Although the official 9/11 Commission
Report(CR) said Vice President Richard Cheney did not arrive at the
Presidential Emergency Operations Center(PEOC) under the White House until
"shortly before 10 a.m." that tragic day, Transportation
Secretary Norman Mineta testified when he arrived in the room at 9:20 a.m.
Cheney was already there. (CR published no testimony from Mineta.) 911
Commission Report GPO Access and see ProLiberty
The timeline is important because if
Cheney arrived at 10 a.m. it would have been about 20 minutes after the
Pentagon was allegedly struck by a hijacked airplane at 9:38 a.m., too
late for him to authorize the Air Force to shoot it down. Some 125
Pentagon employees perished in the attack.
Mineta testified "during the time
that the airplane was coming in to 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 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...said, 'Of course the orders still
stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"
Since the airplane was not intercepted and destroyed, even though the vice
president knew of it, "the orders" may have been to allow the
plane to hit the Pentagon. All of this, and more, is contained in the
March/April issue of "Tikkun" magazine, "a bimonthly Jewish
critique of Politics, Culture & Society." The piece was authored
by Dr. David Ray Griffin, a principal debunker of the accepted 9/11 dogma,
and published by Rabbi Michael Lerner on grounds, "if his view is
true, the position he articulates would provide adequate grounds for
impeachment of the president..."
In Griffin's view, "the strike on the Pentagon was orchestrated by
forces within our own government." If he's right, 9/11 was, indeed,
the crime of the century, and what has been called a false flag operation
involving the fabrication of evidence to make it appear the Taliban
government of Afghanistan was complicit, paving the road for invasion.
To begin with, there's even a question of whether American Airlines Flight
77 under control of Al-Qaeda hijacker Hani Hanjour struck the Pentagon. It
would require, Griffin charges, not only outfoxing military radar for over
an hour but the quite miraculous performance of descending 7,000 feet in
two minutes while executing a 270-degree banked turn and bashing into the
Pentagon without touching or damaging the lawn, a feat of aeronautical
magic.
Griffin, a professor of philosophy and theology at Claremont Graduate
University, Calif., says the impact of the strike, unlike those of the two
planes that struck the Twin Towers, did not create a dectactable seismic
signal. "Also, according to photographs and eyewitnesses, the kind of
damage and debris that would have been produced by the impact of a Boeing
757 was not evident in the aftermath of the strike on the Pentagon."
Karen Kwiatkowski, then an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel employed at the
Pentagon, writes of "a strange lack of visibile debris on the
Pentagon lawn, where I stood only moments after the impact." Another
witness was CNN's Jamie McIntyre, who reported live from the Pentagon that
day: "The only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you
pick up in your hand."
Griffin also quotes retired pilot Ralph Omholt, discussing the
photographic evidence, who said, "There is no hole big enough to
swallow a 757... There is no viable evidence of burning jet fuel... The
expected 'crash' damage doesn't exist...Even the Pentagon lawn was
undamaged!" So it may have been more than just a slip of the tongue
when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld blurted about the
"missile" that hit the Pentagon.
The CR report alleged there was no warning of an unidentified aircraft
heading to Washington until 9:36 a.m., only "one or two minutes"
before the Pentagon was struck, yet Mineta said Cheney knew of it at least
10 minutes earlier, time to order an evacuation.
"By omitting Mineta's testimony and stating that Cheney did not enter
the PEOC until almost 10 a.m., the 9/11 Commission implied that Cheney
could not have given a stand-down order to allow an aircraft to strike the
Pentagon," Griffin writes.
The author goes on to say, CR's conclusion "contradicts Cheney's own
account, which can still be read on the White House Website. Speaking on
NBC's "Meet the Press" shortly after 9/11 Cheney said: '(A)fter
I talked to the president...I went down into...the Presidential Emergency
Operations Center...(W)hen I arrived there within a short order, we had
word the Pentagon's been hit.' So he got there, as Mineta said, some time
before the Pentagon was struck, not 20 minutes afterwards."
Griffin asserts the public has been fed three different yarns about why
Flight 77 was not intercepted before hitting the Pentagon. Initially,
military officials said no fighter jets were scrambled until after the
Pentagon was hit; next, they said fighters were scrambled but did not
arrive in time because of late FAA notification; finally, the CR found the
FAA did not notify NORAD until after the planes crashed.
Particularly curious is that the FBI "immediately confiscated videos
from security cameras on nearby buildings," and destroyed crash
evidence, Griffin said. "After the strike, officials picked up debris
in front of the impact site and carried it off. Shortly thereafter the
entire lawn was covered with dirt and gravel, so that any remaining
forensic evidence was literally covered up."
Griffin's views are akin to those published on Internet site
"Scholars for 9/11 Truth," which has joined with Judicial Watch
in calling for release of documents and physical evidence related to 9/11.
The group's cofounder, James Fetzer, McKnight Professor of Philosophy
Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, calls Mineta's estimony
"devastating."
"It pulls the plug on the Commission's contention there was no
advance warning that the Pentagon was going to be hit," Fetzer said.
"In fact, there are multiple witnesses who contradict the Vice
President's account, including Richard Clarke, Condoleeza Rice, and
several others. It had to have been a 'stand down' order, but the mere
fact that he knew the plane was coming in and did not warn the Pentagon is
proof this was an inside job," Fetzer said.
Philip J. Berg, former Pennsylvania deputy attorney general and member of
Scholars, added, "Those who made it happen were obviously in the
position to know that it was going to happen and therefore could have
sounded a warning alarm. The case against Cheney is more powerful than the
case against (Zacarias) Moussaoui(for willfully concealing advanced
knowledge of the forthcoming 9/11 attack). No one is more culpable than
the perpetrators. If Moussaoui deserves the death penalty, what does our
Vice President deserve?"
Fetzer said the government's case against the hijackers is counterfeit.
"A growing body of evidence supports the inference that these 19 men
were patsies for forces within the United States government,"
#
(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist, reporter, and publicist. Reach
him at [email protected]).
Sherwood Ross has worked in the civil
rights movement and as a reporter for major dailies and wire services.
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