NORAD Tapes Only Intensify Implausibility Of 9/11 Official Story

http://infowars.com/articles/sept11/..._911_story.htm

[align=left]NORAD Tapes Only Intensify Implausibility Of 9/11 Official Story[/align]
"These guys are smart," statement completely inconsistent with flight instructors description of hijacker's skills
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | August 2 2006

Newly released portions of NORAD tapes from 9/11 featured in a Vanity Fair article do little to answer skeptic's questions about the impotence of U.S. air defenses on 9/11 and if anything only increase focus on the incompatibility of the official version of events with what is actually known to have taken place on that day.

It is clear that the exercises revolving around hijacked airliners scheduled for that morning created so much noise in the system that controllers could not pinpoint the positions of any of the real airliners to orchestrate any kind of intercept.

Errant 'ghost' aircraft such as 'Delta 89' and American Airlines 11 which controllers weren't aware had already crashed into the World Trade Center north tower continually confuse NORAD officials and at one point after Flight 77 has hit the Pentagon, they even intercept their own aircraft.
Several exchanges between NORAD personnel outline the confusion that the drills caused and delayed the response of air defense procedures.

08:37:52
BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [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.
POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?
BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.
8:37:56
WATSON: What?
DOOLEY: Whoa!
WATSON: What was that?
ROUNTREE: Is that real-world?
DOOLEY: Real-world hijack.
WATSON: Cool!

"When they told me there was a hijack, my first reaction was 'Somebody started the exercise early,'" said mission-crew commander Major Kevin Nasypany.

The exercise of running numerous war games where planes would be mock-hijacked and crashed into high-profile targets is dismissed as a coincidence by the writer Michael Bronner, with no discussion of the astronomical improbability of the two scenarios colliding, in alliance with similar same target, same time drills which took place during the London bombings.

The tapes betray the fact that NORAD's attention to the fact that Flight 77 was heading towards Washington are virtually non-existent as they struggle to gain authorization to shoot down stray aircraft.

Despite the lies of Cheney in his subsequent TV interviews and statements given under oath to the 9/11 Commission, those shoot down orders never arrived, even after United 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania.

While NORAD struggled to comprehend what exactly was heading towards Washington, in Dick Cheney's PEOC bunker things were apparently a lot clearer. The testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta is brought under more scrutiny by the NORAD tapes.

How could Cheney know exactly what was heading for Washington and give clear orders for its path to remain clear, while the very people mandated to defend the skies of America scrambled desperately to make sense of the chaos and get fighters in the positions they needed to be?

"During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out."

And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?"

"And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"

Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony to the 9/11 Commission, May 23, 2003.

The impotence of NORAD in only having access to four fighters to cover the entire eastern seaboard of the US contradicts the fact that 35 USAF bases alone were within range of the hijacked flights but were never called upon or given as an option.

The quick response by NORAD to the golfer Payne Stewart's off-course aircraft in 1999 is often cited as contradicting with procedure on 9/11. In addition, there were 67 occasions where fighters were scrambled to intercept errant aircraft in the 9 month period before 9/11.

Other segments of the tapes only raise more questions and do not provide any answers to long-standing mysteries.

- How did the admittedly incompetent pilot hijackers turn off the transponders of all the aircraft? A procedure, according to professionals that we have talked to, is often beyond the capability of even the most experienced commercial pilots?

- In one portion of the tapes, NORAD personnel are heard to marvel at the excellence of the hijacker's strategy.

9:23:15

ANDERSON: They're probably not squawking anything [broadcasting a beacon code] anyway. I mean, obviously these guys are in the cockpit.
NASYPANY: These guys are smart.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, they knew exactly what they wanted to do.
These guys are smart? Contrast this statement with those of the flight instructors when describing the skills of the alleged hijackers.
Mohammed Atta: "His attention span was zero."

Khalid Al-Mihdhar: "We didn't kick him out, but he didn't live up to our standards."

Marwan Al-Shehhi: â??He was dropped because of his limited English and incompetence at the controls.â?�

Salem Al-Hazmi: "We advised him to quit after two lessons.â?�

Do the descriptions afforded to these men square with the chaos that their skills in evading detection brought to the NORAD control room? Or were the planes being controlled by some other means than morons who could barely get single engine Cessna's off the ground - but who apparently ran the world's most sophisticated air defense ragged for hours?

Does the panic that envelops the NORAD control room and the fear that new reports of hijacked planes will never end, coupled with speculation that anything (the White House and the Statue of Liberty are mentioned) could be a target, corroborate with the actions of President Bush's security detail?

Reports of numerous stray aircraft, bombs on planes, and truck bombs at the Pentagon fly and yet President Bush sits calmly in a Florida classroom apparently safe in the knowledge that he is not a target. Why wasn't the President hurried into the nearest underground bunker as soon as Card told him "America is under attack," unless Bush's people were confident of the exact targets beforehand, and that Bush himself wasn't one of them?

The writer of the Vanity Fair piece has taken the NORAD tapes on their own and attempted to forward them as proof that the official version of events is largely accurate, minus the proven lies about the non-authorization of shoot downs.

The problem is that the behavior of the errant planes, when overlaid with the activities of Cheney and Bush, standard intercept operating procedure (minus the intentional confusion of an untold number of blips from the NORAD drills) and the incompetent hijackers, simply does not corroborate.

Furthermore, the tape portions amount to a total of no more than 20 minutes of hand-picked cmmunications and it is admitted that the discussions of the higher brass are not recorded due to secrecy. Nothing is mentioned of the six tapes of air traffic control communications with the hijacked airliners that were deliberately destroyed by FAA managers.

The purpose of the Vanity Fair and a similar Washington Post article is to whitewash the entire affair and blame 9/11 on the incompetence of NORAD.

The NORAD tapes, far from dissolving so-called "conspiracy theories," only serve to support the weight of evidence that points directly towards a deliberate plan on September 11, 2001 to make the air defenses of the United States impotent and to enable the planes to find their targets.

Third of Americans suspect 9-11 government conspiracy

http://www.scrippsnews.com/911poll
Scripps Howard News Service | August 2 2006
By THOMAS HARGROVE

Flashback: Zogby Poll: Over 70 Million American Adults Support New 9/11 Investigation
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles...30506Zogby.htm

More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

The national survey of 1,010 adults also found that anger against the federal government is at record levels, with 54 percent saying they "personally are more angry" at the government than they used to be.

Widespread resentment and alienation toward the national government appears to be fueling a growing acceptance of conspiracy theories about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Suspicions that the 9/11 attacks were "an inside job" _ the common phrase used by conspiracy theorists on the Internet _ quickly have become nearly as popular as decades-old conspiracy theories that the federal government was responsible for President John F. Kennedy's assassination and that it has covered up proof of space aliens.

Seventy percent of people who give credence to these theories also say they've become angrier with the federal government than they used to be.

Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."

"One out of three sounds high, but that may very well be right," said Lee Hamilton, former vice chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also called the 9/11 commission.) His congressionally appointed investigation concluded that federal officials bungled their attempts to prevent, but did not participate in, the attacks by al Qaeda five years ago.

"A lot of people I've encountered believe the U.S. government was involved," Hamilton said. "Many say the government planned the whole thing. Of course, we don't think the evidence leads that way at all."

The poll also found that 16 percent of Americans speculate that secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the real reason the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.

Conspiracy groups for at least two years have also questioned why the World Trade Center collapsed when fires that heavily damaged similar skyscrapers around the world did not cause such destruction. Sixteen percent said it's "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that "the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings."

Twelve percent suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile in 2001 rather than by an airliner captured by terrorists.

That lower percentage may result from an effort by the conservative Washington-based Judicial Watch advocacy group to debunk the claim. The group filed claims under the Freedom of Information Act and got two fill loops released from Pentagon security cameras.

"Some people claim they can't see anything, but I see a plane hitting the Pentagon at incredibly high speed," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "I see the nose of the plane clearly entering the frame of one video and the tail of the plane entering the Pentagon in the other video."

Many conspiracy Web sites have posted the video loops and report the films are inconclusive or were manipulated by the government.

"Some folks will never be convinced," Fitton said. "But I'm hoping that these videos will dissuade reasonable people from falling into a trap with these conspiracy theories."

University of Florida law professor Mark Fenster, author of the book "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture," said the poll's findings reflect public anger at the unpopular Iraq war, realization that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction and growing doubts of the veracity of the Bush administration.

"What has amazed me is not that there are conspiracy theories, but that they didn't seem to be getting any purchase among the American public until the last year or so," Fenster said. "Although the Iraq war was not directly related to the 9/11 attacks, people are now looking back at 9/11 with much more skepticism than they used to."

Conspiracy-believing participants in the poll agree their suspicions are recent.

"I certainly didn't think of conspiracies when 9/11 first happened," said Elaine Tripp, 62, of Tabernacle, N.J. "I don't know if President Bush was aware of the exact time it was going to happen. But he certainly didn't do enough to stop it. Bush was so intent on having his own little war."

Garrett Johnson, 19, of Manassas, Va., said it was "well after the fact" before he started questioning the official explanation of the attacks. "But then people I know started talking about it. And the Internet had a lot to do with this. After reading all of the different articles there, I started to think we weren't being told the truth."

The Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University has tracked the level of resentment people feel toward the federal government since 1995, starting shortly after Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Forty-seven percent then said they, personally, feel "more angry at the federal government" than they used to. That percentage dropped to 42 percent in 1997, 34 percent in 1998 and only 12 percent shortly after 9/11 during the groundswell of patriotism and support for the government after the attacks.

But the new survey found that 77 percent say their friends and acquaintances have become angrier with government recently and 54 percent say they, themselves, have become angrier _ both record levels.

The survey also found that people who regularly use the Internet but who do not regularly use so-called "mainstream" media are significantly more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracies. People who regularly read daily newspapers or listen to radio newscasts were especially unlikely to believe in the conspiracies.

"We know that there are a lot of people now asking questions," said Janice Matthews, executive director of 911Truth.org, one of the most sophisticated Internet sites raising doubts about official explanations of the attacks. "We didn't have the Internet after Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin or the Kennedy assassination. But we live in different times now."

Matthews' Web site averaged 4,000 "hits" a day last year, but currently has at least 12,000 visits every 24 hours. The site, according to its online policy statement, is dedicated to showing the public that "elements within the U.S. government must have orchestrated or participated in the execution of the attacks for these to have happened the way in which they did."

Participants in the poll were asked to respond to "several serious accusations that some people have made against the federal government in recent years." Five conspiracy theories were described and participants were asked if each was "very likely, somewhat likely or unlikely."

The level of suspicion of U.S. official involvement in a 9/11 conspiracy was only slightly behind the 40 percent who suspect "officials in the federal government were directly responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy" and the 38 percent who believe "the federal government is withholding proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets."

The poll found that a majority of young adults give at least some credence to a 9/11 conspiracy compared to less than a fourth of people 65 or older. Members of racial and ethnic minorities, people with only a high school education and Democrats were especially likely to suspect federal involvement in 9/11.

The survey was conducted by telephone from July 6-24 at the Scripps Survey Research Center at the University of Ohio under a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. The poll has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

(Thomas Hargrove is a reporter for Scripps Howard News Service. Guido H. Stempel III is director of the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University.