Is anyone interested in Apollo missions...

[Len Colby]

Yes Sid, the FD had been predicting since about midday that 7 could or would collapse some people the news media got wind of it. So sorry no banana, not even close.

How's the official report on WTC-7 coming along, I wonder?

It's only been 70 months since 9-11. Surely that's enough time to stitch together a story?

The report might help folk like me understand how this miraculous collapse occurred - and how it was so accurately foretold (with the exception of the BBC, who got the event correct, but the timing of their announcement a little too early).

All ready explained ad infinium including in my last post above So I must ask if for any reason you are understand the fairly simple explanation or if you reject it or you are being disingenuous again and just pretending to have an unanswered question?

Perhaps the identity of Mr "Nothing Informations" could also be established as a footnote, just to put suspicious minds at rest?

That standard of spoken (broken) English may be common in the NYC emergency services, but it seems rather odd to me.

His uniform looks decidedly US military, he is probably a member of the National Guard or barring that a reservist or perhaps even an active duty soldier. IIRC service in the armed forces shortens the number of years you need to live in the US to become a citizen.

[William Kelly]

What Was Dick Chaney Doing on the Morning of 9/11?

Talk by Peter Dale Scott at the Arizona 9/11 Accountability Conference, February 23-25, 2007.

Thank you very much. I am going to read this talk because I want to argue quite closely.

You've heard a great many things in this book that I am going to say, but you might hear some of them now in a slightly different way, because this is condensed from two chapters out of my forthcoming book, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America.

There are only two chapters that deal with 9/11-- it's a history of America since World War II. I do talk about things like Operation Northwoods, that you've been hearing about here. And it's phrased rather cautiously because it is being published by the University of California Press, and I believe that this will be the first University Press volume that calls for the questioning under oath and the possible impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. (Applause)

9/11 is a controversial and unfashionable topic, like the JFK assassination, and for the same reason. To ask questions about 9/11 risks raising questions about the legitimacy of our government. Above all, it raises questions about the radical restrictions of basic freedoms that have been introduced since September 2001.

The more status someone has in this society, the harder it is for them to listen to suggestions that there is something illegitimate about the power structure in which they have that status. Thus the paradox that ordinary people are more likely to disbelieve the official theories about 9/11, or JFK, than are people with higher education and greater access to information.

So my book, of which as I say only two chapters deal with 9/11, is addressed to this problem of the ignorance of the highly educated.

Since January 2004, my Web site www.peterdalescott.net -- (Don't go to peterdalescott.com because that's some enemy of mine who got it registered in Kenya, I don't know how. I am peterdalescott.net) -- Since January 2004 I have been calling for Congress to Impeach Cheney First.

But what I have written is not really a case for impeachment because I think at this stage impeachment is probably premature, and would probably fail. What we need is to build the case that Cheney is a suspect who must, for the first time, be required to testify under oath.

The 9/11 Report is an example of concerted cover-up, partially by omissions and just as importantly by it's cherry picking of evidence and contrived misrepresentations of fact.

And there is a pattern to the misrepresentations. You know, it depends on what audience you are speaking to. If you are going out on talk radio it's fine to call the report a pack of lies; but in fact, the 9/11 Report is carefully written, carefully footnoted, and it only really lies in certain places. There is a consistent pattern to the misrepresentations – and the pattern that I am looking at is the consistent downplaying, trivialization of the role played by Cheney on that day. And I actually just look at what happened between 9:20 am and 10:39 am.

Central to the Report's analysis of the US failure to stop the 9/11 attacks, is the claim that crisis management on that day was decentralized among three independent teleconferences -- in the FAA, the White House and National Military Command Center or NMCC -- and for this reason the government failed to generate a timely and coordinated response to the hijackings.

However, it's pretty clear that all the most important orders that day, including an order grounding places, and a later shoot-down order were issued to all three teleconferences from a single source. The source was the Presidential Emergency Operations Center or PEOC, in the bunker underneath the White House, where Dick Cheney was presiding.

Cheney himself told Tim Russert of NBC, on September 16^th 2001, that from the PEOC, and I am quoting, "I was in a position to be able to see all the stuff coming in, receive reports, and then make decisions in terms of acting with it."

I shall argue that this early account by Cheney of a central role is far more accurate than his later account, in which he claimed to have arrived in the PEOC after most of the important decisions had already been made.

Much of the 9/11 Report attempts to give a full and balanced picture, but one of the exceptions is that the Report, suppressing contrary accounts, will only present those versions of events which will exonerate or minimize the role of Cheney.

This happens regularly enough to establish what I have elsewhere called a Negative Template, or a pattern of recurring suppression. The details thus repressed can be seen as indications or clues as to the important information that is being suppressed.

Now let me begin by giving an example which may at first seem insignificant, but in fact isn't: the question of who ordered all the planes to land, shortly after 9:42 am, at the nearest airport?

In the Report this order is attributed to the man who promulgated it - FAA National Operations manager Benedict Sliney, who was on his first day at the job.

According to Sliney, the order was subsequently approved by his superiors, including FAA Deputy Administrator Monty Belger, and eventually, "minutes later," by Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta in the PEOC.

But a year earlier, Mineta had testified to Congress that he himself, from the PEOC, issued the order. According to a corroborating Bob Woodward story, Mineta gave the order TO Belger in the PEOC, with Cheney nearby and nodding approvingly. Interviewed a few months later, Mineta confirmed that he had issued the order to Belger; and he actually gave the dialog in which he and Belger talked about this order. Nine months later Mineta asserted his responsibility again to the 9/11 Commission.

I submit that Mineta's account, that the order was transmitted downwards from Belger to Sliney, is more credible than Sliney's claim that he, on his first day on the job, issued an order that was without precedent in aviation history, and then advised his superiors.

But the 9/11 Report would ultimately report only the story from Sliney which distanced Mineta and Cheney from the decision, and ignored Mineta's and Woodward's conflicting account. Nor did the Commission question Belger, who was a witness to the Commission, about Mineta's story. Thus it missed an easy opportunity to corroborate or disprove Mineta's claim.

This is only one instance of the Report's agenda of removing the presence of Cheney from the important decisions made that day, and indeed removing him from the PEOC when they were made.

For the Report's chronology was not compatible with the story of a decision made in the Bunker with Cheney's approval at 9:45, because as you all know, the Report claimed, ignoring other testimony, that Cheney did not arrive in the bunker until, "shortly before 10, perhaps 9:58."

Here, as elsewhere, the Report promoted a story minimizing Cheney's importance, and suppressed a conflicting first-hand story from an important eyewitness. I agree with David Ray Griffin, that this repeated suppression suggests intentionality: not to "give the fullest possible account of what happened on 9/11," but to defend the account provided by the Bush administration and Pentagon.

All right, when did Cheney arrive at the PEOC?

Well I think at every single session I have attended we have heard from everybody about the conflict between the Report and the testimony of Secretary of Transportation Mineta, given in open hearing of the Commission itself, that when he entered the Bunker at about 9:20, Cheney was already there and fully in charge.

But the Commission, simply omitting Mineta's testimony from its final report, claims that Cheney, and this is a quote now, "arrived in the room shortly before 10, perhaps at 9:58."

Griffin calls this claim that the Vice President arrived in the room shortly before 10, "an obvious lie." But it is arguably not a lie in the sense of a deliberate baseless falsehood. I will argue that Cheney did enter the room at this time, as logs are said to indicate.

But I would suggest that there is material misrepresentation in the word "arrived" – because Cheney had first arrived a half hour or so earlier, and then LEFT the room to go into the tunnel to have an important phone call with the President, before returning at 9:58.

The important claim that Cheney had first arrived well before 9:58 does not rely on Mineta's testimony alone. Richard Clarke wrote that he saw Cheney preparing to leave the White House sometime long before 9:28. Cheney himself told Tim Russert of Meet the Press, on September 16th, 2001, in an interview still available five years later on the White House website, that he arrived at the PEOC BEFORE the Pentagon was hit, in other words before 9:37 am.

But the 9/11 Report suppresses this; and follows a second account in Newsweek, based on an interview with Cheney himself, which now had him leave his office at 9:35 and arrive in the PEOC "shortly before 10 a.m." We shall see that new evidence, which only surfaced about six months ago, corroborates Cheney's first story, and makes his revised timetable extremely unlikely.

Clearly one of Cheney's two accounts of his arrival - before 9:37, or around 9:58 -- must be wrong.

Moreover, what is at stake here is not trivial. Important orders were issued in this hour from the PEOC: one alleged order, whose content is uncertain, which Mineta claims to have heard about 9:25, a second order to ground all planes at 9:45, and a third, tripartite order, which according to Clarke, included a shoot-down order at about 9:50.

By Mineta's account, corroborated by Clarke, Cheney had arrived in the PEOC in time to give all three of these orders. By Cheney's second account, he arrived after all three were given. The Report flagrantly and systematically failed to deal with Mineta's and Clarke's testimony.

Okay, what is this new evidence I am talking about?

It's the evidence of a report from NEADS, from the NORAD Northeast Air Defense Sector, of a third aircraft incoming at 9:21. In 2006, in connection with the release of the movie Flight 93, we learned for the first time that tapes from NEADS contain the following significant event:

9:21.37 seconds:

[Master Sergeant Maureen] Dooley: Another hijack! It's headed towards Washington!

[Major Kevin] Nasypany: xxxx! Give me a location.

[unidentified Male]: "Okay, third aircraft hijacked, heading toward Washington."

Now, this urgent message, which is a key to what happened in the next twenty minutes, is not repeated in the 9/11 Report. It should have been. It corroborates Cheney's original account of his movements that he arrived in the PEOC before the Pentagon was hit at 9:37. And it discredits the 9/11 Report's estimate that an approaching plane at 9:34 or 9:35 prompted the Secret Service to order the immediate evacuation of the Vice President from his White House office just before 9:36.

Richard Clarke revealed in his book that the Secret Service had a system which allowed them to see what the FAA radar was seeing. Thus Secret Service must have known instantly of the 9:21 alarm. It's inconceivable that they did nothing for fifteen minutes, and then at 9:35 acted so precipitously that, according to Cheney himself, they grabbed the Vice President by his belt, hoisted him up so his feet barely hit the ground, and propelled him to the PEOC.

Now the footnotes to this claim in the 9/11 Report appeared to have been constructed with great care. But there has been cherry picking of the evidence. The footnotes cite a Secret Service Timeline memo, for the Vice President's entry into the PEOC at 9:58 and also into the Tunnel at 9:36. And I think these times are accurate, if we imagine Cheney entered the Tunnel at 9:36 -- but from the Bunker end, not the White House end -- and then returned to the PEOC at 9:58.

But what about the Report's estimated departure from the Vice President's office just before 9:36? This should be easily verifiable or falsifiable from the Secret Service Timeline, but here the Timeline is significantly not cited. And if we ever get that Timeline, and I hope we will, I predict that we will find that the time on the Timeline is not 9:36 at all, it's much more likely to be close to 9:21.

The Mineta story of Cheney and an incoming plane you all know about. The NEADS warning of an incoming plane at 9:21 also corroborates Mineta's story, that at 9:26 he heard Cheney reaffirm orders with respect to an incoming plane.

I'm going to skip here because you all know about this story - is there anyone here who doesn't know the story about Mineta and Cheney and the incoming plane?

The important dialog is with the young man who came in and said to the Vice President, "…`The plane is 50 miles out.' `The plane is 30 miles out.' And when it got down to `The plane is 10 miles out,' the young man also said to the Vice President, `Do the orders still stand?' And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, `Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary?'"

Now Commissioner Roemer, questioning Mineta, established this would have been about 9:25 or 9:26. However the 9/11 Commission said a primary radar target, tracking at a high rate of speed heading for Dulles airport was incoming, was only discovered at 9:32 am.

What about that incoming plane at 9:21, which they didn't mention? Unquestionably the 9:21 report of a third hijack was a crucial event on September 11th. It led immediately to the launching by NEADS of planes from Langley, Virginia. And here is the order in that same minute.

"Okay American Airlines is still airborne."

"He's heading towards Washington."

"Okay, I think we need to scramble [planes from] Langley now. And I'm going to take those fighters from Otis, and chase this guy down if I can find him."

Because of a misidentification in the second report, the Report said this was a response to a phantom aircraft, an aircraft that did not exist.

Now at first glance, the NEADS report of an incoming third aircraft at 9:21 appears to be the plane that Mineta referred to. It also fits neatly with NORAD General Arnold's initial testimony to the Commission that NORAD learned of Flight 77's hijacking at 9:24 am.

But the 9/11 Report rejected Arnold's testimony as incorrect. What it meant by this was that the plane reported was not IDENTIFIED as flight 77. Instead these were "reports about a plane that no longer existed, American 11." Thus the Report claims NEADS air defenders had no advance warning on the third plane.

In their book Kean and Hamilton rely on the same quibble about the identification of the plane, and are even more misleading. In their words, "NORAD claimed that the Langley jets were scrambled in pursuit of American 77, YET THAT WAS IMPOSSIBLE. At 9:24 NORAD had not yet been notified that American 77 had been hijacked."

It was not impossible. On the contrary it was pretty clearly the case, even if controllers were not yet aware of the identity of the plane to which they were responding.

This handling of the plane alarm illustrates the distinction between an outright lie and a deliberately constructed deception. The Report's claim that aircraft were scrambled in response to a "phantom aircraft" is craftily crafted language which a lawyer could conceivably persuade a courtroom judge to accept as not untrue.

Yet the impression created, that NORAD was not warned early enough to deal with an approaching plane, was materially misleading and indeed false. The real issue at the time was not the identification of the plane, but the urgent concern that a plane was heading towards Washington.

This corroborates Mineta's detailed account of this moment elsewhere. And this time it comes back to Belger again.

I was sitting across the table from the Vice President with a set of telephones providing us with a direct line to FAA. Someone came in and said, 'Mr. Vice President there's a plane 50 miles out.' I was on the phone with the Deputy Administrator of FAA, Monte Belger, and he said, 'we have a target but the transponder's turned off, so we have no identification, no ident, on the aircraft.' I said, 'Can you tell in relationship to the ground where it is?' He said, 'no that's difficult to do but I would imagine it's somewhere between Great Falls and National Airport coming in.' It seemed it was on what they call the DRA—the down river approach.

– That's down the Potomac. In other words the route described by Belger approximates the eastward route towards Washington being followed in this time frame by American 77, or if you have a different theory about the Pentagon, as many people do, about the plane that we were told was American 77. (It's possible in fact that it was a different plane, but I don't want to get into that here.)

But once again, there is no sign that Belger was interrogated by the 9/11 Commission about this. His testimony could have confirmed or refuted Mineta's detailed account of what happened at this time in the PEOC. And in the 9/11 Report, once again, no mention of the Mineta's story about the incoming plane.

Now Mineta, in telling his story to the 9/11 Commission, stated unambiguously that the story referred to "the plane coming into the Pentagon." In 2002 the White House floated an alternative to the Mineta story, implying that Mineta got both the time and the plane wrong. And once again they relied on an interview with Cheney, and also Cheney's aide Joshua Bolten.

So CNN suggested in September 2002 that a dialog similar to that reported by Mineta did occur, but with respect with Flight 93, sometime after the Pentagon was hit at 9:37.

The 9/11 Report did not refer to this important Cheney-Bolten allegation either. Indeed it tacitly implied that the story was false, by suggesting that there was no military response to Flight 93, and that the only shoot-down order occurred after Cheney arrived in the PEOC at 10.

Instead (By relying on what authority? Lynn Cheney's notes and Lewis Libby's notes, and we know quite a lot about Libby's reliability now. I wrote this a year ago, before Libby was indicted.) the 9/11 Report recorded a THIRD version of the incoming plane story, unambiguously postponing the dialog until after Flight 93 was down at 10:03.

This is a quote from the report:

At sometime between 10:10 and 10:15, a military aide told the Vice President and others there was the aircraft 80 miles out…. The Vice President authorized fighter aircraft to engage the inbound plane…. The military aide returned a few minutes later, probably between 10:12 and 10:18, and said the aircraft was 60 miles out. He again asked for authorization to engage. The Vice President again said yes.

But the aide's behavior is far more implausible in this version than in Mineta's. One can understand his repeatedly questioning a stand-down order as the plane got closer, but why would an aide need to ask more than once for authorization to engage as the plane got closer?

No one has suggested that nearly identical versions of the incoming plane story happened TWO or THREE times in the space of less than an hour. Thus investigators should be granted access to the notes of Lynn Cheney and Lewis Libby which suggested that the story of the incoming plane story occurred an hour later than Mineta claimed.

As we shall see, this is not the only situation where someone's account of what happened must not only be wrong, but may possibly have been falsified. And this is where interrogation under oath could lead either to charges of perjury, or to a very different story as to what really happened.

With respect to the earlier Mineta version of the story, we must ask, what would have been the orders Mineta supposedly alluded to? We do not know of a shoot-down order at this time. Above all, as Griffin notes, it would make little sense for the young man to ask, when the plane is ten miles out, if a shoot-down order still stood. Griffin raises the alternative possibility that it was a stand-down order, not to have the plane shot down.

Now let's go to the shoot-down order because there are two different versions of when that happened, and I'm going to start with Richard Clarke's. There is cherry-picking again, of the evidence with respect to the tripartite order authorized by President Bush in Tampa in a phone call with Dick Cheney.

There is no log book citation in the 9/11 Report for the shoot-down order, which Richard Clarke says was clearly before Air Force One left Tampa at 9:54 am.

This is from Clarke's book:

At that moment, Paul Kurtz handed me the white phone to the PEOC. It was Major Fenzel. 'Air Force One is getting ready to take off. Tell the Pentagon they have authority from the President to shoot down hostile aircraft. Repeat, they have authority to shoot down hostile aircraft.'

It cannot be more unambiguous than that.

But the 9/11 Report, while stating there is "no documentary evidence" for Cheney's call to the President, suggests that the shoot-down order occurred after Cheney's "arrival," or his return to PEOC.

It is significant that the Report cites no record of Cheney's phone call to the President, the most important event of that day. It gives no report of Cheney's phone call with Rumsfeld at this time, which Rumsfeld revealed, but about which the Report is silent.

The easiest explanation of why there is no record of the phone call would be that Cheney was not in the Bunker, where people were taking notes and logs were being kept. And everyone agrees, even Cheney himself, that he used a secure phone in the Tunnel, at around this time, to phone the president.

This matter should have been resolvable by going to the records of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), which handled the White House phone network. They kept logs, the Secret Service kept logs, and we have logs from that day that record phone calls at 9:15 am and at 9:20 am and another phone call at 10:18 am.

But Thomas Kean, the Commission chairman, complained publicly that the logs were not complete. This is Kean: "The phone logs don't exist because they evidently got so fouled up in communications that the phone logs have nothing, so that's the evidence we have."

Then Lee Hamilton came right after him and said, "there is no documentary evidence here" (meaning for the shoot-down order). "The only evidence you have is the statements of the President and the Vice President."

We have thus the equivalent of the notorious 18-minute gap which was discovered in the course of the Watergate investigation. The 9/11 Commission does not present any records from logs for the time of the phone call, only for calls earlier and later.

We can imagine four possible reasons for this, and they are all suggestive of a much bigger story than we know so far.

1) The logs could have been massaged and cleansed and purged before they got to the Commission

2) The logs could have been purged by the Commission or its staff

3) And this is what I suspect, that the phone in the Tunnel was a back-channel, where logs were either not kept at all, or, and this is my real suspicion, had a higher classification than was ever made available to the Commission. I suspect the latter because one of the topics clearly that Cheney was discussing was very important and a very highly classified subject - Continuity of Government – COG, and I'll say more about that soon.

For the unrecorded phone calls resulted in a triple order covering three matters, of which two are not disputed: 1) Protection for Air Force One, and 2) Continuity of Government.

Continuity of Government or COG was a long established plan, radically revised in the Reagan era by Cheney and Rumsfeld, for a response to an emergency which among other things – this is a quote from back in the 1980s, "set aside Constitutional and statutory requirements and established its own process for creating a new American president."

Now in reporting this, James Mann, in his book, Rise of the Vulcans, noted correctly that the original purpose of the plans was to keep the government running during and after a nuclear war. But under Reagan the planning was enlarged by Executive Order to cover "any national security emergency, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency or other emergency."

And this enabled Cheney, after discussions with Bush and Rumsfeld, to implement COG on September 11th, 2001 – pretty clearly I think, before 9:54 am. In the Road to 9/11 I argue that one consequence has been the barrage of recent orders, such as suspension of habeas corpus, infringing on the traditional rule of law.

COG would explain why Cheney exited the Bunker for his calls to Rumsfeld and Bush.

The classification of COG was so high that most people in the bunker were not cleared to hear them.

These were the most important calls Cheney made that day. And yet the Report tells us there is no objective record of the call to Bush, and it makes no mention at all of Cheney's call to Rumsfeld.

Now the third part of the tripartite order, the content of which is disputed, was about planes. According to Richard Clarke, as you have already heard, it gave the shoot-down order. To repeat in his own words: "Air Force One is getting ready to take off. Tell the Pentagon they have authority from the President to shoot down hostile aircraft. Repeat, they have authority to shoot down hostile aircraft." Clarke says that he then transmitted this order, which he said came from the Bunker, to General Myers at the Pentagon, along with the order instituting COG.

This three-part order is echoed in the 9/11 Report, from a Defense Department transcript, at approximately the same time, but with a significant difference which rephrased and in effect, suppressed the shoot-down order. This is the Report, citing a Defense Department transcript:

At 9:59, an Air Force Lt. Colonel working in the White House Military Office, joined the NCC conference and stated that he had just talked to Deputy National Security advisor Steven Hadley, who was with Cheney. The White House requested 1) the implementation of Continuity of Government measures; 2) fighter escorts for Air Force One; and 3) a fighter combat air patrol over Washington.

(This was supposed to be at 9:54 when Clarke had already requested a combat patrol at 9:28 and the planes had already been launched.) The Clarke version of the tripartite call, and the DOD transcript version, are clearly in conflict. One or the other account must be false.

These significant divergences make it necessary for historians to have access to all the records, both those made available to the 9/11 Commission, and those apparently never requested by them. Important in the second category would be the videotape of the Richard Clarke's White House teleconference, which transmitted the tripartite order implementing COG that day, which was reportedly recorded on the White House videotape.

With respect to the tripartite order, and its order for combat aircraft, it seems clear that someone, either Clarke or the DOD transcript cited by the report, has misrepresented it.

I know of no reason to question the bona fides of Clarke, but the Report has been repeatedly evasive, if not misleading, with respect to decisions taken by Cheney.

(What could be so sensitive about this issues is if, as David Ray Griffin has suggested, an order -- a shoot-down order -- may had been given in time to shoot down Flight 93, possibly even after it was already known on the ground that the passengers of Flight 93 had overcome their hijackers.)

I am going to talk about a very strange sort of pause in the behavior or activity of three key figures that day – the President, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

According to the 9/11 Report, it took Cheney 18 minutes to traverse the short tunnel into the Bunker. Here's their account of what he did:

Once inside Vice President Cheney and agents paused in an area of the tunnel that had a secure phone, a bench and television. The Vice President asked to speak to the president, but it took time for the call to be connected. He learned in the tunnel that the Pentagon had been hit and he saw television coverage of smoke coming from the building.

(What a moment to be watching television!)

This account of Cheney's isolation parallels the similar synchronous absence from his post that morning of Rumsfeld, who according to the Report, was in the parking lot of the Pentagon to assist in rescue efforts. The head of our huge defense structure, at a time the nation is under attack, is not at his post but out in the parking lot

Brigadier General Montague Winfield, later told NBC news that "for 30 minutes we couldn't find him and just as we began to worry, he walked into the door of the National Military Command Center NMCC." Chairman Kean and Hamilton later agreed in their book that "Rumsfeld did not get on the Air Threat Conference until 10:39 because he had been assisting rescue efforts."

Their Report found nothing strange in the Defense Secretary's prolonged absence from his post at a time of crucial decisions when the nation was under attack.

In the same period there was a synchronous pause, not originally reported, in the movements of President Bush. Those with him in Tampa later spoke of a threat to the president there, and an ensuing mad dash to get into the air.

Karl Rove told NBC news, and this is Karl Rove's own words:

Before both of us could sit down in the plane cabin and put on our seat belts they were rolling the plane." [Hear that: "Before we could… put on our seat belts they were rolling the plane."] And they stood that 747 on its tail and it got to 40,000 feet as quick as I think you could get a big thing like that in the air.

Bob Woodward, in his book Bush at War, has a very similar account of this instantaneous departure at the airport.

Thus one is surprised to read in the 9/11 Report that in fact the plane paused on the runway for 10 minutes while the President conferred with Cheney, and parenthetically Cheney conferred with Rumsfeld.

This is a quote from the Report, "The President's motorcade departed at 9:35, arrived at the airport between 9:42 and 9:45. The President boarded the aircraft and called the Vice President. Air Force One departed at approximately 9:54 without any fixed destination."

It reports that deadpan, implicitly implying that what Karl Rove said and Woodword wrote was just was not true.

The impression I get from all this is that for ten or fifteen minutes before 9:54, three men, two of whom were in isolation, were making vitally important decisions while the rest of the U.S. government simply waited.

Now about the failure to intercept: Again practically every session practically has talked about this. The failure to intercept the hijackings also demands a more searching explanation than what the Report offers.

FAA reported 67 interceptions between September 2000 and June 2001. And as everyone here has heard, a celebrated example of prompt interception was with the crippled airplane of golfer Payne Stewart in 1999, which had fighter aircraft on its wingtips after it was observed erring off course. [in my speech I said "only 19 minutes after," but have been persuaded it was longer.]

The Report indicates that the failure to intercept on 9/11 derived from the issuance on June 1 of 2001, of a JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) memo, specifying in the words of the Report, "that military assistance from NORAD [and that would include intercepts by the way] required multiple levels of notification and approval at the highest levels of government."

But the Report asks no questions about WHO issued the June 1, 2001 JCS memo.

If we have a memo that was giving an absurd order which overruled the past distinction between emergency responses to planes off course, and responses to hijacks, wouldn't you want to know where that order came from?

It was an absurd order, it conflated the rules for emergency intercept and the rules for a hijack. By the way, this absurd conflation was reportedly removed by December 2001, and you have the feeling that maybe it had served its purpose by then.

Researcher Michael Ruppert, who interviewed many people inside the military and especially NORAD, concluded that the change can be traced to the White House announcement of May 8^th, 2001, in which President Bush asked Vice President Cheney to oversee the development of a coordinated national effort against terrorist weapons of mass destruction.

As the Houston Chronicle reported the next day, "President Bush on Tuesday directed FEMA – the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- to tackle the additional task of dealing with terrorist attacks. To accomplish that goal Bush appointed Vice President Dick Cheney to head a terrorism task force within Office of Emergency Preparedness within the Federal Emergency Management Agency."

I doubt it was coincidental, that Cheney, who with Rumsfeld and FEMA planned COG in 1980s, implemented COG on September the 11th, and was also responsible with FEMA for this planning in May of 2001.

Going back to the 1980s: In their planning, which bypassed Congressional leaders, Cheney was officially no more than a Congressman from Wyoming, while Rumsfeld, who at the time was CEO of a drug company, was not officially in the government at all. And yet they were charged to plan for the suspension of the American Constitution.

The action officer for this secret planning in the 1980s, until his dismissal in 1986, was Oliver North, working under Vice President George H. W. Bush, in the National Security Council. Cheney, Rumsfeld and North were assisted in the role by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, which created a cover agency "with the bland name of the National Program Office."

In this way the Cheney-FEMA Counter-Terrorism alliance of the 1980s was reconstituted in May of 2001 and the bland-sounding National Program Office was reconstituted as the bland-sounding Office of National Preparedness.

To this day, we do not really authoratively know the consequences of having instituted COG on 9/11. We do know that Cheney himself frequently disappeared from public view after the attack. At these times he too was working from a COG base - Site R, the so-called underground Pentagon on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.

As the Washington Post later reported, he became in effect, the leader of what the Post called a "U. S. Shadow Government."

We have to ask whether Cheney's teams were not crucial in instituting the reconstituted

programs from the 1980s, once associated with Oliver North: programs such as warrantless eavesdropping, including of domestic dissidents, warrantless other surveillance, warrantless detention, plans for martial law and over-riding of the Posse Comatus Act, and the use of guilt by association as grounds for deportation.

All of these things were planned in the 1980s, and we've seen them all since 2001. (I have a whole chapter on this which is being very radically condensed here.) Some of these ideas from the 1980s were incorporated almost immediately in the US Patriot Act, which clearly had been drafted before 9/11.

The erosion of Posse Comitatus, which began right after 9/11, was consummated without debate, perhaps even without Congress awareness, in the October 2006 Defense Budget Bill. The suspension of the FISA Act, to eliminate judicial review of warrantless eavesdropping, was initiated with no legal justification at all.

Attorney General John Ashcroft took immediate steps after 9/11 to implement a

central COG idea from the 1980s - arbitrary detention. Starting in September 2001 (this is a quote), "hundreds of non-citizens were swept up on visa violations, held for months in a much-criticized federal detention center in Brooklyn, and then deported."

Were these sweeping programs envisioned by Cheney and Rumsfeld in their secluded discussions on 9/11? And would this explain why they sought isolation rather than a regular phone conversation in front of their colleagues?

Here are my conclusions (one more page):

In this talk I have focused on anomalies in the behavior, especially on 9/11, of Richard Cheney. He along with Donald Rumsfeld and others should testify under oath about:

1) The June 1, JCS order, ordering highest level approvals for intercepts of off-course planes.

2) The contested time of Cheney's arrival in the Presidential Bunker.

3) Cheney's orders with respect to a plane approaching Washington, and did this occur around 9:26 am, as testified to by Mineta, or 10:15 am as per the 9/11 Report?

4) Cheney's call or calls with Rumsfeld and the President before or about 10 am, and did they discuss so-called Continuity of Government - COG? (I always call it Change of Government -- how you can call what has been happening Continuity of Government? It has been the most radical change in the legal structure of the government we have seen since the Alien Sedition Act of 1798.

And by the way, in an article that I wrote (I am departing from my prepared text here, but it is so amazing) you know, Homeland Security instituted, starting in 2001, a ten-year program to build massive detention centers. And in their statement about the program, which has since taken down from their website after I reported on it, said that it was implementing an idea based on the Alien Sedition Act of 1798. I thought in history we had moved away from that sort of thing.

There are two other things which I think Cheney should be asked about.

Is it true, as is said in one authorative book, that Cheney over-ruled plans to send enough forces to surround Tora Bora in Afghanistan and thereby capture Bin Laden? Or did he possibly prefer that Osama Bin Laden to escape, so he could be around to appear from time to time on TV?

And last, the grotesque order of Paul Bremer to disband the Iraqi army and much of the Iraqi police in the summer of 2003. This overruled a National Security Council order. And the book Fiasco says that Bremer was told to do it by Vice President Cheney. Did Cheney want Iraq to become a quagmire where our US troops would be bogged down forever?

The story that the 9/11 Report presented was embarrassing enough: of a multi-billion dollar defense system that broke down on 9/11, and completely failed to perform its allotted function. But the Report's systematic and repeated distortions leads one to suspect that an even more embarrassing truth is being concealed, and this truth has to do with the orders given on that day by the Vice President.

I believe that COG may be the answer to the mystery question about Cheney's actions at the time he was talking to the President and Rumsfeld.

If so, the three men were certainly not acting on their own, but rather they were key figures in a highly classified secret agenda that must have involved other people. The question to be explored is whether that agenda involved revising the US constitutional balance of powers. Was Cheney involved in exploiting the attacks as a means to implement an agenda of constitutional revision that he already had in place?

The 911 Commission decided that its supporting evidence and records should be withheld from public view until January 2, 2009, a date which would obviously insure the President and the Vice President against possible impeachment.

But many would concede that since 9/11, and as a result of 9/11, the American nation has drifted towards a constitutional crisis requiring a change of policy direction. The issues posed by what happened on 9/11 are very relevant and too significant to be postponed until 2009.

As it did belatedly in the case of the John F. Kennedy assassination, Congress should initiate a procedure for these records to be reviewed and released expeditiously.

Records that should be released should include all of the phone logs from the White House on 9/11 to determine as a mater of priority, the precise time and circumstances of Cheney's orders on that day.

They would also include materials such as COG files and the videotape of the White House Teleconference that the Commission apparently never requested. The public also needs to establish also why other records requested by the Commission did not initially reach them.

And then I do believe that it would be appropriate for a venue to be established for the Vice President to testify for the first time about 9/11, under oath.

Thank you very much.

Edited June 13, 2007 by William Kelly

[Guest Mark Valenti]

Don't know if this has been mentioned yet - but here's an amazing archive of video pulled from the major networks, almost minute-by-minute of what was aired in the days surrounding 9-11.

http://www.archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive

[William Kelly]

I just wanted to bump this so it registers as I think it is a very important talk.

Did anybody else get anything out of it?

Thanks,

BK

[Guest David Guyatt]

I have nothing but praise for PDS and the books he publishes and look forward with relish to reading this one.

[Len Colby]

[quoting Peter Dale Scott]Now about the failure to intercept: Again practically every session practically has talked about this. The failure to intercept the hijackings also demands a more searching explanation than what the Report offers.

FAA reported 67 interceptions between September 2000 and June 2001. And as everyone here has heard, a celebrated example of prompt interception was with the crippled airplane of golfer Payne Stewart in 1999, which had fighter aircraft on its wingtips after it was observed erring off course. [in my speech I said "only 19 minutes after," but have been persuaded it was longer.]

The Report indicates that the failure to intercept on 9/11 derived from the issuance on June 1 of 2001, of a JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) memo, specifying in the words of the Report, "that military assistance from NORAD [and that would include intercepts by the way] required multiple levels of notification and approval at the highest levels of government."

But the Report asks no questions about WHO issued the June 1, 2001 JCS memo.

If we have a memo that was giving an absurd order which overruled the past distinction between emergency responses to planes off course, and responses to hijacks, wouldn't you want to know where that order came from?

It was an absurd order, it conflated the rules for emergency intercept and the rules for a hijack. By the way, this absurd conflation was reportedly removed by December 2001, and you have the feeling that maybe it had served its purpose by then.

Scott maybe an expert in English literature, I’ve been told he did excellent work regarding the assassination but his 9/11 research leaves something to be desired.

1) It not clear how many intercepts there were before 9/11 it does seem there were 67 scrambles or diversions of planes already in the air in the period Scott cited, but scrambles don’t always lead to intercepts. Also according to various sources none of those intercepts except Payne Stewarts’s were of civilian aircraft flying over the US. This important because NORAD’s mission is to protect the US and Canada from hostile aircraft coming from outside their boarders. http://911myths.com/html/67_intercepts.html

2) Funny if there really were so many intercepts as the likes of Scott, Fetzer, Griffin etc like to make out they could cite and example of an intercept over the US other than the golfer’s plane. It would help their credibility if they would correctly cite the intercept time which was 82 minutes much longer than the amount of time any of the 9/11 planes were in the air after the FAA became aware they were hijacked. In the case of the Stewart intercept his plane was a much easier target it was flying in a straight line in uncrowded airspace with its transponder on and the 1st fighter to reach it was already in the air. To me his correction was more damming than the original mistake. If he discovered that the intercept took well over an hour why didn’t he tell his readers that? http://911myths.com/html/67_intercepts.html

See also: http://911myths.com/html/stand_down.html

3) His take on the June 1 memo was as unreliable as the rest as this part of his talk. http://911myths.com/html/hijack_assistance_approval.html

See also http://www.911myths.com/html/cheney_in_charge_of_norad.html

William or anybody else what did you find especially compelling in this?

[Guest David Guyatt]

[quoting Peter Dale Scott]Now about the failure to intercept: Again practically every session practically has talked about this. The failure to intercept the hijackings also demands a more searching explanation than what the Report offers.

FAA reported 67 interceptions between September 2000 and June 2001. And as everyone here has heard, a celebrated example of prompt interception was with the crippled airplane of golfer Payne Stewart in 1999, which had fighter aircraft on its wingtips after it was observed erring off course. [in my speech I said "only 19 minutes after," but have been persuaded it was longer.]

The Report indicates that the failure to intercept on 9/11 derived from the issuance on June 1 of 2001, of a JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) memo, specifying in the words of the Report, "that military assistance from NORAD [and that would include intercepts by the way] required multiple levels of notification and approval at the highest levels of government."

But the Report asks no questions about WHO issued the June 1, 2001 JCS memo.

If we have a memo that was giving an absurd order which overruled the past distinction between emergency responses to planes off course, and responses to hijacks, wouldn't you want to know where that order came from?

It was an absurd order, it conflated the rules for emergency intercept and the rules for a hijack. By the way, this absurd conflation was reportedly removed by December 2001, and you have the feeling that maybe it had served its purpose by then.

Scott maybe an expert in English literature, I’ve been told he did excellent work regarding the assassination but his 9/11 research leaves something to be desired.

1) It not clear how many intercepts there were before 9/11 it does seem there were 67 scrambles or diversions of planes already in the air in the period Scott cited, but scrambles don’t always lead to intercepts. Also according to various sources none of those intercepts except Payne Stewarts’s were of civilian aircraft flying over the US. This important because NORAD’s mission is to protect the US and Canada from hostile aircraft coming from outside their boarders. http://911myths.com/html/67_intercepts.html

2) Funny if there really were so many intercepts as the likes of Scott, Fetzer, Griffin etc like to make out they could cite and example of an intercept over the US other than the golfer’s plane. It would help their credibility if they would correctly cite the intercept time which was 82 minutes much longer than the amount of time any of the 9/11 planes were in the air after the FAA became aware they were hijacked. In the case of the Stewart intercept his plane was a much easier target it was flying in a straight line in uncrowded airspace with its transponder on and the 1st fighter to reach it was already in the air. To me his correction was more damming than the original mistake. If he discovered that the intercept took well over an hour why didn’t he tell his readers that? http://911myths.com/html/67_intercepts.html

See also: http://911myths.com/html/stand_down.html

3) His take on the June 1 memo was as unreliable as the rest as this part of his talk. http://911myths.com/html/hijack_assistance_approval.html

See also http://www.911myths.com/html/cheney_in_charge_of_norad.html

William or anybody else what did you find especially compelling in this?

I haven't read his book yet Len, and can't comment with any authority on the subject anyway. But Peter DS is not only methodical but extremely careful in his research. Period. Note also the caveat he provided in the above discourse about being cautious for the reason cited. This same degree of caution was also exhibited by Prof. Alfred McCoy in his book "The Politicis of Heroin" whereas, in public lectures he was a great deal more forthcoming.

In any event, PDS can be contacted and points raised with him directly. If there are errors in his work I am sure he will be the first to acknowledge them --- but based on his avowed aim I would expect him to have crossed every "t" and dotted every "i" and then re-checked a dozen times. Being a Prof and having students willing to do donkey work makes life so much easier don't you think...

David

[William Kelly]

[quoting

Scott maybe an expert in English literature, I've been told he did excellent work regarding the assassination but his 9/11 research leaves something to be desired.

1) It not clear how many intercepts there were before 9/11 it does seem there were 67 scrambles or diversions of planes already in the air in the period Scott cited, but scrambles don't always lead to intercepts. Also according to various sources none of those intercepts except Payne Stewarts's were of civilian aircraft flying over the US. This important because NORAD's mission is to protect the US and Canada from hostile aircraft coming from outside their boarders. http://911myths.com/html/67_intercepts.html

2) Funny if there really were so many intercepts as the likes of Scott, Fetzer, Griffin etc like to make out they could cite and example of an intercept over the US other than the golfer's plane. It would help their credibility if they would correctly cite the intercept time which was 82 minutes much longer than the amount of time any of the 9/11 planes were in the air after the FAA became aware they were hijacked. In the case of the Stewart intercept his plane was a much easier target it was flying in a straight line in uncrowded airspace with its transponder on and the 1st fighter to reach it was already in the air. To me his correction was more damming than the original mistake. If he discovered that the intercept took well over an hour why didn't he tell his readers that? http://911myths.com/html/67_intercepts.html

See also: http://911myths.com/html/stand_down.html

3) His take on the June 1 memo was as unreliable as the rest as this part of his talk. http://911myths.com/html/hijack_assistance_approval.html

See also http://www.911myths.com/html/cheney_in_charge_of_norad.html

William or anybody else what did you find especially compelling in this?

LC,

I find pretty much everything PDS discusses compelling. His talk is primarily about what Chaney did in the WH and Bunker, not about the lack of intercept of the hijacked planes. He says that the intercepts were discussed by practically everyone at every 9/11 conference, and he didn't want to get into it other than state the fact that the issue remains unresolved.

As I transcribed the talk, and my personal research included an investigation of the failure to intercept, and talked with F-16 pilots who went up that day, I already sent off an email to PDS noting that the Payne Stewart incident involved planes that were already in the air on training missions and did not include scrambling jets.

One of the pilots I talked with told me that the June 1, orders, or at least the one that took the 177th NJANG off alert status for the first time in 20 years, was issued by C. Powell when he was chairman of the JCS.

In any case, PDS's talk, if anyone bothers to listen, or read my transcript, is about the institution of Continuity of Government - COG on 9/11, which anyone who is concerned about the US Constitution should find "especially compelling."

Nor do I find PDS's take on anything "unreliable."

In fact, as Peter has suggested, John Judge has already assisted in the drafting of impeach Chaney legislation that has been introduced into the proceedings.

Maybe if there was anyone interested in Chaney and COG he would visit the forum and answer the questions.

And like David, I too look forward to reading his book, when published.

BK

[Len Colby]

David wrote:

“Peter DS is not only methodical but extremely careful in his research. Period. Note also the caveat he provided in the above discourse about being cautious for the reason cited.”

All he said was that it was “condensed”. I don’t believe in the ‘it’s OK to be inaccurate when you talk as long as your not when you write’ rationalization is valid. In any case like him or not what he said about the intercept issue was wrong and misleading he either did bad research or lied.

Bill wrote:

“I find pretty much everything PDS discusses compelling. His talk is primarily about what Chaney did in the WH and Bunker, not about the lack of intercept of the hijacked planes.”

Yes I realized that, what did you find especially compelling or telling in what he said about Cheney (Not Chaney, LOL I hope that was a Freudian slip rather than a typo ) and COS etc? I replied to the part about the intercept issue because it is something I’ve already looked into. What Cheney did and didn’t do that morning never particularly interested me.

Lon Chaney 1941

“He says that the intercepts were discussed by practically everyone at every 9/11 conference, and he didn't want to get into it other than state the fact that the issue remains unresolved.”

Nothing about it seems unresolved except perhaps the failure to intercept flight 77

”As I transcribed the talk, and my personal research included an investigation of the failure to intercept, and talked with F-16 pilots who went up that day, I already sent off an email to PDS noting that the Payne Stewart incident involved planes that were already in the air on training missions and did not include scrambling jets.”

That was only a minor point the principle one being that the intercept took well over an hour for a much easier target and was the only intercept over the territorial US in the decade preceding 9/11. Either he didn’t know this and thus hadn’t done very good research or he knew and was intentionally misleading. I think the former is far more likely but either way he wasn’t reliable. Same goes for his misleading information about the “67 intercepts” and the June 1st JCS memo. And contrary to what he said the 9/11 Commission didn’t blame the memo for the failure to intercept he either 1) didn’t bother to read that part of the report before citing it 2) misunderstood what he read or 3) was intentionally deceptive.

”One of the pilots I talked with told me that the June 1, orders, or at least the one that took the 177th NJANG off alert status for the first time in 20 years, was issued by C. Powell when he was chairman of the JCS.”

It must have been the latter. If that’s the case the unit was taken off alert 1989 – 93. Your friend’s contention that a JCS memo was issued by the VP seems odd and his primary source, Michael Ruppert, has been unreliable in the past.

”Nor do I find PDS's take on anything "unreliable."”

Perhaps everything else he said was accurate but the part of his talk about the intercept question was filled with erroneous and misleading information. How is that not unreliable? Note that I only said that that part of the talk was unreliable

”In fact, as Peter has suggested, John Judge has already assisted in the drafting of impeach Chaney legislation that has been introduced into the proceedings.”

Though I’d love to see it happen I doubt it will, at least not removal which would require a 2/3 vote in the Senate.

“And like David, I too look forward to reading his book, when published”

That he seems to be under the sway of people like Fetzer, Griffin, Ryan and Reynolds doesn’t inspire confidence on my part.

[Michael Hogan]

In any case like him or not what he said about the intercept issue was wrong and misleading he either did bad research or lied....

“And like David, I too look forward to reading his book, when published” (Bill Kelly)

That he seems to be under the sway of people like Fetzer, Griffin, Ryan and Reynolds doesn’t inspire confidence on my part.

Based on Peter Scott's past works, some people will probably give him the benefit of the doubt and wait until they actually read his forthcoming book and check his sources carefully, then weigh his evidence and conclusions before they might agree with the above. Perhaps Len Colby will be proven right, but that does remain to be seen.

It would be suprising if Dr. Scott included material that was so patently false, it could be mistaken for lying. It would be equally surprising if his research could be demonstrated to be bad by Popular Mechanics. Certainly his well-earned reputation as a scholarly researcher and author would be seriously damaged. We will see.

[Jack White]

In any case like him or not what he said about the intercept issue was wrong and misleading he either did bad research or lied....

“And like David, I too look forward to reading his book, when published” (Bill Kelly)

That he seems to be under the sway of people like Fetzer, Griffin, Ryan and Reynolds doesn’t inspire confidence on my part.

Based on Peter Scott's past works, some people will probably give him the benefit of the doubt and wait until they actually read his forthcoming book and check his sources carefully, then weigh his evidence and conclusions before they might agree with the above. Perhaps Len Colby will be proven right, but that does remain to be seen.

It would be suprising if Dr. Scott included material that was so patently false, it could be mistaken for lying. It would be equally surprising if his research could be demonstrated to be bad by Popular Mechanics. Certainly his well-earned reputation as a scholarly researcher and author would be seriously damaged. We will see.

I have talked to Dr. Scott a number of times over the years at symposiums where

he spoke, and have read his books. HE IS NOT UNDER THE SWAY OF ANYONE. He

is an original thinker...a leader, not a follower. His "negative template" theories

have very useful application. He tends to SEE THE BIG PICTURE politically and

economically instead of becoming mired down in details. Colby's opinion of him

is meaningless.

Jack

[Guest David Guyatt]

I couldn't agree more, Peter. I hold PDS in high regard especially because of his past work in Parapolitics (Deep Politics) which, as you say, was completed at a time when of so few were willing to tread where he trod.

I sincerely doubt there are any mistakes and errors -- but even if there were that's no reason to slam him. Individuals make mistakes. It's human nature. None of us are free from that. A momentary slip in concentration is all it takes. I know!

David

[Len Colby]

Mike wrote:

“It would be suprising if Dr. Scott included material that was so patently false, it could be mistaken for lying. It would be equally surprising if his research could be demonstrated to be bad by Popular Mechanics. Certainly his well-earned reputation as a scholarly researcher and author would be seriously damaged. We will see.”

He was definitely wrong about the intercept time of Payne Stewart’s plane. There was confusion over the subject because the ATC’s noticed something was wrong and told NORAD in one time zone (Eastern IIRC) but the plane was intercepted in another (Central IIRC). He either misread the NIST report or depended secondary or tertiary sources with faulty information.

A minor error but the report of the 67 scrambles came from a NORAD not a FAA spokesman. He did not say all the scrambles or diversions lead to successful intercepts nor did he say where the intercepts occurred. Note that Popular Mechanics quoted an FAA official and that a second publication Plane & Pilot Magazine says the same thing.

http://www.planeandpilotmag.com/content/20...usting_tfr.html

For me the fact that 9/11 conspiracists have been unable to cite a single case of an intercept of plane over the US in the decade preceding 9/11 is virtual proof that both publications were right. IIRC there was an intercept in the 80’s after a nutjob hijacked a plane. It should also be noted that before 9/11 pilots who few into restricted airspace over the mainland (except perhaps Alaska) were fined by the FAA rather than intercepted by NORAD.

He was also demonstrably wrong about the JCS memo.

Everyone makes mistakes, whether this part of his talk was the exception or the rule for the rest of his talk and 9/11 research I have no idea.

“Based on Peter Scott's past works, some people will probably give him the benefit of the doubt and wait until they actually read his forthcoming book and check his sources carefully, then weigh his evidence and conclusions before they might agree with the above. Perhaps Len Colby will be proven right, but that does remain to be seen.”

I didn’t say the book is shoddy but based on his association with people who have been thoroughly unreliable and his errors over the intercept issues I can’t share the enthusiasm of other members of the forum to read it. On the other hand people who’s opinions I respect have told me he is a careful scholar or at least was regarding the assassination.

Jack wrote:

“HE IS NOT UNDER THE SWAY OF ANYONE. He is an original thinker...a leader, not a follower.”

Perhaps "under the sway of" is too strong and "influenced by" is more apt. I think the latter is justified because AFAIK he only became part of the "'truth' movement" after the aforementioned people and included articles they wrote in a book he edited.

Edited June 16, 2007 by Len Colby

[William Kelly]

......

For me the fact that 9/11 conspiracists have been unable to cite a single case of an intercept of plane over the US in the decade preceding 9/11 is virtual proof that both publications were right. IIRC there was an intercept in the 80's after a nutjob hijacked a plane. It should also be noted that before 9/11 pilots who few into restricted airspace over the mainland (except perhaps Alaska) were fined by the FAA rather than intercepted by NORAD.

He was also demonstrably wrong about the JCS memo.

Everyone makes mistakes, whether this part of his talk was the exception or the rule for the rest of his talk and 9/11 research I have no idea.

Perhaps "under the sway of" is too strong and "influenced by" is more apt. I think the latter is justified because AFAIK he only became part of the "'truth' movement" after the aforementioned people and included articles the wrote in a book he edited.

BK responds: Colby wrote: "...and included articles the wrote in a book he edited."

What does that mean?

Peter says in the talk that the intercept have been discussed over and over and that he didn't want to get into it except to note that the issue of why none of the hijacked planes were intercepted remains unresolved.

Now does anyone want to discuss COG on 9/11?

And Len, like Bush, I like to give nicknames to people and will refer to Dick Chaney as Lon Chaney from now on, and will come up with an appropriate one for you too.

And if you haven't read PDS and don't intend to, why are you involved in this discussion at all?

BK

[Michael Hogan]

He was also demonstrably wrong about the JCS memo.

Everyone makes mistakes, whether this part of his talk was the exception or the rule for the rest of his talk and 9/11 research I have no idea.

“Based on Peter Scott's past works, some people will probably give him the benefit of the doubt and wait until they actually read his forthcoming book and check his sources carefully, then weigh his evidence and conclusions before they might agree with the above. Perhaps Len Colby will be proven right, but that does remain to be seen.”

I didn’t say the book is shoddy but based on his association with people who have been thoroughly unreliable and his errors over the intercept issues I can’t share the enthusiasm of other members of the forum to read it. On the other hand people who’s opinions I respect have told me he is a careful scholar or at least was regarding the assassination.

First of all Len, who claimed you said the book is shoddy? I don't think I did. Scott's book doesn't come out for several months.

Given Peter Dale Scott's reputation, and your track record on this Forum re 9/11, it would seem that you would be enthusiastic to read it. Then you could appear to be informed in your efforts to demonstrate that he is a xxxx or a poor researcher, if that turns out to be the case. And forbid that you might learn something that you don't already know.

According to Dr. Scott only two chapters of his new book are going to deal with 9/11. Here are some of Peter Dale Scott's thoughts written almost 3 years ago, on the 9/11 Commission Report. Perhaps his views have changed since then:

How to fight terrorism

By Peter Dale Scott

The 9/11 Commission Report has been called "the must-read book of this summer" for Americans. It has also been called a "whitewash" and the "Omission Report." I agree that the book is important, well-written, and worthy of the most serious attention. I also agree that it has serious omissions.

It is clear that the 9/11 Commission Report will frame the debate on security discussions. It supplies a solid beginning, above all by defusing allegations that either Iraq or Iran were behind, or even aware of, the 9/11 attacks. (The public may not appreciate the extent to which administration hawks like Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith have sought to link al Qaeda's attack to both countries, beginning in 2001.)

The 9/11 Commission should be praised for producing a well-crafted and well-footnoted document that defuses false rumors. It should be praised also for reaching a bipartisan consensus, one that may hopefully begin to produce a more reasonable tone in Congressional debates.

At the same time, the report's omissions distort its recommendations and downplay the urgent need for a new approach in national security policy. Its most serious defect is to ask us to strengthen our covert intelligence agencies, while ignoring the extent to which, by their foolish excesses and incompetent shortcomings, they have contributed to the terrorist menace we face.

Some specific concerns appear to have been answered by the 9/11 Report. It now seems likely, for example, that stock market behavior in airline shares just before 9/11 was not as suspicious as many believed. And, contrary to claims in the movie Fahrenheit 9/11, the arrangements to fly members of the Saudi and bin Laden families out of the U.S. were routinely approved and conducted within the times authorized for flight. The report also makes a very strong case that the hijacker Mohammed Atta did not, as Vice President Dick Cheney still believes to be possible, meet with an Iraqi agent in Prague.

The report also disposes of some, but not all, of the concerns raised by books alleging that either the U.S. government itself, or its ally Israel, allowed or even assisted the attacks. These books include Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's The War on Freedom, David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor, and Justin Raimundo's The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection.....

Full Essay: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/war.html

Here is an essay by Dr. Scott entitled The Forthcoming Iraq War And How To Oppose It:

The proposal for an unprovoked US invasion of Iraq is an offense to all people and groups working for a more peaceful and equitable world. It is important to resist what Washington is doing, less from hopes that Bush and his colleagues can be deterred, than by the hope that through resistance we can continue to develop and strengthen the links for an alternative world.

I believe that the US adventure in Iraq, like the Anglo-French adventure in Suez in 1956, is a desperate act by a declining imperial force, not (as many in Washington hope) a bold step towards a new American century. It should be seen as the extrapolation of expansionist policies that have been becoming increasingly unstable and dangerous for some decades, and not simply the accidental product of a miscounted vote in Florida in 2000 (although that miscount too can be seen as part of the general degradation of US policies and politics).

Whatever the outcome of the US adventure in Iraq, it will fail to solve the problems for which it was designed. If the US wins in short order, world-wide terrorism will increase. If there is a stand-off (as now in Afghanistan), pressures in Washington will mount for further action in Iran or even Saudi Arabia. And if somehow war in Iraq is averted at the last minute, those in Washington will surely seek to fight somewhere else.

The underlying goal of these adventures is to sustain the present artificial value of the US dollar by dominating the oil market, and ensuring that OPEC oil purchases will continue to be paid in dollars rather than euros or some other currency. (For more details, see my forthcoming Drugs, Oil, and War.) But this policy cannot last for very much longer in any event; and the more the US offends the rest of the world by its unilateralist bluster, the sooner the present system will end.

It is therefore all the more important that we act out of foresight rather than desperation, and choose our paths of resistance with a view towards building a better future. Above all we must not, in coping with powers that are hateful, become hateful ourselves. This may sound trite, but we must remember how immature hatefulness destroyed the US movement against the war in Vietnam. It may sound ineffective; but we must remember that peaceful and non-violent protest has in fact achieved a number of goals that once seemed improbable, from US disinvestment in South Africa (an important step towards the subsequent liberation of its people) to the independence of East Timor.

The headlines about war should not depress us to the point that we lose touch with the many sources of goodness in this world. Instead we should mobilize to save them.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/war.html

Edited June 16, 2007 by Michael Hogan