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Publicity photo of Jesse Ventura from the 1987 adventure movie "Predator"
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Special Note: for whatever reason, the embed of Episode 8 that is the focus of this article has disappeared, so I am both linking it (a lot) and embedding it twice so this does not happen again. So if you just read this article without seeing the video, now you easily can.
EPISODE 8 HERE
Earlier articles on Ventura episodes:
1) Episode 7 (on the Gulf Oil Disaster)
2) Episode 5 (on the JFK assassination)
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In Jesse Ventura's latest nugget from his wildly popular TruTV investigative series, Episode 8 of Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, the former Navy UDT/SEAL member, actor, wrestler and governor of Minnesota takes on one of the Establishment's sacred myths driving the almost decade long, bloody, chaotic, financially ruinous and corruption-laced War on Terror, the belief that American Airlines Boeing 757 Flight 77, 35 minutes after taking off from DC's Dulles Airport, was hjacked by five al-Qaeda operatives (two of whom, it was later revealed, were alive and well in the Middle East at that time, their identities misused) who stormed the cockpit and overwhelmed the flight crew, allowing their own pilot, Hani Hanjour, to turn the plane around and deliberately fly it into the Pentagon some 50 or so minutes later. Or so the story goes.
There have been many criticisms of, even accusatory attacks on the official government storyline over the past few years, but it seems that for every attack there is a counterattack that doesn't really resemble any dialectical process, but rather trench warfare from World War I, replete with Howitzer bombardments on the critic plus withering rifle fire, as well as smoke grenades and shells that fill the "battle scene" with the fog of propaganda war.
The beauty of Episode 8 is that it lays out the main criticisms of the official storyline in a comprehensive, straightforward manner with powerful interviews and strong rebuttals of key tenets of the "Hani Hanjour slammed the Pentagon" theory of what happened that fateful day of September 11th, 2001. This is not mere wild-eyed speculation, but information grounded in reality. Is it the final word? No, but it certainly adds to the evidence that the official story is not right.
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Jesse begins the episode by recounting a phone call he received from Charles Lewis, a Los Angeles Airport Contractor conducting inspections for the LA Building and Safety Department at the LA airport. As 9/11 was going down, Charles, with approved credentials, happened to be in the vicinity of restricted air traffic controller conversations on a high-level, official radio frequency. He told Ventura, in person, how he overheard controllers demanding to know, with great distress, why NORAD hadn't been informed of the hijacking of Flight 77, to which a shocking reply eventually floated across the secured airwaves: NORAD HAD INDEED BEEN INFORMED BUT HAD BEEN TOLD TO STAND DOWN. When it was asked who had stood NORAD down, the reply came back: THE HIGHEST LEVEL OF THE WHITE HOUSE. NORAD's multi-billion dollar air defense system had been rendered useless by a simple command: Stand down. And this was despite the fact that the Pentagon is in a high-level no-fly zone and equipped with its own anti-aircraft defenses, and where shooting down an invading aircraft is a prime option.
Was this Cheney or Bush who gave that command? We are all too aware that George Bush during this time period was in a Florida schoolroom reading My Pet Goat to young students, so we must assume the order to stand down came from the man at the helm in the White House underground control bunker in Washington DC at the time: Dick Cheney.
But Charles was not done with his revelations in Episode 8: the next shocker he heard coming across the radio as clear as a bell was the statement that the Pentagon had been HIT BY A MISSILE, not a plane, yes, a missile! So imagine his surprise when he finally went home, turned on his TV and heard reports that the Pentagon had been hit by an airplane. The question now becomes, was the radio transmittal just hearsay or insider knowledge?
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Based on Lewis's statements, Jesse and his team faned out across Washington DC to investigate the entire bailiwick surrounding the official Pentagon attack scenario, beginning with the the all-but-repressed and forgotten testimony of then Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta before the 9/11 Commission on May 23, 2003, wherein he stated that he was in the White House underground bunker with Vice-President Cheney on the morning of 9/11 as one young man repeatedly came forth to inform Cheney of how close to Washington the plane being tracked was approaching : 50 miles, 30 miles, etc., and when he announced "10 miles" he also asked Cheney if the "orders still stand", to which Cheney replied, according to Mineta, "Of course the orders still stand!" It doesn't take a psychic to figure out what those orders might be.
Mineta's testimony did not show up in the official 9/11 Commission Report. Worse still, his report has been excised from the 9/11 Commission's video report! Why is that? Could it be because it puts Dick Cheney in an extremely bad light, one of willfully NOT protecting the Pentagon from attack, of letting it get hit instead and killing all those innocent people?
