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New details have emerged about the communications and protocol failures that happened in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, including the breakdown of the "continuity of government" plan among the presidential successors:
Based on a review of newly unclassified documents, memoirs and other published accounts, and interviews with U.S. officials, NBC News has learned that:
- Three dozen live nuclear weapons were aboard U.S. Air Force bombers at three airbases when al Qaeda struck New York and Washington.
- Because of inadequate communications equipment and procedures, top U.S. officials couldn't talk to each other or to anyone else. Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to speak to Bush to know why the U.S. was preparing to go to DEFCON 3 — but the White House couldn't put him through to Air Force One. Bush had no way to receive phone calls.
- After Bush left Florida, where he had been reading a book to schoolkids, his plane was low on fuel but for hours had nowhere to land.
- Most of the top 10 people in the president's line of succession, including Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, either refused to follow the protocol and go to their designated secure sites, or were out of the country, or were never contacted.
- Now-disgraced Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, third in line, observed protocol and was taken to an underground bunker in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But that left him out of touch with all other top government leaders.
- Attorney General John Ashcroft was in a government plane and tried to return to Washington, but was turned away by the FAA.
- Education Secretary Rod Paige, 16th in line to the White House, was left on the tarmac in Sarasota, Florida. He rented a car and drove back to Washington.
[...] Perhaps the biggest newly uncovered secret is that on the morning of 9/11, when Al Qaeda struck New York and Washington, the Pentagon's annual "Global Guardian" war game was in full swing. Three dozen real nuclear weapons had been loaded onboard intercontinental bombers in North Dakota, Missouri, and Louisiana.
[...] With U.S. forces worldwide going on alert, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Alexander Vershbow, called the White House Situation Room: Russian President Vladimir Putin "wanted to speak with Bush." Coincidently, the Russians were in the middle of their own nuclear war exercise and their intelligence had now detected telltale signs of enhanced American force posture. For 30 minutes, White House communicators tried to establish a secure line between Air Force One and the Kremlin, finally giving up. Russian-speaking National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice then got on the phone with the Russian president to agree on a cooperative stand-down.
This will be great fodder for my alternate history novel featuring President John Dennis "Denny" Hastert.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Monday September 12 2016, @03:26AM
War exercises aren't exactly uncommon, right? Coincidence detected.
I find it more interesting that the FBI was facing budget cuts [historycommons.org] in the months prior to 9/11 (I had remembered something about FBI downsizing or funding rejection specifically on Sept. 10, 2001, but it took a while to find).
Nowadays, cutting FBI funding is unthinkable, and the FBI routinely manufactures terrorist plots. When you hear about terrorists getting arrested on U.S. soil, it's generally some deluded or mentally ill [theintercept.com] social media user that an FBI informant prods into purchasing guns/bombs/fertilizer. To catch a real terrorist, you need luck, mistakes made by the terrorists, or to already be monitoring one of the participants.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Monday September 12 2016, @03:38AM
EXACTLY!!!!
I still don't believe those buildings could have come down in their own footprint like that: definitely agree with the engineers for 9/11 truth.
http://www.ae911truth.org/gallery/evidence.html [ae911truth.org]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday September 12 2016, @03:53AM
steel memes
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(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday September 12 2016, @09:26PM
Bin laden was an engineer.
I believe there was an engineer on each of the hi-jacked planes.
That, coupled with gravity generally pulling things straight downwards, does not make such apparently controlled destruction so hard to believe.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 12 2016, @06:46PM
For another perspective on it - one of our friend's husband at the time was a Farsi speaking FBI agent, and the night before the attacks he was relocated to San Francisco because "something big was going down," and they knew it had some thing to do with SanFran, so they sent him there. One of the tower flights' final destination was SFO - so apparently there was a little bit of intel about that known before the hijackings took place.
I think "the truth" on this (and all big events) varies tremendously based on where you learn it from - and there's not going to be one "true truth" about the whole thing, nobody has full accurate disclosure about all the events, who knew what, what their motives were, who helped them, etc. I certainly don't believe Fox News, but even if you spent the next 15 years with unlimited access, interviewing people with firsthand knowledge of events, sorting out the conflicting information would still leave an unsolvable puzzle.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday September 12 2016, @08:44PM
Well, we all know about the "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" memo, and there were other hints.
The situation is likely to get worse with the "collect it all" attitude in full swing, leading to intelligence overload.
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