The following is taken from the book."9-11 Synthetic Terror: Made In USA" by Webster Tarpley (link to download on the tracker)

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Military exercises come in two varieties – there are the field exercises or livefly exercises, war games in which real tanks or real planes move around in the fields or the sky. There are also staff exercises, which mainly involve officers
assigned to the headquarters, who move markers in a sandbox, map grid, or computer screen.
The classic use of war games has been to prepare a sneak attack. The aggressor army announces that it is holding its summer maneuvers near the border of the target state. The deployment takes place under the cover of press
releases announcing that these are merely maneuvers. When the troops are in position, they receive an order for a real attack.
If field exercises can be used for fooling the adversary, then staff exercises are more useful for deceiving ones
own side. In December 1975, in the wake of the US defeat in Vietnam, when the Pentagon was smarting from the reverse and looking for ways to redress the balance, there were certain circles in NATO who considered using the staff
exercise HILEX 75 to set up a confrontation with the Warsaw Pact in Europe. Staff officers of countries who were not party to that plan were told not to be alarmed by the war preparations they saw; after all, those were only part of a staff exercise. Fortunately, due to the efforts of a network of alert citizens in a number of NATO countries, word got out about the really explosive potential of HILEX
75, and the confrontation option was abandoned. But these are at least two models of how maneuvers can be used for deception that we should keep in mind; there are more.

Staff exercises or command exercises are perfect for a rogue network which is forced to conduct its operations using the same communications and computer systems used by other officers who are not necessarily party to the illegal operation, coup or provocation as it may be.


A putschist officer may be working at a console next to another officer who is not in on the coup, and who might
indeed oppose it if he knew about it. The putschist’s behavior is suspicious: what the hell is he doing? The loyal officer looks over and asks the putschist about it. The putschist cites a staff maneuver for which he is preparing. The loyal officer concludes that the putschist’s activities are part of an officially sanctioned drill, and his suspicions are allayed. The putschist may even explain that participation
in the staff exercise requires a special security clearance which the loyal officer does not have. The conversation ends, and the putschist can go on with his treasonous work.

Most civilians would assume that a military exercise or drill, be it a field or live fly exercise, or a staff drill, would tend to enhance the readiness of the military units taking part. This was the view expressed by 9/11 widow Mindy Kleinberg to the 9/11 commission in March 2003, when she remarked that: “…on September 11, NEADS (the North East Air Defense System of NORAD) was several days into a semiannual exercise known as ‘Vigilant Guardian.’ This meant that our North East Air Defense System was fully staffed. In short, key officers were manning the operation battle center, ‘fighter jets were cocked, loaded, and carrying extra gas on board.’” (Testimony to 9/11 commission, March 31, 2003) But in reality the maneuvers may have introduced confusion and scattered available resources. The drills included false radar blips, military aircraft pretending to be hijacked, and the transfer of many NORAD fighters to northern Canada and Alaska.

AMALGAM VIRGO: COVER STORY FOR 9/11

The military exercise called Amalgam Virgo bore a close relationship to the events of 9/11. Amalgam Virgo was a military drill that had to do with hijacked airliners, sometimes from inside the United States, and sometimes used as weapons. A cruise missile was included at least once. The best working hypothesis is that Amalgam Virgo was the cover story under which the 9/11 attacks advanced through the bureaucracy. Preparations for carrying out 9/11 were conducted under the cover of being preparations for Amalgam Virgo. Most of those who took part in Amalgam Virgo could hardly have been aware of this duplicity.

One of the military officers who had been responsible for organizing Amalgam Virgo ‘01 was Colonel Alan Scott. Scott testified on May 23, 2003 at the 9/11 commission hearings:
...MR. ALAN SCOTT: Yes, sir. Specifically Operation Amalgam
Virgo, which I was involved in before I retired, was a scenario using a Third World united – not united – uninhabited aerial vehicle launched off a rogue freighter in the Gulf of Mexico.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: That was Operation Amalgam Virgo. In fact, this exercise – in this exercise we used actual drones – NQM-107 drones, which are about the size of a cruise missile, to exercise our fighters and our radars in a Gulf of Mexico scenario….
MR. BEN-VENISTE: You are referring to Amalgam 01, are you not?
MR. SCOTT: Yes, sir, Amalgam 01.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: I am referring to Amalgam 02, which was in the planning stages prior to September 11th, 2001, sir. Is that correct?
MR. SCOTT: That was after I retired, and I was not involved in 02.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Will you accept that the exercise involved a simultaneous hijacking scenario?
MR. SCOTT: I was not involved in 02.
GEN. MCKINLEY: Sir, I do have some information on 02, if you would allow me to read it for the record.
MR. BEN-VENISTE:Please.
GEN. MCKINLEY: [Reads from briefing book.] Amalgam Virgo in general, 02, was an exercise created to focus on peacetime and contingency NORAD missions. One of the peacetime scenarios that is and has been a NORAD mission for years is support to other government departments. Within this mission falls hijackings. Creativity of the designer aside, prior motivations were based on
political objectives – i.e., asylum or release of captured prisoners or political figures. Threats of killing hostages or crashing were left to the script writers to invoke creativity and broaden the required response of the players.

What this means is that the scenario papers prepared for the officers participating in the drill by collaborating writers included crashing planes into targets; these papers were evidently an integral part of the drill. McKinley is explicitly acknowledging that the drills did indeed include the concept of hijacked aircraft being used as weapons. Ben-Veniste, feigning not to understand this, thought McKinley’s answer was “fatuous,” and added ironically “It wasn’t in the minds of script writers when the Algerians had actually hijacked the plane, when they were attempting to fly into the Eiffel Tower….Don’t you agree we could have been better prepared?” But Amalgam Virgo was not fatuous, it was sinister. Here was an exercise which included many of the elements which were put into practice on 9/11.

Amalgam Virgo thus provided the witting putschists with a perfect cover for conduiting the actual live fly components of 9/11 through a largely non-witting military bureaucracy. Under the cover of this confusion, the most palpably subversive actions could be made to appear in the harmless and even beneficial guise of a drill. In addition, a red herring was built in for the purpose of confusing investigators arriving after the fact: the hijacked planes involved were generally imagined as coming from abroad. But even that covering detail was dubious.

These exercises came up again in the April 2004 hearings of the 9/11 commission. In her much-touted appearance, NSC director Condoleezza Rice repeated her well-known and discredited contention that the White House had not
contemplated hijacked airliners being used as weapons. Bush himself had chimed in, asserting that “Nobody in our government, at least, and I don’t think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.”

As the hearings showed, during the two years before the 9/11 attacks, NORAD conducted exercises using hijacked airliners as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. Another scenario involved crashing an airliner into the Pentagon, but this was not conducted after the Defense Department objected that it was too unrealistic. But it was done as a staff exercise – one might say, as a rehearsal. Perhaps it was too realistic, too revealing.

One drill, planned for July 2001 but not conducted until later, involved planes from airports in Utah and Washington which were hijacked for the purposes of the drill. These aircraft were then escorted by US and Canadian interceptors to airfields in British Columbia and Alaska. A NORAD statement issued in April 2004 confirmed that “Numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft. These exercises test and track detention and identification; scramble and interception; hijack procedures; internal and external agency coordination and operational security and communications security procedures.” According to NORAD, these were regional drills, not regularly scheduled continent-wide drills. (USA Today, April 18, 2004)

Not surprisingly, there is absolutely no mention of Amalgam Virgo in the report of the 9/11 commission. Mike Ruppert has contributed much on the causes of the “complete paralysis of fighter response on 9/11…” Ruppert wrote in June 2004 that he had “obtained an on-the-record statement from someone in NORAD, which confirmed that on the day of 9/11 the Joint Chiefs (Myers) and NORAD were conducting a joint, live-fly, hijack Field Training Exercise (FTX) which involved at least one (and almost certainly many more) aircraft under US control that was posing as a hijacked airliner.” Ruppert also concluded that “There never was a stand down order issued. That would have been way too incriminating and risky a piece of
evidence.” (From the Wilderness, June 6, 2004)

The exercises that were conducted on 9/11 were these:
1. Vigilant Guardian
From what is known about Vigilant Guardian, it is clear that it closely mimicked the actual events of 9/11. Vigilant Guardian was thus the source of much confusion among the non-witting NORAD personnel. As we will see, NORAD personnel were bewildered as to whether the reports they were getting represented fictitious events within the exercise, or whether they were dealing with a real emergency. (Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 3, 2002)

This was a joint US-Canada exercise, and was designed to test the coordination of the two defense establishments. According to GlobalSecurity.org: “The VIGILANT GUARDIAN (VG) is a VIGILANT OVERVIEW Command Post Exercise (CPX) conducted in conjunction with USCINCSTRAT-sponsored GLOBAL GUARDIAN and USCINCSPACE-sponsored APOLLO GUARDIAN exercises. The exercise involves all HQ NORAD levels of command and is designed to exercise most aspects of the NORAD mission. One VG is scheduled each year and the length will vary depending on the exercise scenario and
objectives.” (www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/vigilant-guardian.htm)

According to another source, “The planning for Vigilant Guardian Exercise-2001 probably began in 2000; and it was responding to a growing uneasiness of the US government and intelligence reports, world-wide – including NORAD – about plans for terrorist seizure of commercial air planes to be used as missiles against American targets.” (www.911teachin.net/L5A.html) The 9/11 commission had this to say about Vigilant Guardian: “On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union.” This is a very narrow definition of the drill in question, and is probably intended to mislead. The 9/11 commission continues: “We investigated whether military preparedness for the large-scale exercise compromised the military’s response to the real-world terrorist attack on 9/11. According to General Eberhart, ‘it took about 30 seconds to make the adjustment to the real-world situation.’ (Ralph Eberhart testimony, June 17, 2004).

We found that the response was, if anything, expedited by the increased number of staff at the sectors and at NORAD because of the scheduled exercise. See Robert Marr interview (Jan. 23, 2004)” (911 commission 458 n. 116) Eberhart’s braggadocio was transparent, and the commission’s verdict was a lie. Here is one example of the profound confusion engendered by the simultaneous occurrence of drill and real emergency:

FAA: Hi. Boston Center TMU [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.
NEADS: [Staff Sergeant Jeremy Powell, Air National Guard] Is this real-world or exercise?
FAA: No, this is not an exercise, not a test. (9/11 lcommission report 20)

Here is the same scene of confusion as described from the standpoint of another participant:
On Sept. 11, as Americans watched horror rain upon New York and Washington, command teams at a little-known military outpost in Rome, N.Y., worked feverishly to restore safe skies and rouse a slumbering homeland defense. At the Northeast Air Defense Sector, radar operators who constantly scan the continent’s boundaries suddenly faced a threat from within and a race they could not win. Four months after the terrorist attacks, there are still untold stories. This is one.

6 A.M.: WAR GAMES
Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins figured it would be a long day. Sept. 11 was Day II of “Vigilant Guardian,” an exercise that would pose an imaginary crisis to North American Air Defense outposts nationwide. The simulation would run all week, and Deskins, starting her 12-hour shift in the Operations Center as the NORAD unit’s airborne control and warning officer, might find herself on the spot. Day I of the simulation had moved slowly. She hoped the exercise gathered steam. It made a long day go faster.

8:40 A.M.: REAL WORLD
In the Ops Center, three rows of radar scopes face a high wall of wide-screen monitors. Supervisors pace behind technicians who peer at the instruments. Here it is always quiet, always dark, except for the green radar glow.

At 8:40, Deskins noticed senior technician Jeremy Powell waving his hand. Boston Center was on the line, he said. It had a hijacked airplane.
“It must be part of the exercise,” Deskins thought.
At first, everybody did. Then Deskins saw the glowing direct phone line to the Federal Aviation Administration.
On the phone she heard the voice of a military liaison for the FAA’s Boston Center.
“I have a hijacked aircraft,” he told her.
Three minutes later, the drill was still a factor of confusion for Lt. Deskins in the form of a simulated hijacked plane heading for JFK Airport in New York City:
Deskins ran to a nearby office and phoned 1st Air Force Chief Public Affairs Officer Major Don Arias in Florida. She said NEADS had a hijacked plane no, not the simulation likely heading for JFK. “The entire floor sensed something wrong,” Chief of Operations Control Lt. Col. Ian Sanderson said. “The way this unfolded, everybody had a gut sense this wasn’t right.” (“Amid Crisis Simulation, ‘We Were Suddenly No-Kidding Under Attack,”’ Newhouse News Service, January 25, 2002)

It is not clear from this account whether the “simulation” in question was an artificial radar blip inserted on the NEADS screens, or an actual aircraft (piloted or remote controlled) going towards the New York airport.

2. Vigilant Warrior
This drill was identified by Richard Clarke in his recently published memoir. Here is what he writes:


3. Northern Vigilance
Operation Northern Vigilance involved deploying fighter interceptors to air bases in northern Canada and Alaska. Northern Vigilance was supposedly mounted by NORAD to counter a Russian maneuver going on at the same time. It could have been planned in advance, provided the timing of the Russian drill had also been known in advance. It was announced publicly in a NORAD press release of September 9, 2001 under the headline “NORAD Maintains Northern Vigilance.” Here we read:


The net effect of Northern Vigilance was drastically to reduce the number of fighter interceptors available at airports in the lower 48 states of the continental US. It is not known exactly how many planes moved north.

4. Northern Guardian
This drill is the least documented. It may have involved a complement to Northern Vigilance; one group of planes might have played the attackers, while another group played the defenders. A reference to this drill was found in the Toronto Star, December 9, 2001. At the very minimum, the drill was apparently centered on northern Canada and Alaska, which would also have siphoned off planes from the lower 48 states.

5. National Reconnaissance Office Drill
This drill simulated an airplane crashing into the headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Chantilly, Virginia, near Dulles Airport. It meant that the employees of the NRO were evacuated from their buildings just as the 9/11 attacks were actually taking place. The AP ran a story about this drill under the headline “Top US Intelligence Agency was to simulate plane crash into government building on September 11, 2001.” The story stated that “a US intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.” (AP, August 21, 2002)

The NRO was a super-secret agency responsible for spy satellites and other eavesdropping from space. It was created in 1960, and its existence was not officially acknowledged for some 32 years. The NRO draws its personnel from the military and the Central Intelligence Agency and has a budget equal to the combined budgets of both the CIA and the National Security Agency. On 11 September 2001, the NRO director was Keith R. Hall, who had headed the agency since 1996. In his capacity as DNRO, Hall was responsible for the acquisition and operation of all United States space-based reconnaissance and intelligence systems.

At the same time Hall also served as Assistant Secretary of
the Air Force for Space. As Nico Haupt has pointed out, Booz Allen Hamilton is a prominent subcontractor for the NRO. The obvious effect of evacuating the NRO was at least temporarily to blind institutional US intelligence to events which could have been monitored from space. NRO could have provided a realtime view of the air space over North America; as a result of the evacuation, this may not have been available. The advantages for the perpetrators are obvious.

5. Tripod II
Tripod II was a biological warfare exercise conducted jointly by the US Department of Justice and the City of New York; it was scheduled for September 12, 2001, and formally speaking never took place. Its obvious relevance was to provide a cover for various pre-9/11 activities in New York City. It would seem that the code name “Tripod II” was revealed for the first time in testimony by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the 9/11 commission; however, the basic facts about this exercise had been described by Giuliani in his self-serving memoir, Leadership, published in 2002. Here the former Mayor wrote:


After Giuliani’s unusable command center in WTC 7 had been destroyed by the inexplicable collapse of that large building, he transferred his command post to Pier 92. The ease of the transition is suspicious in and of itself: had Giuliani known in advance that he would need this fallback option?

6. Finally, a number of jets from the Washington DC area were on an informal training flight over North Carolina on 9/11, a circumstance that took them away from the national capital airspace.

Vigilant Guardian in particular compels our attention because it appears to have been transformed from a staff or command post exercise to a live fly exercise. Specifically, VG had all the earmarks of an anti-terrorism live fly exercise. According to research by Mike Ruppert presented at the Toronto 9/11 Inquiry, Vigilant Guardian included the use of military aircraft to simulate hijacked commercial airliners.

In his book, Richard Clarke recalls being told by an official on the morning of 9/11, “we have reports of eleven aircraft off course or out of communication, maybe hijacked.” Clarke said he repeated this number, “Eleven.” (Clarke 4) This figure of eleven has come to be seen as the canonical maximum of the aircraft reported hijacked for whatever reason at the height of the emergency. Because of the post-Cold War defense build-down initiated by Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense under Bush 41, the air defenses of the US had been drastically denuded.

Ruppert estimates that, on 9/11, there were just 8 fighter jets at the ready in the northeast US. Since these jets generally fly in pairs, this meant that there were four pairs of aircraft ready to be scrambled to intercept four aircraft. Therefore, there were at least 11 possible targets as compared to a total of four defensive asset packages available to cover them.

According to Ruppert, leaks of classified information suggest that the number of airliners reported or feared hijacked had at one point risen to 21. Some of the extra hijacks were represented by false blips made to appear on FAA and NORAD radar screens as part of the exercises that have been discussed. Other hijacks would have been accounted for by the actual military aircraft which were playing the roles of hijacked aircraft in the drills. Blips and dummy hijacks combined to create an insuperable confusion. This would have made the predicament of any loyal air defense commanders even more difficult. Keeping this in perspective, however, the real damage on 9/11 had nothing to do with airplanes, as we shall see: the crashes were mere window dressing for the destruction by explosives of not two, but ultimately all seven buildings in the New York World Trade Center.

Who in the Pentagon coordinates military maneuvers, be they of the command post or live fly variety? There must be some focal point where alternative dates are weighed, and conflicts foreseen, and minimum defense capabilities calculated. Whatever office in the bowels of the Pentagon does this, it is an urgent candidate for being swept for the presence of moles. However, even these insights do not by any means explain the failure to deploy fighter interceptors on 9/11. Any military commander would have realized that all available assets had to be scrambled, at the latest by the point at which the second WTC tower was hit. In particular, any military commander would have been alert to the imminent threat of the decapitation of the national command structure centered in Washington.

All the commanders running the show had been schooled in the Cold War, when a Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile detonating over Washington was regarded as the most plausible overture for the third world war. The eight lanes of superhighway leading from Washington DC to Dulles Airport are monuments to the all-encompassing concern of the US federal bureaucracy for its center in Washington. The autonomic reaction of the military establishment would normally have been to place at least one pair of jets over Washington, whatever else was done or not done. The fact that even this was not done until well after the Pentagon had been hit indicates a remarkable density of moles at high levels of the US command structures.
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I also recommend Sander Hicks' interview here http://"Con" spiracycentral.net:6969/stats.ht...36af21c36af0948