L.S.: On 9/11 the plans of “Continuity of Government” (COG) were activated. (8) Is this also of critical importance?
P.S.: It seems as if COG is the center of the whole 9/11 issue. Possibly this is what it was all about. You have to look at it from a distance. 9/11 allowed major policy shifts in some important areas. First it led to a big boost in defense spending. Second, as everybody knows, it caused public support for energy and hegemonic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But perhaps the most important strategic opportunity of 9/11 was to strengthen the executive branch and presidential power in general and to weaken congress and democratic participation.
All of this was exactly the agenda of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their associates before 9/11. And now we come to COG. The widely secret plans for “Continuity of Government” were born in the cold war and should ensure that the country could be governed even after an assumed Russian atomic bomb had destroyed Washington and killed all political leaders there. Therefore, COG called for a parallel structure of executive officials located outside the capital taking over the government after such a deadly strike. But with knowledge, access and criminal energy people at the top could use COG of course also for some kind of coup d’etat.
You really don’t need that much fantasy to imagine a national emergency as cover for a partly suspension of democratic structures. It has happened often enough in history. And presumably this is exactly what occurred on 9/11—or at least what was planned, assuming the attack was an inside job. As we saw, it didn’t fully succeed at first. Flight 93, the fourth hijacking that morning, didn’t reach its planned target which was probably the White House or the Capitol in Washington. If it had hit, politicians would also have been killed.
Interestingly COG was activated anyway, even without any political leaders being assassinated. It was started by Cheney, for the first time in the history of the country, shortly before 10 a.m., after the third hijacked plane had crashed into the Pentagon. We know this from the 9/11 Commission Report, which says next to nothing about COG beyond the sheer fact of the plan’s activation. In the tiny footnotes of the Commission Report’s appendix you can read: “We did not investigate this topic” and that the Commission’s investigators were only briefed “on the general nature” of COG. (9) The most we know about this clandestine “Continuity of Government” program is from a “Washington Post” article from March 2002 titled: “Shadow government is at work in secret”. (10)
So this shadow government of about 100 people outside Washington, activated by Cheney on 9/11, was at work at least for months. No one informed the public if and when it was stopped. Even Congress wasn’t aware of it until the “Washington Post” had made it public 6 months after the attack. All we know is that Cheney had a secret parallel executive structure at hand since 9/11. No one has investigated the actions of these people so far.
L.S.: Thank you very much for taking your time, Mr. Schreyer!
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Remarks by the interviewer:
It seems relevant to me to clarify three specific issues related to the topic “war games / air defense” and the usual procedures in order to avoid misunderstandings:
1) As to whether there were enough fighter jets available although a series of exercises were held, the answer is crystal clear: yes, and the reason is of utmost importance because it is the core of the air policing system that was introduced and practiced since the 1950s in all NATO air forces – initiated by the US. Each air force squadron (or wing) that has the task of air policing has a horde of two fighters that are held on alert 24 hours every day of the year exclusively to fulfill this task. As a rule, the machines must be in the air 10 to 15 minutes after the alarm. This process is called in NATO air force “alpha scramble.” These crews and their machines do not participate – under any circumstances – in exercises. Even if the squadron will be used for any other activity, this does not happen without an assignment of the air policing to another squadron for that specific time. In Germany for example, this task is carried out by the Fighter Wing 71 in Wittmund (airspace north) and 74 in Neuburg (airspace south).
2) The change of the rules which are mentioned in the interview (the need for an approval for “alpha scramble”) is remarkable by itself, because it contradicts the practice that was conducted since decades. This practice knows deliberately no hierarchical command structures, but instead relies on the principle of fire service or ambulance, whereby delays of interception missions should be avoided.
3) No air traffic controller that is employed for the simulation process of an air force exercise will – under any circumstances – undertake at the same time parallel tasks of the normal civilian or military flight operations, and vice versa. This would be not compatible with the principles of flight safety. If it should have been the case that an air traffic controller received virtual signals / false blips on the radar, this would be an indication that someone (with access to the radar system) wanted to cause deliberately confusion.
Notes
(1) ITV News, 07.07.05, Interview with Peter Power, Managing Director of Crisis Management firm Visor Consultants, published here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKvkhe3rqtc
BBC Radio 5 Live, 07.07.05, Interview with Peter Power, who was “actually running an exercise (…) based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations that happened”. See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEbUQiYOGjU
(2) Matthew Everett, “‘Let’s Get Rid of This Goddamn Sim’: How NORAD Radar Screens Displayed False Tracks All Through the 9/11 Attacks”, 12.08.10, published here: http://shoestring911.blogspot.de/2010/08/lets-get-rid-of-this-goddamn-sim-how.html
(3) Washington Post, “Pentagon Crash Highlights a Radar Gap”, 03.11.01, Don Phillips, published here: http://www.paul-schreyer.de/recherchen_archiv07.html
(4) CNN, Breaking News “Terrorist Attack on United States”, 11.09.01, published here: http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/11/bn.01.html
(5) Aidan Monaghan, “Plausibility of 9/11 Aircraft Attacks Generated by GPS-Guided Aircraft Autopilot Systems”, October 2008, published here: http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/AutopilotSystemsMonaghan.pdf
Kevin Ryan, “Renovation to revolution: Was the Pentagon attacked from within?”, 15.06.12, published here: http://digwithin.net/2012/06/15/from-renovation-to-revolution-was-the-pentagon-attacked-from-within/
(6) Paul Schreyer, “Inside 9/11 – Hijacking the air defense”, 28.06.11, published here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8En6Ag8y77M
(7) Lt. Col. Robert Darling, “24 Hours Inside the President’s Bunker. 9-11-01: The White House”, Bloomington 2010, p. 109.
(8) Compare Peter Dale Scott: “‘Continuity of Government’ Planning: War, Terror and the Supplanting of the U.S. Constitution”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 24, 2010, published here: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3362
(9) 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 38, 555, published here: http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf
(10) Washington Post, “Shadow Government Is at Work in Secret”, 01.03.02, Barton Gellman / Susan Schmidt, published here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/09/AR2006060900891.html
