By Craig McKee
They were busy with other things.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, claim they were in meetings and that they weren’t told that their country was under attack until it was too late. The most incredible thing is that people actually believe them.
In this article, I’ll take a look at the whereabouts of General Myers that morning and why I contend that his claim to have been otherwise occupied is beyond belief.
On that morning, the general claimed to be meeting with Georgia Senator Max Cleland on Capitol Hill to discuss his upcoming confirmation hearing. Myers says he heard about the first plane impact at the World Trade Center (which occurred at 8:46 a.m.) before the meeting started, but assumed it was an accident. And get this: no one told him about the second tower being hit (which happened at 9:03) until after the meeting was over. That’s unless you believe one of his other versions (recounted in various media interviews) in which the meeting was interrupted by the news of the second strike.
According to one version, we’re supposed to believe that Myers stayed with Cleland discussing a confirmation hearing until after the Pentagon was allegedly hit at 9:38 – a full 52 minutes after the first tower impact. Only then was he brought up to speed. He didn’t make it back to the Pentagon until just before 10 a.m. This means that Myers was one of the last people in America to find out what was going on that morning.
We are also asked to believe that the top military official at the Pentagon would see a TV report about a plane hitting the World Trade Center and not want to know more. He assumed it was a small plane? And we’re asked to swallow the idea that no one would inform Myers of the second impact (or the fact that the first one was actually an airliner, for that matter)? It all makes no sense.
Myers has given contradictory accounts of when he learned of the Pentagon attack (he was either still in Cleland’s office or in his car on the way back to the Pentagon). This on its own is suspicious. Most people would have a very vivid memory of where they were when they got such news – especially if they were the top military official in the country.
Cleland backed up Myers’ account that they had been meeting that morning, but stated that Myers was sitting in his Capitol Hill office when the Pentagon was hit, contradicting Myers’ 9/11 Commission testimony that he was already on his way to the Pentagon. Cleland would later be appointed to the 9/11 Commission but would resign in protest because he believed the Commission investigation was a “whitewash.”
It gets worse. The whole story about the Myers/Cleland meeting is contradicted by White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke in his book Against All Enemies, which came out in 2004. Clarke wrote that both Myers and Rumsfeld participated in a video conference run from the White House by Clarke. This video conference started at about 9:10 a.m., almost half an hour before the Pentagon was supposedly hit by Flight 77.
Clarke specified that the video conference began with the involvement of Rumsfeld, Myers, FBI director Robert Mueller, and CIA head George Tenet. Clarke specifies that both Myers and Rumsfeld were told by Jane Garvey of the FAA during the conference that Flight 93 (which crashed just after 10 a.m.) was believed to be hijacked.
So Clarke says Myers was part of the 9:10 conference while Myers says he was in Cleland’s office until after the Pentagon was hit (at least that’s one of his versions). Clarke further states that Myers was aware of the two World Trade Center impacts by about 9:25 a.m.
The claim from both Myers and Rumsfeld that they were out of the loop and only became aware of the hijacking of flights 77 and 93 after they crashed is simply not credible. Think about it: from the time the first plane was believed to be hijacked until the alleged crash of the fourth plane was more than an hour and 40 minutes. And we’re supposed to believe that they couldn’t intercept any planes because they didn’t know? Could the countries leaders be this incompetent or was it intended to look that way?
We already know that George W. Bush was defying all reason by staying in a school for more than 45 minutes after the first World Trade Center tower was hit. We already know that Vice-president Dick Cheney’s claim that Cheney didn’t reach the presidential bunker until just after 10 a.m. that morning has been contradicted by then Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta.
And how did the 9/11 Commission handle the contradiction between Myers’ and Clarke’s accounts? They ignored it. They acted as if Clarke’s book didn’t exist, even going so far as to say that they didn’t know who from the Defense Department had participated in the video conference. They did know one thing, though: that no one who was “managing the crisis” participated.
How could that be? Well, it couldn’t. If you believe the official 9/11 story, you have to conclude that no one was in charge as the nation was being hit with the largest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. The Myers cover story is simply a convenient lie to cover up the fact that nothing was done to avert the alleged crashes. And that’s because the crashes were part of the false-flag operation that was 9/11.
And to top off everything, this blue-suited piece of useless brass is confirmed to permanent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in the fine tradition of Lyman Limnitzer who signed off recommending that Operation Northwoods be implemented which involved terrorism perpetrated by elements of the armed forces of the United States against the people of the United States and Cuba while providing a casus bellus for an invasion of Cuba. Fortunately, President Kennedy, unlike his much less worthy (putting it mildly) rejected the treasonous recommendation and fired Limnitzer, undoubtedly adding to the motives for his assassination by a gang of conspiratorial secret government operatives. According to a CIA operative, Kennedy was the last President of the U. S. to actually believe he was in charge. Not that hard to believe.
Yes, the Operation Northwoods case is so revealing; it wish it were better known among the general public. I wrote about it over three columns starting with this post: http://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/can%E2%80%99t-believe-u-s-would-unleash-terror-on-its-own-citizens-they-already-tried/
And I agree with you about Kennedy.