Gold9472
11-20-2005, 08:01 PM
The Lone Gunmen, First Episode - A Review Of The New Wargames Timeline
http://home.comcast.net/~gold9472/lonegunmen.gif
Video
Click Here (http://www.metatech.org/lonegunmanpilo-2.wmv)
A Review of the New Wargames Timeline
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050830185334880
(Gold9472: There are a lot of links from the original article.)
The Complete 9/11 Timeline hosted by The Center for Cooperative Research recently published a revised set of entries on the military exercises of September 11, providing a goldmine of well-sourced information. Compiled by Paul Thompson, the 9/11 Timeline long ago became the leading resource of mainstream news reports about September 11. Available in book form as The Terror Timeline (2004), it continues to evolve online.
The latest material for the first time casts light on what may have been the day's master wargame: Global Guardian, run out of Offutt Air Force Base by the US Strategic Command (Stratcom) under Admiral Richard Mies (official bio). He has since retired and taken up a gig as the CEO of Hicks & Associates, a "strategic consultant" to the federal government dealing in "military transformation."
Our New York correspondant, Nicholas Levis, has written a review:
Aug. 2005:
As the day dawns over the East Coast on September 11th, 2001, the US Strategic Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska is on full alert, busily dispatching warplanes around North America in a rehearsal for Armaggedon.
Stratcom directs the US nuclear arsenal. A number of interrelated air-defense wargames are underway around the country, under the overall umbrella of Global Guardian. This is the designation for the annual combined exercises run by Stratcom in conjunction with the US Space Command and NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The man officially in charge of Global Guardian is Admiral Richard Mies, Stratcom's commander-in-chief.
The crash-bombings of New York City and Washington unfold starting at around 8:15 am, when Flight 11 out of Boston ceases communications with ground stations and diverts radically from its planned route. The often-contradictory official accounts are more or less in agreement that the diversions of Flight 175 and Flight 77 began about 27 and 41 minutes later, respectively.
Ample evidence gathered from mainstream news sources and compiled by Thompson in the new timeline entries indicates that the wargames served to confuse and stymie air defense response to the simultaneous crash-bombings. Although Thompson avoids conclusions and merely presents a long series of verifiable facts, confusion appears to have been the exact result intended by at least some of the wargame planners. This was already a central thesis of Mike Rupperts's 2004 book Crossing the Rubicon (click here for a summary), but Thompson's timeline update adds new pieces to the puzzle.
Thompson cites multiple reports (see 8:30 am) indicating that Global Guardian is normally held in October, and that the run-through in 2001 was in fact originally scheduled for late October and then re-scheduled for early September at some point after March 2001. Who made that scheduling decision? That may be the most crucial question of all in determining the criminal culpability for 9/11 among US officials.
In the period after March 2001, military planners discussed various possible exercises that would have involved hijacking simulations, including live-fly (FTX) exercises using real planes with actors playing passengers. It is known that the idea of rehearsing air defense against a hijacked plane aimed at the Pentagon was at least temporarily considered in April 2001 and postponed. Meanwhile, the planners of Amalgam Virgo II were discussing a simulation for simultaneous hijackings of passenger planes out of Utah and Vancouver, with military people and FBI agents acting in the roles of passengers and hijackers. As of spring 2001, Amalgam Virgo II was scheduled for July 2002.
The idea was hardly new. A mass casualty (MASCAL) exercise of the Pentagon's command and emergency services, using the scenario of a plane hitting the building, had already been conducted by hundreds of personnel at the Pentagon in October 2000. Two clinics at the Pentagon rehearsed the same script in May 2001.
All this activity, combined with the many past precedents of kamikaze attack attempts using civilian planes, completely demolish the lie frequently propagated by Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld that "no one could have imagined" simultaneous hijackings or planes used as weapons against buildings. (See "Bush, Rice and the Genoa Warning")
But a more ominous question obviously presents itself: Were any of these hijacking scenarios under discussion that spring finally incorporated into the scripts for the wargames of September 2001?
The story of Global Guardian and the breakfast activities of its director Mies has long been in the public domain, published on military news sites and the Omaha press among other venues. But until recently the vast-but-scattershot investigations of the last four years by the hundreds of 9/11 researchers working cooperatively via the Internet had missed these snippets.
As the timeline relates, Mies was having breakfast on the morning of 9/11 with a group of business leaders, as part of a charity event hosted by Offutt Air Force Base and sponsored by Warren Buffett, the second-richest man in the United States. We have no way of knowing what communications Mies was receiving about the crisis that began at 8:15, but soon after 8:46 am, the entire party would have learned that a plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Mies remained with the civilians until after they all heard that the second WTC Tower had also been hit. (The second crash occurred at 9:03 am.) Based on the new timeline entries, it is apparently only then that Mies went to his command post, and that Global Guardian and related wargames were suspended.
Mies thus joins the growing list of men in key positions at the top of the US military chain of command who managed to absent themselves from any decision-making capacity during the opening hour of the 9/11 crash-bombings. That list includes:
George W. Bush, who asked his staff chief Andrew Card for no clarification on the whispered message that "America is under attack" (9:05), but instead remained seated, listening to children read in a classroom, until around 9:16; and whose large White House entourage remained in the Florida school until 9:34.
Gen. Richard Myers, the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who says he heard about the first crash, thought it was an accident, went into a Senate meeting, and only became aware of the second crash just a few minutes before the Pentagon was hit at 9:37.
Donald Rumsfeld, who was sought for an hour by the Pentagon command center and first appeared there at around 10:30 am, according to The 9/11 Commission Report.
Gen. Montague Winfield, head of the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, who on the evening of Sept. 10th arranged to be replaced on his scheduled shift the next morning for the two hours starting at 8:30 am by his rookie deputy, Capt.Charles Leidig (since promoted to admiral).
Is all of this attributable to nonchalance? At what point are we allowed to discern a pattern in the behavior of the men who topped the military chain of command and who were responsible for responding to the unfolding events?
Rumsfeld's case is particularly flagrant, given that he had signed off on a June 1, 2001 Pentagon order that for the first time inserted the Secretary of Defense into the chain of response for issuing military intercept orders for errant planes. His story is that he reacted to news of the first and second WTC crashes by continuing his routine morning briefings, and that after the Pentagon was hit (at 9:37 or 9:41 am, depending on which official timeline one prefers), he decided to assist in rescue efforts instead of taking his place at the command center.
The official story of 9/11 holds that four passenger planes were diverted and that none of them were intercepted for reconnaissance and response, which constitutes a massive and unprecedented failure of standard operating procedures. The story of how and why that happened has changed repeatedly since 9/11, and no official has ever been held accountable for the failures. On the contrary, many of the key figures involved received promotions, among them Myers, who was confirmed in that position soon after 9/11, and Gen. Ralph Eberhart, the NORAD director who was appointed to head the new Northern Command (since retired).
During the last four years we have seen a plethora of contradicting timelines and testimonies presented by NORAD, the US Air Force (in its official history Air War Over America), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), press reports citing official sources, and, finally, The 9/11 Commission Report. Each of these versions of what happened on 9/11 was upheld in its turn for months or years without revision. The contradictions mean that at least some of the responsible officials must have been promoting falsehoods, but again, no move has been made to hold anyone accountable for that.
Already in the first year after 9/11, when next to nothing was known about the exercises, researchers skeptical of the official story developed the hypothesis that wargames could have been used as the device to subvert standard operating procedures and allow the attacks to proceed unmolested. A wargame pretext can allow false-flag attacks to be rehearsed or prepared without arousing suspicion; and divert resources or block communication lines on Day X. After the fact, the idea that the wargames were subverted by Arab hijackers with inside information (or a lot of luck!) might serve as a military-fiasco story (read: piece of wishful thinking) that engenders embarrassment and silence among that vast majority of US military people who were not involved in any conscious wrong-doing or facilitation of the 9/11 events.
Hard evidence for the hypothesis first began surfacing in August 2002, when it was revealed that the CIA had scheduled an evacuation drill at the National Reconnaissance Office on the morning of Sept. 11, based on the script of an "errant plane" hitting the NRO headquarters. The drill was cancelled when the real-world events began, and most of the NRO staff, who control the military-intelligence establishment's surveillance satellites, were sent home. One man who helped plan the drill, John Fulton, actually put it on his resume as an example of his prescience.
The Kean Commmission hearings occasionally touched upon past exercises (also compiled, to far more devastating effect, in Thompson's new timeline), but entirely avoided the issue of the wargames on Sept. 11 itself. These were finally mentioned in a single note to The 9/11 Commission Report (Chapter 1, Note 116). This acknowledged only a "cold war"-style exercise, and was based entirely on a brief quote from Eberhart. He claimed that the exercises enhanced air defense response, an incredible statement given the failures to intercept. While quoting Eberhart that "it took about 30 seconds" to make the adjustment from the wargames to the ongoing real-world situation, the note significantly avoids specifying the time when the wargames were suspended.
The known NORAD wargames of 9/11, which were apparently incorporated into the larger framework of Global Guardian, include Northern Guardian, Vigilant Guardian and Vigilant Warrior. The most innocent-seeming of these, Northern Guardian was announced in advance and dispatched air force assets to the Arctic Circle in response to the Russian maneuvers also scheduled for that day. (The NORAD press release of 9/9/01 is still online.)
However, Vigilant Guardian appears to have scripted simulated attacks within the continental United States. NORAD personnel in Rome, New York who received first reports of hijackings within NORAD'S Northeastern sector, including Col. Robert K. Marr and Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins, are reported to have asked if this was "real world or exercise." This implies that the scenarios for the wargames on September 11 were strikingly similar to the actual attacks that unfolded that morning--as was the supposedly unrelated CIA/NRO exercise.
How much strain can a "coincidence hypothesis" sustain before it becomes untenable?
As reported by the wire service Newhouse News (1/25/02):
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.
Six minutes later, at 8:46, the wargames were still causing confusion, apparently in the form of a craft (or at least a radar-blip) thought to be heading for JFK Airport in Queens: "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 no, not the simulation likely heading for JFK."
So much for Eberhart's "30 seconds" to adjust to real-world events. Again, the new supporting evidence provided by Thompson suggests that no move was made to suspend the wargames until well after the second crash at 9:03 am, by which time the worst of the attacks had occurred and the Pentagon flight was well under way.
End Part I
http://home.comcast.net/~gold9472/lonegunmen.gif
Video
Click Here (http://www.metatech.org/lonegunmanpilo-2.wmv)
A Review of the New Wargames Timeline
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050830185334880
(Gold9472: There are a lot of links from the original article.)
The Complete 9/11 Timeline hosted by The Center for Cooperative Research recently published a revised set of entries on the military exercises of September 11, providing a goldmine of well-sourced information. Compiled by Paul Thompson, the 9/11 Timeline long ago became the leading resource of mainstream news reports about September 11. Available in book form as The Terror Timeline (2004), it continues to evolve online.
The latest material for the first time casts light on what may have been the day's master wargame: Global Guardian, run out of Offutt Air Force Base by the US Strategic Command (Stratcom) under Admiral Richard Mies (official bio). He has since retired and taken up a gig as the CEO of Hicks & Associates, a "strategic consultant" to the federal government dealing in "military transformation."
Our New York correspondant, Nicholas Levis, has written a review:
Aug. 2005:
As the day dawns over the East Coast on September 11th, 2001, the US Strategic Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska is on full alert, busily dispatching warplanes around North America in a rehearsal for Armaggedon.
Stratcom directs the US nuclear arsenal. A number of interrelated air-defense wargames are underway around the country, under the overall umbrella of Global Guardian. This is the designation for the annual combined exercises run by Stratcom in conjunction with the US Space Command and NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The man officially in charge of Global Guardian is Admiral Richard Mies, Stratcom's commander-in-chief.
The crash-bombings of New York City and Washington unfold starting at around 8:15 am, when Flight 11 out of Boston ceases communications with ground stations and diverts radically from its planned route. The often-contradictory official accounts are more or less in agreement that the diversions of Flight 175 and Flight 77 began about 27 and 41 minutes later, respectively.
Ample evidence gathered from mainstream news sources and compiled by Thompson in the new timeline entries indicates that the wargames served to confuse and stymie air defense response to the simultaneous crash-bombings. Although Thompson avoids conclusions and merely presents a long series of verifiable facts, confusion appears to have been the exact result intended by at least some of the wargame planners. This was already a central thesis of Mike Rupperts's 2004 book Crossing the Rubicon (click here for a summary), but Thompson's timeline update adds new pieces to the puzzle.
Thompson cites multiple reports (see 8:30 am) indicating that Global Guardian is normally held in October, and that the run-through in 2001 was in fact originally scheduled for late October and then re-scheduled for early September at some point after March 2001. Who made that scheduling decision? That may be the most crucial question of all in determining the criminal culpability for 9/11 among US officials.
In the period after March 2001, military planners discussed various possible exercises that would have involved hijacking simulations, including live-fly (FTX) exercises using real planes with actors playing passengers. It is known that the idea of rehearsing air defense against a hijacked plane aimed at the Pentagon was at least temporarily considered in April 2001 and postponed. Meanwhile, the planners of Amalgam Virgo II were discussing a simulation for simultaneous hijackings of passenger planes out of Utah and Vancouver, with military people and FBI agents acting in the roles of passengers and hijackers. As of spring 2001, Amalgam Virgo II was scheduled for July 2002.
The idea was hardly new. A mass casualty (MASCAL) exercise of the Pentagon's command and emergency services, using the scenario of a plane hitting the building, had already been conducted by hundreds of personnel at the Pentagon in October 2000. Two clinics at the Pentagon rehearsed the same script in May 2001.
All this activity, combined with the many past precedents of kamikaze attack attempts using civilian planes, completely demolish the lie frequently propagated by Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld that "no one could have imagined" simultaneous hijackings or planes used as weapons against buildings. (See "Bush, Rice and the Genoa Warning")
But a more ominous question obviously presents itself: Were any of these hijacking scenarios under discussion that spring finally incorporated into the scripts for the wargames of September 2001?
The story of Global Guardian and the breakfast activities of its director Mies has long been in the public domain, published on military news sites and the Omaha press among other venues. But until recently the vast-but-scattershot investigations of the last four years by the hundreds of 9/11 researchers working cooperatively via the Internet had missed these snippets.
As the timeline relates, Mies was having breakfast on the morning of 9/11 with a group of business leaders, as part of a charity event hosted by Offutt Air Force Base and sponsored by Warren Buffett, the second-richest man in the United States. We have no way of knowing what communications Mies was receiving about the crisis that began at 8:15, but soon after 8:46 am, the entire party would have learned that a plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Mies remained with the civilians until after they all heard that the second WTC Tower had also been hit. (The second crash occurred at 9:03 am.) Based on the new timeline entries, it is apparently only then that Mies went to his command post, and that Global Guardian and related wargames were suspended.
Mies thus joins the growing list of men in key positions at the top of the US military chain of command who managed to absent themselves from any decision-making capacity during the opening hour of the 9/11 crash-bombings. That list includes:
George W. Bush, who asked his staff chief Andrew Card for no clarification on the whispered message that "America is under attack" (9:05), but instead remained seated, listening to children read in a classroom, until around 9:16; and whose large White House entourage remained in the Florida school until 9:34.
Gen. Richard Myers, the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who says he heard about the first crash, thought it was an accident, went into a Senate meeting, and only became aware of the second crash just a few minutes before the Pentagon was hit at 9:37.
Donald Rumsfeld, who was sought for an hour by the Pentagon command center and first appeared there at around 10:30 am, according to The 9/11 Commission Report.
Gen. Montague Winfield, head of the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, who on the evening of Sept. 10th arranged to be replaced on his scheduled shift the next morning for the two hours starting at 8:30 am by his rookie deputy, Capt.Charles Leidig (since promoted to admiral).
Is all of this attributable to nonchalance? At what point are we allowed to discern a pattern in the behavior of the men who topped the military chain of command and who were responsible for responding to the unfolding events?
Rumsfeld's case is particularly flagrant, given that he had signed off on a June 1, 2001 Pentagon order that for the first time inserted the Secretary of Defense into the chain of response for issuing military intercept orders for errant planes. His story is that he reacted to news of the first and second WTC crashes by continuing his routine morning briefings, and that after the Pentagon was hit (at 9:37 or 9:41 am, depending on which official timeline one prefers), he decided to assist in rescue efforts instead of taking his place at the command center.
The official story of 9/11 holds that four passenger planes were diverted and that none of them were intercepted for reconnaissance and response, which constitutes a massive and unprecedented failure of standard operating procedures. The story of how and why that happened has changed repeatedly since 9/11, and no official has ever been held accountable for the failures. On the contrary, many of the key figures involved received promotions, among them Myers, who was confirmed in that position soon after 9/11, and Gen. Ralph Eberhart, the NORAD director who was appointed to head the new Northern Command (since retired).
During the last four years we have seen a plethora of contradicting timelines and testimonies presented by NORAD, the US Air Force (in its official history Air War Over America), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), press reports citing official sources, and, finally, The 9/11 Commission Report. Each of these versions of what happened on 9/11 was upheld in its turn for months or years without revision. The contradictions mean that at least some of the responsible officials must have been promoting falsehoods, but again, no move has been made to hold anyone accountable for that.
Already in the first year after 9/11, when next to nothing was known about the exercises, researchers skeptical of the official story developed the hypothesis that wargames could have been used as the device to subvert standard operating procedures and allow the attacks to proceed unmolested. A wargame pretext can allow false-flag attacks to be rehearsed or prepared without arousing suspicion; and divert resources or block communication lines on Day X. After the fact, the idea that the wargames were subverted by Arab hijackers with inside information (or a lot of luck!) might serve as a military-fiasco story (read: piece of wishful thinking) that engenders embarrassment and silence among that vast majority of US military people who were not involved in any conscious wrong-doing or facilitation of the 9/11 events.
Hard evidence for the hypothesis first began surfacing in August 2002, when it was revealed that the CIA had scheduled an evacuation drill at the National Reconnaissance Office on the morning of Sept. 11, based on the script of an "errant plane" hitting the NRO headquarters. The drill was cancelled when the real-world events began, and most of the NRO staff, who control the military-intelligence establishment's surveillance satellites, were sent home. One man who helped plan the drill, John Fulton, actually put it on his resume as an example of his prescience.
The Kean Commmission hearings occasionally touched upon past exercises (also compiled, to far more devastating effect, in Thompson's new timeline), but entirely avoided the issue of the wargames on Sept. 11 itself. These were finally mentioned in a single note to The 9/11 Commission Report (Chapter 1, Note 116). This acknowledged only a "cold war"-style exercise, and was based entirely on a brief quote from Eberhart. He claimed that the exercises enhanced air defense response, an incredible statement given the failures to intercept. While quoting Eberhart that "it took about 30 seconds" to make the adjustment from the wargames to the ongoing real-world situation, the note significantly avoids specifying the time when the wargames were suspended.
The known NORAD wargames of 9/11, which were apparently incorporated into the larger framework of Global Guardian, include Northern Guardian, Vigilant Guardian and Vigilant Warrior. The most innocent-seeming of these, Northern Guardian was announced in advance and dispatched air force assets to the Arctic Circle in response to the Russian maneuvers also scheduled for that day. (The NORAD press release of 9/9/01 is still online.)
However, Vigilant Guardian appears to have scripted simulated attacks within the continental United States. NORAD personnel in Rome, New York who received first reports of hijackings within NORAD'S Northeastern sector, including Col. Robert K. Marr and Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins, are reported to have asked if this was "real world or exercise." This implies that the scenarios for the wargames on September 11 were strikingly similar to the actual attacks that unfolded that morning--as was the supposedly unrelated CIA/NRO exercise.
How much strain can a "coincidence hypothesis" sustain before it becomes untenable?
As reported by the wire service Newhouse News (1/25/02):
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.
Six minutes later, at 8:46, the wargames were still causing confusion, apparently in the form of a craft (or at least a radar-blip) thought to be heading for JFK Airport in Queens: "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 no, not the simulation likely heading for JFK."
So much for Eberhart's "30 seconds" to adjust to real-world events. Again, the new supporting evidence provided by Thompson suggests that no move was made to suspend the wargames until well after the second crash at 9:03 am, by which time the worst of the attacks had occurred and the Pentagon flight was well under way.
End Part I