Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, December 18, 2008
A career Army officer who was injured in the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 is suing Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for failing to issue a warning that American Airlines Flight 77 was about to hit the building despite receiving knowledge of its approach some 20 minutes in advance.
Retired Army officer April Gallop, a ranking specialist with top secret clearance who began working at the Pentagon in 2000, has also filed suit against US Air Force General Richard Myers, who was acting chairman of the joint chiefs on 9/11.
Gallop was knocked unconscious when the roof collapsed in her office her and her 2-month-old baby sustained a serious brain injury after suffering the consequences of what Gallop describes as “two explosions”. Gallop does not believe that a Boeing 757 struck the building on 9/11. The lawsuit charges that the attack was “engineered by other means, a planted bomb or bombs and/or a missile,” citing the lack of plane debris witnessed after the attack, along with evidence from the “black box” discovered at the scene, which indicated that the plane passed low over the building immediately before the fireball was observed, as well as the complete failure of ground and air defenses which protect the Pentagon.
The official 9/11 timeline confirms that NORAD and the FAA knew that Flight 77 had been hijacked and was likely headed towards Washington at 9:24 a.m, 19 minutes before the Pentagon was struck. The gap between the second plane hitting the World Trade Center and the incident at the Pentagon was a full 40 minutes.
“The ex-G.I. plaintiff alleges she has been denied government support since then, because she raised ‘painful questions’ about the inexplicable failure of military defenses at the Pentagon that day, and especially the failure of officials to warn and evacuate the occupants of the building when they knew the attack was imminent” said Gallop’s attorney William Veale in a press release.
The suit charges that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Myers conducted a conspiracy to facilitate the attacks and alleges that other unnamed individuals had foreknowledge. The preliminary statement of the lawsuit charges that the attacks were staged so as to “Generate a political atmosphere of acceptance in which the new Administration could enact and implement radical changes in the policy and practice of constitutional government in our country.”
The text of the lawsuit lists a mountain of evidence indicating that top members of the Bush cabinet had a hand in the attacks, focusing not just on the Pentagon, but prior knowledge of the attacks and the inconceivable response to all four hijacked airliners on 9/11.
The suit cites the Project For a New American Century strategy documents as proof that top Neo-Cons were yearning for “a new Pearl Harbor” in order to whip up support for a pre-planned geopolitical agenda.
“By helping the attack succeed, defendants and their cohorts created a basis for the seizure of extraordinary power, and a pretext for launching the so-called Global War on Terror, in the guise of which they were free to pursue plans for military conquest, “full spectrum dominance” and “American primacy” around the world; as they have done,” reads the lawsuit.
Attorney William Veale says that if the lawsuit gets past a motion to dismiss, it may be the key which will unlock a plethora of disturbing questions about 9/11.
“What they don’t want is for this to go into discovery,” William Veale told Raw Story. “If we can make it past their initial motion to dismiss these claims, and we get the power of subpoena, then we’ve got a real shot at getting to the bottom of this. We’ve got the law on our side.”
The full text of the lawsuit is reprinted below.
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UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK ___
APRIL GALLOP, for Herself and as Mother and Next Friend of ELISHA GALLOP, a Minor, No. _____________
Plaintiff, Jury Trial Demanded
vs.
DICK CHENEY, Vice President of the U.S.A., DONALD RUMSFELD, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, General RICHARD MYERS, U.S.A.F. (Ret.), and John Does Nos. 1– X, all in their individual capacities, Defendants.
__________________________________________
COMPLAINT FOR VIOLATION OF CIVIL RIGHTS, CONSPIRACY, AND OTHER WRONGS
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
1. This case arises from the infamous Attack on America of Sept 11, 2001, and especially on the Pentagon; and is premised on an allegation of broad complicity in the attack on the part of key U.S. Government officials, beginning with and led from the top by Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Myers, then acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The plaintiffs allege that these and other government officials, whose identities will be ascertained from their proven or evident relevant roles and activities, and who are named herein as ‘John Doe’ defendants, together with other known and unknown operatives and functionaries, official and otherwise, engaged in an unlawful conspiracy, or a set of related, ongoing conspiracies, in which the concrete objective was to facilitate and enable the hijacking of the airliners, and their use as living bombs to attack buildings containing thousands of innocent victims; and then to cover up the truth about what they had done.
2. The defendants’ purpose in aiding and facilitating the attack, and the overall object of the conspirac(ies), was to bring about an unprecedented, horrifying and frightening catastrophe of terrorism inside the United States, which would give rise to a powerful reaction of fear and anger in the public, and in Washington. This would generate a political atmosphere of acceptance in which the new Administration could enact and implement radical changes in the policy and practice of constitutional government in our country. Much of their intention was spelled out prior to their coming into office, in publications of the so-called Project for the New American Century, of which defendants Cheney and Rumsfeld were major sponsors. There they set forth specific objectives regarding the projection of U.S. military power abroad, particularly in Iraq, the Persian Gulf, and other oil-producing areas. They observed, however, that the American people would not likely support the actions the sponsors believed were necessary, without being shocked into a new outlook by something cataclysmic: “a new Pearl Harbor”. By helping the attack succeed, defendants and their cohorts created a basis for the seizure of extraordinary power, and a pretext for launching the so-called Global War on Terror, in the guise of which they were free to pursue plans for military conquest, “full spectrum dominance” and “American primacy” around the world; as they have done.
3. In pursuit of the goals of the conspiracy, the named and unnamed defendants knowingly and by agreement committed a series of acts and omissions which were aimed at and did generally accomplish the following objectives:
+ To permit the men they later identified as the hijackers and any immediate accomplices to enter and remain in the country, and carry out the activities, movements and communications needed in their preparations for the hijacking, free from interference by police or counter-terrorist authorities; and then allow the groups of these men to book passage, all on the same day, and board the flights;
+ To cause normal operation of the regular off-course airline flight interception practice of the US Air Force, in cooperation with civil flight control authorities, to be altered, suspended or disrupted in such a way as to remove its protections, at least on that day, and thus permit three of the four apparently hijacked planes to reach their targets and crash into them (or appear to do so…);1
+ To cause the normal operation of ground and air defenses which guard the Pentagon from external attack to be altered, suspended or disrupted in such a way as to remove or negate the building’s normal protections, and thus permit an airliner, believed to be hijacked by possible suicide bombers, and following a forbidden, descending flight path, to reach the Pentagon undeterred;
+ To cause and arrange for high explosive charges to be detonated inside the Pentagon, and/or a missile of some sort to be fired at the building, at or about the time the wayward airliner supposedly arrived there, to give the false impression that hijackers had crashed the plane into the building, as had apparently happened in New York;
+ To arrange, thereafter, and fabricate, propound and defend, as part of the conspiracy, an elaborate, highly complex and sophisticated cover-up, centering around the Report of the 9/11 Commission, and continuing to this day. To this end, defendants misappropriated the highest authority of government to block, misdirect and otherwise evade any fair, independent investigation of the evidence, and officially if implausibly explain away the evident wholesale failure of America’s defenses with misinformation, omissions and distortions, withheld and destroyed evidence, and outright lies.
4. In the attack on the Pentagon, in particular, plaintiff avers that the official story, that a hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon and exploded (causing the plaintiff’s injuries), is false. In fact, the bombing was accomplished another way, so as to limit the damage, protect the defendants, and only make it appear that a plane had been crashed into the building. This claim is supported by data from the plane’s supposed “black box”, released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which indicate the plane passed over the building at very low altitude, just as an explosion and fireball were engineered by other means, a planted bomb or bombs and/or a missile. This is supported by the lack of any photographic evidence of a wrecked airliner at the Pentagon, compounded by the record of reported refusal by the U.S. Department of Justice to release some 85 video tapes from surveillance cameras in locations at or near the Pentagon, which it has declared exempt from Freedom of Information Act disclosure.
5. Whatever way the bombing of the Pentagon was accomplished, however, and whatever else may or may not have been done by defendants to facilitate the hijackings that day, it is clear the defendant top commanders would have had and did have, at a profound minimum, enough foreknowledge, on that day and in the intelligence information they received beforehand, to have sounded a warning in time for plaintiff and others to evacuate the building, and thereby avoid much if not all the death and injury which occurred. In the end, more than half an hour passed after flight controllers first sounded the alert on Flight 77, while all concerned were fully aware of the suicide crashes in New York; plenty of time for the Pentagon to be evacuated. ‘Top gun’ jet fighter-interceptors under defendants’ command, available with time to spare, were not summoned; and the people in the building, including plaintiff and her infant, were not
warned. This was the result of unlawful conspiracy among these highest-level commanders, and others, who acted knowingly and intentionally to have the Pentagon attacked or to allow it to be attacked, without warning, with deliberate indifference to and in reckless and callous disregard for the fundamental constitutional and human rights of plaintiff and her child, and many other people, dead, injured and bereaved.
6. Plaintiff April Gallop brings this action for herself and as next friend of her son Elisha Gallop now aged 7, who was a two-month-old baby in her arms on that day, her first back from maternity leave. She was a career member of the US Army, a ranking specialist with top secret clearance, who had served six years, two-and-a-half of them in Germany, before being assigned to the Pentagon in 2000. Her desk was roughly 40 feet from the point where the plane allegedly hit the outside wall. As she sat down to work there was an explosion, then another; walls collapsed and the ceiling fell in. Hit in the head, she was able to grab the baby and make her way towards the daylight showing through a blasted opening in the outside wall. There was no airplane wreckage and no burning airplane fuel anywhere; only rubble and dust.
7. Plaintiff and her baby both suffered substantial head and brain injuries, which seriously affect them still today. Plaintiff charges that, because of the conspiracy alleged herein, she and her child and others were injured by acts of terrorism participated in by defendants. Further, as more fully described within at Pars 57-59, she and her child were and subsequently have been denied fundamental rights — including by acts of retaliation against her for raising painful questions about what occurred — as the cover-up continues.
JURISDICTION & VENUE
8. This Court has jurisdiction of this case, as follows:
a. Under the First, Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as applied to federal officials under the rule of Bivens v Six Unknown Named Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971); and 28 USC 1331;
b. Under the federal Common Law — given that the most direct occurrences and mechanisms of plaintiffs’ injuries, no doubt including crucial agreements and other communications among various defendants, took place in the Pentagon, a federal enclave — giving plaintiff a right of action in this Court for conspiracy to commit and facilitate actions likely to cause wrongful death, great bodily injury, terror and other loss to plaintiff and others to whom defendants owed a special duty of care; where, instead, defendants acted with reckless and callous disregard for and deliberate indifference to the likelihood of great harm to plaintiff and others, and deprivation of their rights;
c. Under the Terrorism Acts, 18 U.S.Code 2333(a), for acts of terrorism brought about by actions wholly outside the scope of defendants’ duties, in perversion of their authority, and beyond the bounds or color of any law; and therefore not exempt or immune under the provisions of Sec. 2337, the application of which to exonerate these defendants would be unconstitutional.
9. Venue for the case is set by the special provisions of the Air Transportation Safety Act of September, 2001, 49 U.S.C. 40101, Subsection 408(b)(3), bringing all claims arising from events of 9/11 to this honorable Court .
PARTIES
10. Plaintiff APRIL GALLOP is an American citizen, resident of the State of Virginia, a member until this year of the U.S. Army, stationed at the Pentagon on 9/11, claiming for herself and for her minor child, ELISHA GALLOP, who was just two months old on 9/11/01, and was with her when the building was hit. Plaintiff respectfully petitions the Court to appoint her as guardian ad litem for the purposes of this action and related matters.
11. Defendants are DICK CHENEY, the Vice President of the United States; DONALD RUMSFELD, formerly and at relevant times Secretary of Defense of the U.S.; Gen. RICHARD MYERS, then acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; all sued in their individual capacities. Additional named, unknown defendants are other persons who were and are co-actors and co-conspirators in sundry phases of the (terrorist) undertaking complained of herein, whose identities, and some of whose precise places or functions in the plot(s) alleged herein are not yet known or fully known, but who certainly include high-ranking members of the Defense Department, the Military, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies. Such persons are named and alleged as co-defendants, designated as John Does Nos.1-X and hereby notified of this action, pro tanto, to be identified for the record and impleaded by plaintiffs as the particulars of both culpable and innocent acts and omissions by everyone involved in these events become known.
12. Existence of a Class. Plaintiff notes that a number of other persons suffered injury and loss in the Pentagon on September 11 as she did, and are similarly situated to her, plainly within the provisions of Rule 23, F.R.Civ P., so that she represents a Class, the members of which evidently are also entitled to recover judgment as sought herein. She does not now assert the Class interest; but, where it appears there could be action by the Court affecting this question, and a class could emerge, she wishes to and does hereby reserve the right, subject to the Court’s approval, to act as lead plaintiff.
13. Limitations. There is no time bar to the claims in this action. The Statute does not run against plaintiff’s child, as a minor, under Virginia law (Va. Code Ann., §8.01-229). As to the plaintiff herself, defendants and their cohorts and agents, by means of elaborate planned and other ad hoc cover stories, public lying, alteration of records, misappropriation of official authority and other nefarious activities, have concealed and continue to conceal, fraudulently, the truth about the attacks and the way they occurred — and their own participation and complicity in the range of acts and omissions needed, in furtherance of conspiracy, to bring them about. Likewise, the original conspiracy to act secretly in furtherance of terrorism, and lie and dissemble afterwards, in order to foment war and vengeance against the supposed perpetrators, has stayed alive and continued to harm the plaintiff, as she will show.
STATEMENT OF FACTS
I. Background: Al Qaeda and the 9/11 Attack
14. As the world knows, four large commercial airliners filled with ordinary passengers were reported hijacked in the northeastern United States the morning of September 11, 2001. Two were evidently crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York, which later collapsed; a third was said to have hit the Pentagon in Washington DC, and the fourth, supposedly aiming for the White House or the Capitol, was reported crashed in Pennsylvania by its passengers, fighting back against the hijackers.
15. The alleged hijackers were quickly identified by US authorities, supposedly from passenger lists, as 19 men of Middle Eastern descent, fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian and one Lebanese. Their pictures, apparent police mug shots, were shown on TV around the world soon after the attack. It emerged that some if not all of these men were already known to police and intelligence authorities in the US and elsewhere as terrorist suspects. They were said to be associated with Al-Qaeda, a network of radical ‘Islamic’ militants, led by the renegade Saudi aristocrat Osama bin Laden, and pledged to unremitting ‘holy war’ against the United States and its people. Al Qaeda was blamed for several previous terrorist attacks, including suicide attacks in which hundreds died, in the Middle East and Africa, and against a U.S. Navy warship in the Persian Gulf. An earlier, precursor group of ‘Islamist’ terrorists, based in Brooklyn and New Jersey, carried out the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993.
16. At the time the Clinton Administration was succeeded by that of George W. Bush and defendant Dick Cheney, in January, 2001, an extensive, complex U.S. counter-terrorism effort against Al Qaeda was in progress, involving personnel and resources from a number of government agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the U.S. Military, and others, requiring coordination between these agencies at the highest levels. The Chief of Counterterrorism under President Clinton, Richard Clarke, was retained by Bush, but later strongly criticized the Bush Administration for ignoring the Al Qaeda threat, allowing the effort begun under Clinton to lapse, to the point where he felt constrained to apologize to the families of those who died, for the failure he said led directly to the devastation of September 11th. At all events, it is clear from the accounts of Clarke and others that, once Mr. Bush and Defendant Cheney were in office, the effort to combat Al Qaeda was decisively blunted at the top, and at key points down the chain of command.
17. In particular, little or no attention was paid by defendants and others responsible to an increasingly explicit series of warnings, during 2001, that Al Qaeda was hoping and planning to strike inside the US; and that there were concrete plans — which cadres in U.S. agencies were aware of, and were in fact conducting exercises to prepare for, and defeat — which included attempting to crash planes into important buildings. U.S. investigators were well aware that the man they believed was the enemy network’s chief bomb-maker for the 1993 attack on the Trade Center, Ramzi Youssef, had hoped and attempted to bring a tower down in that attack; and that this remained a goal of the group.
18. Responsible intelligence officials were aware that Al Qaeda members were operating inside the U.S., and there were a number of critical investigative leads. Two of the hijackers-to-be lived with an FBI informant in San Diego. The CIA monitored a meeting in Malaysia in 1999, after which two of the participants came to the U.S., where authorities supposedly lost track of them. There were reports from FBI field offices in Arizona and elsewhere that figures on the suspect list were taking or seeking training as pilots — including one who reportedly said he only wanted to learn how to fly an airliner, not how to land or take off — but coordination and follow-up investigation on these and other leads was blocked by John Doe defendant CIA and FBI higher-ups and key players. Notwithstanding such malfeasance, the signs and portents of an imminent attack were very strong in the summer of 2001. As the then CIA chief George Tenet testified, “The system was blinking red.”
19. Despite the flow of ominous information to various sections of the US counterterrorism apparatus, however, and the danger to innocent people — and as a result of conspiracy among defendants Cheney and Rumsfeld, and other members of the Government in various positions — the many warnings of a coming attack by Al Qaeda forces (as many as forty messages in all, according to the Commission Report, from eleven different countries) were studiously ignored.
20. That is, defendants and others in the highest circles of the Government knew more than enough beforehand about the threat and gathering danger of an imminent possible attack by Al Qaeda in the U.S. to understand that they needed to take strong, thoroughgoing measures to increase the country’s protections and alertness. Instead, led by defendants Cheney and Rumsfeld, and because defendants were callously indifferent to the rights and safety of innocents — including their own people in the Pentagon, plaintiff among them — the government did not respond. On information and belief, no special meetings of high officials and agency heads were called, to make sure protections systems were on high alert and functioning properly, and that all needed information was being shared. No special warnings were given to the Federal Aviation Administration, the Immigration Service, the Military and other affected agencies. No consultations were had about possible methods of attack, including specifics about possible hijackings, and the use of planes as missiles to hit buildings, despite operational planning and training which had already occurred at lower echelons. The FBI did not step up surveillance of suspected terrorist individuals or “cells”, or immigration checks, or let such people know they were being watched, in order to impede their activities; and it appears that no coordinated, high-level monitoring and analysis of the threats, and planning for counteraction, ever took place. Instead, the threat was dismissed, and ignored.
21. It should be noted that plaintiff cannot and does not know with certainty the outlines of the plot at its initiation. The attacks may have been conceived of as a false-flag operation from the beginning, with the defendants and their operatives as creators, planners, and executors, with the assistance of others as necessary. Or, defendants may have employed Muslim extremists to carry out suicide attacks; or they may have used Muslim extremists as dupes or patsies. The roles of the supposed “nineteen” could have been to hijack the airliners, or simply, unwittingly, to be on the planes when they were crashed into buildings by remote control. It is also possible that the defendants learned of a plot originated by Muslim extremists, and co-opted or overrode it with their own plan. Whatever lay in the minds of the defendant conspirators at the outset, it is clear that the nineteen men so quickly identified as the hijackers, some if not all of them known terrorist suspects, traveling under their own names, simply walked onto the four planes that morning, with their “box cutters”, without hindrance or incident.
II. Failure of the Air Defense System.
22. Accounts from the FAA and the National Military Command Center vary widely, suffer from internal contradictions, and are in conflict with each other; but credible reports show that FAA flight controllers were aware of a problem with the first plane as early as 8:14 or 8:15 a.m. the morning of September 11th, and evidently called the military for emergency assistance, pursuant to routine, by 8:21 a.m. or thereabouts. They learned the second plane was off course and not responding a short time later. According to reports, United Flight 11 hit the WTC North Tower at 8:46 a.m. and Flight 175 hit the South Tower at 9:03. The Pentagon was hit at or about 9:32 a.m. — although the official version says 9:38 — and the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania shortly after 10:00 a.m. High performance jet fighter planes stationed at various bases around the northeastern U.S. — tasked to intercept and deal with unidentified or straying aircraft entering or flying in U.S. airspace under NORAD district command, or otherwise at NORAD’s disposal — were available at a moment’s notice. None were notified, however, or sent to the right place, until it was too late; at least for the first three planes.
23. No interceptor planes came to stop the supposed hijackers — shoot them down if necessary — even though the Air Force has for many years maintained a practice of immediate response in which the fighters have readily been “scrambled” when aircraft are seen to go too far off course, or lose radio contact with flight controllers. The interceptor program has been an elite assignment in the Air Force, even after the Cold War ended, in which pilots fly regularly, and wait in ‘ready rooms’ near the hangars, and planes are kept in top condition, with engines warm and ready for takeoff. The best jets are used, which can reach speeds of 1600-1800 miles per hour, and the personnel are so well trained and practiced that pilots routinely go from hearing the scramble order to 29,000 feet in less than three minutes. The scramble orders are normally made by local NORAD commanders in cooperation with the FAA. Both the FAA and the affected NORAD North East Air Defense Sector (NEADS) military command have radar tracking coverage of the entire airspace, and special telephone hotlines between them and with higher authority. Nor are these forays rare, reportedly occurring once or twice a week at various U.S. locales during the past several years. Published Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records showed that, between September 1, 2000 and June 1, 2001, interceptor jets took to the air 67 times to check on “in-flight emergencies” involving wayward planes.
24. No interceptors came to defend the Pentagon, in particular, and plaintiff and the other occupants, because of actions and failures to act by defendant Rumsfeld, Defendant General Myers and John Doe others in concert with them, even though more than an hour passed between the time the first warning went out to the Military, at or about 8:21a.m., and the attack on the Pentagon at 9:32; even though the first tower was hit in a suicide crash in New York at least 46 minutes before the Pentagon was hit; and even though ‘combat air patrol’ jets from any of several bases in the region could have reached the Pentagon — or the path of Flight 77 — in a fraction of that time.
25. Having pre-arranged a coordinated failure of the Pentagon defenses, and its warning system, the defendants hid and distracted themselves, and otherwise failed to act, just at the time they were needed to ensure defense of the building; and they have dissembled ever since, as part of the conspiracy, in representing where they were and what they did during that time. As with the planes that hit the towers in New York, the Military and the 9/11 Commission, while failing to cast blame, explained away the failure to launch fighter interceptors at the Pentagon as the result of a failure by flight controllers — which FAA personnel deny — to notify the Air Force of the flight emergencies in a timely way. This was cover-up, in furtherance of the conspiracy.
26. Likewise, by the acts of one or more defendants in furtherance of the conspiracy, no defenses at the Pentagon responded either, no missile or anti-aircraft batteries opening from the ground around the building, or the roof; no sharpshooters deployed with hand-held missiles at stations close by; nothing. And, shockingly, when the towers in New York had already been hit, and Flight 77 (or a substitute, see below) was out of radio contact and headed back towards the capital; and even when the plane approached, and then doubled back and headed toward the building in a long dive, no alarm was sounded.
27. It is evident, particularly with respect to the attack on the Pentagon in which the plaintiff and her baby were injured, that, if the building was hit by a plane that morning, or if, as appears more likely, a plane flew low over the building at the time the bomb(s) went off inside and/or the missile hit, to give the (false) impression of a crash, some form of order or restriction was in force which suspended normal operation of the building’s defenses. In particular, it is indisputable that the expected response of the fighter-interceptors failed completely; and plaintiff avers this resulted from orders or authorization from within the defendant circle of Rumsfeld and Myers and their helpers, restraining normal operation of the protections system and armaments at the Pentagon — including but not limited to jets available at various bases near the capital.
28. Plaintiff alleges further that such “standdown” orders, in whatever manner or form they had been prepared or issued, were maintained and affirmed by defendants up to and through that morning, and that defendant Cheney in particular, operating in the underground command bunker (Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC) beneath the White House, personally affirmed such an order. His word kept the order in force during the period between 9:20 a.m., when he was observed in the Bunker and the moment the Pentagon was hit.
29. In this connection, plaintiff refers the Court to the testimony of then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta to the 9/11 Commission. Mineta testified that when he arrived at the White House, he was sent to the PEOC, and arrived at around 9:20 a.m., to find Cheney there, and in charge. He said he sat at a table with Cheney for the next period of time, during which a young man came in the room, three times, and informed the Vice President that an “unidentified plane” was approaching Washington, D.C., first at 50, then 30, and then 10 “miles out”; and that, when he reported the distance as 10 miles, the young man asked the vice president, “Do the orders still stand?” Secretary Mineta testified that defendant Cheney responded sharply, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?” Whereupon the young man left the room; and a few minutes later, the hit on the Pentagon was announced. This testimony by the Secretary has never been contested, discredited or explained away by any U.S. official.
30. Plaintiff alleges that the “orders” were orders not to intercept or shoot down the approaching plane. If the orders had been to attack the approaching plane, it would have been shot down before it reached the Pentagon — or at least some attempt to stop it would have been made; and the world would know of it. Based on some two hundred years of American military history, the failure would have led to a Board of Inquiry or other public official investigation, to determine how and why the defense apparatus had failed. Individuals would have been called to account, and disciplinary procedures followed resulting in findings of responsibility and demotions or formal charges against those found to have failed the Country. All of these bureaucratic events would have become part of the official record, and known to the public; none of which has happened. There has been no publicly recorded disciplinary action against any military or civilian officer of the United States government as a result of the attacks of September 11th. Such proceedings would have created a great risk that the truth would be exposed.
31. The public record also shows that no meaningful follow-up questioning of Sec. Mineta occurred before the 9/11 Commission; that defendant Cheney has never testified under oath or been reasonably questioned about these events; and that he has given contradictory accounts, one of which—the account he gave to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” five days after 9/11— conflicts with The 9/11 Commission Report. The 9/11 Commission Report adopts an unsworn statement by Cheney that he never reached the bunker until about 10:00 a.m.; and contains no reference to Mineta’s testimony, ignoring completely this contradiction between the two high government officials. The Commission also ignores the fact that Richard Clarke’s book “Against All Enemies” supports Mineta’s testimony and hence contradicts the 9/11 Commission’s account.
32. Plaintiff charges that, in point of fact, the “orders” referred to were orders not to shoot the plane down, but to let it proceed, and that such orders were given and/or approved by defendants Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Myers, pursuant to the root conspiracy alleged herein, and transmitted down a chain of command. The normal expected operation of Pentagon defense that day was thus prevented, allowing the attack to succeed, or to “succeed” in creating a false and deceptive scenario of a plane crash.
III. The Attack on the Pentagon.
photo courtesy of Melies Kish,