LF: 911 SURVIVOR WON’T BACK DOWN

Perhaps the most compelling direct testimony regarding the harrowing events of Sept. 11, 2001 comes from survivor and former Army Spec. April Gallop, who—with her two-month-old child, Elisha, in tow—arrived at the Pentagon just minutes before a powerful explosion rocked the building that Tuesday morning. Ms. Gallop spoke out on her experience at conferences where this AFP writer heard her story—which has never wavered.

Ms. Gallop wants justice. So, in coordination with the Center for 911 Justice, she filed a federal lawsuit and is staying the course, whatever the odds. The defendants are former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Gen. Richard Myers (USAF, retired), former acting Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman.

Transportation Secretary and eyewitness Norman Mineta testified to the now disbanded 911 Commission that Cheney, on duty during the attacks, urgently spoke of an approaching hostile attack against the Pentagon but, incredibly, ordered a military stand down. Since the World Trade Center in Manhattan had already been hit, Ms. Gallop continues to ask why neither air defenses nor alarm warnings were implemented in and around the Pentagon.

The moment she turned on her work computer on Sept. 11, 2001, a powerful blast knocked her unconscious. Injured, she soon awoke with debris on her, even while reaching around and pulling her child, also injured, who survived, from the debris pile.

When Ms. Gallop exited the building through the hole made by the explosion, she saw no sign of plane wreckage. Yet the world is still told 10 years later that American Airlines Flight 77 rammed into history’s most sophisticated command center without any attempted interception and vaporized, which various researchers say is absurd.

Ms. Gallop also maintains that federal officials repeatedly preached to her that a large commercial airliner hit the Pentagon and that she was strongly advised not to state otherwise.

“I could have very early given up,” Ms. Gallop told AFP March 29. “My efforts are much larger than many people think they are.” She now is fighting to obtain subpoena power, with the help of attorney William Veale and support through Centerfor911Justice.org.

Talking with AFP, she asked: “Do we want certain people in a position where they cannot ever be brought to justice?”

Federal District Judge Denny Chin dismissed Ms. Gallop’s lawsuit in a lower court, claiming that the complaint was based on “cynical delusion and fantasy.” But Ms. Gallop won’t buckle. Her appeal, as AFP went to press, was slated to go before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit on April 5 in New Haven, Conn. She is citing a “violation of civil rights, conspiracy and other wrongs,” the complaint states.

“This case . . . is premised on an allegation of broad complicity in the attack on the part of key U.S. government officials,” the complainant said.

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CHENEY: Well, we need to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. So what we've decided to do is crash a whole bunch of remote-controlled planes into Wall Street and the Pentagon, say they're real hijacked commercial planes, and blame it on the towelheads; then we'll just blow up the buildings ourselves to make sure they actually fall down.

RUMSFELD: Right! And we'll make sure that some of the hijackers are agents of Saddam Hussein! That way we'll have no problem getting the public to buy the invasion.

CHENEY: No, that's too obvious. We'll make the hijackers Al Qaeda and then just imply a connection to Iraq.

RUMSFELD: But if we're just making up the whole thing, why not just put Saddam's fingerprints on the attack?

CHENEY: (sighing) It just has to be this way, Dick. Ups the ante, as it were. This way, we're not insulated if things go wrong in Iraq. Gives us incentive to get the invasion right the first time around.

BUSH: I'm a total idiot who can barely read, so I'll buy that. But I've got a question. Why do we need to crash planes into the Towers at all? Since everyone knows terrorists already tried to blow up that building complex from the ground up once, why don't we just blow it up like we plan to anyway, and blame the bombs on the terrorists?

RUMSFELD: Mr. President, you don't understand. It's much better to sneak into the buildings ourselves in the days before the attacks, plant the bombs and then make it look like it was exploding planes that brought the buildings down. That way, we involve more people in the plot, stand a much greater chance of being exposed and needlessly complicate everything!

CHENEY: Of course, just toppling the Twin Towers will never be enough. No one would give us the war mandate we need if we just blow up the Towers. Clearly, we also need to shoot a missile at a small corner of the Pentagon to create a mightily underpublicized additional symbol of international terrorism -- and then, obviously, we need to fake a plane crash in the middle of fucking nowhere in rural Pennsylvania.

RUMSFELD: Yeah, it goes without saying that the level of public outrage will not be sufficient without that crash in the middle of fucking nowhere.

CHENEY: And the Pentagon crash -- we'll have to do it in broad daylight and say it was a plane, even though it'll really be a cruise missile.

CHENEY: Because it's much easier to shoot a missile and say it was a plane. It's not easy to steer a real passenger plane into the Pentagon. Planes are hard to come by.

CHENEY: Mr. President, you're missing the point. With the Pentagon, we use a missile, and say it was a plane.

BUSH: Right, but I'm saying, why don't we just use a plane and say it was a plane? We'll be doing that with the Twin Towers, right?

CHENEY: Right, but in this case, we use a missile. (Throws hands up in frustration) Don, can you help me out here?

RUMSFELD: Mr. President, in Washington, we use a missile because it's sneakier that way. Using an actual plane would be too obvious, even though we'll be doing just that in New York.

RUMSFELD: The other good thing about saying that it was a passenger jet is that that way, we have to invent a few hundred fictional victims and account for a nonexistent missing crew and plane. It's always better when you leave more cover story to invent, more legwork to do and more possible holes to investigate. Doubt, legwork and possible exposure -- you can't pull off any good conspiracy without them.

BUSH: You guys are brilliant! Because if there's one thing about Americans -- they won't let a president go to war without a damn good reason. How could we ever get the media, the corporate world and our military to endorse an invasion of a secular Iraqi state unless we faked an attack against New York at the hands of a bunch of Saudi religious radicals? Why, they'd never buy it. Look at how hard it was to get us into Vietnam, Iraq the last time, Kosovo?

RUMSFELD: Well, I'm sold on the idea. Let's call the Joint Chiefs, the FAA, the New York and Washington, D.C., fire departments, Rudy Giuliani, all three networks, the families of a thousand fictional airline victims, MI5, the FBI, FEMA, the NYPD, Larry Eagleburger, Osama bin Laden, Noam Chomsky and the fifty thousand other people we'll need to pull this off. There isn't a moment to lose!

BUSH: Don't forget to call all of those Wall Street hotshots who donated $100 million to our last campaign. They'll be thrilled to know that we'll be targeting them for execution as part of our thousand-tentacled modern-day bonehead Reichstag scheme! After all, if we're going to make martyrs -- why not make them out of our campaign paymasters? Shit, didn't the Merrill Lynch guys say they needed a refurbishing in their New York offices?

RUMSFELD: Oh, they'll get a refurbishing, all right. Just in time for the "Big Wedding"!

"The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership."

Removing Saddam and protecting Israel and Mid-East oil...

"It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, the safety...of our friends and allies like Israel ...and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.
In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power." - Jan. 1998

Increasing U.S. military budget by way of a "new Pearl Harbor"...

"To preserve American military preeminence in the coming decades, the [DoD] must move more aggressively to experiment with new technologies and operational concepts, and seek to exploit the emerging revolution in military affairs.
...the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." - Sept. 2000

PNAC who's who:

Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz - PNAC Statement of Principles