The FAA & Ptech
In the 9/11 Commission report a "phantom flight 11" was added to the official version of what happened that day. A tape was played at the final commission hearing on June 17, 2004, of a woman from the FAA telling NORAD that flight 11 was still airborne at 9:24 am, long after it had actually struck the WTC. Originally this was reported to be the time when the FAA notified NORAD that flight 77 was off course and headed to the Pentagon.
This information was used by the commission to claim NORAD had never been informed that flight 77 was headed towards Washington D.C., leaving the FAA holding the bag for the penetration of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world. The commission's report states they were "unable to identify the source of this mistaken FAA information."
It has been clearly documented that "false blips," or radar injects, were placed on FAA radar screens on the morning of 9/11 as part of the Air Force war games that morning.2 "Phantom flight 11" fits the description of a "false blip." If it was, in fact, a radar inject, that would explain why the 9/11 commission was unable to locate the source of the "mistaken FAA information." The 9/11 war games are classified and specific information regarding such details is not publicly available. We do know by the time "phantom flight 11" appeared on FAA screens - 9:24 am - the war games had reportedly been called off.3
So what was it doing there?
FTW's position is that "phantom flight 11" was injected onto FAA radar screens by "the maestro"4 using Ptech software to override FAA systems. Let's examine the feasibility of such a scenario.
Ptech had been working on the data blueprint of the FAA's entire network for 2 years prior to 9/11. Their confidential business plan lays out just how much access they had to the FAA's data systems.
Ptech Inc. Confidential Business Plan: Page 37 of 46 11/7/2001
The FAA recognized the need for leveraging its IT investment, with a means of centralizing activities and introducing consistency and compatibility within the operating systems environment. A Ptech consulting team was organized to use activity modeling to identify key functions that could be examined for improvement in network management, network security, configuration management, fault management, performance management, application administration, network accounting management, and user help desk operations.5
What the above tells us is that Ptech had access to the entire informational barn door of the FAA's data systems. In an amazing exchange published in part 1 of this series, FTW editor Jamey Hecht was able to confirm a central thesis of Crossing the Rubicon while interviewing Wall St. Whistleblower Indira Singh. Indira is an IT professional who started First Boston's first Information Technology group in 1975 and had worked on Wall St. until 2002. She's been an IT consultant for Banker's Trust, the U.N., JP Morgan, and American Express. In 1988 she started TibetNet - a derivative of DARPA's Internet, the service you are likely reading this report on at the moment. The exchange was as follows:
Jamey Hecht: You said at the 9/11 Citizens' Commission hearings, you mentioned - its on page 139 of transcript - that Ptech was with Mitre Corporation in the basement of the FAA for 2 years prior to 9/11 and their specific job was to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force, in case of an emergency.
Indira Singh: Yes, I have a good diagram for that…
Jamey Hecht: And that relationship had been going on mediated by Ptech for 2 years prior to 9/11. You elsewhere say that the Secret Service is among the government entities that had a contract with Ptech. Mike Ruppert's thesis in Crossing the Rubicon, as you know, is that the software that was running information between FAA & NORAD was superseded by a parallel subsuming version of itself that was being run by the Secret Service on state of the art parallel equipment in the PEOC with a nucleus of Secret Service personnel around Cheney.
…In your view, might it have been the case that Cheney was using Ptech to surveil the function of the people who wanted to do their jobs on the day of 9/11 in FAA & NORAD, and then intervene to turn off the legitimate response?
Indira Singh: Is it possible from a software standpoint? Absolutely it's possible. Did he (Cheney) have such a capability? I don't know. But that's the ideal risk scenario - to have an over-arching view of what's going on in data. That's exactly what I wanted for JP Morgan.
You know what's ironic about this; I wanted to take my operational risk blueprint which is for an operational event going wrong and I wanted to make it generic for extreme event risk to surveil across intelligence networks. What you're describing is something that I said, 'boy if we had this in place maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened.' When I was going down to In-Q-Tel and getting these guys excited about creating an extreme event risk blueprint to do this, I'm thinking of doing exactly what you're saying Cheney might have already had! [emphasis added]
-- end of transcript
Ptech was working with Mitre Corp. in the FAA and, according to Indira, Ptech was the Alpha dog in that relationship. Mitre has provided simulation & testing technologies for the Navy.6 They provide multiple FAA technologies and boast in their annual reports that their two biggest clients are DOD & FAA. Mitre knew the FAA's technological enterprise inside and out, including any simulation-and-testing (war game) technology operated by the FAA.
This was the perfect marriage to ensure that the capacity to covertly intervene in FAA operations on 9/11 existed - in the middle of simulated war games.It is also the perfect marriage to ensure that the command and control of these capabilities was readily available to Dick Cheney via Secret Service Ptech software in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the bunker to which Cheney was "rushed" by the Secret Service. As already pointed out in part 1 of this series, Ptech does what Total Information Awareness (TIA, the DARPA program to monitor all electronic transactions in real-time) is supposed to do. (There are an undetermined number of other software programs in the hands of an undetermined number of corporations also capable of this. Again, enterprise architecture software is designed with the express purpose of knowing everything that is going on throughout the entirety of the "enterprise" in real-time.
In the case of Ptech software, installed on White House, Secret Service, Air Force and FAA systems (as well as most American military agencies), the enterprise included all of the real-time data of the above mentioned agencies. Indira has confirmed Ptech software could have been set up to allow Dick Cheney to surveil and intervene on FAA radar screens.
As documented by former Bush counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies, on 9/11 the Secret Service had the capability of seeing FAA radar screens in real time; and as documented by Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon, Secret Service has the authority to take supreme command over any and all American agencies - including the Air Force.
9/11 is a prime example of what Indira Singh calls "extreme event risk." In the months prior to the attack, she was working on a program capable of providing data in real time to prevent these types of events from happening. She had pitched this very idea just one week before 9/11 at In-Q-Tel Headquarters (CIA) in Virginia, giving a final presentation for an ICH (Interoperability Clearinghouse) project code named "Blue Prophet." Indira explained to CIA why she was supporting ICH in this project.
She told the In-Q-Tel team, "The intelligence and other agencies need this now." One of the men with CIA looked at Indira with what she describes as the "blackest, coldest look anyone has ever given her."
They weren't interested in Blue Prophet's software for interoperability or risk, but rather the data it would produce because the data would point in the right directions. That data was very predictive, producing quality real-time intelligence. This is one week before 9/11. If In-Q-Tel already had this capability, it's no wonder they would be wary of someone like Indira - the woman from New York in Risk Management who resided a few minutes' walk from the Twin Towers.
End Part II/Part II