Tripod II
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The story...

The exercise Tripod II may have been a significant factor in the success of the 9-11 attacks.

Our take...

We'll examine this case as it's portrayed in "The Military Drills on 9-11: "Bizarre Coincidence" or Something Else?", by Four Arrows (aka Don Jacobs).

Yet another drill was a bio-warfare exercise called Tripod II. According to Michael Ruppert, ‘‘The ‘Tripod II,’ joint New York City-Department of Justice bio-warfare exercise, scheduled for Sept 12th, 2001 at New York’s Pier 29, and mentioned in testimony by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at the 9/11 Commission, may become one of the single most important disclosures of 9/11.’’10 Giuliani apparently knew about the exercise because the New York-Department of Justice was a participant in the drill.
"The Military Drills on 9-11: "Bizarre Coincidence" or Something Else?"

As this drill was scheduled for September the 12th, then plainly it’s not going to in itself have had any effect on the outcome of the attacks. So what’s the significance? Jacobs explains:

Cheney was in charge of the war game known as Tripod 2, an exercise set up in downtown New York that set up a command and control center on 9/11 that was configured exactly like the one lost that morning in WTC 7.
"The Military Drills on 9-11: "Bizarre Coincidence" or Something Else?"

The idea that Cheney was in charge of Tripod may be based on the same flawed assumptions that suggest he controlled the other exercises (see here), but that’s a separate point. Here Jacobs appears to be saying that Tripod II had created a duplicate control centre by 9/11 so it was all ready to go. Unfortunately, that isn’t true: Jacobs is happy to use Giuliani’s confirmation of the Tripod exercise, but inexplicably ignores this part of the same testimony:

We then arrived at the police academy and set up a command center at the police academy. And the command center at the police academy was complete with everything that we needed -- all of the facilities -- and were able to have a press conference there about 2:30 in the afternoon in which we could explain to people how the whole thing would be managed from there on in.

Our number two backup command center would have been the police department. Seven World Trade Center was the primary one. The backup was the police academy. The number three would have been MetroTech in Brooklyn, which is fully equipped to be a command center.

We made the decision to use the policy academy because we didn't want to leave this island. We didn't want to leave Manhattan. We thought it would be a terrible statement if the city government left the island of Manhattan. But then we realized pretty shortly that the police academy was too small, and we selected Pier 92 as our command center.

And the reason Pier 92 was selected as the command center was because on the next day, on September 12, Pier 92 was going to have a drill. It had hundreds of people here from FEMA, from the federal government, from the state, from the State Emergency Management Office, and they were getting ready for a drill for a biochemical attack. So that was going to be the place they were going to have the drill.

The equipment was already there. So we were able to establish a command center there within three days that was two and a half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center. And it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed.
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0405/19/se.01.html

First, Tripod did not “set up a command and control centre on 9/11”: it didn’t appear until two to three days later.

And second, they had two other command and control centre options anyway. Giuliani points out that they were “too small”, but presumably if Tripod II hadn’t been running then the sole complication is that they’d have had to wait perhaps an extra 2 or 3 days for a large command and control centre to be working. How did saving this time benefit the supposed conspirators to the degree that they’d set up an entire exercise to ensure it happened? Makes very little sense to us.
 

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