Down South Perspective

 

Hi folks,

It’s relentless, plus ridiculous.

Here’s the end part of one of my recent email exchanges, the last installment having arrived in my Inbox like 30 seconds ago (read from the bottom up):

— XXXX XXXX <XXXXXX@gmail.com > wrote:
You're just blabing on and on

On 9/22/06, Allan Weisbecker <acwdownsouth@yahoo.com> wrote:

what did i do this time?

— XXXX XXXX <XXXXXX@gmail.com > wrote:

> No No No. I think maybe you are a jerkoff after all.

The guy is of course referring to my recent messages about the lies we’ve been told about 9/11.

I’m “blabing on”?

It’s a motif: The people who get hostile about my talking about this stuff (as opposed to people who merely disagree with what they think I’m saying) invariably cannot write a complete sentence without fucking up. (At least he got the “you’re” as opposed to “your” part right.)

To belabor the obvious, via a rhetorical question: What does this tell you?

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First:

As I say, I’ll soon be starting a blog and reader’s forum so as not to aggravate those who have no interest in matters other than surfing and life in paradise (cool cowabunga stuff). This newsletter will then go back to cool cowabunga stuff-laden. So hang in for now, humor me.

Okay:

An interesting development since I owned up to not PAYING ATTENTION regarding the NTSB Report on the Payne Stewart Learjet accident back in 1999:

Recall that I said I thought I’d seen a newspaper account saying that the F-16s did in fact intercept Stewart’s Lear within 20 minutes of the tower losing contact with it. This was in part my excuse for not examining the NTSB Report more closely. (The time zone switch went unnoticed by me, the point being that the document does imply that the F-16 took an hour and 22 minutes to intercept, as Popular Mechanics claimed, not about 20 minutes.)

I asked you guys if someone would check to see if there was such a newspaper account.

A great gal by the name of Jennifer came up with this link to a Knight Ridder account from the day after the accident:

http://www.wanttoknow.info/991026dallasmorningnews

Go there if you like, but here’s the relevant passage:

…according to an Air Force timeline, a series of military planes provided an emergency escort to the stricken Lear, beginning with a pair of F-16 Falcons from the Air National Guard at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., about 20 minutes after ground controllers lost contact.
10/26/1999
KRTBN Knight-Ridder Tribune Business News: The Dallas Morning News - Texas
Copyright (C) 1999 KRTBN Knight Ridder Tribune Business News; Source: World Reporter ™. (Staff writers Terri Langford, Kathy Lewis and Richard Whittle and the Associated Press contributed to this report.)

What does this mean?

Two possibilities:

1. The NTBS Report was altered to conform to the “history rewrite” that military jets are not routinely scrambled to intercept civilian aircraft. This would be necessary because a 20 minute intercept in the case of the Lear would be (further) evidence that we were lied to about “standard operating procedure” (SOP).
2. The reporters got the story wrong in the first place. (In other words, the “20 minute” claim in the newspaper account is inaccurate.)

If any of you can come up with a third possibility, I’m all ears.

I don’t know which of the above is the case, but it would be interesting to find out, no? (If the NTSB Report was altered, a cover up of some sort would be implied. Please correct me if I’m wrong on this – notice I’m avoiding the word conspiracy, so certain types out there don’t react with the Pavlovian sending of grammatically incorrect emails to me.)

Then another interested (and smart) Googler sent me this:

Military Jets 7 Times as Busy as Before Sept. 11

H E R N D O N, Va., Aug. 13 (2002) — The military sent fighter jets to chase suspicious aircraft 462 times between Sept. 11 and June (2001 – 2002), nearly seven times as often as the 67 scrambles from the same period a year earlier (just before 9/11).

Right: I also said I’d seen a document saying that military jets had chased 67 aircraft in the year prior to 9/11/2001.

Here’s the link for the rest of it:
http://newsmine.org/archive/9-11/norad-faa-response/67-af-scrambles-year-before-911.txt

The primary source here is an Air Force major.

What does this mean?

Seems to mean that it was SOP to scramble jets to intercept “suspicious” aircraft at the time in question, 9/11/2001. Doesn’t it? (By the way: I think hijacked aircraft are a bit more “suspicious” than, say, a wayward Learjet.)

Which seems to mean that they are lying about chains of command (and so forth) in scrambling and intercepting on 9/11. (The current “official version” is that higher ups in the Department of Defense have to okay a mere intercept [as opposed to a shoot down] of a civilian aircraft. This is an outright lie, which replaced the original lie that the president or vice president have to okay an intercept.)

Wait! But the highjacked airplanes’ transponders were turned off! No one knew where the planes were! Right? Wrong, but even so – the transponder issue has nothing to do with the subject at hand, which is the possible lies about scrambling and intercept SOP. I hope you see this.

So what else have we got on this matter of possible lies about SOP on 9/11?

Back to the above question of whether the NTSB Report on the Learjet accident was altered (a federal crime). I’m not a good Googler and I’m supposed to be working on the adjunct website to my book, on which I’m far behind in my work. So I again ask you guys to help me out.

This could be an interesting exercise in detective work, and which can mostly be done in front of your computer, at home, when you’re in the mood.

Again, here’s the quote in question from the Learjet accident NTSB Report:

At 0933:38 EDT (6 minutes and 20 seconds after N47BA acknowledged the previous clearance), the controller instructed N47BA to change radio frequencies and contact another Jacksonville ARTCC controller. The controller received no response from N47BA. The controller called the flight five more times over the next 4 1/2 minutes but received no response.

About 0952 CDT,7 a USAF F-16 test pilot from the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base (AFB), Florida, was vectored to within 8 nm of N47BA.8 About 0954 CDT, at a range of 2,000 feet from the accident airplane and an altitude of about 46,400 feet,9 the test pilot made two radio calls to N47BA but did not receive a response.

The relevant footnote: 7 About 1010 EDT, the accident airplane crossed from the EDT zone to the CDT zone in the vicinity of Eufaula, Alabama.

So we want to know if the report has always read like this. We want to know if it was altered after 9/11, right?

What we’re looking for are any changes in the report, especially in the time zones, changes that would put the intercept at about 22 minutes after contact was lost with the air traffic controller (rather than an hour and 22 minutes) — “0933:38 EDT.”

Hard core, “smoking gun” evidence of conscious lying (to back up the probable lying we unearthed via the news stories quoted above) would be an old version of the report, with a different elapsed time before the intercept, i.e., about 20 minutes rather than an hour and 22 minutes. (Hard copy would be the best but “old” Web stuff would be good too. It’s possible that the original report was archived in different places, some of which were neglected in the altering – if such altering did take place.)

That would pretty much do it, right? (Correct me if I’m wrong here.)

Since the NTSB Report was issued well after the news piece, a misreading of it by the reporters was not the cause of their getting the time wrong, if they indeed got it wrong.

But it’s still possible that they got it wrong by way of interviews in which the interviewees spouted times without clarifying the time zone referred to. This would imply that no lying has transpired.

Best here would be to contact the reporters directly and, if possible, get copies of their notes. Where did they get their “20 minutes” to intercept information?

Here’s another relevant passage I Googled up:

The FAA says controllers lost contact with it at 9:44 a.m. [Washington Post, 10/26/1999] , but according to a later report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) the plane first failed to respond to air traffic control at 9:33 a.m., after which the controller repeatedly tried to make contact for the next 4 1/2 minutes, without success. [National Transportation Safety Board, 11/28/2000] NORAD’s Southeast Air Defense Sector was notified of the emergency at 9:55 a.m. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 459] At 10:08 a.m., two F-16 fighters from Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida that were on a routine training mission had been asked by the FAA to intercept the Learjet, but never reached it.

(http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-4906)

There are some problems with this account: No attribution, no date, although it was obviously written well after the events of that day (they refer to the 9/11 Commission Report). So any lies have already been told and would be included in this.

Even so, did you notice anything significant in the above passage? The last sentence:

“At 10:08 a.m., two F-16 fighters from Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida that were on a routine training mission had been asked by the FAA to intercept the Learjet, but never reached it.”

What does this mean? It means that the FAA can and does authorize scrambles/intercepts; it would also seem to imply that the FAA can and does contact the military directly. Both of these implications fly into the face of what we’re now being told.

More Googling. From a USA Today article from the day after the accident:

But after 9:44, the crew did not respond to radio calls. Within 24 minutes, the Federal Aviation Administration had asked the Air Force for help in tracking the jet.

Although it’s possible that the above reporters (Jack Kelley, Steve Komarow and Andrea Stone in Washington; Blake Morrison and Traci Watson in Mina, S.D.; and Deborah Sharp in Orlando, Fla.) got the same bad information as the Knight Ridder folks, it seems unlikely. Especially in the context of all the other quoted stuff.

It really looks like we’ve been lied to here, no?

Hold on. I just went and did a little more Googling (notice that the date is pre-9/11):

CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT
CHIEFS OF STAFF
INSTRUCTION
J-3 CJCSI 3610.01A
DISTRIBUTION: A, B, C, J, S 1 June 2001
AIRCRAFT PIRACY (HIJACKING) AND DESTRUCTION OF DERELICT
AIRBORNE OBJECTS

Note from AW: “Escort service” and “escort aircraft” refer to the military aircraft that scramble and intercept a hijacked airplane.

(2) Pursuant to reference j, the escort service [intercepting aircraft] will be requested by
the FAA hijack coordinator by direct contact with the NMCC…. When the military can
provide escort aircraft, the NMCC will advise the FAA hijack coordinator of
the identification and location of the squadron tasked to provide escort aircraft… When a NORAD resource is tasked, FAA willcoordinate through the appropriate Air Defense Sector/Regional Air Operations Center.

This government document outright says that the FAA is in fact the “coordinator” in cases of hijackings. This also contradicts what we’ve been told, i.e., that there is a “chain of command” to deal with before a scramble/intercept. This seems to indicate that the FAA should have contacted the military directly and routinely on 9/11. (If the reason they did not was a “screw up” then why not just tell us? Why lie?)

Assuming for a moment that the above stuff amounts to an exposure of a lie (regarding what we’ve been told about SOP):

When people lie they invariably fuck up and give themselves away. You just have to PAY ATTENTION. (I’ve noticed this via my personal life.)

I hope you see that the matter of scrambling/intercept SOP is important. Although the real truth (there are all sorts of “truths” in this world that are not “real”) on this matter will not tell us what in fact happened that day, it would surely be a part of the puzzle.

Other avenues to the truth:

Were there other newspaper accounts of the Learjet accident, done independently of the above Knight Ridder and USA Today ones? If so, what did they say? Where did they get their information?

Are there other government reports/documents that deal with the accident? If so, what do they say?

Be really useful to contact the Air Force and Air National Guard pilots who were on call that day. Difficult, but useful. Or any Air Force or Air National Guard pilots who were on the job back then (to ask them about SOP). Or the air traffic controller(s). Or any air traffic controller who was on the job back then. (Do any of you know any such people?)

And of course there are documents and manuals that define SOP – but keep in mind that the versions available now might have been altered. (Again, hard copy from pre-9/11 would be best.)
There are a lot of you out there: Via the “six degrees of separation” concept we should be able to unravel this, get to the truth.

Again: An alteration of the NTSB Report would be a bombshell. A true smoking gun. And we could expose it.

Those of you who are interested in what happened on 9/11 (or don’t like being lied to), or just get a kick out of mental exercises — testing yourself in a Sherlock Holmesian manner — I welcome other suggestions of how we can get to the truth on this.

Remember that oft-quoted line from All the President’s Men?

Follow the money.

For me it’s Follow the lies.

Notice I still have not yet said a word about what did happen on 9/11/2001.

I am not saying what did happen!

This is the third time I’ve said this in as many messages, but I will still get… jerk offs accusing me of being a “conspiracy theorist.” (How can I be a conspiracy theorist if all I’m doing is asking questions and quoting people and documents?)

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Steve James, I’ll ask again: Where are you? I need confirmation that you’re a real person and among the living! I’ll give you another week, then the surfboard gets auctioned, with the proceeds going to The SurfRider Foundation.

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I’ve been getting lots of emails from people who have started Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise.

I mean lots. And the book was only just sent out. Not everyone in the States has even gotten their copy (blame the limey mail system).

So far all of them have been either positive or… more than that. In almost all of them the phrase “I couldn’t put it down” pops up. Trust me that to a writer (this writer anyway) “I couldn’t put it down” is sweeter music than, say, “Better than Moby-Dick!”

I can’t tell you what a relief this is to my sorry ass.

Here’s a review that initially gave me a fright because the author put “Your new book SUCKS!!!!” in the subject box:

Allan,

gotta be honest amigote…..IT FUCKIN' SUCKS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  with all due respecto.

…..just got back from Jersey……went to visit the family and your new book was waiting for me when I got home.

…….I can't put the fucking thing down….it is sucking all my attention…..like an interstellar big black hole…….I should be catching up on work, sleep, pokin my wife ,etc. ( pms to blame on that…tu eres indemnified )   after dinner yesterday……I cracked it open and have been up all night reading the damn thing till now.  I am only half way through it cause I keep getting caught up in all your "loopy" loop tangents……..goooooogling, etc.  I am only half way through it…..and have to take a break now……I blew off the work day today….it's all your fault.

hands down the most enjoyable book I have ever read……i don't give a shit if you just wrote blah blah blah for the last half of the book………which I hope you didn't…….

the wife yelled at me and violently threw something too around 4 a.m. today telling me to go in the other room ( I think it was the remote she threw cause earlier today my assistance was needed when she declared an A.P.B.) ….anyway her early morning tirade happened cause I was shaking the bed when I was crackin' up…..I sincerely tried to silence my chuckling……but, did not take into account the moving bed thing……my dogs even growled at me a couple times….cause I kept leaving the room to access my computer……and when I came back the floor has a creak…..that they hate……and I keep forgetting about……your fault too…..

I know I should have waited to send you my comments…….you know read the whole book and such…..

………. I think if I eat something I could complete the marathon read.  ……..F you and your tangents man………..I wish I had this on the plane trip………..but, then I couldn't check the web………here comes da wife………..un momento

….hasta…….I'm going back in……….the wife just said she'll make me dibs….coffee too…..what a woman…….( she just told me she got her period……yeah…….that means she's back……amazing how they can instantly change…….when the flow starts to go………..fuck I’m rhyming now)

later………….Brian

That’s what I call a review.

You gotta love the dogs growling at him image (not once but a couple times):

……and when I came back the floor has a creak…..that they hate……

I love it that Brian has dogs, plural, and that they both, they all [how many does he have?] got as pissed off as his wife and ganged up on him.

But here’s my favorite part:

………here comes da wife………..un momento

….hasta…….I'm going back in……….

That Brian says more about his married life (and in a Homer Simpson-esque way, about everyone’s married life) than my fucking book bothers me not a bit.

If, say, Christopher Lehman-whatever of that lying rag (“All the news that fits we print”) had Brian’s descriptive pizzazz I might take him seriously. (A question: how can you take seriously a reviewer with a hyphen in his name?)

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Of the sixty plus so-far reader reviews I’ve received, forty-something were of Brian’s degree of enthusiasm, if not as eloquent. The rest pretty much just loved the book (or are loving it). One reader even said that it “changed” how he looks at the world. Holy shit!

Point being: It looks like I did good.

So: If you’re reading the book, please do shoot me feedback. (If you don’t like it, say so, and try to explain why. I’ve learned from you guys in the past, and I expect I will so again, here – hey, the cover is the way it is because of one of you.)

I’m still learning.

In a sense, the reader is always right.

I’ll be in touch.

Allan

Oh. If you notice any other screw ups on my part in the 9/11 stuff – facts, logic, whatever – please, let fly. I like the way you keep me on my toes and honest.

And you can still buy the book! See if Brian is a jerk off with his head up his ass!

One last thing: I’m losing subscribers because of my “blabing” about stuff other than cool cowabunga stuff.  Please help offset this by recommending my site and newsletter to smart friends and associates. We need all the help we can get.

And remember that this stuff will soon be limited to my blog and reader’s forum.

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