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host · 01-01-2008, 10:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Sorry but I see it as people wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

Does the TSA suck? Yes.

Are things more secure than prior to 9/11? I'd say yes. Its improved, if not that effective.

If you really wanted to fly safe the 'humiliations' from the article would be seen for what they really are, which is a minor inconvenience.

The problem with any security measures is you can't tell just how effective they are until something bad happens. So far we haven't had any terrorists acts involving aircraft since then, that succeeded. Maybe they just aren't trying, maybe they think the risk of getting caught is to high.

Time will tell but the incessant whining about taking off your shoes is getting old.

Ustwo, my intent is to challenge your underlying belief, evident in your post (above). My position is that the entire official rationale for increased airport security after 9/11, as was the "official story" of the events of 9/11 is total bullshit. Don't you see the "pattern"...the incoherence coming from "official sources", yet?

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/05/wa...n/05norad.html

August 5, 2006
Agency Says Military Did Not Lie to 9/11 Panel
By PHILIP SHENON and JIM DWYER

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 — The Defense Department’s watchdog agency said Friday that it had no evidence that senior Pentagon commanders intentionally provided false testimony to the Sept. 11 commission about the military’s actions on the morning of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

<h3>The agency, the Pentagon’s office of inspector general, said the Defense Department’s initial inaccurate accounts could be attributed largely to poor record-keeping.</h3>

The Pentagon initially suggested that the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the military’s domestic air-defense operation, had reacted quickly to reports of the hijackings and had been prepared to intercept and possibly shoot down one of the hijacked planes.

The Sept. 11 commission, which uncovered the inconsistencies in the Pentagon’s account, made a formal request in July 2004 for the inspector general to investigate why senior military officials who testified to the commission had made so many inaccurate statements.

In testimony in 2003 and in other statements to the commission, Pentagon officials made several statements that were proved false, including ones that Norad had closely tracked United Flight 93 and was prepared to shoot down the plane if it had approached Washington. Later investigations determined that the Defense Department was not aware of Flight 93 until after the plane had crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

<h3>In a report dated May 27, 2005, but not released until Friday, the inspector general’s office found that “the inaccuracies, in part, resulted because of inadequate forensic capabilities,” including poor log-keeping at the military air traffic control centers.</h3>

A spokesman for the inspector general’s office, William P. Goehring, said that the question of whether military commanders intentionally withheld the truth from the commission <h3>would be addressed in a separate report that is still in preparation.

But Mr. Goehring suggested that the second report would exonerate the commanders.</h3> “We haven’t found any information to indicate that testimony was knowingly false,” he said.

The report, initially classified secret, was released Friday under a freedom-of-information request by The New York Times. Before it was made public, the equivalent of several pages of the report were blacked out on national security grounds.

The report said commanders had found it difficult to create an accurate timeline of the events of Sept. 11 because of the lack of a well-coordinated system in logging information about air-defense operations.

On Sept. 11, the report said, air-defense watch centers used handwritten logs that were not always reliable. After Sept. 11, it said, commanders failed to press hard enough to be certain that an accurate timeline was produced for the Sept. 11 commission and other investigations.

Newly disclosed audiotapes provided to the commission by Norad demonstrated widespread confusion within the military on the morning of the attacks, with many air-defense commanders uncertain whether the reports of the hijackings were part of an unannounced military exercise......

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/washington/02faa.html
September 2, 2006
Report Urges F.A.A. to Act Regarding False 9/11 Testimony
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — The Transportation Department’s inspector general urged the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday to consider disciplinary action against two executives who failed to correct false information provided to the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The acting inspector general, Todd J. Zinser, whose office acts as the department’s internal watchdog, found in a new report that the F.A.A. executives, as well as a third official who is now retired, learned after the fact that false information was given to the commission in May 2003 about the F.A.A.’s contacts with the Air Force on the morning of Sept. 11.

The false information suggested that the aviation agency had established contact with its Air Force liaison immediately after the first of the four hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.

In fact, the commission’s investigators found, the Air Force’s liaison did not join a conference call with the F.A.A. until after the third plane crashed, at 9:37 a.m. The 51-minute gap is significant because it helps undermine an initial claim by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is responsible for domestic air defense, that it scrambled quickly on Sept. 11 and had a chance to shoot down the last of the hijacked planes still in the air, United Airlines Flight 93.

The inspector general’s report, prepared in response to complaints from the independent Sept. 11 commission, found that the three F.A.A. executives failed to act on an “obligation” to correct the false information provided to the commission, which found widespread confusion within the aviation agency and the military on the morning of the attacks.

The F.A.A., part of the Transportation Department, declined to identify the three executives, whose names and titles were not revealed in the inspector general’s report. Nor did the agency say whether it would consider disciplinary action.

The inspector general’s office found that while false information was given to the Sept. 11 commission, there was no evidence that F.A.A. executives had done it knowingly or had intentionally withheld accurate information about the agency’s actions on the morning of the attacks.

That finding was welcomed by the F.A.A., which said in a statement that the “inspector general’s investigation has clarified the record and found no evidence that F.A.A. officials knowingly made false statements.” <h3>The Pentagon’s inspector general issued a similar finding last month about military officers who provided inaccurate testimony to the commission, saying their inaccurate statements could be attributed largely to poor record-keeping.</h3>

Richard Ben Veniste, a commission member, said in an interview on Friday that he was troubled that it had taken the inspector general two years to complete his investigation — “more time than it took the 9/11 commission to complete all of its work’’ — and that he released the report “on the Friday afternoon before the Labor Day weekend.”

Mr. Ben Veniste said he was convinced that the failure of the aviation agency and the North American Aerospace Defense Command to provide early, accurate information about their performance had “contributed to a growing industry of conspiratorialists who question the fundamental facts relating to 9/11.’’

<h3>In the preceding quote box is news reporting that:

a.) The 9/11 Commission chairman and many of the members believed that testimony from military commanders and from FAA officials to the Commission regarding the timeline of events related to the four hijacked airliners was untrue and/or intentionally misleading.

b.) As a compromise, the Commission members agreed to allow the FAA and Defense Dept., to investigate themsleves, regarding the alleged false testimony, instead of filing their suspicions of false testimony with the Justice Dept. as criminal complaints.

c.)The Inspectors General of both the Defense Dept. and the FAA took more than two years to publicly release any results of their respective investigations about false testimony. THe Defense Dept. Inspector General actually completed his report 14 months before releasing it's contents in response to a long pending FOIA request filed by the press.

d.)The Defense Dept. report contradicted the 9/11 Commission report by claiming that:
"..initial inaccurate accounts could be attributed largely to poor record-keeping..." and "...On Sept. 11, the report said, air-defense watch centers used handwritten logs that were not always reliable...." The excerpt from the 9/11 Commission Report (Below) clearly contradicts the Inspector General's report, the logs and the tape recordings were already compared by the 9/11 Commission to coordinate the timeline of the sequence of events for accuracy.

e.)The Defense Dept. Inspector General told the NY Times in early August, 2006, two years after the 9/11 Commission requested an investigation into false testimony:

"A spokesman for the inspector general’s office, William P. Goehring, said that the question of whether military commanders intentionally withheld the truth from the commission would be addressed in a separate report that is still in preparation.

But Mr. Goehring suggested that the second report would exonerate the commanders....."

I can find no record of the promised "second report", ever being released !!!!!!!!!
</h3>

Quote:

http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch1.htm or:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Juf...xFbxs#PPA34,M1

....In their testimony and in other public accounts, NORAD officials also stated that the Langley fighters were scrambled to respond to the notifications about American 77,178 United 93, or both. These statements were incorrect as well. The fighters were scrambled because of the report that American 11 was heading south, <h3>as is clear not just from taped conversations at NEADS but also from taped conversations at FAA centers; contemporaneous logs compiled at NEADS, Continental Region headquarters, and NORAD; and other records.</h3> Yet this response to a phantom aircraft was not recounted in a single public timeline or statement issued by the FAA or Department of Defense. The inaccurate accounts created the impression that the Langley scramble was a logical response to an actual hijacked aircraft.

In fact, not only was the scramble prompted by the mistaken information about American 11, but NEADS never received notice that American 77 was hijacked. It was notified at 9:34 that American 77 was lost. Then, minutes later, NEADS was told that an unknown plane was 6 miles southwest of the White House. Only then did the already scrambled airplanes start moving directly toward Washington, D.C.

Thus the military did not have 14 minutes to respond to American 77, as testimony to the Commission in May 2003 suggested. It had at most one or two minutes to react to the unidentified plane approaching Washington, and the fighters were in the wrong place to be able to help. They had been responding to a report about an aircraft that did not exist.

Nor did the military have 47 minutes to respond to United 93, as would be implied by the account that it received notice of the flight's hijacking at 9:16. By the time the military learned about the flight, it had crashed.

We now turn to the role of national leadership in the events that morning.

1.3 NATIONAL CRISIS MANAGEMENT ....

The NORAD tapes directly contradict claims by Cheney and Bush that they discussed, and then Cheney issued, a "shootdown" order:

Quote:

http://web.archive.org/web/200608130...l/060801fege01
VF.com exclusive: Hear excerpts from the September 11 NORAD tapes. Click PLAY after each transcript to listen
By MICHAEL BRONNER

...In his bunker under the White House, Vice President Cheney was not notified about United 93 until 10:02—only one minute before the airliner impacted the ground. Yet it was with dark bravado that the vice president and others in the Bush administration would later recount sober deliberations about the prospect of shooting down United 93. "Very, very tough decision, and the president understood the magnitude of that decision," Bush's then chief of staff, Andrew Card, told ABC News.

Cheney echoed, "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before." And it wasn't on 9/11, either.

President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which—though no one knew it at the time—was 15 minutes after the attack was over.

But comments such as those above were repeated by other administration and military figures in the weeks and months following 9/11, forging the notion that only the passengers' counterattack against their hijackers prevented an inevitable shootdown of United 93 (and convincing conspiracy theorists that the government did, indeed, secretly shoot it down). The recordings tell a different story, and not only because United 93 had crashed before anyone in the military chain of command even knew it had been hijacked.

At what feels on the tapes like the moment of truth, what comes back down the chain of command, instead of clearance to fire, is a resounding sense of caution. Despite the fact that NEADS believes there may be as many as five suspected hijacked aircraft still in the air at this point—one from Canada, the new one bearing down fast on Washington, the phantom American 11, Delta 1989, and United 93—the answer to Nasypany's question about rules of engagement comes back in no uncertain terms, as you hear him relay to the ops floor.

<h3>10:10:31</h3> NASYPANY (to floor): Negative. Negative clearance to shoot.… Goddammit!…<br><p>FOX: I'm not really worried about code words at this point.<br><p>NASYPANY: Fuck the code words. That's perishable information. Negative clearance to fire. ID. Type. Tail.<br><p>PLAY | STOP

Just as on the TFP politics thread, everyone already "knows what they know", and I'm confident nothing that I've posted here was not already known in this detail by all of you who post in this thread. I have this bad habit, and I'm trying my best to kick it!