9/11 News Stories
Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on 9/11 from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.
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CMK [Congresswoman Cythia McKinney]: Mr. Secretary, after the last Hearing, I thought that my office was promised a written response to my question regarding the four wargames on September 11th. I have not yet received that response. The question was ... whether or not the activities of the four wargames going on on September 11th actually impaired our ability to respond to the attacks. RM [Top Pentagon Chief, General Richard Myers]: The answer to the question is no, it did not impair our response, in fact General Eberhart who was in the command of the North American Aerospace Defense Command as he testified in front of the 9/11 Commission I believe - I believe he told them that it enhanced our ability to respond, given that NORAD didn't have the overall responsibility for responding to the attacks that day. That was an FAA responsibility. But they were two CPXs; there was one Department of Justice exercise that didn't have anything to do with the other three; and there was an actual operation ongoing because there was some Russian bomber activity up near Alaska. CMK: Who was in charge of managing those wargames? RM: The important thing to realize is that North American Aerospace Defense Command was responsible. These are command post exercises; what that means is that all the battle positions that are normally not filled are indeed filled; so it was an easy transition from an exercise into a real world situation. It actually enhanced the response; otherwise, it would take somewhere between 30 minutes and a couple of hours to fill those positions, those battle stations, with the right staff officers.
Note: For the full transcript of this testimony and more, click here. Why to this day have all media (other than C-SPAN) and the 9/11 Commission Report failed to inform the public that there were four wargames happening at the time of the 9/11 attacks? For possible answers, click here.
The Defense Department is dramatically expanding its 'black world' of covert operations. The Bush administration has turned to what the Pentagon calls the "black world" to press the war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The increasingly dominant role of the military ... reflects the desire of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to gain greater overall control of the war on terror. "Our task is to find and destroy the enemy before they strike us." Though covert action can bring quick results, because it is isolated from the normal review processes it can just as quickly bring mistakes and larger problems. The epicenter of the Pentagon's covert operations remains the North Carolina-based Joint Special Operations Command, often referred to as Delta Force. The super-secret command is still not officially acknowledged to exist. Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board ... recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception. This body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces. The Air Force is designing its own Global Response Task Force ... capable of delivering a "worldwide attack within an hour."
Note: For an amazing expos by a highly decorated U.S. general on the hidden reasons behind war, click here.
In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise ... the target was the Pentagon but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic, NORAD and Defense officials say. NORAD, in a written statement, confirmed that such hijacking exercises occurred. "Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft," the statement said. "These exercises tested track detection and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures." On April 8, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks heard testimony from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that the White House didn't anticipate hijacked planes being used as weapons. President Bush said ... "Nobody in our government ... could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale." One operation, planned in July 2001 ... involved planes from airports in Utah and Washington state that were "hijacked." NORAD officials have acknowledged that "scriptwriters" for the drills included the idea of hijacked aircraft being used as weapons. "Threats of killing hostages or crashing were left to the scriptwriters to invoke creativity and broaden the required response," Maj. Gen. Craig McKinley, a NORAD official, told the 9/11 commission.
Note: This highly revealing news was reported on the front page of USA Today, yet no other major media even picked up the story. Why? For lots more, click here and here.
LEHMAN. Were you told that there were numerous young Arab males in flight training? RICE. I was not. LEHMAN. Were you told that the red team in F.A.A. for 10 years had reported ... that the U.S. airport security system never got higher than 20 percent effective. RICE. To the best of my recollection I was not told that. LEHMAN. Were you aware that I.N.S. had quietly internally halved its internal security enforcement budget? RICE. I was not made aware of that. LEHMAN. Were you aware that it was the U.S. government established policy not to question or oppose the sanctuary policies [which] prohibited the local police from cooperating at all with federal immigration authorities? RICE. I do not believe I was aware of that. LEHMAN. Were you aware of a program that was well established that allowed Saudi citizens to get visas without interviews? RICE. I learned of that after 9/11. LEHMAN. Were you aware of the extensive activities [of] the Saudi government in supporting over 300 radical teaching schools and mosques around the country, including right here in the United States? Were you aware at the time of the fact that Saudi Arabia ... had in their custody the C.F.O. [Chief Financial Officer] and the closest confidante of Al Qaeda, of Osama bin Laden, and that they refused direct access to the United States? RICE. I don't remember anything of that kind. LEHMAN. Were you aware that they would not cooperate and give us access to the perpetrators of the Cobar Towers attack? RICE. I was very involved in issues concerning Cobar Towers. LEHMAN. Were you aware that it was the policy of the Justice Department ... to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning? RICE. No.
Note: Don't miss the full revealing transcript at the link above. Most of the quotes above are towards the bottom of the webpage. Why didn't we hear lots more about these astounding facts put forward by one of the 9/11 commissioners, yet hardly mentioned in the final report? For lots more, click here.
At least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation. The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested. In November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough. The BBC reported [that] a former Pakistan foreign secretary was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Zacarias Moussaoui ... was arrested in August 2001. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers. US agents ... sought a warrant to search his computer. They were turned down by the FBI. [A] PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document ... which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership". The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool". The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.
Note: This is one of the very few articles recommended as a must read. Michael Meacher was the U.K. Minister of Environment from May 1997 to June 2003. Mr. Meacher lays out a wealth of highly revealing information backed by reliable sources. To confirm most of his statements on our 9/11 timeline, click here. Mr. Meacher's cliams were reported on BBC News, as well, though the BBC mentioned amazingly little on his claims of U.S. involvement in 9/11. To see the BBC article click here.
Former minister Michael Meacher has blamed the Iraq war on the US desire for world domination. Mr Meacher also suggested the Americans might have failed to prevent 11 September as it gave a pretext for military action. Mr Meacher was environment minister until three months ago and has already spoken out in opposition to the war. Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Mr Meacher said the 11 September attacks gave an invaluable excuse for attacking Afghanistan. And he said the US Government intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power because of its need for further secure oil supplies. In his piece Mr Meacher wrote: "It seems that the so-called war on terrorism is being used largely as a bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 11 September. The global war on terrorism has all the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project." Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said this agenda had been outlined by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) - a thinktank associated with leading neoconservative hawks within the US administration. In his article, Mr Meacher also said the US had passed up opportunities to catch Osama Bin Laden and other senior al-Qaeda figures.
Note: Mr. Meacher's comments were actually much stronger than the BBC reports. He stated publicy on the front page of the Guardian his belief that the U.S. government was very possibly behind the 9/11 attacks. To verify this, see the Guardian article mentioned in the BBC article above available here.
The Pentagon ... has resisted entreaties from U.S. anti-narcotics officials to play an aggressive role in the faltering campaign to curb the country's opium trade. Military units in Afghanistan largely overlook drug bazaars, rebuff some requests to take U.S. drug agents on raids and do little to counter the organized crime syndicates shipping the drug to Europe, Asia and, increasingly, the United States. Poppy cultivation has exploded, increasing by more than half this year. Afghanistan supplies about 92% of the world's opium. "It is surprising to me that we have allowed things to get to the point that they have," said ... a former top State Department counter-narcotics official. Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade is a law enforcement problem, not a military one. The opium trade is one-third of the country's economy. Several dozen kingpins ... have become more brazen, richer and powerful. [They] openly run huge opium bazaars and labs that turn opium into heroin. [The] head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said ... that the location of major drug operations were "well-known to us and to the authorities." The Pentagon has balked at drug interdiction efforts even when it had the resources, said a former senior U.S. anti-drug official. "There were [drug] convoys where military people looked the other way," the former official said. "DEA would identify a lab to go hit or a storage facility and [the Pentagon] would find a reason to ground the helicopters." A recent congressional report said the DEA asked the Pentagon for airlifts on 26 occasions in 2005, and the requests were denied in all but three cases.
Note: Some observers and insiders believe the reason Afghanistan was attacked is because the Taliban had virtually stopped the opium trade in 2001. For reliable evidence supporting these allegations, click here.
Tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens. The government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. The Truth Movement's recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary "Loose Change." It's been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing "Loose Change" are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement's canon. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt. For the Administration, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of bounds. Of course, the ommission report was something of a whitewash Bush would only be interviewed in the presence of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key witnesses, and ... a meeting convened by George Tenet the summer before the attacks to warn Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda's plotting ... was nowhere mentioned in the report. It's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth.
Note: Though this article belittles the 9/11 movement, there is abundant evidence to support the claim that the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash and the attacks may have been orchestrated. For more, click here.
In the frenzied days after Sept. 11, 2001, when some flights were still grounded, dozens of well-connected Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, managed to leave the United States on specially chartered flights. Newly released government records show previously undisclosed flights ... and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure. The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed. The material ... provides details about the F.B.I.'s interaction with at least 160 Saudis who were living in or visiting the United States and were allowed to leave the country. Some of the departing Saudis were related to Osama bin Laden. In several ... cases, Saudi travelers were not interviewed before departing the country, and F.B.I. officials sought to determine how what seemed to be lapses had occurred. "From these documents, [the Saudi interviews that did occur] look like they were courtesy chats, without the time that would have been needed for thorough debriefings," said Christopher J. Farrell, who is ... a former counterintelligence interrogator for the Army. "It seems as if the F.B.I. was more interested in achieving diplomatic success than investigative success." The F.B.I. documents left open the possibility that some departing Saudis had information relevant to the Sept. 11 investigation.
Note: For lots more crucial, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up, click here.
"If what I say is right, the whole US government should end up behind bars."- Andreas von Bülow, former German government minister and author of "Die CIA und der 11." .... A Zogby poll in late August 2004 found 49 per cent of New York City residents and 41 per cent of New York citizens overall agreed that "some leaders in the U.S. Government knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to take action." Stanley Hilton -- a former aide to Senator Bob Dole -- has filed a $7 billion suit on behalf of the families of 14 victims of the 9/11 attacks, alleging that Bush, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld and others, actually ordered 9/11 to happen for political gain. Hilton says he has incriminating documents and witnesses showing this. Even an investigation into just a few of these questions, such as those around the war games on 9/11, could be enough to start a major scandal. However, as numerous writers and independent researchers have found, there are so many suspicious circumstances that the truth could be very different to what we have been led to believe. The human rights lawyer Richard Falk has written: "There are so many gaping holes in the official accounts of 9/11 that no plausible coherent narrative remains, and until now we have been staggering forward as if the truth about these traumatic events no longer mattered." But if the mainstream press start investigating properly, it could lead to a completely unprecedented '9/11 scandal.'
Note: The cover of this issue of the respected Journal of Psychohistory is titled "The New 9/11 Scandal."
Reported by: 9News Staff, 9/11/01 11:43:57 AM. A Boeing 767 out of Boston made an emergency landing Tuesday at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport due to concerns that it may have a bomb aboard, said Mayor Michael R. White. White said the plane had been moved to a secure area of the airport, and was evacuated. United identified the plane as Flight 93. The airline did say how many people were aboard the flight. United said it was also "deeply concerned" about another flight, Flight 175, a Boeing 767, which was bound from Boston to Los Angeles. On behalf of the airline CEO James Goodwin said: "The thoughts of everyone at United are with the passengers and crew of these flights. Our prayers are also with everyone on the ground who may have been involved. "United is working with all the relevant authorities, including the FBI, to obtain further information on these flights," he said.
Note: Remember that Flight 93 reportedly crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11, with all aboard killed. This story was posted within hours of the 9/11 attacks. Click on the link above and you will see, "This story has been removed from WCPO.com. It was a preliminary AP story, and was factually incorrect." However, using the powerful Internet Archive, you can see the original article here. Click here and you can see the article continued to be posted for all dates through June 2004, and was only removed later. How can this be?
The FBI, as we know, blocked all manner of investigations into the [9/11] plot in the run up to its execution, whether these involved highly specific warnings from its own agents or from government sources in Afghanistan, Argentina, Britain, the Cayman Islands, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco and Russia. Meanwhile, I worry why the nearest military aircraft weren't scrambled to intercept any of the hijacked flights when this is standard procedure and why, when more distant jets were finally aloft, they flew at less than half speed, thus failing to prevent the impacts at the twin towers.
A federal appeals court rejected a fired FBI contractor's bid to revive her lawsuit against the government. Sibel Edmonds said she was fired from her job as a wiretap translator because she told superiors she suspected that a co-worker was leaking information to targets of an ongoing FBI investigation. The FBI said it fired her because she committed security violations and disrupted the office. The Justice Department's inspector general said Edmonds's allegations about a coworker "raised serious concerns that, if true, could potentially have extremely damaging consequences for the FBI."
Note: This article doesn't even mention 9/11, yet Ms. Edmonds has stated publicly that her testimony would put top government officials behind bars for their role in blocking information which could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. For more eye-opening information, click here and here. Read Ms. Edmond's open letter to the chairman of the 9/11 Commission to find out what key people in government don't want you to know about her testimony. See also her excellent website http://www.justacitizen.com She was also instrumental in forming a National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
The FBI has moved to fire a veteran agent who alleged that the bureau had mishandled domestic investigations. On Thursday, Robert Wright was ordered by superiors at an FBI counterterrorism command office in Washington to hand over his badge and weapon, was suspended and was told he would be fired within 30 days, said an official with Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group whose attorneys represent Wright. Wright was told he was being dismissed for, among other things, publicly discussing sensitive FBI matters in 2003, the official said. Wright has been under disciplinary investigation for almost three years. He has two lawsuits pending against the FBI. Yesterday, Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) sent FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III a letter repeating their support for Wright and expressing concern that the FBI was retaliating against him for his public statements.
Note: What the Post article completely fails to mention is that Robert Wright was hot on the trail of key terrorists before 9/11, yet he was ordered to stop the investigation by his FBI supervisors. For past media stories on this with links to original sources, click here, here, and here. Mr. Wright is one of the FBI agents who approached renowned attorney David Schippers just weeks before 9/11 to warn that a major terrorist attack was going to take place in lower Manhattan. For more, click here.
The emergency phone calls made by people trapped inside the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, need not be released to the public, a New York court ruled Thursday. The families sought release of the 9-1-1 calls possessed by the Fire Department of New York, along with department dispatcher calls and interviews with firefighters who participated in the September 11 rescue effort. The FDNY had resisted the disclosures, citing privacy concerns. The FDNY also sought to block the release of six unidentified tapes and transcripts selected by federal prosecutors as evidence in the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person facing trial in the United States for the September 11 attacks.
The federal judge overseeing the prosecution of admitted al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui has blocked an attempt by the Justice Department's inspector general to release a report on FBI missteps prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a ruling unsealed yesterday. Without explanation, U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema denied the request by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, who completed the report last July but since has been unable to get permission to provide an unclassified version of the document to the public. The report, titled "A Review of the FBI's Handling of Intelligence Information Related to the September 11 Attacks," provides an in-depth examination of three episodes considered potential missed opportunities to detect the Sept. 11 plot, including Moussaoui's arrest in August 2001.
Note: Moussaoui is one of only two people ever to be charged with direct involvement in 9/11. For more key info on Moussaoui, click here. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Aug. 27, 2001, an FBI agent was trying to make sure that Moussaoui did "not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center." Why have we not heard more about all this?
A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, "If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling." Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings."
Note: If the above link fails, click here. Why wasn't this widely reported? For 50 other senior government officials who have seriously questioned the 9/11 Commission Report, click here.
In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. But the cause wasn't terrorism it was to be a simulated accident. Officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building. The agency is about four miles from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport. "It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility," [NRO spokesman Art] Haubold said. "As soon as the real world events began, we canceled the exercise." Adding to the coincidence, American Airlines Flight 77 the Boeing 767 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 50 minutes before the exercise was to begin. It struck the Pentagon around 9:40 a.m., killing 64 aboard the plane and 125 on the ground. The National Reconnaissance Office operates many of the nation's spy satellites. It draws its personnel from the military and the CIA. In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement says, "On the morning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building."
Note: For many more disturbing coincindences and outright cover-ups around 9/11, click here. And for yet another amazing "coincidence" surrounding the London bombings, click here.
POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now. HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this, and it happened while you were running the exercise? POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning. We planned this for a company, and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met. And so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one, and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking.
Note: For Mr. Power's comments on CBC radio, Canada's PBS, click here. For many more serious questions raised around the London bombings, click here and here. For a very similar "coincidence" on 9/11, click here.
The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. The Russians had been our ally against the Nazis, an expedient alliance for the sake of war. Now they were our enemy. To fight them we turned to some of the very men who had inflicted on humanity the horrors of Hitlers madness. We hired Nazis as American spies. Admiral Gene La Rocque: That National Security Act of 1947 changed dramatically the direction of this great nation. It established the framework for a national security state. Never have we had a National Security Council so concerned about the nations security that were always looking for threats and looking how to orchestrate our society to oppose those threats. National Security was invented, almost, in 1947, and now it has become the prime mover of everything we do. The National Security Act also gave us the Central Intelligence Agency." In 1975 ... Congress took its first public look at the Secret Government. Senator Frank Church chaired the Select Committee to study government operations. The hearings opened the books on a string of lethal activities. From the use of electric pistols and poison pellets, to Mafia connections and drug experiments. And they gave us a detailed account of assassination plots against foreign leaders and the overthrowing of sovereign governments. This is a system easily corrupted. While freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends.
Note: This highly revealing PBS documentary is available for free viewing on the Internet. For the link, written text, and much more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
