Webster Tarpley's 9/11: Synthetic Terror: Made in USA uses the events of 9/11 to develop what may be the first comprehensive theory of false-flag terror. Below is an important addition: A new chapter discussing the many exercises, war games and drills that were used to mask and perpetrate the 9/11 attacks. Webster Tarpley will discuss this important new chapter on my radio show Wednesday, August 24^th.

         - Kevin Barrett, 8/20/2011 

From 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA by Webster Tarpley

NEW CHAPTER 9 FOR 5^TH EDITION 2011 

THE FORTY-SIX EXERCISES AND DRILLS OF 9/11 

“Why the thermonuclear mushroom cloud on the cover?” That question has come from a number of readers of this book, who probably expected to find the more usual photographs of the World Trade Center tragedy, or the explosions at the Pentagon which are seen on the covers of other 9/11 books. The mushroom cloud is there to signal that this book is concerned not only with what did happen on 9/11, but with also with larger tragedies which came close to happening, but which ultimately did not occur. Among these was the threat of thermonuclear escalation among the great powers. Important material which has come to light during 2005, after the first edition of this book was published, provides decisive support for this avenue of inquiry, and to this new material we will turn presently. 

But first, a note on methodology. This book argues the rogue network MIHOP (made it happen on purpose) position. That is to say, it represents the analytical point of view which sees the events of September 11, 2020 as a deliberate provocation manufactured by an outlaw network of high officials infesting the military and security apparatus of the United States and Great Britain, a network ultimately dominated by Wall Street and City of London financiers. It is our contention that any other approach not only misrepresents what actually happened in the terror attacks, but also must tend to leave the public naïve and helpless when it comes to identifying the present and future threat of state-sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism, and therefore preventing repeat performances of 9/11, including on a far larger scale. 

What are the alternatives to MIHOP? There is of course the official version as codified in the Kean-Hamilton commission report of July 2004, notoriously a tissue of lies. A demagogic variation on this is the “official version and it serves you right” or “blowback” position, which accepts all the crucial elements of the official version - Bin Laden, Atta and the rest of the 19 hijackers, al Qaeda, the US intelligence failure, and so forth. But here the official version is endorsed with its moral signs inverted: the catastrophe of 9/11 is seen as just retribution by the victims of imperialism for the chronic crimes of the system. This is the thesis which, in understated form, underlies the approach of Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal, as the first edition made clear. “Blowback” is dear to the hearts of a whole series of left gatekeepers, to the extent that they are willing to say anything at all about 9/11. This view has been embraced in the most grotesque form by the veteran agent provocateur Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado. During the first few months of 2005, the Fox News O’Reilly Factor attempted to promote Churchill to the status of chief spokesman for the 9/11 truth movement by paying obsessive attention to his demagogic claims that the office workers who perished on 9/11 were war criminals in the service of imperialism. With this, the 9/11 truth movement was demonized in the eyes of millions. More important for our purposes here, Churchill also ranted that anyone who rejected the attribution of the crimes of 9/11 to Atta, Bin Laden, and al Qaeda was a racist who was really arguing that Arabs were genetically inferior and thus incapable of carrying out this complex and spectacular attack. Churchill is thus the leading contender for the Arlen Spector Award for the most imaginative defense of the official version so far recorded. Academics, in particular, seemed unable to see him for what he was. His posturing, which was given lavish attention by the corporate media, did more than anything else to discredit and disorient the 9/11 truth movement, precisely at a time when an advertising campaign by the political philanthropist Jimmy Walter was actually beginning to educate the public about how it had been hoodwinked.  

Other commentators tentatively accept the 9/11 commission report, but hasten to add that they have unanswered questions. “Official version with unanswered questions” is the most nondescript of views, and it has not stood the test of time. Unanswered questions were a mark of courage in October 2001, and were still a healthy symptom in 2002. By 2004 this position had been rendered obsolete and untenable by the progress of research, and by 2005 it had come to embody a basic refusal to understand, whether out of fear or prejudice. But the “unanswered questions” gambit remained popular, perhaps because it was quite compatible with the continued receipt of foundation funding. On Judgment Day, when Gabriel blows his horn and the dead rise from their sepulchers, this contingent will still be parading their unanswered questions as an alibi for their political impotence and paralysis. LIHOP is increasingly at war with masses of evidence. A more outré version of LIHOP admits that Atta and his cohorts were working for the CIA, but only as gun-runners and drug-runners, not terrorists. At a certain point, this view alleges, the drug-runners decided to revolt against their arrogant CIA masters by blowing up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon! But even this recondite scheme cannot address the absence of air defense for one hour and forty-five minutes, nor the controlled demolition which overtook the two trade towers. 

LIHOP (let it happen on purpose) is a better analysis, although ultimately an inadequate one. LIHOP assumes that Bin Lade, al Qaeda, Atta, and company actually have at least a semi-independent existence and possess the will and the physical-technical capability to strike the United States in the ways seen on 9/11. But LIHOP also posits that the al Qaeda attack could not have been successful without the active cooperation of elements of the Pentagon and Bush administration who deliberately sabotaged US air defenses so as to allow the suicide pilots to reach their targets at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The LIHOP view of things has been expressed by Mike Ruppert, whose book features the constant refrain borrowed from Delmart “Mike” Vreeland, “Let one happen. Stop the rest!” Nafeez Ahmed’s first book also verged on LIHOP.  

In 2002 and 2003, LIHOP represented progress beyond the unanswered questions way-station. But here too, as more new material has come to light, LIHOP has also become untenable, as I will try to show below. A Zogby poll commissioned by Jimmy Walter in August 2004 showed that almost 50% of New Yorkers believed that US officials knew in advance that 9/11 was going to happen—a reasonable approximation of LIHOP. Today the LIHOP position is increasingly unstable. Some devotees of LIHOP have a curious habit of reverting to a very tepid unanswered questions posture as soon as a microphone or television camera approaches.  

David Ray Griffin’s New Pearl Harbor exemplified what might be called Bush-Cheney MIHOP, although this must be qualified by Griffin’s repeated caveat that was not advancing any overall explanation for what happened on 9/11. The emphasis on Bush-Cheney as the possible masterminds of 9/11 is problematic, since the rogue network has demonstrably been around since the blowing up of the USS Maine more than a century ago (long before Bush-Cheney). In addition, we must ask if serious plotters would ever dream of assigning an important role to a moron, or to a man who has had multiple heart attacks, who has had a pacemaker installed and who is living on borrowed time. These objections apply to all allegations that assign Cheney an absolutely central role, including those of Mike Ruppert. The invisible government, in fact, will not necessarily be defeated if its puppets of the moment - Bush, Cheney, and company - were to be ousted. Griffin then turned to a detailed refutation of the Kean-Hamilton report, a task that could easily have been left to the unanswered questions theorists, or even relegated as fiction to literary critics, as Griffin himself has suggested. We are left with Griffin’s basically agnostic view, which means that we are effectively disarmed in the face of new threats of state-sponsored terrorism as they continued to emerge. 

Differences among these categories are worth stressing, even though they may be blurred. For example, a successful terrorist provocation generally has a LIHOP function built into it, since it typically is the job of the moles in the CIA, FBI, the Justice Department. etc., to make sure that normal law enforcement does not interfere with the patsies and throw them into jail, thus stripping the operation of its indispensable scapegoats. But this is only one part of the terror deployment, and the presence of trained professionals or technicians who actually produce the results observed, which the patsies could never produce, suffices to validate a MIHOP analysis for the entire operation. 

Some other commentators have, either consciously or unconsciously, advanced an outlook which might be called Mossad MIHOP. As I show in this book, it is a well-established fact that the Mossad meticulously observed every phase of the preparation and execution of 9/11. The Mossad is also known to be a very nefarious organization. But what is missing is convincing proof of a direct operative role for the Mossad in 9/11. So far not even limited subcontracting of specific 9/11 tasks by CIA to Mossad, a standard practice, has been established. Mossad MIHOP would appear to appeal to a chauvinistic mentality which implicitly believes that Americans would never do such a thing to their fellow Americans, so a foreign group, the Mossad, has to be blamed. This is dangerous nonsense, and those who profess it need to be reminded of the Operation Northwoods documents, which contemplate precisely the sort of killing of Americans by Americans they think is impossible. As far as I know, MI-6 MIHOP, another possible variant, has not been argued; here the evidence is greater, but still not enough. Therefore, my fifth edition still asserts on the cover that the 9/11 terror was: “Made in USA.” 

The 2004 edition of Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon was aware of five exercises related to 9/11 -Vigilant Warrior, Vigilant Guardian, Northern Vigilance, Tripod II, and the National Reconnaissance Office drill. Ruppert focuses exclusively on the drills which crippled air defense, the ones we may call LIHOP drills. It is of course vital to know about these war games, which moved fighter planes to northern Canada and Alaska, which introduced fake radar blips on the screens of military personnel, and which deployed civilian and military aircraft in the guise of hijacked airliners. This was one way the vaunted US air defense in the northeast corridor was paralyzed for about one hour and forty-five minutes. 

But even this argument has limits. Loyal military officers would have positioned any and all interceptor assets they had in the skies over Washington DC to prevent their recurrent nightmare, the decapitation of the national command authority by a lightning stroke. The fact that this was not done for so many minutes is irrefutable evidence that the commanders were not loyal. It does no good to argue, as Ruppert does, that red-blooded US fighter pilots would never have obeyed a stand-down order when this is manifestly exactly what they did, as they followed orders for the critical hour and three quarters that the US was under attack. But there are additional 9/11 maneuvers which claim our attention. These are the MIHOP drills, which provided cover and operational capabilities for terror operations run through the official bureaucracy. 

9/11 AS COUP D’ÉTAT 

The events of September 11, 2020 are a leading example of a coup d’état enabled by a spectacular event of state sponsored, false flag terrorism - or of modern synthetic terrorism, as I have ventured to call it. [1] These events continued the NATO spheres of influence or geopolitical terrorism which I studied in central Europe during the 1970s. [2] The 9/11 coup faction aimed at a radically anti-historical re-organization of world affairs under the slogan of the “Global War on Terrorism.” These putschists desired to unleash a version of the Samuel Huntington “clash of civilizations,” [3] and their handiwork can be observed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and more. Challenges to the Anglo-American empire, and to its economic and financial keystone, the US dollar, have been suppressed, and US-UK world domination has been prolonged, albeit at a fearful cost. Inside the US, the myth of al Qaeda, Bin Laden, Atta, the nineteen hijackers, and of 9/11 in general has been successfully and cynically exploited to maintain the Bush regime in the elections of 2002 and 2004, although it has shown signs of crumbling in 2006 and may now be considered politically moribund, thanks largely to the efforts of the worldwide 9/11 truth movement. The internal US social order, down to the details of property relations and fiscal policy, now depends on the 9/11 myth to such a degree that the Bush regime’s budget director, when asked why Bush’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2008 ruthlessly cut expenditures for education, health care, and social welfare, replied that this lethal austerity was made necessary by the overriding need to fight the Global War on Terror. The US Democratic party and its left-liberal or radical liberal fringe, it should be noted, remain even more devoted to the 9/11 myth than the Bush regime itself. 

The 9/11 coup was not directed against the George W. Bush regime per se, although Bush was definitely an expendable asset on 9/11. The goal was to shock the entire US political system - the White House, the executive departments, the Congress, the courts, the political parties, the mass media, publishing and journalism, and the public in general out of their inertia of normal everyday life into a kind of war psychosis and paranoid obsession with phantom threats agreeable to outlook of the neocon faction, the modern heirs of Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s lawyer. The United States had to be mobilized, on the basis of pure hysteria, for the clash of civilizations. A country which had won two world wars and a cold war, and which in truth had very little to fear from anyone, had to be convinced that it faced an existential threat even greater than that looming over tiny Israel. If Bush could play his part in this transformation, he would be permitted to survive. If not there was always Cheney, and yet other alternatives in case of need. [4] Notions of Bush, or Cheney, as masterminds or evil geniuses of 9/11 tend to collapse under the weight of their own absurdity. 

We must recall that the United States presidency tends to be dominated from above and behind the Oval Office by a group of financiers and officials in London and New York whom we can define as the invisible or secret government. The current form of this arrangement goes back to about 1895, when President Grover Cleveland capitulated to the demand of J.P. “Jupiter” Morgan, London’s official agent, that the banking faction assumes control of the public debt of the United States. The 1898 blowing up of the USS Maine in Havana, the Spanish-American War, and the founding of an American empire, soon followed. Then came the McKinley assassination of 1901, placing Theodore Roosevelt, a rabid racist and imperialist, as well as a devoted servant of the House of Morgan, in the White House. In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican Party to guarantee the election of Woodrow Wilson, another Morgan puppet. The Federal Reserve System soon followed, institutionalizing the Morgan-led financier domination of the US government. With the US entry into World War I on April 6, 1917, invisible government domination was consolidated under the aegis of Wilson’s wartime dictatorship. 

Since then, the invisible government has often made its views known through a spokesman; from time to time figures like Andrew Mellon, Henry Stimson, George Marshall, John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and George Shultz have carried out this role. Presidents have generally acted as the puppets of this group; the two recent exceptions are Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Right now the financier oligarchy is arrayed as a neocon extremist faction around George Shultz and Rupert Murdock, and a more moderate but Malthusian imperialist grouping around James Baker III and Prince Charles, which has George Soros as a pseudo-left tentacle. The critical lesson, in any case, is that a US president must be viewed as a puppet of the US-UK financiers unless he has provided strong reasons to think otherwise; Bush and Cheney confirm this rule abundantly. 

The 9/11 myth is the key to the racist, militarist, and fascist tendencies of our time, and we have every reason to challenge it. My thesis has been that the 9/11 attacks cannot be attributed to al Qaeda, Bin Laden, the nineteen accused hijackers, Atta, nor Khaleed Sheikh Mohammed (now enshrined in the pantheon of CIA legends as the ubiquitous “KSM”); they have not been and cannot be traced back to a laptop in a cave in some myth-drenched corner of the Hindu Kush. These patsies lack the physical and technical ability to produce the observed effects. They must rather be regarded as the outcome of a large-scale combined operation - involving expenditures of hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, legions of trained operatives of different types, and many months or years of preparation - featuring the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Defense, the Continuity of Government apparatus, certain private military firms, agents of influence within the US corporate media, and related forces. 

This book proposes an analysis of state-sponsored false flag terrorism that develops along three planes - the patsies, the moles, and the technicians. The patsies, like Lee Harvey Oswald (agent of the CIA, the FBI, and the US Customs [5]) are the often unwitting scapegoats who are blamed for the terrorist act, and whose ethnic, religious, or political identity is used for the broader work of identification and defamation of the target group which the coup faction wants the populace to hate. The moles are the functionaries, ensconced at key points inside the state apparatus (or private companies), who prevent normal law enforcement from breaking up the terror action before it can be completed, and who direct the cover-up after the fact, including the key task of fingering the patsies as the perpetrators. The technicians are the specialists who actually produce the observed effects which the patsies are often physically and technically incapable of creating. The technicians are those of whom the average person hears the least, since they act behind the scenes and pursue anonymity. 

The terror action, as perceived by world public opinion, is the optical, political and epistemological illusion which arises, by fallacy of composition and with assistance from the controlled media, at the point of intersection of these three planes when the action is carried out. 

This conceptual framework has proved to be of great value in sorting out the blizzard of empirical data which confronts anyone trying to make sense of a spectacular act of psychological warfare. The passage of time, which always erodes attempts to keep secrets, now allows us to be more specific about one aspect of the work of the technicians: this involves the way in which the technicians are able to exploit the potentialities of legally sanctioned drills and exercises to make extensive use of government resources to carry out their murderous tasks. [6] 

Military drills and exercises have long been employed as a way to deceive an adversary. The classic case is that country ‘A’ wishes to mass its troops for an invasion of country ‘B.’ To cover its mobilization, country ‘A’ announces that its peace-loving forces will conduct their routine summer maneuvers along the border of country ‘B.’ When the troops have been deployed, the drill goes live (or is flipped live), and the invasion begins. 

SOME FORTY-SIX DRILLS, EXERCISES AND OPERATIONS BEAR ON 9/11 

When we turn to 9/11, we find that information in the public domain reflects what may well be the greatest density of drills and exercises in US history up to that time, and quite possibly of all time. Current research suggests that some forty-six drills bear on 9/11. This includes drills held on the day of 9/11, drills held to prepare 9/11 during the months and years leading up to these events, and drills - primarily Amalgam Virgo 2002 - which were scheduled for the time after 9/11. But which were in an advanced state of preparation. The drills before 9/11 created the array of capabilities, coordination, and techniques which were put into action on the big day. The drills on 9/11 created conditions conducive for the planned event, and allowed numerous concrete actions to be conduited and bootleg through government bureaucracies, employing government resources in the process. The post-9/11 scheduling of Amalgam Virgo 2002 allowed techniques and methods to be further refined and adjusted. 

The principle directly at stake here is that state terrorists wishing to conduct an illegal terror operation often find it highly advantageous to conduit or bootleg that illegal operation through the government military/security bureaucracy with the help of an exercise or drill that closely resembles or mimics the illegal operation. Once the entire apparatus is set up, it is only necessary to make apparently small changes to have the exercise go live, and turn into a real hecatomb. If there is a gas dispersion drill announced in Manhattan, as there was in August 2005, it is merely necessary to replace the inert gas with a highly toxic one to go from drill to mass slaughter. A drill simulating a terror attack provides the greatest possible camouflage of the criminal intent of the perpetrators and allows the terror attack to occur through minor departures from the scenario script. All these drills try to be as realistic as possible. But the greatest realism is an actual terror attack. The fact that attempts at disruption, infiltration, harassment, and sabotage may be built in simply increases the opportunities available to the plotters, as do the varying levels of awareness of the participants, only a very few of whom need to know that a real terror attack is intended, or what the fate of certain patsies might be. To prevent new terror attacks from providing the pretexts for new wars, it is imperative that this mechanism be understood, but it cannot be understood in the unanswered questions, LIHOP, and agnostic frames of reference. That is why the apparent moderation of these theoretical points of view is so crippling and so dangerous. 

COVERT USES OF MILITARY EXERCISES 

In addition to being a day of terrorism, 9/11 was also a day of military and civilian maneuvers. These may turn out to have been more closely connected than many people might think. Let us recall a recent coup d’état of US history, that of March 30, 1981. On that day John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Reagan. Scott Hinckley, the elder brother of the would-be assassin, was a personal friend of Neil Bush, the son of the Vice President who would have assumed the presidency if Reagan had died that day. George H.W. Bush presided over a cabinet meeting that same day which declared it to be the official policy of the US government that Hinckley was a lone assassin who had acted by himself, without any accomplices. But the question of the close relations between the Bush and Hinckley families has never been cleared up. (Tarpley 1992) 

The aspect of the attempted assassination of Reagan which concerns us here is the fact that the shooting occurred on the eve of two important maneuvers, one military and one civilian. As I described these events in my 1992 Unauthorized Biography of Bush the elder: 

“.... Back at the White House, the principal cabinet officers had assembled in the situation room and had been running a crisis management committee during the afternoon. Haig says he was at first adamant that a conspiracy, if discovered, should be ruthlessly exposed: “It was essential that we get the facts and publish them quickly. Rumor must not be allowed to breed on this tragedy. Remembering the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, I said to Woody Goldberg, ‘No matter what the truth is about this shooting, the American people must know it.’ But the truth has never been established. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s memoir of that afternoon reminds us of two highly relevant facts. The first is that a “NORAD [North American Air Defense Command] exercise with a simulated incoming missile attack had been planned for the next day.” Weinberger agreed with General David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that this exercise should be cancelled. Weinberger also recalls that the group in the Situation Room was informed by James Baker that “there had been a FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Administration] exercise scheduled for the next day on presidential succession, with the general title ‘Nine Lives.’ By an immediate consensus, it was agreed that exercise should also be cancelled.” (Tarpley 1992, Chapter XVII, The Attempted Coup D’état of March 30, 2020) 

The FEMA exercise was much more than an uncanny coincidence - that a presidential succession exercise was planned for the day after a real presidential succession was attempted by assassination. It is very unlikely that Hinckley acted alone, and it is likely that whoever prodded him to act when he did could well have been aware of the upcoming presidential succession exercise. This suggests that we need to think about the ways in which military maneuvers which seem to be coincidental and routine events can prepare and promote other types of actions, including important terrorist attacks. 

Military exercises come in two varieties - there are the field exercises, or live-fly exercises, war games in which real tanks or real planes move around in the fields or the sky. There are also staff exercises, which mainly involve officers assigned to the headquarters, who move markers in a sandbox, map grid, or computer screen. 

The classic use of war games has been to prepare a sneak attack. The aggressor army announces that it is holding its summer maneuvers near the border of the target state. The deployment takes place under the cover of press releases announcing that these are merely maneuvers. When the troops are in position, they receive an order for a real attack. If field exercises can be used for fooling the adversary, then staff exercises are more useful for deceiving one’s own side. In December 1975, in the wake of the US defeat in Vietnam, when the Pentagon was smarting from the reverse and looking for ways to redress the balance, there were certain circles in NATO who considered using the staff exercise HILEX 75 to set up a confrontation with the Warsaw Pact in Europe. Staff officers of countries who were not party to that plan were told not to be alarmed by the war preparations they saw; after all, those were only part of a staff exercise. Fortunately, due to the efforts of a network of alert citizens in a number of NATO countries, word got out about the really explosive potential of HILEX 75, and the confrontation option was abandoned. But these are at least two models of how maneuvers can be used for deception that we should keep in mind; there are more. 

Another example of this is Able Archer 1983, a US nuclear war drill which was so realistic in its deployment of US nuclear assets that the Soviet command feared that this drill might be flipped live. Accordingly, the Soviets went to a red alert of their own, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. [7] 

A DISTANT MIRROR: OPERATION VALKYRIE, 1944 

A notable instance of a military operation being redirected in this way was the attempted July 20, 2020 coup d’état by the group of German army officers around Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg against Hitler and the Nazi regime. Stauffenberg and his associates had to prepare their action covertly, despite the scrutiny of the Gestapo and the presence of many Hitler loyalists in the army. In seeking a way for the army to seize power against Hitler, the SS, the Gestapo, and the Nazi Party, the army plotters discovered a pre-existing operation plan called Operation Valkyrie (Walküre), which was designed to mobilize the reserve forces of the Home Army inside Germany and the occupied countries behind the fighting front. This mobilization was intended to defend the Nazi regime against an uprising by foreign slave laborers, possibly backed up by air drops of Allied paratroopers into the Reich. 

Stauffenberg’s associate Henning von Tresckow re-wrote Operation Valkyrie, transforming it from an operation to preserve Nazi rule into an operation aiming at bringing down the Nazi regime in the wake of the projected assassination of Hitler and as many top members of the Nazi leadership group as possible. The SS and Gestapo leadership, along with other pro-Hitler diehards, were to be arrested by the army. The recent Tom Cruise movie (2007) shows von Tresckow re-writing the operational plan to include these changes. A dramatic scene in this movie shows Stauffenberg getting the revised Operation Valkyrie document signed by Hitler personally. On this occasion, Hitler failed to examine the new plan carefully, and thus did not become aware of the decisive changes. [8] 

The Stauffenberg-Tresckow-Quirnheim group of German army conspirators along with some politicians and others attempted to implement the new Operation Valkyrie, combined with a bid to kill Hitler. If the assassination attempt had not failed, there is good reason to believe that Valkyrie could have been effective in ending Nazi rule. SS and Gestapo leaders were in fact arrested in Paris and other locations. 

For our purposes, Operation Valkyrie is useful as an example of how a planned drill, operation, or exercise can be re-directed for a totally new purpose, even under the extreme surveillance of the Gestapo and the related apparatus of the totalitarian Nazi regime. It also shows that the method of conduiting covert operations through a military or security bureaucracy under the cover of a sanctioned drill plan which has been redirected through inserted changes is not specific to the United States or NATO, but represents a widespread practice. 

HOW IT WORKS IN PRACTICE 

Staff exercises or command exercises are perfect for a rogue network which is forced to conduct its operations using the same communications and computer systems used by other officers who are not necessarily party to the illegal operation, coup or provocation as it may be. A putschist officer may be working at a console next to another officer who is not in on the coup, and who might indeed oppose it if he knew about it. The putschist’s behavior is suspicious: what the hell is he doing? The loyal officer looks over and asks the putschist about it. The putschist cites a staff maneuver for which he is preparing. The loyal officer concludes that the putschist’s activities are part of an officially sanctioned drill, and his suspicions are allayed. The putschist may even explain that participation in the staff exercise requires a special security clearance which the loyal officer does not have. The conversation ends, and the putschist can go on with his treasonous work. 

Most civilians would assume that a military exercise or drill, be it a field or live fly exercise, or a staff drill, would tend to enhance the readiness of the military units taking part. This was the view expressed by 9/11 widow Mindy Kleinberg to 9/11 commission in March 2003, when she remarked that: “… on September 11, NEADS (of the North East Air Defense System of NORAD) was several days into a semiannual exercise known as ‘Vigilant Guardian.’ This meant that our North East Air Defense System was fully staffed. In short, key officers were manning the operation battle center, “fighter jets were cocked, loaded, and carrying extra gas on board.’” (Testimony to 9/11 commission, March 31, 2020) But in reality the maneuvers may have introduced confusion and scattered available resources. The drills included false radar blips, military aircraft pretending to be hijacked, and the transfer of many NORAD fighters to northern Canada and Alaska. 

It is clear that the London terror bombings of July 7, 2020 constituted an intelligence operation conduited through drills. These bombings were strangely similar to an international drill called Atlantic Blue by the UK, Topoff 3 (Top Officials) by the US, and Triple Play by Canada. The scenario for these drills involved explosions in the London Underground at the same time that a major international conference was taking place in the UK - in this case, the meeting of the Group of 8 in Gleneagles, Scotland. At the time, there were large demonstrations at Gleneagles. Peter Power of Visor Consultants went on BBC Radio Five on 7/7 to state that his firm had been simulating bomb attacks in more or less those same subway stations where the bombs actually went off, and at more or less the same time as the explosions. Scotland Yard knew in advance that explosions would occur, and warned the visiting Israeli Finance Minister Netanyahu to stay in his hotel room; the London working people crowding into the Underground that morning received no warning. [9] We cannot blame Netanyahu for this but we can and must blame Scotland Yard. We must conclude that the bombing was actually carried out by way of the drills, while the accused dead men were simply hapless dupes. 

A drill that is about to go live involves the efforts of many persons operating at radically different levels of awareness. Some are total patsies, pure dupes or fanatics who do not even know that they are taking part in what is supposed to be a drill. Others are double agents who think that they are in a mere routine drill, and that they will go home to their brothels, gin mills, opium dens, or discotheques, as the case may be. Some may know that it is a drill destined to undergo significant modification. Others may be seeking to avoid such consequences, since they have figured out that they may be highly unpleasant. A few may be aware that the drill is about to turn into a massacre, and they may be tasked with introducing the changes that make this occur. Then there are the persons who plan and order such drills. The essence of the entire process is cruelty, betrayal, and deception, resulting in the ghostly objectivity of a social process that shimmers back and forth between subjective illusion and objective mass murder, according to which of the players is viewing it. 

The biggest dupes of all are the public. In an earlier chapter, we described synthetic terrorism as a process that requires the efforts of patsies, moles, and technicians; we also pointed out that these operations were often conducted under the camouflage of exercises and drills. We further stipulated that the headquarters of the entire operation was likely to be found in a private military firm. The synthetic terrorist event is the optical, political, and epistemological illusion which arises at the point of intersection of the three planes of patsies, moles, and technicians in the moment when the cataclysmic event occurs. 

A DRILL FOR EVERY KEY COMPONENT OF 9/11

The rule of thumb that a drill which coincides with or mimics the details of an actual terror act within a reasonable time frame is almost certainly the vehicle for that terror act is well established, and the inevitable objections of coincidence theorists need not concern us here. In these cases, small but decisive changes have been made to the legally authorized drill. The drill is thus taken live, or flipped live. Depending on how we wish to count them, we can identify and enumerate at about 46 drills and exercises that either directly preceded 9/11 and are linked to it, or else were actually taking place on the morning of 9/11, or were scheduled for soon after 9/11, or which bear on 9/11 in some other direct way. Even more dramatic is the fact that virtually every important aspect of 9/11 corresponds to one or more of the drills we know about so far. There is a drill for every big event of the day, for every theme or meme of the myth. All the main foci were simulated by drills, often in real time. We must therefore proceed from the working hypothesis that the 9/11 terror events were largely camouflaged, assisted, conducted, conduited, and bootlegged through these drills. This is the most dramatic possible validation of the MIHOP thesis regarding 9/11, the one that asserts that a privately controlled network or faction inside the US government directly caused and created 9/11. [10] 

A first group of drills reflects the need of the coup faction to secure control over certain key military facilities, a number of them in the Washington DC area. These drills and related measures included stricter controls on those entering and exiting the bases, and they started in the months directly before 9/11. 

THE PUTSCHISTS LOCK DOWN MILITARY BASES FOR GREATER SECRECY 

Forts Hamilton, Meade (NSA), Belvoir, Ritchie, Myer, and McNair, Virginia: Starting August 15, 2001, Army limited public access to bases near Washington DC, allegedly as part of nationwide security clampdown because of terrorist threat. 

Fort Meyer, VA, Fort McNair, DC, 3rd US Infantry: September 5, 2001: US Army bases near Washington DC implemented “full access control.” Fort McNair is the Headquarters of the Army Military District of Washington DC. 

Fort Meyer, VA: A “force protection exercise” was scheduled for week after 9/11. 

Fort Belvoir, VA: September 11, 2020 was the second Tuesday of a “garrison control exercise,” allegedly to “test the security at the base in case of a terrorist attack.” [11] 

In Dr. Strangelove, the first thing Gen. Jack Ripper does before launching his B-52s against the USSR is to put his base on maximum security lock down; he even wants to take pocket radios away from the base personnel. The same lockdown measures are taken at the desert headquarters of the putschist ECONCOM in Seven Days in May, who are very strict about who can go in and out. Even a senator who wants to investigate is arrested by base security. The 9/11 putschists thought along the same lines, and as an elementary precaution imposed comprehensive controls on military bases, especially the highly sensitive posts around Washington DC; it would be indispensable to control these in case of unexpected resistance to the provocation they were about to stage. For if anything went wrong, a battle for the control of the capital city might involve controlling these bases and using them for staging areas. 

Drills were also used to divert existing security and intelligence assets far away from what was shortly to be the actual base of operations. 

DIVERSION OF COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE 

FBI training exercise in Monterey, California: the FBI/CIA Anti-Terrorist Task Force was massed at this drill, and was therefore absent from its usual Washington DC headquarters on 9/11. 

In Oliver Stone’s JFK, an integral part of the coup faction’s preparations to kill President Kennedy is to send the character representing Col. Fletcher Prouty of military intelligence to accompany a delegation of bigwigs to the South Pole just before November 22, 1963. He reads of the Kennedy assassination as he is coming back, by way of New Zealand. This allows the assassins to remove a supplementary security screen which otherwise would have enveloped the President with a layer of additional protection in case of failure by the Secret Service. On 9/11 the FBI had deployed “all of its anti-terrorist and top special operations agents at a training exercise (complete with all associated helicopters and light aircraft)” in Monterey, California. Therefore, on 9/11, “the chief federal agency responsible for preventing such crimes [was] AWOL.” [12] Because all commercial flights had been grounded, these personnel were stranded in California and thus out of the picture for several days. A layer of anti-terror capability had in effect been stripped. 

SABOTAGE OF AIR DEFENSE AND SIMULATION OF MULTIPLE HIJACKINGS 

A critical set of drills involves the suppression of air defense in the Boston to Washington DC corridor on that fateful morning. The overall impact of these drills and operations was to multiply the number of possible hijacked aircraft, and to radically diminish the number of interceptor aircraft available to deal with them. Vigilant Guardian, in particular, included real commercial and real military aircraft which were airborne and signaling that they were hijacked. In addition, a NORAD office was able to introduce injects or inputs - fake blips -- onto the radar screens at the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) at Griffiss AFB near Rome, New York. These were supposed to represent hijacked aircraft. 

Some of the simulated hijacks were represented by false blips made to appear on FAA and NORAD radar screens as part of the exercises that have been discussed. Other hijacks would have been accounted for by the actual military aircraft which were playing the roles of hijacked aircraft in the drills. Blips and dummy hijacks combined to create an insuperable confusion. This would have made the predicament of any loyal air defense commanders even more difficult. In his book, Richard Clarke recalls being told by an official on the morning of 9/11, “we have reports of eleven aircraft off course or out of communication, maybe hijacked.” Clarke said he repeated this number, “Eleven.” (Clarke 4) But Colonel Robert Marr, commanding NEADS on 9/11, reported, “At one time I was told that across the nation there were some 29 different reports of hijackings.” USAF Major General Larry Arnold, for his part, claimed that 21 planes were reported hijacked. [13] In his book, Richard Clarke recalls being told by an official on the morning of 9/11, “we have reports of eleven aircraft off course or out of communication, maybe hijacked.” Clarke said he repeated this number, “Eleven.” (Clarke 4) 

NORAD annual readiness drill: at Cheyenne Mountain bunker near Colorado Springs, Colorado, was happening on 9/11: NORAD was at “full ‘battle staff’ levels for a major annual exercise to test every facet of the organization.” This drill appears to coincide with Vigilant Guardian. [14] Were the false blips seen at NEADS generated here? 

Operation Northern Watch, also ongoing on 9/11, represented actual air combat; not a drill; six fighters and 115 personnel had been sent from Langley AFB to Incirlik AFB, Turkey, to impose an illegal northern no-fly zone over northern Iraq. 

Operation Southern Watch involved about 100 members of 174th Fighter Wing, New York Air National Guard, who had been deployed to Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, to impose the no-fly zone over southern Iraq, August-September 2001. In addition, “at the time of the 9/11 attacks, the 94th Fighter Squadron, which is stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, is away on a 90-day combat deployment to Saudi Arabia for Operation Southern Watch, to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq.” [15] 

Vigilant Guardian: Air defense against hijacking. From what is known about Vigilant Guardian, it is clear that it closely mimicked the actual events of 9/11. Vigilant Guardian was thus the source of much confusion among the non-witting NORAD personnel. NORAD personnel were bewildered as to whether the reports they were getting represented fictitious events within the exercise, or whether they were dealing with a real emergency. (Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 3, 2020) This was a joint US-Canada exercise, and was designed to test the coordination of the two defense establishments. According to GlobalSecurity.org: “The VIGILANT GUARDIAN (VG) is a VIGILANT OVERVIEW Command Post Exercise (CPX) conducted in conjunction with USCINCSTRAT-sponsored GLOBAL GUARDIAN and USCINCSPACE-sponsored APOLLO GUARDIAN exercises. The exercise involves all HQ NORAD levels of command and is designed to exercise most aspects of the NORAD mission. One VG is scheduled each year and the length will vary depending on the exercise scenario and objectives.” [16] According to another source, “The planning for Vigilant Guardian Exercise-2001 probably began in 2000; and it was responding to a growing uneasiness of the US government and intelligence reports, world-wide - including NORAD - about plans for terrorist seizure of commercial air planes to be used as missiles against American targets.” [17] 

Vigilant Guardian ranks among the four principal exercises held yearly by NORAD. Most of these exercises include a hijack scenario. ^[18] Ken Merchant, NORAD’s joint exercise design manager, testified before the 9/11 Commission in 2003 that he could not “remember a time in the last 33 years when NORAD has not run a hijack exercise.” ^[19] 

The 9/11 commission had this to say about Vigilant Guardian: “On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union.” This is a deliberately misleading definition of the drill in question. The 9/11 commission continues: “We investigated whether military preparedness for the large-scale exercise compromised the military’s response to the real-world terrorist attack on 9/11. According to NORAD supremo General Eberhart, ‘it took about 30 seconds to make the adjustment to the real-world situation.’ (9/11 commission, Ralph Eberhart testimony, June 17, 2020). We found that the response was, if anything, expedited by the increased number of staff at the sectors and at NORAD because of the scheduled exercise. See Robert Marr interview (Jan. 23, 2004)” (911 commission 458 n. 116) Eberhart’s braggadocio was transparent, and the commission’s verdict was a lie.  

On the morning of September 11, the staff of NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, were preparing to carry out a Vigilant Guardian drill based on a plane hijacking scenario. Here is one example of the profound confusion engendered by the simultaneous occurrence of drill and real emergency: 

FAA: Hi. Boston Center TMU [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out. 

NEADS: [Staff Sergeant Jeremy Powell, Air National Guard] Is this real-world or exercise? 

FAA: No, this is not an exercise, not a test. (9/11 commission report 20) 

Here is the same scene of confusion at NEADS as described from the standpoint of another participant. This was Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins, the regional mission crew chief for the Vigilant Guardian exercise, who worked alongside Col. Marr and Major Kevin Nasypany, whom we will meet later:

On Sept. 11, as Americans watched horror rain upon New York and Washington, command teams at a little-known military outpost in Rome, N.Y., worked feverishly to restore safe skies and rouse a slumbering homeland defense.

At the Northeast Air Defense Sector, radar operators who constantly scan the continent’s boundaries suddenly faced a threat from within and a race they could not win.

Four months after the terrorist attacks, there are still untold stories. This is one.

6 A.M.: WAR GAMES

Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins figured it would be a long day.

Sept. 11 was Day II of “Vigilant Guardian,” an exercise that would pose an imaginary crisis to North American Air Defense outposts nationwide. The simulation would run all week, and Deskins, starting her 12-hour shift in the Operations Center as the NORAD unit’s airborne control and warning officer, might find herself on the spot.

Day I of the simulation had moved slowly. She hoped the exercise gathered steam. It made a long day go faster.

8:40 A.M.: REAL WORLD

In the Ops Center, three rows of radar scopes face a high wall of wide-screen monitors. Supervisors pace behind technicians who peer at the instruments. Here it is always quiet, always dark, except for the green radar glow.

At 8:40, Deskins noticed senior technician Jeremy Powell waving his hand. Boston Center was on the line, he said. It had a hijacked airplane.

“It must be part of the exercise,” Deskins thought.

At first, everybody did. Then Deskins saw the glowing direct phone line to the Federal Aviation Administration.

On the phone she heard the voice of a military liaison for the FAA’s Boston Center.

“I have a hijacked aircraft,” he told her.

Three minutes later, the drill was still a factor of confusion for Lt. Deskins in the form of a simulated hijacked plane heading for JFK Airport in New York City:

Deskins ran to a nearby office and phoned 1st Air Force Chief Public Affairs Officer Major Don Arias in Florida. She said NEADS had a hijacked plane now, not the simulation likely heading for JFK.

“The entire floor sensed something wrong,” Chief of Operations Control Lt. Col. Ian Sanderson said. “The way this unfolded, everybody had a gut sense this wasn’t right.” [20] 

It is not clear from this account whether the “simulation” in question was an artificial radar blip inserted on the NEADS screens, or an actual aircraft (piloted or remote controlled) going towards the New York airport. A hijacked plane headed for JFK might represent the original scenario for Vigilant Guardian that day - the pretend hijacking that was superseded by real hijackings. 

VIGILANT GUARDIAN: KAMIKAZE AIRLINER, WMD AT UN HEADQUARTERS 

NORAD (NEADS) Exercises, October 16 and October 23, 2020: this drill had a scenario of a kamikaze airliner crashing into United Nations Headquarters, New York City, followed by an airborne WMD attack on the UN. 

There were two scenarios, one each for October 16 and October 23, 2020 as part of NORAD’s annual Vigilant Guardian drill. All of NORAD, including its Northeast Air Defense Sector based in Rome, New York, took part in this exercise. JCS chief General Richard Myers (USAF) testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on August 17, 2020 about the scenario used in the October 16 drill: “Due to recent arrests involving illegal drug trafficking in Maine, an individual steals a Federal Express plane and plans a suicide attack into the United Nations building in New York City.” [21] Meyers then told the senator that the October 23 exercise assumed “weapons of mass destruction directed at the United Nations. An individual steals a Federal Express aircraft and plans a suicide attack on the United Nations building in New York City.” [22]

NORAD (NEADS) exercise, September 6, 2020: Terrorists hijack an airliner going from Japan to Alaska and threaten to explode it, probably over a city, probably as part of Vigilant Guardian. The Complete 9/11 Timeline finds that this drill 

…involves the hijacking of a Boeing 747 bound from Tokyo, Japan, to Anchorage, Alaska. According to a document later produced by the 9/11 Commission, the scenario involves the “[t]hreat of harm to [the plane’s] passengers and possibly [a] large population within [the] US or Canada.” It includes what is apparently a fictitious Asian terrorist group called “Mum Hykro,” which is threatening to “rain terror from the skies onto a major US city unless the US declares withdrawal from Asian conflict.” During the hijacking scenario, some of the plane’s passengers are killed. The plane’s course is changed to take it to Vancouver, Canada, and then to San Francisco, California. (9/11 Commission: NORAD Exercises: Hijack Summary, 2004) [23] 

NORAD (NEADS) drill, September 6, 2020. This exercise is also thought to be a part of Vigilant Guardian; in this scenario, 

… 10 members of another fictitious terrorist group, “Lin Po,” seize control of a Boeing 747 bound from Seoul, South Korea, to Anchorage. The hijackers have weapons on board that were smuggled onto the plane in small tote bags by ground crew members prior to takeoff. Gas containers were also smuggled onto the aircraft by baggage handlers before takeoff. Arming devices are attached to these containers, which can be remotely detonated. The terrorist group issues demands and threatens to blow up the plane if these are not met. The CIA and NSA caution that the group has the means and motivation to carry out a chemical and biological attack. The group kills two of the plane’s passengers and threatens to use the gas it has on board in some manner. In response to the simulated hijacking, NORAD directs fighter jets to get in a position to shoot down the hijacked airliner, and orders [Alaska region] to intercept and shadow it. In the scenario, the 747 eventually lands in Seattle, Washington. (9/11 Commission: NORAD Exercises: Hijack Summary, 2004) [24] 

NORAD (NEADS) Exercise, September 9, 2020: Terrorists hijack a jet coming from Great Britain and threaten to blow it up over New York City. This drill was carried out by NEADS of Rome, New York, and is thought to belong to the Vigilant Guardian series. 

In the scenario, the fictitious hijackers take over a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 aircraft bound from London to JFK International Airport in New York…. the terrorist hijackers have explosives on the plane and “plan to detonate them over NYC.” As the scenario plays out, a “Blue Force” is able to divert the hijacked aircraft. When the terrorists then realize they are not near New York, they “detonate [the] explosives over land near the divert location.” There are no survivors. (9/11 Commission: NORAD Exercises: Hijack Summary, 2004) [25] 

NORAD (SEADS) drill, September 10, 2020: Cubans hijack a Cuban airliner coming from Havana and demand political asylum in New York. This drill was assigned to the Southeast Air Defense Sector (SEADS), Panama City, Florida. In this exercise, “…hijackers take over an Ilyushin IL-62 jet airliner that took off from Havana, Cuba. The hijackers, who are “demanding political asylum, demand to be taken to” New York City, according to a document later produced by the 9/11 Commission. As the scenario plays out, the FAA requests support from NORAD. The FAA directs the plane toward Jacksonville, Florida, but the hijackers then demand to be taken to Atlanta, Georgia. Finally, the hijacked plane lands safely at Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia.” (9/11 Commission: NORAD Exercises: Hijack Summary, 2004) [26] 

NORAD in general and the NEADS personnel in particular had thus held several hijack drills over the days just before 9/11- two on September 6, 2001, and one on September 9. By the time they were getting ready for the September 11 drill, they had become inured to drills. But the next drill was destined to go live, when some of them least expected it. 

Vigilant Warrior, a NORAD drill: This drill was identified by Richard Clarke in his memoir. The “warrior” designation is taken to mean that this drill was under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military leaders. Here is Clarke’s narrative: 

“I turned to the Pentagon screen. ‘JCS, JCS. I assume NORAD has scrambled fighters and AWACS. How many? Where?’ 

‘Not a pretty picture, Dick.’ Dick Meyers, himself a fighter pilot, knew that the days when we had scores of fighters on strip alert had ended with the Cold War. ‘We are in the middle of Vigilant Warrior, a NORAD exercise, but…Otis has launched two birds toward New York. Langley is trying to get two up now. The AWACS are at Tinker and not on alert’ Otis was an Air National Guard base on Cape Cod. Langley Air Force Base was outside Norfolk, Virginia. Tinker AFB, home to all of America’s flying radar stations, was in Oklahoma.” 

‘Okay, how long to CAP over DC?’ Combat Air Patrol, CAP, was something we were used to placing over Iraq, not over our nation’s capital. 

‘Fast as we can. Fifteen minutes?’ Myers asked, looking at the generals and colonels around him. It was now 9:28.” (Clarke 5) 

Myers was an accomplished actor, as he later showed at the 9/11 Commission hearings. At the same time, fighter interceptors were sent far away, to Alaska, northern Canada, Iceland, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Three of those that remained were sent to North Carolina for the morning. As a result of these movements, two thirds of the Langley AFB fighter plane contingent, the closest to Washington, was outside of the US on 9/11. 

Operation Northern Vigilance: NORAD deployed fighters to Alaska and northern Canada allegedly to counter ongoing Russian bomber drill. [27] 

Operation Northern Vigilance undoubtedly reduced the number of interceptors available to defend the lower 48. Northern Vigilance was supposedly mounted by NORAD to counter a Russian maneuver going on at the same time. It could have been planned in advance, provided the timing of the Russian drill had also been known in advance. It was announced publicly in a NORAD press release of September 9, 2020 under the headline “NORAD Maintains Northern Vigilance.” NORAD stated: 

CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN AFS, Colo. - The North American Aerospace Defense Command shall deploy fighter aircraft as necessary to Forward Operating Locations (FOLS) in Alaska and Northern Canada to monitor a Russian air force exercise in the Russian arctic and North Pacific ocean. “NORAD is the eyes and ears of North America and it is our mission to ensure that our air sovereignty is maintained,” said Lieutenant-General Ken Pennie, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of NORAD. “Although it is highly unlikely that Russian aircraft would purposely violate Canadian or American airspace, our mission of vigilance must be sustained.” NORAD-allocated forces will remain in place until the end of the Russian exercise. NORAD conducted operation Northern Denial from December 1 to 14, 2000 in response to a similar, but smaller scale, Russian deployment of long-range bombers at northern Russian air bases. NORAD-allocated forces were deployed to three FOLS, two in Alaska and one in Canada. More than 350 American and Canadian military men and women were involved in the deployment. 

It is not known exactly how many planes moved north. 

Northern Guardian: This was actual air defense; not a drill. From late August to early December 2001, fighter planes from Langley Air Force Base (Virginia) deployed to Keflavik AFB, Iceland, allegedly to counter Russian strategic bombers. [28] 

Red Flag Exercise, Nevada: On September 11, most of the F-15s of the 71st Fighter Squadron Stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, were also away from the nation’s capital due to their participation in the Red Flag exercise held in Nevada between late August and September 17, 2001. [29] 

According to the Complete 9/11 Timeline: 

Red Flag is a realistic combat training exercise that involves the air forces of the US and its allies. It is managed by the Air Warfare Center through the 414th Combat Training Squadron. Most of the aircraft and personnel that are deployed for Red Flag are part of the exercise’s “Blue Forces,” which use various tactics to attack targets that are defended by an enemy “Red Force,” which electronically simulates anti-aircraft artillery, surface-to-air missiles, and electronic jamming equipment. A variety of aircraft are involved in the exercise. Red Flag is held four times a year at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. It is usually composed of two or three two-week periods. The current exercise began on August 11, and involves more than 100 pilots in total. The timing of the Red Flag exercise may reduce the ability of the District of Columbia Air National Guard (DCANG) to respond to the 9/11 attacks. The 121st Fighter Squadron is stationed at Andrews Air Force Base, which is located 10 miles southeast of Washington, DC. [30] 

Local exercise of Andrews AFB, near Washington DC: Three F-16s were sent to North Carolina for air to ground training mission. This took them away from the national capital airspace. [31] 

FAA HIJACK DRILLS, 2000-2001: “PRETTY DAMN CLOSE TO THE [9/11] PLOT” 

John Hawley of the Federal Aeronautics Administration’s intelligence division and FAA liaison to the State Department told the 9/11 commission that some FAA drill scenarios tried out in December 2000 were “pretty damn close to [the] 9/11 plot.” He added that “one of the scenarios may have had something to do with a chartered flight out of Ohio that had turned the transponder off.” Hawley thought such scenarios “really forced you to think outside the box.” Hawley testified that FAA Security Director Mike Canavan was the official who ran these scenarios. (9/11 Commission, October 8, 2020) [32] 

FAA Exercise, summer 2001, featured a Varig airliner of Brazilian origin being hijacked over Florida. The Complete 9/11 Timeline provides the following details: 

The FAA takes part in a training exercise based around the hijacking of a Boeing 767, the same kind of aircraft as those that hit the Twin Towers on 9/11. The exercise is conducted as part of efforts to update the strategy for dealing with hijackings. Its participants include the FAA, the FBI’s Miami field office, Miami-Dade County Police Department, a SWAT team, and Varig Airlines, and it utilizes a 767. Further details are unknown, but the hijacking exercise presumably takes place somewhere in the Miami area of Florida…. (9/11 commission, September 15, 2020) [33] 

Were actors employed in these drills? Was Mohammed Atta, or any of the other 9/11 patsies, among the participants? 

Canavan, in his testimony to the 9/11 commission, denied that there had ever been US exercises in which a commercial airliner was used as a weapon. Standard procedure was that, in case of a hijacking, the FAA had to call the Pentagon to request assistance. But this was not done, as the 9/11 commission noted. The Complete 9/11 Timeline points out that FAA security director “Mike Canavan, who would normally be the FAA’s hijack coordinator, is away in Puerto Rico this morning, and it is unclear who—if anyone—is standing in for him in this critical role.” [34]

And just who was this Canavan? He was a former Army lieutenant general - of Special Forces. According to New York journalist Pete Hamill, Canavan “spent 34 years in the U.S. Army, enlisting during Vietnam and serving much of his time with Special Forces - not a very reassuring resume. He worked on special operations in northern Iraq, Liberia and Bosnia, and when he retired, had risen to the rank of three-star general.” There are many grave problems with Canavan’s role on 9/11, and with his absurd testimony that there had never been a drill using commercial airliners as weapons - when this had been drilled repeatedly. Canavan either quit or was fired by the FAA in October 2001. [35] 

AMALGAM VIRGO 

Amalgam Virgo 2002 was a multi-agency, live-fly homeland security exercise sponsored by NORAD. One of the military officers who had been responsible for organizing Amalgam Virgo ‘01 was Colonel Alan Scott. Scott testified on May 23, 2020 at the 9/11 commission hearings: 

...MR. ALAN SCOTT: Yes, sir. Specifically Operation Amalgam Virgo, which I was involved in before I retired, was a scenario using a Third World united - not united - uninhabited aerial vehicle launched off a rogue freighter in the Gulf of Mexico.  

MR. BEN-VENISTE: That was Operation Amalgam Virgo. In fact, this exercise - in this exercise we used actual drones - NQM-107 drones, which are about the size of a cruise missile, to exercise our fighters and our radars in a Gulf of Mexico scenario…. 

MR. BEN-VENISTE: You are referring to Amalgam 01, are you not? 

MR. SCOTT: Yes, sir, Amalgam 01. 

MR. BEN-VENISTE: I am referring to Amalgam 02, which was in the planning stages prior to September 11th, 2001, sir. Is that correct? 

MR. SCOTT: That was after I retired, and I was not involved in 02. 

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Will you accept that the exercise involved a simultaneous hijacking scenario? 

MR. SCOTT: I was not involved in 02. 

GEN. MCKINLEY: Sir, I do have some information on 02, if you would allow me to read it for the record. 

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Please. 

GEN. MCKINLEY: [Reads from briefing book.] Amalgam Virgo in general, 02, was an exercise created to focus on peacetime and contingency NORAD missions. One of the peacetime scenarios that is and has been a NORAD mission for years is support to other government departments. Within this mission falls hijackings. Creativity of the designer aside, prior motivations were based on political objectives - i.e., asylum or release of captured prisoners or political figures. Threats of killing hostages or crashing were left to the script writers to invoke creativity and broaden the required response of the players. 

What this means is that the scenario papers prepared for the officers participating in the drill by collaborating writers included crashing airborne vehicles into targets; these papers were evidently an integral part of the drill. McKinley is explicitly acknowledging that the drills did indeed include the concept of aircraft being used as weapons. Ben-Veniste, feigning not to understand this, thought McKinley’s answer was “fatuous,” and added ironically “It wasn’t in the minds of script writers when the Algerians had actually hijacked the plane, when they were attempting to fly into the Eiffel Tower….Don’t you agree we could have been better prepared?” [36] But Amalgam Virgo was not fatuous, it was sinister. Here was an exercise which included some key elements which were put into practice on 9/11. Amalgam Virgo thus provided the witting putschists with a perfect cover for conduiting the actual live fly components of 9/11 through a largely non-witting military bureaucracy. Under the cover of this confusion, the most palpably subversive actions could be made to appear in the harmless and even beneficial guise of a drill. In addition, a red herring was built in for the purpose of confusing investigators arriving after the fact: the hijacked planes involved were generally imagined as coming outside of the United States. But even that covering detail was dubious. 

Amalgam Virgo 2002: This was to be a large-scale deployment of real aircraft for air defense, interception, surveillance, and pursuit. The scenario called for a Delta Boeing 757 with actual Delta pilots, and actors posing as passengers, to fly from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Honolulu, Hawaii. It was to be “hijacked” by FBI agents posing as terrorists. A DC-9 was to be hijacked by Canadian police near Vancouver BC. All this was scheduled for June 2002. [37] 

These exercises came up again in the April 2004 hearings of the 9/11 commission. In her much-touted appearance, NSC director Condoleezza Rice repeated her well-known and discredited contention that the White House had not contemplated hijacked airliners being used as weapons. Bush himself had chimed in, asserting that “Nobody in our government, at least, and I don’t think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.” As the hearings showed, during the two years before the 9/11 attacks, NORAD conducted exercises using hijacked airliners as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. Another scenario involved crashing an airliner into the Pentagon, but this was not conducted after the Defense Department objected that it was too unrealistic. But it was done as a staff exercise - one might say, as a rehearsal. Perhaps it was realistic, but too revealing. 

A NORAD statement issued in April 2004 confirmed that “Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft. These exercises test and track detention and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures.” According to NORAD, these were regional drills, not regularly scheduled continent-wide drills. (USA Today, April 18, 2004) Not surprisingly, there is absolutely no mention of Amalgam Virgo in the final report of the 9/11 commission. 

MULTIPLE EXERCISES CREATE CHAOS 

For the low-level, non-witting subjectively loyal NEADS personnel, everything was vastly complicated by the endless confusion between drill and reality. This is reflected in the initial exchange of Sergeant Powell cited above; after which we have this exchange among other NEADS staffers: 

8:37:56 WATSON: What? DOOLEY: Whoa! WATSON: What was that? ROUNTREE: Is that real-world? DOOLEY: Real-world hijack. WATSON: Cool! 

The question of drill or reality is repeated many times during these conversations. Later another NEADS staffer comments: 08:43:06 FOX: I've never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise. Major Mark Nasypany of NEADS at one point exclaimed “Somebody started the exercise early — the hijack's not supposed to be for another hour.” Here we are very close to the heart of the matter: the events of 9/11 in fact represent a hijack drill which has gone live, and has turned into a real hijack. 

As the crisis worsened, this same officer attempted some grim humor: 08:57:11 NASYPANY: Think we put the exercise on the hold. What do you think? [Laughter.] Another NEADS staffer complains about a fake blip on his radar screen: 09:04:50—I think this is a damn input, to be honest. The NEADS staffers were also much confused about American 11, probably due to the fact that there were at least two American 11s airborne. [38] 

NOT NORMAL COMMERCIAL AVIATION, BUT DRILLS GONE WILD 

Using documentation from press reports, Woody Box et al. concluded that two distinct aircraft took off from Boston on the morning of September under the designation of American Flight 11. “Where did Flight 11 start?” writes Box. “There are two answers: Gate 26 and Gate 32. And both answers resist any attempt to refute them.” American 11’s departure was regularly scheduled for 7:45 AM from Terminal B, Gate 32 of Boston’s Logan Airport. This was American 11’s departure gate on 9/11, as shown in a transcript of radio communications between American 11 and the Logan tower published in the New York Times: “7:45:48 — Ground Control 1: American eleven heavy Boston ground gate thirty two you’re going to wait for a Saab to go by then push back” (New York Times, October 16, 2020) But many press reports indicate that passengers on American 11 embarked at Gate 26 (Washington Post, September 15, 2001, and other newspapers) Gate 26 is located in another wing of Terminal B, and is about 1000 feet away from Gate 32. Gate 26 is the majority view. 

One paper, the Boston Globe, mentioned both gates on successive days. In an extra of the Boston Globe published on September 11, we find: “One airport employee, who asked not to be identified, said the American flight left on time from Gate 32 in Terminal B, and that nothing unusual was apparent.” One day later, in the Boston Globe article entitled “Crashes in NYC had grim origins at Logan,” we read: “The American flight left from Gate 26 in Terminal B, and the United flight from Gate 19 in Terminal C. One airport employee said nothing unusual was apparent when the American flight left.” Was this the same employee as the day before? The Gate 26 flight pushed back later than its scheduled departure time of 7:45 AM. 

Was one of these two flights a dummy flight, a decoy being used in one of the live fly hijacking exercises described above? Did its unannounced presence contribute even more to the confusion that reigned in US airspace on the morning of 9/11? Or was there some other, more devious purpose? 

There are also reports of another mystery flight landing in Cleveland. And then there is a cryptic remark by Richard Clarke in his White House narrative of the morning of 9/11. Clarke reports hearing: “We have a report of a large jet crashed in Kentucky, near the Ohio line.” (Clarke 13) 

DRILL SUPERVISION AND COORDINATION? 

Who in the Pentagon coordinates military maneuvers, be they of the command post or live fly variety? There must be some focal point where alternative dates are weighed, conflicts foreseen, and the need of maintaining a minimum distribution of assets so as not to compromise defense capabilities calculated. Whatever office in the bowels of the Pentagon does this, it is an urgent candidate for being swept for the presence of moles. However, even these insights do not by any means explain the failure to deploy fighter interceptors on 9/11. Any military commander would have realized that all available assets had to be scrambled, at the latest by the point at which the second WTC tower was hit. In particular, any military commander would have been alert to the imminent threat of the decapitation of the national command structure centered in Washington. All the commanders running the show had been schooled in the Cold War, when a Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile detonating over Washington was regarded as the most plausible overture for the third world war. The eight lanes of superhighway leading from Washington DC to Dulles Airport are monuments to the all-encompassing concern of the US federal bureaucracy for its center in Washington. The autonomic reaction of the military establishment would normally have been to place at least one pair of jets over Washington, whatever else was done or not done. The fact that even this was not done until well after the Pentagon had been hit indicates a remarkable density of moles at high levels of the US command structures. 

The NEADS operational commander that day, Colonel Bob Marr, did not concentrate his assets over Washington, nor did he take measures to defend New York. At a certain point Col. Marr received a request to send two planes from Langley Air Force Base to New York City, but Marr refused this. He ordered the fighters to be ready, but not to launch. Marr’s absurd excuse: "The problem there would have been I'd have all my fighters in the air at the same time, which means they'd all run out of gas at the same time." Marr later explained. When these fighters were finally launched, they went out eastward over the Atlantic Ocean to a training zone called Whiskey 386, and not towards Washington DC, which was clearly threatened. Col. Marr is one of many NORAD Air Force Officers whose role in the 9/11 coup has aroused suspicion. 

Air Force generals working for NORAD were guilty of numerous counts of perjury before the 9/11 commission. Kean and Hamilton convened a secret meeting of their staff to discuss possible criminal referrals for perjury, but decided to do nothing. “The Sept. 11 commission, which uncovered the inconsistencies in the Pentagon’s account, made a formal request in July 2004 for the inspector general to investigate why senior military officials who testified to the commission had made so many inaccurate statements.” The Defense Department Inspector General, William P. Goehring, predictably came back with a whitewash. [39] 

CRUISE MISSILE OR PILOTLESS PLANE ATTACK ON PENTAGON 

It has long been clear to all serious observers that no commercial airliner struck the Pentagon, but most likely a cruise missile or drone aircraft, quite possibly supplemented by explosions within the building. The scenario for Positive Force 2001, which included hijacking a commercial airliner and flying it into the Pentagon, is said to have been developed by a team of officers of the Army Special Forces command (SOCOM) who are trained to “think like terrorists.” It would be interesting to know a great deal more about this group, and what further directions their terrorist-style thinking may have taken, this may be a group of moles who can also function as technicians. [40] 

The military exercise called Amalgam Virgo 2001 bore a close relationship to certain events of 9/11, especially to the events at the Pentagon. Amalgam Virgo was a military drill that had to do with hijacked airliners, sometimes from inside the United States, and sometimes with airborne vehicles used as weapons. [41] A cruise missile was included at least once. The best working hypothesis is that Amalgam Virgo was the cover story under which the 9/11 strike on Pentagon advanced through the bureaucracy. Preparations for carrying out this key aspect of 9/11 were conducted under the cover of being preparations for Amalgam Virgo. Most of those who took part in Amalgam Virgo could hardly have been aware of this duplicity. 

Amalgam Virgo 2001: NORAD, SEADS. In this US-Canada multi-agency drill held June 1-2, 2001, the scenario involves a Third World uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) [42] most likely an NQM-107 drone launched from a rogue freighter in the Gulf of Mexico or a cruise missile from a barge in Atlantic Ocean. In the summary of the Complete 9/11 Timeline, this “exercise takes place at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. Drones simulating cruise missiles are launched from Tyndall, head out to sea, circle a ship as if they are being launched from there, and then head back to land. Air Force F-16s, Navy gunners, and Army missile defense units attempt to find and track the drones. The Coast Guard attempts to catch the ship serving as the dummy launch site.” In another scenario drilled, a Haitian man suffering from AIDS crashes a small plane into the SEADS headquarters at Tyndall AFB. (Col. Alan Scott, 9/11 commission, May 23, 2003, American Forces Press Service, June 4, 2002). [43] 

Amalgam Virgo 2001 represents a close approximation of what actually occurred at the Pentagon: its scenario of a rogue launch of a cruise missile of unmanned aerial vehicle against a land target in the US looks like the vehicle for the cruise missile or drone. Such a vehicle could have been launched from an air launcher at very high or very low altitude, or from a ground launcher, or perhaps from a ship or barge on a body of water, be it one of the Great Lakes, a river, etc. It could even have been launched from a submarine or other underwater location in Lake Erie, etc. The Amalgam Virgo 2001 program prepared by NORAD features a photograph of Osama Bin Laden on its front cover; the back cover shows an aircraft flying west to east towards a line across the United States which ends at the dome of the US Capitol building in Washington DC. These materials were published well before 9/11. 

Positive Force 2001, April 17-26, 2001: This was a worldwide exercise by a dozen agencies, including NORAD, to drill plans for “continuity of operations” (or COG) to maintain ability to respond under attack; includes “a series of simulated attacks against the maritime, surface and aviation sectors.” 

Continuity of operations, or continuity of government (COG), refers to the secret programs which aim at maintaining the US national command authority intact and functioning under extreme conditions of surprise attack and the like. It has long been suspected of providing a cover story for the installation of a military regime or other dictatorship. The Complete 9/11 Timeline reports that the Positive Force series is based on “various scenarios, including non-combatant evacuation operations, cyber attacks, rail disruption, and power outages. It includes ‘a series of simulated attacks against the maritime, surface and aviation sectors” of America’s national security transportation infrastructure.’” 

Of decided relevance to 9/11 is the following: 

One of the scenarios that was considered for this exercise involved “a terrorist group hijack[ing] a commercial airliner and fly[ing] it into the Pentagon.” But the proposed scenario, thought up by a group of Special Operations personnel trained to think like terrorists, was rejected. Joint Staff action officers and White House officials said the additional scenario is either “too unrealistic” or too disconnected to the original intent of the exercise. [44] 

One original scenario involved “a terrorist group hijack[ing] a commercial airliner and fly[ing] it into the Pentagon,” but this was allegedly rejected by the Joint Staff as “too unrealistic.” [45] 

PLANES IMPACTING SKYSCRAPERS 

A central theme of 9/11 was crashing airliners into skyscrapers. This vital component of the 9/11 orchestration had been thoroughly drilled in the decade before 9/11, and was being drilled in the very hour that it actually happened. 

NORAD Exercise (no code name known) simulated a kamikaze crash into US building: Between 1991 and 2001, one of the NORAD regions simulates a foreign hijacked airliner crashing into a prominent but undisclosed building in the United States. [46] 

White House training exercise (no code name known) chaired by terror czar Richard Clarke, 1998: anti-US terrorists load a Lear jet with explosives, and seek to strike Washington DC in a suicide attack. [47] 

NORAD Exercises, 1999 -2001: “In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties… numerous types of civilian and military aircraft” were used as mock hijacked aircraft,” One target is the World Trade Center. [48] 

National Reconnaissance Office Drill, Chantilly, Virginia: "Top U.S. Intelligence Agency was to simulate plane crash into government building on September 11, 2001. U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.” [49] 

The National Reconnaissance Office drill simulated an airplane crashing into the headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Chantilly, Virginia, near Dulles Airport. It meant that the employees of the NRO were evacuated from their buildings just as the 9/11 attacks were actually taking place. The NRO was a super-secret agency responsible for spy satellites and other eavesdropping from space. It was created in 1960, and its existence was not officially acknowledged for some 32 years. The NRO draws its personnel from the military and the Central Intelligence Agency and has a budget equal to the combined budgets of both the CIA and the National Security Agency. On 11 September 2001, the NRO director was Keith R. Hall, who had headed the agency since 1996. In his capacity as DNRO, Hall was responsible for the acquisition and operation of all United States space-based reconnaissance and intelligence systems. At the same time Hall also served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space. Booz Allen Hamilton was reportedly a prominent subcontractor for the NRO. The obvious effect of evacuating the NRO was at least temporarily to blind institutional US intelligence to events which could have been monitored from space. NRO could have provided a real time view of the air space over North America; as a result of the evacuation, this may not have been available. The advantages for the perpetrators are obvious. 

Great interest naturally attaches to the NRO drill, since it corresponds in real time to the airplanes which impacted the World Trade center. The NRO is a co-production of CIA, NSA, and the rest of the US intelligence community; its task is to maintain US spy satellites. It is accordingly well able to follow the movements of airliners without recourse to radars of any kind. With the help of Global Hawk drone technology, it could also steer these airliners by remote control. This drill was under the command of John Fulton, the chief of the NRO’s strategic war gaming office, and his CIA cohorts. The organizers claim that “as soon as the real world events began, we cancelled the exercise,” and the NRO’s 3,000 personnel were told to go home - an extremely unlikely scenario for a country supposedly under foreign attack. What happened in the NRO buildings after the employees had left? Did a skeleton crew remain? The guess here is that, with parts of the NRO building possibly empty, flying planes into buildings kept going as flying planes into buildings - in Manhattan. 

AIRLINE CRASHES, COLLAPSING BUILDINGS IN NEW YORK CITY 

The collapse of buildings was also the object of a drill which had been recently held in New York City. This time the sponsor was not the federal government, but the City of New York under the adventurer Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. 

Red Ex was a “Recognition, Evaluation, and Decision-Making Exercise, ”New York City: It was a scenario of plane crashes and building collapses drilled by the NYC Office of Emergency Management (OEM), Fire Department of New York (FDNY), New York City Police Department (NYPD), FBI, FEMA, May 11, 2001. [50] 

Red Ex was the precursor to Tripod II on the part of the Giuliani administration of the City of New York. It drilled the most spectacular aspect of 9/11: the collapse of buildings. It was so realistic that, in the words of one participant, “five minutes into that drill, everybody forgot it was a drill.” According to Richard Sheirer, the New York OEM Director, “Operation RED Ex provided a proving ground and a great readiness training exercise for the many challenges the city routinely faces, such as weather events, heat emergencies, building collapses, fires, and public safety and health issues.” Later, Giuliani’s corrupt crony Bernard Kerick, the New York Police Commissioner (who was too dirty to become Secretary of Homeland Security, and was later jailed), told the 9/11 Commission that among the emergencies the city prepared for were specifically “building collapses” and “plane crashes.” [51] Here is the perfect vehicle and cover for the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers and Building Seven of the World Trade Center, otherwise demonstrated by the work of Professor Steven Jones. More research is needed to determine exactly how the simulation of building collapses might be linked to the proven reality of controlled demolition. 

A related question is whether New York Mayor Giuliani’s advance knowledge that the towers would collapse derived from Red Ex, Tripod II, or some other drill. There is no doubt that Giuliani had advanced warning that the towers would fall. The Mayor told Peter Jennings of ABC news on the afternoon of 9/11: “I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barclay Street, which was right there, with the police commissioner, the fire commissioner, the head of emergency management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building, so we were trapped in the building for ten, 15 minutes, and finally found an exit and got out, walked north, and took a lot of people with us.” [52] 

Of course, hundreds of office workers, cops, firemen, and others in the South Tower never got the warning that Giuliani said he received. Instead, they were told to stay put, and many of them died. Loud speakers announced: “Our building is secure. You can go back to your floor. If you’re a little winded, you can get a drink of water or coffee in the cafeteria.” [53] 

Why was Giuliani warned, and not these office workers? Giuliani was confronted in the Bronx on May 31, 2020 by Sabrina Rivera, a truth activist whose boyfriend’s father was a fireman who died on 9/11. She asked Giuliani why he and his staff had received a special warning that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were going to collapse, when the people in the buildings never got that warning. Giuliani’s response contradicted everything he has ever said about 9/11 - he denied that he had ever received a warning that the twin towers were going to come down. We never though the towers would implode, stammered Giuliani. [54] 

RECRUITMENT AND MANAGEMENT OF PATSIES 

And what of the indispensable scapegoats and fall-guys, the patsies? We must stress again, as always, that no positive proofs makes any of the canonical 19 patsies accused by the FBI a participant, accomplice, or accessory to 9/11. But let us assume for the sake of argument that there were indeed patsies on board aircraft which were hijacked and which crashed into the World Trade Center. Here we may be dealing with professional FBI provocateurs or with human assets of intelligence agencies like the CIA, persons who had been used in the past for spying, assassinations, terrorism, destabilization, or related activities. But the 9/11 patsies may also have been bit players of walk-on parts belonging to itinerant troupes of actors whose job was to simulate terrorists and hijackers in the incessant drills which filled the yearly calendar of the US armed forces and intelligence agencies — actors who thought that their 9/11 gig, whatever it was going to be, was just another day’s work of terrorist simulation. 

Able Danger: A co-production of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the US Special Operations Command at MacDill AFB of Florida, and the Army Land Warfare Information Activity (LIWA). [55] Several other operations are thought to belong to the Able Danger complex, including: 

Stratus Ivy: Defense Intelligence Agency Project, linked to Able Danger. According to Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, Stratus Ivy was located in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Stratus Ivy was reportedly tasked “to take on ‘out of the box’ ideas, and develop them into real intelligence operations.” [56] How far out of the box did they go? 

Door Hop Galley: Super-secret cell, possibly inside Able Danger; still classified. [57] 

Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group (P2OG): Designed to dupe al Qaida into undertaking operations it is not prepared for and thereby exposing its personnel; this task of manipulation made this operation one of de facto terrorist controller. P2OG was supposed to “conduct secret operations aimed at “stimulating reactions” among terrorists and states suspected of possessing weapons of mass destruction.” [58] P2OG became an object of public discussion in August, 2002, but these initial reports may represent the outing of an operation which had already existed for some time. 

ABLE DANGER: 2.5 TERABYTES OF TREASON 

Able Danger is the best candidate so far to fulfill the role of terrorist controllers, case officers, and monitors for the patsies. According to Congressman Curt Weldon (Republican of Pennsylvania) at his landmark press conference of August 12, 2005, Able Danger was tasked not just to track terrorists, but also to “manipulate, degrade or destroy the global Al-Qaeda infrastructure.” [59] If Able Danger chose the “manipulate” option, then they were ipso facto terrorist controllers, since manipulation is the essence of the case officer in his relation with the patsy he is running. An educated guess is therefore that some Able Danger personnel might have been charged with tracking the patsies, while others directed them. These latter functions might have been located in Door Hop Galley, the most secretive part of the complex, about which little is known. Able Danger was part of a complex of related operations. It was linked to Stratus Ivy of the DIA. In the words of Stratus Ivy commander Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer’s testimony, this unit is supposed to “to take on ‘out of the box’ ideas, and develop them into real intelligence operations.” According to published reports, a key part of Able Danger was a chart or collection featuring photographs of Mohamed Atta, Marwan Alshehhi, Khalid Almihdhar, and Nawaf Alhazmi — all principal patsies — kept on an office wall by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Lambert, the Special Forces Command Intelligence chief; these were marked with a post-it note warning that the identity of the patsy was not to be divulged to the FBI. [60] 

Congressman Weldon revealed on September 15, 2020 that the Pentagon had destroyed 2.5 terabytes of data collected by Able Danger data mining (equivalent to one quarter of the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library) in May-June 2000, with more data being destroyed in March 2001 and spring 2004. Congressman Weldon was defeated for re-election to the House of Representatives in 2006 by a series Department of Justice leaks about alleged criminal activity by himself and his family, followed by an FBI raid on his daughter’s home and reports of a grand jury being empanelled to investigate him just before the elections. No indictment of Weldon has since been forthcoming, suggesting that there never was probable cause; this represents the classic method of character assassination used by the intelligence community to silence maverick politicians, as we have seen in the case of Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli, who had demanded an immediate and serious probe of 9/11. 

ABLE WARRIOR AND ABLE DANGER 

Able Warrior is identified by Arkin [61] as the main yearly anti-terror exercise of the Army Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Military exercises often come in binary pairs of attacker and defender, with one representing the US side and the other the enemy. If Able Warrior represents SOCOM, the need may well arise for a group of plausible-looking terrorists to represent the enemy, figures deemed acceptable in terms of the racist stereotypes prevalent in the Pentagon of the late twentieth century: they would not be six foot tall musclemen with blond hair and blue eyes; they would need to be dark-skinned, swarthy Arabs or other Moslems. This would mean in practice a troupe of actors who could also be used as double agents in drills, and indeed as expendable patsies in terror attacks. Mohammed Atta was surely central casting’s ideal model of a terrorist, building on such earlier Arab stereotypes as Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik (1921), who was famous for his riveting and unforgettable gaze. It is known that a number of the accused hijackers had addresses or received training on US military bases, such as the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Defense Language School at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. But this begs the question of an agency to supervise and manage the patsies who, as sociopaths and schizophrenics, needed to be tracked constantly to ensure they were doing what they were told and that they were not getting rounded up. 

INDOCTRINATION OF LOCAL FIRST RESPONDERS AND EMERGENCY PERSONNEL 

Pentagon MASCAL (mass casualties) exercise, Oct. 24-28, 2000: Pentagon and Arlington County, VA first responders assembled in the Secretary of Defense’s conference room in the Pentagon for a mass casualty exercise using a cardboard model of Pentagon and burning model airplane to simulate a “commercial aircraft” hitting Pentagon. [62] 

Fort Belvoir, Virginia MASCAL drill, including Davison Army Airfield helicopter base, June 29, 2001: based on plane hitting Pentagon: Exercise was “designed to enhance the first ready response in dealing with the effects of a terrorist incident involving an explosion.” General Lance Lord of US Air Force Space Command called the similarity of this drill to 9/11 “purely a coincidence, the scenario for that exercise included a plane hitting the building.” [63] 

Mall Strike 2001, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania: this June 16, 2020 drill prepared first responders in the county adjoining Shanksville; the site was Greengate Mall in Hempfield, Pennsylvania. The scenario involved “600 emergency first responders and emergency managers responding to the simulated release of a toxic chemical agent and the simulated release of radiation and radiological contamination.” This drill involved 600 first responders and emergency managers. [64] 

Airport rescue fire fighters class, Fort Meyer, Virginia: Prepares firemen (Pentagon) via “aircraft crash refresher course” for firefighters. The drill participants had the common 9/11 experience of seeing their drill go live: 

At the Education Center at Fort Myer, an army base 1.5 miles northwest of the Pentagon, the base’s firefighters are undertaking training variously described as “an airport rescue firefighters class,” “an aircraft crash refresher class,” “a week-long class on Air Field Fire Fighting,”; and a “training exercise in airport emergency operations.” Despite hearing of the first WTC crash during a break, with no access to a TV, the class simply continues with its training. According to Bruce Surette, who is attending the session: “We had heard some radio transmissions from some other units in Arlington about how they thought they had a plane down here or a plane down there. So you’re thinking, ‘Hey this could be real.’ But it really didn’t strike home as being real until our guy came on the radio and said where the plane crash was.” [65] 

The spring and summer of 2001 at the Pentagon were crowded with first responder drills, with a COG exercise scheduled but reportedly called off in late April, a May training session for medical personnel based on a Boeing 757 hitting the Pentagon, a series of Department of Defense police drills during the summer, and an August MASCAL (mass casualties) exercise supposing a plane hitting the building. Local first responders and emergency workers needed rudimentary training to prepare them for the terror attacks. Above all, they had to be trained to keep inquiring photographers and television cameras as far away as possible from the various crash scenes. This was done from a very early point on in the Pentagon and Shanksville. At the Pentagon, firemen were observed fighting the fire with water, not foam - the opposite of what they would have done in a fire involving jet fuel, but the correct approach to the aftermath of a missile attack. Had they been instructed in advance? It may be objected that first responder drills were a fixture of life in most communities of the United States by 2001, but it is an undeniable fact that these drills were held in all three 9/11 impact sites on the eve of 9/11. 

Tripod II, Manhattan: Response to biochemical attack; this drill prepared an alternative command post for Giuliani: Tripod II was a biological warfare exercise conducted jointly by the US Department of Justice and the City of New York; it was scheduled for September 12, 2001, and formally speaking never took place. Its obvious relevance was to provide a cover for various pre-9/11 activities in New York City. 

It would seem that the code name “Tripod II” was revealed for the first time in testimony by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the 9/11 commission; however, the basic facts about this exercise had been described by Giuliani in his self-serving memoir, Leadership, published in 2002. Here the former Mayor wrote: 

For months, we had in place an exercise in which we’d drill on our response to a biochemical attack, specifically practicing for the distribution of medication. The planned date: Wednesday, September 12. We had stored much of the materials for that drill at Pier 92. Pier 92 offered 125,000 square feet of open space and easy transportation to and from Ground Zero by way of boat and the West Side Highway. Moreover, because it was already in use by the military, the points of access were relatively easy to guard.” (Giuliani 355) 

After Giuliani’s unusable command center in WTC 7 had been destroyed by the inexplicable collapse of that large building, he transferred his command post to Pier 92. The ease of the transition is suspicious in and of itself: had Giuliani known in advance that he would need this fallback option? 

Timely Alert II, held at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, drilled emergency response to a bomb attack. [66] Timely Alert was used to train personnel who later saw service in the attacks on the World Trade Center. 

According to the Complete 9/11 Timeline: “Staff at Fort Monmouth, an Army base in New Jersey located about 50 miles south of New York City, is preparing to hold a “disaster drill” to test emergency response capabilities to a fake chemical attack. The exercise, called Timely Alert II, is to involve various law enforcement agencies and emergency personnel, including Fort Monmouth firefighters and members of the New Jersey State Police. Personnel are to be deployed and measures taken as in a real emergency. A notice has been sent out, warning that anyone not conducting official business will be turned away from Fort Monmouth during the exercise. Soon after 9 a.m., the exercise director tells a group of participating volunteers that a hijacked plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. The participants pretend to be upset, believing this is just part of the simulation. When they see the live televised footage of the WTC attacks, some people at the base think it is an elaborate training video to accompany the exercise. One worker tells a fire department training officer: “You really outdid yourself this time.” … the follow-up exercise held in July 2002 (Timely Alert III) does incorporate simulated television news reports to give participants the impression that the emergency is real. And in the first Timely Alert exercise, held on the base in January 2001, a call had come through of a supposed “real” bomb situation, but this “fortunately turned out to be a report related to a training aid being used during the exercise.” On 9/11, Fort Monmouth is geared to go into high-alert status as part of Timely Alert II. The exercise is called off once the base is alerted to the real attacks Fort Monmouth is home to various Army, Defense Department, and other government agencies. The largest of these is the US Army’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM). CECOM serves to “develop, acquire, field, and sustain superior information technologies and integrated systems for America’s warfighters.” It is tasked with the “critical role of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR).” ^[67] Timely Alert illustrates once again the ambiguities of the grey area between drills and reality. 

POSSIBLE ELIMINATION OF OUTSIDE CONTRACTORS 

The figure of Jack Ruby, who silenced the patsy Lee Harvey Oswald before he could testify and perhaps reveal the real nature of his own role, is by now a classic. In ancient Egypt, it is told, the priests who sealed the sarcophagus of the dead Pharaoh in his burial chamber were immediately massacred by soldiers, and that those soldiers were in turn massacred by a second group of soldiers - all to eliminate witnesses who might have betrayed a vital secret. Such features may well have been included in 9/11. 

WTC Emergency Drill for computer specialists and consultants: this exercise was held in the WTC South Tower, in the 97^th floor offices of Fiduciary Trust Co., at 8 AM on 9/11. Among those present were computer specialists from Oracle Corp. of California; six consultants were reported killed. [68] 

One of the potential problems faced by the 9/11 coup planners was how to silence inherently unreliable outside contractors from the private sector who had been part of the preparations for 9/11, and who might figure out in retrospect how their work had been a part of the terrorist attacks. If they did not share the ideological agenda of the putsch, they might have talked. This drill may represent a way that some of them were liquidated. The tech-heavy passenger list for American 77, which took off from Washington Dulles and disappeared, may also reflect an effort to have some of the unwitting or partially witting contributors to 9/11 get hoist with their own petard. 

SIMULATION OF CELL PHONE CALLS FROM HIJACK VICTIMS 

US Department of Transportation Hijacking Exercise, August 31, 2001: The scenario involved cell phone calls made from a hijacked plane. The DOT Crisis Management Center participated. 

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, one of the most important means used by the US government to indoctrinate the average person to believe the official version of events consisted of claims about cell phone calls allegedly made by hijack victims. The pathos of these calls had immense emotional impact on millions of ordinary people, who immediately identified with the tragic plight of the hapless victims. The allegations made by US official and neocon Theodore Olsen about a phone call from his wife were only the most prominent case. But even this aspect of the 9/11 exercise had been carefully prepared and drilled. 

An integral part of an operation of the scale and importance of 9/11 is the indispensable propaganda function of the controlled corporate media, who in the United States are shot through with witting and unwitting assets of the various intelligence agencies. One of the key problems of a complex synthetic terror event is how to bring it down to the cognitive level of the little people, the mass of stupefied persons whose mental life is populated by celebrities, sports figures, astrology, social media, and the like. These persons do not relate to ideas or concepts, but only to concrete individuals and their stories, the more lurid the better. Anglo-American propaganda has become expert in concocting first person narratives and manufacturing objects of mass cathexis out of thin air, from the fraud of the Kuwait incubator babies killed by the Iraqi invaders, none of whom ever existed, to the saga of Jessica Lynch, who appeared before a Congressional committee in the spring of 2007 to denounce the Pentagon for massively falsifying what had happened to her. This is the essence of mind control, the MK in the CIA’s notorious MK Ultra.

Allegedly to get ready for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the Department of Transportation Crisis Management center — a key focus of activity less than two weeks later — did its own drill involving a hijacked plane and cell phone calls. Ellen Engleman, the administrator of the DOT’s Research and Special Programs Administration, commented that this was “actually much more than a tabletop” drill. She added: “During that exercise, part of the scenario, interestingly enough, involved a potentially hijacked plane and someone calling on a cell phone, among other aspects of the scenario that were very strange when twelve days later, as you know, we had the actual event.” [69] 

The only possible conclusion was that the 9/11 victims’ phone calls placed from “hijacked” airliners were faked and staged using government resources under the cover of this drill. Such cynical exploitation of popular emotions illustrates the profound degradation of the coup faction, but also the vast and meticulous preparation they invested in every aspect of the staged atrocity of 9/11. The majority of the cell phone calls were either physically impossible, or evidently faked, as we will discuss below. 

DETERRENCE OF RUSSIA, CHINA, AND OTHERS 

Thanks to Arkin, there is another 9/11 drill complex which can be given the special mention it deserves. [70] The present study emphasizes more than any other stresses the thermonuclear war potentials unleashed on 9/11, and this emphasis is fully vindicated by this additional drill. In effect, the mushroom cloud on the cover was there for excellent reasons. The heart of the matter is Global Guardian, a nuclear warfighting or Armageddon exercise staged by STRATCOM on 9/11 from Offutt Air Force Base, where Brent Scowcroft and Warren Buffett were converging in what might have been the nucleus a Committee of Public Safety [71] set to govern in case Bush had to be ousted. Global Guardian involved land-based missiles, nuclear submarines, and B-52 and B-1 bombers loaded with live H-bombs at bases like Offutt (Nebraska), Barksdale (Louisiana), Minot (North Dakota) and Whiteman (Missouri). The first two became destinations for Bush that day. The Doomsday-Night Watch-Looking Glass flying command posts were also mobilized. 

Global Guardian, STRATCOM (US strategic missile and bomber command): Here the scenario included nuclear warfighting, in effect a version of Armageddon, with a back door option for the rogue launch of nuclear missiles; the drill involved Offutt AFB, Nebraska, Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, Minot AFB, North Dakota, and Whiteman AFB, Missouri. [72] 

Amalgam Warrior: This was a large live-fly air defense and air intercept, tracking, and surveillance drill; it included air defense against foreign retaliation. Amalgam Warrior usually drills “tracking, surveillance, air interception, employing rules of engagement, attack assessment, electronic warfare, and counter-cruise-missile operations.” [73] Associated drills include: 

Crown Vigilance: Air combat command exercise. No further details are known. 

Apollo Guardian: Space command exercise. [74] No further details are known. 

Thus, on the morning of 9/11, before a single hijacking had been reported, the US had assumed a strategic nuclear posture comparable to that observed during the Cuban missile crisis: B-1 and B-52 bombers were in the air; ballistic missile submarines were at their launch points, presumably near Russia and possibly China, and land-based ICBMs were ready for launch. The air defenses of North America were also on high alert, both in terms of interceptor aircraft and space assets. Everything, in short, was ready for a nuclear war by way of the sort of US nuclear first strike of which the neocons have talked so much over recent years. All of this was observed in real time from Moscow by General Leonid Ivashov and his colleagues of the Russian General Staff. 

The combination of mobilization for nuclear war plus the spectacular self-inflicted terrorism of 9/11 was unquestionably designed to provide the backdrop for Bush’s announcement, to Russian President Putin and then soon to the world, that the US would seize Afghanistan, and also bases in former Soviet central Asia. Anyone wanting to resist such plans had the US nuclear striking force — presumably under the control of the neocon fascist madmen who had organized the attacks — staring him in the face. It is also highly significant that Bush’s 9/11 flight itinerary included both Barksdale AFB and Offutt AFB, two US nuclear command centers which were part of Global Guardian. Global Guardian was a massive exercise in nuclear blackmail, worse than Able Archer 1983. [75] 

A COMEDY OF ERRORS FOR ARMAGEDDON 

Even high-lever commanders were reportedly confused by the convergence of so many exercises, drills, and war games on a single morning. Although these reports need to be examined with some skepticism lest they represent a cover story for putschist officers, it has been alleged that Lieutenant General Thomas Keck, the commander of the 8th Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was among those who confused drills and reality. According to the Complete 9/11 Timeline, when Keck was 

…told that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center, he mistakenly thinks this is a simulated scenario as part of a training exercise…Keck is sitting in a windowless command center at Barksdale, monitoring the base’s participation in Global Guardian. Ground crews are practicing getting a fleet of B-52 bombers fueled, armed, and ready to get airborne for bombing runs. Keck watches on a monitor as, at exactly 9:00 a.m., an alarm sounds across the base and the crews rush to their planes. Then a younger officer taps him on the shoulder and tells him, “Sir, we just had an aircraft hit the World Trade Center.” Keck mistakenly thinks the officer is describing a simulated crisis that is being included in the exercise. He says: “That’s not the way you interject a situation into a training exercise! When you have a scenario injection, you say, ‘Sir, this is an exercise input,’ and then you give me the information.” But the younger officer replies, “No, sir,” and points at a television showing CNN, which is broadcasting live coverage of the burning WTC in New York….It is only when Keck sees the second plane hitting the WTC at 9:03 a.m. that he will realize the US is under attack. He then yells to his staff, “Lock it down,” thereby signaling that the exercise is over. (However, according to an article in The Bombardier, the newspaper for Barksdale Air Force Base, Stratcom will put Global Guardian on pause at 9:11 a.m., but only terminate the exercise at 10:44 a.m. [76] 

UNAUTHORIZED NUCLEAR MISSILE LAUNCH OPTION 

Global Guardian Computer Network Attack (CNA) exercise, STRATCOM: This involved a STRATCOM red team “bad” insider with access to a key command and control system. 

Global Guardian also provided a specific back door for the coup network to launch nuclear missiles without reference to the nuclear launch codes which were supposedly the monopoly of the president. According to IAnewsletter, a Pentagon publication, part of Global Guardian in 1998 and for several years before had been a Computer Network Attack (CNA) on STRATCOM; the simulated enemy force carrying out this attack “war dialed” STRATCOM’s telephone system to tied it up, and clogged the command’s fax machines with a denial of service attack. In the words of Ward Parker of the US Strategic Command, writing in IAnewsletter, “To carry out the attacks, we employed Command ‘red team’ members and other organizations to act as enemy agents. Our goal was to make the attacks seamless, in the sense that they were all related and graduated in severity. The attacks ranged from attempting to penetrate the Command from the Internet to a ‘bad’ insider with access to a key command and control system.” This suggests that if the simulated bad insider called for by the drill had turned into a really bad insider, a putschist plant working for some “other organization,” namely the rogue network, missiles might actually have been launched. Here was the invisible government’s back door to worldwide thermonuclear escalation, if that had been necessary, on 9/11. [77] 

In Thierry Meyssan’s analysis, the surrender of the Bush White House to the 9/11 coup owed much to the fear that the coup faction were extremists capable of unleashing nuclear war. Here is a portal through which the rogue network could have launched nuclear missiles without the help of Bush, as I argued in the original edition. The targets for such missiles could have been Arab or Islamic capitals, if Bush had refused to initiate the war of civilizations in conventional form by attacking Afghanistan. The target could also have been China, or Russia. We must never lose sight of the Bush-Putin telephone call on 9/11, which was the central diplomatic and strategic event of the day even though most 9/11 books do not even mention it. In that telephone call, Bush in effect delivered an ultimatum that the United States was determined to seize Afghanistan (where the Soviets had staged and invasion and a long war in response to a grab for power by Brzezinski in 1979), plus bases in former Soviet central Asia. What if Putin’s response to Bush’s ultimatum had been a more traditional defense of Mother Russia, coupled with a threat to incinerate New York if Bush dared to do any such thing? The rogue network had obviously thought of that eventuality in advance, and had evidently provided a back door through which they could direct a confrontation. 

Fortunately, President Putin declined a head-on confrontation with the US rogue network over whether the US could invade and seize Afghanistan. Putin knew only too well what the US and NATO invaders would find in that country - defeat, and quite possibly a collapse of the United States comparable to the debacle experienced by the USSR after a decade of warfare there. Accordingly, Putin assumed a flexible posture of supporting the United States in its “Global War of Terror,” sometimes pointing out that Russia was also threatened by terrorist violence, notably involving the Chechen issue: 

“…President Vladimir Putin was the first foreign leader to speak with President Bush and to personally offer his condolences. (Bush later noted his appreciation of this gesture and of Putin’s decision to ‘stand down’ Russian forces after America’s forces had been placed on high alert: “It was a moment where it clearly said to me that he understands the Cold War is over.” Putin’s September 24, 2020 television address was the beginning of a series of key policy statements by him in the wake of the events of September 11. That address…marked a new phase in U.S.-Russian relations.… Commenting on Putin’s post-9-11 geopolitical reasoning, Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post suggested that “Putin has helped make September 11 potentially the most important moment in world history since the collapse of communism.” Michael McFaul stated that acceding to American troops in Central Asia was as if “Russian troops came into Mexico…The center of gravity in the world has changed.” Later McFaul held that, in supporting President Bush, Vladimir Putin “made the boldest decision of his short tenure” and that this geopolitical orientation represents a “risky westward turn” within the bureaucracies and traditions of Russian geopolitical thinking. McFaul’s position is supported by Anatoly Chubais, a well-known reformer and former vice-Prime Minister in the Yeltsin years who stated that “Putin has turned Russian foreign policy around 180 degrees….There has never been a change on a similar scale in all of the history of Russian statehood.” [78] 

DRILLING THE US ATTACK ON AFGHANISTAN 

Unified Vision 2001: Joint Experimentation Directorate of the US Joint Forces Command (US JFCOM), US Central Command (US CENTCOM), US Special Operations Command (US SOCOM), plus 40 organizations and 350 personnel from all branches of the armed services, plus other federal agencies, held May 7-24, 2001. 

The immediate result of the 9/11 attacks was the US invasion of Afghanistan. Such an attack could not be improvised on the spot, especially by a power as weak logistically as the US, and they did not have to be. Unified Vision 2001 was the exercise which prepared for the transition from the 9/11 attacks to the stage of external US aggression; it was designed to prepare for “global deployment into a landlocked country with hostile terrain and a lack of basing and agreements with neighboring countries for US access” - just like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Dave Ozolek, the assistant director of the exercise, commented: “The threat we portrayed was an unstable and hostile state, but the primary enemy was not the state itself but a transnational actor based out of that area, globally connected, capable and willing to conduct terrorist attacks in the US as part of that campaign.” The American Forces Press Service noted that “real events similar to the Unified Vision scenario unfolded in the attacks of Sept. 11.” Ozolek boasted, “Nostradamus couldn’t have nailed the first battle of the next war any closer than we did... this time we got it right.” Many participants slipped seamlessly from the drill into actual war. This package of 9/11 attacks and the Afghan war together in advance will challenge even the most fanatical theorist of random coincidence. [79] 

COUP DIRECTION 

AWACS drill: Two AWACS aircraft from Tinker AFB, Oklahoma were sent over Washington DC and Florida by USAF Gen. Larry Arnold. 

These two AWACS aircraft had been pre-ordered by Gen. Larry Arnold to patrol the two most critical points for a coup involving a change of personnel at the top - Washington DC, where the National Command Authority was, and Florida, where Bush was located. 

Gen. Arnold later revealed that these AWCS were told “to go into an exercise scenario simulating an attack on the United States. The AWACS crew initially thought we were going into one of those simulations.” [80] Here is one example:                      

When [an AWCS] pilot, Anthony Kuczynski, hears of the first WTC crash, he mistakenly believes he is involved in a planned military simulation. He says, “We sometimes do scenarios where we’re protecting the United States from bombers coming in from unknown areas.” [81] 

Once again, the drill had become reality. 

ANTICIPATING COMPLICATIONS OR RESISTANCE 

What if Bush had denounced the coup faction as treasonous plotters, asserted that he was President of the United States, and vowed swift retribution for traitors? In that case, one of the several threats to Air Force One might have proven successful, making Cheney president. This would have had obvious advantages in terms of increased popular hysteria, advantages mitigated to some degree by the fact that Cheney is a far less effective public spokesman than Bush proved to be in 2001-2004. 

And what if Cheney had not survived 9/11, succumbing perhaps to yet another heart attack as a man who has had heart bypass surgery and carries an implanted pacemaker? In that case, the rogue network might have had recourse to a sort of Committee of Public Safety, the rudiments of which had been conveniently assembled at Offutt AFB. 

STRATCOM Strategic Advisory Committee, Offutt AFB: Former Bush National Security Director Gen. Brent Scowcroft was airborne in a Doomsday aircraft; Warren Buffet was present with other “business leaders” at Offutt AFB, ostensibly for a charity event. 

As part of Global Guardian, Offutt had ordered the launch op three Doomsday or Looking Glass aircraft, the E-4B National Airborne Operations Center planes, which are designed as headquarters from which to conduct nuclear war. One took off from an airport near Washington, probably Andrews AFB. Another was launched from Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio. Aboard one of these, with the official cover story of observing Global Guardian, was General Brent Scowcroft, a grey eminence of the establishment. Scowcroft was part of the Strategic Advisory Group (SAG, sometimes called Federal Advisory Committee) of STRATCOM; other members are not known. This shadowy SAG is supposed to “provide timely advice on scientific, technical, intelligence, and policy-related issues to the Commander, U.S. Strategic Command during the development of the Nation’s war plans,” including discussion of secret information. [82] The multibillionaire investor and speculator Warren Buffet, a member of the George Shultz-Rupert Murdoch faction of the US-UK ruling elite, was also helpfully present at Offutt that day along with other “business leaders,” allegedly to attend a charity fundraiser. Scowcroft, Buffet and a couple of business and military men might have become the new, post-coup US government later that day in the form of a committee of public safety if Bush and Cheney had fallen by the wayside. We need only recall how Yanayev, Pugo, Yazov, Pavlov, Kryuchkov, Lukyanov, Tisyakov, Starodubsev, and Baklanov — the Committee of Nine (USSR State Committee for the Emergency Situation or G.K.Ch.P.) — had tried to supplant Gorbachev and Yeltsin in the August 1991 Soviet coup attempt. 

“ANGEL IS NEXT” — THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT SPEAKS 

As we will show in detail in the next chapter, the most critical piece of evidence pointing towards the 9/11 perpetrators was the “angel is next” or “Air Force One is next” telephone call, since this was the moment when the invisible government coup faction emerged from the shadows and spoke. The call was revealed by William Safire in the New York Times, [83] and confirmed in television interviews by NSC Director Condoleezza Rice. [84] The call was evidently an ultimatum to Bush from the coup faction to announce the war of civilizations by blaming that tacks on bin Laden and al Qaeda, or be liquidated. Israeli, French, and Russian sources confirm that the call was made, and that it contained a series of top secret code words, suggesting that the callers were highly placed within the US military and intelligence bureaucracy. An Israeli analysis from the Debka website stresses the extent of the top-secret information controlled by the plotters, and the network that would be necessary to have gathered such information. According to Debka, the message “Air Force One is next” was received by the U.S. Secret Service at 9 AM. Debka suggests that the code name of Air Force One is changed daily, and that “the terrorists’ message threatening Air Force One was transmitted in that day’s top-secret White House code words.” Debka estimated that “…the terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals. This made it possible for a hostile force to pinpoint the exact position of Air Force One, its destination and its classified procedures. In fact, the hijackers were picking up and deciphering the presidential plane’s incoming and outgoing transmissions.” 

A COUP BY US EXTREMISTS CAPABLE OF NUCLEAR WAR 

But for Thierry Meyssan, the “angel” call definitely came from the “sponsors of the terror attacks in New York and Washington.” He argues that “from 10 AM to 8 PM approximately, American officials did not think that those strikes were the result of Middle Eastern terrorists, but that they manifested an attempted military coup by American extremists capable of provoking nuclear war.” The content of the call had been not so much to claim responsibility for the attacks, but to “pose an ultimatum, to force the hand of the President of the United States.” The trump card of the plotters was their possible possession of nuclear launch codes, and to counteract that, “during some 10 hours, President Bush was forced to run away from Washington and to go personally to the US Strategic Command (Offutt, Nebraska) both to take direct control of the armed forces; and especially so that no one could usurp his identity and unleash nuclear war.” In Meyssan’s view, in the wake of the “angel” call, “no member of the National Security Council thought any longer about terrorist attacks, everyone thought only about a military putsch which is ongoing. Calm will only be restored at 8:30 PM.” Meyssan sums up 9/11 in these terms: “The attacks were thus not ordered by a fanatic who believed he was delivering divine punishment, but by a group present within the American state apparatus, which succeeded in dictating policy to President Bush. Rather than a coup d’état aimed at overthrowing existing institutions, might it not involve instead the seizure of power by a particular group hidden within those institutions?” [85] This model of a covert coup has proven to be the most effective in explaining 9/11. 

AL QAEDA MOLES OR WALL STREET/CIA MOLES? 

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the maneuvers enumerated above all took place on the same day. Some of the exercises were public knowledge, but some were not. If the actions of the hijackers (assuming there were hijackers) and the US military maneuvers were coordinated, what does this suggest? Did al Qaeda have a spy inside the US government, or was the US government directing or influencing the actions of al Qaeda? One who believes that al Qaeda had penetrated the US government in order to learn the day of the many simultaneous maneuvers is Barbara Honegger, the former Reagan Administration official and author of October Surprise, an account of Bush 41’s secret negotiations with Iran during the 1980 election campaign. Ms. Honegger is currently with the US Naval Postgraduate School. She rightly calls attention to the salient fact that the terror attacks and the US government exercises took place on the same day. She argues for the  

growing reasons to believe that the date for the attack was not ‘chosen’ by the hijackers at all, but that one of them learned that a counter-terror war-game/exercise simulating a scenario like the one that actually took place on 9-/11 was planned for that morning, and then ‘piggybacked’ the ‘real thing’ on top of it. 

But for Ms. Honegger, all of this does not point to the obvious reality that al Qaeda, notorious as the CIA’s Arab Legion, was marching to the tune of a rogue network of rebel moles inside the US state apparatus. In order to avoid this evident conclusion, she reaches for a deus ex machina in the person of the myth-drenched Khalid Sheikh Mohamed. Not only does she mobilize KSM; she presents him as a wily triple agent who has successfully bamboozled the chief personalities of the US regime. After describing the question of the coordination of the terrorist attacks with the day of drills, Ms. Honegger writes that “…for all of this to ‘work’, the bad guys had to have at least one person among them who had fooled U.S. intelligence into believing that he was ‘one of us.’ That person, almost certainly, is Khalid Shaikh Muhammed -- the only person about whom all information is still classified, even his name, even though reams have already been written about him in the open press.  And for good reason.  Vice President Cheney, President Bush, CIA Director George Tenet, CIA officer and chief of NRO’s strategic gaming division for their 9/11 ‘plane-into-building’ exercise, John Fulton, and all the others who were so stupid as to risk thousands of innocent American lives on the bet that their star ‘informant’, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, had really been ‘turned’ to the U.S. ‘side’ - don’t want him to talk about what he knows. And he knows a lot. On Sept. 10, 2002, Knight Ridder quoted a top U.N. counter-terror expert that Mohammad is probably the only person who has all the pieces to the 9/11 puzzle.” At this point 9/11 the day of the drills becomes 9/11 the day of the dupes. In reality KSM, to the extent that he exists at all, does so as a sleazy patsy and operative of US intelligence. The orchestration of the terror attacks and the 9/11 drills was the handiwork of the rogue network inside the US government, and not a product of an Afghan cave or the teeming slums of Karachi. 

In support of her thesis, Ms. Honegger also over-interprets the term “match” as used in the supposed communication between Atta and the phantomatic Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on September 10, 2001, but not translated until after the attacks. The text of this message was: “The Match is about to begin. Tomorrow [i.e., 9/11] is zero hour.” (AP February 8, 2003) Ms. Honegger notes that Cheney was so incensed when this became public that he ordered an FBI investigation of members of the JICI to find out who might have leaked it. According to Ms. Honegger, “match’ is “what you would expect if the speaker were referring to his discovery of the date that the U.S. Government had selected to conduct its counter-terror simulation/exercise on the scenario of plane(s) crashing into government buildings - one that was about to turn very real when the terrorists ‘piggybacked’ their long-planned plot onto it.” But this interpretation is strained. If the speaker was speaking English, he might have been speaking the British English which is still prevalent in the Middle East, and in British English “match” would simply mean “game.” If the speaker was speaking Arabic, then we need to be aware of the multiple problems faced even by competent Arabic translators. So the philological and linguistic problems involved with this term “match” finally appear insuperable; it tells us nothing reliable. (Barbara Honegger, “The U.S. Government, Not the Hijackers, ‘Chose’ the Date of the 9/11 Attacks.”) 

MODES OF STANDING DOWN 

The obvious lack of any air defense on 9/11, combined with the flagrant disregard for well-established and long institutionalized procedures involving the FAA air traffic controllers and NORAD, led soon after 9/11 to the notion that an order or guideline must have been issued that was responsible for the paralysis of the usual intercept routine. A written “stand down” order per se has never been found, but this does not mean that it did not exist, possibly in some non-written form. Orders can be conveyed in verbal form, or better yet the expectations of a superior can be conveyed by indirection. But the surest way to make sure that nothing gets done is to make sure that moles, more or less witting partners in the covert operation, occupy the key nodal points in the bureaucracy on the day of the big event. And since we ascribe responsibility for 9/11 to precisely such a network of moles, this is the conclusion that is offered here. We have already considered this problem as regards the NEADS headquarters in Rome, New York. 

If the FAA guidelines had been observed, an exchange like this one between the FAA Command Center and the FAA headquarters from 9:49 AM would have been simply unthinkable: 

FAA Headquarters: They’re pulling Jeff away to go talk about United 93. 

Command Center: Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft? 

FAA Headquarters: Oh, God, I don’t know. 

Command Center: Uh, that’s a decision somebody’s gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes. 

FAA: Uh, ya know everybody just left the room. [86] 

Was one or both of these speakers a mole? As they knew well, since the plane was off course, not responding to the radio, not following orders, and had its transponder turned off, there was absolutely no doubt that fighters had to be scrambled automatically and immediately, and not in ten minutes. In fact, any one of these conditions would have been enough to scramble fighters. 

Another example of extremely suspicious behavior on 9/11 - this time from the private sector rather than the government - became known after June 4, 2004, when the FBI finally allowed a group of victims’ families gathered at Princeton, New Jersey to hear a tape of the responses of managers and officials of American Airlines to the obvious fact that American 11 and United 175 had been hijacked. 

The FBI had tried as usual to intimidate the families with nondisclosure agreements and a ban on note-taking. However, some of the content of this tape seeped out, and was reported by Gail Sheehy of the New York Observer. One crucial passage recorded at the headquarters of American Airlines in Fort Worth, Texas, beginning about 8:21 AM on September 11, showed that American Airlines managers had done everything possible to prevent the news of a hijacking from leaking out. Here is a segment, according to the best recollection of family members of the deceased: 

Don’t spread this around. Keep it close. 

Keep it quiet. 

Let’s keep this among ourselves. What else can we find out from our own sources about what’s going on? 

These were the words of two managers at American Airlines Systems Operations Control. According to the recollection of another family member, their words were: “Do not pass this along. Let’s keep it right here. Keep it among the five of us.” When a United Airlines dispatcher was told by his superiors to transmit the order that all planes had to land, he was also told, “Don’t tell the pilots why we want them to land.” 

We cannot know if the unnamed speakers were moles within the American Airlines bureaucracy, but this is certainly what moles would have done on such an occasion. Family members noted that if the news of the hijack of American 11 had been transmitted with the necessary rapidity, United 93 might never have taken off from Newark Airport. When Gerald Arpey, the president of American Airlines, testified before the 9/11 commission, he never mentioned the existence of the tapes played in Princeton on June 4, 2004. Clearly Arpey had not been served with a duces tecum subpoena, instructing him to present the 9/11 commission with all relevant records and exhibits. (“9/11 Tapes Reveal Ground Personnel Muffled Attacks,” New York Observer, June 17, 2020) As for the FBI, they were indignant that their non-disclosure had been violated, not that airline officials blocked timely notification about a hijack. This was another example of the FBI’s abuse of the Moussawi case to withhold vital information from the public. 

As for the FAA, it issued an official gag order for all of its employees in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and for a long time what little was known had been divulged in violation of that gag order. Even some twelve FAA directives and warnings sent out during the summer of 2001 were reportedly classified. The mystery enveloping the actions of the FAA on 9/11 was made deeper by the notorious Kevin Delaney, the FAA official who deliberately destroyed audio tapes of the reports and recollections of New York air traffic controllers about what they had done on the morning of 9/11. (New York Times, June 6, 2020) If those tapes still existed, they might shed some more light on the air defense stand down of 9/11. 

CHENEY’S TERRORISM TASK FORCE 

In May of 2001, one week before the execution of Timothy McVeigh, Bush issued an Executive Order making Cheney the leader of a new terrorism task force. According to Bush, Cheney’s job was to consist in the development of “a coordinated national effort so that we may do the very best possible job of protecting our people from catastrophic harm.” The threat of chemical, biological, or nuclear attack on the U.S. “while not immediate - is very real,” Bush added. “Should our efforts to reduce the threat to our country from weapons of mass destruction be less than fully successful, prudence dictates that the United States be fully prepared to deal effectively with the consequences of such a weapon being used here on our soil.” 

The executive order gave Cheney authority over the anti-terror operations of 46 government agencies. Cheney said that his new task force would “figure out how we best respond to that kind of disaster of major proportions that in effect would be manmade or man-caused.” Cheney said the threats under his purview would include “a hand-carried nuclear weapon, or biological or chemical agent.” “The threat to the continental United States and our infrastructure is changing and evolving and we need to look at this whole area oftentimes referred to as homeland defense,” said Cheney. Cheney also announced in an interview with CNN television that Bush was creating an office within the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate the government’s response to any biological, chemical or nuclear attack. Cheney added that his task force would cooperate with FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh. Cheney’s task force was supposed to report to the Congress and the National Security Council by October 1, 2001, according to press reports. (AP, CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg, May 8, 2001) 

Many observers have concluded that Cheney’s supposed terrorism task force was nothing but a boondoggle, and that this group never did anything; references to a “do-nothing: anti-terror task force” abound. But perhaps Cheney’s task force was a good deal more sinister. Since Cheney is a candidate for at least some degree of witting participation in the rogue network in a way that Bush himself may not be, we must wonder about how Cheney might have deliberately abused his authority over the anti-terrorism capabilities of those 46 agencies. Did his sweeping authority extend to military maneuvers as well? If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then we must conclude that Cheney must bear a good deal of the responsibility for the total disarray of the US anti-terror posture on the morning of 9/11. Indeed, Cheney’s task force appears to be the universal common denominator for that pattern of chaos and confusion. 

On 9/11, US air defense collapsed. Before and after 9/11, US air defense functioned more or less normally. What happened on 9/11 to create this paralysis, and why was that date such an anomaly in comparison to the previous and subsequent operation of the Federal Aeronautics Administration/North American Aerospace Defense Command tandem? The heart of the cover-up of these events performed by the 9/11 commission can be found in the section sub-headed “Clarifying the Record,” on page 31 of the 9/11 commission report. The 9/11 commission here concedes that “the defense of US airspace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with pre-existing training and protocols.” (31) Why then were the well-established procedures suddenly abandoned, for that one day? On this crucial point the 9/11 commission’s sense-certainty, empiricist account is silent. 

What the 9/11 commission should have done, but did not do, was to prepare an honest timeline and then compare that timeline to the notification times as they would have been had the standard procedures been followed, rather than mysteriously thrown out the window. They would have found that American 11 (North Tower) at 8:20 AM stopped transmitting its IFF beacon and veered sharply off course. It was thus at 8:20 that FAA should have notified NORAD, and NORAD should have scrambled interceptors. Instead, the FAA waited until 8:38, and NORAD pilots at Otis AFB on Cape Cod were not informed of the emergency until 8:40, were not ordered to take off until 8:46, and did not actually get into the air until 8:52. By this time American 11 had already hit the World Trade Center, at 8:46. The pilots flew slowly and did not arrive over New York in time to protect the WTC South Tower, which was hit at 9:03. At this time the Otis jets were still 71 miles away. 

Similarly, the hijacking of United 175 was evident at 8:42, when the aircraft went off course and its transponder was turned off. This time NORAD was told within a minute, by 8:43, but was still unable to scramble any additional planes from bases in New Jersey, despite the fact that multiple hijackings were now evident. 

The 9/11 commission also found that on that day US air defense “was improvised by civilians who had never handled a hijacked aircraft that attempted to disappear, and by a military unprepared for the transformation of commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction.” (31) This is dishonest in the extreme. The long-established defenses against traditional, classical, or normal hijacking would also have been effective against the suicide hijacking that the 9/11 commission claimed was involved this time. One suspects that Philip Zelikow, the controversial Executive Director of the 9/11 commission, is attempting to provide cover for his former business partner Condoleezza Rice, who had made that absurd remark on precisely this subject (“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.” [May 16, 2020]) As Miss Rice knew or should have known, these scenarios had been prominent since the mid-1990s, especially since the Atlanta Olympics, since the threatened 1994 attack on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, since the 2001 Genoa summit, and were routinely main themes of military exercises on various levels. 

Why was it necessary to improvise US air defense? Before and after 9/11, the air defense system was noted primarily for its stability and regularity in responding to any emergency. An emergency was defined objectively as a plane that went off course, a plane that did not respond to radio communication, a plane whose transponder went off, or a plane that refused to obey the instructions of an air traffic controller. If any one of these conditions were fulfilled, an emergency had to be declared, and fighters had to be scrambled for intercept. Intercept did not mean shooting down any aircraft; intercept simply meant that fighters would join the aircraft in trouble, carry out visual observation, and signal the pilot to follow them to a landing place. Only if these attempts failed, would shooting down an aircraft become an option. And shooting down would have to be approved by the President. The great virtue of its system was its automatic functioning, which was recognized by all concerned. The criteria were all objective. If there were any doubt that an incident had to be treated as an emergency, it was automatically upgraded to an emergency. Nothing fell between the chairs as long as the guidelines were observed. Before and after 9/11, the FAA/NORAD link worked like a well-oiled machine. Sixty-seven cases of successful intercept were carried out by the FAA-NORAD combination between January 1 and September 10, 2001. 

STANDARD PROCEDURES: PAYNE STEWART, 1999 

On October 26, 1999, a Lear jet carrying the famous golfer Payne Stewart veered off course and traveled for 1500 miles cross the United States before crashing into a field near Mina, South Dakota. Stewart had intended to fly to Love Field in Dallas for a business meeting. Stewart took off from Orlando, Florida at 9:19 in the morning. His plane apparently lost oxygen pressure, leading to the deaths of the passengers. The plane proceeded on automatic pilot. The air traffic controllers stopped getting responses to their radio contacts with Stewart’s plane. Following established procedures, FAA air traffic controllers called NORAD to inform them that something had gone wrong with a plane in the air. As soon as it was clear that Stewart’s plane was in distress, the US Air Force scrambled two F-15s from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, which intercepted the plane and followed it to Missouri. According to published accounts, fighter jets intercepted Stewart’s jet in either 15 or 21 minutes after his plane first lost contact. An F-16 fighter aircraft came up behind it and did a visual inspection. The pilot said the windows of Stewart’s plane were frosted over. 

Two F-15s from Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida had also been sent to track the Lear jet, but they turned away when the Eglin planes got there first. After the Lear jet reached the Midwest, the two Eglin F-16s returned to base and four F-16s and a midair refueling tanker from the Tulsa National Guard followed it. Finally, four F-16s from Fargo, North Dakota moved in; they also helped to clear air space. According to the Air Force, additional F-16s were also scrambled from the Oklahoma Air National Guard unit in Tulsa, but were not used because the Fargo planes arrived first. Two additional F-16s on “strip alert” at Fargo, South Dakota, were armed, but never took off. This is a fair sample of the capabilities NORAD could normally deploy if it wanted to. 

The Pentagon said it never came close to shooting down Stewart’s plane in order to prevent a crash into a heavily populated area. Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon said, “Once it was determined it was apparently going to crash in a lightly populated area, we didn’t have to deal with other options, so we didn’t.” The FAA routed air traffic around the Lear jet and prevented other planes from flying underneath it, in case it should suddenly lose altitude. (CNN, ABC, October 26, 2020) Andrews Air Force Base is 12 miles from the White House, and on 9/11 was the home of a fighter squadron of F-16s as well as a fighter squadron of FA-18s. 

A change in the standard operating procedures was introduced on June 1, 2001; this inserted the Secretary of Defense into the bureaucratic chain. This marked a radical departure from procedures which had been in relatively successful operation for some 35 years. Now, the approval of the Secretary of Defense was required for the scrambling of aircraft. The authority to order the shooting down of an aircraft remained with the president. There may have been something more afoot here than simply adding another layer of bureaucracy. The authors of this change may have been seeking to introduce that element of disorder and uncertainty which might be necessary in order to allow the success of the upcoming operation. Who was responsible for this needless change? The 9/11 commission, as usual, is silent. 

THE 9/11 COMMISSION’S FUDGED TIMELINES 

The 9/11 commission was also guilty of doctoring the timelines of the key events of the day. The timelines had been assembled by an exhaustive collation of media reports, and, apart from a detailed analysis which need not detain us here, they provided conclusive demonstration that NORAD had ample time to scramble fighter jets to intercept America 77 (Pentagon) and United 93 (Shanksville). If the system had performed according to its own strict protocols, there would also have been a fighting chance to intercept American 11 (North Tower) and United 175 (South Tower). But the 9/11 commission, in a sweeping and breathtaking revision of everything that was known about the chronology of the day, writes: “As it turned out, the NEADS air defenders had nine minutes’ notice on the first hijacked plane, no advance notice on the second, no advance notice on the third, and no advance notice on the fourth.” (31) For the 9/11 commission, it would appear that the longer the crisis went on, the less the lead time available for NORAD. During the time between 8:55 and 9:41, the whole world knew (or thought it knew) that American 77 was headed east towards Washington; when even the Washington news stations were warning that the capital was a likely target, NORAD was incapable of providing two planes over Washington DC to provide a minimal screen against the threatened decapitation of the federal government. 

The 9/11 commission hypocritically pretended that it was setting the record straight: “More than the actual events, inaccurate government accounts of those events made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond to two of the hijackings, raising questions about the adequacy of the response. Those accounts had the effect of deflecting questions about the military’s capacity to obtain timely and accurate information from its own sources. In addition, they overstated the FAA’s ability to provide the military with timely and useful information that morning.” (34) Underlying this obfuscation is a strategic decision by the 9/11 commission to focus primarily on the FAA, while attempting to lead investigators away from NORAD track, which in reality is likely the more important one. The 9/11 commission cites the testimony of NORAD officers that NEADS had learned from the FAA of the hijacking of United 93 at 9:16. The 9/11 commission report claimed that there had been no such notification, since United 93 had not yet been hijacked at that time. In the last sessions of the 9/11 commission, we had the absurd spectacle of NORAD officers thanking the commissioners for helping them to straighten out their own erroneous and fragmentary in-house chronologies. Perhaps NORAD had decided early in the game to spread the chaff of disinformation as a means of foiling the radar of any future inquiries. If so, it appeared to have worked. 

One of the more obvious absurdities recounted by NORAD personnel during the 9/11 commission hearings was their fairy tale to the effect that NORAD radar was only able to look outwards from US coasts, and that their radar capability for tracking events in US airspace was zero. NORAD, they claimed, could look out, but could not look in. In the May 2003 hearings, we have this exchange: 

Mr. Ben-Veniste: And so on the day of September 11^th, as you can see these dots - I know it may be difficult to see - NORAD was positioned in a perimeter around the United States, but nothing in the central region, nothing on the border with Canada? 

Gen. McKinley: That’s correct, sir. 

This is a crude subterfuge. The NORAD generals would have us believe, for example, that a Russian submarine-launched cruise missile, once it had penetrated the US coastline in New Jersey, would have nothing more to fear from NORAD and could proceed on its leisurely way to Detroit or St. Louis, without any risk of further interference? Or, would they have us believe that a Russian Bear bomber, having once gotten into Minnesota, could fly on unmolested to destroy Chicago, because NORAD could no longer detect it? These nonsensical arguments refute themselves. NORAD was known to possess phased array warning system radars (PAWS) of various types which provided a comprehensive overview of US airspace and beyond. 

To attempt to ignore this vast body of evidence, which has only been summarily indicated here, is obviously absurd. As long as only the air defense suppression and target multiplication (or LIHOP) drills were known, it might have been possible that “al Qaeda” chose to attack on 9/11 by a lucky chance, or else because they had infiltrated an agent or agents into the US command apparatus. Or maybe they had used some exotic software to find out when the drills were being held. But even these desperate arguments cannot hope to deal with the MIHOP exercises which were the means for locking down relevant bases, for crashing planes into the World Trade Center, for building collapses in New York City, and for directing a flying object at the Pentagon. A final objection might be that the present thesis requires too many people to know about the coup; it could not have been kept secret after the fact. A first answer is that the overwhelming majority of the participants in these drills, because of the military obsession with compartmentalization and need to know, have no idea of the larger structure of which they are a part. For the several hundred persons who would have had to know the big picture, or at least a considerable part of it, the ever-present threat of assassination of self and family by the rogue network has been a formidable deterrent to testimony. In any case, the official explanation of 9/11 lies in ruins, and the purging of the actual September criminals and related invisible government or rogue networks from the US federal government, before they can create new 9/11s to unleash new and wider wars, becomes all the more urgent.

THE 46 DRILLS, OPERATIONS, WAR GAMES, AND ACTIVITIES OF 9/11 

PRE-9/11 PREPARATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Drill		Date	Scenario
1	NORAD	Between 1991 and 2001	Foreign hijacked airliner crashing into famous US building
2	White House, Richard Clarke	1998	Terrorists load Lear Jet with explosive, attack Washington DC
3	NORAD	1999-2001	Hijacked aircraft hit many targets, including WTC, MASCAL
4	Able Danger: DIA, US-SOCOM, LIWA	Dec. 1999-2001	Manipulate al Qaeda; data mining (patsy control)
5	Stratus Ivy: DIA	Dec. 1999-2001 (?)	Operate on patsies “out of the box” (patsy control)
6	Door Hop Galley: DIA (?)	Dec. 1999-2001 (?)	Still secret (patsy control?)
7	Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group (P2OG)	unknown	“Stimulating reactions” of terrorists (patsy control)
8	NORAD (NEADS) Exercises: UN HQ, NYC	October 16, 2000	Terrorist crashes Federal Express plane into UN HQ NYC
9	NORAD (NEADS) Exercises: UN HQ NYC	October 23, 2000	Terrorist crashes FedEx plane with WMD into UN HQ NYC
10	Pentagon MASCAL exercise	Oct. 24-28, 2000	Commercial aircraft hits Pentagon, MASCAL
11	FAA drill	December, 2000	Scenario: a chartered flight out of Ohio that had turned its transponder off
12	Positive Force ’01: NORAD plus a dozen agencies; worldwide	April 17-26, 2001	COG; attacks on transportation; one scenario: terrorist group hijacking commercial airliner and flying it into Pentagon (Pentagon attack)
13	Unified Vision ’01: US JFCOM; US CENTCOM; US SOCOM: 40 agencies	May 7-24, 2001	Invasion of Afghanistan and Pakistan (prepared Operation Enduring Freedom)
14	Red Ex (Recognition, Evaluation, and Decision-Making Exercise); NYC OEM; FDNY; NYPD; FEMA; FBI	May 11, 2001	Plane crashes and building collapses in New York City (WTC attack, demolition)
15	Amalgam Virgo ’01: US-Canada multi-agency drill; NORAD; SEADS; Coast Guard, Army, Navy	June 1-2, 2001	UAV drone launched from rogue freighter in Gulf of Mexico or cruise missile from barge in Atlantic Ocean; Joint Based Expeditionary Connectivity Center (JBECC) mobile radar command center tested. (Pentagon attack)
16	Mall Strike 2001, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania (near Shanksville); 600 local first responders and emergency managers	June 16, 2001	Toxic chemical agent and the simulated release of radiation and radiological contamination; (indoctrination of first responders).
17	FAA Drill: FBI Miami field office, Miami-Dade County Police Department.	Summer 2001	Varig airlines Boeing 767 hijacked over Florida
18	Ft. Belvoir, Davison Army Airfield helicopter base MASCAL	June 29, 2001	Scenario based on plane hitting Pentagon (indoctrination of first responders).
19	US Department of Transportation Hijacking Exercise	August 31, 2001	US Dept. of Transportation Crisis Management Center drilled hijacks; simulated cell phone calls.
20	NORAD, NEADS (Vigilant Guardian)	September 6, 2001	Tokyo to Anchorage flight hijacked by “Mum Hykro” to Vancouver and San Francisco

 

PRE-9/11 PREPARATION AND DEVELOPMENT (continued)
Drill		Date	Scenario
21	NORAD, NEADS (Vigilant Guardian)	September 6, 2001	Seoul to Anchorage flight hijacked by “Lin Po” to Seattle
22	NORAD, NEADS (Vigilant Guardian)	September 9, 2001	UK to NYC flight hijacked, blown up
23	NORAD SEADS NEADS (Vigilant Guardian)	September 10, 2001	Ilyushin IL-62 from Cuba hijacked by asylum seekers, lands at Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia

 

ON 9/11
Drill		Date	Scenario
24	FBI training exercise in Monterey, California for FBI/CIA Anti-Terrorist Task Force	Through 9/11	Diverts top FBI, CIA anti-terrorist and special operations agents and heavy equipment away from Boston, NYC, Washington DC
25	NORAD annual readiness drill, Cheyenne Mountain, CO (Vigilant Guardian)	9/11	Full ‘battle staff’ levels to test entire organization
26	Vigilant Guardian: NORAD, NEADS, US-Canada	9/11	Live-fly hijacking and air defense; hijack multiplication, diversion and confusion
27	NORAD/JCS Vigilant Warrior	Through 9/11	Reported by Richard Clarke
28	Operation Southern Watch	Through 9/11	Diverts 174th Fighter Wing, New York Air National Guard, to Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, to impose no-fly zone over southern Iraq
29	Operation Northern Watch	Through 9/11	Diverts 6 fighters from Langley AFB sent to Incirlik AFB, Turkey to impose no-fly zone over northern Iraq
30	Operation Northern Vigilance	Through 9/11	Diverts fighters, 350 personnel to Alaska and northern Canada to counter a Russian bomber drill
31	Operation Northern Guardian, Keflavik AFB, Iceland	Through 9/11	Diverts fighters from Langley Air Force Base (Virginia) deployed to Keflavik AFB, Iceland to counter a Russian bomber drill
32	Red Flag, Nellis AFB, Nevada: 100 pilots	9/11	Diverts most F-15s of 71st Fighter Squadron, Langley AFB, VA; DC ANG’s 121st Fighter Squadron of Andrews Air Force Base also depleted.
33	Andrews AFB local drill	9/11	Diverts 3 F-16s to North Carolina
34	National Reconnaissance Office drill, Chantilly, Virginia	9/11	Simulated plane crash into high-rise government building; satellite imaging (WTC attack)
35	Tripod II, New York City	9/11	Response to biochemical attack; run from backup command center at Pier 92, Hudson River.
36	Fort Meyer VA Education Center training drill for local firemen	9/11	Assembled and indoctrinated Pentagon first responders.
37	Timely Alert II, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey	9/11	Indoctrination of WTC first responders.
38	World Trade Center Emergency Drill, Fiduciary Trust Co., 97th floor, South Tower	9/11	Meeting called to assemble and silence unreliable outside contractors?

 

ON 9/11 (continued)
Drill		Date	Scenario
39	Global Guardian, STRATCOM: Offutt AFB, Nebraska; Barksdale AFB, Louisiana; Minot AFB, North Dakota; Whiteman AFB, Missouri.	9/11	Nuclear warfighting; Armageddon. (deterrence of Russia and China during invasion of Afghanistan and Pakistan)
40	Amalgam Warrior	9/11	Large live-fly air defense and air intercept, tracking, and surveillance drill; air defense against foreign retaliation.
41	Crown Vigilance, Air Combat Command	9/11	No details known.
42	Apollo Guardian, US Space Command	9/11	No details known.
43	AWACS drill, ordered by NORAD commander Gen. Larry Arnold	9/11	Two AWACS aircraft from Tinker AFB, Oklahoma sent over Washington DC and Florida; surveillance of capital and president during coup.
44	Global Guardian Computer Network Attack	9/11	Enemy forces “war dialed” STRATCOM’s telephone and fax systems; “bad insider” has access to key C³ system (missile launch option)
45	STRATCOM Strategic Advisory Committee, Offutt AFB, Nebraska; Andrews AFB, MD; Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio.	9/11	Three E-4B National Airborne Operations Center planes (Doomsday or Looking Glass) airborne; passengers include Brent Scowcroft; Warren Buffet at Offutt. (Committee. of Public Safety option?)

 

IN ADVANCED PREPARATION ON 9/11
Drill		Date	Scenario
46	Amalgam Virgo ‘02	Scheduled for June 2002	Air defense, interception, surveillance, and pursuit drill; Delta 757 with real Delta pilots, actors as passengers, FBI as hijackers - deviated from Salt Lake City to Hawaii; Canadian police to hijack DC-9 near Vancouver BC

 

[1] Webster G. Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2005, fourth ed., 2007).

[2] Umberto Pascali, Webster G. Tarpley et al., Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro? (Roma: Partito Operaio Europeo, 1978).

[3] Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations.

[4] For a discussion of 9/11 as a coup d’état, see the work of Thierry Meyssan. See also Maurizio Blondet, 11 settembre: Colpo di stato in USA (Milano: Effedieffe, 2003)

[5] Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2005).

[6] The present analysis draws upon William Arkin, Code Names (Hanover NH: Steerforth Press, 2005). For economy of reference, empirical data has been drawn especially from Paul Thompson’s indispensable Complete 9/11 Timeline (http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/), now part of the online History Commons. References to 9/11 drills are noted as C9/11T. References to Thompson’s Able Danger database are noted as C9/11TAD. This useful database is animated by an outlook that varies between unanswered questions and LIHOP, but it offers the valuable feature of links which allow the documentary evidence to be traced back directly to the primary sources.

[7] Benjamin B. Fischer, “A Cold War Conundrum” (CIA: History Staff Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997). (https://www.cia.gov/csi/monograph/coldwar/source.htm)

[8] For the Operation Valkyrie, the July 20 coup attempt and the German resistance against Hitler, see Peter Hoffman, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 3^rd edition.

[9] At least two of the members of the London 7/7 alleged terror cell have been exposed as MI-5 and MI-6 double agents, informants, and provocateurs. These are alleged 7/7 and 7/21 mastermind Haroon Rashid Aswat, fingered by US terror commentator John Loftus on Fox News Dayside (July 29, 2020), and alleged 7/7 ringleader Mohammed Siddique Khan, exposed by veteran Scotland Yard detective Charles Shoebridge, a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, who spoke on BBC Newshour (June 27, 2020). The recorded martyrdom speech of Mohammed Siddique Khan can thus be seen as training video made to increase the realism of what this patsy probably thought was just another terror drill.

[10] For media sources on the drills, see the Complete 9/11 Timeline, Military Exercises Up to 9/11, at cooperativeresearch.org, hereafter C9/11T, to which we are indebted for much of the data cited in this chapter.

^[11] Washington Post, August 15, 2020, Military District of Washington News Service, 8/3/2020, MDW News Service, 7/2001, MDW news service, 8/2000; GlobalSecurity.org, 11/28/2001; MDW News Service, 7/2001; C9/11T.

[12] Evote.com, September 11, 2020, NBC 4 New York, 9/11/2020, C9/11T.

[13] Newhouse News Service, March 31, 2020, C9/11T.

[14] Aviation Week and Space Technology, 6/3/2020, C9/11T.

[15] “September 2001: Fighters from Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, Deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Southern Watch,” C9/11T.

[16] www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/vigilant-guardian.htm

[17] www.911teachin.net/L5A.html

[18] USA Today, April 18, 2004; C9/11T.

[19] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a090901detonateovernyc

[20] “Amid Crisis Simulation, ‘We Were Suddenly No-Kidding Under Attack,”’ Newhouse News Service, January 25, 2002.

[21] C9/11T: See also Arkin, 545; GlobalSecurity.org, 4/27/2005.

[22] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a090901detonateovernyc

[23] C9/11T.

[24] C9/11T.

[25] C9/11T.

[26] C9/11T

[27] First revealed by the Toronto Star, December 9, 2001. See also Washington Times, 9/11/2020, C9/11T.

[28] First revealed by the Toronto Star, December 9, 2001.

^[29] Virginian-Pilot, 9/24/2001, C9/11T.

[30] GlobalSecurity.org, 10/19/2002; Arkin, 2005, 476; Las Vegas Review-Journal, 7/28/2001 and 8/22/2001; GlobalSecurity.org, 8/21/2005 and 1/21/2006; C9/11T.

^[31] Aviation Week and Space Technology, 9/9/2020.

[32] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a120500faaexercises#a120500faaexercises

[33] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a01faaexercise#a01faaexercise

[34] http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a120500faaexercises

[35] New York Daily News, October 15, 2001.

[36] This is a reference to Air France Flight 8969, which was hijacked on December 24, 2020 by members of the Algerian GIA terrorist organization, who intended to crash it into the Eiffel Tower in Paris. When the plane landed at Marseille, it was successfully stormed by the French GIGN special police.

^[37] CNN, 6/4/2020; American Forces Press Service, 6/4/2020; Associated Press, 6/5/2020; USA Today, 4/18/2004, C9/11T.

^[38] “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” Vanity Fair, September, 2006.

[39] New York Times, August 5, 2006.

[40] Washington Post, April 14, 2020, C9/11T.

^[41] American Forces Press Service, 6/4/2020; Arkin, 2005, 253; GlobalSecurity.org, 4/27/2005, C9/11T.

^[42] Cfr. the NORAD account at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/linkscopy/AmalgumVirgo.pdf

[43] See C9/11T for a fuller list of sources.

[44] C9/11T; Air Force Times, 4/13/2004; Boston Herald, 4/14/2004; Washington Post, 4/14/2004; New York Times, 4/14/2004; Guardian, 4/15/2004.

^[45] “One of [NORAD’s] imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States. In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon — but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say.” (USA Today, April 18, 2020); Guardian, 4/15/2004; Air Force Times, 4/13/2004; Boston Herald, 4/14/2004; Washington Post, 4/14/2004; New York Times, 4/14/2004; Guardian, 4/15/2004; C9911T.

[46] CNN, 4/19/2004, C9/11T.

[47] Slate, 7/22/2004; 9/11 Commission, 345, 457-458, C9/11T.

[48] USA Today, April 18, 2020, C9/11T.

[49] Associated Press, August 21, 2002; UPI August 22, 2002; C9/11T.

[50] New York Sun, 12/20/2003; C9/11T.

[51] 9/11 Commission, 5/18/2004, C9/11T.

[52] ABC News, 9/11/2001.

[53] New York Times, September 13, 2001, C9/11T.

[54] The Sabrina Rivera intervention was covered by New York City stations WNBC channel 4, WCBS channel 2 (in both local news telecasts and website postings), and Hannity and Colmes on Fox, as well as Rawstory and other internet sites.

[55] Government Security News, 9/2005; New York Times, 8/9/2020; See C9/11TAD. C9/11T. See also C9/11TAD.

[56] Bergen Record, 8/14/2005; Government Security News, 9/2005; C9/11T.

[57] Government Security News, 9/2005, C9/11T.

[58] UPI, September 26, 2002. United Press International, 9/26/2002; Los Angeles Times, 10/27/2002; Asia Times, 11/5/2020; C9/11T.

[59] “Statement by Rep. Weldon on Commission Omission,” Washington DC, 12 August 2005, http://newsminute.com/Stories/statementbyrepweldononcommissionomission.htm.

[60] New York Times, August 9, 2005, C9/11TAD.

[61] Arkin, 246.

[62] United Press International, April 22, 2020, C9/11T.

[63] MDW News Service, July 5, 2020, C9/11T.

[64] Westmoreland County Annual Financial Report, 2001 Connellsville Daily Courier, 9/11/2020, C9/11T.

[65] MDW News Service, 10/4/2020; Pentagram, 11/2/2020; JEMS, 4/2002; US Department of Health and Human Services, 7/2002; First Due News, 4/17/2003; C9/11T.

[66] See Monmouth Message, 2/9/2020; Hub, 9/21/2001; Monmouth Message, 9/21/2001; Asbury Park Press, 7/24/2002; Monmouth Message, 8/23/2002; Monmouth Message, 9/12/2020; C9/11T.

[67] See C9/11T. See Monmouth Message, 2/9/2020; Hub, 9/21/2001; Monmouth Message, 9/21/2001; Asbury Park Press, 7/24/2002; Monmouth Message, 8/23/2002; US Department of the Army, 7/26/2003; Monmouth Message, 9/12/2020; Communications-Electronics Command, 4/17/2002; US Department of the Army, 1/2003; GlobalSecurity.org, 2/12/2020.

[68] Associated Press, September 14, 2020, New York Times, 3/31/2006; New York Times, 4/1/2021, USA Today, 9/13/2001; Dwyer and Flynn, 2005, pp. 77; New York Times, 3/30/2006; InfoWorld, 9/13/2001; Associated Press, 9/14/2001; C9/11T.

[69] Mineta Transportation Institute, October 30, 2001, p. 108, in C9/11T.

[70] See Arkin, 45; Atlantic Monthly, 3/2004; C/11T.

[71] The Committee of Public Safety was the dictatorial government of France in 1793-1795 which carried out the Reign of Terror. Its members included Robespierre, Danton, and St, Just.

[72] Omaha World-Herald, 2/27/2002; Omaha World-Herald, 9/10/2002; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11/1/1997; Associated Press, 2/21/2002; Omaha World-Herald, 2/27/2002; Omaha World-Herald, 9/10/2002, C9/11T.

[73] C9/11T.

[74] US Department of Defense, 5/1997; GlobalSecurity.org 4/27/2005, C9/11T.

[75] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11/12/1997; Associated Press, 2/21/2002; Omaha World-Herald, 2/27/2002; BBC, 9/1/2002; Omaha World-Herald, 9/10/2002; C9/11T.

[76] 2d Bomb Wing, 6/30/2002, pp. 40 American History, 10/2006 Bombardier, 9/8/2020; American History, 10/2006.

[77] “A 1998 Defense Department newsletter reported that for several years Stratcom had been incorporating a computer network attack (CNA) into Global Guardian. The attack involved Stratcom “red team” members and other organizations acting as enemy agents, and included attempts to penetrate the Command using the Internet and a “bad” insider who had access to a key command and control system. The attackers “war dialed” the phones to tie them up and sent faxes to numerous fax machines throughout the Command. They also claimed they were able to shut down Stratcom's systems. Reportedly, Stratcom planned to increase the level of computer network attack in future Global Guardian exercises.” IAnewsletter, 6/98, cooperativeresearch.com: Ward Parker (US Strategic Command), “Incorporating IA into GLOBAL GUARDIAN,” IAnewsletter, June 1998, C9/11T. IA stands for information assurance. This publication is put out by the Information Analysis Center administered by the Pentagon’s Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC); article online at: http://www.iwar.org.uk/infocon/dtic-ia/Vol2_No1.pdf, cited at C9/11T.

[78] John O’Loughlin, Gerard Toal, Vladimir Kolossov, “A ‘Risky Westward Turn’ Putin’s 9-11 Script and Ordinary Russians,” http://www.colorado.edu/IBS/PEC/johno/pub/Putin_911.html

[79] C9/11T.

[80] Code One Magazine, 1/2002, C9/11T.

[81] David Forster, “UST Grad Guides Bombers in War,” St. Thomas Aquin, April 12, 2002, C9/11T.

[82] Executive Order 12958, dated April 17, 1995. http://cryptome.quintessenz.org/mirror/offutt-eyeball.htm

[83] “Inside the Bunker,” New York Times, September 13, 2001.

[84] Fox News Sunday, September 16, 2001.

[85] Réseau Voltaire, Information Note 235-236, September 27, 2001; Meyssan, Pentagate, p.48.

[86] 9/11 Commission Report, p 29.

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