Did Cheney Give Orders For The Stand Down?
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Item One
Norman Mineta on Cheney's (unknown) 'Orders'
The testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta on May 23 about Cheney's actions is revealing. Mineta said he arrived at the Presidential Emergency Operating Center (PEOC) at 9:20 a.m. where he observed the Vice President taking charge:
Mineta: There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out.The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?"
And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant. And.
Hamilton: The flight you're referring to is the.
Mineta: The flight that came into the Pentagon.
After some discussion of whether Cheney's orders meant to shoot down the hijacked aircraft, it was clearly stated on the record that there were no such orders to do so, which raises the obvious question of what "the orders" were:
Hamilton: And so there was no specific order there to shoot that plane down.
Mineta: No, sir.
Hamilton: But there were military planes in the air in position to shoot down commercial aircraft.
Mineta: That's right. The planes had been scrambled, I believe, from Otis at that point.
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Item Two
FAA DID Alert IMMEDIATELY On 9.11
received from Brian Quig (Dec. 10, 2001)
12.09.01
AF Spokesman: FAA did alert immediately On 9.11; AF prevented from scrambling!
Top_View conducted a phone interview this morning (12.09.01) with a spokesperson for the U.S. Air Force, located in New York.
This person was ordered to the Ground Zero, Pennsylvania and Pentagon 9.11 crash sites within several days of the events, as part of an Air Force investigative probe.
Much of the truly eye-opening information conveyed to us by this high-ranking officer will -- unfortunately -- have to wait until some future time until we can organize it into article form; a small percentage of the information simply cannot be made public at this time for reasons of personnel --not of "national security."
What we are focusing on right now is some crucial information related specifically to the entire matter of if or when FAA/ATC personnel alerted appropriate Air National Guard/Air Force units, that four large passenger jets were significantly off course and that all standard communications with these craft had been broken.
We were informed that standard procedures fully in effect on the morning of September 11 were absolutely followed to a "T" by U.S. Air Traffic Control personnel; that via established channels and according to established guidelines, U.S. Air National Guard and Air Force units -- which are ALWAYS on alert to be scrambled for intercepts of either distressed OR suspicious and possibly hostile aircraft 365/24/7 in these United States -- were definitely contacted by FAA/ATC on 9.11 immediately after Air Traffic Control had become aware of the developing situation with the jets.
The Air Force spokesman confirmed that after the alerts and requests for intercepts of the aircraft were received from FAA/ATC, orders from the highest level of the executive branch of the federal government were received, demanding that the Air Force stand down and not follow through with established scramble/intercept procedures that morning until further notice!
The U.S. Air Force's hands (wings) were deliberately tied on the morning of September 11, until such time that the deeds had been carried out by the Bush team.
Our informant has told us in no uncertain terms that as much as seventy percent of Armed Forces officers -- with the NOTABLE exception of the U.S. Navy -- are vehemently opposed to the treacherous, murderous actions carried out by profoundly corrupt elements within the federal government on 9.11, and to the wholesale demolition of the U.S. Constitution which these elements have now undertaken.
It was conveyed to us that the "story" is by no means over yet; that the fat lady has by no means yet "sung", and that this large percentage of the military who DO support, uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution are NOT going let all this just "slide". They are simply waiting for the right time, to do all within their power to set things straight in the United States.
Our source furthermore fully concurred with the assessment of ourselves and others: that a crucial element in the government being able to "sell" to the public their utterly false fables about WHY 9.11 death planes were NOT intercepted by Air Guard/Air Force units has to do with a deliberate, major and blatant distortion and twisting of the truth by none OTHER than Dick Cheney himself; accomplished in the following manner.
Cheney, while being interviewed by Tim Russert on NBC TV's 'MEET THE PRESS on September 16th, claimed that the military needed authorization from the president before scrambling fighter jets to intercept American Airlines Flight 77.
This is a lie, plain and simple.
For example: remember two years ago, when golf pro Payne Stewart's small private Lear jet went off-course and out of communication just after takeoff in Florida?
Within minutes, on an immediate alert from the FAA, U.S. Air Force and Air Guard jets were scrambled to intercept Stewart's jet and see what the heck was up (not that it helped much in that case...): "Several Air Force and Air National Guard fighter jets, plus an AWACS radar control plane, helped the Federal Aviation Administration track the runaway Learjet and estimate when it would run out of fuel." --CNN, 10.26.99
Interceptors were in direct proximity to Stewart's seriously messed-up aircraft within about TEN MINUTES of him having taken off. Nobody had to go pull Clinton away from Vice-president Monica Lewinsky and get him to AUTHORIZE the INTERCEPT of Payne Stewart's jet that day.
Moreover, according to the same CNN article: "...officers on the Joint Chiefs were monitoring the Learjet on radar screens inside the Pentagon's National Military Command Center. -- CNN, 10.26.99
Air Traffic Controllers request military intercepts of private and commercial planes regularly. Sometimes it's because communications have broken off; sometimes it's to inform a pilot that his plane has gone off course; other times it's to observe the situation directly - for instance, to see who's actually flying the plane and things like that. None of this requires presidential approval.
But there's MORE to how Cheney twisted the truth here regarding what is provably one of the biggest holes in the FedGov's 9.11 tapestry of lies; since someone of even the most minimal intelligence would realize that such intercepts are VERY common, do NOT require any "presidential authorization" and should have taken place on September 11.
So what arch-spin-meister Mengele Cheney did was to very subtly and cleverly fudge the distinction between a common, often-executed intercept and a shoot-down of an aircraft already determined to be hostile.
Cheney put the entire situation in the context that there was a terribly troubling, agonizing ethical decision to be made whether or not to shoot down a number of passenger aircraft which "seemed" to be hostile, and that only the president (who WAS after all (don't forget) very busy reading rabbit stories to Florida schoolkids at the time!) could have authorized this shoot-down.
(snip)
Here's a transcript of the Meet the Press segment where Cheney gets going muddying the waters about intercepts, shootdowns, time frames, (non-existent) moral considerations that supposedly delayed a response even more, and other chaff to deflect truth-seeking radar. Following that is a very worthwhile analysis of Cheney's verbal/conceptual gymnastics from:
www.emperors-clothes.com/
"MR. RUSSERT: What's the most important decision you think he made during the course of the day?
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, the--I suppose the toughest decision was this question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft.
"MR. RUSSERT: And you decided?
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: We decided to do it. We'd, in effect, put a flying combat air patrol up over the city; F-16s with an AWACS, which is an airborne radar system, and tanker support so they could stay up a long time...
"It doesn't do any good to put up a combat air patrol if you don't give them instructions to act, if, in fact, they feel it's appropriate.
"MR. RUSSERT: So if the United States government became aware that a hijacked commercial airline was destined for the White House or the Capitol, we would take the plane down?
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yes. The president made the decision...that if the plane would not divert...as a last resort, our pilots were authorized to take them out. Now, people say, you know, that's a horrendous decision to make. Well, it is. You've got an airplane full of American citizens, civilians, captured by...terrorists, headed and are you going to, in fact, shoot it down, obviously, and kill all those Americans on board?
"...It's a presidential-level decision, and the president made, I think, exactly the right call in this case, to say, "I wished we'd had combat air patrol up over New York." --NBC, 'Meet the Press' 16 September 2001 (1)
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