UQ Wire: Silence over Commission's Failings

Introduction

NOTE: Two articles follow. Please read and study the Commission's report before rushing blindly forward echoing calls to restructure our nation's intelligence. Our intelligence should be applied now to expose the cover-up, omissions, and discrepancies of this report. They are plain to see under scrutiny. Sheehy and Ridgeway only touch the tip of the iceberg that lurks beneath the surface.

When the commission began its work 9/11 CitizensWatch posed a simple set of questions as did the families (see 911independentcommission.org). The Commission was paid $15 million dollars to answer these questions. Most of them remain unanswered and given their cover-up of the apparent lies and deceptions of NORAD and the FAA, this Commission has failed to deliver on its promise to fulfill it's mandate. There are many voices crying foul - even a Senator who says "NORAD lied" and who calls upon the President to hold them to account - response: near total silence! The only press in his home state report on his statement before the Chair and Co-chair of the 9/11 Commission.

Where is the integrity of the American press? It seems you have sold out!

How does being complicit to cover-up sit with YOUR conscience?

Kyle F. Hence

9/11 CitizensWatch

The Dayton Discord

At long last, one member of the U.S. Senate has spoken out about the 9-11 report. Last Friday, during a Governmental Affairs committee meeting, Mark Dayton, a Democrat from Minnesota, directly attacked the government for distorting facts and covering up what happened that day. Highlights of his narrative:

-- Referring to the period between the first hijacking, at 8:14 a.m. and the crash of the fourth plane, at 10:03 a.m., Dayton said: "During those entire 109 minutes, to my reading of this report, this country and its citizens were completely undefended."

-- "According to [the 9-11 Commission's] findings, FAA authorities failed to inform military command, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, about three of the four hijackings until after the planes had crashed into their targets at the second World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the ground in Pennsylvania, which was not their target. NORAD then scrambled one of only two sets of fighter planes on alert in the entire eastern third of the country, one in Massachusetts and one in Virginia, but it didn't know where to send them "because the hijackers had turned off the plane's transponder so NORAD couldn't locate them on their radar, and they were still looking for it when it exploded into its target at 8:46 a.m."

…snip…

"By then, FAA's command center had learned of the fourth hijacking and called FAA headquarters, specifically asking that they contact the military, at 9:36 a.m. At 9:46 a.m., the FAA command center updated FAA headquarters that United flight 93 was '29 minutes out of Washington, D.C.' Three minutes later, [the commission's] document records this following conversation between the command center and FAA headquarters:

"Command center: 'Uh, do we want to, uh, think about scrambling aircraft?'

"FAA headquarters: 'Oh God, I don't know.'

"Command center: 'Uh, that's a decision somebody's going to have to make probably in the next 10 minutes.'

"FAA headquarters: 'Uh, yeah, you know, everybody just left the room.' "

SEE FULL STORY…. http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0431/mondo3.php

Who's in Charge Here?

What the 9-11 Commission Report does not explain is why, on the morning of September 11, 2001, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other top officials were essentially missing in action.

By Gail Sheehy

July 22, 2004

Whoís our quarterback in case of a future terrorist attack? Whoís in charge? That was the core question members of the 9-11 commission put to every government official they interviewed. The reason that youre hearing such a tone of urgency in our voices is because the answer to the question was almost uniform, said commissioner Jamie Gorelick at the press conference following todays release of the 600 page final 9-11 Commission Report. The person in charge, she said the commissioners had been told over and over again, would be the president.

It is an impossible situation for that to remain the case, Gorelick observed. Impossible, because the commissions report clearly shows that on the morning of September 11, 2001, the president and the other top officials in charge of the systems to defend the country from attack were, in essence, missing in action: They did not communicate, did not coordinate a response to the catastrophe, and in some cases did not even get involved in discussions about the attacks until after all of the hijacked planes had crashed.

Yet, even though the commissions report paints a stark portrait of opportunities lost in defending against terrorism, many observers especially the families of some 9/11 victims, who pushed hard for the commissions creation were disappointed in its failure to provide a timeline of the actions of the nations top leaders that morning. Such an analysis, they believe, would have shown conclusively that blame for failing to defend against the attacks goes all the way to the top.

SEE FULL STORY…. http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/07/07_400.html

Richard Clarke has Rumsfeld 'in the loop' BEFORE the strike on the Pentagon. According to his book, Clarke and other White House officials monitoring events in real-time looked to see if Rumsfeld was ok after they heard word of the attack on the Pentagon. From these comments it is obvious he was participating in at least the video conference link established during the attack linking the Pentagon with the White House before 9:25AM EST. Who is telling the truth?

For the Commission this could have been easily resolved. Instead it was readily ignored, despite the persistance of Gail Sheehy asking the direct questions. Sheehy is to be heartily commended for being one of only a few real journalists willing to ask the most disturbing questions rather than march blindly in lock step with the spin, lies, deceptions and omissions of this sham Commission's report.

Kyle F. Hence

STANDARD DISCLAIMER FROM UQ.ORG: UnansweredQuestions.org does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the above article. We present this in the interests of research -for the relevant information we believe it contains. We hope that the reader finds in it inspiration to work with us further, in helping to build bridges between our various investigative communities, towards a greater, common understanding of the unanswered questions which now lie before us.

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