accounts of the military's response to the attack on 9/11/01 -- or lack thereof -- has gone through at least three mutually contradictory versions, a fact that has remained virtually un-noticed by mainstream news organizations.

Three Versions of the Official Story

Version 1: No Scrambles

In his confirmation hearing two days after the attack, General Myers, acting head of the Joint Cheifs of Staff on the day of the attack, said he thought that no interceptors were scrambled until after the Pentagon was attacked.

LEVIN: Was the Defense Department contacted by the FAA or the FBI or any other agency after the first two hijacked aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center, prior to the time that the Pentagon was hit?

MYERS: Sir, I don't know the answer to that question. I can get that for you, for the record.

LEVIN: Thank you. Did the Defense Department take -- or was the Defense Department asked to take action against any specific aircraft?

MYERS: Sir, we were . . .

LEVIN: And did you take action against -- for instance, there has been statements that the aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down. Those stories continue to exist.

MYERS: Mr. Chairman, the armed forces did not shoot down any aircraft. When it became clear what the threat was, we did scramble fighter aircraft, AWACS, radar aircraft and tanker aircraft to begin to establish orbits in case other aircraft showed up in the FAA system that were hijacked. But we never actually had to use force.

LEVIN: Was that order that you just described given before or after the Pentagon was struck? Do you know?

MYERS: That order, to the best of my knowledge, was after the Pentagon was struck.

General Myers Confirmation Hearing 9/13/01

Version 2: NORAD's Timeline

On September 18, 2001 NORAD issued a press release containing a timeline which listed scramble times for fighters stationed at Otis and Langley bases.

The document, NORAD'S Response Times 9/18/01, contains the following description of times of events:

AA

Flight 11 UA

Flight 175 AA

Flight 77 UA

Flight 93

FAA notification of NEADS 08:40 08:43 09:24 N/A

Fighter Scramble Order 08:46 09:24 --

Fighters Airborne 08:52 09:30 --

Originating Base Otis ANGB

Falmouth, MA Langley AFB

Hampton, VA

Fighter Distance /

Time to Impact Location not airborne

153 miles 8 min /

71 miles 12 min /

105 miles 11 min /

100 miles

Version 3: The 9/11 Commission Report

AA

Flight 11 UA

Flight 175 phantom

Flight 11* AA

Flight 77 UA

Flight 93

Notification of NEADS 08:38 09:15 -- 09:34 10:07

Fighters Scrambled 08:46 09:24

Fighters Airborne 08:53

Originating Base Otis, MA Langley, VA

*Phantom Flight 11 refers to the Commission's assertion that the F-16s scrambled from Langley were sent up, not to intercept Flight 77, but to look for Flight 11, under the erroneous belief that it had bypassed New York City and was headed for the capital." - Source: http://911review.com...se_stories.html

9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied." - Source: http://www.washingto...6080101300.html

Scapegoating Norad

...What the Washington Post article fails to mention is that 5 or more war games were being conducted by several U.S. defense agencies, including:

• At least one "live fly" exercise using REAL planes

• At least one "plane into building" exercise

• Injection of false radar "blips" onto the screens of air traffic controllers

• Monitoring of the exercises and the 9/11 events by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Indeed, Secretary of Transportation Norm Minetta testified to the 9/11 Commission that Cheney monitored flight 77 for many miles as it approached the Pentagon, and was in charge of the military's (non) response to flight 77.

So the Washington Post article completely misses the other half of the story: that the dedicated rank-and-file personnel at Norad were misled, intentionally, by the planners of 9/11. Specifically, the good and dedicated lower-level military people were confused by the events of 9/11 because 9/11 occurred at the same time as the multiple war games with their live fly exercises, plane into building scenarios, false radar inserts, and apparent interference by Cheney.

The prevailing spin from the Washington Post article and the related Vanity Fair article is that Norad lie to the Commission simply to cover up its incompetence on 9/11.

But stop and think about it for one minute. Is it more likely that a government agency would lie to an official government commission simply to cover up incompetence? Or to hide classified information regarding 5 military war games occuring that day, and the the interference which those war games caused with FAA and Norad's normal response to hijackings? Remember that this administration routinely lies, and in fact authorized governmental agencies to lie about 9/11...

Norad has already changed its story numerous times, apparently to address impossibilities with the official story pointed out by 9/11 skeptics.

Therefore, it is obvious that Norad lied for more important reasons that covering up incompetence. Norad lied in a desperate attempt to save the official story from that myth's glaring inconsistencies and, moreover, to cover up treason by certain people within the U.S. government and military." - Source: http://georgewashing...ting-norad.html

In his article "9/11 Live or Fabricated: Do the NORAD Tapes Verify The 9/11 Commission Report?" David Ray Griffin compares and contrasts the two choices we are left with, he states:

"If our military had been guilty only of confusion and incompetence on 9/11, it would have been strange for its officials, by saying that they had been notified by the FAA earlier than they really had, to open themselves not only to the charge of criminal fraud but also to the suspicion that they had deliberately not intercepted the hijacked airliners. We are being asked to believe, in other words, that Scott, Arnold, and the others, in telling the earlier story, acted in a completely irrational manner--that, while being guilty only of confusion and a little incompetence, they told a lie that could have exposed them with being charged with murder and treason."

Griffin also points out that even if we accept the 9/11 Commission's third version of the day's events that in the end it is inconsequential because, as Laura Brown of the FAA reported to the 9/11 Commission:

"Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges that included FAA field facilities, the FAA Command Center, FAA headquarters, DOD [meaning the NMCC in the Department of Defense], the Secret Service. . . . The US Air Force liaison to the FAA immediately joined the FAA headquarters phone bridge and established contact with NORAD. . . . The FAA shared real-time information on the phone bridges about the unfolding events, including information about loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest. . . ."

So in the end "the formal notification was primarily a formality and hence irrelevant to the question of when the military" knew about the flights.

"I knew within hours of the attacks on 9/11/2001 that it was an inside job. Based on my 11-year experience as an FAA Air Traffic Controller in the busy Northeast corridor, including hundreds of hours of training, briefings, air refuelings, low altitude bombing drills, being part of huge military exercises, daily military training exercises, interacting on a routine basis directly with NORAD radar personnel, and based on my own direct experience dealing with in-flight emergency situations, including two instances of hijacked commercial airliners, I state unequivocally; There is absolutely no way that four large commercial airliners could have flown around off course for 30 to 60 minutes on 9/11 without being intercepted and shot completely out of the sky by our jet fighters unless very highly placed people in our government and our military wanted it to happen." - Robin Hordon, Former FAA Air Traffic

Controller at the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center, located in Nashua, NH, 1970 - 1981. FAA certified commercial pilot. FAA certified Flight Instructor and certified Ground Instructor

Confirmed: 9/11 Planes Were Tracked even With Transponders Turned Off

"One of the most important parts of the official story is that the government couldn't track the location of the hijacked planes because the hijackers had turned the transponders off. The official version is that, with transponders turned off, only 'primary radar' was available to civilian air traffic controllers. Primary radar can track location, but not altitude.

This makes no sense, because America's air defenses need to protect our nation against foreign fighter jets and other airplanes invading our country. Is our trillion-dollar defense system set up so that a Russian or Chinese pilot can invade undetected if he just turns off his transponder? Darn! Why didn't we think of that?!" - Source: http://911blogger.com/node/14583

"Helpful background information on the significance of transponder signals is provided in journalist and 9/11 critic Michael Rupert's Crossing the Rubicon. Ruppert explains that all commercial airliners are equipped with transponders--devices that identify the altitude and position of planes by means of radio signals to air traffic controllers (ATCs). When transponders go off, the plane can still be tracked in two dimensions, but the ATC can no longer pinpoint its altitude. At that point, the system is in emergency status and the offending plane appears on the consoles of all the local ATCs. Ruppert goes on to quote from the statement of a pilot, one Michael Guillaume, who explains that such a plane...

'...is now a hazard to air navigation, and the controller's primary function of separating planes is now in jeopardy... If in addition to losing communication and transponder the flight starts to deviate from its last clearance, the whole system is in emergency condition. Alarms all over the country would be going off...

So we know that the traffic control system would be in panic mode within two or three minutes of the initial events. ... The odds are that many flights would be on patrol just offshore. It would be most improbable that even one commercial flight could go [astray] more than ten minutes without being intercepted...

Interceptions are routine daily occurrences. The fact that they didn't happen under extreme provocation raises some serious questions...'" - Source: http://www.bushstole..._griffin911.htm

Payne Stewart

"There's an argument that says the 9/11 attacks couldn't have succeeded if the FAA and NORAD had only followed standard procedures, as at least some of the planes would have been intercepted in time. The 1999 case of Payne Stewart is occasionally used as an example of just how fast intercepts can be.

It's certainly true that there were initial media reports suggesting Air Force jets intercepted the plane only around 20 minutes after contact was lost. But this isn't actually what happened.

Read this carefully and you'll notice a change of time zone, from Eastern to Central time. CDT is one hour on from EDT, so the lack of contact was first noticed at around 09:34, accepted as a loss of contact at 9:44, and the fighter didn't get to within 2000 feet of Stewart’s jet until 10:54. That's well over an hour between the controllers realising there’s a problem, to intercept taking place." - Source: http://www.911myths....p/Payne_Stewart

"Let's keep it in context. The Payne Stewart flight was not hijacked. It was not a commercial airliner with hundreds of people on board. It was not of the size or fuel capacity that would enable it to be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

Yet it was still intercepted by the airforce. Viewed in context, it still boggles the mind that we apparently could not get it together on the morning of 9/11."

"...They are totally different scenarios. The Stewart plane stopped responding and basically kept flying straight. There were no known hijackings taking place and the plane was not actively diverted. It wouldn't surprise me if given these fatcs there was not a sense of urgency about intercepting it. On 9/11 however, we were presumably UNDER ATTACK. Planes were known (believed anyway) to have been hijacked and diverted, and if memory serves, their transponders turned off. The difference in the situiations makes a comparison unreasonable as a defense of the failure to intercept on 9/11."- Source: 911blogger.com: Payne Stewart

at 7:57 AM

Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook

Labels: Jesse Ventura's 9/11 documentary, NORAD 9/11 aircraft outside United States, NORAD 9/11 capabilities, NORAD 9/11 United States airspace, NORAD looking inward outward, tin foil hat wearing loons

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

<a href="http://911debunkers.blogspot.com/2011/08/lack-of-911-air-defence-explained.html">Lack of 9/11 Air Defence Explained?

Posted by John-Michael P. Talboo

Posted by John-Michael P. Talboo

In a post entitled, "NORAD's 'Lies' Explained?," Pat Curley of the Screw Loose Change blog recently wrote that the blog of 9/11 Commission staffer Miles Kara explains "the erroneous assertion that the military found out about Flight 93 long before they did."

Kara writes:

Essential NORAD files and data were held at NEADS. The single, most important document was the MCC/T (Mission Crew Commander/Technician) log, a handwritten journal maintained in real time. It is that log, in particular, to which Colonel Scott refers when he stated to the Commission on May 23, 2003; “I will tell you the times on this chart come from our logs.”

Therefore, the 8:43 notification time for UA 175 was not mentioned by Scott. It was not in any log and had never existed. Scott’s review repeated the original mistake concerning the 9:24 entry for AA11 and made another mistake in interpretation by attributing a 9:16 entry concerning a United flight (probably UA175) to UA93. (The 9:16 time may come from a different log than the MCC/T log) Nearly two years after the initial mistake about AA77 was made and became CINC-approved, it was repeated and compounded to include UA93.

However, the initial report is supported by the following, as noted on HistoryCommons.org:

Before 9:36 a.m. September 11, 2001: Officials Claim NORAD Is Monitoring Flight 93

According to one account given by NEADS Commander Robert Marr, some time before around 9:36 when it changes direction, while it is still flying west, Flight 93 is being monitored by NEADS. Marr describes how, “We don’t have fighters that way and we think [Flight 93 is] headed toward Detroit or Chicago.” He says he contacts a base in the area “so they [can] head off 93 at the pass.” Not only does NORAD know about the flight, but also, according to NORAD Commander Larry Arnold, “We watched the 93 track as it meandered around the Ohio-Pennsylvania area and started to turn south toward DC.” (This change of direction occurs around 9:36 a.m.) [

Filson, 2003

] This account completely contradicts the 9/11 Commission’s later claim that NEADS is first notified about Flight 93 at 10:07 a.m. [

9/11 Commission, 6/17/2004

]

Miles Kara's explanation does not account for this contradiction even if it does explain the 9:16 time. If the 9:16 time is correct then NORAD was tracking the flight for 47-50 minutes (depending on which crash time is correct) as opposed to zero. If the 9:36 time is correct then NORAD was tracking the flight for at least 27-30 minutes as opposed to zero.

Now for the bottom line. If the 9:16 and 9:36 times are both mistakes, what we are left with is the FAA not notifying NORAD about Flight 93 for 37 minutes!

This is the fourth flight of that day to perish mind you, by the time it crashes the country has been being waged war on for almost two hours. Considering this and the fact that the FAA received 52 pre-9/11 warnings, including five that "specifically mentioned Al Qaeda's training or capability to conduct hijackings," and warned airports in the spring of 2001 that "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion," the moment Flight 93 was suspected of being hijacked it should have become a target for interception.

The lack of air defence that day continues to be literally unbelievable.

Edited December 5, 2012 by Steven Gaal