It had been a while since I'd checked out Ethel the Blog, a very smart leftie who unfortunately hasn't been blogging for the last couple of weeks (and who also lacks an RSS feed. Get one, Ethel!)
As usual some great stuff on there, some of which I'll comment on later, but this article from June caught my attention. Does anyone else remember the conspiracy theory that FEMA was already in NYC on the morning of 9/11? Some FEMA worker said in an interview that he'd arrived there the day before, and it was among the thousand or so rumors that were circulating around then, this one in the "the gubmint knew!" category. It was quickly debunked, with everyone saying that the FEMA worker merely had his dates mixed up.
Not so fast!
In Rudy Giuliani's testimony to the 9/11 comission, he stated:
Later on I visited the police department, our backup command center, our number two backup command center would have been the police department, 7 World Trade Center was the primary one, the backup was the police academy.[...] But then we realized pretty shortly that the police academy was too small, and we selected Pier 92 as our command center.So FEMA was there on the morning of 9/11, they were getting ready for a drill that was scheduled for the next day. Take your pick between massive coincidence and massive conspiracy. (BTW, I emailed snopes to tell them to consider updating their entry on this.)And the reason Pier 92 was selected as the command center was because on the next day, on September 12th, Pier 92 was going to have a drill. It had hundreds of people here, from FEMA, from the federal government, from the state, from the State Emergency Management Office, and they were getting ready for a drill for biochemical attack. So that was going to be the place they were going to have the drill. The equipment was already there so we were able to establish a command center there within three days that was two-and-a-half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center. And it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed.
While your busy crafting that tinfoil hat, there's some other news I hadn't heard, also referenced in Ethel's post: on the morning of 9/11, we were conducting military exercises, including simulated hijackings. This may have led to confusion at NORAD.
There's certainly a lot of confusion about these exercises. With many names sounding similar, it's hard to tell whether there were five exercises, or one; whether they were all simulating a Russian air invasion, or whether any of them had simulated hijackings. Google turned up reliable confirmation of a Vigilant Guardian semi-annual exercise, and a Northern Vigilance, and a Northern Guardian, but which actually took place in Iceland. But if you want the full-on conspiracy-theory version, you can read here, or this excerpt from Mike Ruppert's upcoming "Crossing the Rubicon".
I think the shiny metal looks good on me, don't you?
| Conspiracy Theories |
