Michael Kane: "9/11 War Games – No Coincidence"

" “I have an on-the-record statement from someone in NORAD that on the day of 9/11 The Joint Chiefs of Staff (Richard B. Myers) and NORAD were conducting a joint, live-fly, hijack Field Training Exercise (FTX) which involved at least one (and almost certainly many more) aircraft under US control that was posing as a hijacked airliner”. Mike Ruppert – June 5, 2004, editor of FTW www.fromthewilderness.com . . . .
On September 11, 2001, the Air Force was in its second day of annual wargame drills, titled VIGILANT GUARDIAN, designed to test national air response systems, which incidentally involved hijacking scenarios. In addition the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) which is staffed by military and CIA personnel, and is in charge of most American spy satellites, was running a drill for the scenario of an errant aircraft crashing into its headquarters. NRO headquarters also happens to be located just four miles from Washington’s Dulles airport – where Flight 77 (the flight said to have hit the Pentagon) originated. . . . .
It is possible that Phillip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, has classified certain wargames running on 9/11 so the Commission can’t address them publicly. The fact that the war games are open source, having been reported in mainstream publications including the Associated Press, UPI, and Aviation Weekly Magazine would make such a classification part & parcel to a cover-up. Hopefully the Commission will address, in public hearing, the impact these wargames apparently had on the NORAD response on 9/11. . . .
Officials at NORAD have stated when the hijackings first occurred they initially thought it was part of the Vigilant Guardian drills running that morning. Despite some confusion, once Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center at 8:45 am, everyone should have known it was not a test. However, this is still an assumption because we do not know what the fighter jocks in the air at the time did and did not know, we do not know the full extent of the orders they received and it has yet to be explained why scrambled fighter jets were unable to intercept even one of the 4 hijacked airliners. . . .
Standard operating procedure of both FAA & NORAD dictates that once an aircraft is off course and/or its transponder is not responding, within 10 minutes Air Force jets are scrambled to re-establish physical contact with the wayward plane.
Scrambling Air Force interceptors does not mean shooting down any aircraft. It simply means that an Air Force jet is dispatched to fly next to the off course aircraft, attempt to communicate with the its pilots, look inside the cockpit, see who is in control of the plane and report back to flight control what is actually happening. In the year prior to 9/11 this automatic procedure was triggered a total of 67 times (AP, 8/13/02). On the morning of 9/11, it was not successfully applied even once in the well over an hour-long period in which the four separate hijackings occurred."