... the only copy of Windows 95 that never crashes.
Actually, the official 9/11 narrative pretty much requires us to believe something like the above. Or another frequently cited line of alleged reasoning that tells us the absence of NORAD interceptor planes actually put NORAD in a better defensive position than if they had been at their assigned bases. Same as having fun at a party by not attending, I guess.
But people actually advance this argument with apparent straight faces, asking the world to believe that an F-16 five hours distant is better positioned to intercept a hijacked commercial jet flying over the eastern US than an F-16 sitting at an Air Force Base just five minutes away.
Here's the thing:
On the morning of 9/11/01,
US northeastern air defenses were crippled by a Cheney-Rumsfeld production that combined at least four exercise scenarios -- Vigilant Warrior, Vigilant Guardian, Northern Guardian and Northern Vigilance – and which, per script, diverted to northern Canada or Alaska many of the NORAD fighter jets that would have been scrambled per standard operating procedure in the event of a suspected hijacking.
As part of the exercises,
false radar blips showed up on air traffic controllers' screens that masked the flight patterns of the four hijacked jets and led controllers to believe that as many as 21 planes had been hijacked. Per standard procedure, various regional air traffic control centers notified the FAA, which passed on the alerts to NORAD, which couldn't respond because they hadn't enough fighters available to handle that many hijackings. Because of the ongoing drills, they didn't even know which blips represented actual threats.
Also noteworthy is a fifth exercise taking place at the same time, this one conceived by the National Reconnaissance Office (the NRO operates the US network of spy satellites) and carried out by CIA operatives. This exercise was designed to test emergency response capabilities in the event that
an off-course plane crashed into one of the NRO's four office towers. Believers in cosmic synchronicity apparently see no reason why these events should call into question the official conspiracy theory. Nor do they see why this series of unlikely coincidences should invalidate repeated official denials of 9/11 foreknowledge by members of the Bush administration.
Personally, I find that most coincidences turn out to be anything but. Because most are trivial, they're not worth the time it takes to even recognize them, much less get to the bottom of the matter.
A very few, however, are of ultimate importance and must be examined critically rather than simply labeled "conspiracy theories," which has become code for the fantasies of certifiable paranoid loons with too much time on their hands.
Fair enough. Let's see what the loons make of the unprecedented absence of NORAD on the only day in recent history that their presence would have been extremely useful.
It's a proven, demonstrable, uncontested fact -- not a trooother fantasy -- that on the morning of 9/11/01 the majority of the northeast corridor's usual contingent of NORAD interceptor jets were engaged in drills that took them far out of the area and out of position to defend against any airborne threats.
It's also a proven, demonstrable, uncontested fact that the WTO was running that plane-into-building scenario that morning, a drill that removed the country's primary group of satellite image watchers and analysts from their usual stations and forced them to mill around the parking lot while the simulation unfolded. They were all away from their screens almost the entire time the alleged hijackings were taking place. By the time the drill was aborted, two high rises had collapsed and the pentagon had allegedly been impaled by a 757.
This 757, btw, was the infamous Flight 77 allegedly piloted by Hani Hanjour, a guy so inept at flying even small planes that in mid-August, 2001, two flight instructors at a Bowie, Maryland airport refused to rent him a single-engine Cessna 172 after taking Hanjour on three test runs, noting he had trouble controlling and landing the Cessna. No problem; he was just waiting for the right enormous Boeing 757 fly-by-wire twin engine commercial jet with an instrument panel the size of a Volkswagen van. Or so we're told.
It's also a proven, demonstrable, uncontested fact that the few planes left out of the exercise were not air-borne until 80 minutes after the first hijacking alert – about 70 minutes longer than a scramble normally takes. In the case of Flight 77, that 757 was allegedly hijacked about 8:50 AM. Interceptors were finally scrambled at 9:30 AM. But nobody orders fighter jets to scramble from Andrews AFB although it's only 11 miles from the pentagon and has a complement of interceptors that were apparently not involved in the various NORAD exercises. Ignoring the easy route, fighters from Langley AFB, about 120 miles south of the pentagon, got the call instead. Then, of course, they head directly for New York at sub-sonic speeds.
That's about when Hani begins channeling the ghosts of Blue Angels past and pulls off the aerial maneuver of the young century: a downward spiral at around 500 MPH during which he carves a perfect 320-degree turn and drops the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes. Don't try this at home.
This move was tracked by radar the whole way, so those who say the maneuver never happened are ... um... misinformed. It's a cinch that Hani wasn't flying the plane, though, unless his session with Boeing flight manuals paid off in spectacular fashion. You really have to wonder who was, though...
Meanwhile, the Langley interceptors are done sight-seeing and are on their way back to DC, again at sub-sonic speeds. Unfortunately, the pentagon was hit at 9:38 so they're a little late for the party.
So let's sum up: Flight 77 has uncontested use of US airspace for around 48 minutes. It's supposedly piloted by a guy who can't handle a Cessna. The interceptors assigned to chase Flight 77 are dispatched from the exact wrong base if they're to actually get there in time to take countermeasures. But just to make sure they can't achieve anything, they're sent to New York instead of to the pentagon. At Andrews, jet interceptors sit and wait for calls that never come.
In a bunker somewhere underneath the white house, Bunker King Cheney is running the show. According to Former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, in sworn testimony before the 9/11 Commission, here's how Cheney upheld his oath of office that morning, which requires him to "... support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
“During the time that the airplane was coming into 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!?'"
So, what were those orders? Engage or stand down? Consider that the wrong planes were scrambled, that the scramble order came almost 40 minutes after Flight 77 had allegedly been hijacked, that they headed for New York rather than for DC, that they maintained a slow (for an F-16) speed of 600 MPH rather than use afterburners and triple that speed, and that they arrived too late to intercept Flight 77 when they must have been receiving realtime status and location reports every few seconds and must have known that 600 MPH wasn't going to do it.
In that context, Cheney's snarled retort to a simple but all-important question seems to indicate that the order he was reaffirming was to stand down rather than to attempt to intercept and engage Flight 77.
There's a pretty good chronology of NORAD's activities on 9/11, as well as links to details on each of the exercises,
here. Caution, though... It's a "troother" site and therefore all its content must be completely full of shit. Or so the people will tell you who do the Bushies' PR work for them through their unflagging support for the official fiction, which is the only thing standing between the Bush junta and indictments for mass murder.
So look for yourself. Spend some time googling both truth and debunker sites. Make up your own mind.
wp