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posted by janrinok on Monday September 12 2016, @01:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the follow-the-rules dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 12 2016, @12:29PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 12 2016, @12:29PM (#400664) Journal

    Uhhhhhh - citations, please? I've heard a couple rounds of the rumor mill saying that plane was shot down, but that doesn't really add up. The wreckage was confined to such a small area, it's not possible that the craft was shot down from altitude. The plane that was shot down in Ukrainia rained bits and pieces down on square miles of real estate.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @05:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @05:18PM (#400814)

    As coroner, responsible for returning human remains, Miller has been forced to share with the families information that is unimaginable. As he clinically recounts to them, holding back very few details, the 33 passengers, seven crew and four hijackers together weighed roughly 7,000 pounds. They were essentially cremated together upon impact. Hundreds of searchers who climbed the hemlocks and combed the woods for weeks were able to find about 1,500 mostly scorched samples of human tissue totaling less than 600 pounds, or about 8 percent of the total.

    Miller was among the very first to arrive after 10:06 on the magnificently sunny morning of September 11. He was stunned at how small the smoking crater looked, he says, "like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it." Once he was able to absorb the scene, Miller says, "I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes, because there were no bodies there. It became like a giant funeral service." As a funeral director, Miller says, he is honored and humbled to preside over what has become essentially an immense cemetery stretching far into the scenic wooded mountain ridge. He considers it the final resting place of 40 national heroes.

    Immediately after the crash, the seeming absence of human remains led the mind of coroner Wally Miller to a surreal fantasy: that Flight 93 had somehow stopped in mid-flight and discharged all of its passengers before crashing. "There was just nothing visible," he says. "It was the strangest feeling." It would be nearly an hour before Miller came upon his first trace of a body part. Source–(Feb., '02)

    But a week after the FBI closed its criminal investigation at the Somerset County site, county Coroner Wallace Miller indicated that his job has switched largely from search and recovery to a cleanup of what he deems sacred ground. "I consider this site almost like a cemetery," Miller said yesterday. "When you walk through a cemetery and you see debris, you pick it up."

    Over the weekend, about 300 volunteers combed a half-mile square around the crash site and found enough debris from the Boeing 757 to fill about one-third of a trash container.

    ...For Miller, the focus seems to rest just as heavily on aesthetics -- from removing debris to felling charred trees that could be upsetting to relatives of Flight 93's passengers and crew. "This site won't be released until we're comfortable that we've removed as much of this debris as is humanly possible," he said.-Source (October, '01)

    first the coroner was questioning stuff. after getting a good talking to, he's nothing but reverence. nothing to see here folks, move along.

  • (Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday September 13 2016, @03:16AM

    by dry (223) on Tuesday September 13 2016, @03:16AM (#401100) Journal

    Shortly after 9/11 someone posted a bunch of citations on the green site. I went to most of them, mostly small newspapers, and the evidence was that the plane was lost at altitude with pieces of wreckage on the other side of a mountain, there was also a story about the young air-force pilot dieing from a heart attack. The evidence seemed to point to , in no particular order, the plane being shot down, the plane breaking up trying to evade being shot down, and the plane breaking up during the passenger revolt. Unluckily the citations vanished not long after. I also remember the news reports about the plane being shot down.
    There were a lot of weirdness's about 9/11, whether a full blown conspiracy or more likely, a bunch of big egos refusing to look at/consider the evidence or worse, thinking "let it happen". Just look at this story about how unready the upper echelons were.