that there was some sort of a stand down? I have a few indications of that. There is a 177th Air National Guard based out of Pomona, New Jersey, near Atlantic City at the Atlantic City Airport. They're about equidistant, actually a little closer to DC. They could cover both Manhattan and DC. They have fighter-ready intercept jets. But one investigator that talked to them said that they were told two weeks prior to the event to stop putting the jets up in the air on a regular basis.
"I also talked to an independent journalist investigator at the Pentagon whose response to my stand down thesis that I'm giving you, he said, 'Didn't you read in the New York Times' -- and I've not been able to find this article so it may be he mis-cited it -- 'that three days before September 11th half of the combat ready planes in the United States were taken down offline.' I said, 'I did not. Are you making your argument or mine?'
"And then there's a third indication I have from someone whose son is stationed at Otis Air Force Base. The son has talked to pilots who were in the air the hour that the second plane was hit, scrambled out of Otis, who turned their attention to Flight 77 (the Pentagon flight) and made clear that they were going to go to try to intercept that flight coming back across from Ohio to DC and were called back -- according to these pilots -- were called back off the flight by the Command.
"So was there a stand down and no response? Were there call backs? These are not questions that I ultimately have the resources to answer but they're questions that stand and that raise, for me, a much deeper level of this scenario than is being addressed. But was there a point at which they knew ahead? There certainly was and for forty minutes everybody in DC knew the plane was coming and we didn't do a thing.
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