I'm not uninterested in particularly the question of the interception of planes, because that too has a bit of history to it. The reason that planes weren't intercepted that day, and I think everybody would agree including the 911 Commission Report, this is one thing they're right about it, is that there was a new instruction introduced on June 1st, 2001. This instruction indicated that any military intervention had to be approved on the highest level. Now when you hear the words "military intervention" that sounds pretty extreme, but the normal military intervention are just some fighter planes going up and establishing some proximity with an airplane that's gone off course. That shouldn't require approval from the Secretary of Defense, and particularly that shouldn't require approval from the Secretary of Defense when he, by his own account, is out in the courtyard of the Pentagon helping to put people on stretchers.
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...among those issues I am particularly interested in the question of the failure to intercept because I think we need very much to know why the rules were changed on June the 1st, and I think the probable answer is one that was suggested some time ago by Michael Ruppert. It was a product of the counterterrorism task force that was set up under Dick Cheney on May the 1st of 2001. So the chronology is right there to suggest it. If you have a counterterrorism task force working on something and then you get a change in the rules the most likely source for that change is indeed that counterterrorism task force.
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Q: In the 911 report, when they touched on the change of rules on the deployment of military force, was an explanation of the rule change offered?
A: No. They quoted the relevant documents. When they were trying to explain why there weren't intercepts they pointed to the relevant documents and they quoted them, but they didn't investigate it further. And the fact that it was dated June the 1st didn't, apparently, arouse any curiosity.
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