Death of a Nation

9/11 and the Rise of Fascism in America

George Grundy

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781510721265
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Was 9/11 engineered and designed to allow the Bush administration to hijack America's democracy? Did fear mongering allow the US government to convince the American public that conducting huge, expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was a necessary counter to defeat fabricated culprits in the Middle East? Was this all a plot to induce a financial boom that robbed the middle class of its wealth and brought the world to its knees in 2008?Examining the key players within America's government, as well as the states that supported and carried out the attacks, Death of a Nation attempts to reveal that 9/11 was falsely portrayed by the Bush administration, and in fact carried out by elements within the United States government and military to further their own geopolitical and financial interests. Death of a Nation provides a searing indictment of the role now played by America in global affairs and warns that, with a broken society and body politic, the world is seeing the rise of one of the most overtly fascist nations since the Second World War—creating profoundly disturbing implications for the future of humanity.A generation is coming of age that doesn't remember 9/11 happening, and knows of no world but this. We can't allow this to be the new normal. Death of a Nation will change your view of the events of 9/11 and force you to question America's self-appointed position as leader of the free world.

PART ONE

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

CHAPTER ONE

WORLD TRADE CENTER

American Airlines Flight 11

From 8:14 to 10:06 on the morning of September 11, 2001, America’s air defenses failed completely. For one hour and fifty-two minutes, every civilian and military protection surrounding New York City and Washington, DC suddenly stopped working.

112 minutes seems like a short space of time, but for a nation that had spent most of the previous fifty years imagining Russian fighter jets or nuclear missiles coming over the horizon, every second counted.

Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the downgrading of the overall Soviet-US military posture, America’s doomsday scenario had been an unexpected nuclear attack on Washington or New York. Although the air above the eastern seaboard of the United States might seem like a playground filled with cattle moving from A to B and businessmen drinking gin and tonics, it is in fact the most highly restricted and well-defended airspace on Earth.

Domestic and international flights around Washington and New York are closely monitored by numerous parties, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the airlines themselves, and the US military (with a budget larger than that of the next largest ten nations combined). Defense protocols had been written, gamed, tested, re-tested, and used on numerous occasions. Nothing was faulty, until the morning of 9/11.

At dawn, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari flew from Portland to Boston, departing at 6 a.m. Their flight was right on time, arriving in Boston at 6:50 a.m. Had the Portland flight been just thirty minutes behind schedule, Atta and al-Omari would have missed the connecting flight from Boston that they intended to hijack, and would have been unable to mount the first World Trade Center attack. No explanation has been forthcoming as to why the two lead hijackers chose to take this preposterous risk, and put the entire mission in peril for seemingly no benefit.

As it was, both men boarded American Airlines flight 11 on time, meeting fellow hijackers Waleed al-Shehri, Wail al-Shehri and Satam al-Suqami onboard. All sat in Business or First Class. The plane left Boston’s Logan Airport at 7:59 a.m. with ninety-two people onboard, bound for Los Angeles.

At 8:14 a.m., flight 11 failed to respond to a standard in-flight order from the FAA, and at 8:21 its radio and transponder were turned off.

When a plane is over land, its transponder gives air traffic controllers on the ground detailed information on the flight’s location and altitude. Without a functioning transponder, those on the ground can use primary radar to see where the plane is, but not its altitude or other information.

Transponders are also used when a distress code is broadcast, known as a “squawk.” Pilots unable to use radio can punch in a four-digit code and issue an automated distress message, but no such message was sent from flight 11. None of the pilots on 9/11 managed this relatively standard action. At the time, some newspapers speculated that there must have been a hijacker in the cockpit before each hijacking began. But experienced pilots questioned how it could possibly be that four separate hijackings occurred and not one of them involved an emergency code transmission that takes seconds to perform.

At 8:23, a radio announcement was heard. The voice is widely assumed to have been Mohamed Atta on flight 11, pressing the wrong button while trying to communicate with the passengers. “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you’ll be OK. We are returning to the airport.” Two similar announcements were heard as the minutes passed.

At 8:24, the plane went radically off its course, turning one hundred degrees to the south, toward New York. Boston flight controllers never lost sight of the plane. What they heard was garbled and intermittent radio transmissions from the cockpit. Controllers suspected the captain, John Ogonowski, was surreptitiously pressing the talk button on the radio. The voices that could be heard spoke with heavy accents or in Arabic. More than one FAA controller said they heard the words “we have more planes.”

Flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney used onboard phones to contact those on the ground. Sweeney called Boston’s Logan Airport and quickly gave controllers information on the seat numbers of the hijackers. American Airlines officials would have known within minutes that these seat numbers corresponded with a series of Middle Eastern sounding names, and assumed immediately that a hijacking was taking place.

In fact, the forty phone calls received from the four flights on 9/11 are the only direct evidence we have of what happened on the hijacked planes, since no information was broadcast by the pilots.

Ong and Sweeney reported that fellow flight attendants had been stabbed, and that a passenger, Daniel Lewin, had been killed. Lewin, an American-Israeli, was an ex-officer in Israel’s Sayeret Matkal special forces unit, which specializes in anti-hijacking actions and is highly trained in combat.

The majority of the eleven men described by the press as the “muscle” hijackers (those charged with overpowering the crew and passengers) were by no means physically imposing—being between 5’5” and 5’7” in height, and slight in build. It is unclear how the small Arabic terrorists over-powered Lewin, unless a gun was involved, as was reported in an FAA memo written on the evening of 9/11.

Flight 11 tracked south uninterrupted for another twenty-three minutes, and hit the north tower of the World Trade Center complex at 8:46 a.m. Seismic records pinpointed the impact at 8:46 and 26 seconds. The plane had roughly ten thousand gallons of fuel on board, and was travelling around 470 mph. Thirty-two minutes had elapsed between the hijacking and the building impact.

Most of the damage was between the ninety-third and ninety-eighth floors of the 110-story building. Horrifically, no one above the crash impact survived. Approximately 1,360 people were killed. Everyone on the ninety-second floor was killed; everyone on the ninety-first floor survived. Below the impact line, approximately seventy-two people died, with four thousand escaping to survival. At least two hundred people plunged to their death to escape the fires. Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm with headquarters on the 101st to 105th floors of the tower, lost 658 employees.

Although 2001 seems so recent, technologically it was another age. Smartphones like the iPhone were still six years away. Today we would expect an almost unlimited number of smartphone pictures and videos, but on the morning of 9/11 the first impact was recorded by just one camera, held by French film-maker Jules Naudet. Jules and his brother Gedeon were filming a documentary about New York City firefighters, heard the plane flying low and heading south across Manhattan, and captured the last second before the plane crashed into the north tower.

Accordingly, we have very little photographic evidence of any aspect of the above story, except to know that a large plane hit the building at 8:46 a.m. Oddly, there was some kind of bright flash moments before the plane hit the building, but with only one distant recording of the impact, this can’t be further examined.

CNN began their coverage within three minutes of the first impact. Rapidly, the entire world turned on their televisions.

United Airlines Flight 175

United Airlines 175 left Boston for Los Angeles with fifty-six people on board. With 168 seats, it was only a third full. The plane departed sixteen minutes late, at 8:14 a.m., which was just as the FAA was learning that flight 11 was possibly hijacked.

Although American 11 and United 175 departed from the same airport with the same destination, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), 175 was routed indirectly, and further south than the normal “Great Circle” route, which is the fastest way of getting from Boston to LA. This meant that when 175 left its flight path, it was much closer to Manhattan than would have normally been the case, significantly reducing the time it took to reach the World Trade Center (twenty-one minutes, compared to flight 11’s thirty-two minutes) and the amount of time American defenses had to intercept the plane. This also means that the two hijacked planes almost simultaneously crossed each other’s paths at 8:36 a.m., right over Stewart Air National Guard Base.

Flight controllers asked flight 175’s pilots to look for American flight 11, which was around ten miles to their South and had stopped responding. The pilots answered that they could see the plane at around thirty thousand feet, and were told to stay away from it. They were not told of a possible hijacking.

At 8:42 a.m., the pilots of flight 175 told ground control they had heard suspicious radio transmissions from flight 11 and suggested a possible hijacking might be taking place. Seconds later, 175 itself stopped responding.

As with flight 11, the official story is that five Middle Eastern hijackers took control of the plane, with pilot Marwan al-Shehhi in the cockpit. Two of the men had such poor English that they had trouble answering the standard security questions at the check-in, and the questions had to be repeated slowly, word by word, so they could respond before being allowed to board the plane.

At 8:47 a.m., the plane’s radio and transponder frequencies were changed twice in a minute, and it radically changed course. At 8:50 the plane made a U-turn and headed northeast, toward New York. By this point the FAA, and presumably those along the chain of command, knew that a large plane had hit the tallest tower in Manhattan. Now, a second hijacking was clearly taking place.

Flight 175 nearly collided with a Delta plane as it headed North, missing by only one hundred meters. Calls were made from the plane to the ground, including by passenger Peter Hanson, who told his father that an airline hostess had been stabbed and that the plane was being hijacked. Brian Sweeney called his mother and told her that the passengers intended to do something about the hijacking. He said the Middle Eastern men appeared to have bombs and mace, and that he suspected the plane might be piloted into a building.

From 8:58 a.m., the plane descended rapidly, dropping more than twenty-four thousand feet in five minutes, an unheard of rate of descent. The plane came steeply out of the sky toward Manhattan.

Every network in the US was showing live pictures of the north tower in flames. The FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) both knew a second hijacking was taking place, and that the plane was heading towards Manhattan. According to normal hijack response times, fighter jets should have intercepted the plane. Instead, twenty-one minutes after being hijacked, the plane crashed into the south tower, six seconds before 9:03 a.m. Seventeen minutes had elapsed since the first strike on the north tower.

With the world’s eyes already on the Manhattan skyline, the last few seconds of the flight were recorded from a wide number of angles by television cameras, and seen live by countless people. Unlike the first plane, which had crossed Manhattan in a straight line, the second plane made a steep, diving, banking corrective maneuver that brought it out of the skies and into the side of the building quickly and accurately. A technically stunning move.

Both World Trade Center (WTC) impacts were remarkably accurate, with Boeing 767–200 planes with a wingspan of 156 feet hitting buildings just 208 feet wide dead-on. Commercial aircraft have very poor maneuverability. They’re big buses in the sky. At well over 400 mph, just a tiny error would have caused the planes to clip or miss the buildings entirely.

The plane struck between the seventy-eighth and eighty-fourth floor of the 110-story building. It is estimated that one hundred people in the building were killed instantly, with another five hundred dying in the south tower. Eighteen people made it to safety from above the crash zone.

Now no one was in any doubt. The largest terrorist attack in history was taking place.

The Pod

There was much confusion on the day as to the nature of the second plane itself. Some witnesses, unsighted by the building, said they had seen no plane at all. Some said they saw no markings on it, or no windows, or that it was “definitely not a commercial plane.” Others said it looked “like a military plane.” One Fox reporter said he saw a blue logo on the front of the plane, but no windows on the sides. Despite all the camera angles, the plane’s steep descent made it nearly impossible to make out markings. The plane was the right size, and appeared a similar color, but none of the video footage definitively identified the plane as a United Airlines aircraft.

Several shots were taken from directly underneath the plane’s path, in the seconds before it struck the World Trade Center, and it’s here that we find cause for concern, because there appeared to be a strange attachment on the underside of the plane.

Although the bottom of a 767’s fuselage has fairings that contain the landing gear, this “pod” appeared much more pronounced. The images are quite distinct. Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia published a study in 2002 showing that the pod seen on the belly of plane was a 3D object, not a shadow, as had been claimed.

This unexpected addition to the fuselage could be a number of things. The pictures might indicate that this was extra equipment added to United 175, but it seems very unlikely that pilots and ground staff would not have noticed something so large attached to the plane’s underbelly before takeoff. Another possibility that has to be considered is that this was not United 175.

Global Hawk

While there is footage of both crashes, the only evidence we have to confirm that the two planes that hit the World Trade Center towers were indeed the flights hijacked out of Boston are the in-flight calls made by flight attendants and passengers, limited radar information, and the supposedly mistaken broadcast by Mohamed Atta, saying that he had “some planes.”

Some of the in-flight phone calls were long and detailed. Most were brief and only lasted a couple of sentences. Flight attendant Betty Ong’s call was said to have lasted twenty-three minutes, but only four minutes were recorded. Hers is the only call whose audio has been publicly released.

We also have no way of knowing who was in control of the planes. No one identified themselves as the new pilots, and apart from Atta’s “mistaken” announcement, we don’t know who was in the cockpit. The established narrative supposes that the Middle Eastern hijackers did a superb job of flying these large planes under exceptional pressure directly to their targets, hitting them pretty close to dead center. But in truth we have very little concrete information to confirm that the planes that hit the buildings were indeed the flights that we were told, and no evidence at all as to who was controlling the planes.

As will be shown in this chapter, the collapse of the twin towers was caused by controlled demolition, so it’s impossible to imagine that those responsible would have left the matter of the aircraft strikes on the buildings (without which there would have been no cause for building collapses) to a ragtag bunch of amateur pilots under the most exceptional pressure imaginable. Had the planes crashed before making it to Manhattan, or missed their targets, the entire scheme would have failed, the explosives in the buildings been found, and the greatest treason in modern history exposed. The planes had to hit the buildings.

So the question of who controlled the planes is one worth considering. Was there technology available that allowed the precise remote control of such large vessels, because remote-controlled planes, as fanciful as that may sound, would have allowed an outside agency to ensure that nothing was left to chance.

As it transpires, there was.

Raytheon

The late 1990s saw huge advances in remote-controlled flight. Global Hawk was a prototype drone that was developed primarily for the Pentagon by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Maxwell was not just the home of Global Hawk. Mohamed Atta had been an enrolled student there.

Raytheon is one of America’s biggest defense and weaponry manufacturers, and the largest producer of guided missiles in the world. The company made significant advances with its Global Hawk and flight termination technology in the months before 9/11, flying a pilotless drone across the Pacific in April 2001, and in August 2001 landing a 727 six times at a military base in New Mexico without any pilots or passengers on board. Ironically, the new technology was promoted as making hijackings impossible in the future, allowing those on the ground to take control of airborne hijacked planes.

Flight Termination Systems (FTS) allowed the remote control of multiple aircraft from the ground or air, and could also take over or disable transponder channels and radio communications. This might explain why none of the 9/11 pilots (eight of them, two per plane) issued the standard four-digit 7500 emergency squawk.

The story becomes even more intriguing as a number of Raytheon employees involved in their electronic warfare division were among the passengers on all three planes that hit their targets on 9/11. Overa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One—September 11, 2001
• Part Two—Suspects and the Accused
• Part Three—The Cover Up
• Part Four—The Age of Terror
• Part Five—Obama and Beyond
• Conclusion—The Death of a Nation
• Bibliography