"Do the orders still stand?" - Person identified

. In the case of Mineta, we really do have a mystery in his testimony. Either he was in the PEOC making observations with Cheney when AAL77 hit or he was not. He is either being completely honest, mistaken, or lying out his teeth. Which is it?

However, I cannot ignore that his account parallels this SS log entry. So either it does because he was there, or because he 'filled out the blanks' using a source of information very consistent with the actual approach of the plane. Now I personally don't think he was in the PEOC because he said he arrived after the evac began. The news media was part of the evac and I don't see any reference in media accounts of the evac beginning prior to the Pentagon event.

I really don't care much about Mineta's account personally. It simply does not impact the flight I am studying and the 'orders' really have no bearing on my research. And afraid I don't know much about Dutch soldiers....

He misremembered. His own, and Mrs Cheney's, statements debunks the whole thing. As do the controllers signed statements. There is no mystery except that fact some people cant see the woods for the trees after all this time.
 
In the case of Mineta, we really do have a mystery in his testimony. Either he was in the PEOC making observations with Cheney when AAL77 hit or he was not. He is either being completely honest, mistaken, or lying out his teeth. Which is it?

Miles Kara might have hit on the answer to that one:

There is just one question at issue. Why did Norman Mineta testify to a precise time that was inaccurate? We may never know the answer. For anyone that has worked in an operations or command center with world-wide responsibilities there is a logical explanation. He looked at the wrong clock; Central Time.

That fits.
 
Miles Kara might have hit on the answer to that one:

That fits.


It's a viable explanation, but I think there's other potential explanations as well. Another is that Mineta wrongly concluded the conversation must have been in reference to AA77. I think he built his timeline (I question the qualification of his times as "precise") retroactively based on the assumption that it was AA77 that the conversation was about.

It all stems back to the later reporting that an American Airlines jet was "confirmed" as having hit the Pentagon. This could have been a long time after impact, but Mineta wouldn't necessarily have known that. He was "out of the loop" for a bit, so would have missed the initial "something's going on at the Pentagon" reports. First thing he knew was the confirmation of an aircraft hit. He naturally would have aligned that with about the time of impact (0937) and would have worked backwards from there, thus arriving at 0925-6 for the "do the orders still stand?" conversation.
 
It all stems back to the later reporting that an American Airlines jet was "confirmed" as having hit the Pentagon. This could have been a long time after impact, but Mineta wouldn't necessarily have known that.
I think that's right.

The way Mineta tells it, the confirmation arrives almost immediately:

Some young man came in and said to the Vice President, "There's a plane 50 miles out coming towards D.C." So I said to Monty Belger, who is the No. 2 at FAA, I said, "Monty, what do you have on radar on this plane coming in?" He said, "Well, the transponder has been turned off, so we don't know who it is, and we don't know the altitude or speed." I said, "Well, where is it?" He said, "It's somewhere beyond Great Falls right now." Then, the young man came in and said it's 20 miles away. I'd say, "Well, Monty, where is this plane in relationship to the ground?" On radar it is hard to associate with a ground point, but they'd be able to tell you roughly the distance from wherever you are, but he couldn't tell you the speed or altitude, and then all of a sudden, as I was talking to him, he said, "Oh, I lost the bogie. Lost the target." I said, "Well, where is it?" He said, "Well, it's somewhere between Rosslyn and National Airport," and about that time someone broke into the conversation and said, "Mr. Secretary, we just had a confirmation from an Arlington County police officer saying that he saw an American Airlines plane go into the Pentagon." So then I said, "Monty, bring all the airplanes down." When you see one of something happen, it's an accident; when you see two of the same thing happening, it's a trend, something. When you see three, it's a plan. So I said, "Bring all the planes down."
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/min0int-8

Others say it took a while for them to find out, though, and there was initially a lot of confusion over what had happened at the Pentagon. So I think that's the key: Mineta associated the confirmation with what he'd just been hearing, but in fact Flight 77 had crashed some time before.
 

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