reply to post by impressme
OK so I haven't been on ATS in a while, but I read over this thread and found myself intrigued by it's accusations...
My dad retired a few months before 9/11 as an O-6 (that's Colonel for all you civvies in this thread) from the USAF, so I figured he would be a good
person to ask about it considering he worked in Cheyenne Mountain for a year and then after that at Peterson AFB. At the time, NORAD was beginning to
be centralized at Peterson (which would become the HQ of NORTHCOM after 9/11) rather than the mountain. Anyway he was a Deputy commander of a mission
group (he says it's kind of confusing as half the time he was the deputy for a Canadian military officer) while he was stationed in the mountain.
Now that you have a little background info about him, I'd like to share with you some things I learned from very lengthy and interesting conversation
I had with him recently.
I asked him, and he said that he still knew some fellow officers who worked at NORAD when 9/11 occurred (he almost got called up again during the
crisis; as some of you military guys know, my dad wasn't completely "retired" until this past summer).
Then when I asked him what happened there on 9/11 and if the Air Force stood down, he gave me a puzzled look as if to say "shouldn't it be
obvious?"
That's right, the military actually went on high alert as a result of a terrorist attack!


I know, hard to believe. Anyway, I asked him what the procedures were at the time for such an incident and he noted that there were some, but they
were insufficient as no one really considered them a big threat at the time. He noted that (and keep this in mind: he was a senior officer working IN
NORAD just a few months before) we "weren't prepared for it." Communication between the FAA and NORAD was not as efficient as it needed to be to
deal with such a situation. That's why as a result of 9/11 the FAA now has representatives at NORAD to facilitate better communication between
civilian/military agencies should another incident like those happen again.
With regards to the actual hijackings: even IF a fighter or two could have been scrambled in time to intercept the airliners, there's only so much
you can deduce from a visual. The president can't just order a couple of 16's to shoot down an airliner with possibly hundreds of citizens/foreign
nationals aboard over a heavily populated area such as D.C. or NYC just because they broke communication. The thought of it is ludicrous. What if
they're just having trouble with the comms? What if the pilots fell asleep?
Anyway I can see why civilians outside of the military could believe that Airmen would betray their country for money, because unless they join up,
they can't possibly understand the love we have for our country (that does not, I repeat
DOES NOT mean a love for the idiotic politicians who
run the place) and the calling to defend the people in it (that means all of you on this thread slandering us, too). Do you somehow think that
Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines join the military for the
money and can be bribed to commit treason? I'm not going to get payed nearly
as much as my fellow engineering buddies when I graduate and get commissioned as an officer in the Air Force, but I'm doing it anyway.
Someone said earlier in this thread that if you tried to pull something off like that with anyone in the military that everyone else would call them
out on it. This is absolutely true. Even if you could find a couple bad apples do commit such an atrocity, there's NO WAY that no one else would find
out about it.
Oh and by the way I did a short proof of your general argument in my head after reading your posts, and it simplifies down to one of these two
solutions:
I am right, therefore, the USAF helped with the 9/11 attacks.
or
You can't be absolutely 100% sure I'm not correct in my assertions, therefore, the USAF helped with the 9/11 attacks.
I can't tell which. Someone wanna help me out?
Why are the brave men and women who serve in the armed forces converging on you in this thread you might ask? Well, we look out for one another. And
you're basically asserting that the average Airman is more prone to commit treasonous acts than the average American.
Good day, sir.
[edit on 27-12-2009 by CaptainIraq]