President George W. Bush disembarks from Air Force One on 9/11 at Offutt Air Force Base, HQ of the Strategic Command, with Brent Scowcroft’s E-4B in the background
Air traffic control monitors all civilian aviation and is in constant radio communication with each flight. When flights lose radio contact or deviate from filed flight plans, there are routine procedures for intercepting them with armed fighter jets. To rack up a complete and total failure of this system on the fateful day of 911 strains credulity to the utmost. The opportunity of 911 - the moment of the ability to commit the crime - motive, means and opportunity - lies in an intentional compromising of the FAA and NORAD response. This is in part explained an officer with authority over this response who may have issued a crucial stand-down order and who also worked for a company with links to the aviation school Mohammed Atta and another “hijacker” trained at, as well as by the implementation of a plethora of war games that day, four in particular: Vigilant Guardian, Amalgam Warrior, Amalgam Virgo and Global Guardian.
On October 26, 1999 professional golfer Payne Stewart’s Lear jet depressurized at altitude and killed everyone on board but it kept flying on autopilot. “Within 21 minutes of Stewart's plane flying off course” it had already been intercepted by a fighter jet. It was passed off to a succession of other fighter jets until it ran out of gas and crashed. Interception of errant aircraft is routine. In 2000 it had occurred 129 times. In the year of 2001 through the end of June it had occurred 67 times. According to a memorandum for the record for the 911 Commission all four war games Vigilant Guardian, Amalgam Warrior, Amalgam Virgo and Global Guardian were approved by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Commander in Chief of NORAD.
An earlier iteration of Vigilant Guardian in October 2000 practiced for the interception of the suicide hijacking of an airliner into “the 39-story United Nations building in New York City, just a few blocks from the WTC.” The command post exercise had been in effect for a week prior to 911. Among the nine scenarios it was gaming out, all involved hijackings, including “a suicide hijack targeting New York which took place two days before 911.”
As the declassified planning document noted “all expansions will be Real World. Except under exceptional circumstances, an expansion will not be terminated due to a real world scramble.” “Real world” means that real aircraft will be used. Field training exercises Amalgam Warrior and Amalgam Virgo were planned for and possibly operational on 911. In field training exercises “a track is taken out of radar coverage and then re-introduced as an unknown track.” As a NORAD review document stated:
“The Warrior is similar in nature to Vigilant Guardian, and is a scenario run through as a war game. The primary purpose is to have live assets flying to check on communications connectivity and other technical capabilities and performance.” Amalgam Warrior 02 was “a large-scale live-fly exercise involving two or more NORAD regions.”
The cover page in the planning document for a June 1-2, 2001 practice run of Amalgam Virgo quoted Defense Secretary William Cohen: “the United States faces a quite real threat of a terrorist, nuclear, chemical or biological weapon attack on national soil within 10 years.” - Washington Times May 29, 2000. The scenario was counter-terrorism and the task was “combined joint training for unconventional threat.” At the center of the slide, surrounded by pictures of aircraft, was Osama bin Ladin. According to 911 Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, Amalgam Virgo 2 was a simulated exercise in “a simultaneous hijacking of two planes in the United States.”
Colin Powell initiated the concept of dividing the continental United States into four quadrants “each with its own headquarters, commander and bases on alert.” The 1998 Quadrennial Defense Review reduced the number of based with “armed jet fighters on alert status at all times” from 107 to 5-7.
The air force base with armed planes closest to Boston’s Logan International Airport was Otis at Falmouth near Cape Cod. They received word too late to scramble jets in time. Another important airport for the defense of the northeast was the Atlantic City International Airport in Pomona, New Jersey. It has an FAA facility that trains air marshals and hosts 177th New Jersey Air National Guard. Although it played “an integral part of the air defense of the continental United States for decade.”
The 1998 Quadrennial Defense Review also converted the mission of the 177th New Jersey Air National Guard from air sovereignty to general-purpose fighter. In spite of this overall degradation of readiness, two jets were on the runway at Atlantic City International Airport with enough time to make a difference when they received “an emergency order to return to the hanger.”
911 occurred in the airspace under the jurisdiction of the Continental U.S. NORAD Region Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS). Colonel Robert Marr was in charge of NEADS on 911. Marr had been a veteran of the air force for over 20 years until 1994 when “he spent a few months in Saudi Arabia as ‘director of combat operations.’ He then left the military to work two years for a private company called Phoenix Air. Coincidentally, Phoenix Air provided aircraft for the Amalgam Virgo exercises. After his brief stint at Phoenix Air, Marr returned to the military as the exercise coordinator at NEADS and, by 911, had risen to the position of commander of the facility.” (link)
Huffman Aviation is where hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were trained. Phoenix Air “turned over between 12-15 mid-sized regional jets to one of the two owners of Huffman Aviation, Wallace J. Hilliard,” in 2000 to be based at the Fixed Base of Operations (or Venice Jet Center) at the Venice Municipal Airport in Florida. Phoenix Air has been engaged by the federal kidnapping and torture program (or, as it is known in a grotesque miscarriage of language, the “rendition program”), as well as been a part of other American covert activities.
“Almost immediately after the purchase of Huffman Aviation in the summer of 1999 by Wallace J. Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers, the aviation facility became the center of a series of financial scams that included Ponzi schemes, pension fraud, international stock swindles, and fraudulent bankruptcies which have altogether looted more than $1 billion from the American economy.” (link)
Hilliard was also involved in drug smuggling. His “Learjet was busted carrying 43 lbs. of heroin at Orlando Executive Airport on July 25, 2000. The Orlando Sentinel called it the "biggest bust of its kind in Central Florida history.” A DC 9 registered to a company called Skyway used a hanger at Huffman Aviation as its address. It “was caught in Campeche, Mexico carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, Mexican authorities called it the biggest drug seizure in an airplane in Yucatan history."
The plane was painted to look like it was from the Department of Homeland Security. Its previous owner was Adnan Khashoggi lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi. The FAA refused to divulge the new owner of the plane, even though it should have been a matter of public record. After serving as president of Skyway, Brent Kovar went on to serve as vice president of research and development of the tracking department of the Department of Homeland Security.
In Vigilant Guardian, Amalgam Virgo and Amalgam Warrior we have two war games that match 911 exactly. They all involved false blips and simulations of what was happening over real data on FAA and NORAD radar. They involved the use of live aircraft simulating what was happening. Furthermore, the company website of Phoenix Air, the contractor providing aircraft to Amalgam Virgo, touts its capacity to provide “military clients with user-defined services, including highly modified aircraft for Electronic Attack (EA), Electronic Warfare (EW), Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) and Electronic Counter-Counter Measures (ECCM).”
These exercises and the technical capacities of Phoenix Air must have made it hard for air controllers of good faith to understand what was going on during 911.
“Hours after the hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, an FAA manager at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center gathered six controllers who communicated or tracked two of the hijacked planes and recorded in a one-hour interview their personal accounts of what occurred. A second manager said he destroyed the tape between December 2001 and January 2002 by crushing the tape with his hand, cutting it into small pieces and depositing the pieces into trash cans around the building.” (link)
Global Guardian is an annual exercise and, like Vigilant Guardian, a command-level one. Its fundamental purpose is to test and maintain the readiness of “nuclear command, control and execution procedures.” A NORAD review document noted that the “Vigilant Guardian exercise would be a full blown nuclear war exercise, including bomber response and Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) response. Global Guardian was coordinated with Vigilant Guardian so the combined STRATCOM offensive abilities and the NORAD defensive abilities could be exercised.”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Brent Scowcroft was in an E-4B aircraft on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base waiting to takeoff for STRATCOM at Offutt Air Force Base, the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command. An E-4B is a modified Boeing 747-200B used as a National Airborne Operations Command Center. It was being used by Scowcroft to participate in Global Guardian. He was heading to Offutt to lead the debriefing on the military exercise.
“Scowcroft was involved in observing the command and control operations of both President George W. Bush in Florida, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was at the White House.” Scowcroft arrived at Offutt Air Force Base just minutes ahead of Air Force One. Since the communication capabilities of an E-4B are so state-of-the-art, one can only imagine that Scowcroft was monitoring all the events of 911 and perhaps even giving orders, quite possibly being the person with the best single overall view of everything. Was George H.W. Bush the architect of 911 and Brent Scowcroft the commander?