CHAPTER 17 - THE ACCUSATIONS
Summary
(1) The original FAA/NORAD timeline implicated the military as being derelict on 9/11. NEADS’ 8:43 notification of the Flight 175 hijack (as we will see shortly) meant Otis F-15’s could very well have reached that flight before its 9:03 WTC impact. (F-15’s can fly 1,875 mph (Slate) and Otis is 129 miles from New York (Clarke).) And NORAD’s 9:16 alert to Flight 93 and 9:24 alert to Flight 77 resulted in Langley F-16’s being scrambled at 9:24 which could have reached Flight 77 before its Pentagon impact and certainly Flight 93 before its 10:03 Pennsylvania impact. (F-16’s can fly 1500 mph (Slate) and Langley is 129 miles from Washington (Clarke).)
However, as we have seen, the 9/11 Commission claimed the evidence it obtained under subpoena showed the military was not derelict because it never received these timely alerts from the FAA. Then the 9/11 Commission chose not to prosecute the officials it said testified falsely, instead referring the matter to the DOT/DOD Inspectors General, who nonsensically claimed the false testimony was the result of poor record-keeping capabilities.
The Consensus 9/11 Panel argued that this sequence suggests the 9/11 Commission served as an ally to the military by helping cover up its dereliction and/or complicity (Consensus 9/11) in the attacks while creating the façade of being its opponent by accusing it and the FAA of lying for years about its awareness of the last three hijacked flights.
(2) One Consensus 9/11 Panel member, David Ray Griffin (Nobel Prize nominee, theology professor, author of numerous books on 9/11), suggested the audio clips cited by the 9/11 Commission as evidence of the military’s supposed ignorance of the hijacked flights could have been fabricated using military voice morphing technology which was developed with psychological operations in mind (Griffin, WAPO).
(3) Interestingly, the Flight 93 cockpit voice recorder tape also came under tampering allegations after the ending played for the victims’ family members in April of 2002 was completely different than ending played for the jury in the 2006 Zacarias Moussaoui trial (Philadelphia Daily News, CNN, Daily Mail).
(4) Similarly, 15 audio tapes purported to be Osama bin Laden released between 2001 and 2007 were said to be authentic by the U.S. government. However, researchers at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland, using state of the art voice recognition systems used for banking security, found that 14 of the tapes not only were not Osama bin Laden, but were not even the same individual (BBC, Guardian, Chicago Tribune, The American Spectator-Codevilla).
(5) Further, according to CIA legend Robert Baer, even the majority of the CIA team devoted to tracking bin Laden was not convinced the tapes were authentic (NPR- Baer). Interestingly, some of the disputed tapes were extremely well-timed for the Bush administration insofar as one handed him the 2004 presidential election (BBC, Reuters, Telegraph) and another helped make his case for the Iraq War (BBC, CNN, Guardian).
(1) Sources:
Consensus 9/11 Panel Website, 2021, “Point MC-9: The Activities of General Ralph Eberhart During the 9/11 Attacks”
Richard Clarke, 2004, “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,” pg. 5
San Francisco Chronicle, 9/3/2006, “The Conspiracy to Rewrite 9/11,” (opinion)
Slate, 1/16/2002, “IGNORAD: The Military Screw-Up Nobody Talks About”
(2) Sources:
Dr. David Ray Griffin, 9/14/2006, “9/11 Live or Fabricated: Do the NORAD Tapes Verify The 9/11 Commission Report?”
Washington Post, 2/1/1999, “When Seeing and Hearing Isn’t Believing”
(3) Sources:
CNN, 4/13/2006, “On Tape, Passengers Heard Trying to Retake Cockpit; 9/11 Jury Relives Final Minutes of Hijacked United Flight 93”
Daily Mail, 8/19/2006, “Flight 93 ‘Was Shot Down’ Claims Book,” by Rowland Morgan
Philadelphia Daily News, 9/16/2002, “Three-Minute Discrepancy in Tape; Cockpit Voice Recording Ends Before Flight 93's Official Time of Impact”
(4) Sources:
BBC, 11/13/2002, “Analysis: New Fears Over Bin laden Tape”
BBC, 11/18/2002, “Bin Laden Tape ‘Genuine’”
BBC, 11/29/2002, “Bin Laden Tape ‘Not Genuine’”
Chicago Tribune, 11/14/2002, “U.S. Treats Bin Laden Tape as Genuine”
Guardian, 11/29/2002, “Swiss scientists 95% Sure that Bin Laden Recording was Fake”
Huffington Post, 3/17/2009, “Osama Bin Elvis”
The American Spectator, 3/13/2009, “Osama Bin Elvis” by Professor Angelo M. Codevilla
(5) Sources:
BBC, 2/11/2003, “‘Bin Laden’ Condemns Iraq Plans”
BBC, 1/31/2005, “Kerry Blames Defeat on Bin Laden”
Guardian, 2/12/2003, “Bin Laden offers tips to defend Iraq”
NPR, 10/2/2008, “Ex-CIA Operative Discusses ‘The Devil We Know’”
Reuters, 2/28/2006, “Bush Says Bin Laden Tape Aided Re-Election: Report”
Telegraph, 10/31/2004, “Bush Takes a Six-Point Lead After New Bin Laden Tape”
9/11 Commission is Accused of Helping NORAD Cover-Up Its Dereliction/Complicity While Pretending to Be Its Opponent
Consider the implications of the FAA and NORAD’s narrative before the 9/11 Commission claimed to debunk it. NEADS’ 8:43 notification of the Flight 175 hijack meant Otis F-15’s could very well have reached that flight before its 9:03 WTC impact. (F-15’s can fly 1,875 mph, per Slate, and Otis was 129 miles from New York, per Richard Clarke.) And NORAD’s 9:16 alert to Flight 93 and 9:24 alert to Flight 77 resulted in Langley F-16’s being scrambled at 9:24 which could have reached Flight 77 before its Pentagon impact and certainly Flight 93 before its 10:03 Pennsylvania impact. (F-16’s can fly 1500 mph, per Slate, and Langley was 129 miles from Washington, per Richard Clarke.) Therefore, NORAD implicated itself as being derelict on 9/11.
Now consider again the following sequence of events we have covered:
NORAD voluntarily publicized self-incriminating chronologies and testimony of their early awareness of Flights 175, 77, and 93. All of this was corroborated by the FAA.
NORAD and the FAA for years withheld audio recordings and transcripts that purportedly corroborated their chronologies and testimony.
The 9/11 Commission subpoenaed the audio recordings and transcripts and claimed they showed NORAD was never aware of the Flight 175, 77, and 93 hijacks before their crashes.
The 9/11 Commission publicized only the recordings/transcripts that supported their narrative and none of the recordings/transcripts that purportedly would have corroborated NORAD’s/FAA’s chronologies/testimonies.
The 9/11 Commission accused NORAD and FAA officials of knowingly lying to congress and falsifying official reports for years, but sought no charges against them and instead asked their Inspectors General (which had no authority to make criminal charges) to investigate why they did this.
The Defense and Transportation Department Inspectors General nonsensically concluded that the false reports were due to poor record-keeping and the testifying officials did not realize they were inaccurate. The Inspectors General classified their reports and all evidence that supposedly proved their conclusions.
How should the public interpret this sequence of events? We previously saw that several government officials alleged that NORAD’s 9/11 failures may have been due to a deliberate military stand down. As a reminder, they included:
Morgan Reynolds (Department of Labor Chief Economist under President George W. Bush)
Robert Bowman (directed the “Star Wars” missile defense program under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter)
Steven Jones (BYU Physics Professor, Principle Researcher for US Department of Energy’s Division of Advanced Energy Projects 1982-1991)
Andreas von Buelow (German Parliament member, and Secretary of State for the German Ministry of Defense)
Barbara Honegger (White House Policy Analyst under President Ronald Reagan, Senior Military Affairs Journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School, author of the famous 1989 political exposé, October Surprise)
Michael Meacher (British Cabinet Member and perennial Parliament Member)
Jesse Ventura (Minnesota State Governor)
We also previously saw that the Consensus 9/11 organization (of which the first four aforementioned officials are members) dives into a series of “Consensus 9/11 Points” upon which all members agree there are insurmountable inconsistencies between public domain evidence and the current official narrative. The organization argued on its website that the 9/11 Commission’s narrative that NORAD was never notified of the Flight 175, 77, or 93 hijacks before their impacts may have emerged because:
“The 9/11 research community had shown that NORAD’s first timeline did not excuse NORAD, because there would have been time to intercept the airliners before the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit.”In essence, this argument alleges that the 9/11 Commission served as an ally to NORAD in helping cover up its dereliction and/or complicity in the attacks while creating the façade of being its opponent by accusing it (and the FAA) of lying for years about its awareness of the last three hijacked flights. This argument could also be understood to suggest that NMCC intentionally stay away from the FAA hijack net for half an hour, but even with this breathtaking delay NORAD still received enough warning to intercept Flights 77 and 93, which created the need for the new official narrative formalized by the 9/11 Commission.
It is impossible to know from information available in the public domain whether the Transportation and Defense Departments withheld the recordings/transcripts (despite being under subpoena) that would have debunked the 9/11 Commission’s narrative or whether the 9/11 Commission did receive them and then withheld them from the public. Whatever the case, John Farmer’s self-preserving statement to Time Magazine rings unmistakably true, even though it was meant to obscure his central role in the cover-up he lambasted:
“It’s almost a culture of concealment… The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened. If what the government is telling you isn’t true, then the truth could be anything. I think there is evidence that the truth wasn’t told and that at least some of that was deliberate.”
Sources:
Daily Mail, 9/5/2006, “Fury as Academics Claim 9/11 was ‘Inside Job’”
Daily Mail, 2/9/2007, “An Explosion of Disbelief”
Guardian, 9/5/2006, “Who Really Blew Up the Twin Towers”
Los Angeles Times, 8/28/2005, “Getting Agnostic About 9/11”
MarketWatch, 6/5/2012, “Expert Panel Reports False Accounts of U.S. Political and Military Leaders on 9/11”
NBC, 11/16/2005, “Questioning What Happened on 9/11”
New York Times, 9/2/2006, “2 U.S. Reports Seek to Counter Conspiracy Theories About 9/11”
PR Newswire, 3/1/2006, “Experts Call for Release of 9/11 Evidence”
PR Newswire, 5/6/2011, “Obama Says ‘Justice Has Been Done’: Bin Laden Scholar Says No”
PR Newswire, 9/9/2011, “New Investigative Panel Releases 13 Consensus Statements of Evidence Opposing the Official Account of 9/11”
Richard Clarke, 2004, “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,” pg. 5
San Francisco Chronicle, 9/3/2006, “The Conspiracy to Rewrite 9/11,” (opinion)
Slate, 1/16/2002, “IGNORAD: The Military Screw-Up Nobody Talks About”
Telegraph, 11/20/2003, “German Sept 11 Theory Stokes Anti-US Feeling”
Time, 9/11/2009, “A New Look at the 9/11 Commission”
Washington Post, 9/8/2006, “The Disbelievers”
Consensus 9/11 Panel Website, 2021, “Panel Members”
Consensus 9/11 Panel Website, 2021, “Point MC-9: The Activities of General Ralph Eberhart During the 9/11 Attacks”
Consensus 9/11 Member Considers Tape Fabrication; Charge Bares Similarity to Bin Laden Tape Fraud Allegations
David Griffin (Consensus 9/11 member, Nobel Prize nominee, theology professor, author of numerous books on 9/11) suggested in a 2006 essay entitled, “9/11 Live or Fabricated: Do the NORAD Tapes Verify The 9/11 Commission Report?,” that the audio clips cited by the 9/11 Commission contrast so starkly with firsthand witness accounts that the possibility of tape fabrication should be considered. Griffin pointed to a February of 1999 Washington Post article which reported that researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico had developed voice morphing technology that can use a digital recording of a subject’s voice to “in near real time, to clone speech patterns and develop an accurate facsimile.” The article also explained the usefulness of such technology for military psychological operations. It stated:
“Digital [voice] morphing… has come of age, available for use in psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives… Being able to manufacture convincing audio or video, they say, might be the difference in a successful military operation or coup.”
Griffin’s essay was not the only time the possibility of possible tape fabrication or manipulation was broached in proximity to the war on terror. Here are two additional examples.
First, as we will discuss in more detail in a coming chapter on the Flight 93 crash site, the FBI kept the contents of the Flight 93 cockpit voice recorder secret until it was forced in April of 2002 to let the relatives of the deceased listen to it under heavy security. When they did, they reported that there was no sound of impact, as is typically the case after such a crash according to Philadelphia Daily News. Instead, the tape ended with a “rushing sound” and then went silent.
Then, in yet another twist, when the judge of the 2006 Zacarias Moussaoui trial ordered the FBI to enter the recording as evidence, it ended completely differently – with the hijackers shouting praises to Allah, per CNN (4/13/2006). Rowland Morgan, former journalist for the Independent and Guardian and co-author of the 2006 book, “Flight 93: What Really Happened On The Heroic 9/11 ‘Let’s Roll’ Flight,” said in an August of 2006 article he wrote for the Daily Mail that the alternative ending “confirmed suspicions of tape tampering.”
Second, in November of 2002, an audiotape purported to contain the voice of Osama Bin Laden praising recent terrorist attacks was made public by the Arab satellite television channel Al Jazeera. Days later, after the tape was analyzed by the CIA and the National Security Agency, White House officials announced that the tape was authentic and therefore constituted the first proof in nearly a year that Osama Bin Laden was still alive. Reports of the U.S. government’s belief in the tape’s authenticity were carried by the BBC (11/13/2002, 11/18/2002) and Chicago Tribune.
However, less than two weeks later (per BBC (11/29/2002), Guardian (11/29/2002), Toronto Star), a team of researchers at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland said it was 95% sure the tape was a fake. The team, which employed state-of-the-art voice recognition systems used for banking security, compared the tape against 20 undisputedly authentic recordings of Bin Laden, ranging from very good to very poor in quality.
In October of 2008, NPR interviewed ex-CIA operative Robert Baer. Baer won the Career Intelligence Medal in 1998, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh called Baer “the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East,” and Baer’s published memoirs served as the basis for the 2005 George Clooney film Syriana. During the interview, Baer said this regarding the over one dozen disputed audio and video Bin Laden messages after October of 2001:
“I mean, all these things can be manipulated. As you know, voices can be manipulated. We can take this recording, and you could change everything to completely the opposite of what I said…”
Baer further said that he believed Bin Laden was already dead. Also, when he recently polled multiple CIA officers responsible for tracking Bin Laden, not one of them was sure whether he was dead or alive. Therefore, not even the CIA officers closest to the Bin Laden case believed the U.S. government declarations of authenticity regarding the Bin Laden tapes. Baer stated:
“Of course [Osama Bin Laden] is dead… I have taken in the last month a poll of CIA officers who had been on his trail, and what astounded me was not a single one was sure if he was alive or dead.”
In March of 2009, Professor Angelo Codevilla wrote an essay entitled, “Osama Bin Elvis,” for the publication, The American Spectator, for which he was the acting editor-in-chief. The essay was also covered by the Huffington Post. Codevilla was a former State Department Intelligence Officer, who oversaw the transition of the State Department and CIA into the Reagan era as part of President Reagan’s transition team. He was also a former U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee staff member, a Stanford University Senior Research Fellow, a political author, and a reputable op-ed writer for various mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and Foreign Affairs Magazine.
In the essay, Codevilla stated that, in 2007, Switzerland’s Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence compared the voices on 15 undisputed recordings of Osama Bin Laden with the voices on 15 post-October 2001 recordings attributed to him, which the CIA had declared authentic. The CIA provided no information about what methodology it used to determine the recordings were authentic.
The Institute’s analysis employed recordings of two native Arab speakers who had trained to imitate Osama Bin Laden and read his writings. Upon completion of the analysis, 14 of the 15 disputed recordings were proven to differ blatantly, not only from the authentic recordings, but also from one another! Just one of the disputed recordings fell into a grey area.
It should be pointed out that some of the dispute tapes were extremely well-timed for the Bush administration. For example, both Bush and his opponent John Kerry credited Bush’s 2004 reelection to the purported Bin Laden tape released just days before the election, per BBC (1/31/2005) and Reuters, after it provided Bush with an instant 6-point swing, per the Telegraph.
Similarly, the purported Bin Laden tape released a month before the Iraq War helped make Bush’s case for the invasion, per BBC (2/11/2003) and CNN (2/12/2003). However, the Guardian (2/12/2003) skeptically commented:
“…perhaps it is not the voice of the al-Qaida leader at all. Could it simply be an actor, hired by the CIA, addressing the world from Langley, Virginia? The trouble with Bin Laden tapes is that nobody can ever be quite sure.”
Sources:
BBC, 11/13/2002, “Analysis: New Fears Over Bin laden Tape”
BBC, 11/18/2002, “Bin Laden Tape ‘Genuine’”
BBC, 11/29/2002, “Bin Laden Tape ‘Not Genuine’”
BBC, 2/11/2003, “‘Bin Laden’ Condemns Iraq Plans”
BBC, 1/31/2005, “Kerry Blames Defeat on Bin Laden”
Chicago Tribune, 11/14/2002, “U.S. Treats Bin Laden Tape as Genuine”
CNN, 2/12/2003, “Tape Urges Muslim Fight Against U.S.”
CNN, 4/13/2006, “On Tape, Passengers Heard Trying to Retake Cockpit; 9/11 Jury Relives Final Minutes of Hijacked United Flight 93”
Daily Mail, 8/19/2006, “Flight 93 ‘Was Shot Down’ Claims Book,” by Rowland Morgan
Dr. David Ray Griffin, 9/14/2006, “9/11 Live or Fabricated: Do the NORAD Tapes Verify The 9/11 Commission Report?”
Forbes, 2/20/2013, “As Country Club Republicans Link Up with the Democratic Ruling Class, Millions of Voters Are Orphaned,” by Angelo Codevilla
Foreign Affairs, Authors: “Angelo Codevilla”
Guardian, 11/29/2002, “Swiss scientists 95% Sure that Bin Laden Recording was Fake”
Guardian, 2/12/2003, “Bin Laden offers tips to defend Iraq”
Hoover Institute (Stanford University), Contributor Profiles: “Angelo Codevilla”
Huffington Post, 3/17/2009, “Osama Bin Elvis”
New York Times, 8/19/1990, “Don’t Destroy the CIA – Renovate It,” by Angelo Codevilla
NPR, 10/2/2008, “Ex-CIA Operative Discusses ‘The Devil We Know’”
Philadelphia Daily News, 9/16/2002, “Three-Minute Discrepancy in Tape; Cockpit Voice Recording Ends Before Flight 93's Official Time of Impact”
Reuters, 2/28/2006, “Bush Says Bin Laden Tape Aided Re-Election: Report”
Telegraph, 10/31/2004, “Bush Takes a Six-Point Lead After New Bin Laden Tape”
The American Spectator, 3/13/2009, “Osama Bin Elvis” by Professor Angelo M. Codevilla
The American Spectator, Authors: “Angelo Codevilla”
Toronto Star, 12/16/2002, “Debunking the Bin Laden Tape”
Washington Post, 1/2/1999, “Justice and Jonathan Pollard,” by Angelo Codevilla
Washington Post, 2/1/1999, “When Seeing and Hearing Isn’t Believing”