UNRESOLVED QUESTIONS ABOUND

As previously noted, the 9/11 attacks have prompted a lengthy list of disturbing questions, most of which have never been satisfactorily answered despite several official government inquiries.

For example, the “New Jersey widows” who co-founded the 9/11 Family Steering Committee (FSC), along with many other 9/11 family members, made this clear at a July 21, 2005 press conference convened at the National Press Club on the occasion of the first anniversary of the 9/11 Commission's final report. In their opening statement, they declared that the Commission had ignored “approximately 70 percent” of their concerns, while also suppressing important evidence and whistleblower testimony that challenged the official story. It will be remembered that the 9/11 Commission was formed only after 18 months of intense lobbying by the FSC, and that the FSC’s list of questions were initially considered to be the “road map” for the work of the Commission.

Many unanswered questions concern the collapses of the towers at the World Trade Center (WTC). But due to the premature and illegal cleansing of Ground Zero, these crucial issues may never be definitively answered. These questions include the controversy concerning how relatively minor fires could have brought down steel-frame buildings; the unprecedented speed of their collapse; the cause of their apparent pulverization into fine dust; multiple reports of bombs in the buildings; and the mystery surrounding the collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by hijacked planes nor subjected to intense fires.

In the course of this inquiry, it will become clear that many other pieces of evidence have been systematically withheld, ignored, or even destroyed, raising additional unanswered questions.

Years of foot-dragging and unnecessary secrecy by the Bush administration, widely documented in the mainstream press, also hampered independent and official inquiries into unanswered questions.

Throughout this difficult process, unanswered questions about the failure of US intelligence also linger in the minds of critics of the official story. How could an obviously sophisticated terrorist plan that likely involved scores of persons collaborating over many years escape the notice of our intelligence services, especially the FBI and CIA? The fact is, it didn't. Following 9/11, the American public was to learn again and again that a great deal was already known about the alleged plot within the intelligence community—but simply not acted upon, or directly suppressed. Mild admissions of incompetence have been made in official hearings, but a great deal of additional evidence of wrongdoing and missteps by these agencies has still not entered mainstream discourse.

And what about the question of accountability? Was 9/11 simply a case of bungling incompetence, as the official account claims? To many thoughtful people, it is unsettling that not one individual within the federal government or military has been fired or even reprimanded for the many obvious government missteps of that day. Indeed, many of those responsible for failures were actually promoted. Many have interpreted this lack of discipline as evidence that government actions on 9/11 were not missteps at all.

And perhaps most important of all is this crucial question: Why did there appear to be such a systematic failure of response on the part of our air defense authorities?

Both American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 were known to be off course by 8:15 am, yet NORAD was not notified for almost twenty minutes. Why the long delay? It then required another fifteen minutes before jet interceptors were ordered off the ground at Otis AFB, entailing a total delay of more than thirty minutes—according to independent chronologies. Even so, we now know that the F-15s still had enough time to reach the World Trade Center in time to intercept Flight 175 before it hit the second tower. Simple calculations using NORAD’s own numbers reveal that the fighters were flying at far less than their top speeds.

The fighter jets scrambled on 9/11 did not arrive in time for a visual check of the hijacked planes’ cockpits, even though such jet intercepts of wayward flights are a routine occurrence. For example, in October 1999, when golf pro Payne Stewart's Learjet went off course due to a failure of the plane's oxygen system, the Air Force announced that two F-15s from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, intercepted the plane within twenty-four minutes after it had lost contact with air traffic controllers, and followed it until it crashed after running out of fuel. In 2001, a private plane that merely passed too close to the Bush ranch in Texas was immediately ordered to land.

“It happens all the time,” noted investigative journalist William Thomas in a definitive essay on the issue of the 9/11 interceptors. “Between September 2000 and June 2001, the Pentagon launched fighters on sixty-seven occasions to escort wayward aircraft.”

The air traffic controllers who actually handled the hijacked flights on 9/11 may have been able to give a clearer picture of what really happened in the hand off to NORAD and other authorities. In fact, according to the inspector general of the Department of Transportation, at least six of the controllers had made tape recordings that day describing their experiences. Incredibly, an FAA quality-assurance manager destroyed these tapes, without making any copies or even a transcript. According to an article in the May 6, 2004, New York Times, the manager told investigators he had destroyed the tape because he thought its production was contrary to FAA policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers “were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping” due to stress.

But even more disconcerting than the aforementioned fatal delays, and the intended or unintended destruction of evidence, is this disturbing fact previously noted: The US military had almost an hour and a half lead time to protect Washington after learning that four airliners had been hijacked. Yet no jet interceptors were launched from nearby Andrews AFB where two squadrons of jet fighters are specifically assigned to protect the Pentagon and the White House. Instead, F-16s were dispatched from the more distant Langley AFB, and for some reason flew at an estimated one-fourth of their top speed of 1875 mph, as had also occurred with the F-15s earlier dispatched toward New York. Curiously, none of the sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries adjacent to the Pentagon or in the Washington area were activated. These installations are set to fire automatically if any aircraft approaches the Pentagon that is not sending out a “friendly” signal from its transponder.

What could explain such failures? “It seems evident that…the Commission has not succeeded in removing grounds for suspicion that the US military had issued stand-down orders for 9/11,” concluded author David Ray Griffin in his landmark analysis of the 9/11 Commission's report. Griffin is a distinguished author, philosopher, and theologian who taught at California's Claremont School of Theology until his retirement.

And what about the war game exercises on that day? The indisputable record shows that multiple war games and exercises were underway simultaneously with the attacks, and thus might have been the true cause of failure of our air defenses. This case is argued in convincing detail by researcher Michael Ruppert, author of another lengthy study of 9/11 entitled Crossing the Rubicon.

And there are more questions:

What are the odds that four transcontinental flights on two major airlines—American Flights 77 and 11 and United Flights 175 and 93—would have 78, 74, 81, and 84 percent of their seats empty, respectively, on September 11, 2001? This came at a time when many airlines were trying to save money by overbooking and canceling flights that were not full.

And how did the terrorists obtain top-secret White House and Air Force One codes and signals, one of the excuses for hustling President Bush from Florida to Louisiana and finally to Nebraska on September 11?

At 9:00 am on September 11, just about the time Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower of the WTC, Secret Service agents in Washington received this chilling message: “Angel is next.” It was chilling because “Angel” was that day's top secret code for Air Force One. Someone had access to our most sensitive codes. Within minutes Vice President Dick Cheney was hustled from his seat in front of a television down to the president's nuclear-bombproof emergency operations center, while the White House was evacuated.

The warning was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code, indicating that whoever was behind the ongoing attacks had access to the highest level of security codes, only known to the Secret Service. It meant that whoever had the codes could track and accurately pinpoint the president's plane.

After several days of investigation, the picture grew even darker. Someone had penetrated the National Security Agency's (NSA) Echelon surveillance system. In fact, the perpetrators appeared to have more electronic capability than even the NSA, including the use of “steganography,” technology that allows its user to bypass Echelon and other electronic monitoring by hiding messages randomly in otherwise innocent digital files such as music, online advertisements, email headers or even Internet pornography. Such buried messages leave no trace of their presence. The idea that someone had access to such high-level codes provoked speculation that there were “moles,” deep-cover secret agents, within the US government. It also meant that whoever was behind the attacks had access to our latest and most sophisticated electronic technology. Was this evidence of an inside job?

Access to high-level secret codes; “moles” within the government; foreknowledge of war-game exercises which disrupted normal air defenses; the lack of a rapid and decisive response to the hijackings; a systemic lack of response to numerous pre-9/11 warnings; no one fired or reprimanded over the series of security failures. Could all this be attributed to simple bad luck?

A key member of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, Mindy Kleinberg, summed up the frustration of many about so many unanswered questions in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission during its first public proceedings in early 2003.

“Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored?” Kleinberg asked, referring to the widespread reports of possible insider trading in the week leading up to September 11 indicating specific prior knowledge of the attacks.

“Is it luck when 15 visas are awarded based on incomplete forms? Is it luck when Airline Security screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray? Is it luck when Emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis?

“To me luck is something that happens once. When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck…”