9/11 Planes Part II: 33 Anomalies

This post is a sequel to my “Debunking Myself” post, in which I explain why—based upon accumulated evidence—I abandoned the “no planes” theory of 9/11 and rescinded a theory I had proposed. (A significant number of revisions have since been made to that post.)

However, many anomalies remain concerning 9/11. Although the fiercest controversy continues to swirl about the manner in which the Twin Towers were destroyed, this article will continue to confine focus on the planes and related phenomena. For that reason, this post should be considered a continuation of the previous one. While I do believe that planes were indeed used on 9/11, and that there were flights numbered American 11, United 175, American 77, and United 93, we’ll now proceed to review anomalies that persist with these flights.

My intention here is to present facts as an attorney would in a courtroom. I wish to avoid speculation as much as possible, but where an aberration in the official story occurs, I will sometimes suggest a possible explanation.

Before proceeding, I wish to acknowledge some of the 9/11 researchers who, among many, have helped me over the years:

• With his permission, I can finally reveal the real name of loopDloop, widely acknowledged as the best analyst on the now defunct—but partially resurrected—Let’s Roll forum. His name is Simon Miles; he is from the UK, and he has a website at https://simonmmiles.com/. While the site is devoted primarily to other topics, you can find his 9/11 work by clicking on “Research,” then “Reserved.”

• Davide Cole is a real treasure, a researcher who has probably obtained more 9/11-related FOIA-requested documents than anyone in the world. Although he has preferred to remain in the background, he has been the backbone of many prominent 9/11 writers. He pushes no agenda and has always been objective in any discussion I’ve had with him.

•  Art Olivier worked in the aerospace industry from 1979 to 2000, with McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. He oversaw the design and construction of all of the C-17 structural test facilities and some of the ones for the MD-11. He is the writer-producer of the 9/11 film Operation Terror, and was able to spot some mistakes in my last 9/11 article, which I amended as a result.

• Mark Conlon, who has specialized in 9/11 planes research.

• DJ Thermal Detonator (Nelson Martins), who can be found here and here, and whose work often delves into areas that other 9/11 Truthers have neglected.

• And there have been many others. Now let’s get to those anomalies.

(1) A Matter of Logic. It is still accepted by me—and broadly throughout the 9/11 movement—that the Twin Towers were destroyed by demolition, regardless of the theory ascribed to—nano-thermite, nuclear devices, Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs), or more conventional explosives.

But to demolish the Twin Towers, successful plane hits had to be guaranteed up front. If Flight 175, the second plane, had only clipped the South Tower with a wing, and crashed elsewhere in the city, the tower’s demolition would have had to be called off.

The same holds true for the first plane, “Flight 11.” If this plane had missed, not only would the North Tower’s destruction have been cancelled, but no cameras would have been focused on the Twin Towers, enabling them to capture the iconic pictures of the second plane hit, which became so embedded in worldwide consciousness.

I do not accept that 9/11’s masterminds would have gambled that Marwan al-Shehhi (alleged hijacker pilot of Flight 175) Mohamed Atta (alleged hijacker pilot of Flight 11—a cocaine-snorting psychopath) and Hani Hanjour (alleged hijacker pilot of Flight 77—by virtually all accounts, a bad pilot) would hit their targets in the way it happened, pulling off feats that experienced Boeing pilots have said they could not have achieved.

(2) Focusing on the Hijacker Pilots. Hani Hanjour was the alleged pilot of Flight 77, said to have hit the Pentagon, The New York Times profiled him as follows:

Mr. Hanjour, who investigators contend piloted the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon, was reported to the [Federal] aviation agency in February 2001 after instructors at his flight school in Phoenix had found his piloting skills so shoddy and his grasp of English so inadequate that they questioned whether his pilot’s license was genuine. . . .

Staff members characterized Mr. Hanjour as polite, meek and very quiet. But most of all, the former employee said, they considered him a very bad pilot. “I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon,” the former employee said. “He could not fly at all.”¹

Newsday reported on September 23, 2001:

At Freeway Airport in Bowie, Md., 20 miles west of Washington, flight instructor Sheri Baxter instantly recognized the name of alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour when the FBI released a list of 19 suspects in the four hijackings. Hanjour, the only suspect on Flight 77 the FBI listed as a pilot, had come to the airport one month earlier seeking to rent a small plane.

However, when Baxter and fellow instructor Ben Conner took the slender, soft-spoken Hanjour on three test runs during the second week of August, they found he had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172. Even though Hanjour showed a federal pilot’s license and a log book cataloging 600 hours of flying experience, chief flight instructor Marcel Bernard declined to rent him a plane without more lessons.²

If Hanjour had trouble controlling a Cessna, with cruising speeds a little over 100 mph, how was he able to fly a Boeing 757, executing a perfect strike on the first floor of the Pentagon at approximately 530 mph?

Mohamed Atta, who supposedly flew Flight 11 into the first tower, was a drug-addicted psychotic. He regularly boozed it up and snorted cocaine.³ When a girl he was dating broke up with him in Florida, he went to her place, and chopped her cat and its kittens into little pieces.⁴ Was anyone going to trust this guy to execute a James Bond-level mission?

The pilot of the second plane to hit the Towers, Marwan al-Shehhi, was officially flying at well over 500 mph. You can fly at 500 at 30,000 feet, but at ground level, the air is three times thicker. I’m not saying a jetliner can’t surpass 500 at ground, especially after coming out of a steep dive, but the plane would be extremely difficult to control, its engines under enormous strain. On top of that, a loud distracting alarm would have been going off in the cockpit because the pilot had exceeded the plane’s speed limits. (You can hear the alarm here; it would have been even louder in the cockpit.)  Passengers would have been screaming. The cockpit was presumably splattered with blood from the pilots whose throats had been cut. Yet—and you can see this in the footage—a couple of seconds before impact and his own death, al-Shehhi had the presence of mind to make a finessed adjustment, tipping the left wing to ensure the plane fully entered the building.  (Perhaps best seen starting at 1:44 of the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YLm3pkAiJQ.)

Here are comments from Captain Russ Wittenberg, a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot with over 100 combat missions. A retired commercial pilot, he flew for Pan Am and United Airlines for 35 years, with over 30,000 total hours flown:

I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11; the Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that’s alleged to have hit the South Tower. I don’t believe it’s possible for, like I said, for a terrorist, a so-called terrorist, to train on a [Cessna] 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding its design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns, exceeding—pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G’s. The aircraft would literally fall out of the sky. I couldn’t do it, and I’m absolutely positive they couldn’t do it.⁵

Next, here is a fascinating interview with Dan Govatos, who was chief pilot for Meridian Airlines. The day after 9/11, all flights were grounded. Since his pilots had nothing to do, Govatos put about ten of them on a Boeing simulator and asked them to try hitting the Twin Towers. None of them could do it unless they slowed down almost to landing speed (about 180 mph, about one-third of al-Shehhi’s speed), even though each of the pilots had thousands of hours of experience flying Boeings. Joining Govatos in the interview is Ron Balsamo of Pilots for 9/11 Truth. A nine-minute interview, but well worth a listen:

(3) Tail and Serial Numbers. Every commercial airliner is given a unique identifier called a “tail number”—just as every automobile has a unique license plate number. On 9/11 the alleged tail numbers were:

American Airlines Flight 11 – N334AA
United Airlines Flight 175 – N612UA
American Airlines Flight 77 – N644AA
United Airlines Flight 93 – N591UA

Let’s be clear—flight numbers and tail numbers are not the same thing. Sure, we have recordings of aircraft controllers speaking with the cockpits of the 9/11 flights. However, any aircraft can identify itself as “Flight 11.”

Why am I raising this as an issue? As George Nelson, Colonel, USAF (ret.) wrote:

In 1989 I graduated from the Aircraft Mishap Investigation Course at the Institute of Safety and Systems Management at the University of Southern California. In addition to my direct participation as an aircraft accident investigator, I reviewed countless aircraft accident investigation reports for thoroughness and comprehensive conclusions for the Inspector General, HQ Pacific Air Forces during the height of the Vietnam conflict.

In all my years of direct and indirect participation, I never witnessed nor even learned of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft—and in most cases, even determining the precise cause of the accident. This is because every military and civilian passenger-carrying aircraft have many parts that are identified for safety of flight. . . . [T]hese parts are individually controlled by a distinctive serial number and tracked by a records section of the maintenance operation and by another section called plans and scheduling. . . .The government alleges that four wide-body airliners crashed on the morning of September 11 2001, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 human beings, yet not one piece of hard aircraft evidence has been produced in an attempt to positively identify any of the four aircraft.⁶

I asked Microsoft Copilot (AI): “How many parts with serial numbers would a Boeing 757 or 767 have?” After breaking down the analysis into different categories, it replied:

Total ballpark estimate: 20,000 to 50,000 parts with serial numbers, depending on configuration, airline customization, and whether subcomponents are individually tracked.

That means between 80,000 and 200,000 parts for all four crashes. Even allowing for a lot of loss due to fragmentation, there should have been enough recovered parts to make identifying the planes easy. Yet the government failed to match a single aircraft part, by serial number, to any of the 9/11 planes by tail number.,

(4) Transponder Records. There are other discrepancies that suggest the 9/11 planes may not have been the aircraft claimed. As is fairly well known, all of the allegedly hijacked aircraft on 9/11 turned off their transponders (with the exception of 175’s, which was turned on and off with new numbers). Depending on their quality, transponders provide air traffic controllers (ATC) with essential information, such as location, velocity, altitude, and aircraft ID. Without the transponder on, ATC can only follow an aircraft as a radar blip. This data, like tail numbers, would enable us to identify the planes before they were hijacked.   Unfortunately, since 9/11, the U.S. government has suppressed all of the original Mode S transponder data from that day—preventing any of the hijacked aircraft from being positively identified.  I confirmed this with Microsoft Copilot, which stated:

No, the U.S. government has not publicly released the full Mode S transponder data from the four 9/11 aircraft prior to the hijackings and transponder shutdowns. . . . Mode S transponder data could offer granular insight into aircraft behavior before and during the hijackings—such as heading changes, altitude shifts, and system status. Its absence from public records has fueled ongoing interest among aviation analysts and independent researchers.

(5) Departure Times. There are also major discrepancies in flight departure times. According to the official story, United Flight 175 left the Logan runway at 8:09 AM, and United 93 departed the Newark runway at 8:42 (you can easily check these times yourself).

However, runway departure times are automatically recorded electronically and kept by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). Go to their database at https://www.transtats.bts.gov/ONTIME/Departures.aspx. You can look up any date, for any airline at any airport, going back to 1987. Type in the data, and you will see that UAL 175, tail number N612UA, departed Logan on 9/11 at 8:23, 14 minutes later than the official time. And as researcher Mark Conlon has pointed out, this departure time was corroborated by the pilots of US Airways 6805, which was directly behind 175 on the runway.

What about United 93, which officially left Newark at 8:42 AM?  Go to the same BTS site, and you’ll see that 93, tail number N591UA, had a “wheels off” time of 8:28, fourteen minutes earlier than claimed.

You might be wondering about the two American flights, 11 and 77. What does the BTS database say about them? It says nothing. Both flights have been completely scrubbed. You can find all the details about American 11 departing Logan on September 10, 2001, but nothing about September 11. I doubt that this was done out of “respect for the dead”—if that was the case, United should have done it for their flights as well.

(6) Logan Departure Gate.  However, there is still airport data suggesting that there were two Flight 11s. Officially, it left from Gate 32 of Logan Airport’s Terminal B. But several mainstream sources reported it was Gate 26, including the Boston Globe, which related on September 12, 2001:

The American flight left from Gate 26 in Terminal B, and the United flight from Gate 19 in Terminal C. One airport employee said nothing unusual was apparent when the American flight left.⁷

On the first anniversary of 9/11, the Globe hadn’t changed its view:

Sylvio Amorino, just off a flight yesterday morning, simply stood there in front of Gate 26, Terminal B, Logan Airport. It was 7:55 a.m. The 70-year-old realized that, one year ago, American Airlines Flight 11 had idled here.⁸

Was the Globe simply mistaken about Gate 26?

(7) Dulles Gate. There is also discrepancy concerning American Flight 77’s departure gate. The plane’s Flight Data Recorder (FDR) was allegedly recovered at the Pentagon. The government has refused to reveal its serial number.  The FDR, even when corrected for slight positional errors, still showed the plane leaving from the wrong gate, according to this discussion at Pilots for 9/11 Truth.

(8) ACARS stands for “Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System.” It’s a system that allows planes to send and receive short text messages with ground stations and airline operations centers. It’s similar to texting.

I asked Microsoft Pilot’s AI system: “Can an aircraft continue receiving ACARS messages after the plane has been destroyed?”

It responded:

No, once an aircraft is destroyed, it cannot continue receiving ACARS messages. ACARS relies on functioning onboard systems—including power, antennas, and avionics—to receive and process messages. If those systems are damaged or destroyed, communication ceases immediately.

Why is this a problem? Because United 175 and United 93 continued receiving ACARS messages well after their purported complete destruction. According to Ed Ballinger, who was in charge of sending ACARS messages for United flights on 9/11, Flight 175 continued receiving ACARS messages after its alleged crash at 9:03 AM. Aircraft normally receive ACARS messages from the nearest ground station—in 175’s case, it was receiving them from stations in Pennsylvania, well beyond New York. It received its final massage at 9:51 AM—a technical impossibility. Flight 93, continued receiving ACARS messages from ground stations in Ohio, then Indiana, then Illinois, some 500 miles from Shanksville. The last message was 7 minutes after the plane had crashed or allegedly crashed.

Incidentally, in case you’re thinking, “Perhaps these ACARS messages were sent, just not received,” a message that is not received is returned as “failed,” just like a bounced email.

For further discussion of the ACARs anomalies, see “ACARS Confirmed—9/11 Aircraft Airborne Long After Crash,” at
https://pf911t.org/ACARS-CONFIRMED-911-AIRCRAFT-AIRBORNE-LONG-AFTER-CRASH.html and “911acars” at https://911acars.blogspot.com/.

(9) 77 over Missouri. According to the official story, Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, disappeared from radar completely for 8 minutes after turning off its transponder while heading west over Kentucky. Radar picked it up again heading east over West Virginia, and radar records do follow a plane from that point to the Pentagon.

However, an FOIA request made to the FAA has revealed that 77 was tracked by radar on 9/11, and did not turn around but continued west over Missouri:

A shoutout to 9/11 researcher Mark Conlon for publicizing this on his substack.  Conlon also discovered that the Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center was discussing AA77 being airborne at 10:41 AM:

Conlon also confirmed that, three minutes earlier, air traffic controllers at he Indianapolis Air Traffic Control Center had placed AA 77 as being over Kansas City:

Something else on 77. Linda Povinelli, whose name has been virtually scrubbed from the Internet, was an Indianapolis flight controller involved with the disappearance of 77 off radar.

In the official clip of her being interviewed for the 9/11 Commission, she said she heard a report from West Virginia of a very low-flying jetliner on the morning of 9/11—near the treetops (below radar range). Could this plane have been substituted for the original 77, and tracked by radar all the way to the Pentagon?

(10) Flight 11 Still Airborne?  It is fairly well-known that Flight 11 was reported to still be airborne after it had allegedly crashed into the North Tower, and was heading south over the Atlantic toward Washington. The 9/11 Commission stated they didn’t know where this report originated from. Some people thought it might have been a fake blip put on radar screens by a company such as Ptech, in order to distract fighters launched from Langley Air Force Base out over the Atlantic, so that the Pentagon would be left unprotected. However, Mark Conlon assembled a good deal of the official recorded communications (with captions) concerning Flight 11 remaining airborne:

(11) Deregistration.  Early research in the 9/11 movement widely documented that United Airlines failed to deregister the tail numbers given to flights 93 and 175 for about four years. Unfortunately, this now seems impossible to officially reconfirm without filing an FOIA request. However, here are images corroborating it from an email I received from Jim Fetzer:

The foregoing information:
• The failure to standardly match even a single aircraft part by serial number to any of the 9/11 planes;
• The government’s suppression of all transponder data by which the hijacked aircraft could have been identified;
• The significant discrepancies concerning the departure times for both United flights;
• The discrepancies concerning the departure gates for both American Airlines flights:
• The continued reception of ACARS messages by United 175 and 93 after their crashes—a physical impossibility;
• The radar records and air traffic communications that put Flight 77 continuing west and not back toward Washington;
• The communications that Flight 11 remained airborne and that another aircraft struck the North Tower;
• The failure of United Airlines to deregister the tail numbers claimed to be Flights 175 and 93.

All this suggests that each 9/11 plane—the ones with the original tail numbers—had a duplicate plane that actually crashed. (This had been a hallmark of the Pentagon’s Operation Northwoods plan, which President Kennedy rejected.)   There is no question that radar records exist that track four planes to the crash sites—the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Shanksville. But were these the same planes—as identified by tail numbers—that the government claimed?

(12) Lewin. Staying right now with flight 11, I’m going to repeat some information from my “Debunking Myself” article concerning Danny Lewin. Feel free to skip over this if you’ve already read it. Lewin, said to be “first victim” of 9/11, was an Israeli passenger on Flight 11 (the first of the hijacked planes). He was a former captain in the IDF who had served in the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s elite special ops. Lewin could bench-press 315 pounds and “was trained to kill terrorists with a pen or a credit card, or just his bare hands.”⁹ In 2000, he had himself photographed in front of panels resembling the Twin Towers, wearing a Swatch Watch whose model name was “Hijacker.” The hour, minute and second hands were all on the “11” and the date was set to the 11th, even though the picture was taken on the 10th.

The odds against all four time indicators being on “11” were more than 50,000 to one. Times the odds of the watch model also being named “Hijacker”? Unfathomable.

And where was Lewin on 9/11? In row 9 of Flight 11. “Mohamed Atta” was allegedly seated ahead of him in row 8.

(13) Ogonowski.  Flight 11’s pilot was John Ogonowski. In addition to flying, he owned 150 acres of farmland, more than 30 of which he leased to Cambodian and Hmong immigrants (legal ones), who used the land to grow Asian crops such as bock choy and Laotian mint. This project was very special to John, and September 11, 2001 was to be a big day—a festive event on which government officials would be coming to inspect the immigrants’ work.

But quoting History Commons:

Groveland pilot Walter Sorenson was scheduled to fly Flight 11 on Sept. 1, 2001 but was ultimately replaced by Captain John Ogonowski, who had seniority over Sorenson. The last-minute change of pilots spared Sorenson’s wife, Sarah, the loss of a young husband. Sarah was seven months pregnant with their son James when the doomed flight took off from Logan.¹⁰

And we read in the account of a local Flag Day celebration in Georgetown, Mass.:

American Airlines pilot Walter Sorenson attended as a representative of the crew of Flight 11, which was the first of two planes hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. A twist of fate spared Sorenson’s life, as Captain John Ogonowski took over the flight at the last minute and died with the plane’s entire crew and all its passengers.¹¹

A natural question: Since Ogonowski’s farm was scheduled for an important festive event on September 11, why did he suddenly decide to fly to LA, using his seniority to replace the originally assigned pilot?  Some may say, “It’s just a coincidence.” But hold on.

(14) McGuinness. The copilot on Flight 11 was Thomas McGuinness. Quoting 9/11blogger:

Thomas McGuinness, the co-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 before it became the first plane to be hijacked in the 9/11 attacks, only assigned himself to be on the flight the afternoon before September 11, 2001, and pushed from it the original co-pilot, who had put his name down for the flight less than half an hour earlier.¹²

As NBC affiliate WYFF4 reported on the tenth anniversary of 9/11:

Steve Scheibner describes the 10 years of his life after Sept. 11, 2001, as “borrowed time.” Scheibner, a commercial pilot for more than 20 years, said that he signed up to be first officer on American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles. “I came in and told my wife, I said ‘I’m going to Los Angeles!’ That’s how sure I was that I was going to get that assignment,” Scheibner said. But during the 30-minute window between when Scheibner signed on for the flight and when the crew was finalized, another pilot, who had priority for claiming flights on that day, took the spot. “I can count three times in 20 years at American Airlines that I’ve been bumped from a trip the night before,” Scheibner said.¹³

Let’s do some very loose math here. Scheibner said he had been bumped from flights, as soon as the night before, only three times in 20 years. This would mean it was something that happened, on average, only once every seven years.

Scheibner was a part-time pilot for American. Let’s say he only flew twice a week—one flight and back—or about 100 times per year; around 700 flights in seven years. Using this as a very crude benchmark, the odds of his being bumped from a flight within 24 hours of takeoff would be around 700 to one.

If the same general odds applied to Sorenson, then the probability of both pilots being displaced from the flight on such short notice would have been around 500,000 to one.

The U.S. military was engaging in several major military exercises on September 11, 2001. NORAD’s Vigilant Guardian exercise included simulated hijackings. Both pilots of flight 11 were former military men, John Ogonowski having been an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War, and Thomas McGuiness a former Navy fighter pilot. Is it just possible that the U.S. military asked Ogonowski and McGuiness to take over Flight 11’s cockpit, in order to participate in what was expected to be a hijacking drill? I am not asserting this, just asking.

The Many Flight Attendant Controversies Aboard Flight 11

(17) The “Flight 12” controversy. All the information we have about what occurred on Flight 11 came from two flight attendants, Madeline Sweeney and Betty Ong.

Sweeney made three calls, but got disconnected twice. Sweeney spoke to several people in American Airlines flight services at Boston’s Logan Airport—including Evelyn Nunez, Michael Woodward, and Jim Sayer.  Betty Ong called American Airlines Reservations to report the hijacking; her call was randomly directed to AA’s reservations office in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the call was answered by Vanessa Minter. Minter, unable to remember how to push the “record” button for emergency calls, connected it (while remaining on the line herself) to an associate, Winston Sadler, who recorded 4 minutes of the 25-minute call (more on that later). Several others from AA’s Operations Center listened in on the call. You can hear the released four minutes of the call here.

Here’s something weird. In the clip, Betty Ong originally said she was on “Flight 12” (which she had also said before the recording started), but later corrected this to “Flight 11.” Here’s how this been normally explained: Flight 11 was a regularly scheduled Boston-to-Los Angeles flight; on the return trip to Boston it was known as “Flight 12”; Ong, in her nervousness over the hijacking, simply made a mistake and called it “Flight 12.”

This situation might not seem controversial until we turn to Madeline Sweeney. She called American Airlines and reached passenger service agent Evelyn Nunez. According to FBI records, Nunez reported Sweeney said that “Flight 12 at Gate 32 had two flight attendants stabbed. In addition, there was a passenger in row 9 who had their throat cut by a passenger in seat 10B. Nunez also learned the hijackers said they had a bomb. The flight attendant was talking fast and then got disconnected.”¹⁴

So Sweeney, just like Ong, mis-identified the flight as “12.” When Sweeney called back a second time, she spoke to Flight Services Manager Michael Woodward, who kept notes of the conversation. Here is the first page:

Woodward initially wrote “12,” but corrected it to say “11.” Apparently Sweeney once again mis-identified the flight as “12.” What are the chances of both flight attendants making this mistake twice?

It has been suggested that Ong and Sweeney may have thought they were partaking in a hijacking drill designed to test American Airlines’ emergency responsiveness, but deliberately labeled the flight “12,” believing, at the time, that this would exempt them from any liability for frivolously reporting a non-existent hijacking.

(18) Sweeney’s “doctor and nurse.” In reading the FBI’s interview of Jim Sayer of American Airlines, who spoke with Madeline Sweeney, we read the following:

Who Sayer and Sweeney are referring to by the “man in business class stabbed in the throat” is clearly a reference to the Israeli Danny Lewin, who was also identified by flight attendant Ong.

The problem? Of the 92 people on board Flight 11, there was no doctor or nurse. Therefore either Sweeney was reading from a script, or invented it, or Sayer seriously misunderstood what she said.

(19) The passengers in coach “don’t know what’s going on.” While Betty Ong made her 25-minute call to American Airlines, Nydia Gonzalez, who was listening in, said seven minutes into the call (based on Ong’s own remarks): “It seems like the passengers in coach might not be aware of what’s going on right now.”

This was absurd. According to Ong herself, passengers from First and Business class were being moved into coach because the air up front was “unbreathable.”

Let’s again read from the FBI’s interviews:

You can also hear Betty Ong, in her recorded phone call, report that two of her fellow flight attendants had been stabbed.

So let’s get this straight. The passengers in first and business class have witnessed the following:
• Hijackers have stormed the cockpit;
• The hijackers have displayed what they say is a bomb;
• Passenger Danny Lewin has had his throat cut, and is either dead or near death:
• Two flight attendants have been stabbed, requiring oxygen and one reportedly unconscious;
• According to Ong, the plane was flying “erratically”;
• The air is so unbreathable in first class and business, from mace sprayed by the hijackers, that the passengers have been directed to retreat to coach.

All of this activity must have generated shouts, chaos, and fear. Are we seriously to believe that the passengers in coach “didn’t know what was going on”?  That they didn’t ask the passengers from up front why they were retreating into coach?

(20) No flight attendant duties whatsoever. Betty Ong’s call lasted an uninterrupted 25 minutes. Sweeney made three calls lasting around 15 minutes. With two of their fellow attendants stabbed—one apparently unconscious—the flight crew would have been seriously understaffed. Surely they would have been busy calming panicked passengers, seeing to their needs, and helping their wounded comrades. Why did they have so much free time to spend on the phone, providing a “narrative”?

(21) No passenger calls. Not counting alleged hijackers, Flight 11 carried 76 passengers—far more than any of the other three hijacked planes on 9/11. Yet this was the only plane on which no passenger used an airphone or cell phone to call a loved one, despite about a half hour elapsing after the hijack began. Why were the only calls from two seemingly idle flight attendants? This does raise the question if Flight 11 was flying with no passengers, but only a skeleton crew who believed they were on a hijack drill.

(22) The 4-minute recording. Officially, Betty Ong’s call lasted for 25 minutes, yet only four minutes were recorded.

Here’s a screenshot of the FBI’s interview with American Airlines systems analyst Troy Wreggelsworth, purporting to explain why:

Who ever heard of a phone system, designed to record emergency calls, that automatically shuts off after four minutes? Emergency calls to a reservations center would be a rarity, so it couldn’t have been to “save money.” Can you imagine a police station installing a 911 emergency call system that automatically halts recording after 4 minutes? I asked Microsoft Copilot which told me:

In fact, call recordings are typically continuous and preserved for the full duration of the call, regardless of length, to ensure accountability and aid investigations.

Allow me to suggest—not insist—that the real reason only 4 minutes of Ong’s call are publicly available is that the other 21 minutes had content that contradicted the official 9/11 narrative and that the FBI and/or American Airlines didn’t want the public to hear.  Which brings us to:

The FBI’s Strange Connections to 9/11

(23) Larry Wansley. Who was American Airlines’ Managing Director of Corporate Security on 9/11? Larry “Mandrake” Wansley, a veteran deep undercover FBI agent, co-author of the book FBI Undercover: The True Story of Special Agent Mandrake, which you’ll find on Amazon.

As the Dallas Observer reported:

On 9-11 Wansley was walking into [executive assistant Dee] Baker’s office for the morning phone call (8:45 AM EST) and the secretary told Wansley that “we have a hijacking.” He called the SOC [System Operations Control] but they didn’t have much information. Wansley then called Danny Defenbaugh who was the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Dallas Field Office. Wansley informed Defenbaugh about the hijacking with the little information that he had which was that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Defenbaugh did not know anything about it. Defenbaugh told Wansley to hold and got a couple of other people together which Wansley said “started the ball rolling.”¹⁵

Defenbaugh, we’ll note, had been in charge of the FBI’s investigation of the Oklahoma City Murrah Building bombing, recognized in alternative media as a false flag.

So according to Wansley, his FBI colleagues had no clue about the hijacking at 8:45 AM Eastern. What a contrast to the statement of Vanessa Minter, who received Betty Ong’s call at 8:20, and said FBI agents took her off the call within five minutes—about 20 minutes before Wansley allegedly phoned Defenbaugh. Here she is being interviewed on the 9/11 tenth anniversary—note her comments about the FBI taking her off the phone at about the 2 minute and 5:50 marks of this 16-minute interview. (For proprietary reasons, I cannot embed this video.)

https://www.wral.com/news/local/video/10111135/&rel=0/

(24) Mainstream News Reveals FBI Foreknowledge. In case you think Minter was off her rocker, check out what CBS News reported on July 26, 2001—just six weeks before the 9/11 attacks:

Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a “threat assessment” by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

“There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,” an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.¹⁶

And as the San Francisco Chronicle reported after 9/11:

The FBI did advise Ashcroft to stay off commercial aircraft. The rest of us just had to take our chances. The FBI obviously knew something was in the wind. Why else would it have Ashcroft use a $1,600-plus per hour G-3 Gulfstream when he could have flown commercial, as he always did before, for a fraction of the cost? Ashcroft demonstrated an amazing lack of curiosity when asked if he knew anything about the threat. “Frankly, I don’t,” he told reporters. So our nation’s chief law enforcement officer was told that flying commercial was hazardous to his health, and yet he appeared not to care what the threat was, who made it, how, or why? Note that it was the FBI that warned Ashcroft before Sept. 11. That’s the same FBI now claiming it didn’t “connect the dots” before Sept. 11. Had we in the press been on our toes, we might have realized that if flying commercial posed a threat to John Ashcroft, it also posed a threat to the population at large.¹⁷

(25) The FBI at Dulles. Vanessa Minter was not the only one to get an amazingly fast visit from the FBI on 9/11. Quoting History Commons:

(After 10:00 a.m.) September 11, 2001: FBI Immediately Identifies Hijackers on Dulles Security
Shortly after arriving at Washington’s Dulles Airport, from which Flight 77 took off, the FBI confiscates a security tape from a checkpoint through which the hijackers passed before boarding the plane. Airport security manager Ed Nelson will later say: “They pulled the tape right away. . . .  They brought me to look at it. They went right to the first hijacker on the tape and identified him. They knew who the hijackers were out of hundreds of people going through the checkpoints. They would go ‘roll and stop it’ and showed me each of the hijackers. . . . It boggles my mind that they had already had the hijackers identified. . . . Both metal detectors were open at that time, and lots of traffic was moving through. So picking people out is hard. . . . I wanted to know how they had that kind of information. So fast. It didn’t make sense to me.”¹⁸

(26) The FBI “within minutes” at the Pentagon Citgo.  The Richmond Times of December 11, 2001 interviewed José Valasquez:

an employee at a gas station across the street from the Pentagon that services only military personnel says the gas station’s security cameras should have recorded the moment of impact. However, he says, “I’ve never seen what the pictures looked like. The FBI was here within minutes and took the film.”¹⁹

(27) The FBI at the Florida Flight Schools. As the Huffington Post reported:

The speed by which our government was able to accumulate such a vast amount of information immediately following the 9/11 attacks (in less than 24 hours) is the most persuasive proof that our government had the hijackers under its surveillance. FBI agents descended upon the very flight schools (out of the thousands of flight schools in our country) that the hijackers attended within two hours of the attacks. They were seen removing files from the flight schools buildings. Furthermore, photos of the hijackers and details about their activities in the final days before the attacks were also immediately presented to the American people. I mean you are talking about an intelligence apparatus that according to official accounts was completely in the dark about the plotting and planning of the 9/11 attacks.²⁰

(28) The FBI at the World Trade Center.

The following information is a personal account, so readers are free to take it with a grain of salt if they wish. In 2018 I was on a major podcast—one of the biggest in alternative media—to discuss 9/11. Afterwards, the show’s producer, whose name I’ll keep in confidence, emailed me as follows:

I actually lived in the city at that time. I was a professional chef in my prior life, and I lived and worked in Manhattan 11+ years. I worked in the South Tower upon my arrival in NYC, and my boyfriend worked for a high-end purveyor that supplied to Windows on the World in the North Tower (Tower One). He could not make the usual delivery on the Friday morning before 9/11—the FBI turned him away at the basement receiving area. They had the entire thing occupied.

This has been a mystery to me ever since.

Fascinated by this account, I emailed her back:

Very interesting story about your boyfriend. When you say “They had the entire thing occupied,” do you mean the FBI had the whole Tower occupied?  Did they give him a reason for why he could not make the delivery?

She replied:

It IS interesting. And I often wish I had asked more questions. The only thing I can say with certainty is that “they” had the underground area completely blocked off and occupied—the structure of which was similar to an underground parking lot. Small delivery trucks could drive in and unload at the receiving dock there which I’m pretty sure was the top-level basement. My BF said they were wearing FBI attire (hats and jackets), and that they didn’t give a reason for denying him entry. They weren’t very nice about it, either—kinda like: Scram! So he left and called his boss.

And just to break that down a bit more: they stopped him AT the entrance to the underground garage, but he could see beyond. The area was crowded with official-looking vehicles and people inside the underground area.

For those who think nothing fishy could have been going on at the World Trade Center before 9/11, let me remind them of the interviews of Scott Forbes and Gary Corbett of Fiduciary Trust, affirming that there was an unprecedented “power down” in the South Tower on the weekend before 9/11.

(29) Atta’s Suitcase. On September 14, 2001, just three days after the attacks, the FBI famously identified the official 19 hijackers, publishing their photos in newspapers. Though some turned out to be mistaken identities, how did they complete their investigation so quickly?

It seems that only one set of luggage didn’t make it onto Flight 11—that of alleged lead hijacker Mohamed Atta. (Supposedly, Atta had mysteriously driven to Portland, Maine on September 10 and flew back to Boston’s Logan Airport on the morning of the 11th).  Inside his luggage the FBI found the names of the other hijackers, instructions on preparations for martyrdom, flight manuals, and Atta’s will.

As Aviation Pros reported:

Former federal terrorism investigators say a piece of luggage hastily checked in at the Portland, Maine, airport by a World Trade Center hijacker on the morning of Sept. 11 provided the Rosetta stone enabling FBI agents to swiftly unravel the mystery of who carried out the suicide attacks and what motivated them.

A mix-up in Boston prevented the luggage from connecting with the plane that hijackers crashed into the north tower of the trade center. Seized by FBI agents at Boston’s Logan Airport, investigators said, it contained Arab-language papers revealing the identities of all 19 hijackers involved in the four hijackings, as well as information on their plans, backgrounds and motives.²¹

But this raises questions. Why would Atta jeopardize the entire operation by putting incriminating documents, including the names of his accomplices, in a suitcase that might have been opened and scrutinized by airport security? And why would he put his will in a suitcase that he expected would be destroyed in a fiery crash?

By the way, while it is obvious that the FBI had foreknowledge about the hijackers, I don’t mean to imply that they—with the possible exception of a few higher-ups—necessarily knew that the planes were to be hijacked for the purpose of flying into buildings; they may conceivably have also thought that September 11 was only to be a “dry run” and not the actual day of the hijackings.

(30) Atta’s father. Few Americans know that Atta’s father said his son called him after 9/11, and that he (the father) believed 9/11 was a Mossad operation:

Asked where Muhamed was now, Atta’s father said, “Ask Mossad.”²² The question may be reasonably asked if the “Atta’s luggage” evidence was planted by a sophisticated security service such as Mossad.

(31) Was Atta himself a Mossad Agent? According to Amanda Keller, the girl Atta dated in Florida, Atta could speak Hebrew.²³

Mossad spies, tracked by the U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement agency), lived constantly in close proximity to the alleged 9/11 hijackers. In 2004, Gerald Shea, District Attorney for San Luis Obispo County, California, submitted a 166-page memorandum to the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the US/Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Using public records, he proved that, throughout the months leading up to 9/11, Israeli groups chronically lived in very tight proximity to the Arabs accused of carrying out the 9/11 plot. Quoting the early part of the memo:

In the months leading up to September 11, 2001, the Israeli DEA Groups were spying on the United States. They were at the same time keeping Arab groups in our country under surveillance, including the future hijackers and other FBI suspects in the catastrophic attacks of September 11. The base of operations for both the Israeli DEA Groups and the future hijackers of the World Trade Center Planes and the Pennsylvania Plane was in and around Hollywood, Florida.

During the same period, the Israeli New Jersey Group was keeping under surveillance Arab groups in Bergen and Hudson Counties, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, including the future hijackers of the Pentagon Plane, whose center of operations was also in Bergen and Hudson Counties. The Israeli New Jersey Group appears to have been aware, before they occurred, that hijackings had been planned by Arab terrorists, as evidenced by their jubilation when the World Trade Center was first struck, by the North Tower Plane. The leader of the Israeli New Jersey Group, who has fled the United States for Israel, is included, along with the names of the hijackers and FBI suspects, on the May 2002 FBI Suspect List.²⁴

Using documents provided by Wikileaks, Wayne Madsen summarized how Mossad completely ran the hijacker cells.

For what it’s worth, here is a musician’s little-known account of Atta hanging out with Israelis in Florida: https://gumshoenews.com/mohammed-atta-israeli-moving-companies-psychic-friends-and-a-dead-handyman/

One week before 9/11, Atta and other hijackers were on the casino boat of Jack Abramoff, who was a Zionist lobbyist.  Why would hijackers want to gamble less than a week before dying on 9/11?

(32) Was Ziad Jarrah Mossad? It is not widely known that two of the cousins of Ziad Jarrah, alleged Lebanese hijacker pilot of Flight 93, had two cousins who were arrested in Lebanon as spies for Israel’s Mossad. As the website 9/11 Skeptics vs. Truth reported:

It was revealed that Ziad’s cousin, Ali al-Jarrah was arrested for having been a Mossad spy for 25 years. He was also arrested along with his brother Yusuf. Written by Robert F. Worth for The New York Times February 18, 2009, Ali also “appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah”.

If Mossad was running the hijacker cells, is it that unlikely that Jarrah, like his cousins, was working for them?

It is questionable if Jarrah was even on board Flight 93. Phone calls from the plane were consistent: five said there were three hijackers—none said there were four, as the government claimed. Furthermore, the cockpit voice recorder for flight 93 shows “Saeed” (Saeed al-Ghamdi) as the pilot, not Jarrah as the government says. True, Jarrah’s partially burned passport eventually turned up at Shanksville—but that doesn’t prove he was on the plane, and should be viewed with the same caution as Satam al-Suqami’s passport found at the World Trade Center.

(33) Cheney’s Standdown. Watch this 1-minute video clip of Nelson Garabito of the Secret Service:

Garabito makes some mistakes. He clearly speaks of “four planes outstanding, two headed for the Towers, and two headed for Washington, D.C.” But no one knew that planes were “headed for the Towers” until they hit them. Garabito is obviously speaking of the moments after the attack on the World Trade Center, when radar was tracking the alleged flights 77 and 93 moving toward Washington. But he is correct when he says he spoke with his contact at the FAA. This was Terry Van Steenbergen, the FAA official in charge of Washinton airspace, who confirmed in his interview with the 9/11 Commission that Garabito had called him.

What is most significant is when Garabito says of the planes: “One of them approximately 30 minutes out, one of them approximately 45 minutes out.”

This means Dick Cheney—who was in charge at the White House, President Bush having been conveniently sidetracked to a Florida elementary school—was fully aware that Washington had been targeted. Andrews Air Base is only 10 miles from the Pentagon. Major Daniel Caine, supervisor of flying at Andrews, phoned his Secret Service contact Kenneth Beauchamp and asked if he needed help. Beauchamp said “No,” and Caine could clearly hear Cheney in the background.²⁵ The Andrews Air Force Base Mission Statement was listed as “The Highest State of Combat Readiness.”²⁶

So what does this mean? Dick Cheney, now in charge of the nation’s defenses, was fully aware that America was under attack. He had certainly known that, at least since the time that the second Tower was hit. Now he knows two additional hijacked aircraft are headed for Washington. Yet Cheney deployed no fighters to protect the capital.

American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked, according to the official story, at 8:51 AM, and struck the Pentagon At 9:37 AM. This means it flew, after hijack, for 46 minutes without being approached by any interceptors. Despite having 30 minutes’ advance warning, Dick Cheney refused to deploy a single fighter to intercept it. Only after the Pentagon explosion occurred did Andrews AFB finally receive orders to deploy. But by now it was too late: the last remaining hijack, Flight 93, had allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania due to a passenger revolt.

The question remains: Why did Cheney, despite advance warnings, refuse to protect Washington on September 11, 2001? Could it just be that, if interceptors approached any of the “hijacked” planes, the fighter pilots would have seen something in the cockpits that contradicted what Cheney and the 9/11 Commission would later spoon-feed the public?

In Part 3 of this series, we’ll explore the controversial question of what struck the Towers. And the answer will be something that, to my knowledge, has never been investigated by the 9/11 Truth Movement—a solution proposed by veteran lead architect and construction manager at McDonnell Douglas and Boeing, Art Olivier, writer-producer of the 9/11 film Operation Terror, whom I recently interviewed, and whose movie suggested a unique fate for the 9/11 passengers.

NOTES

CLARIFICATION: On several of these end-notes, I have listed the hyperlink as “dead.” This is because some news sources, especially small ones, do not keep their articles posted online permanently. I can vouch that all hyperlinks were live and working when I first encountered them a few years ago.

1. Jim Yardley, “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence,” New York Times, May 4, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/04/national/04ARIZ.html.
2. As quoted, “Hani Hanjour: 9/11 Pilot Extraordinaire,” What Really Happened, https://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/hanjour.html.
3. Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to TerrorLand: Mohamed Atta & The 9-11 Cover-up in Florida (Eugene, Oregon: Madcow Press, 2004), 344.
4.  Hopsicker, 36.
5. See Wittenberg make his comments at https://www.youtube.com/watcG6h?v=Y9o7n2nugmc 51:08 to 52:20. Note: This link has suddenly gone dead, but his quotation is still on the Internet, and you can see him make comparable remarks at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXA-enq65ng.
6. George Nelson, “Impossible to Prove a Falsehood True,” Pilots for 9/11 Truth, https://pf911t.org/latestnews.html.
7. As quoted, “Controversy Over Flight 11 Departure Gate @Bos,” Airliners.net., https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=269085. (original link dead)
8. As quoted, Mark Conlon, “Did Passengers of Flight 11 Board A Different Plane?” 9/11 Planes Research, September 9, 2024, https://911planesresearch.substack.com/p/did-the-passengers-of-flight-11-board-a7c/ (Original link  https://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/globe_stories/091202_solemn.htm now dead.)
9. Paul Sperry, “Lewin: Flight 11’s Unsung Hero?” WorldNetDaily, March 27, 2002, https://www.wnd.com/2002/03/13281/.
10. History Commons, which provided a complete 9/11 timeline, has been vaporized from the Internet since 2022. The original link for this note, now dead, was http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=john_ogonowski.
11. “Georgetown Fish & Game Club Honors Flag Day,” Georgetown Record, https://www.wickedlocal.com/georgetown/features/x1224664369/Georgetown-Fish-Game-Club-honors-Flag-Day#axzz1qZKXViJC.  Sorry, this is another dead link.
12. As quoted, “911 Masterminds Saved Select Few From Inside Job Deaths,” February 15, 2012, https://stendec8.blogspot.com/2012/02/911-masterminds-saved-select-few-from.html.
13. Original link (now dead):  http://www.wyff4.com/news/29145244/d…#ixzz1qgke4epF/.
14. “T7 B17 FBI 302s of Interest Flight 11 Fdr-Entire Contents,” p. 57, https://www.scribd.com/doc/14094215/T7-B17-FBI-302s-of-Interest-Flight-11-Fdr-Entire-Contents.
15. Carlton Stowers, “Rough Skies,” Dallas Observer, November 21, 2002, https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/rough-skies-6392004.
16. “Ashcroft Flying High,” CBS News, July 26, 2001, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ashcroft-flying-high/.
17. Harley Sorensen, “Heads-Up To Ashcroft Proves Threat Was Known Before 9/11,” SF Gate, June 3, 2002, https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Heads-Up-To-Ashcroft-Proves-Threat-Was-Known-2830946.php.
18. Susan B. and Joseph J. Trento, Unsafe at Any Altitude, (Hanover, N.H.,: Steerforth Press, 2006, pp. 36-37. (The original URL link http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=ed_nelson_1 is now dead, but the hard copy cited is still accessible.)
19. Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 11, 2001, as quoted by “September 21, 2001: Report Suggests There Are Confiscated Videos of Pentagon Crash,” International Center for 9/11 Justice, https://ic911.org/complete-timeline/september-21-2001-report-suggests-there-are-confiscated-videos-of-pentagon-crash/.
20. Kristen Breitweiser, “Enabling Danger (part one),” Huffington Post, August 20, 2005, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/enabling-danger-part-one_b_5951.
21. “Luggage that Didn’t Get Put on Sept. 11 Jet Provided Lead to Terrorists,” Aviation Pros, April 18, 2006, https://www.aviationpros.com/home/news/10400889/luggage-that-didnt-get-put-on-sept-11-jet-provided-lead-to-terrorists.
22. Ashraf Khalil, “Muhammad Atta Sr. Is in
    the Center of the Media Storm,” What Really Happened, https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/atta.html.
23. Hopsicker, 109.
24. Gerald Shea, “Memorandum to The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” September 15, 2004, https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/40994810/gerald-shea-memo-to-the-9-11-commission.
25. Kevin Ryan, Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects (2013: Kenneth Robert Ryan, 213), 150.
26. Alfons Olszewski, Co-founder, Veterans For 9/11 Truth, essay of August 7, 2006, 8/7/06, as quoted, Patriots Question 9/11,  http://patriotsquestion911.com/pilots.html#Olszewski. (link now dead)