The Wall Street Lawyer and the Special Ops Hijack Coordinator
One might think that the Commissioners would have expressed surprise at Canavan’s rambling, somewhat incoherent claim that he was just not available during the events of 9/11. We would certainly expect the Commissioners to have followed up with detailed questions about who was in charge that day with respect to the most important role related to the failed national response. But that was not the case. Instead, Ben-Veniste redirected the discussion while “putting aside the issue.” None of the other Commissioners said a word about Canavan being missing that day or even asked who was filling in for him as the primary contact between the FAA and the military with regard to hijackings. And, of course, the 9/11 Commission report did not mention any of it at all.
In the interest of finding out what happened, we should return to the failure of FAA HQ to request military assistance for Flight 93. We should ask: What was FAA HQ doing with this information for those 30 minutes in the absence of the one person who was charged to do something about it? Apparently, for fifteen minutes, nothing was done. But after fifteen minutes, according to the 9/11 Commission report, the conversations were going nowhere.
At 9:49, according to the report, this was the exchange between the FAA Command Center and FAA HQ.
Command Center: Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft?
FAA Headquarters: Oh, God, I don’t know.
Command Center: Uh, that’s a decision somebody’s gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes.
FAA Headquarters: Uh, ya know everybody just left the room.
The Commission report says that ineffectual discussions about scrambling aircraft were still occurring at FAA HQ twenty minutes after it had received notification of the fourth hijacking.
At 9:53 am, “FAA headquarters informed the Command Center that the deputy director for air traffic services was talking to Monte Belger about scrambling aircraft.”
Apart from contradicting Benedict Sliney’s testimony that an FAA request for military assistance “emanates from the effected Center … directly to the military,” this part of the 9/11 Commission report never mentions who the “deputy director for air traffic services” was. Tape recordings suggest that it was someone named Peter. This might have been Peter H. Challan, an engineer who had worked for the FAA since 1969 and had been Deputy Associate Administrator for Air Traffic Services since July 1999. But the Deputy Director of Air Traffic Services that day was Jeff Griffith. Monte Belger was the Deputy Administrator for the FAA, second in command to the FAA Administrator, Jane Garvey. Belger and Griffith later denied they ever had a conversation about scrambling aircraft, despite the 9/11 Commission stating this as fact.
Jane Garvey was also present during the failed response at FAA HQ. She was the FAA Administrator from 1997 to 2002 and, coincidentally, in the years before that, had been the director of Logan International Airport in Boston, where two of the flights took off on 9/11. Apparently Garvey’s record as director for the Logan airport, which had for many years the worst security record of any major airport, was not a problem for her nomination to the top job at FAA. It was Garvey who appointed Canavan to his role as Associate Administrator for Civil Aviation Security and, therefore, as hijack coordinator.
In any case, in the absence of the hijack coordinator, the FAA was completely incompetent in terms of communicating the need to intercept the hijacked planes on 9/11. Officially, the only notice of the hijackings to the military came directly from the FAA centers, bypassing both the Command Center and FAA HQ. Boston Center reached the North East Air Defense Sector (NEADS) at 8:37 to request help with the first hijacking, and New York Center notified the military of the second hijacking at 9:03. NEADS only found out about the third hijacking at 9:34 by calling the Washington center to ask about Flight 11, and the military was said to have first learned about the hijacking of Flight 93 from Cleveland Center at 10:07. Still, none of the planes were intercepted.
9/11 and special operations
Although Michael Canavan was unavailable to perform his critical job function on 9/11, he was fully involved in the response to the attacks. Just two days later, he attended a “Principals Committee Meeting” chaired by Condoleezza Rice that included all of Bush’s “war cabinet.”[27] This meeting set the stage for how the new War on Terror would be conducted.
Canavan later cashed in on the windfalls of the resulting wars and the privatization of military operations when he was hired on at Anteon International Corporation as president of its Information Systems Group. In doing so, he joined a number of prominent defense department alumni, including his former special operations colleague, SOCOM commander and JCS chairman Hugh Shelton, who was on the board of directors at Anteon.
Since 9/11, covert activities have been encouraged at a much higher level, but, prior to 9/11, SOCOM was not supposed to conduct covert operations. Therefore, JSOC worked intimately with the CIA’s clandestine division called the Special Activities Division (SAD). Canavan led those kinds of operations in northern Iraq, Liberia and Bosnia. He ran special operations in Croatia in 1996 and, according to President Clinton, was the one who identified Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown’s body after Brown’s plane crashed there.[28]
JSOC regularly works with foreign intelligence agencies, including the Mossad.[29] It has been involved with hijackings, for example that of the Achille Lauro and TWA Flight 847. It has also operated from bases in foreign countries, such as Saudi Arabia, for many years.[30] Presidential Decision Directive PDD-25 gave JSOC one of the rare exemptions from the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which means that JSOC can legally conduct its missions within the US.[31]
In the “War on Terror”, the special mission units of JSOC have been given the authority to pursue secret operations around the world. JSOC effectively operates outside the law, capturing and killing people with or without the knowledge of the host countries in which it operates. JSOC missions are always low-profile, and the US government will not acknowledge any specifics about them.
Reporter Seymour Hersh has reported that the JSOC was under the command of Vice President Dick Cheney after the attacks.[32] Hersh also claimed that the leaders of JSOC “are all members of, or at least supporters of, the Knights of Malta” and that “many of them are members of Opus Dei.”[33] The ties between the Knights of Malta and high-level US intelligence personnel, including William Casey and William Donovan, have been well-documented.[34] Such accusations have also been made of Louis Freeh, who headed the FBI from 1993 to June 2001 and would have worked closely with Canavan and Shelton in the pursuit of special operations targets.
Other special operations leaders who were involved in the lack of response on 9/11 included Richard Armitage, who was present on the Secure Video Teleconference (SVTS) during the attacks.[35] This was the White House meeting chaired by Richard Clarke, which the 9/11 Commission said convened at 9:25 and included leaders of the CIA, the FBI, the FAA, as well as the departments of State, Defense and Justice. Even with all those leaders in on the call, nothing was done to stop Flight 93 from “crashing” that morning, approximately 40 minutes after the call began. Instead, we were left completely undefended.
Like Canavan and Shelton, Armitage was involved in special operations in Vietnam and later was reportedly involved in several of the most well-known covert operations in US history, including the Phoenix Program and the Iran-Contra crimes.[36] Although he had spent many years in the Defense department, he was Deputy Secretary of State on 9/11. After the invasion of Iraq, he was identified as the one who betrayed CIA agent Valerie Plame by revealing her identity, apparently in retaliation for her husband’s attempt to set the record straight on weapons of mass destruction. Armitage admitted he revealed Plame’s identity, but claimed it was done inadvertently.[37]
I gather the 911 commission are the decendents of the Warren Commission
who also had all the answers over how Kennedy was killed?
786:
WONDER FULL COMMENT. GO DEEP AND YOU WILL FIND ALL THE ANSWERS.
Funny how you don’t mention the 15+ wargames running that day and how NORAD was chasing virtual hijacked planes as well as the real ones.
Sorry but I don’t call this journalism, it’s more like state propaganda without analysis.
Wow, kouby, you really should try reading things before trying to respond to them. Really. Try it.
The concoction of mistakes looks like a plan to me. You will never convince me that 9/11 was anything but a false flag attack to get us into wars that serve the interests of the Zionists that have taken over our government. Where is all of the turmoil in the Mideast taking us. Wars have been used time and again by eugenicists to reduce the population. Only this time a lot of people are aware of what is going on.
Kudos Aubrey Farmer, you hit the nail on the head!
Anyone who has done any real research into the matter
will come to the same conclusion!
As it seems, the F93 takedown request got at least to Fort Meade. A quick calculation shows that of the F-16s “chasing virtual hijacked planes” at least one group would have arrived where F93 went down just a few minutes before it did.
If this is correct, the officials who took the decision at Meade to FW or not FW the request include but are not limited to the upper NSA liaison staff and the Army base command.
You want the facts? These people have them.
matteroffact,
you are correct. at the exact moment that 93 was departing capital area to the NW and F-16 in full blower went over the capital building after it. ETA to intercept, less than a minute. What happened between that time and the time of impact, remains open to conjecture… by everyone but Rumsfeld who blurted it out during a news conference.
NB: the above scenario assumes that the order was processed with priority at Meade. Which may well be so, given that F93 was at that time pointing its nose at Camp David and Washington DC (and had covered already 2/3 of the distance to the former in the time between the turnaround and the crash).
One of the most important questions that has actually been answered by Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth is how a 47 story building (Building 7) came down at free-fall speed into its own footprint – without being hit by a plane.
Excellent research and reporting, Kevin.
We all owe you for your diligence in seeking truth, and shedding more light than heat on complex events such as 9/11. Hope one day lawyers can build on your exhaustive research to prosecute those as deserve it.
Kevin or Jeremy (or anyone else), are you familiar with 9/11 whistle-blower & former CIA Asset, Susan Lindauer?
Cindy Sheehan (Soapbox radio show) interviewed her yesterday, May 22, 2011.
She sounds knowledgeable and credible re various assertions–incl. that many top govt officials knew about 9/11 prior to 9/11, and sounds like she will soon (if not already) provide evidence re controlled demolition of the 3 towers on 9/11.
Any thoughts about her?
No, not familiar. Will look into it.
Jeremy, here’s Susan Lindauer’s website:
http://extremeprejudiceusa.wordpress.com/
& link to Cindy Sheehan’s recent interview with her:
http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/
to listen to interview, or download the mp3 of it:
http://sheehan.streamguys.org/SoapboxInternet05222011.mp3
Let’s support our whistle-blowers. Without them–we’re sunk.
Yes, I found her website. Thanks, though, and also for the interview link. Don’t know if I will have time to listen to it, but I did otherwise take the time to check out what she has to say.
Complete nonsense. Kevin has no clue what the procedures were and how things would work. For insight on what happens when planes go off course, check out Payne Stewart. On 911 the time to figure out the hijackings were attacks and take action; the time it took for Passengers on Flt 93 to figure out 911 and attack the murderers Kevin is apologizing for.
I’m a Vietnam Vet and my first job was an Air Operations Specialist, the number 1 reason the planes were not intercepted or sent to intercept too late is because after the fall of the Berlin wall and the supposedly end of the cold war, we pretty much deactivated the Air Defense command, hot-cocked rapid response intercept units, I served in 1 of those units, where an intercept fighter would be launched in under 5 minutes to intercept Russian bombers that came too close to the USA, and as of now they have not reactivated those units, we are wide open for a stealth under the radar air attack, all it takes is for a country with the ability and the will to carry it out, hell all they have to wait for is total economic collapse and it will be a (fait accomplli). We have let this leadership of this country be taken over by lawyers, who don’t have a clue about leading an Imperial Dynasty like the USA, they have undermined the very moral and ethical values of what America stands for.