DID WAR GAMES AID THE TERRORISTS?

US military war games did take place on the very day—in fact the very hour—of the actual 9/11 attacks. Indeed, it appears likely that plans for staging a variety of war game exercises were designed to be so distracting that they may well have contributed to the success of the actual strikes. Equally startling has been the revelation that some of these exercises involved scenarios in which terrorists fly hijacked planes into buildings.

The existence of such exercises remained a secret for nearly a year after 9/11 and then was dismissed as an Internet hoax for several more months. But as many as a half-dozen 9/11 war game exercises have since been acknowledged by the government.

The 9/11 Commission Report relegated any discussion of the war game exercises to a footnote on page 458 where, while timidly admitting that NORAD “was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian,” the report actually argued that the military response on 9/11 “was, if anything, expedited by the increased number of staff at the sectors and NORAD…” Apparently they reasoned that increased staff and the foresight of wargaming an attack actually aided in the slow response of that morning. Many Americans still don't know of the exercises and many more relegate them to a side issue in 9/11. However, more astute researchers see the pre-planned war game exercises as integral to the success of the attacks.

To begin with, the powerful but little publicized National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) had scheduled a test exercise for the morning of September 11, 2001. The scenario was that of a corporate jet, crippled by mechanical failure, crashing into one of the four towers of the NRO headquarters building in Chantilly, VA, which is about four miles from Washington's Dulles International Airport. No actual planes were to be used in the exercise, but plans called for evacuating most of the three thousand NRO employees.

The exercise, later described as a “bizarre coincidence,” was the brainchild of CIA officer John Fulton, chief of the NRO’s strategic gaming division. In 2002, an announcement for a Department of Homeland Security conference noted the exercise with the comment, “On the morning of September 11, 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team…were running a preplanned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day.”

The exercise was canceled when the first plane struck the World Trade Center less than an hour before the test was to begin. All NRO employees, except for certain essential personnel, were sent home for the day, according to NRO officials.

The NRO exercise, astounding in its timing, apparently was either part of—or concurrent with—an even larger set of war games being played out by NORAD’s northeast sector, the region that included the three 9/11 crash sites in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. This was confirmed by then-NSC Counterterrorism Chief Richard A. Clarke. In his 2004 book Against All Enemies, while narrating his experiences during a video teleconference in the White House Situation Room on the morning of 9/11, Clarke writes: “I turned to the Pentagon screen. ‘JCS, JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff]. I assume NORAD has scrambled fighters and AWACS. How many? Where?’”

Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers then responded, “We're in the middle of Vigilant Warrior, a NORAD exercise, but…Otis has launched two birds toward New York. Langley is trying to get two up now. The AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft] are at Tinker [AFB] and not on alert.”

Lt. Col. Robert Marr, commanding the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), upon also receiving notification from Boston regarding the possible hijacking of American Flight 11, asked: “Part of the exercise?” He was then told the hijacking was real. Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins, a NORAD airborne control and warning officer, also received word from Boston regarding the possible hijacking. She immediately thought, “It must be part of the exercise.”

It has also been reliably reported that the war game exercises included not only real military aircraft posing as hijacked planes but that perhaps as many as two dozen false aircraft images placed in the FAA’s monitors—were in use. Such false images may account for the rumors that day that as many as eight or more aircraft were hijacked.

Army Sgt. Lauro “LJ” Chavez, who participated in the war games exercises as a member of the US Central Command headquarters staff in Florida, said false images called “inputs” representing several hijacked aircraft were placed on radar screens creating confusion over what was real. Chavez, a computer specialist, also stated this was the first military exercise that he had ever participated in that was classified “Top Secret.” Chavez dropped several bombshells in his account of that day—he noted that Vice President Dick Cheney had become the first civilian to take command of NORAD only weeks before 9/11 and that the war game exercises included a scenario in which a hijacked commercial airliner was crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. “What are the odds this could happen for real?” Chavez quoted astonished command center staffers as asking. He also said when some officers began asking why no jet interceptors were in the air, a superior officer stated that Cheney had issued a “stand-down” order.

A stand-down order is not to be confused with a shoot-down order. NORAD’s chief of air defense operations, Lt. Col. William E. Glover, Jr., had telephoned Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, commander of the Continental US NORAD Region at Tyndall AFB, FL, telling him that Cheney had authorized a shoot down of any threatening aircraft in the Washington area. “We created a free-fire zone over the nation's capital,” Arnold later reported. “Anyone airborne who did not immediately turn away from the center of town, or who did not land, could be shot down.”

Adding to the problem of false radar images, journalist William B. Scott pointed out the enormity of simply trying to locate hijacked aircraft from amongst the thousands of radar contacts. He said, “In essence, [FAA] technicians were half-blind, trying to separate hijacked airliners from thousands of skin-paint returns. At the time, more than 4,000 aircraft were airborne over the nation, most in the northeast sector, which monitors half a million square miles of airspace.” The FAA command center was reporting as many as 11 aircraft either not in communication with FAA facilities, or flying unexpected routes. The confusion mounted.

In addition to the NRO, the Pentagon drills and the false “inputs” creating confusion, by several reliable accounts noted these war game exercises also included “Northern Vigilance,” which sent fighter interceptors deep into Canada in response to a Russian exercise in the Arctic and northern Pacific; “Vigilant Guardian,” which may have included scenarios based on a hijacked airplane; “Vigilant Warrior,” believed to have been the “aggressor” component of Vigilant Guardian; “Northern Guardian,” another portion of the Vigilant Guardian exercise; “Amalgam Virgo,” an exercised specifically dealing with hijacked airplanes used as weapons (Amalgam 01 began in June 2001 may have ended by 9/11 but Amalgam 02 was already in the planning stages); and “Tripod II,” a biological warfare exercise mentioned by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani that may explain the arrival of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Urban Search and Rescue Team in New York the night before the 9/11 attacks and confusion in New York on the day of the attacks.

Author Barbara Honegger, noting the obvious lack of timely response to the 9/11 attacks—especially at the Pentagon—suggested, “This is beyond comprehension over the nation's capital unless some previous piece of information or mental set led them to assume the Pentagon plane could not be a terrorist vehicle, or at least confuse them as to whether it was or not. If those looking on from inside the Pentagon as 9/11 unfolded believed Flight 77 was, or might be, part of a counter-terror exercise set for that very morning, it would explain the otherwise incomprehensible delay, almost to the point of paralysis, in effectively scrambling interceptors.”

Honegger, well-known for her 1989 book October Surprise that revealed the elder Bush's role in a covert deal with Iranian terrorists that ensured the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, noted that if in fact the 9/11 attacks were enabled by homegrown war games, this might explain why the leak by a congressional investigation (to be examined later) of a September 10, 2001, NSA intercept message is reported to have upset Vice President Cheney so much.

That message reportedly was between hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the purported attack mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It stated, “The Match is about to begin. Tomorrow is zero hour.”

“‘Match,’ of course, is what you would expect if the speakers were referring to his discovery of the date that the US government had selected to conduct its counter-terror exercises—one that was about to turn very real when the terrorists piggybacked their long-planned plot onto it,” said Honegger. “[G]iven the context in which all this finally begins to make sense, Atta was merely communicating to his boss, or vice versa, the date that the US government exercise was to take place. Bin al-Shibh, Atta, and Mohammed didn't choose the date. The US government did.”

The NSA phone intercept makes it clear that the hijackers knew when to coordinate their attack with the war games. How could they have obtained this vital yet top-secret information unless through some source within the government? In the Appendix to this book, Honegger provides a detailed scenario for how the hand-off of the “match” information to Atta may have taken place.

Journalist Webster Tarpley saw within the war games, particularly Amalgam Virgo, something sinister. “Here was an exercise which included many of the elements which were put into practice on 9/11. Amalgam Virgo thus provided the witting putschists with a perfect cover for conducting the actual live fly components of 9/11 through a largely non-witting military bureaucracy. Under the cover of this confusion, the most palpably subversive actions could be made to appear in the harmless and even beneficial guise of a drill.”

The release of news concerning such exercises certainly gives lie to the numerous public statements of President Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and others who stated, at times under oath, that the government never considered that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons.

If the idea that war game exercises both explained the lack of initial response on 9/11 as well as put to lie the oft-stated question by Bush administration officials that they could not have known terrorists might use aircraft as weapons, in early 2005 this issue grew even hotter. The American Free Press reported that the US Army had planned just such a scenario—in 1976!

Timothy McNiven, a US Defense Dept. contract operative, revealed that his military unit conceived of a mock terrorist attack on the World Trade Center as part of a 1976 exercise. “[A]s I watched the Twin Towers really collapse on the morning of September 11, I realized I was watching the very same thing we devised in 1976,” McNiven said.

McNiven, who successfully passed a polygraph “lie detector” test in regard to his story as well as naming about 40 individuals who took part in the planning, said in 1976 he was with C Battery, Second 81st Field Artillery stationed in Strasbourg, Germany, when the unit was ordered to concoct the “perfect terrorist plan” using the World Trade Center towers as their target. The congressionally commissioned project reportedly was to identify security lapses and alert lawmakers to needed legislation. McNiven's group came up with a plan in which Middle Eastern terrorists would hijack commercial airliners using plastic box cutters to bypass security, then level the towers by crashing the planes into them. He said the team's leader, Lt. Michael Teague, was specifically ordered by his superiors to use the World Trade Center towers as the terrorist target.

“Why have I spent every waking hour trying to bring this story to the American people?” McNiven asked during an interview. He said he told his superior officer that if the towers were ever brought down in the manner in which his group had foreseen, he would go public with the story. Initially, he said he was ordered never to talk about the 1976 plan and was even physically beaten for speaking about it. He said a week or so later, in a strange turn of events, he was given a direct order that if the Twin Towers were ever attacked as in the 1976 study, he was to do everything he could to bring this story to the public. “I have no idea why they changed their minds,” he said, “but I was then emphatically told that this order was never to be rescinded—never—because those who would rescind it, would be the very same people who turned against the American people.”

Do the war games provide sufficient evidence of an inside job? “I think the people who planned and carried out those exercises, they're the ones that should be the object of investigation,” said Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF (ret.). Bowman flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam and was a recipient of the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President's Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Society of Military Engineers Gold Medal (twice), six Air Medals, and dozens of other awards and honors. His PhD is in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech and he is considered one of the country's foremost experts on National Security. In the 1970s, Bowman worked on the then-secret Star Wars space defense system but left the program when he realized it was designed for offensive warfare against the old Soviet Union.

Bowman said that the entire chain of military command may have been unaware of what was taking place and were used as tools by the people pulling the strings behind the attack. “If I had to narrow it [a 9/11 conspiracy] down to one person…I think my prime suspect would be Dick Cheney,” said Bowman in an April 2006, radio interview. He added that reaction to the 9/11 attacks, such as the Patriot Act has “…done more to destroy the rights of Americans than all of our enemies combined.”

But if Cheney is a key conspirator as Bowman claims, how was the apparent subterfuge of the war game exercises put into place?

One speculation points to yet another piece of evidence of gaming scenarios. It was learned that as far back as November 3, 2000, the Military District of Washington's Command Emergency Response Training unit conducted a scenario entitled The Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise, which simulated the crash of an airliner into the courtyard of the Pentagon.

According to an email message sent by a NORAD officer in September 2001, and published by the nonprofit watchdog group, Project Government Oversight, “The NORAD exercise developers wanted an event having a terrorist group hijack a commercial airliner (foreign carrier) and fly it into the Pentagon. Joint Staff action officers rejected it as unrealistic.”

“What do you want to bet that, when the April 2001, hijacked-plane-into-Pentagon NORAD war game script writer was turned down, that he took his idea to Cheney or one of Cheney's people, who then took it as their own…” mused Honegger, “…and on September 11, the same scenario that had been turned down in April was embedded in NORAD’s own game, ‘Vigilant Guardian’?”

Few people realize to what extent Cheney was in a commanding position to know all aspects of the international terrorist structure and particularly America's terrorist attack planning scenarios. On May 9, 2001, four months prior to the attacks, the Bush administration had launched an effort to address the problem of terrorism. President Bush created a new Office of National Preparedness (ONP) within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and named Vice President Dick Cheney to head a special task force to study terrorism and guide FEMA’s antiterrorism operations. His position in the counterterrorism effort of the federal government was therefore central—especially so if one considers his previous experience as secretary of defense during the first Bush administration.

Practically speaking, Dick Cheney was in a virtual command-and-control position during the actual events of 9/11, argues Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon. We've already noted that Cheney was rushed to the White House Presidential Emergency Operations Center, (located in a bunker under the east wing of the White House) just after the second plane had hit the WTC, and was directing activities of the government from this secure location while President Bush was being whisked around the country on Air Force One.

Cheney's terrorism task force was scheduled to produce antiterrorism recommendations for Congress by October 1, 2001, too late to make a difference. Of course, by that time, the nation was well into the new War on Terrorism. During much of 2001 prior to 9/11, Cheney also was in charge of another crucial task force, this one reviewing national energy policy. This panel later became the center of controversy, when California's escalating power woes indicated that corporate energy executives had unduly influenced national policies. Cheney's task force never turned over its internal papers, despite a lawsuit over this refusal that made its way up to the Supreme Court. Some observers have argued that smoking-gun documents related to 9/11—and revealing a motive involving an invasion of Iraq for the sake of oil—may be hidden in the records that Cheney has refused to make public. But what has been revealed is the fact that Cheney met at least six times with officials of the failed energy company Enron.