There were a variety of pieces after the event working hard to 'debunk' Mineta's testimony. Remarkably, one of them appeared in TIME magazine maybe a week or less after the attacks - maybe days after the attacks - where they paraphrased "the plane is thirty miles out, the plane is twenty miles out" etc etc into a more innocuous (for that day) context.
Mineta was later interviewed on camera by activists and reconfirmed his original statement.
https://youtu.be/suKKhDWbnSk?t=29
I haven't looked at the 9/11 Commission Report for a while but it does seem a nice guide to all the stuff they wanted to cover up.
A 9/11 research tidbit for the week, for researchers wanting new info to ponder. On the core staff of Rumsfeld's 1998 Ballistic Missile Commission, Rumsfeld's key administrative assistant was Delonnie Henry. When Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense, he brought Delonnie into his immediate Pentagon office as a "confidential assistant". (That quote is from Bill Gertz's book THE FAILURE FACTORY, looking at recent govt administrations). Delonnie's husband, then and now, is Christopher Ryan Henry, a Navy officer who was earlier the information system architect at DARPA, who was a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, and who later became the deputy undersecretary of defense under Douglas Feith and a Senior Fellow at the RAND Corporation.
Shortly before Rumsfeld's Missile Commission, where Henry's wife Delonnie would eventually work alongside Rumsfeld, Christopher Henry left DARPA to become the Vice President of SAIC, and Henry remained at SAIC throughout the proceedings of Rumsfeld's Commission, where his wife was helping out, then through the end of the Clinton administration, through the early months of George W Bush's presidency, where his wife Delonnie was brought back in by Rumsfeld as a 'confidential assistant', and then during and after 9/11. When Christopher Ryan Henry finally left SAIC to join the Pentagon, SAIC was awarded the running of the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council, letting Henry oversee the government expenses for that program that would run back to his former company.
Kevin Ryan's article on SAIC is here.
https://digwithin.net/2014/06/04/andrews-and-saic/
In Peter Dale Scott's AMERICAN WAR MACHINE, Scott discusses how SAIC had "helped supply the faulty intelligence about Saddam's WMD that then generated ample contracts for SAIC in Iraq". In the late 90's, when Christoper Ryan Henry was VP, and his wife was joined at the hip to Rumsfeld, SAIC established the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis, a unit set up to warn and advise the world of imminent national and global terrorism threats.
Kevin Ryan argues that, prior to 2001, SAIC likely played a key role in 9/11 planning. It certainly benefited from the various war contracts that followed. I can only assume that some of the activities carried out by SAIC that Ryan describes in his article were done through the period where the Vice President's of SAIC's wife was working alongside Rumsfeld on a daily basis. According to Ryan, SAIC
- Created the national databases that tracked and identified terrorists
- Supplied U.S. airports with terrorism screening equipment
- Predicted and investigated terrorist attacks against U.S. infrastructure including national defense networks and the World Trade Center (WTC)
- Helped create the official account for what happened at the WTC both in 1993 and after 9/11
- Was a leader in research on thermitic materials like those found in the WTC dust
- Employed the leader of the robotics team that scoured the pile at Ground Zero, using equipment capable of eliminating explosives
- Provided the information to capture the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM)
It's quite a resume. SAIC's 2004 annual report, flicking through the various windfalls they made off the War on Terror.
https://web.archive.org/web/201209301822...rt2004.pdf
When Delonnie Henry retired from government service a year or so ago, she was given a warm public send-off by Ashton Carter. Carter might be better known to researchers as the co-author (with Philip Zelikow and John Deutch) of the Kennedy School of Government's paper CATASTROPHIC TERRORISM: ELEMENTS OF A NATIONAL POLICY. That paper is based on months of work by a group that worked under Zelikow and Carter, through the same months that Delonnie Henry was working alongside Rumsfeld, and through the same period that Delonnie's husband Christopher Ryan Henry was busy with tasks of interest at SAIC. Small world.
