The day before the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration agreed on a plan to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by force if it refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, according to a report by a bipartisan commission of inquiry.

OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN (AP) — In a historic first for Cold War adversaries, U.S., Canadian and Russian military officers directed fighter jets and ground controllers to test how well they could track an international terrorist hijacking over the Pacific Ocean.

A chartered American jet code-named Fencing 1220 sent a mock distress signal shortly after taking off from Anchorage, Alaska, on Sunday, triggering a pursuit by at least seven fighters and a flurry of radio and telephone calls between military and civilian officials on both sides of the Pacific.

The Associated Press had exclusive access to Fencing 1220, a plush executive-style Gulfstream whose passengers included a Russian Air Force colonel and a senior commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the joint U.S.-Canadian command that patrols the skies over North America.

Their goal: To ensure that two militaries still distrustful of each other can work effectively tackling a terror threat that worries both nations.

One question that arose Sunday was just how much information they need – from the ground, from the fighters, from the hijacked pilots and from the terrorists – and whether fewer, simpler messages might be better than the flood of communication the exercise generated.

Canadian Forces Col. Todd Balfe, the deputy commander of NORAD’s Alaska region, acknowledged it may seem “incongruous” that the exercise was taking place amid tension between his country and Russia over recent Russian bomber flights probing the northern boundaries of Canadian airspace. But with al-Qaida at the front of North American minds and Russia dealing with threats from Chechen rebels, terrorism transcends national boundaries, and exercises like this could lay the foundation for cooperating on other issues as well, Balfe said.

“So we’ll start out with this mission, and if that leads into other missions, for example, probing of air spaces, well, that would be a great thing as well,” he said.

Even veteran officers aboard the Gulfstream were struck by the unprecedented cooperation the exercise required and the breathtaking sight of fighter jets so near that the pilots’ helmets were clearly silhouetted against the bright blue sky.

“I’m kind of in awe,” said U.S. Army Maj. Michael Humphreys, the senior American officer on Fencing 1220 and a spokesman for NORAD. “It was a remarkably well-planned and well-executed exercise.”

It is only half over. The plane will fly back to Alaska later this week, again pursued by fighter jets and tracked by controllers on the ground and in the air.

Russian Air Force Col. Alexander Vasiliev said he knew the day would come when the former Cold War enemies would work in concert, but “he never thought it would be him sitting on the aircraft,” his translator said. Vasiliev declined to be quoted directly, saying he would leave that to a Russian spokesman at a news conference planned later in the week.

The intricate exercise began about 10 minutes after the Gulfstream took off from Alaska. Its civilian pilots sent an agreed-upon digital distress code, 5475, to civilian air traffic controllers in the U.S. to signal that the plane had been “hijacked.”

Ben Rhodes, one of the pilots, followed up with a voice radio call: “Fencing 1220 squawking 5475 for the exercise.”

NORAD then dispatched two F-22s and an E-3 Sentry – an airborne surveillance and command post – to shadow the plane.

The Gulfstream was still over Alaska at about 38,000 feet (11,500 meters) when the angular, silver F-22s drew alongside, about 10 minutes after the hijack signal. They edged to within 500 feet (150 meters) and after about 30 minutes, they turned back to refuel and didn’t return.

On the ground and in the air, commanders at NORAD headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., and civilian aviation officials in Alaska were communicating with their Russian counterparts. About two hours after the F-22s fell back, while the Gulfstream was over the Pacific, NORAD officers aboard the E-3 Sentry radioed their counterparts on a Russian surveillance and command post plane that Fencing 1220 was theirs to follow.

Two Russian Su-27 fighters painted pale blue and white soon pulled up from behind the Gulfstream and hovered off its right side, red stars clearly visible on their wings and twin tails. They shadowed the Gulfstream for about 90 minutes before banking sharply to the left and peeling away.

Three other Russian fighters, a MiG-31 and two Su-27s, later shadowed the Gulfstream during the 7 1/2-hour flight. All the fighters were unarmed, a condition of the exercise.

The scene aboard Fencing 1220 was a dramatic contrast to the ominous threats and bluster that marked U.S.-Soviet relations for most of the last half of the 20th century. One of the lowest points came in 1983, when the Soviet air force shot down a Korean Air Lines jumbo jet, killing 269 people. The jet had strayed far off course near the USSR’s Pacific coast and was brought down near Sakhalin Island, well south of the route Fencing 1220 took.

Aboard the Gulfstream, Balfe and Vasiliev chatted amiably about the planes they flew and their families. The radio sometimes carried the voices of Russian officers speaking heavily accented English, asking questions or delivering route instructions.

“To see those Russian fighters pull up right on time, to hear the Russians (talking on the radio), it’s just incredible,” the U.S. Army’s Humphreys said.

(CBS) Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market.

An extraordinary number of trades were betting that American Airlines stock price would fall.

The trades are called “puts” and they involved at least 450,000 shares of American. But what raised the red flag is more than 80 percent of the orders were “puts”, far outnumbering “call” options, those betting the stock would rise.

Sources say they have never seen that kind of imbalance before, reports CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. Normally the numbers are fairly even.

After the terrorist attacks, American Airline stock price did fall obviously by 39 percent, and according to sources, that translated into well over $5 million total profit for the person or persons who bet the stock would fall.

Sources tell 60 Minutes that the initial options were bought through at least two brokerage firms including NFS, a subsidiary of Fidelity Brokerage, and TD Waterhouse, a discount firm.

TD Waterhouse says they handled approximately 3 percent of the initial orders for “puts” on American Airline stock. The company says it has looked at the orders and has determined no evidence of any suspicious activity.

At least one Wall Street firm reported their suspicions about this activity to the SEC shortly after the attack.

The same thing happened with United Airlines on the Chicago Board Options Exchange four days before the attack. An extremely unbalanced number of trades betting United’s stock price would fall — also transformed into huge profits when it did after the hijackings.

“We can directly work backwards from a trade on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The trader is linked to a brokerage firm. The brokerage firm received the order to buy that ‘put’ option from either someone within a brokerage firm speculating, or from one of the customers,” said Randall Dodd of the Economic Strategy Institute.

U.S. investigators want to know whether Osama bin Laden was the ultimate “inside trader” — profiting from a tragedy he’s suspected of masterminding to finance his operation. Authorities are also investigating possibly suspicious trading in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Japan.

There’s always the danger that the stock trail stops at the water’s edge if the money came from banks in countries that don’t cooperate with the United States. But insider trading is always motivated by greed, and a senior Wall Street executive noted it would be ironic if the terrorists’ greed ended up providing one of the most promising leads investigators have.

President Obama predicted a wholesale rethink of America’s love affair with oil today, saying he believed the Gulf disaster would have as profound an impact on the American psyche and policy as 9/11.

On the eve of his fourth trip to the region and ahead of a national address from the Oval Office, Mr Obama vowed to seize the opportunity to push for “a visionary energy policy that we so vitally need and has been absent for so long”.

“In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come,” Mr Obama told the influential news website Politico.

“One of the biggest leadership challenges for me going forward is going to be to make sure that we draw the right lessons from this disaster.”

Mr Obama is under fire from all sides over his handling of the spill and this week he faces what could be the defining week of both the crisis and his presidency, with a two-day trip to the new frontline states at risk from the slick and a national address from the Oval office, the first of his presidency.

In his address, Mr Obama is expected to outline a plan legally compelling BP to create a reserve account to compensate businesses and individuals for their losses from the spill. On Wednesday he will meet senior oil company executives in Washington.

Shares in BP plunged by 6 per cent today amid proposals from US senators that the oil giant place $20 billion in an account to pay for the impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mr Obama’s comments to Politico, however, are likely to fuel the accusations that he is trying to exploit the disaster to pass politically unpopular climate change legislation, a key election pledge. While the appetite for energy legislations has grown, not least out of the desire to punish BP, enthusiasm for longer-ranging laws on climate change remains low.

With opposition from Republicans and even within his own Democratic party, Mr Obama is nowhere near a filibuster-proof majority of support for measures to limit carbon emissions. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, has asked committee members to begin work on a watered-down bill on energy regulation in the anticipation that more sweeping climate change legislation will fail. Opponents say no legislation should be presented before the causes of the BP spill become clearer.

Mr Obama said that changing America’s oil based economy would not be easy but “now is the time for us to start making that transition and investing in a new way of doing business when it comes to energy”.

“I have no idea what new energy sources are going to be available, what technologies might drive down the price of renewable energies,” he said.

“What we can predict is that the availability of fossil fuel is going to be diminishing; that it’s going to get more expensive to recover; that there are going to be environmental costs that our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren are going to have to bear.”

The President will visit Mississippi, Alabama and Florida today and then meet top BP officials, including the company’s chairman, at the White House on Wednesday.

A 48-hour deadline imposed by the US Coast Guard to produce a new clean-up and containment plan expired last night. BP promised to comply with the demand. However, any new strategy is too late for Alabama’s Orange Beach, near Mobile Bay, where crews worked all night on Saturday, taking away a 4-inch-thick layer of oil.

The top cap installed over the Macondo well is collecting 15,000 barrels of oil a day — less than half the estimate of 40,000 barrels a day coming from the ruptured well. Experts believe that the equipment could collect more oil, but if it did there would be nowhere on the surface to store it. BP has said that extra tankers will not arrive in the area until next month.

The oil company pledged to donate any proceeds from the sale of the oil collected from the spill to a special fund for the restoration of damaged wildlife habitats.

6.11.2010

By Greg Ericson

2001 – The September 11 attacks take place in the United States. Airplane hijackings result in the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, destruction of the western portion of The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and a passenger airliner crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania

1941 – Ground is broken for the construction of The Pentagon.

1990 — Bush Sr. makes a ‘new world order’ declaration on Sept. 11, 1990.

2001 – Victims of the September 11 attacks:

Born:
David Angell, American sitcom creator (b. 1946)
Garnet Bailey, Canadian hockey player and scout (b. 1948)
Todd Beamer, passenger on United Airlines Flight 93 (b. 1968)
Berry Berenson, widow of Anthony Perkins (b. 1948)
Mark Bingham, passenger on United Airlines Flight 93 (b. 1970)
Tom Burnett, American businessman (b. 1963)
Peter J. Ganci, Jr., Chief of Department, FDNY (b. 1946)
Father Mychal F. Judge, Chaplain, FDNY (b. 1933)
Angel L. Juarbe, Jr., American firefighter (b. 1966)
John P. O’Neill, American anti-terrorism FBI agent (b. 1952)
John Ogonowski, pilot for American Airlines Flight 11 (b. 1951)
Barbara Olson, American political commentator (b. 1955)
Daniel M. Lewin, founder of Akamai Technologies (b. 1970)

2001 – 9/11 terrorists:

Born:

Marwan Al-Shehhi (b. 1978)

Mohamed Atta (b. 1968)
Hani Hanjour (b. 1972)
Ziad Jarrah (b. 1975)

1981 – Dylan Klebold, Coumbine shooter born

2005 – The State of Israel completes its unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

2007 – Russia tests the largest conventional weapon ever, the Father of all bombs.

1916 – The Quebec Bridge’s central span collapses, killing 11 men

1989 – The iron curtain opens between the communist Hungary and Austria

SOURCES:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11

www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/03/16/the_bushes_new_world_disorder/

NEW YORK (AP) — Lawyers are proposing a new settlement for thousands of ground zero workers suing New York City over their exposure to toxic dust from the World Trade Center.

Lawyers representing about 10,000 workers are going before a federal judge Thursday. They are expected to present a possible deal to revise a settlement the judge originally rejected.

The two sides have been renegotiating the package in recent months.

The amount of the new settlement wasn’t immediately available.

The original settlement was between $575 million and $657 million. In March, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein criticized it as too rich for the lawyers and too stingy for the most seriously ill responders.

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”

Although the commission’s landmark report made it clear that the Defense Department’s early versions of events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the revelation that it considered criminal referrals reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension between it and the Bush administration.

A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the inspector general’s office will soon release a report addressing whether testimony delivered to the commission was “knowingly false.” A separate report, delivered secretly to Congress in May 2005, blamed inaccuracies in part on problems with the way the Defense Department kept its records, according to a summary released yesterday.

A spokesman for the Transportation Department’s inspector general’s office said its investigation is complete and that a final report is being drafted. Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said she could not comment on the inspector general’s inquiry.

In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today, Vanity Fair magazine reports aspects of the commission debate — though it does not mention the possible criminal referrals — and publishes lengthy excerpts from military audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC News aired excerpts last night.

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD’s Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft — American Airlines Flight 11 — long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.

These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies’ reluctance to release the tapes — along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence — led some of the panel’s staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.

“I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described,” John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. “The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true.”

Arnold, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not have all the information unearthed by the panel when he testified earlier. Other military officials also denied any intent to mislead the panel.

John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.

“My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don’t know,” Lehman said. “But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn’t seem to make sense to me.”

We have seen the Twin Towers collapse hundreds of times on TV. The steel and glass skyscrapers exploding like a bag of flour, the dust and smoke pluming out across Manhattan. But never like this, from above.

Nine years after the defining moment of the 21st century, a stunning set of photographs taken by New York Police helicopters forces us to look afresh at a catastrophe we assumed we knew so well.

3:18

Threatened Federal Sanctions Against NYPD, Secret Service, FBI & Mayor’s Office If Secret Ever Got Out

Federal officials knew that sending two fighter jets and Air Force One to buzz ground zero and Lady Liberty might set off nightmarish fears of a 9/11 replay, but they still ordered the photo-op kept secret from the public.

In a memo obtained by CBS 2 HD the Federal Aviation Administration’s James Johnston said the agency was aware of “the possibility of public concern regarding DOD (Department of Defense) aircraft flying at low altitudes” in an around New York City. But they demanded total secrecy from the NYPD, the Secret Service, the FBI and even the mayor’s office and threatened federal sanctions if the secret got out.

“To say that it should not be made public knowing that it might scare people it’s just confounding,” Sen. Charles Schumer said. “It’s what gives Washington and government a bad name. It’s sheer stupidity.”

The flyover — apparently ordered by the White House Office of Military Affairs so it would have souvenir photos of Air Force One with the Statue of Liberty in the background — had President Obama seeing red. He ordered a probe and apologized.

“It was a mistake. It will never happen again,” President Obama said.

The NYPD was so upset about the demand for secrecy that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly vowed never to follow such a directive again and he accused the feds of inciting fears of a 9/11 replay.

“Did it show an insensitivity to the psychic wounds New York City has after 9/11? Absolutely. No questions about it. It was quite insensitive,” Kelly said.

The cost of the frivolous flight was about $60,000 an hour and that was just for Air Force One. That doesn’t include the cost of the two F-16s that came along.

The mayoral aide who neglected to tell Mayor Michael Bloomberg about it was reprimanded.

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

It’s a matter of life and death

A bipartisan group of senators is pushing legislation that would force the CIA to release an inspector general’s report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The CIA has spent more than 20 months weighing requests under the Freedom of Information Act for its internal investigation of the attacks but has yet to release any portion of it.

The agency is the only federal office involved in counterterrorism operations that has not made at least a version of its internal 9/11 investigation public.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and two other intelligence committee leaders — chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and senior Republican Kit Bond of Missouri — are pushing legislation that would require the agency to declassify the executive summary of the review within one month and submit a report to Congress explaining why any material was withheld.

The provision has been approved by the Senate twice, but never made into law.

In an interview, Wyden said he is also considering whether to link the report’s release to his acceptance of President Bush’s nominations for national security positions.

“It’s amazing the efforts the administration is going to stonewall this,” Wyden said. “The American people have a right to know what the Central Intelligence Agency was doing in those critical months before 9/11…. I am going to bulldog this until the public gets it.”

(CBS) Key congressional leaders say they didn’t know President Bush had established a “shadow government,” moving dozens of senior civilian managers to secret underground locations outside Washington to ensure that the federal government could survive a devastating terrorist attack on the nation’s capital, The Washington Post says in its Saturday editions.

Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) told the Post he had not been informed by the White House about the role, location or even the existence of the shadow government that the administration began to deploy the morning of the Sept. 11 hijackings.

An aide to House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said he was also unaware of the administration’s move.

Among Congress’s GOP leadership, aides to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.), second in line to succeed the president if he became incapacitated, and to Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (Miss.) said they were not sure whether they knew.

Aides to Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) said he had not been told. As Senate president pro tempore, he is in line to become president after the House speaker.

LONDON – President Bush has exploited the Sept. 11 attacks, and a timorous American press has not held him to account, former President Jimmy Carter said in an interview published Monday.