Why did no helicopters attempt to rescue the trapped people by landing or lowering a rope ladder to the roof tops? Even saving just one life would have been worth the effort. Helicopters routinely land on skyscrapers in New York City, and Coast Guard choppers routinely rescue people drowing in storms at sea in much more dangerous weather conditions than CAVU. Of. I forgot, all US military aircraft were grounded that day. Of course, WTC office workers would have been applauded for preparedness via rappelling by mountaineering ropes or gliding to safety by parasail. Of course, NYFD could have attempted to provide airbags to possibly save some lives, albeit with probable severe injuries. Why could none escape to the rooftops, even though there were observation decks open to the public? These photos were censored from all broadcasts in order to prevent lynching of Mafia mayor Rudy Giuliani  |
"Unreal. Every time you looked up somebody else was jumping. I guess when you're burning alive you do stupid things. Nobody's had experience with something like this before."
—Claude Kebbe, NYC Firefighter [Too bad NYFD had no equipment for catching people bailing out of buildings, especially since NY City has more skyscrapers than any other city on Earth.]
"This is a nightmare. We haven't seen any wounded. You're either going to walk out of there or you're dead."
—Andrew Renner, MD, in town for a tax-free vacation and seminar for trauma surgeons.
[quotes from MSNBC]
What they saw
Esquire magazine
November 2001
E-mails from Hell
"The bodies were hitting the ground with such force, I could feel it in my chest."
—A trader who worked at WTC
"I saw a man on the plaza being put in a body bag. Someone told us he'd come running out of the lobby of the Trade Center a few minutes before, completely on fire."
—Catherine LeBlanc, consultant, 2 World Financial Center
"We kept running over body parts," the fireman whispered. He was staring into my eyes with a pleading look, as if seeking forgiveness. "I mean, the ash was so thick you'd see things in the street, but you couldn't tell what they were until you ran over them. I mean, what the fuck were we supposed to do?"
—Scott Anderson, "In Country"
"I wake up at night now--I sleep in 15-minute pops--and I wake up with the guys who jumped, with their eyes in my face. I see my boss and I look west. We see the nodies on the ground and I ask him, 'Where did they come from?' Then I look up and I see debris like a macabre ticker-tape parade and bodies hurtling by--which you imagine are girders because your mind can't process it. I'm shattered, and yet I don't have a physical scratch on me. Why me? How? How many of us were right in the fireball and lived? It's like winning the worst lottery of all time."
—Malcolm Hall, bond salesman, WTC Tower 2
In Country
by Scott Anderson
"I was at my desk on the ninety-first floor," the white woman said. "I think the plane might have hit right above us, maybe on ninety-three or ninety-four. They told us to leave."
She told of her long descent down the stairwell of Tower One, how after a few flights she she felt a second shudder, softer than the first, and figured this must have been made by the second plane hitting Tower Two. She related all this in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, but her face was trembling, her knees unsteady.
"When I got outside, I saw people were jumping. I didn't know they were people at first. I thought maybe it was just different things falling, you know? Maybe bits of the building or chairs or lamps. I really didn't know. Even now, I'm not sure that's what I saw, that maybe it wasn't people. Have you heard anything about people jumping?"
Her eyes were desperate and terribly sad, and they searched my face for a clue.
I stayed with them, and we all gazed down the side street from which they had emerged, from which any other survivors would probably emerge. After a time, a lone figure appeared. She was a very pretty Hispanic woman in her mid-twenties, and she seemed oblivious to the fact that she had lost her shoes and and was leaving behind drops of blood with each step. Just about the only way to reach someone in severe shock is to look directly into their eyes and speak softly, but this woman only stared straight ahead, so as she passed, I leaned close and whispered that she was bleeding, that there was a medical unit just ahead. She continued on without any indication she heard me.
We waited awhile longer, the two ladies and I, but no one else came down the street.
Bringing out the dead
by John Falk
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Next to the morgue, I ran into a guy I'd met a few years before. He was now attatched to the body-recovery unit.
"What we do here is try to see if the remains are that of firemen, police or EMT," he said. "We're trying to get a count."
He took me over to where the refridgerator trailer was. Just beneath the trailer door was a wooden plank laid across four chairs. The plank was red and looked like an office door. At that moment, two cops struggled in, carying a black body bag. When it was laid down on the plank, a man with blue gloves came over. He was the medical examiner.
The examiner unzipped the bag. Inside the bag was an orange bucket and next to it a three-by-two-foot charred black mass specked with peices of concrete. It probably weighed forty pounds, and there is no better way to describe it other than as raw meat. The examiner reached into it and realized it was really several peices that had become stuck together in the bag during the walk over. The black top side gave way to a dark-red underneath as he turned each peice over and over.
"He's looking for peices of uniform," my friend said.
The examiner seemed to find something and conferred with the guy from NYPD. The examiner waited for them, then he picked up the orange bucket and dumped its contents onto a clean part of the body bag. These remains were whitish in color. He looked at them for a second, turned, motioned for the chaplain, who stepped in and gave a blessing. Within seconds another bag was being carried through the tent and the whole thing started over. It went on like this all night.
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The Smoking Airliners
"We've got to understand airpower—its strengths, its weaknesses, and its potential—if we are to fully capitalize on it to at tack an adversary's strategy and to compel him to do our will."
—Gen Ronald R. Fogleman, US Air Force Chief of Staff, "Airpower and the American Way of War," presentation to the Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium, Orlando, Florida, 15 February 1996
"Strategic attacks are defined by objective--not by the weapon system employed, munition used, or target location."
—Air Force Manual AFM 1-1, Basic Aerospace Doctrine of the United States Air Force, vol. 1, March 1992, 11.
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JCS to Secretary of War Robert McNamara
March 13, 1962
Hijacking attampts against US civil air and surface craft should be encouraged.
8. It is possible to create an incident which would demonstrate
convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a
chartered civilian airliner from the United States.
a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact
duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary
organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be
subsituted for the actual civil aircraft and the passengers, all boarded under
carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a
drone.
b. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to
allow a rondevous. From the rondevous point the passenger-carrying aircraft
will descend to minimum altitude and go directly to an auxiliary airfield at Eglin
AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and
return the aircraft to its original status. Meanwhile the drone aircraft will continue
to fly the filed flight plan. The drone will be transmitting on the international
distress frequency "MAY DAY" message stating it is under attack by
Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by the
destruction of aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will
allow IACO radio stations to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft
instead of the US trying to "sell" the incident.
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"Some of my packmules have experienced three campaigns, but they still don't know anything about waging war."
—Frederick the Great
[Un]Friendly Fire
By David Ruppe
ABC News.com
May 1, 2001
N E W Y O R K, May 1 — In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.
Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, shown Jan. 9, 1957, was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time the plans were drawn up and presented to the secretary of defense. What a dick (AP Photo)  |
Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.
America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."
Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America's largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.
The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.
Prove you love America by buying this book  |
"These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing," James Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.
"The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."
Gunning for War
The documents show "the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government," writes Bamford.
The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.
Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic]."
The plans were motivated by an intense desire among senior military leaders to depose Castro, who seized power in 1959 to become the first communist leader in the Western Hemisphere — only 90 miles from U.S. shores.
The earlier CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been a disastrous failure, in which the military was not allowed to provide firepower. The military leaders now wanted a shot at it.
"The whole thing was so bizarre," says Bamford, noting public and international support would be needed for an invasion, but apparently neither the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S. troops deployed to drive out Castro.
Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.
"That's what we're supposed to be freeing them from," Bamford says. "The only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing."
'Over the Edge'
The Joint Chiefs at the time were headed by Eisenhower appointee Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, who, with the signed plans in hand made a pitch to McNamara on March 13, 1962, recommending Operation Northwoods be run by the military.
Whether the Joint Chiefs' plans were rejected by McNamara in the meeting is not clear. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly there was virtually no possibility of ever using overt force to take Cuba, Bamford reports. Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another term as chairman and transferred to another job.
The secret plans came at a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns in American society about their military overstepping its bounds.
There were reports U.S. military leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative during the election.
And at least two popular books were published focusing on a right-wing military leadership pushing the limits against government policy of the day. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own report on right-wing extremism in the military, warning a "considerable danger" in the "education and propaganda activities of military personnel" had been uncovered. The committee even called for an examination of any ties between Lemnitzer and right-wing groups. But Congress didn't get wind of Northwoods, says Bamford.
"Although no one in Congress could have known at the time," he writes, "Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge."
Even after Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan "pretext" operations at least through 1963.
One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base — an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.
"There really was a worry at the time about the military going off crazy and they did, but they never succeeded, but it wasn't for lack of trying," he says.
After 40 Years
Ironically, the documents came to light, says Bamford, in part because of the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK, which examined the possibility of a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy.
As public interest in the assassination swelled after JFK's release, Congress passed a law designed to increase the public's access to government records related to the assassination.
The author says a friend on the board tipped him off to the documents.
Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.
"The scary thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after," says Bamford.
Baltimore Sun, "New book on NSA sheds light on secrets - U.S. terror plan called Cuba invasion pretext", April 24, 2001
http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.md.nsa24apr24.story
National Security Archive at George Washington University, Washington DC
Mafia Mobsters Kill
"Lewis D'Avanzo, a son of the [New York City] mayor's uncle and a guest at
[Rudolph] Giuliani's first wedding in 1968, was a "ruthless and widely feared mob
associate" who headed a massive stolen car ring, according to FBI documents and
interviews. Giuliani's cousin Lewis D'Avanzo was known as 'Steve the Blond' and listed as
armed and dangerous in FBI bulletins. His criminal record included a 10-year federal
sentence for the armed hijacking of a truck loaded with $240,000 worth of mercury.
The book alleges that he was suspected of taking part in several murders. D'Avanzo
was gunned down by the FBI in October 1977, when he tried to run down an agent after
being stopped on a warrant that accused him and two associates of transporting 100 stolen
luxury cars. The book describes a 1962 shootout pitting a local mobster against the
mayor's father and Leo D'Avanzo, Lewis D'Avanzo's father. The book says Leo
D'Avanzo, who was known in family circles as a black sheep, ran loansharking and
gambling operations out of a Brooklyn bar where Giuliani's father worked as a bartender.
In his role as debt collector, his father [Harold Giuliani] 'broke legs, smashed
kneecaps, crunched noses,' the book says. According to The Village Voice, Harold
Giuliani spent more than a year in Ossining State Prison (Sing Sing) for the armed
robbery of a milkman in 1934. His only child, best known for his strict law-and-order
persona, was born 10 years later."
—MICHAEL R. BLOOD, City Hall Bureau Chief, and LISA L. COLANGELO, New
York Daily News, on Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani, July 2001
PAX TV was destroyed in the airstrike on the World Trade Center 9-11, and is now back on air. Click link on week of
March 15 to check broadcast times. A previous documentary by PAX TV about the fatal crash of John F. Kennedy,
Jr., broadcast in February 2002, revealed that 3 eyewitnesses reported to FAA investigators that they saw JFK's
airplane explode in midair. The testimony by the JFK wedding party, a lawyer, a doctor and a reporter, disproved the
official allegations that JFK had died because he did not know how to fly a plane. PAX reported that in 2000, JFK
had turned down Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore's offer to run with him as vice president, and that JFK
had instead decided to announce that weekend his candidacy for the US Senate in 2000 against the Republican
mayor of New York City, the Mafia-born-and-bred Rudolf Giuliani (whose father spent years in Sing Sing prison for
armed robbery and had an uncle gunned down by the FBI and another uncle running New York state's largest
car-theft ring). PAX reported that either the Mafia assassinated JFK to put Giuliani into Congress [or to elect the wife
of presidential bastard Bill Clinton - the illigitimate son of Arkansas governor Rockefeller - Hillary Clinton?], or else
he was killed after JFK's magazine George, the largest monthly news magazine in the world, was reporting on
political assassinations in Israel. Other episodes on PAX in 2002 include NASA's bogus Moon landings and Pentagon's abandonment of 80,000 POWs since World War 2, including 1 US POW leftover from George Bush Sr's, Cheney's, Powell's Gulf War 1.
Oh yeah, and when the Mafia's garbage haulers got done digging out the $350-Million in buried gold and silver from under WTC, news reports only mentioned $250-Million returned to its rightful owners. $100-Million is a bloody big tip.
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