Amid fears another hijacked airliner was barrelling towards Washington, Heather Penney, then a lieutenant in the Washington DC National Guard, was one of two pilots ordered to take off without delay, she said in a recent interview.

The threat of an attack on US soil was seen as such a remote possibility at the time that the 121st fighter squadron at Andrews Air Force base outside Washington had no fully-armed fighter jets on standby.

With only 105 lead-nosed bullets on board, Penney and Colonel Marc Sasseville took to the skies, while two other F-16s waited to be armed with heat-seeking AIM-9 missiles, Penney told C-SPAN television this week.

The pilots had orders from the White House to take out any plane that refused to heed warnings and land, so the two pilots agreed on their plan.

“We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We would be ramming the aircraft because we didn’t have weapons on board to be able to shoot the airplane down,” Penney said.

As they were putting on their flight gear, “Sass looked at me and said, ‘I’ll ram the cockpit.’

“And I had made the decision that I would take the tail off the aircraft,” she said.

Penney said she “knew if I took off the tail of the aircraft, that it would essentially go straight down and so the pattern of debris would be minimised.”

She said she thought about possibly ejecting just before impact.

“I would essentially be a kamikaze and ram my aircraft into the tail of the aircraft. I gave some thought to, you know, would I have time to eject?”

But the young pilot was concerned about failing to hit the target.

“I mean you only got one chance, you don’t want to eject and have missed, right?”

When she took the plane down the runway, she said she believed it be the last take-off of her life.

In the end, Flight 93 never reached Washington, as passengers assaulted the hijackers in the cockpit and the plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

But the F-16 pilots did not learn of the aircraft’s fate until later that day, said Penney, now a major.

“The people on Flight 93 were heroes, but they were going to die no matter what,” she said.

“My concern was how do I minimise collateral damage on the ground.”

Later that afternoon, Penney helped escort Air Force One, with former president George W Bush on board, back to Andrews Air Force base.

A few years later, she flew missions in the Iraq war, hunting for SCUD missiles and backing up special operations forces.

Penney was among the first wave of female fighter pilots and she has since stopped flying full-time. The mother of two girls, she now works as a corporate executive, according to the Washington Post.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Penney said she was absorbed with the urgent job at hand and had no time for emotions.

“It wasn’t so much that I kept my emotions in check. It was that they didn’t even exist,” she said.

“There was significant adrenalin. It was really just, dear God, please don’t let me screw up.”

The post Fighter Pilot's 9/11 Kamikaze Mission appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

That revelation is one of many in newly released audio recordings compiled by investigators for the 9/11 Commission, published this week by The Rutgers Law Review. Featuring voices from employees at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and American Airlines, the newly released multimedia provides a glimpse at the chaos that emerged as the attack progressed.

Most striking of all is the revelation that an order by Vice President Dick Cheney was ignored by the military, which saw his order to shoot down aircraft as outside the chain of command. Instead of acknowledging the order to shoot down civilian aircraft and carrying it out, NORAD ordered fighters to confirm aircraft tail numbers first and report back for further instructions.

Cheney’s order was given at “about 10:15” a.m., according to the former VP’s memoirs, but the 9/11 Commission Report shows United flight 93 going down at 10:06 a.m. Had the military followed Cheney’s order, civilian aircraft scrambling to get out of the sky could have been shot down, exponentially amplifying the day’s tragedy.

Far from sending fighters to chase after the hijacked aircraft, as Bush administration officials have repeatedly said they did, the new audio tapes paint a picture of bedlam and unpreparedness.

The situation was so chaotic, military officials received the exact location of one of the aircraft that hit the World Trade Center towers just nine minutes before impact. It even took a military official calling the FAA some 30 minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 went off course before the nation’s defense apparatus began scrambling. Moments later the jet is said to have slammed into the Pentagon.

Despite these latest disclosures, the vast majority of materials gathered during the investigation of 9/11 remains a secret, even over the wishes of the 9/11 commissioners. Among that information is a 30-page summary of the commission’s interview with President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney; black box data; minutes from a secret, high-level “continuity of government” meeting; and information on America’s overseas intelligence-gathering on al Qaeda.

Withheld from the audio released by Rutgers was a high-level meeting held by top administration officials, where they discussed continuity of government measures to be implemented if the president were to be killed or a mass casualty event were to occur. In Cheney’s memoir, he claims to have ordered a staffer to hang up on that meeting when a technical glitch caused a degradation in audio quality. Instead of going directly there to participate in discussions about how to sustain the government, Cheney decided to watch television news.

9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean has said most of the investigation’s materials are classified for no apparent reason, and urged that the National Archives release the 9/11 files to the public as soon as possible. He’s also suggested that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) tried to impede the investigation when it turned towards al Qaeda intelligence gathering methods.

As many as 92 tapes of terror war captives being tortured by CIA operatives were later destroyed. Officials suggested these recordings depicted torture sessions with terrorism suspects Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri. Along with the tapes, detailed records of the CIA’s so-called “torture flights,” showing the planes, destinations and even the passengers, were also destroyed.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced in June that after a lengthy investigation, a probe of the CIA’s interrogations during the Bush-era would not proceed.

This video is from ABC News, broadcast Thursday, Sept. 8, 2011.

The post Military Officials Ignored Cheney 9/11 Shoot-down Order appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

MP3 Interview with Lorie Van Auken [48:26]

Lorie Van Auken, the mother of two children, lost her husband Kenneth Van Auken in the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. She is one of the “Jersey Girls” who, along with Kristen Breitweiser, Mindy Kleinberg, and Patty Casazza, fought the Bush administration for a commission to investigate the attacks. Ms. Van Auken is also a member of the September 11 Advocates.

The post Lorie Van Auken Interviewed by Sibel Edmonds appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

According to a report at Matt Drudge’s website, The Drudge Report, the new book Decision Points talks about topics including alcoholism, his order to shoot down planes on 9/11, Katrina and the financial crisis.

According to Drudge, the book begins, “It was a simple question, ‘Can you remember the last day you didn’t have a drink?'”

The book also discusses the events of Sept. 11, 2001. That morning, Bush says he made the order to shoot down hijacked planes.

At 10:03 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, United Flight 93 slammed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Most believe it was brought down when passengers tried to overtake the hijackers.

Bush writes that at first he believed Flight 93 had been shot down by the US military, according to Drudge’s filing.

Jon Gold notes “this is nothing new“.

As usual, the comments on Raw Story are a hotbed of 9/11 controversy.

The post Drudge: Bush Thought Flight 93 Was Shot Down on 9/11 appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

In a weird alignment of planets, this week in the news, at home and at work I’ve been plagued by conspiracy theorists determined to convince me, once again, that George Bush, Zionists or even the Vatican were responsible for the September 11 attacks.

In general, I consider conspiracy theories the rabid fantasies of lonely blokes who failed at university and have spent the rest of their lives trying to prove they’re smarter than everyone who passed.

And since many of them are, unlike me, smart enough to retain and regurgitate precise (albeit selective) scientific detail, it makes me a pretty soft target for their rants. Therefore, in preparation for my next 9/11 nut job assault, I’ve been working on an official response.

I don’t know if you’ve checked, but there are significantly more websites dedicated to conspiracy theories than to the mainstream point of view. In fact my 15-year-old got half way through a history assignment on September 11 before her confused cries for help alerted us to the fact she was reading the wrong stuff.

I know if you’re a conspiracy theorist you’re mad at me now for not letting my daughter read everything and draw her own conclusions. Honestly, I was just saving her the time.

With a nod to the animated series South Park, in short, there are three reasons I don’t think George Bush, The Pope or even the CIA did it – love, logistics and dibber-dobbers.

Truth Movement websites, as they’re known, routinely claim there were no terrorists on board any of the 9/11 flights. Apparently the pilots were either stooges or, in the case of the World Trade Centre crashes, the planes were military jets guided remotely into the buildings with no passengers on board. The phone calls from supposed loved ones were faked and the actual passenger jets that went missing on the day were shot down over the ocean.

The heart of the conspiracy theory stems from how the buildings collapsed. In particular, that an aviation fuel fire is incapable of melting steel, that the buildings collapsed upon themselves and that a third building, not hit by a hijacked plane also collapsed. There’s plenty more, by the way, but this will do for now. Based on those propositions, the truth movement contends all three buildings were imploded in a “controlled demolition” using explosives planted at some earlier time.

They also claim the Pentagon was not hit by an airliner but by a guided missile and the fourth airliner, United 93, was shot down en route to the capital because the passengers threatened to land it successfully thus exposing the plot.

To accept any of it, you have to believe there are thousands of people connected to the US government evil and brilliant enough to co-ordinate such a complex plan, without one person ever dobbing. Keep in mind that the group had to train or invent 19 fake hijackers, complete with elaborate background stories and send them to flying schools across the country to ensure there was someone to blame following the event.

Imagine the paperwork. No matter how rotten you think the US administration is there must be some good people in there. And surely they’d be looking for paperwork on every new recruit, every planning meeting, request for flight times, aircraft requisition, talent fee, mislaid guided missile or flying student conveniently made disappear. And don’t get me started on the overtime it would have taken for the bomb squad to wire up the twin towers.

It’s not only ridiculous to suggest there were hundreds of civil servants willing to cold heartedly slaughter thousands of their countrymen, it’s deeply offensive. And just quietly, you know how all of your friends have stopped arguing about your whack job theories? I promise you, it’s not assent, they’re just bored.

It’s not only ridiculous to suggest there were hundreds of civil servants willing to cold heartedly slaughter thousands of their countrymen, it’s deeply offensive.

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