9/11 Inquiry

Bin Laden died in December 2001

2008-11-19T08:22:00.000-08:00

Have you ever thought that we really don't want to find Bin Ladin? Or if he is dead, the U.S. doesn't want that known?
According to this, there is a documentary that proves the first theme.
Peace and good,
Sam
from: http://www.juancole.com/2008/11/afghan-article-says-us-bin-ladin-hunt.html
Informed Comment
Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

At 3:32 PM, Anonymous said...

Bin Laden is dead. he has not been seen or spoken to since late 2001:

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/osama_dead.html

Webstie What Really Happened.com wrote:

Bin Laden's voice was detected regularly until [14 December 2001] by intelligence operatives monitoring radio transmissions in Tora Bora, according to the Pentagon [details]. Since then, nothing has been heard from the al-Qa'eda leader and President Bush has hinted in private that bin Laden's silence could mean he has been killed. [Telegraph, 12/28/2001]
Osama bin Laden:
A dead nemesis perpetuated by the US government

Osama bin Laden is dead. The news first came from sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan almost six months ago: the fugitive died in December [2001] and was buried in the mountains of southeast Afghanistan. Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, echoed the information. The remnants of Osama's gang, however, have mostly stayed silent, either to keep Osama's ghost alive or because they have no means of communication.
With an ego the size of Mount Everest, Osama bin Laden would not have, could not have, remained silent for so long if he were still alive. He always liked to take credit even for things he had nothing to do with. Would he remain silent for nine months and not trumpet his own survival? [New York Times. July 11, 2002]
Bin Laden has often been reported to be in poor health. Some accounts claim that he is suffering from Hepatitis C, and can expect to live for only two more years. According to Le Figaro, last year [2000] he ordered a mobile dialysis machine to be delivered to his base at Kandahar in Afghanistan. [Guardian]

Peter Bergen: Bin Laden has aged 'enormously'

This is a man who was clearly not well. I mean, as you see from these pictures here, he's really, by December [2001] he's looking pretty terrible.

Bin Laden December 27, 2001 video

Healthy bin Laden

But by December, of course, that tape that was aired then, he's barely moving the left side of his body. So he's clearly got diabetes. He has low blood pressure. He's got a wound in his foot. He's apparently got dialysis ... for kidney problems. [CNN]

The [December 27, 2001 video] was dismissed by the Bush administration ... as sick propaganda possibly designed to mask the fact the al-Qa'eda leader was already dead. "He could have made the video and then ordered that it be released in the event of his death," said one White House aide. [Telegraph]
Pakistan's Musharraf: Bin Laden probably dead

Pakistan's president says he thinks Osama bin Laden is most likely dead because the suspected terrorist has been unable to get treatment for his kidney disease.

[A Bush administration official] said U.S. intelligence is that bin Laden needs dialysis every three days and "it is fairly obvious that that could be an issue when you are running from place to place, and facing the idea of needing to generate electricity in a mountain hideout." [CNN]

Renal dialysis -- talking about hemodialysis -- is something that really is reserved for patients in end-stage renal failure. That means their kidneys have just completely shut down. The most common cause of something like that would be something like diabetes and hypertension. Once that's happened, if you're separated from your dialysis machine -- and incidentally, dialysis machines require electricity, they're going to require clean water, they're going to require a sterile setting -- infection is a huge risk with that. If you don't have all those things and a functioning dialysis machine, it's unlikely that you'd survive beyond several days or a week at the most. [CNN]
Karzai: bin Laden 'probably' dead

Osama bin Laden is "probably" dead, but former Taliban leader Mullah Omar is alive, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said. [CNN]

FBI: Bin Laden 'probably' dead

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation's counter-terrorism chief, Dale Watson, says he thinks Osama bin Laden is "probably" dead. [BBC]

Magazine runs what it calls bin Laden's will

The editor-in-chief of a London-based Arab news magazine said a purported will it published Saturday was written late last year [2001] by Osama bin Laden, and shows "he's dying or he's going to die soon." [CNN]

Usama bin Laden has died a peaceful death due to an untreated lung complication, the Pakistan Observer reported, citing a Taliban leader who allegedly attended the funeral of the Al Qaeda leader. "The Coalition troops are engaged in a mad search operation but they would never be able to fulfill their cherished goal of getting Usama alive or dead," the source said. [FOX News]

Translation of Funeral Article in Egyptian Paper:
al-Wafd, Wednesday, December 26, 2001 Vol 15 No 4633

News of Bin Laden's Death and Funeral 10 days ago

A prominent official in the Afghan Taleban movement announced yesterday the death of Osama bin Laden, the chief of al-Qa'da organization, stating that binLaden suffered serious complications in the lungs and died a natural and quiet death. [Welfare State]

Osama bin who?

Israel does not view bin Laden as a threat. [Janes]

Israeli intelligence: Bin Laden is dead, heir has been chosen

Israeli sources said Israel and the United States assess that Bin Laden probably died in the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan in December. They said the emergence of new messages by Bin Laden are probably fabrications, Middle East Newsline reported. [World Tribune]

[See also The Fake bin Laden Audio Tape]

[See also Benazir Bhutto says Osama is dead.]

When you hear a threat which is "probably" made by bin Laden, just remember that he's "probably" dead.
Also think about who benefits from your believing he's alive.

The US Government Connection to forged documents and to 9/11

2008-09-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

An Anonymous Blogger who calls herself George Washington (see below) makes the connection from forged and backdated documents to US Government involvement in 9/11. --RB

Bestselling journalist Ron Suskind has revealed that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 . . . and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq.
Suskind also revealed that "Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official 'that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.' ”
This is a stunning revelation in its own right. But what does it say about the government's claims that 9/11 was an attack by Muslim extremists which the U.S. government could not have anticipated?
Well, if the White House ordered the CIA to forge documents falsely implicating the people against which they wanted to wage war (Iraqis), and falsely linking supposed Al Qaeda terrorists with someone they had no connection with (Saddam Hussein), is it possible that a similar thing occurred as to who carried out 9/11?
Let's take a look:
- The flight manuals and other evidence supposedly "accidentally" left behind by the terrorists were in fact planted. For example, the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam wrote:
"Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists' identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, 'Whatever trail was left was left deliberately — for the F.B.I. to chase'"
- The top expert on Osama Bin Laden has said that Bin Laden's "confession" video is fake (and see this statement by a video expert )
And imagine if a piece of evidence could not be authenticated according to basic science. For example, let's say an apparent confession note was found at an arson crime scene where the entire building had been turned to fine ash particles and nothing else survived. That would raise suspicions, right?
Well, a passport from one of the alleged hijackers was "found" a couple of blocks from the Twin Towers. And yet the government claims that the areas inside the Twin Towers where planes crashed were infernos so hot that they caused the collapse of the massive steel cores in the center of the towers. Indeed, the passport-owner's hijacked plane was allegedly almost completely lodged in the building's core. How could the passport have survived and ended up a couple of blocks away?
And if the above-described documents were in fact forged, isn't that strong evidence that elements of the U.S. government actually aided and abetted the 9/11 attack? For example, the "initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists' identities and preparations, such as flight manuals", had to have been planted before or immediately after the 9/11 attacks?
For those still skeptical about the possibility that the government intentionally created false evidence, please remember that Norad intentionally lied about what happened on 9/11; indeed, the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements (free subscription required).
And remember that the government intentionally and falsely linked Muslims with the anthrax attacks, when it was obvious that the attacks came from white Americans.
At the very least, isn't it likely that the White House instructed the intelligence agencies and the 9/11 Commission to ignore any evidence which contradicted the narrative that would justify wars in the Middle East (euphemistically called "the war on terror") - that 9/11 was carried out solely by Arabs?
In connection with Iraq, Suskind writes that "the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official 'that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.'” And an ex-CIA official confirms that evidence that there were no WMDs in Iraq was ignored.
In connection with 9/11 itself, obstruction of an accurate assessment is equally clear. -- George Washington

George Washington is a pen name. I am using the pen name, with the approval of the publisher, because I have received death threats due to my 9/11 research and writing. I am using a pen name to protect myself and my family.

David Ray Griffin revisits his classic The New Pearl Harbor

2008-09-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé
David Ray Griffin

“Citizens in many countries are waging a war on the cover-up of the basis for the so-called war on terror---this basis being the official interpretation of the 9/11 attacks. Along with the Internet, which has equipped both public figures and ordinary citizens to wage this war on the cover-up, David Ray Griffin has revealed dozens of omissions, distortions, and contradictions in the official story in a way that provides undeniable evidence of its falsity. The New Pearl Harbor Revisited presents a powerful exposé of the false narrative that has been driving the mainstream political agenda since 9/11. It is now up to politicians and journalists around the world to expose this truth to our peoples.”---Yukihisa Fujita, member of the House of Councilors, the Diet of Japan

“With this work, Dr. Griffin cements his place as the preeminent spokesperson for the growing number of people who demand answers to an expanding list of questions about 9/11. . . . Even those members of the 9/11 Truth Movement who have immersed themselves thoroughly in the subject will find new information here, presented in the precise and very readable style Dr. Griffin has brought to each of his books. . . . Absent a revival of investigative journalism---a dim prospect at best, in view of the media ownership concentration---books like this one, arming the informed citizen with solid information and providing a basis for demanding direct action, appear to be our best hope.”---Shelton F. Lankford, Lt. Col. US Marine Corps (Ret.)

“In The New Pearl Harbor, Dr. Griffin raised serious questions about the destruction of the World Trade Center---the part of the official conspiracy theory about 9/11 with which I have been especially concerned. Now, in The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, he continues to pierce the heart of the official story with his signature penetrating research, this time sharpened with arguments provided by physical scientists, architects, and engineers. He definitely delivers the technical goods. Message to authors of the NIST Report: The charade is over!”---Richard Gage, member of American Institute of Architects, founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

PUBLISHER'S BOOK DESCRIPTION
In 2004, David Ray Griffin published The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11. Translated into several languages, it helped spark a worldwide movement demanding “9/11 truth.” Even as it became increasingly outdated, it continued to be widely cited as the best introduction to the issues.

Griffin has now written The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, which provides a chapter-by-chapter updating of the information provided in that earlier book. It shows that the case against the official account constructed by independent researchers---who now include architects, engineers, physicists, pilots, politicians, and former military officers---is far stronger than it was in 2004, leaving no doubt that 9/11 was a false-flag operation, designed to give the Bush-Cheney administration a pretext to attack oil-rich Muslim nations.

Taken together, these two books provide everything one needs to make an informed decision about 9/11---whether one is a journalist, a political leader, a religious leader, or an ordinary citizen concerned about truth, democracy, and the rule of law.

MORE ENDORSEMENTS

"David Ray Griffin stands at the center of one of the most impressive citizen research projects in history. In this superb new volume, he draws together a great quantity of recent evidence and demonstrates
beyond question the fraudulent nature of the official account of 9/11."---Dr. Graeme MacQueen, Founder of McMaster University's Center for Peace Studies

“Nowhere is it clearer that truth is now considered quaint, obsolete here in Washington, than in the disingenuous non-answers to questions about the cavernous holes in the official version of 9/11—-and the flippant attempts to marginalize intrepid souls like David Ray Griffin, branded “blasphemous” by the likes of Tucker Carlson. Facing straight into this rancid wind, Griffin now provides a definitive account that updates and integrates his earlier findings. Will Congress ever authorize an honest investigation of the seminal event of our time?”---Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and presidential briefer

“President Bush and Vice President Cheney have many questions to answer in light of this book. This time they should have to testify separately and under oath. Unlike their testimony at the 9/11 Commission, behind closed doors, this should be open testimony.”---Jesse Ventura, Governor of Minnesota, 1999-2003

“This latest book by David Ray Griffin is scholarly research at its best. Meticulous empirical investigation and painstaking analysis are combined to refute the official 9/11 narrative. Every event surrounding the tragic events of September 11, 2001, is subjected to close scrutiny, ultimately with a view to revealing the lies and upholding the truth. In this fascinating and skillfully researched exposé, Griffin demonstrates unequivocally that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.”---Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics and author of America’s War on Terrorism

BOOK'S OUTLINE
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
1. Flight 11, Flight 175, and the World Trade Center: New Developments
2. Flight 77 and the Pentagon: New Developments
3. Flight 93: Additional Evidence against the Official Story
4. Bush at the School in Sarasota: Cover-Up Attempts
5. Evidence of Advance Information: The 9/11 Commission’s Treatment
6. Continuing Obstructions and New Doubts about Hijackers
7. Motives of US Officials: The Silence of the 9/11 Commission
8. 9/11 Commission Falsehoods about Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Pakistanis, and Saudis
9. Complicity by US Officials: A Summary of the Evidence
10. New Revelations about the 9/11 Commission and the Strengthened Case for a New Investigation
Notes
Index

MORE ENDORSEMENTS
“You and I, along with all citizens of the world, are victims of a heinous crime. The conspiracy that generated the Twin Tower photo-op, blamed the 9/11 attacks on Arab Muslims, and misdirected truth-seekers by destruction of evidence and willful misrepresentation is masterfully exposed in this book. Who had the motive, means and opportunity to demolish three skyscrapers, including Building 7, which was not even attacked by a mere airplane? Who could penetrate the Earth’s most heavily defended air space and fortress—-the Pentagon? What was their motive? Greed to concentrate power, to control access to the last drop of Gaia's reserve hydrocarbon energy? But, alas, who thinks of our children? David Ray Griffin, apolitical scholar and theologian, was transformed by the coup d'etat into a superb scientist-journalist. By documenting the tragic 9/11 crime, this consummate educator has done us victims a profound service.”–-Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and National Medal of Science recipient

“Circuses use people to clean up their elephants---a dirty job, but someone has to do it. The 9/11 Commissioners evidently likened themselves to circus workers, cleaning up after the (Republican) elephant. They did a very sloppy job, making it easy to see that 9/11 was an inside job. The contrary view---that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by Arab Muslims---has been the source of innumerable evils, which threaten to destroy our country and the world itself. David Griffin’s New Pearl Harbor Revisited contains everything needed by Congress and the press to see through the most massive crime and cover-up in our history.”---Edward Asner, actor and citizen

“David Ray Griffin has again painstakingly laid bare the many lingering questions and inconsistencies of the official story regarding the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001. Sadly, millions of taxpayer dollars have been squandered on investigations that yielded no accountability, few answers, and fewer reforms. Yet, the attacks of September 11, 2001 have been wantonly used as political and policy fodder. Without truth, there can be no accountability. Without accountability, there can be no real change. Without change, we remain at risk.”---Monica Gabrielle, widow of Richard Gabrielle, who was killed at WTC2 on 9/11/01, and member of the Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission

ORDERING INFORMATION
The New Pearl Harbor Revisited can be purchased for $20 at bookstores or Interlink Books (1-800-238-LINK) or for $13.60 at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/New-Pearl-Harbor-Revisited-Cover-Up/dp/1566567297/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220620840&sr=1-6). It should be available at Amazon by September 11.

--------
PLEASE FORWARD

911 Feature Film: The Reflecting Pool: Trailer, Synopsis; NYC Schedule July 2008

2008-07-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

The NYT trashed it, so maybe it's struck a nerve. --RB

An open letter by the writer/director to Nathan Lee, the NY Times movie critic of “The Reflecting Pool.” (includes a link to the Times review and to several comments about
http://911blogger.com/node/16607

Here's the trailer. Looks interesting.
http://www.reflectingpoolfilm.com/reflectingpooltrailer.htm

SYNOPSIS
(by ReflectingPool.com)
An investigation of the 9/11 events by a Russian-American journalist and a father of a 9/11 victim implicates the US government in the attacks.

ALEX PROKOP (Jarek Kupsc), a successful journalist, receives a rare 9/11 video tape revealing new information about the attack. The footage was sent by PAUL COOPER (Joseph Culp), a driven researcher, whose daughter died on 9/11. Sensing a good story, Prokop travels with Cooper to New York and Washington, DC, where they uncover suppressed information implicating the US Government in the attacks. As Cooper introduces Prokop to key eye-witnesses, the façade of the "official story" begins to crumble. Prokop hears accounts of underground explosions in the Twin Towers moments before their collapse and discovers that the firm providing WTC security was run by the President's brother.

We follow Alex and Cooper as they investigate the inexplicable collapse of the 47-story WTC Building Seven, disprove the implausible airliner "attack" on the Pentagon, and uncover the illegal destruction of physical evidence from Ground Zero.

The pressure builds as the FBI intimidates Alex's editor, McGUIRE, (Lisa Black) to reveal key sources – while the magazine's corporate investors threaten to kill the entire story. Plagued by the ghosts of his Communist childhood and trying to uphold the independence of American journalism, Alex's search for the truth leads to a dangerous and shocking realization!

THE REFLECTING POOL is an intense, sobering investigation into the most controversial tragedy of our time. Drawn from established sources and based on verifiable facts, THE REFLECTING POOL is a thought-provoking study of a search for truth and the profound consequences of not looking for it any further than the nightly news.
***
JULY 11-16 & 18 (7pm & 9pm)
NEW YORK CITY

Pioneer Theater
155 East 3rd St
New York, NY
(212) 591-0434

No shows on Thursday July 17. Filmmakers will attend for Q & A! For more information:
www.twoboots.com/pioneer

David Ray Griffin: Mohamed Atta's Mitsubishi and His Luggage

2008-05-10T19:53:00.000-07:00

9/11 Contradictions: Mohamed Atta’s Mitsubishi and His Luggage

by Prof. David Ray Griffin
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8937

Global Research, May 9, 2008
The Canadian

At the core of the official story about 9/11 is the claim that the four airliners that crashed that day had been taken over by a band of al-Qaeda hijackers led by Mohamed Atta. No proof was ever provided for this claim. But various kinds of evidence have been offered, the most important of which was reportedly found in Atta’s luggage after the attacks. The materials in this luggage were said to confirm the suspicion that the planes had been hijacked by Atta and fellow Muslims. As Joel Achenbach wrote in a Washington Post story on September 16, 2001:

Atta is thought to have piloted American Airlines Flight 11, the first to slam into the World Trade Center. A letter written by Atta, left in his luggage at Boston's Logan Airport, said he planned to kill himself so he could go to heaven as a martyr. It also contained a Saudi passport, an international driver's license, instructional videos for flying Boeing airliners and an Islamic prayer schedule. (“’You Never Imagine’ A Hijacker Next Door.”)

This discovery was clearly very helpful in making the case against Atta and al-Qaeda.

But why was Atta’s luggage there to be discovered? Achenbach said: “Officials believe that Atta and [Abdul] Alomari rented a car in Boston, drove to Portland, Maine, and took a room Monday night at the Comfort Inn . . . . They then flew on a short flight Tuesday morning from Portland to Boston, changing to Flight 11.”

But why did Atta’s luggage not make it on to Flight 11? A 9/11 staff statement suggested that it was a tight connection, saying: “The Portland detour almost prevented Atta and Omari from making Flight 11 out of Boston. In fact, the luggage they checked in Portland failed to make it onto the plane” (Staff Statement No. 16, June 16, 2004). When The 9/11 Commission Report appeared the following month, however, this suggestion was missing. Indeed, the Commission, after saying that “Atta and Omari arrived in Boston at 6:45,” added that “American Airlines Flight 11 [was] scheduled to depart at 7:45” (9/11 Commission Report [henceforth 9/11CR], 1-2).

If there was almost an hour for the luggage to be transferred, why was it left behind? We might suppose that the ground crew was careless. American Airlines reported, however, that “Atta was the only passenger among the 81 aboard American Flight 11 whose luggage didn't make the flight” (Paul Sperry, WorldNetDaily.com, September 11, 2002).

There was, moreover, even a bigger mystery: Why did Atta, if he was already in Boston on September 10, take the trip to Portland and stay overnight, thereby necessitating the early morning commuter flight? If the commuter flight had been delayed by an hour, Atta and al-Omari would have missed the connection. There would have been only three hijackers to take control of Flight 11. Atta, moreover, was reportedly the designated pilot for this flight and also the ringleader of the whole operation, which, after years of planning, he might have had to call off.

Why he would have made such a risky trip has never been explained. A year after the attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller, testifying to the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, said:

[T]he day before the attacks, Mohamed Atta . . . picked up Abdul Aziz . . . and drove to Portland, Maine. They checked into the Comfort Inn in South Portland. . . . [T]heir reason for going there, to date, remains unclear. (“Statement for the Record,” Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry, Sept. 26, 2002)

Two years later, the 9/11 Commission wrote: “No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides a convincing explanation of why Atta and Omari drove to Portland, Maine, from Boston on the morning of September 10, only to return to Logan on Flight 5930 on the morning of September 11” (9/11CR 451n1).

We have, therefore, two mysteries. Why would Atta have risked the trip to Portland? And why did his luggage fail to get loaded onto Flight 11? My book, 9/11 Contradictions, is about contradictions, not mysteries. Clues to these mysteries, however, can be found by exploring a full-fledged contradiction: the fact that the Atta-to-Portland story contradicts stories that appeared in the press in the first days after 9/11.
The Original Story: Boston and the Bukharis

According to the official account, as we have seen, Atta drove to Portland in a blue Nissan Altima, then flew on the morning of September 11 from Portland to the Boston airport, where the incriminating materials were found in his luggage later that day. In the first few days after 9/11, however, the story was very different.

On September 12, a CNN report distinguished between Atta and the men who flew from Portland to Boston.

Law enforcement sources say that two of the suspected hijackers . . . are brothers that lived [in Vero Beach, Florida]. . . . One of them is Adnan Bukhari. We have a photograph of him. . . . Also living in Vero Beach, Bukhari's brother, Ameer. . . . Law enforcement sources . . . tell CNN that the Bukhari brothers were believed to have been on one of the two flights out of Boston . . . . Also we can report to you that a car impounded in Portland, Maine, according to law enforcement authorities, was rented at Boston Logan Airport and driven to Portland, Maine. Now the Maine state police confirm that two of the suspected hijackers were on a U.S. Air flight out of [the Portland airport.]. . . The FBI is also looking at two more suspected hijackers . . . , Mohammad Atta and Marwan Yusef Alshehhi.” (“America Under Attack: How Could It Happen?” Although the reporter, Susan Candiotti, said “Logan Airport,” the information she received had to have referred to the Portland airport, from which the U.S. Airways flight originated, and about which the Maine state police would have had information.)

Another CNN report that same day stated that the incriminating materials were found in a car at the Boston airport and, while discussing the Nissan found at the Portland airport, did not connect it to Atta:

Law enforcement officials confirmed that a car was seized at Boston's Logan International Airport and that suspicious materials were found. The Boston Herald said there were Arabic language flight training manuals in the car. . . . Meanwhile, in Portland, Maine, police said that two individuals who traveled by plane from that city to Boston were under investigation. . . . Maine authorities said a car---a rented silver Nissan Altima with Massachusetts plates---was seized from the Portland airport Tuesday evening. (“US Says It Has Identified Hijackers”)

On the next day, September 13, CNN named the Bukharis as the renters of the Nissan and said that the car found at Boston, now identified as a Mitsubishi, was rented by Atta:

"Two of the men were brothers, . . . Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Abbas Bukhari. . . . The two rented a car, a silver-blue Nissan Altima, from an Alamo car rental at Boston's Logan Airport and drove to an airport in Portland, Maine, where they got on US Airways Flight 5930 at 6 AM Tuesday headed back to Boston. . . . A Mitsubishi sedan impounded at Logan Airport was rented by [Mohamed] Atta, sources said. The car contained materials, including flight manuals, written in Arabic that law enforcement sources called “helpful” to the investigation." (“Two Brothers among Hijackers”)

Another CNN report that same day said that law enforcement authorities were led to the Bukhari brothers by documents connected to the Nissan (“Hijack Suspect Detained, Cooperating with FBI”).

A Problem Emerges

However, that same day (September 13), CNN issued a correction (“Feds Think They’ve Identified Some Hijackers”), pointing out that neither of the Bukharis had died on 9/11: Ameer had died the year before and Adnan was still alive. CNN apologized for the “misinformation,” which had been “[b]ased on information from multiple law enforcement sources.”

However, this discovery did not immediately lead to a complete change of story. For example, the next day (September 14), CNN said: “A Mitsubishi sedan [Atta] rented was found at Boston's Logan Airport. Arabic language materials were found in the car” (Mike Fish, “Fla. Flight Schools May Have Trained Hijackers”).

The Emergence of the Final Story

That same day, however, the story began to change more drastically. An Associated Press report, referring to “two suspects in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center,” said:

One of the two suspects who boarded a flight in Portland was Mohamed Atta, 33. . . . The 2001 Nissan Altima used by the men came from the same Boston rental location as another car used by additional suspects that contained incriminating materials when it was seized at Boston's Logan Airport.

Once in Maine, the suspects spent the night at the Comfort Inn in South Portland before boarding the plane the next morning. (“Portland Police Eye Local Ties”)

Suddenly, the Nissan Altima had been driven to Portland by Atta and his companion, who had then flown back to Boston the next morning. But the transition to what would become the accepted narrative was not yet complete. The incriminating materials were still found in a rental car left at Logan---although this car was now said to have been rented by unnamed “additional suspects,” not by Atta.

The complete transition was made on September 16, in the aforementioned Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach, which had the incriminating evidence found in Atta’s luggage.

This new story was soon fleshed out with various details, including physical evidence that Atta and al-Omari had been in Portland the night before the attacks. One article said:

The FBI released a detailed chronology Thursday [October 4] showing that two of the suspected hijackers in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center spent their final hours in Greater Portland. . . . After checking in at the motel, Atta and Alomari were seen . . . [b]etween 8 and 9 PM . . . at Pizza Hut; at 8:31 PM, they were videotaped by a KeyBank automatic teller machine, and videotaped again at 8:41 PM at a Fast Green ATM next to Pizzeria Uno. . . . At . . . 9:22 PM, Atta was caught on videotape in the Wal-Mart in Scarborough. (“The Night Before Terror,” Portland Press Herald, October 5, 2001)
The Mysteries and the Contradiction

This new story solved a problem created by the discovery that the Bukharis had not died on 9/11---how to explain why a rental car left at the Portland airport could have led authorities to two of the hijackers. This solution, however, created the mystery of why Atta would have taken this trip plus the problem of explaining the well-reported fact that incriminating materials had been found at Logan Airport. This latter problem was solved by saying that they were found in Atta’s luggage, which did not make it onto Flight 11. But this solution created, in turn, the mystery as to why Atta’s luggage failed to make the flight. The main problem facing the new story, however, is simply the fact that it is a new story, which radically contradicts what the authorities had said the first few days.

The 9/11 Commission dealt with this contradiction by simply ignoring it. It did not mention the early reports that the Nissan left at the Portland airport had documents leading the FBI to Adnan and Ameer Bukhari, that the Bukharis had taken the early morning flight from Portland to Boston, that the FBI was led to Atta (along with Marwan al-Shehhi) by information found in a Mitsubishi left at Boston’s Logan Airport, or that this Mitsubishi was where the treasure trove of information was found. It instead simply told the new story as if it had been the story all along.

Congress and the press need to ask why this contradiction exists and why the 9/11 Commission ignored it. This essay is an abbreviated version of Chapter 16 of Dr. Griffin's 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, March, 2008).

Global Research Articles by David Ray Griffin

Bleier: Intro to Morgan Reynolds on No planes on 911

2006-03-13T09:28:00.000-08:00

9/11: Plane huggers vs. no planers:
An introductory note to an article by Morgan Reynolds
by Ronald Bleier
March 2006

For those still grappling with which of the three main versions of what really happened on 9/11, the U.S. government’s official version, or the LIHOP or MIHOP versions,(1) you may be better advised to file this post in the appropriate place unless and until you become convinced that the U.S. government planned and executed the terror attacks of that day (MIHOP).

Advocates of MIHOP may feel that Morgan Reynolds’s (2)article on the subject serves as an excellent introduction to evidence suggesting that no civilian jetliners were involved in the 9/11 terror attacks.

I suspect that many will be put off by the counterintuitive nature of the no planes theory, since “we all saw” a plane going into the South Tower on TV in real time.(3) Yes, I know, the no planes thesis may at first be hard to accept. However, once one begins looking at some of the evidence as presented by Morgan Reynolds, and before him, Gerard Holmgren (4) and Rosalee Grable (5)and others, I think many will agree that the evidence doesn’t support the use of planes.

Because the no planes theory is so counterintuitive, few established 9/11 researchers are eager to take up the inquiry despite its plausibility. As an independent researcher with little at stake, it is relatively easy for me to follow the no planes evidence where it leads, especially as it begins to seem the most persuasive and the one most in conformity with Occam’s Razor.

It’s disturbing but not surprising that MIHOP plane huggers, like Jim Hoffman, use their often well-deserved reputations to attack advocates of the no planes thesis with harsh and sometimes ad hominem attacks. Some make no bones about suggesting that their motives are to disassociate themselves from theories that they consider likely to put off potential converts to 9/11 inquiry.

The irony is that many 9/11 researchers have in the past decried the unwillingness of proponents of the official theory to look calmly and carefully at the evidence that has already been uncovered. And yet, when it comes to the no planes theory some “establishment” researchers are similarly loath to directly address the evidence.

If you’re like me, and you look forward to finding out the truth about 9/11 for its own sake and for what it tells us about the Bush administration, about the U.S. government and the media, about the world’s intelligence services and security agencies, about the history of the 20th and 21st century, you’ll be delighted with this brilliant article by Morgan Reynolds.
***
It’s not my purpose here to summarize Morgan Reynolds’s key arguments, but I can’t resist highlighting one of his smoking guns that should be easy for many to visualize.

Reynolds asks the simple question: What happened to the wreckage of the two jetliners that supposedly crashed into the North and South WTC towers? There’s no independent evidence on video or in still photographs, much less in evidence presented by the government, of wreckage consistent with Boeing 767s. If the jetliners flew into the Towers they should have struck some of their 47 core columns. In that case the tails and parts of their fuselages should have remained stuck outside of the buildings or fallen to the ground for all to see and photograph. Needless to say, no such evidence has ever been presented.

Under the circumstances, the government’s production of Mohammed Atta’s undamaged passport is ludicrous, and is as damaging to their case as is anything else.
***

Here is a link to Morgan Reynolds’s important article.
(An alternate title for his article might be: The case against the use of jetliners in the 9/11 attacks)

Morgan Reynolds: We Have Some Holes in the Plane Stories
http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911&subpage1=we_have_holes

1. LIHOP = Let it Happen On Purpose; MIHOP = Made it Happen on Purpose
2. Reynolds is a member of the National Center for Policy Analysis. See his bio on: http://www.ncpa.org/~ncpa/about/Morgan.html
3. Even as one writes such a phrase – “we all saw the plane crashing into the South Tower in real time,” we recognize that it raises questions. For example: how did it happen that camera crews were ready to film the second plane coming into the Tower when all eyes were on the North Tower which had been struck less than 20 minutes earlier.
4. (http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/noplanework.html)
5. (http://thewebfairy.com/911 http://missilegate.com)

Xymphora update on London Bombings

2006-01-30T12:40:00.000-08:00

Xmymphora's update on London Bombings
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
Sunday, January 29, 2006

London bombers not terrorists

MI5 has spent months investigating the July 7 London bombing, and has not been able to find any connection between the bombers and Islamic terrorism. No big surprise, considering that they were almost certainly tricked into thinking they were drug mules, and had no intention of blowing up anything (drug dealing pays well). I am a bit surprised that MI5 hasn't been able to make up a story by now. Could the leaking of this MI5 report be an indication that there is some dissent in the British ruling class to framing the incident on Islamic terrorism?

Exchange: 9/11, WTC Collapse, Israel's involvement, science and logic, etc.

2006-01-29T09:33:00.000-08:00

The following is an edited transcript of a recent thread mostly by myself, Albert (not his real name), Jeff and Gerard having to do pretty much with 9/11 and terrorism. The discussion began when I circulated a blog entry by Kurt Nimmo, on the conveniently resurrected Osama Bin Laden in January 2006.

Nimmo has been criticized, rightly I believe, for stating certain events as fact, thinly supported by documentation. Nevertheless, I generally find him on target, especially when it comes to skepticism about the official story regarding the “war on terror.” story. I suspect many would agree that it’s a phony war, unless it’s viewed as a war by the U.S. government on our democratic institutions and a means of intimidating the masses.

In my header I mentioned the myths regarding Bin Laden and 9/11.

Ronald wrote:
It looks like it's just as hard to get through to people that Osama is dead as is the notion that 9/11 was an inside job. Or maybe the Osama myth is a little easier for folks to crack. But even if we had a majority on our side, and we're nowhere near that, it wouldn't matter unless we had institutions that could enforce accountability. Since we don't it's called fascism.
--Ronald

P.S. The way I read him, Nimmo isn't saying that Osama is dead: he's saying that there's a barrelful of evidence to point to it, and readers should check out the evidence for themselves. See the link: before he died

> Kurt Nimmo wrote:
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=195
> Phantom Osama Groomed for a Return
> Thursday January 19th 2006, 7:59 pm
>
> After a long and suspicious hiatus, Osama bin
> Laden has resurfaced with new threats against
> the Great Satan. Naturally, as with previous
> visages of Osama-the fat Osama, the Osama who
> does not look like previous Osamas, the nose
> job Osama, etc.-the latest incarnation of Osama
> was vetted by the CIA, the spook agency
> responsible for promoting the original Osama's
> illustrious career, that is before he died of
> kidney failure in December, 2001. "In the tape,
> bin Laden said he was directing his message to
> the American people after polls showed that 'an
> overwhelming majority of you want the
> withdrawal of American troops from Iraq but
> (Bush) opposed that desire,'" reports
> al-Jazeera.
>
> snip]

Albert responded: essentially arguing that he believed Osama might be alive and that critics of the 9/11 official story skeptics were underrating Arab anger and their ability to strike Western targets.

Albert wrote:

I think this is honestly one of the worst thought out conspiracy theories I have read in quite a long time. It begins with the premise that 9/11 was an inside job and deductively concludes that OBL is dead. By extension the conclusion is that
OBL being alive is more useful for the Empire
than he being dead. I fundamentally object to
this conclusion for the following reasons:

1) OBL's last several public pronouncements have
not been directed toward the US government, they
have been directed towards people in the West,
whether it be the current address and the
election address directed at Americans or the
other one (I call it the Swedes address) directed
at Europeans.

2) In all cases, the corporate media has
portrayed the addresses as OBL asking for a
truce, meaning attempting to negotiate a truce
with governments, when that was clearly not his
intention. In other words the corporate media is
purposely obfuscating this to save face for
western governments, whom have clearly failed in
their efforts to not only capture him and his
staff, but also in imposing their will on the
rest of the Arab and Muslim population. His
intention was fairly clear and consistent with
his prior addresses, namely that he recognizes
that Western governments define themselves as
democracies, therefore through using this
definition he implicates the peoples of the west
for the actions of their governments. This is
meant to shore up support for his methods in the
only place that matters to him, which is the Arab
or Muslim street.

3) The whole entire framework of this conspiracy
theory, including the 9/11 conspiracy,
understates the sheer antipathy and hatred that
many in the Arab and Muslim world feel towards
the West in general and the US in particular. It
is not a far leap to say that the conspiracy
theory of 9/11 reaffirms the concepts of western
supremacy, that it is impossible for those
primitive Arabs to pass easily through our
defenses. The conspiracy theory OBL's death
continues in the same vein, where OBL is the
Orientalist caricature of eastern power- the evil
vizier who is primitive and isolated (cave
dweller).

Albert

I responded and introduced the question of how the WTC Towers came down

Ronald wrote:

It's one thing to say that there is tremendous and justified anger and rage in the Muslim world, and quite another to look at evidence for:

a. 9/11 as an inside job
b. Osama's death

The three are not of course mutually exclusive. One way I like to start conversations about 9/11 as an inside job is to ask my interlocutor how he/she thinks the 3 towers came down. And then to explain that fire doesn't bring steel framed buildings down in any shape, manner or form, and certainly not in their own footprints and not at the speed of gravity. Only controlled demolitions do that. In that case, Osama didn't have the means. So we must look elsewhere.

As far as Osama dead or alive, I can only repeat what I emphasized below: let's look at the circumstantial evidence and decide for ourselves.

To the further point, about the Muslim world capable of the kind of 9/11 and London and Madrid and Oklahoma City, etc terror attacks, one can say quickly that whether Muslims are capable or not, the history of all these events reveals links between the patsies and elements of government security agencies, which is always one of the key red flags. So once again, it's a matter of judgment and discrimination, and investigation, trying to find the most likely perpetrators.

Ronald

Jeff responded asking for evidence about London and Madrid

Now you're dragging in London and Madrid? What's your evidence? I mean REAL evidence. As far as the explosives in the WTC go, who placed them there in 1993?

Jeff

I responded with a little on Madrid
Ronald wrote:
As far as REAL evidence, I confess that I haven't done much work on Madrid, but it falls into a pattern. Thus when I heard -- mostly from Ralph Schoenman -- that there were connections between the suspects and elements of government security agencies, I found it plausible that it was another inside job. It's not that Muslims aren't capable, it's that they simply haven't been engaging in these terror attacks apart from government security agencies.
You're probably familiar with Operation Gladio where NATO (read US) forces in Europe planned and executed false flag operations particularly in Italy to prevent the Communists from gaining power. Here's an excerpt from Prison Planet, followed by one citation from another website regarding Madrid.
Ronald
***
Operation Gladio from Prison Planet
Originally set up as a network of clandestine cells to be activated behind the lines in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, Gladio quickly expanded into a tool for political repression and manipulation, directed by NATO and Washington. Using right-wing militias, underworld figures, government provocateurs and secret military units, Gladio not only carried out widespread terrorism, assassinations and electoral subversion in democratic states such as Italy, France and West Germany, but also bolstered fascist tyrannies in Spain and Portugal, abetted the military coup in Greece and aided Turkey's repression of the Kurds.
Re Madrid
- Train bombings like London 7/7 are a speciality of NATO psy-war units. The expert on this ever since 1978 has been Webster Tarpley, who shows in his latest book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, how the bombing of Bologna Stazione Centrale in 1980 by the so-called Red Brigades is of one cloth with the Madrid bombings. The supposed “communist terrorist” Red Brigades were fakes, a patsy outfit created by Lodge P2, the neofascist shadow government running Italy. Likewise, the suspects in the Madrid train bombing were police agents, run by a neo-fascist falange: as Tarpley notes, one suspect admitted he was working for the old guard of the Guardia Civil Unidad Central Operativa.
Re WTC 93, it’s documented, in the NYT no less, that the FBI was responsible for the 93 WTC explosions. As it happened, an FBI Muslim informant taped conversations he made with his FBI handlers. At one point he upbraided them. “I thought you said that the explosives in the truck were to be fake.” All this came out at the trial, which is why the NYT reported it.
***

Jeff responded
In Italy, it was obvious early on that the Bologna bus bombing was not done by the Red Brigades and that nut case, Webster Tarpley's assertion that the Red Brigades were a fake outfit is equally spurious and that I know for a fact, having lived in Italy and known members of Israel's ultra left which the Red Brigades emerged from. I even had a brief, pleasurable interlude with the ex-girl friend of one of them who had become a junkie after he killed someone in a bank robbery. When I went to Rome and looked her up, it turned out that she, too, had become a junkie.

Frankly, I think there is altogether too much of a tendency in this country, and this country, uniquely, to see all forms of resistance against the state that are outside of "acceptable" norms, as being state-sponsored and other groups are, of course, infiltrated.. Some are, of course, but I have yet to see anything re Madrid or London that proves either event was state-sponsored The accusations that all these acts against states that go beyond peaceful street marches are state -sponsored is the leftist version of the "colonialist mentality.". You should be more careful in what you see as legit and what you circulate on your list.
The FBI infiltrator, an ex-Egyptian officer supplied the explosives and reportedly kept the FBI aware of what he was doing, but he did not organize the group that did or drugged them to make them cooperate. True, the FBI had its reasons for wanting the event to happen, much like 9-11, but they were not the only ones involved. Why must we deny the possibility that people who have legitimate anger against the US may act on it, even if what they do may be horrible and kill innocents?
jeff
Ronald responded to Albert on WTC
Thanks, Albert:

One advantage that 9/11 skeptics have over those who accept the official version is that many like me have viewed video of the towers" collapse dozens and scores of times, often in slow motion. We’re looking again and again at the evidence, and making judgments aided by information that wasn’t available on 9/11.

As we watch we can see evidence of explosions going off, in some cases, floor by floor as the building collapses into its footprint.

Slowing down the tape enables us to see squibs coming out of the buildings in floors below the falling buildings indicative of explosives. We’ve viewed tape of NYC firemen discussing the event describing multiple explosions going off, floor by floor. In one tape they use appropriate hand motions and explicitly say that they heard explosions going off floor by floor and describing the boom, boom, boom, boom, booms that they heard.

Some of us have seen a remarkable video taken from the New Jersey shore where we can make out the sound of explosions and see dust as from explosive charges coming from the bottom of one of the towers before it started to come down from the top.

We’ve also sought out additional information that would shed light on the matter. One recent article that comes to mind is by Stephen E. Jones, a physics professor from Brigham Young University (no less) who has written a persuasive paper. Among his findings, was one that seemed a particularly striking smoking gun. He includes a photo of the South Tower and an explanatory paragraph suggesting that the official theory is in contravention of some of the fundamental laws of physics such as the law of increasing entropy and the law of angular momentum. (Torque is also mentioned but perhaps not in the same context as you suggested.)

This section from his paper might very well be entitled: A BLOCK TURNS TO POWDER IN MID-AIR
(Begin Jones citation)
Those who wish to preserve fundamental physical laws as inviolate may wish to take a closer look. Consider the collapse of the South WTC Tower on 9-11: http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/south_tower_collapse.mpeg
(Photo not available here. See S.E Jones’s article)
Top ~ 34 floors of South Tower topple over.
What happens to the block and its angular momentum?
We observe that approximately 34 upper floors begin to rotate as a block, to the south and east. They begin to topple over, as favored by the Law of Increasing Entropy. The torque due to gravity on this block is enormous, as is its angular momentum. But then – and this I’m still puzzling over – this block turned mostly to powder in mid-air! How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives? Remarkable, amazing – and demanding scrutiny since the US government-funded reports failed to analyze this phenomenon.

(End Jones citation)

Jones’s complete paper can be found at:
http://www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html

For those who wish more information on the collapse of the Towers, a good internet site is the section on 9/11 at whatreallyhappened.com. Here are some of their chapter headings, including one which sheds light on the question of how the terrorists may have managed to set explosives in the heavily populated buildings.

9/11 Security Courtesy of Marvin Bush
Who Told Giuliani the WTC was going to collapse?
The "Truss Theory": A Fantasy Concocted to Conceal a Demolition
The "Truss Theory" is Implausible

Item: Too big to hide
It’s interesting that you fall back on the popular notion that it couldn’t have been an inside job because too many people would have to be involved and there would be too many whistleblowers to silence. But it’s not a question of numbers, but rather who controls the agenda and the media. Plenty of evidence and whistleblowers have come forward in the cases of the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK but to this day, the perpetrators have not been held accountable.

Regarding, 9/11, many whistleblowers have already appeared as has a mountain of evidence contradicting the official story on dozens of aspects of 9/11. One of the most prominent whistleblowers was Colleen Rowley, an FBI agent who was actually named Time’s woman of the year in 2002. She loudly and clearly pointed to apparent malfeasance in high places, and hinted that ultimate responsibility might go even higher. However, since there was no official willingness to prosecute her findings, they were left to dissipate into the marginalized history of past events.

There are many other 9/11 whistleblowers: there’s Willie Rodriguez, the last man to get out of the towers alive who has testified to bombs going off in lower levels of the buildings before the buildings came down. There’s Sibel Edmonds, bound by gag orders, who testified to corruption at the FBI. There are engineers who built the Twin Towers and testified to their strength and redundant safety and structural features. Many more witnesses from mainstream media and other credible sources could be cited.

Ronald
***
Gerard responded to Albert: (He begins by citing a passage from Albert’s argument.)
Albert writes

[[There is a force called
gravity ….The associated falling mass of
the higher floors creates an impulse force on the
lower supports causing them to collapse, adding
greater weight to the falling body. The more
floors that collapse, the faster the floors below
will collapse and the more likely the body will
fall in place.]]

Actually the law of gravity is not what you’ve just stated.

While its true that the greater weight would make each new floor fail more quickly, it makes no difference to the speed of the fall.

Excluding air resistance *all* objects fall at the same speed. 9.81m/sec/sec. The weight makes no difference.
And the law of gravity is the ultimate proof that the towers did not smash through their own structure.

An object dropped from the top of the WTC, excluding air resistance, would hit the ground in 9.2 secs..
The towers actually collapsed in negligibly more time than this. Even the 9/11 commission says 10 secs.
From measurement on the video , I got 11 secs, a figure which was agreed by a documentary called “
How the twin towers fell “ , a doco, which totally supported the official story and didn’t even acknowledge that anyone was suggesting otherwise.

Since the falling rubble smashing through itself would have resistance all the way, its it impossible for it to have fallen at this speed - unless it met almost zero resistance – which proves that the entire structure was suddenly disembodied , while it was still standing.

There is no argument or debate about this. There is such a thing as proof and that is it. Speculations about probable logistics and motives are irrelevant alongside the basic gravitational maths that we have been using since Newton. In fact the principle was worked out earlier by Galileo, when he dropped two cannon balls – one much heavier than then other from a tower, and observed that they hit the ground at the same time. Newton later quantified the universal gravitational force.

Additionally, you can observe from the video that there are huge clouds of dust pouring from the building while it is still standing. This is concrete being ground into fine dust. The combination of this with the time of the fall creates an inescapable paradox for the non demolition theory.

It takes energy to grind concrete into dust. If one is to speculate that this energy is not being supplied by demolition charges or some other kind of demolition technology, but by the collision of falling rubble with still standing building, then you can’t have a collapse in free fall time. Something can’t be smashing into something else with enough force to create dust, and still fall at the same speed as what it would through air. That’s simple conservation of energy. So a non demolition theory might attempt to explain the dust by resistance of the pancaking, but then the theory fails due to the time factor.

On the other hand, if you speculate that somehow, both buildings miraculously failed in symmetrical fashion by coincidence, allowing a non engineered fall without resistance, thus allowing a free fall speed, then there is nothing to create the dust.

Only a controlled demolition explains both. As I said before, this isn’t open to argument. When you find proof you have a right to state it as such.
[Gerard]

Albert responded to Gerard:

Gerard,

What I stated was correct -- and you are correct that what i stated is not a result of the law of gravity alone. It is the result of the law of gravity and Newton's second law. Newton’s second law It is true that objects fall at the same rate independent of mass, when in a vacuum and not subject to a resistant force. But that is not the case here. In this case you have a resistant force which for our purposes we can look at as a spring. The impulse force is directly proportional to the change in mass associated with more floors falling. This force in addition to the gravitational force is what overcomes the resistant force. The greater the impulse portion of the force, the less time it takes to compress the spring.

BTW, If you have an issue with the fact that I have approximated the structural support of a skyscraper using a spring, then take a good look in the mirror. What you will see is that the WTC existed in a vacuum, where explosions are controlled burns, where the building fell its full height (not its rest height-mound), where you cite government investigation findings to justify your belief in a government conspiracy. This discussion is over, except for one last thing.
Albert

Gerard responded to Albert:

What Albert writes above does not answer the proof I supplied. A free fall time means that there was zero resistance. The fact that the resistance at each floor would become less as the fall progressed is meaningless when the time of fall shows that there was no resistance anywhere.

The calculations are easy to do.

Weight the analysis beyond credibility in favour of the official story by assuming that the structure of the building actually offered zero resistance.

That as each floor was impacted by the one above, no velocity was lost in the energy needed to tear the next floor free. That each floor miraculously broke free spontaneously, a nanosecond before being impacted by the floor above, meaning that the only resistance being offered to the already falling floors is that of the faster moving object above colliding with the slower moving object below , the lower object velocity being zero at the time of collision.

So, take the distance between each floor. Accelerate the first floor at 9.81m/sec/sq through that distance. The speed reached at the instant before collision with the lower floor we shall call V1.

The speed of the combined falling mass the instant after the collision we shall V2.

V2 is calculated thus, on the assumption that the mass of each floor is equal. N = the total number of floors now falling.

V2 = V1 divided by N/N-1.

In other words, when floor 110 hits 109, the velocity is halved. When they hit floor 108, the velocity is divided by 3/2. When thy hit floor 107, it is divided by 4/3, when they hit floor 106, it is divided by 5/4 etc.

This, I think is what Albert was talking about, and the factor was not overlooked when I worked this out back in Feb 2002.

Once V2 is determined, then again accelerate by 9.81 m/sec sq through the distance to the next floor to get the next V1.

In this way, the time taken to fall each floor can be added up. After 110 floors you add up the fall times.

You'll find that it comes to 14.7 seconds.

This method has the problem of ignoring certain unquantifiable factors.

1)The mass of the floors may not be exactly equal, since the lower floors are likely to be progressively more massive than the upper floors.

2)The mass of a few floors may have been reduced or missing, due to pre collapse damage.

3)The collapse may not have started from the very top floor.

4) The total distance to fall is slightly less than the actual height of the building, since it creates a pile to fall into at the bottom.

If we try to quantify these factors we are guessing. So instead of guessing at those factors, they are balanced by making a concession to the non demolition theory of such massive proportions that it is ridiculous. That is, assuming *no* structural strength to the building. That the resistance required to tear each floor free was zero. That the only resistance was the faster moving floors above colliding with the stationary floor below.

Such a ridiculous concession clearly outweighs the unquantifiable factors acknowledged above. The assumption upon which I am basing this, is therefore a perfectly symmetrical spontaneous collapse of each floor, a spontaneous free fall, something which is impossible from an engineering and probability POV. So in fact , its not even a pancaking scenario as such. It's actually a spontaneous progressive free fall scenario, something which is clearly impossible in the real world, which of course is a ludicrous concession to the non demolition theory, far outweighing the unquantifiable factors above.

And yet the minimum possible collapse time is still more than 30% above the time in which the buildings actually fell, which means that even the resistance calculated above did not happen.

The proof stands.
[Gerard]

At this point, Gerard offered a theoretical essay.
The Absurdity is in both Science and Logic

Having presented irrefutable scientific proof that the buildings were
demolished, I would now like to point out that the philosophy of this
discussion was unfairly skewed towards the non demolition theory from the
beginning. It was not a level playing field.

Let me explain why. There seems to be an unspoken assumption at the
beginning of any such discussion that the default truth is that the building
were not demolished and that the demolition proposition is subjected to the
cliché of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof".

This founding assumption for the debate is fundamentally flawed.

In an honestly weighted discussion,we begin by laying all conceivable ideas
on the table. In terms of why the building collapsed, we have two such
conceivable ideas.

1) The buildings fell down by accident.

2) They were deliberately demolished.

Is there anything which rules out either idea immediately from an obvious
impossibility ?

No. We know that it is possible for a building to be demolished and possible
for a building to fall down.

So at the first stage of our analysis. The two competing theories are equal
in probability.

Supporters of the official story seem to claim the right to a founding
assumption that there is something inherently improbable about a building
being demolished.

If such a claim were to be made, it is made purely on the basis of perceived
politics and logistics, not science. There are a number of dishonesties in
the way in which this is presented.

1) If objections are to be made of means , motive and opportunity , then
they should be clearly compartmentalized into that aspect of the argument,
not inserted into the scientific aspect, because they have nothing to do
with science.

2) Such arguments are circumstantial, and as such should only be considered
if the scientific argument proves inconclusive.

3) If such arguments are to be used,(that a demolition is politically and
logistically inconceivable) then they should be argued properly on their own
terms, not inserted suddenly as default assumptions in order to rebut some
other aspect of the discussion.

For example, simply saying "it would have too difficult to get away with"
does not make it so. One must properly discuss such assertion in the light
of all available evidence.

In fact, if one is to ignore the scientific aspect and concentrate on the
more circumstantial aspect of means , motive and opportunity, one finds a
compelling case that the towers were demolished, something which I can go
into if necessary. However, when we are talking science, lets talk science
alone, and see if it becomes necessary to resort to circumstantial evidence
relating to means , motive and opportunity in the absence of a conclusive
scientific result.

At the very first stage of our enquiry, we find a 50% probability of each
theory on the basis of science. If at this stage, one wanted to quit the
scientific debate and discuss means , motive and opportunity, then we have a
blank sheet. Both possibilities are still equally on the table.

So you can't then just assume a default victory on the basis of means,
motive and opportunity without discussing it. That means that no evidence at
all has been discussed. No science, and no circumstantial evidence. And yet,
this is the most common slight of hand used to claim the non demolition
theory.

So, to return to the science. At this stage, both theories are possible. So
now start to take an overview of probability.

Do deliberately demolished buildings characteristically fall straight down ?
Yes. This is the whole idea of demolition. Is there anything in the fall of
the building which is inconsistent with the way in which a demolished
building would fall ? No.

Do accidentally collapsing buildings characteristically fall straight down.
No. Tall objects topple sideways. This is in fact why we have demolition
experts. To apply sophisticated engineering to induce a building to fall in
a manner in which it would not, if left to its own devices. In fact, no one
can show me a documented example of a tall building which has fallen
accidentally - straight down. Is there anything in the fall of the building
which is inconsistent with how a building , collapsing accidentally from
asymmetrical and unpredictable damage, characteristically falls ? Yes.

So immediately, we have a significant although unquantifiable probability
advantage in favour of demolition. The demolition theory requires only a
routine repletion of what is done as a matter of course, by demolition
companies in carrying out their business.

The non demolition theory on the other hand, requires two instances of
something which has never happened before. And something which is
acknowledged as so improbable that it takes highly trained experts to
engineer it.

So which side bears the burden of demonstrating proof ? Not the demolition
theory. It's the non demolition theory.

Now we get to another logical fallacy. As I demonstrated with the time of
collapse argument, the demolition theory enjoys unassailable scientific
proof. But let's just suppose that someone found a hole in this argument.
What would they have proved ? That the building fell by accident ?

No, what they would have proved is that you can't *prove* it was demolition,
and that therefore both options are still on the table. Let's just suppose
that that someone could prove that a non demolition was scientifically
possible. If so, that does not prove that it was an accidental collapse.
Proving that something is possible doesn't prove that it happened.

If it did, then the demolition argument would also be scientifically proven,
because it is also possible as discussed above. And shouldn't both theories
be afforded the same standards of proof ? Obviously two mutually
contradictory theories can't both enjoy proof, and you can't apply more
generous standards of proof to one than the other. So the question would
still be open.

If someone can prove that an accidental collapse was possible, then how
probable is it ? Has it ever been observed to occur in the real world, or is
it merely a theory about what *could* conceivably happen?

The latter. So even if you prove that an accidental collapse is possible,
then the demolition is still way out ahead in probability terms , because it
is observable by precedent as by routine event, and does not require the
acceptance of any new theory, still untested in the real world by practical
and repeatable experiment.

But lets go further, and suppose that someone came up with a very strong
scientific argument that an accidental collapse was extremely probable. So
probable that it restores the 50/50 rating. It can't exceed that, because
everything about the collapse is already completely consistent with what we
see in controlled demolitions. There is nothing to suggest any anomaly in
terms of that scenario.

So the very best one could hypothetically do with a scientific argument is
demonstrate the same in relation to an accidental collapse.

So , even the most stunning scientific counter argument from the supporters
of the official story, would do nothing more than create an inconclusive
verdict with equal probability on both sides.

If this were to be achieved, the argument would resort to the more
circumstantial aspect of means, motive and opportunity, which I claim still
presents a compelling argument for demolition.

You see the hidden philosophical dishonesty which underlines the general
debate on this issue ?

Using dubious science to make weak arguments that it *might* just be
possible for the buildings to have fallen by accident, the official story
advocates then make a wild leap of logic to claim that they have *proved*
that they did fall by accident. This is done on the basis of an assumption
of default truth on their side in relation to the means, motive and
opportunity question. This is flowed by a failure to weigh the strength of
that alleged victory against any examination of the scientific probabilities
in.

In fact, the logical fallacy goes further. There is an unspoken assumption
that proving the an accidental collapse was *possible* proved that a
demolition is *impossible*.

If its to be asserted that scientific proof has been achieved, then why
discuss means, motive and opportunity at all ?

So we see that defence of the official story requires not only belief in the
in the scientifically impossible. That belief is then used to launch an
argument which is flawed in logic at every turn - even if one were to accept
the scientific absurdity on which it is based.

Jeff responded about this time with a question about possible U.S. or Israeli involvement in planning and executing the 9/11 events.

Jeff wrote:
If what you write is true and the buildings were deliberately exploded, are you are assuming that US government agents or perhaps Israeli agents placed the explosives? I am of the opinion that explosives were used but, if so, who placed them there is a wide open question.
[Jeff]

Gerard responded to the question of Israeli involvement

I don’t see any particular reason to suspect Israel. Of course, its conceivable that a foreign govt was involved, but if so then why not France or Germany or Italy or Zimbabwe ? Why Israel in particular ?

The prime default suspect must be the govt of the country where it happened. Unless one is to believe that it was a hostile act, by another govt, for which the USG is now covering up ( a speculative scenario which requires a fair bit of evidence in order to become credible), then it was done with the full blessing and knowledge of the USG. So even if another govt was involved in the logistics, that effectively amounts to the USG simply outsourcing some of the logistics of its frame up, and this leaves the USG still as the ultimate target of accusation.

Its like when somebody hires a hit man. The hired professional pulls the trigger, but the person who hired them is the ultimate architect of the crime.

I have a site dedicated to evidence of all aspects of the Sept 11 evidence. (Well…I don’t think any site covers all of it, but mine comes as close as any)

It overwhelmingly fingers the USG as the prime architect of the entire Sept 11 event.

Once the full range of evidence is digested, it then follows logically that every govt is covering up, because it becomes apparent that the official story is so ridiculous that no govt or intelligence agency in the world could possibly believe it.

However, while this certainly raises the possibility of other govts having co-operated in the logistics, I don’t see any real direct evidence of it. That’s not to say that I am asserting with confidence that no one else was involved. I just can’t assert with any confidence that they were.

A good place to start is the summary article

http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/manufactured.html

This will link you to the rest of the site which contains the specific research and documentation to support the summary.
[Gerard]

Jeff responded to Gerard

While it is clear that you have spent considerable time thinking about why the WTC buildings collapsed, you have not devoted the same amount of time to some of the incidents surrounding the attack which suggest that Israel, if it was not actually involved in the attack, had some forewarning, Otherwise, how would one explain the presence with a video camera, five Israelis, at least three of whom were identified by name as Mossad agents in the national Jewish weekly, Forward (3/15/02) who were working for a moving company, Urban Moving, that turned out to be a Mossad front (same article) filming the burning towers from across the river in New Jersey and who were arrested when a woman called the police saying that some Middle Eastern looking men were filming the burning towers and laughing and joking. The men were arrested, their boss had already left for Israel, and they were held for two months in jail before being deported. The Forward article wondered why the story never appeared in the mainstream or any other US media. Then, there was the instance, of Israelis working at the Israeli Odigo messaging service receiving a warning two hours before that there would be an attack on the WTC and they reported it to their boss. This story ran in Haaretz and the Washington Post. What did Israel have to gain. Well, at least Netanyahu thought that it was good for Israel, now that they were also victims of terror, and it expedited a very public plan that had been initiated by pro-Israel Jewish neocons for Netanyahu in 1996 called a "Clean Break: which called for regime change in Iraq, Iran and Syria, and it became quite obvious that Afghanistan was just a warm-up before going into Iraq. There is more, the reports of Israelis shadowing the hijackers, but that's enough and I have no more time at the moment. Italy, France,. Germany, or Zimbabwe? No motive. Big question. What are Mossad agents doing running phony moving companies in the US? Moving explosives, maybe?

Jeff

Gerard responded to Jeff
Actually, I have spent considerable time looking at this evidence. (Dancing Iraelis and Odigo)

The claim that five Israelis were arrested for laughing and dancing is very poorly documented, and there are internal contradictions in the story which you cite.

For example, the very same article quotes a relative of the arrested men as saying that they are blond haired and blue eyed. How does this reconcile with the claim that men of “middle eastern appearance” were seen by the witness ?

Of course , it’s possible that the claim that they were blonde is not true, but you can’t pick and choose from the same article arbitrarily, accepting one claim as fact and another as not even worthy of being cited.

I came across this when I checked the documentation supplied by Henry Makow in an article promoting the dancing Israeli theory.

Makow dishonestly failed to acknowledge the contradiction in his article.

Secondly, the initial basis for believing that anyone was dancing is extremely poor. A “witness identified only as Maria “ reported second hand to the press by the FBI. You’ll find that on my site, I don’t use anything as poorly verified as this as the basis for a major theory. It is legitimate to use the report to note that this *may* have occurred and if so, that people arrested *may* have been Israelis, but to extrapolate this to anything other than a thin suspicion that Israel was involved to a degree worthy of special mention does not meet the same standards which I apply even handedly to all the other evidence.

If this were to be used, then there is equally strong evidence for the direct involvement of Australia, UK and Pakistan, but I notice a curious disinterest in accusations towards any of these countries.

Having established that the documentation is so weak, we must then subject it to a critical thinking test. Why would the ruthlessly efficient and professional Mossad have five of its agents being so undisciplined as to be making a public display of cheering the collapse in a public place ? Assuming that it happened at all, one can only conclude that they *wanted* to be seen. Just like the alleged hijackers who seemingly went to a lot of trouble to be noticed everywhere they went.

The story that some of the alleged hijackers – supposedly strict Muslims, about to meet Allah the following day - went out drinking and womanizing the night before, even leaving their Korans in the bar is quite rightly met with a torrent of ridicule by those applying any measure of critical thinking, observing that *if* it happened at all, then they were deliberately drawing attention to themselves. Likewise the ludicrous story of Atta, supposedly going into a govt loans office and trying to borrow $650,000 for a crop dusting business, flying into a furious rage when refused, threatening to destroy all of NY and DC and to cut the throat of the woman behind the counter, and then offering $20,000 to buy a large framed arial photo of DC which was on the wall and then flying into another furious rage when refused.

Anybody with a modicum of critical thinking falls about on the floor laughing at these pathetic cartoon scripts, and rightly so. And yet the assertion, supported by only the thinnest of documentation, that 5 Israeli agents, engaged in such a huge and sensitive covert operation, blew their cover in public with an undisciplined display of public cheering is treated seriously as the entire basis for singling out one particular country as having a special role in the operation.

The overwhelming conclusion is either that it never happened, or if it did then it was deliberately for the purpose of creating suspicion towards Israel.

I’ll come back to the probable motives for that.

Now to the Odigo text message story. The documentation for this is even thinner. Two guys saying that they got a text message?
How about all the phone calls from the planes ? We believe them at face value? The supposedly intercepted phone call from OBL telling his mother that something big was about to happen and he might have to disappear for while? Once we get to this level of documentation, anybody can make up anything they like and present it as evidence. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to keep in mind that it’s *possible* that the story could be true, but if this is the basis for building entire theories of Israel’s involvement and claiming them to be supported by solid evidence, then I can prove the Loch Ness monster, alien abductions, the weeping statue of Mary and anything else you like. I can prove that a 757 *and* a missile *and* a two engine prop plane all flew into the pentagon and that they fl;ew in low and straight *and* dived steeply *and* hit the lawn first.

http://memebrs.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/witness.html

And again, if such laughably thin documentation as the Isaeli stories are to be accepted as significant evidence , then why the disinterest in similarly strong evidence against UK, Pakistan and Australia ?

Please don’t misinterpret this as a claim that Israel is innocent of any involvement at a general level in the entire process of the frame up – which includes the subsequent spin. It’s not. I accuse virtually every country in the world of involvement at some level for the reasons I stated earlier. But if we are to single out specific countries for special mention of notably significant involvement, we should cite real evidence which meets the same standards of documentation and critical thinking as what I have presented on my site against the USG.

Any help from any other country, even if properly documented, can only be seen as outsourcing of logistics by the USG.

Furthermore, if there was significant evidence of special Israeli involvement, one would expect that once suspicion had been ignited by the observations above, that further digging would start to unravel more. But it hasn’t happened. The very fact that we saw clues which scream at us “look at Israel” within weeks of the event, but then find nothing more in the next four years of investigation, strongly suggests that there is nothing more to find. By contrast, the initial clues which screamed “look at the USG” – specifically the failure of the air defence system, led to an unstoppable torrent of more evidence pouring out from all directions.

So let’s apply some critical thinking as to why suggestions of special Israeli involvement would be deliberately planted in the media. From my experience as an investigator over the last four years, I have discovered a general pattern that the official story never relies on one viewpoint. Because they know that significant numbers of people will never buy the story, no matter how hard they sell it. So there is always an official story and an “unofficial official “story.

The official story appeals to one set of prejudices in the general community. The alternative story anticipates that large numbers will sense that there is something wrong with this story and therefore leaks a suggestion of an alternative story appealing to difference prejudices into the mainstream media , just enough to be noticed by those suspicious of the main story, and then quickly denies the alternative story in order to lead those suspicions in a particular direction.

I can point to this process in many other issues, but to get more specific about this now, starts to spread the discussion to a dysfunctional width. It’s already approaching that with what I’m writing now.

So cutting me a bit of slack in acknowledging that I’m asking a little bit of faith on me in other issues at this stage…

Here is what happens. The US is a country obsessed with race and religion, so suspicions based on race and religion appeal to the prejudices of most of the country. What we have is the main story “the Arabs/Muslims did it” which appeals to the fears and prejudices of large parts of the US population.

Of those who are unlikely to buy this, what is the next most common prejudice to appeal to ? “The Jews did it”

Collectively, most of the US population is heavily susceptible to one of these prejusdices. So the main story, “The Arabs/Muslims did it” is supplemented by its fake opposition story “The Jews did it.”

Those who don’t buy the first story will be alert for any clue indicating the second story. So a few clues are manufactured, allowed to leak into the media enough for some of those types of people to pick up on, and then quickly denied to increase suspicion that that is where the true area of the cover up lies.

The USG doesn’t care whether you blame the Arabs/Muslims or the Jews. As long as they’ve got you hating someone on racial/religious grounds and don’t really know what happened or understand why.

I should point out here that I blieve that the Israeli govt would fully cooperate with such an underground demonsization of itself, because the Israeli govt and Mossad are the biggest Jew hating organizations on earth. To understand this fully, we need to go more into the history of Nazism and how high levels of Jewish organizations collaborated in slaughtering ordinary Jews and then making an industry out of their professed outrage in order to further the tensions created by it. The object is not to protect Jews nor to advance their position in the world but to promote strategic racial and religious tension which plays both sides.

The very top of the Jewish hierarchy are Nazis. As just one example of this, one only needs to look at how the Simon Wiesenthal foundation, while making a big show of hunting down every last petty officer who is alleged to shot a few Jewish prisoners – most likely because he would have been shot himself if he didn’t - collaborated in the protection of many of the worst mass murderers in the Nazi regime, including Werner Von Braun – one of the most unspeakably evil criminals of the Nazi regime- given a new and comfortable home in the US as a venerated figure without a whimper of protest from the supposed Nazi hunters, and the way that the worst of Von Braun’s crimes – his personal supervision of the slaughter of thousands of slave labourers in the camps dedicated the Nazi weapons programs, although well documented at an academic level, has been covered up in popularly taught history.

http://missilegate.com/rfz/

http://thewebfairy.com/911/video/reich.of.the.black.sun.pdf (too big for dial up)

There’s also a lot of good information in relation to this playing both sides routine at this site

http://www.tenc.net

This author misses one important piece of the puzzle. He’s extremely pro Israel, and mistakenly believes that Israel is there for the protection and advancement of the Jewish people. Nevertheless, if one ignores that, he presents some excellent documentation for how the USG plays both sides, that while overtly supporting Israel, it also covertly aids it enemies. His documentation in this regard is excellent insofar as it goes, and if he could understand the final piece of the puzzle - that the Israeli govt and Mossad are playing the same game, then you’d have a more complete picture.

But put some his research together with the observations that top level of the Jewish hierarchy are part of the Nazi game to use ordinary Jews as pawns in the game – to slaughter them en masse and then take political control of the outraged reaction and use it against the Arab world - then you start to get the whole picture. Particularly as the Author above provides some excellent documentation for the Nazi roots of many militant Arab organizations. He just misses that the very same roots are in the top of the Jewish organizations.

I don’t claim to have presented the whole case for that here, but enough to get one started on it.

To return to more specifics, the two pieces of “evidence”, cited ad nauseum for some special role of Israel are little more than hearsay, apply inconsistent standards in that evidence of similar strength against three other countries is routinely ignored, and that if they happened at all, then they present better evidence for cooperation between the USG and Israel/Mossad to deliberately create exaggerate the role of Israel.

This of course is a paradox, because that assertion in itself is evidence of heavy Irsaeli/Mossad involvement, but the point is that uits of a different type and has different implications to that which is seen by viewing the evidence superficially.

In closing, the WMD scandal is a good example of how both sides of the argument are controlled by the same people.

The USG could have fabricated any number of reasons fro invading Iraq. The WMD excuse was one of the most ridiculous they could have thought of. Having decided on that, they then made no effort whatsoever to make it look credible. When they can pull off scams like S11, then at least some attempt to fabricate post invasion evidence of WMD in Iraq – enough to fool Joe 6 pack – was child’s play.

But they didn’t even try. The WMD fiasco was designed that way. It was designed to be a propaganda disaster. Thus all of the anti-war sentiment – which they knew would be significant anyway, no matter what story they sold - was safely channeled into a pre-planned direction.

It was clear to me at the time that the mainstream media was orchestrating *both* the case for war and the case against it.
This is a classic example of how the strategy of having both an official story and an “unofficial official” story is implemented.

I realize that if this idea is new to you, it might be a bit of a leap and I don’t claim to have fully argued it here. I’ve really only set it out as a concept and scratched the surface of some of the evidence for it.

Rather than get too deeply into that at the moment, I would prefer that people simply take this a general explanation of where I’m coming from , but accept that this can’t be fully explained unless one first develops a full familiarity with some very specific evidence on a number of specific issues which fit this pattern.

That’s because the “dual lie” paradigm is not an idea which developed in a theoretical vacuum. It is rather a repetitive observation of a pattern I’ve eventually noticed in the specific evidence relating to every issue which I’ve looked into in any depth. As an example of one of those – I put forward the specific S11 evidence examined on my site. A fuller understanding of the specific evidence of exactly what really happened (to the extent that it can be determined) is essential as a precursor to any analysis of the various theories surrounding who did it.

For Ronald’s benefit, you will notice that my observations on peak oil fit a similar pattern. The official story being “consume, don’t worry, endless growth will bring benefits for us all and oil is our friend” and the unofficial official story being “be very afraid, oil is destroying the atmosphere and we’re about to run out of it anyway”.

Both stories are false, but collectively they instinctively appeal to almost everyone who is concerned enough to think about such issues, and thus control the entire debate as one lie against another lie, with both lies suiting the interests of those who pull the strings. The others on this list can ignore what I just wrote here, but I think Ronald will understand what I’m getting at in relation to previous discussions we’ve had.
[Gerard]

Jeff responded to Gerard
The Israelis were named in the Forward, they were arrested, held two months and the last thing I read, in the Forward, that they were suing for false arrest. Stick with your explosives.. Makow is no source for anything as I have told him, and I consider you different. I could have added the story about the phony Israeli artists that Carl Cameron of Fox documented and then the story was killed, our the four instances of phony Israeli movers who were arrested in different parts of the country by local police, which was reported in local newspapers, turned over to the FBI and that was the end of it. You have established nothing except a special interest in protecting Israel and your comparing it to other countries that might have been involved such as Italy or France is a joke. If you intended this message for me, you wasted your time because I have been following 9--11 and moved on. Some of the stories about Atta, BTW, remind about a number of the phony stories that were created from whole cloth about Oswald. I believe the US government was involved in some way, to what extent we will never know.
[Jeff]

Gerard responded to Jeff:
Gerard wrote:

Jeff,

The phony Israeli movers ? What does that here to do with S11? At the very most it shows that Israel has spies in the US, So what ? So does China, presumably. Does that mean that China did it ?

I didn’t use Makow as source, I used Makow’s article to check the links to original documentation. They were named ? So were the hijackers. Were they blond or of middle eastern appearance ? If the witness reported Middle easterners, why did the FBI arrest blond men ? If the blond claim is alleged to be untrue, under what criteria are selected parts of the report taken as fact, and others dismissed out of hand ?

[[You have established nothing except a special interest in protecting Israel]]

Hmm… I just said that they were Nazis.
[[your comparing it to other countries that might have been involved such as Italy or France is a joke.]]

Yes that was a joke – to show that anybody just make up an accusation against anyone. However, I made serious comparisons with the role of Australia, UK and Pakistan, countries which [[You have established nothing except a special interest in protecting]]

I made it clear that I didn’t expect uncritical agreement with everything I was saying, merely asking that you check the proven documentation in relation to S11 evidence. As a courtesy I was explaining a little of the background of where some of this eventually leads.

This blind dismissal demonstrates the mass attraction of the alterative official story. If you don’t want to blame the Arabs/Muslims, then blame the Jews. Then everyone can keep on hating on religious/racial grounds and avoid the unpleasant task of thinking.
[Gerard]

Jeff responded to Gerard:
To tell you the truth, I've had it up to the eyeballs with 9-11, that bone has been gnawed to splinters, and so what? Most American believe that the US, at least knew about the event before hand but that hasn't and is not likely to translate into anything meaningful. Like the world has moved on since then, and there is reasonable speculation that 9-11 was initiated to give the US the opportunity to launch its enduring war. That is really enough for me. At the moment the drums are beating for an attack on Iran, the consequences of which would make Iraq look like a garden party. I don't think the US will attack but the Israelis are apparently gearing up to do so which, from the standpoint of Iranians would be the same thing. That is helluva more important at this time than anything one can say about 9-11, and that's what I didn't finish your piece. I am not ignorant of the story. I have interview Nafeez Mosadegh Ahmed twice because I am much more interested in the political connections than I am in the physical event itself.
[Jeff]

Gerard responded to Jeff
[[I am much more interested in the political connections than I am in the physical event itself.]]

Understanding the physical event is a vital prerequisite to understanding the politics. People who think that the Govt had “something to do with it “ or “allowed it happen” barely understand anything more than those who believe the entire story.

This will become self evident who to those are prepared to avail themselves of the full story of what happened.

The idea that you can determine what it means without knowing what it is represents lazy thinking. S11 has direct connections to global developments which were already in place by 1947, and they are heavily connected to events going back to pre WW 1.

It is not an isolated “event” which popped out of the blue. But knowing what that event actually was in combination with deconstructions of other similar events will fit the pattern together in a way which wont happen, if one simply satisfies oneself that “the govt had something to with it”.

The End

9/11 -- The Firefighter tapes

2005-12-23T12:23:00.001-08:00

Angie begins with a review of David Ray Griffin's speech in NYC in late 2005.

Okay, I saw Griffin speak on Saturday. I don't know if he's read all
503 of the oral interviews that were put up on the New York Times'
website, but during his lecture, he indicated that "at least 25"
firefighters knew in advance that WTC7 would collapse, and that in
fact "a collapse zone was established" in advance and people were told
to stand "5 blocks away" for safety reasons & that the 'expectation'
of the collapse of WTC7 was communicated 4-5 hours in advance. He
also read from the quote from Fellini which Mitsy found (copied below
& Rob, by the way, you know Mitsy - she's the mother of our youngest
911 Meetup member) as well as from another fire chief who spoke about
heavy fire on many floors in WTC7, and Griffin found it peculiar that
the 3-4 story gap described by Fellini & the fires by the other chief
were never captured on film, and that the fires alleged to be on the
south side of WTC7 couldn't have been that big or they would have
swept through and been visible on the northside or blown out windows,
etc., and that in any event, the nature of the collapse & it's speed,
etc., demonstrated that it was intentionally demolished.

Angie

911 Truth Movement Musings (Watching the Watchers)
http://www.Angieon911.com

Frank Fellini -" The major concern at that time at that
particular location was number Seven, building number seven,
which had taken a big hit from the north tower. When it fell,
it ripped steel out from between the third and sixth floors
across the facade on Vesey Street. We were concerned that the
fires on several floors and the missing steel would result in
the building collapsing.

So for the next five or six hours we kept
firefighters from working anywhere near that building, which
included the whole north side of the World Trade Center
complex. Eventually around 5:00 or a little after, building
number seven came down.

We just started organizing things on the north
side of the north foot bridge to remove apparatus that was
moveable and recover the bodies that we could locate and
remove -- in the meantime the job was sectored with Chiefs Blaich,
Visconti,
Hayden
and Haring, having different sectors of the World Trade
Center complex. Blaich, Hayden and Visconti were all working
south in the north tower, the north bridge. Chief Haring was
by City Hall Park on the Church Street side of the
operation.

At some point in the afternoon prior to number
seven coming down, Chief Nigro, Chief Callan, Chief
Cruthers, Chief Meyers, Chief Butler and I had a meeting in
the auditorium of the high school that was located around
Murray Street."

file://localhost/Users/mj/Desktop/9%2F11%20Investigation/Oral%20history/
Fellini_Frank=damage%207.txt

--- In 911nycmeetup@yahoogroups.com, "angiesept11"
wrote:
>
> I also posted the following at portland indymedia where the format
> makes for easier reading:
> http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/10/326218.shtml
>
> Angie
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> New 9/11 stuff & Advance Knowledge of 3 Bldg. Collapses
>
> Summary:
> Newly released transcripts of firefighters interviewed after 9/11
> reveal advance knowledge of twin towers' and WTC7 collapses with a
> little speculation about what this could mean. Also a discussion on
> what else was & is going to be released and how that info is being
> redacted first.
>
> >>>>>"Dr. Griffin will be speaking about the recently-released
> archives of police, firefighter and citizen responses on 9/11/2001
> (this Thursday in Connecticut and on 10/15 in NYC). According to Dr.
> Griffin and others, those archives strengthen the already-formidable
> case that the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 were destroyed in
> controlled demolitions with explosives."
> http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/42578/index.php
>
> Can't seem to post this comment in response to boston indymedia page
> above, so I put it here.
>
> This is a very interesting topic, this recently released information,
> and I haven't seen any analysis of it yet. Below I've copied some
> tidbits from it that demonstrate that there was advance knowledge that
> the twin towers and WTC Building 7 would collapse. With the twin
> towers, the newly released material provides further information
> concerning an unidentified guy from the Office of Emergency Management
> knowing that both towers would collapse before either of them did.
> With WTC7, you even had groups of firefighter and other personnel
> standing around (a sufficient distance away) WAITING for a couple of
> hours for it to collapse, as they were directed to do, so that they
> could help out afterwards.
>
> Since there's never been a credible scientific explanation of these 3
> building collapses that jives with the official story - as the fires
> and/or plane hits should not have been anything close to sufficient to
> bring these buildings down (see all the internet research indicating
> extent and estimated temperature of fires and the temperature needed
> to weaken steel, the free-fall speed of the collapses, etc., etc.),
> this is further evidence of their intentional demolition by explosion
> or similar means with some people in the know before it happened. And
> it is interesting to examine too how this material was dealt with by
> the Kean Commission's 9/11 report. How could anyone know in advance
> that these buildings would collapse when there was no scientific
> reason, no previous history of building collapses under similar
> circumstances, and when the buildings were so constructed to withstand
> collapsing under such circumstances - unless they had inside info
> about the PLANNED DEMOLITIONS? Answer: they couldn't.
>
> All of the recently released information is located here:
>
> link to graphics8.nytimes.com
>
> and includes oral histories from firefighters and other personnel
> interviewed by the Fire Department beginning a few weeks after the
> attacks through 2/02. Although the New York Times indicated in August
> on the day the new stuff was released that they were making it all
> public - some 500 firefighter and other personnel interview
> statements, that wasn't previously true. Previously, I counted only 80
> interview statements up on their website. They had a different link
> for it back on August 12th: ( link to www.nytimes.com ) which is still
> a working link -although it does NOT provide all the 503 statements
> even when you refresh the page, so don't be fooled like I was. Use the
> new link that I just discovered tonight which does contain some 500
> odd statements. The link is above, the one with the word "full"
> contained in its url towards the end. The Kean Commission report also
> mentioned 500 fire department interview transcripts, and they also
> indicated in footnote 163 of Chapter 9 that the Kean Commission
> interviewed 100 such personnel themselves, although any transcripts of
> same have not been released by the Commission.
>
> Note that although the Times' webpage which provides transcripts of
> these oral histories misleadingly indicates that the
>
> "[t]he oral histories of dispatch transmissions are transcribed
> verbatim. They have not been edited to omit coarse language"
>
> the oral histories have, in fact, been edited to delete "portions that
> can be shown likely to cause serious pain or embarrassment to an
> interviewee". That phrase is from the New York Court of Appeal's
> decision which ruled in March on what should and
> should not be released out of all the info the New York Times was
> seeking in its lawsuit which it brought after the City and Fire Dept.
> refused disclosure under the Freedom of Information law. The New York
> Times admitted as much when it reported on the histories' release on
> 8/12/05 by indicating that "The Court of Appeals allowed the oral
> histories to be edited under a limited set of circumstances" although
> the Times didn't mention therein what those limited set of
> circumstances were.
> link to www.nytimes.com
> 5eca4cdc744faf&ei=5094&partner=homepage
> Pursuant to the Court's decision (here: link to www.nycourts.gov )
> those "limited set of circumstances" refers to the 'embarrassing'
> stuff, as quoted above.
>
> Also to be noted, so you can see the extent of the farce that is the
> information the public is denied access to with respect to 9/11 is
> that the New York Court of Appeals will permit only the release of one
> side of the telephone calls made to 911 on 9/11: the 911 operators'
> side, not the side of the people who called 911 (except for calls to
> 911 involving 8 victims whose family members were party to the
> lawsuit.) So, we don't get to hear what people reported to the 911
> operators, only the operators' responses. This is a special privacy
> rule the Court came up with just for Sept. 11th, as traditionally
> there is no expectation of privacy under the law when one calls 911.
>
> And with respect to "interagency communications or dispatch calls"
> made on 9/11, the Court will only permit "facts" from same to be
> revealed, not "opinions". In other words, to give just a quick &
> sloppy example, if in a dispatch call or recorded interagency
> communication, one firefighter chief said to another that "My name is
> John Smith and the time now is X. I heard what sounded like explosions
> in the basement and I think it was bombs that took down that tower",
> the only portion of such communication that is not opinion, "My name
> is John Smith and the time is X" would be released, not the rest which
> would be considered an opinion. There are audio dispatch tapes on the
> Times' website above. Haven't listened to hardly any of them. And on
> 8/12/05, the New York Times reported that "[o]ther records, including
> tapes of 911 operators, are being assembled and are not yet ready for
> release, city officials said" (link above).
>
> Anyway, back to the advance knowledge of the collapse of the towers
> and WTC #7. I read only a very few of the oral histories (from the
> Times' original link, which was to only about 80 of them) and happened
> to come across the following excerpts which reveal this advance
> knowledge. Links to same are also included & a few times I inserted my
> own comment in parenthesis, identified as such with my name - Angie.
>
> After the excerpts, I'll just mention how the Kean Commission report
> dealt with this material, of advance knowledge of the 3 building
> collapses and leave others to speculate on what it means.
>
> Excerpts from the recently released oral histories:
>
> "because I was getting hungry. We were eating oatmeal cookies and
> watered-down Gatorade from the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. They
> were great. They had plenty of food. But we were getting hungry.
> We walked back. We didn't do any
> further because building number seven was coming down. That was
> another problem, to wait for building seven to come down, because that
> was unsecure. It was about 5:30 that building came down."
>
> link to graphics8.nytimes.com
> PDF
>
> -----------------------------------------
> FIREFIGHTER SCOTT HOLOWACH
> link to graphics8.nytimes.com
> > PDF
>
> A. Yes, Stuyvesant High School, until they figured out, I guess, there
> was no gas leak or no secondary bomb. Or no bomb. I guess they put the
> PD in there to search it. They moved us back south. We ended up back
> up on Vesey Street and West Street and just hanging out until tower 7
> came down.
> After tower 7 came down, we went right to work over at tower 7 to put
> the fires out. That's where we stayed until we were relieved.
> Q. Did you see a lot of civilians coming out towards you away by the
> water on West Street?
> A. There wasn't much civilians at the water, no, no.
>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> LIEUTENANT WILLIAM RYAN
> link to graphics8.nytimes.com
> > PDF
>
> I remember Chief Hayden saying to me, "We have a six-story building
> over there, a seven-story building, fully involved." At that time he
> said, "7 has got fire on several floors." He said, "We've got a
> ten-story over there, another ten-story over there, a six-story over
> there, a 13-story over there." He just looked at me and said, "Fuck
> 'em all. Let 'em burn."
> He said, "Just tell the guys to keep looking for guys.
> Just keep looking for the brothers. We've got people trapped. We've
> got to get them out."
>
> . . .
>
> Then we found out, I guess around 3:00
> o'clock, that they thought 7 was going to collapse.
> So, of course, we've got guys all in this pile over here and the main
> concern was get everybody out, and I guess it took us over an hour and
> a half, two hours to get everybody out of there.
> Q. Initially when you were there, you had said you heard a few Maydays?
> A. Oh, yes. We had Maydays like crazy.
> Q. You were getting radio transmissions?
> A. There were people talking. The guys I've talked to that were with
> us heard voices and were shouting to people. We had heard pass alarms,
> but then we didn't hear voices, no more pass alarms. The heat . . .
> So it took us a while and we ended up backing everybody out, and
> that's when 7 collapsed. Then, basically, after 7 collapsed, I went
> over and told the Chief that -- by then they had companies with
> handie-talkies, masks. You've got to remember, the first 200 guys went
> in there with no handie-talkies, no masks, some of them with bunker
> gear, some without. A lot of guys I recognized. I'm on the job 23
> years, so I know a lot of guys, and they were just coming up to me. It
> was good to see everybody was there trying to do something.
> Basically, we fell back for 7 to collapse, and then we waited a while
> and it got a lot more organized, I would guess. By then there was some
> heavy equipment showing up and the Chiefs took over, and I basically
> kind of slipped away from the Chiefs because I didn't want to be doing
> what I was doing anymore. I kind of felt stuck there.
> . . .
> position over here. I went in there to take a leak and I just looked
> around. I guess when we fell back for 7 to collapse I called her. I
> found a phone that worked, a landline, and I got through to her. I
> didn't know the Pentagon got hit. I didn't know. She started telling
> me all that shit.
>
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------> > ------------------------
> FIREFIGHTER FRANK SWEENEY
>
> link to graphics8.nytimes.com
> > PDF
>
> Now the Fire Department is trying to gather the people and make some
> kind of organization out of it and getting companies together at that
> time.
> Once they got us back together and
> organized somewhat, they sent us back down to Vesey, where we stood
> and waited for Seven World Trade Center to come down.
> --------------------------------------------------------
> A different oral history:
>
> "Again, times are a little fuzzy initially for
> me. A few minutes later, John (not further identified except most
> likely from OEM - Angie)
> came to me and said you need to go find Chief Ganci and relay the
> following message: that the buildings have been compromised, we
> need to evacuate, they're going to collapse. I said
> okay. I went down Vesey Street towards West.
>
> Q. You were by yourself?
>
> A. I was by myself, me and my helmet and my
> radio. I got to the corner of Vesey and West. I found
> some EMS vehicles. I think I saw Chief Gombo there.
> I'm not really sure. I mentioned to the EMS people
> there, again, not knowing who they were, I said you
> need to get away from here, the building might
> collapse, we need to leave this spot.
>
> As I was walking towards the Fire command
> post, I found Steve Mosiello. I said, Steve, where's
> the boss? I have to give him a message. He said,
> well, what's the message? I said the buildings are
> going to collapse; we need to evac everybody out. With
> a very confused look he said who told you that? I said
> I was just with John at OEM. OEM says the buildings
> are going to collapse; we need to get out.
> He escorted me over to Chief Ganci. He said,
> hey, Pete, we got a message that the buildings are
> going to collapse. His reply was who the fuck told you
> that? Then Steve brought me in and with Chief Ganci,
> Commissioner Feehan, Steve, I believe Chief Turi was
> initially there, I said, listen, I was just at OEM.
> The message I was given was that the buildings are
> going to collapse; we need to get our people out. At
> that moment, this thunderous, rolling roar came down
> and that's when the building came down, the first tower
> came down.
>
> . . .
>
> very fine but heavy dust that was in the air.
> Once I got out of the building, maybe ten
> minutes from there, that unforgettable rolling started.
> Q. The same sound you heard earlier?
> A. The same sound I heard earlier.
> Q. Where were you at this point?
> A. I was on West and Vesey, probably in the
> middle of the intersection, trying to find people that
> I knew. At this point I didn't know where John was,
> where Abdo was. I don't know what happened to No. 7.
> I knew the building was coming down. I watched it come
> down on us, but I don't know where anybody else is.
> As that roar was happening on the second time
> around, I was running down Vesey Street towards the
> water with a few thoughts in my head.
> A. There was a building right there on the
> corner. Maybe 15, 20 feet off the corner, there was an
> entrance into a building, and that's where -- it was
> mostly glass windows and we were concerned that the
> glass was going to implode.
> Q. Did that face the river?
> A. It faced the river and that was protection in
> my view.
> Q. About a three-block distance?
> A. It's actually one city block, but still that . . ."
>
> link to graphics8.nytimes.com
> PDF
> -----------------------------------------
> link to graphics8.nytimes.com
> PDF
>
> John Perrugia interview:
>
> Q. What is your rank and title?
> A. EMS Division Chief, in charge
> the Chief of Department's office.
>
> (This is the "John" that sent Zarrillo with the message about the
> inpending collapses. But first he mentions in his interview why WTC7
> was evacuated, not because of any fear for the buildings' structural
> integrity due to fires or 2 airplane attacks but because of a report
> of a 3rd hijacked plane: - Angie)
>
>
> "I reached 7 World Trade Center. We walked
> into the lobby and we were going up the escalators to
> the main level. I checked in at the security desk. As
> we reached the top of the escalators, there were lots
> of people running down the escalator on the promenade.
> I spoke to one of the Deputy Directors and as I was
> speaking with him, I believe it was Deputy Director
> Rotanz (not on list of those statementized - Angie), who is a Fire
> Department Captain on detail over there, Captain Nahmod and EMT
> Zarrillo approached as well. They had indicated that the building was
> being evacuated.
> I questioned as to what the nature of the
> evacuation was. I was told that it was not because of
> what was occurring across the street. No one feared
> that the building was in any danger as a result of two
> airplane attacks and subsequent fires, but that there
> were reports of a third plane that had been hijacked.
> It was unidentified, the location, and they thought it
> may be coming in for an additional strike. Therefore,
> they were evacuating the building.
> We proceeded down to the lobby where the
> various agency representatives were present. We
> collectively started to set up in the lobby and try to
> think of strategies to where we could move the
> inter-agency cooperation effort."
>
> And now to advance notice that towers would collapse:
>
> "point I went back into the building. I was in a
> discussion with Mr. Rotanz [again, not on the list of people
> statementized - Angie] and I believe it was a
> representative from the Department of Buildings, but
> I'm not sure. Some engineer type person, and several
> of us were huddled talking in the lobby and it was
> brought to my attention, it was believed that the
> structural damage that was suffered to the towers was
> quite significant and they were very confident that the
> building's stability was compromised and they felt that
> the north tower was in danger of a near imminent
> collapse.
>
> I grabbed EMT Zarrillo, I advised him of that
> information. I told him he was to proceed immediately
> to the command post where Chief Ganci was located.
> Told him where it was across the street from number 1
> World Trade Center. I told him "You see Chief Ganci
> and Chief Ganci only. Provide him with the information
> that the building integrity is severely compromised and
> they believe the building is in danger of imminent
> collapse." So, he left off in that direction.
> Q. They felt that just the one building or both
> of them?
> A. The information we got at that time was that
> they felt both buildings were significantly damaged,
> but they felt that the north tower, which was the first
> one to be struck, was going to be in imminent danger of
> collapse. Looking up at it, you could see that, you
> could see through the smoke or whatever, that there was
> significant structural damage to the exterior of the
> building. Very noticeable. Now you know, again, this
> is not a scene where the thought of both buildings
> collapsing ever entered into my mind.
> I was there in 1993, 14 minutes after the
> bomb went off. I operated some 16 hours at the
> building and with all the post-incident critiques and
> debriefings with various agencies. We were always told
> by everyone, the experts, that these buildings could
> withstand direct hits from airplanes. That's the way
> they were designed. They went through all of this
> architectural stuff, way beyond the scope of my
> knowledge.
> It was hit by an airplane. That's okay.
> It's made to be hit by an airplane. I mean I think
> everyone may have believed that. We were all told
> years ago it was made to be hit by an airplane.
> Some amount of time passed by, probably not
> long, again, I wasn't checking my watch. Actually we
> were just really disgusted, maybe we were going to move
> what we were going to do and how we were going to try
> to coordinate. Things were hectic. We didn't have the
> tools that we normally have to communicate with our
> agency, you know, cellular phones were not working
> properly, radio was very difficult to get through. I
> work for the Chief of the Department, I don't have a
> fire ground radio, so I had no direct communications
> with my boss at that time, which is one of the reasons
> I needed to send EMT Zarrillo with that message, which
> I felt was very significant, to the command post.
> Just moments before the south tower collapsed
> and, you know, when it happened we didn't know it was
> the south tower. We thought it was the north tower.
> There was a reporter of some sort, female with blond
> hair and her cameraman, an oriental fellow. They were
> setting up outside 7 World Trade Center, just east of
> the pedestrian bridge. I told them it would probably
> be better off to be set up under the bridge. At least
> it was protected. I was just about to enter a dialogue
> with her when I heard a sound I never heard before. I
> looked up and saw this huge cloud. I told him run. I
> grabbed the female, I threw her through the revolving
>
> . . . (omitting portion of statement until 2nd collapse - Angie)
>
> on Vesey and West. I looked up, I saw the north tower
> fully involved. I saw number 6 World Trade Center
> fully involved with fire. I started to make my way to
> the command post when I heard that horrible sound
> again, you know, that whining screeching jet engine.
> I looked up and at that point I knew the
> north tower was coming down. I made an immediate about
> face and I started to run as quick as I can."
> ----------------------------
>
> Now think about the ramifications of how and why the cagey Kean
> Commission dealt with this material as they did. They indicated they
> reviewed the 500 oral histories (footnote 163 on p. 550), and mention
> advance knowledge of the twin towers' collapse in this manner:
>
> "They also received advice from senior FDNY chiefs that while the
> building might eventually suffer a partial collapse on upper floors,
> such structural failure was not imminent. No one anticipated the
> possibility of a total collapse." Page 290 of Kean Commission Report,
> & something similar on p. 302.
>
> "At about 9:57, an EMS paramedic approached the FDNY Chief of
> Department and advised that an engineer in front of 7 WTC had just
> remarked that the Twin Towers in fact were in imminent danger of a
> total collapse." P. 302
>
> "Prior to 9:59, no NYPD helicopter pilot predicted that either tower
> would collapse". P. 304
>
> "Though almost no one at 9:50 on September 11 was contemplating an
> imminent total collapse of the Twin Towers, many first responders and
> civilians were contemplating the possibility of imminent additional
> terrorist attacks . . . " p. 320
>
> "Contrary to a widely held misperception, no NYPD helicopter predicted
> the fall of either tower before the South Tower collapsed" p. 321
>
> About advance knowledge that WTC7 would collapse, the Kean Commission
> report is completely silent. In fact, it doesn't mention the collapse
> of WTC7 at all. And the FEMA report concedes it doesn't have a good
> theory as to what caused WTC7 to fall. Prepare for the possibility of
> the exposure of the intentional demolition of WTC7 without it being
> connected with the towers or any 9/11 inside job plot, perhaps the
> exploitation of the tragedy that day wrought by the terrorists (a
> property crime, insurance fraud scam), or explained away in some other
> non 9/11-inside job manner as the release of these oral histories
> demonstrate that they aren't hiding the fact that they knew WTC7 would
> come down well before it did.
>
> Angie
>
> 911 Truth Movement Musings (Watching the Watchers)
> http://www.Angieon911.com
>
> homepage: http://www.Angieon911.com
>

S.E.Jones: Why Indeed did the WTC Buildings Collapse?

2005-12-06T09:34:00.000-08:00

Accepted for publication:
Steven E. Jones, (2006). "Why Indeed did the WTC Buildings Collapse?," The Hidden History of 9-11-2001, Research in Political Economy, Volume 23, P. Zarembka, editor, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006.

DRAFT

Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?

http://www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html

By Steven E. Jones

Department of Physics and Astronomy

Brigham Young University
(The views in this paper are the sole responsibility of the author (not Brigham Young University).
Provo, UT 84604

ABSTRACT

In writing this paper, I call for a serious investigation of the hypothesis that WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were brought down, not just by damage and fires, but through the use of pre-positioned explosives. I consider the official FEMA, NIST, and 9-11 Commission reports that fires plus damage alone caused complete collapses of all three buildings. And I present evidence for the explosive-demolition hypothesis, which is suggested by the available data, testable and falsifiable, and yet has not been analyzed in any of the reports funded by the US government.

Let's start with the collapse of the 47-story WTC 7, which was never hit by a jet. I ask you to take a minute to look at the collapse of this building as a basis for discussion.

WTC 7: 47 - Story, steel-frame building..

WTC 7 on afternoon of 9-11-01. WTC 7 is the tall

sky-scraper in the back-ground, right. Seen from WTC 1 area.

WTC 7 collapsed completely, onto its own footprint

Now that you have seen the still photographs, it is important to the discussion which follows for you to observe video clips of the collapse of this building, so go to:

http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/videos.html Click on the three photos at the top of this web-site page in order to see the videos of the collapse of WTC 7. It helps to have sound.

Then consider a video close-up of the same building (SW corner) as its demise begins:

http://st12.startlogic.com/~xenonpup/Flashes/squibs_along_southwest_corner.htm

What did you observe?

Symmetry: did the building collapse straight down (nearly symmetrically) – or did it topple over?

Speed: How fast did the building fall? (Students and I measure less than 6.6 seconds; time it!)

Smoke/debris-jets: Did you observe puffs of smoke/debris coming out of the building? Please note for yourself the sequence and fast timing of observed puffs or "squibs." Note that reference to web pages is used in this paper due largely to the importance of viewing motion picture clips, thus enhancing consideration of the laws of motion and physics generally. High-quality photographs showing details of the collapses of WTC 7 and the WTC Towers can be found in books (Hufschmid, 2002; Paul and Hoffman, 2004), magazines (Hoffman, 2005; Baker, 2005) and at http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/collapses.html.

My reasons for advancing the explosive-demolition hypothesis while challenging the "official" fire-caused collapse hypothesis are these:

1. As you observed, WTC 7 collapsed rapidly and symmetrically -- even though fires were randomly scattered in the building. WTC 7 fell about seven hours after the Towers collapsed, even though no major persistent fires were visible. There were twenty-four huge steel support columns inside WTC 7 as well as huge trusses, arranged asymmetrically, along with approximately 57 perimeter columns. (FEMA, 2002, chapter 5.) A symmetrical collapse, as observed, evidently requires the simultaneous "pulling" of most or all of the support columns. The Second Law of Thermodynamics implies that the likelihood of complete and symmetrical collapse due to random fires as in the "official" theory is small, since asymmetrical failure is so much more likely. On the other hand, a major goal of controlled demolition using explosives is the complete and symmetrical collapse of buildings.

Concluding remarks in the FEMA report on the WTC 7 collapse lend support to my arguments:

The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse ["official theory"] remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis [fire/damage-caused collapse] has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue. (FEMA, 2002, chapter 5; emphasis added.)

That is precisely my point: further investigation and analyses are needed, including consideration of the controlled-demolition hypothesis which is neglected in all of the government reports (FEMA, NIST and 9-11 Commission reports). Note that the 9-11 Commission report does not even mention the collapse of WTC 7 on 9-11-01. (Commission, 2004) This is a striking omission of data highly relevant to the question of what really happened on 9-11.

2. A New York Times article entitled "Engineers are baffled over the collapse of 7 WTC; Steel members have been partly evaporated," provides relevant data.

Experts said no building like it [WTC7], a modern, steel-reinforced high-rise, had ever collapsed because of an uncontrolled fire. (Glanz, 2001; emphasis added.)

That's correct – no such steel-beam building had ever before (or since) completely collapsed due to fires! However, such complete, symmetrical collapses have indeed occurred many times before -- all of them due to pre-positioned explosives in a procedure called "implosion" or controlled demolition. What a surprise, then, for such an occurrence in downtown Manhattan— three skyscrapers completely collapsed on the same day, September 11, 2001.

Engineers have been trying to figure out exactly what happened and whether they should be worried about other buildings like it around the country… Most of the other buildings in the [area] stood despite suffering damage of all kinds, including fire... 'Fire and the structural damage …would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated', Dr. [Jonathan] Barnett said. (Glanz, 2001; emphasis added.)

The observed "partly evaporated" steel members is particularly upsetting to the official theory, since fires involving paper, office materials, even diesel fuel, cannot generate temperatures anywhere near the 5,000+ oF needed to "evaporate" steel. However, thermite, RDX and other commonly-used explosives can readily slice through steel (thus cutting the support columns simultaneously in an explosive demolition) and reach the required temperatures. (It is possible that some other chemical reactions were involved which might proceed at lesser temperatures.) This mystery needs to be explored – but is not mentioned in the "official" 9-11 Commission or NIST reports.

3. There are several published observations of molten metal in the basements of all three buildings, WTC 1, 2 ("Twin Towers") and 7. For example, Dr. Keith Eaton toured Ground Zero and stated in The Structural Engineer,

'They showed us many fascinating slides' [Eaton] continued, 'ranging from molten metal which was still red hot weeks after the event, to 4-inch thick steel plates sheared and bent in the disaster'. (Structural Engineer, September 3, 2002, p. 6; emphasis added.)

The observation of molten metal at Ground Zero was emphasized publicly by Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer responsible for the design of the World Trade Center Towers, who reported that "As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running." (Williams, 2001, p. 3; emphasis added.)

Sarah Atlas was part of New Jersey's Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue and was one of the first on the scene at Ground Zero with her canine partner Anna. She reported in Penn Arts and Sciences, summer 2002,

'Nobody's going to be alive.' Fires burned and molten steel flowed in the pile of ruins still settling beneath her feet. (Penn, 2002; emphasis added.)

Dr. Allison Geyh was one of a team of public health investigators from Johns Hopkins who visited the WTC site after 9-11. She reported in the Late Fall 2001 issue of Magazine of Johns Hopkins Public Health, "In some pockets now being uncovered they are finding molten steel." Further information on the subject is available at http://globalresearch.ca.myforums.net/viewtopic.php?p=11663.

Thus, molten metal was repeatedly observed and formally reported in the rubble piles of the WTC Towers and WTC 7, metal that looked like molten steel. However, scientific analysis, using for example X-ray fluorescence, would be needed to ascertain the actual composition of the molten metal.

I maintain that these published observations are consistent with the use of the high-temperature thermite reaction, used to cut or demolish steel. Thermite is a mixture of iron oxide and aluminum powder. The end products of the thermite reaction are aluminum oxide and molten iron. So the thermite reaction generates molten iron directly, and is hot enough to melt and even evaporate steel which it contacts while reacting. On the other hand, falling buildings (absent explosives) have insufficient directed energy to result in melting of large quantities of metal. The government reports admit that the building fires were insufficient to melt steel beams -- then where did the molten metal come from? Metals expert Dr. Frank Gayle (working with NIST) stated:

Your gut reaction would be the jet fuel is what made the fire so very intense, a lot of people figured that's what melted the steel. Indeed it did not, the steel did not melt. (Field, 2005; emphasis added.)

None of the official reports tackles this mystery. Yet this is evidently a significant clue to what caused the Towers and WTC 7 to collapse. So I would very much like to see an analysis of the elemental composition of the metal, and could do this myself if a small sample were made available according to scientific courtesy. Any reader who knows of chemical analyses or even photographs of this molten metal found below the rubble piles of WTC 1, 2 and 7 is invited to speak out and contact the author. This could lead to an experiment crucis.

4. Horizontal puffs of smoke and debris are observed emerging from WTC-7 on upper floors, in regular sequence, just as the building starts to collapse. (The reader may wish to view the close-up video clip again.) The upper floors have not moved relative to one another yet, as one can verify from the videos. In addition, the timing between the puffs is less than 0.2 seconds so air-expulsion due to collapsing floors is excluded. Free-fall time for a floor to fall down to the next floor is significantly longer than 0.2 seconds: the equation for free fall, y = ½ gt2, yields a little over 0.6 seconds, as this is near the initiation of the collapse.

However, the presence of such "squibs" proceeding up the side of the building is common when pre-positioned explosives are used, as can be observed at http://www.implosionworld.com/cinema.html. The same site shows that rapid timing between explosive squibs is also common. (It is instructive to view several of the implosion videos at this web site.) Thus, squibs as observed during the collapse of WTC 7 going up the side of the building in rapid sequence provide additional significant evidence for the use of pre-placed explosives. Regarding this highly-secure building, a NY Times article entitled "Secretive C.I.A. Site in New York was Destroyed on Sept. 11," provides an intriguing puzzle piece:

The C.I.A.'s undercover New York station was in the 47-story building at 7 World Trade Center… All of the agency's employees at the site were safely evacuated… The intelligence agency's employees were able to watch from their office windows while the twin towers burned just before they evacuated their own building. (Risen, 2001)

5. The official FEMA 9-11 report admits a striking anomaly regarding the North Tower collapse:

Review of videotape recordings of the collapse taken from various angles indicates that the transmission tower on top of the structure began to move downward and laterally slightly before movement was evident at the exterior wall. This suggests that collapse began with one or more failures in the central core area of the building. (FEMA, 2002, chapter 2; emphasis added.)

North Tower showing antenna (top) at beginning of collapse.

Yes, we can see for ourselves that the antenna drops first from videos of the North Tower collapse. (See http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/videos/wtc1_close_frames.html ; also http://home.comcast.net/~skydrifter/collapse.htm.) A NY Times article also notes this behavior:

The building stood for more than an hour and a half. Videos of the north tower's collapse appear to show that its television antenna began to drop a fraction of a second before the rest of the building. The observations suggest that the building's steel core somehow gave way first… (Glanz and Lipton, 2002; emphasis added)

But how? What caused the 47 enormous steel core columns of this building (which supported the antenna) to give way nearly simultaneously? That mystery was raised by the FEMA report (FEMA, 2002, chapter 2) and the New York Times (Glanz and Lipton, 2002) yet not solved in any official report (FEMA, 2002; Commission, 2004; NIST, 2005). The odd behavior was not even mentioned in the final NIST report (NIST, 2005), but some of us have not forgotten.

Could random fires burning office materials in the building account for a near-simultaneous "pulling" of these core supports? Certainly such an event would have exceedingly low probability. Again, use of pre-positioned explosives to cut the core columns first (standard demolition practice) provides a simple yet elegant explanation for the observation, satisfying the "Occam's razor" test (Jones, 2005).

6. Multiple loud explosions in rapid sequence were heard and reported by numerous observers in and near the WTC Towers, consistent with explosive demolition. Firemen and others described flashes and explosions in upper floors near where the plane entered, and in lower floors of WTC 2 just prior to its collapse, far below the region where the plane had struck the tower (Dwyer, 2005). For instance, at the start of the collapse of the South Tower a Fox News anchor reported:

There is an explosion at the base of the building… white smoke from the bottom… something happened at the base of the building! Then another explosion." (De Grand Pre, 2002, emphasis added.)

Firefighter Edward Cachia independently reported:

[We] thought there was like an internal detonation, explosives, because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down…It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit. (Dwyer, 2005; emphasis added.)

And assistant fire commissioner Stephen Gregory provides additional insights:

When I looked in the direction of the Trade Center before it came down, before No. 2 came down, ..I saw low-level flashes. In my conversation with Lieutenant Evangelista, never mentioning this to him, he questioned me and asked me if I saw low-level flashes in front of the building, and I agreed with him because I thought -- at that time I didn't know what it was. I mean, it could have been as a result of the building collapsing, things exploding, but I saw a flash flash flash and then it looked like the building came down.

Q. Was that on the lower level of the building or up where the fire was?

A. No, the lower level of the building. You know like when they demolish a building, how when they blow up a building, when it falls down? That's what I thought I saw. And I didn't broach the topic to him, but he asked me. He said I don't know if I'm crazy, but I just wanted to ask you because you were standing right next to me… He said did you see any flashes? I said, yes, well, I thought it was just me. He said no, I saw them, too. (Dwyer, 2005, Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory FDNY WCT2 File No. 91 10008; emphasis added.)

It is highly unlikely that jet fuel was present to generate such explosions especially on lower floors, and long after the planes hit the buildings. Dr. Shyam Sunder, Lead Investigator for NIST stated: "The jet fuel probably burned out in less than 10 minutes." (Field, 2005) On the other hand, pre-positioned explosives provide a plausible and simple explanation for the observations, satisfying Occam's razor (Jones, 2005). Thus, it cannot be said that "no evidence" can be found for the use of explosives. This serious matter needs to be treated as a plausible scientific hypothesis and thoroughly investigated.

7. The horizontal ejection of steel beams for hundreds of feet and the pulverization of concrete to flour-like powder, observed clearly in the collapses of the WTC towers, provides further evidence for the use of explosives – as well-explained in http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/towers/index.html. (See also, Griffin, 2004, chapter 2.)

North Tower during top-down collapse.

Notice mysterious squibs far below pulverization region.

Unlike WTC7, the twin towers appear to have been exploded "top-down" rather than proceeding from the bottom – which is unusual for controlled demolition but clearly possible, depending on the order in which explosives are detonated. That is, explosives may have been placed on higher floors of the towers and exploded via radio signals so as to have early explosions near the region where the plane entered the tower. Certainly this hypothesis ought to be seriously considered in an independent investigation using all available data.

8. I totally agree with the urgent yet reasoned assessment of expert fire-protection engineers, as boldly editorialized in the journal Fire Engineering:

Respected members of the fire protection engineering community are beginning to raise red flags, and a resonating [result] has emerged: The structural damage from the planes and the explosive ignition of jet fuel in themselves were not enough to bring down the towers.

Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the "official investigation" blessed by FEMA… is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure. Except for the marginal benefit obtained from a three-day, visual walk-through of evidence sites conducted by ASCE investigation committee members- described by one close source as a "tourist trip"-no one's checking the evidence for anything.

Some citizens are taking to the streets to protest the investigation sellout. Sally Regenhard, for one, wants to know why and how the building fell as it did upon her unfortunate son Christian, an FDNY probationary firefighter. And so do we.

Clearly, there are burning questions that need answers. Based on the incident's magnitude alone, a full-throttle, fully resourced, forensic investigation is imperative. More important, from a moral standpoint, [are considerations] for the… present and future generations… (Manning, 2002; emphasis added).

9. The occurrence of nearly symmetrical, straight-down and complete collapses of the WTC 7 and the Towers is particularly upsetting to the "official" theory that random fires plus damage caused all these collapses. Even with explosives, achieving such results requires a great deal of pre-planning and expertise.

The main challenge in bringing a building down is controlling which way it falls. Ideally, a blasting crew will be able to tumble the building over on one side, into a parking lot or other open area. This sort of blast is the easiest to execute [favored by the Law of Increasing Entropy]. Tipping a building over is something like felling a tree. To topple the building to the north, the blasters detonate explosives on the north side of the building first…

Sometimes, though, a building is surrounded by structures that must be preserved. In this case, the blasters proceed with a true implosion, demolishing the building so that it collapses straight down into its own footprint (the total area at the base of the building). This feat requires such skill that only a handful of demolition companies in the world will attempt it. [Again, consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.]

Blasters approach each project a little differently... [A good] option is to detonate the columns at the center of the building before the other columns so that the building's sides fall inward. (Harris, 2000; emphasis added.)

Careful observation of the collapse of WTC 7 (video clips above) demonstrates a downward "kink" near the center of the building first, suggesting "pulling" of the support columns, then the building's sides pull inward such that the building "collapses straight down into its own footprint" (Harris, 2000). FEMA admitted that WTC 7 collapsed onto a well-confined footprint:

The collapse of WTC 7 had a small debris field as the facade was pulled downward, suggesting an internal failure and implosion… The average debris field radius was approximately 70 feet. (FEMA, 2002, chapter 5.)

Evidently we agree that this was a beautifully done implosion in the collapse of WTC 7, and yet:

This feat requires such skill that only a handful of demolition companies in the world will attempt it. (Harris, 2000; emphasis added.)

Consider: Why would terrorists undertake straight-down collapses of WTC7 and the Towers, when "toppling-over" falls would require much less work and would do much more damage in downtown Manhattan? And where would they obtain the necessary skills and access to the buildings for a symmetrical implosion anyway? The "symmetry data" emphasized here, along with other data, provide strong evidence for an "inside job." Proof would require additional investigation and questioning of suspects outside of Al Qaeda.

One of the people a thorough investigation should question under oath would be demolition expert Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. Speaking of the way the WTC buildings came down, he said in an interview: "If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure." (Bollyn, 2002; emphasis added.)

Just right – "explosives in the basement" agrees with eyewitness reports of explosions down low in the buildings (point 6 above). Also, this would be the way to effectively sever the support columns, consistent with both the initial drop of the communication tower (WTC Tower 1) and the "kink" in the middle of WTC 7 as its collapse began. Yes, and as president of Controlled Demolition, Inc., Mr. Loizeaux would know the "handful of demolition companies in the world [that] will attempt" a symmetrical controlled demolition. (Harris, 2000) His company is certainly one of these and was hired to do the rapid clean-up work following the building collapses. A thorough investigation might also query the owner of WTC7, who received billions in insurance monies due to the demise of the WTC buildings on 9-11. (Paul and Hoffman, 2004, p. 17)

If you still haven't looked at the rapid symmetrical collapse of WTC7 for yourself, why not do so now? Watch for the initial "kink" or drop in the middle, and for the "squibs" blowing in sequence up the side of the building, and notice the symmetrical, straight-down collapse -- all so common in controlled demolitions. See for yourself at: http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/videos.html. A great deal of further information is presented from a serious scientific point-of-view at this site (http://911research.wtc7.net/).

10. I presented my objections to the "official" theory at a seminar at BYU on September 22, 2005, to about sixty people. I also showed evidence and scientific arguments for the explosive demolition theory. In attendance were faculty from Physics, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Psychology, Geology, and Mathematics – and perhaps other departments as I did not recognize all of the people present. Two local universities were represented (BYU and Utah Valley State College).

The discussion was vigorous and lasted nearly two hours. It ended only when a university class needed the room. After presenting the material summarized here, including actually looking at and discussing the collapses of WTC 7 and the Towers, all except one attendee agreed (by hand-vote) that further investigation of the WTC collapses was called for. The next day, the dissenting professor said he had further thought about it and now agreed that more investigation was needed. He joined the others in hoping that the 6,899 photographs and 6,977 segments of video footage held by NIST plus others held by the FBI would be released for independent scrutiny; photos largely from private photographers (NIST, 2005, p. 81). We call for the release of these data to a cross-disciplinary, preferably international team of scientists and engineers.

11. One attendee to the BYU Seminar on 9-11 anomalies suggested I review the paper by Bazant and Zhou, which I did. Quoting:

The 110-story towers of the World Trade Center were designed to withstand as a whole the forces caused by a horizontal impact of a large commercial aircraft. So why did a total collapse occur? (Bazant and Zhou, 2002, p. 2.)

Correct – jet collisions did not cause collapses – we can agree on that. MIT's Thomas Eager also concurs "because the number of columns lost on the initial impact was not large and the loads were shifted to remaining columns in this highly redundant structure" (Eager and Musso, 2001).

We continue with Bazant & Zhou:

The conflagration, caused by the aircraft fuel spilled into the structure, causes the steel of the columns to be exposed to sustained temperatures apparently exceeding 800oC… (Bazant and Zhou, 2002, p. 2.)

But here we note from the recent NIST report that: "The initial jet fuel fires themselves lasted at most a few minutes" and office material fires would burn out within about 20 minutes in a given location. (NIST, 2005; p. 179, emphasis added.) Certainly jet fuel burning was not enough to raise steel to sustained temperatures above 800oC. But we continue:

Once more than half of the columns in the critical floor.. suffer buckling (stage 3), the weight of the upper part of the structure above this floor can no longer be supported, and so the upper part starts falling down onto the lower part below…"(Bazant and Zhou, 2002, p. 2.)

Hold on – Bazant & Zhou do not explain how "more than half of the columns in the critical floor [can] suffer buckling" at the same time to precipitate the complete and nearly symmetrical collapse observed. There were 47 huge steel core columns in each Tower, and 24 such support columns in WTC 7 (NIST 2005; NISTb, 2005).

The WTC towers were solidly constructed with 47 steel core

columns and 240 perimeter steel beams. 287 steel-columns total.

Many doubt that random fires/damage could cause them to

collapse straight down (official theory), and suspect explosives.

Steel-frame: Huge core (left), enormous Heat Sink. Notice workers standing on floor pan which is

firmly attached to the interconnected core columns.

They do NOT explain how steel-column temperatures above 800oC were achieved near-simultaneously due to burning office materials. NIST notes that office materials in an area burn for about 15-20 minutes, then are consumed away (NIST, 2005, pp. 117, 179). This is evidently not long enough to raise steel column temperatures above 800oC as required in the Bazant & Zhou model, given the enormous heat sinks of the structures. And to have three buildings completely collapse due to this unlikely mechanism on the same day strains credulity. Moreover, the Final NIST report on the Towers admits:

Of the more than 170 areas examined on 16 perimeter column panels, only three columns had evidence that the steel reached temperatures above 250ºC… Only two core column specimens had sufficient paint remaining to make such an analysis, and their temperatures did not reach 250 ºC. ... Using metallographic analysis, NIST determined that there was no evidence that any of the samples had reached temperatures above 600 ºC. (NIST, 2005, pp. 176-177; emphasis added.)

As for WTC 7, Bazant & Zhou say little but mention in a separate "addendum" that burning natural gas might have been a source of the needed heat (Bazant and Zhou, March 2002, p. 370). The FEMA report (FEMA, 2002) addresses this issue:

Early news reports had indicated that a high pressure, 24-inch gas main was located in the vicinity of the building [WTC 7]; however, this proved not to be true." (FEMA, 2002, chapter 5; emphasis added)

12. I have read through the hundreds of pages of the Final NIST report on the collapses of the WTC Towers. (NIST, 2005) It is interesting to note that NIST "decoupled" and delayed their final report on WTC 7, which is overdue as of this writing (NIST, 2005; NISTb, 2005) I agree with some of the NIST report; for example:

Both WTC 1 and WTC 2 were stable after the aircraft impact, standing for 102 min and 56 min, respectively. The global analyses with structural impact damage showed that both towers had considerable reserve capacity. This was confirmed by analysis of the post-impact vibration of WTC 2… where the damaged tower oscillated at a period nearly equal to the first mode period calculated for the undamaged structure. (NIST, 2005, p. 144; emphasis added.)

At any given location, the duration of [air, not steel] temperatures near 1,000oC was about 15 min to 20 min. The rest of the time, the calculated temperatures were near 500oC or below." (NIST, 2005, p. 127, emphasis added.)

NIST contracted with Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. to conduct tests to obtain information on the fire endurance of trusses like those in the WTC towers… All four test specimens sustained the maximum design load for approximately 2 hours without collapsing." (NIST, 2005, p. 140, emphasis added.)

However, I along with others challenge NIST's collapse theory. NIST maintains that all three building collapses were fire-initiated despite the observations above, particularly the fact that fire endurance tests with actual models did not result in collapse. In a paper by fire-engineering experts in the UK, we find:

The basis of NIST's collapse theory is… column behaviour in fire... However, we believe that a considerable difference in downward displace between the [47] core and [240] perimeter columns, much greater than the 300 mm proposed, is required for the collapse theory to hold true… [Our] lower reliance on passive fire protection is in contrast to the NIST work where the amount of fire protection on the truss elements is believed to be a significant factor in defining the time to collapse… The [proposed effect] is swamped by thermal expansion … Thermal expansion and the response of the whole frame to this effect has NOT been described as yet [by NIST]. (Lane and Lamont, 2005.)

I agree with these pointed objections, particularly that the "response of the whole frame" of each building should be considered, especially heat transport to the whole frame from localized fires, and that the "core columns cannot pull the exterior columns in via the floor." (Lane and Lamont, 2005)

The computerized models of the Towers in the NIST study, which incorporate many features of the buildings and the fires on 9-11-01, are less than convincing. The Final report states:

The Investigation Team then defined three cases for each building by combining the middle, less severe, and more severe values of the influential variables. Upon a preliminary examination of the middle cases, it became clear that the towers would likely remain standing. The less severe cases were discarded after the aircraft impact results were compared to observed events. The middle cases (which became Case A for WTC 1 and Case C for WTC 2) were discarded after the structural response analysis of major subsystems were compared to observed events. (NIST, 2005, p. 142; emphasis added.)

The NIST report makes for interesting reading. The less severe cases based on empirical data were discarded because they did not result in building collapse. But 'we must save the hypothesis,' so more severe cases were tried and the simulations tweaked, as we read in the NIST report:

The more severe case (which became Case B for WTC 1 and Case D for WTC 2) was used for the global analysis of each tower. Complete sets of simulations were then performed for Cases B and D. To the extent that the simulations deviated from the photographic evidence or eyewitness reports [e.g., complete collapse occurred], the investigators adjusted the input, but only within the range of physical reality. Thus, for instance,…the pulling forces on the perimeter columns by the sagging floors were adjusted... (NIST, 2005, p. 142; emphasis added.)

The primary role of the floors in the collapse of the towers was to provide inward pull forces that induced inward bowing of perimeter columns. (NIST, 2005, p. 180; emphasis added.)

How fun to tweak the model like that, until the building collapses -- until one gets the desired result. But the end result of such tweaked computer hypotheticals is not compelling, sorry gentlemen. Notice that the "the pulling forces on the perimeter columns by the sagging floors were adjusted" (NIST, 2005, p. 142; emphasis added) to get the perimeter columns to yield sufficiently – one suspects these were "adjusted" by hand quite a bit -- even though the UK experts complained that "the core columns cannot pull the exterior [i.e., perimeter] columns in via the floor." (Lane and Lamont, 2005; emphasis added.)

I also agree with Kevin Ryan's objections regarding the NIST study. Kevin Ryan, at the time a manager at Underwriters Laboratories (UL), makes a point of the non-collapse of actual WTC-based models in his letter to Frank Gayle of NIST:

As I'm sure you know, the company I work for certified the steel components used in the construction of the WTC buildings. In requesting information from both our CEO and Fire Protection business manager last year… they suggested we all be patient and understand that UL was working with your team… I'm aware of UL's attempts to help, including performing tests on models of the floor assemblies. But the results of these tests… indicate that the buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by… burning [jet fuel, paper, etc.]. (Ryan, 2004)

That models of WTC trusses at Underwriter Laboratories (UL) subjected to fires did NOT fail is also admitted in the final NIST report:

NIST contracted with Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. to conduct tests to obtain information on the fire endurance of trusses like those in the WTC towers…. All four test specimens sustained the maximum design load for approximately 2 hours without collapsing… The Investigation Team was cautious about using these results directly in the formulation of collapse hypotheses. In addition to the scaling issues raised by the test results, the fires in the towers on September 11, and the resulting exposure of the floor systems, were substantially different from the conditions in the test furnaces. Nonetheless, the [empirical test] results established that this type of assembly was capable of sustaining a large gravity load, without collapsing, for a substantial period of time relative to the duration of the fires in any given location on September 11. (NIST, 2005, p. 141; emphasis added.)

So how does the NIST team justify the WTC collapses, when actual models fail to collapse and there are zero examples of fire-caused high-rise collapses? Easy, NIST concocted computer-generated hypotheticals for very "severe" cases, called cases B and D (NIST, 2005, pp. 124-138). Of course, the details are rather hidden to us. And they omit consideration of the complete, rapid and symmetrical nature of the collapses.

Indeed, NIST makes the startling admission in a footnote on page 80 of their Final Report:

The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the "probable collapse sequence," although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached...(NIST, 2005, p. 80, fn. 12; emphasis added.)

Again, on page 142, NIST admits that their computer simulation only proceeds until the building is "poised for collapse", thus ignoring any data from that time on.

The results were a simulation of the structural deterioration of each tower from the time of aircraft impact to the time at which the building became unstable, i.e., was poised for collapse. ...(NIST, 2005, p. 142; emphasis added.)

What about the subsequent complete, rapid and symmetrical collapse of the buildings? What about the observed squibs? What about the antenna dropping first in the North Tower? What about the molten metal observed in the basement areas in large pools in both Towers and WTC 7 as well? Never mind all that: NIST did not discuss at all any data after the buildings were "poised for collapse." Well, some of us want to look at ALL the data, without computer simulations that are "adjusted" to make them fit the desired outcome.

13. Kevin Ryan, the whistleblower from Underwriters Laboratories, did his own statistical analysis in a recent letter regarding the NIST report, arguing that probabilities of collapse-initiation needed to be calculated (Ryan, 2005). NIST nowhere provides such a likelihood analysis for their non-explosive collapse model. Ryan's analysis is that the probability that fires and damage (the "official theory") could cause the Towers complete collapse is less than one in a trillion, and the probability is much less still when the complete collapse of WTC7 is included (Ryan, 2005). Nor does NIST (or FEMA or the 9-11 Commission) even mention the molten metals found in the basements of all three buildings (WTC 1, 2 and 7).

So where does that leave us? I strongly agree with Kevin Ryan,

This ["official"] story just does not add up…. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans…. There is no question that the events of 9/11 are the emotional driving force behind the War on Terror. And the issue of the WTC collapse is at the crux of the story of 9/11. (Ryan, 2004; emphasis added.)

14. The NIST team fairly admits that their report "does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached." (NIST, 2005, p. 80, fn. 1; emphasis added.) Quite a confession, since much of the external evidence for explosive demolition typically comes after collapse initiation, as seen in cases of acknowledged controlled demolition. (Harris, 2000.)

The rapid fall of the Towers and WTC7 has been analyzed by several engineers/scientists (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/proofs/speed.html; Griffin, 2004, chapter 2). The roof of WTC 7 (students and I are observing the southwest corner) falls to earth in less than 6.6 seconds, while an object dropped from the roof would hit the ground in 6.0 seconds. This follows from t = (2H/g)1/2. Likewise, the Towers fall very rapidly to the ground, with the upper part falling nearly as rapidly as ejected debris which provide free-fall references (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/proofs/speed.html; Griffin, 2004, chapter 2). Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum – one of the foundational Laws of Physics? That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors – and intact steel support columns – the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass. If the central support columns remained standing, then the effective resistive mass would be less, but this is not the case – somehow the enormous support columns failed/disintegrated along with the falling floor pans.

How do the upper floors fall so quickly, then, and still conserve momentum in the collapsing buildings? The contradiction is ignored by FEMA, NIST and 9-11 Commission reports where conservation of momentum and the fall times were not analyzed. The paradox is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis, whereby explosives quickly remove lower-floor material including steel support columns and allow near free-fall-speed collapses (Harris, 2000).

And these explosives also readily account for the turning of the falling Towers to fine dust as the collapse ensues. Rather than a piling up with shattering of concrete as we might expect from non-explosive-caused progressive collapse ("official theory"), we find that most of the Towers material (concrete, carpet, steel, etc.) is converted to flour-like powder WHILE the buildings are falling. The Towers' collapses are not a typical implosions, but quite possibly series of "shock-and-awe" explosions – at least the evidence points strongly in this direction. The hypothesis ought to be explored further.

Those who wish to preserve as inviolate fundamental physical laws may wish to take a closer look. Consider the collapse of the South WTC Tower on 9-11: http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/south_tower_collapse.mpeg

Top ~ 34 floors of South Tower topple over.

What happens to the block and its angular momentum?

We observe that approximately 34 upper floors begin to rotate as a block, to the south and east. They begin to topple over, as favored by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The torque due to gravity on this block is enormous, as is its angular momentum. But then – and this I'm still puzzling over – this block turned mostly to powder in mid-air! How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives? Remarkable, amazing – and demanding scrutiny since the US government-funded reports failed to analyze this phenomenon. But, of course, the Final NIST 9-11 report "does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached." (NIST, 2005, p. 80, fn. 1; emphasis added.)

Indeed, if we seek the truth of the matter, we must NOT ignore the data to be observed during the actual collapses of the towers, as the NIST team admits they did. But why did they do such a non-scientific procedure as to ignore highly-relevant data? The business smacks of political constraints on what was supposed to be an "open and thorough" investigation. (See Mooney, 2005.)

So I with others call for an open and thorough investigation. I hope the international community will rise to the challenge. The field is wide open for considering the alternative hypothesis outlined here, due to its neglect by studies funded by the US government.

15. Finally, and by way of review, we consider the variations and inconsistencies in the fire/damaged-caused collapse models with time. The earliest model, promoted by various media sources, was that the fires in the towers were sufficiently hot to actually melt the steel in the buildings, thus causing their collapse. For example, Chris Wise in a BBC piece spouted out false notions with great gusto

"It was the fire that killed the buildings. There's nothing on earth that could survive those temperatures with that amount of fuel burning… The columns would have melted, the floors would have melted and eventually they would have collapsed one on top of the other." (quoted in Paul and Hoffman, 2004, p. 25)

But as we have seen from later serious studies, the jet fuel burned out within minutes following impact. Recall the statement of expert Dr. Gayle refuting the notion that fires in the WTC buildings were sufficiently hot to melt the steel supports:

Your gut reaction would be the jet fuel is what made the fire so very intense, a lot of people figured that's what melted the steel. Indeed it did not, the steel did not melt. (Field, 2005; emphasis added)

Then we have the model of Bazant and Zhou, which requires the majority of the 47 huge steel columns on a floor of each Tower to reach sustained temperatures of 800oC in order to buckle (not melt) – at the same time. But as we've seen, such temperatures are very difficult to reach while burning office materials, in these connected steel structures where the heat is wicked away by heat transport. (Paul and Hoffman, 2004, p. 26) And then to reach the 800oC at the same time, well, no, this scenario is far too improbable.

So that approach was abandoned by FEMA in the next effort (FEMA, 2002). The FEMA team largely adopted the theory of Dr. Thomas Eager (Eager and Musso, 2001), which was also presented in the NOVA presentation "Why the Towers Fell" (NOVA, 2002). Instead of having the columns fail simultaneously, FEMA has floor pans in the Towers warp due to fires, and the floor connections to the vertical beams break, and these floor pans then fall down onto the floor pans below, initiating "progressive collapse" or pancaking of one floor pan on another. Very simple. But not so fast – what happens to the enormous core columns to which the floors were firmly attached? Why don't these remain standing like a spindle with the floor pans falling down around them, since the connections are presumed to have broken away? This interconnected steel core is founded on bedrock. FEMA does not totally ignore the core:

As the floors collapsed, this left tall freestanding portions of the exterior wall and possibly central core columns. As the unsupported height of these freestanding exterior wall elements increased [no mention of the huge central core anymore!], they buckled at the bolted column splice connections and also collapsed." (FEMA. 2002; emphasis added)

This approach finally fails to account for the observed collapse of the 47 interconnected core columns which are massive and designed to bear the weight of the buildings, and it has the striking weakness of requiring the connections of the floor pans to the vertical columns to break, both at the core and at the perimeter columns, more or less simultaneously.

That didn't work out, so NIST goes back to the drawing board. They require that the connections of the floor pans to vertical columns do NOT fail (contrary to FEMA's model), but rather that the floor pans "pull" with enormous force, sufficient to cause the perimeter columns to significantly pull in, leading to final failure (contrary to objections of ARUP Fire experts, discussed above). Also, NIST constructs a computer model -- but realistic cases do not actually lead to building collapse. So they "adjust" inputs until the model finally shows collapse initiation for the most severe cases. The details of these "adjustments" are hidden from us, in their computerized hypotheticals, but "the hypothesis is saved." NIST also has Underwriters Laboratories construct models of the WTC trusses, but the models withstand all fires in tests and do NOT collapse. (See above for details.)

We are left without a compelling fire/damage model, unless one blindly accepts the NIST computer simulation while ignoring the model fire-tests, which I'm not willing to do. And none of the "official" models outlined above accounts for what happens to the buildings AFTER the building is "poised for collapse" (NIST, 2005, p. 142) – namely the rapid and symmetrical and complete (no tall-standing central core) collapses. Reports of explosions, heard and seen, are not discussed. And they ignore the squibs seen ejected from floors far from where the jets hit – particularly seen in WTC 7 (where no jet hit at all). Finally, what about that molten metal under the rubble piles of all three WTC skyscrapers?

Remarkably, the explosive demolition hypothesis accounts for all the available data rather easily. The core columns on lower floors are cut using explosives, near-simultaneously, along with explosives detonated up higher so that gravity acting on now-unsupported floors helps bring down the buildings quickly. The collapses are thus symmetrical, rapid and complete, with accompanying squibs -- really very standard stuff for demolition experts. Thermite (whose end product is molten iron) used on some of the steel beams readily accounts for the molten metal which then pooled beneath the rubble piles.

I believe this is a straightforward hypothesis, much more probable than the official hypothesis. It deserves scientific scrutiny, beyond what I have been able to outline in this treatise. It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings, and set off after the two plane crashes – which were actually a diversion tactic. The science is sound. The implications are paradigm-shifting: Muslims are (probably) not to blame for bringing down the WTC buildings after all.

CONCLUSIONS

I have called attention to glaring weaknesses in the "final" reports funded by the US government and shown evidences for a likely alternative hypothesis. In particular, the official theory lacks repeatability in that no actual models or buildings (before or since 9-11-01) have been observed to completely collapse due to the proposed fire-based mechanisms. On the other hand, dozens of buildings have been completely and symmetrically demolished through the use of pre-positioned explosives. The "explosive demolition" hypothesis better satisfies tests of repeatability and parsimony and therefore is not "junk science." It ought to be seriously, scientifically investigated and debated.

A truly independent, international panel would consider all viable hypotheses, including the pre-positioned-explosives theory, guided not by politicized notions and constraints, but rather by observations and calculations, to reach a scientific conclusion. Questioning (preferably under oath) of officials who approved the rapid removal and destruction of the WTC steel beams and columns before they could be properly analyzed – and others as outlined above – should proceed in the United States.

None of the government-funded studies have provided serious analyses of the explosive demolition hypothesis at all. Until the above steps are taken, the case for accusing ill-trained Muslims of causing all the destruction on 9-11-01 is far from compelling. It just does not add up.

And that fact should be of great concern to Americans and to all those threatened by American military and security units in the wake of the 9-11 events (Ryan, 2004). Use of powerful, pre-positioned explosives in the WTC buildings would imply an "inside job" (Griffin, 2004, chapter 2). Clearly, we must find out what really caused the WTC skyscrapers to collapse as they did.

To this end, NIST must release the 6,899 photographs and over 300 hours of video recordings – acquired mostly by private parties – which it admits to holding (NIST, 2005, p. 81). In particular, photos and analyses of the molten metal (probably not molten steel) observed in the basements of both Towers and WTC7 need to be brought forth to the international community of scientists and engineers immediately. Therefore, along with others, I call for the release of these and all relevant data for scrutiny by a cross-disciplinary, international team of researchers. The explosive-demolition hypothesis will be considered: all options will be on the table.

AFTERWARD

In writing this paper, I call for a serious investigation of the hypothesis that WTC7 and the Twin Towers were brought down, not just by damage and fires, but through the carefully planned use of explosives. I have presented ample evidence for the explosive-demolition hypothesis, which is testable and falsifiable and yet has not been seriously considered in any of the studies funded by the US government.

At the same time, I acknowledge that other notions have sprung up in the near vacuum of official consideration of this very plausible hypothesis. These notions must be subjected to careful scrutiny. I by no means endorse all such ideas. For example, the video "In Plane Site" promotes the theory that a "pod" holds a missile under the wing of the 757 which hit WTC 2 (see Hoffman, 2005; Chertoff, 2005). Careful inspection of the undercarriage of a standard 757 leads to the explanation that the so-called "pod" was merely a reflection from the bulged undercarriage (Hoffman, 2005; Chertoff, 2005). I find that the "pod theory" is very weak and distracts from central issues.

Again, there is a notion that something other than Boeing jetliners hit the WTC Towers (see Hoffman, 2005; Chertoff, 2005). Scrutiny of photographs and videos provides compelling evidence that jets did in fact hit these buildings (Hoffman, 2005; Chertoff, 2005). A March 2005 article in Popular Mechanics focuses on poorly-supported claims and proceeds to ridicule the whole "9-11 truth movement" (Chertoff, 2005). Serious replies to this article have already been written (Hoffman, 2005; Baker, 2005; serendipity.li/wot/pop_mech/reply_to_popular_mechanics.htm).

Those espousing weak or untestable claims should realize that they may be damaging the effort to achieve a rational debate of important issues by poisoning the process with "junk science". Likewise, the notion that the "explosive demolition" hypothesis should not be debated since it would imply a "conspiracy theory" departs from good science as well as from numerous historical precedents of empirical conspiracies (Jones, 2005). Scientific inquiry is not or should not be dictated by politics (Mooney, 2005).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge comments and contributions by Jim Hoffman and Jeff Strahl, and Professors Jack Weyland, David Ray Griffin, Steven Benzley, Bryan Peterson and Harold Stokes.

REFERENCES

Baker, Jeremy (2005). "Contrary to Popular (Mechanics') Belief," Global Outlook, Issue 10, p. 14 (Spring-Summer 2005).

Bazant, Z. P. and Zhou, Y. (2002). "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Simple Analysis," J. Eng. Mech. 128:2, January 2002.

Bazant, Z. P. and Zhou, Y. (March 2002). "Addendum to 'Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Simple Analysis," J. Eng. Mech. 128:369, March 2002.

Bollyn, Christopher (2002). "New seismic data refutes official explanation," American Free Press, September 3, 2002, available at: http://www.americanfreepress.net/09_03_02/NEW_SEISMIC_/new_seismic_.html .

Chertoff, B., et al. (2005). "9/11: Debunking the Myths," Popular Mechanics, March 2005.

Commission (2004). The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition, New York: W.W. Norton.

De Grand Pre, Donn (2002). "Many Questions Still Remain About Trade Center Attack," American Free Press, February 3, 2002, available at: http://www.americanfreepress.net/02_03_02/Trade_Center_Attack/trade_center_attack.html

Dwyer, James (2005). "City to Release Thousands of Oral Histories of 9/11 Today," New York Times, August 12, 2005, with quotes of eyewitnesses available in New York Times archives at http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_01.html and http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_full_01.html .

Eager, T. W. and Musso, C. (2001). "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation", Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, 53/12:8-11 (2001).

FEMA (2005). "World Trade Center Building Performance Study," released May 2002, available at: http://www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm.

Field, Andy (2004). "A Look Inside a Radical New Theory of the WTC Collapse," Fire/Rescue News, February 7, 2004. Available at http://cms.firehouse.com/content/article/article.jsp?sectionId=46&id=25807

Glanz, James (2001). "Engineers are baffled over the collapse of 7 WTC; Steel members have been partly evaporated," New York Times, November 29. 2001.

Glanz, James, and Lipton, Eric (2002). "Towers Withstood Impact, but Fell to Fire, Report Says," Fri March 29, 2002, New York Times.

Griffin, David Ray (2004). The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink.

Griffin, David Ray (2005). The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink.

Harris, Tom (2000). "How Building Implosions Work," available at: http://science.howstuffworks.com/building-implosion.htm, ca. 2000.

Hoffman, James (2005). "Popular Mechanics' Assault on 9/11 Truth," Global Outlook, Issue 10, p. 21 (Spring-Summer 2005).

Hufschmid, Eric (2002). Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack, Goleta, California: Endpoint Software.

Jones, S. E. (2005). "The Official 9-11 Story as 'Bad Science'," Paper in preparation.

Lane, B., and Lamont, S. (2005). "Arup Fire's presentation regarding tall buildings and the events of 9/11," ARUP Fire, April 2005. Available at: http://www.arup.com/DOWNLOADBANK/download353.pdf

Manning, William (2002). "Selling out the investigation," Editorial, Fire Engineering, January 2002

Mooney, Chris (2005). The Republican War on Science, New York, NY: Basic Books.

NIST (2005). http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/NISTNCSTAR1Draft.pdf ("Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers (Draft)"), Sept.-Oct. 2005.

NISTb (2005). http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/WTC%20Part%20IIC%20-%20WTC%207%20Collapse%20Final.pdf %20WTC%207%20Collapse%20Final.pdf (Part IIC – WTC 7 Collapse, preliminary), 2005.

NOVA (2002). "Why the Towers Fell," originally broadcast Tuesday, April 30, 2002; see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/.

Paul, Don, and Hoffman, Jim (2004). Waking Up From Our Nightmare : The 9/11/01 Crimes in New York City, San Francisco: Irresistible/Revolutionary.

Penn Arts and Sciences (2002). Penn Arts and Sciences, summer 2002 , available at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/summer2002/k911.html.

Risen, James (2001). "Secretive CIA Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11," New York Times, November 4, 2001.

Ryan, Kevin (2004). Letter to Frank Gayle, available at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041112144051451

Ryan, Kevin (2005). "A Call for a Personal Decision," Global Outlook, Issue 10, p. 96 (Spring-Summer 2005).

Williams, James (2001). "WTC a structural success," SEAU NEWS; The Newsletter of the Structural Engineers Association of Utah, October 2001, p. 1,3.

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M. Reynolds: Why did the Towers collapse?

2005-11-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

Friends:
This is the best single article I've found so far on the collapse of the Twin Towers, etc. It's the only one I've seen which goes into some detail about the size of the holes purportedly made by civilian airliners. --RB

Why Did the Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse?
by Morgan Reynolds

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reynolds/reynolds12.htm

"It didn�t seem real� There are thousands of these steel beams that just fell like pickup sticks."

~ John Albanese, volunteer firefighter and amateur photographer

"What struck us – guys like Warren Jennings and myself, who have spent basically all our lives in the scrap business – we�d never seen steel this heavy, this huge, this massive. It was just unbelievable."

~ Michael Henderson (p. 93),
General Manager, Marine Terminals, Metal Management NE

To explain the unanticipated free-fall collapses of the twin towers at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, mainstreamexperts (also see The American Professional Constructor, October 2004, pp. 12–18) offer a three-stage argument: 1) an airplane impact weakened each structure, 2) an intense fire thermally weakened structural components that may have suffered damage to fireproofing materials, causing buckling failures, which, in turn, 3) allowed the upper floors to pancake onto the floors below.

Many will nod their head, OK, that does it and go back to watching the NBA finals or whatever, but I find this theory just about as satisfying as the fantastic conspiracy theory that "19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan" caused 9/11. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms, but its blinkered narrowness and lack of breadth is the paramount defect unshared by its principal scientific rival – controlled demolition. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapses of WTC 1 (North Tower), WTC 2 (South Tower), and the much-overlooked collapse of the 47-story WTC building 7 at 5:21 pm on that fateful day.

The scientific controversy over the initial structural weakening has two parts: what caused the original tower damage and did that damage "severely" weaken the structures? Photos show a stable, motionless North Tower (WTC 1) after the damage suffered at 8:46 am and the South Tower after its 9:03 am impact. If we focus on the North Tower, close examination of photosreveals arguably "minor" rather than "severe" damage in the North Tower and its perimeter columns.

As many as 45 exterior columns between floors 94 and 98 on the northeast (impact) side of the North Tower were fractured – separated from each other – yet there is no direct evidence of "severe" structural weakening. None of the upper sections of the broken perimeter columns visibly sags or buckles toward its counterpart column below. We can infer this because of the aluminum covers on the columns: each seam uniformly aligns properly across the Tower, forming a horizontal "dashed line" in the façade from beveled end to end. Despite an impact hole, gaps in perimeter columns, and missing parts of floors 95–98 at the opening, the aluminum façade shows no evidence of vertical displacement in the columns, suggestive of little or no wider floor buckling at the perimeter.

The aluminum covers attached to the columns also aligned vertically after impact, that is, separated columns continued to visually remain "plumb" (true vertical), lining up top to bottom around the aperture, implying no perceptible horizontal displacement of the columns. Photographic evidence for the northeast side of the North Tower showed no wider secondary structural impact beyond the opening itself. Of course, there was smoke pouring out of the upper floors.

The fact that perimeter columns were not displaced suggests that the floors did not buckle or sag. Despite missing parts of floors 95–98, photos show no buckling or sag on other floors. If so, that boosts the likelihood that there was little damage to the core. Photos do not document what happened within the interior/core and no one was allowed to inspect and preserve relevant rubble before government authorities – primarily FEMA – had it quickly removed. Eyewitness testimony by those who escaped from inside the North Tower concerning core damage probably is unavailable.

Photos do not allow us to peer far into the interior of the building; in fact the hole is black, with no flames visible. We know that the structural core and its steel was incredibly strong (claimed 600% redundancy) making it unlikely that the core was "severely" damaged at impact. There were 47 core columns connected to each other by steel beams within an overall rectangular core floor area of approximately 87 feet x 137 feet (26.5 m x 41.8 m). Each column had a rectangular cross section of approximately 36" x 14" at the base (90 cm x 36 cm) with steel 4" thick all around (100 mm), tapering to �" (6 mm) thickness at the top. Each floor was also extremely strong (p. 26), a grid of steel, contrary to claims of a lightweight "truss" system.

Those who support the official account like Thomas Eagar (p. 14), professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at MIT, usually argue that the collapse must be explained by the heat from the fires because the loss of loading-bearing capacity from the holes in the Towers was too small. The transfer of load would have been within the capacity of the towers. Since steel used in buildings must be able to bear five times its normal load, Eagar points out, the steel in the towers could have collapsed only if heated to the point where it "lost 80 percent of its strength, " around 1,300oF. Eagar believes that this is what happened, though the fires did not appear to be extensive and intense enough, quickly billowing black smoke and relatively few flames.

While some experts claim that airliner impact severely weakened the entire structural system, evidence is lacking. The perimeters of floors 94–98 did not appear severely weakened, much less the entire structural system. The criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be saved for forensic analysis but FEMA had it destroyed before anyone could seriously investigate it. FEMA was in position to take command because it had arrived the day before the attacks at New York�s Pier 29 to conduct a war game exercise, "Tripod II," quite a coincidence. The authorities apparently considered the rubble quitevaluable: New York City officials had every debris truck tracked on GPS and had one truck driver who took an unauthorized 1 � hour lunch fired.

The preliminary NIST Response claims that "the wall section above the impact zone moved downward" (pdf, p. 36) on WTC 1 but offers no evidence. It offers photographic evidence, however, for a "hanging floor slab" on the 82d floor of the South Tower at 9:55 a.m. This looks minor though because there is no sag on adjacent floors and the integrity of the structure looks very much intact. The fire looks weak too, yet the South Tower collapsed only four minutes later. This would be quite a puzzle without a demolition theory.

About a dozen of the fragmented ends of exterior columns in the North Tower hole were bent but the bends faced the "wrong way" because they pointed toward the outside of the Tower. This fact is troublesome for the official theory that a plane crash created the hole and subsequent explosion between floors 94 and 98. The laws of physics imply that a high-speed airplane with fuel-filled wings breaking through thin perimeter columns would deflect the shattered ends of the columns inward, if deflected in any direction, certainly not bend them outward toward the exterior.

A possible response would be that, well, yes, an airliner crash would bend a column inward rather than outward, if bent at all, but the subsequent force of a jet fuel blast would act in the opposite direction: any inward bends caused by plane impact would straighten toward vertical or even reverse the bent steel columns toward the exterior under blast pressure. However, such a proposed steel "reversal theory" (first bend inward by collision, then bend outward by explosion) suffers two major handicaps:

No "inward-bending columns" were observed and it would be unlikely that each and every one would be reversed by subsequent explosion, and

the hypothesis is ad hoc and lacks simplicity, both scientific negatives.
Occam�s razor would suggest that the outward bends in the perimeter columns were caused by explosions from inside the tower rather than bends caused by airliner impact from outside. Also supporting this theory is the fact that the uniformly neat ends of the blown perimeter columns are consistent with the linear shaped charges demolition experts use to slice steel as thick as 10 inches. The hypothesis of linear shaped charges also explains the perfectly formed crosses found in the rubble (crucifix-shaped fragments of core column structures), as well as the rather-neatlyshorn steel everywhere.

The engineering establishment�s theory has further difficulties. It is well-known that the hole in the west wing of the Pentagon, less than 18-foot diameter, was too small to accommodate a Boeing 757, but the North Tower�s hole wasn�t big enough for a Boeing 767 either, the alleged widebody airliner used on AA Flight 11 (officially tail number N334AA, FAA-listed as "destroyed"). A Boeing 767 has a wingspan of 155� 1" (47.6 m) yet the maximum distance across the hole in the North Tower was about 115 feet (35 m), a hole undersized by some 40 feet or 26 percent. "The last few feet at the tips of the wings did not even break through the exterior columns," comments Hufschmid (p. 27). But 20 feet on each wing? I�d call that a substantial difference, not "the last few feet," especially since aircraft impact holes tend to be three times the size of the aircraft, reflecting the fact that fuel-laden airliners flying into buildings send things smashing about in a big way. The small size of the holes in both towers casts doubt on the airliner-impact hypothesis and favors professional demolition again. There were no reports of plane parts, especially wings, shorn off in the collision and bounced to the ground on the northeast side of the tower, to my knowledge, though FEMA reported a few small pieces to the south at Church street (pp. 68–9) and atop WTC-5 to the east of WTC-1.

Adding to the suspicious nature of the small aperture in WTC 1 is that some vertical gaps in the columns on the left side of the northeast hole were so short, probably less than three feet (p. 105) high (p. 27). Not much of a jumbo jet could pass through such an opening, especially since a fuel-laden plane would not minimize its frontal area. The engines are a special problem because each engine is enormous and dense, consisting mainly of tempered steel and weighing 5–6 tons, depending upon model. No engine was recovered in the rubble yet no hydrocarbon fire could possibly vaporize it.

The hole in the North Tower also is suspicious because it did not even have a continuous opening at the perimeter, but instead contained substantial WTC material (p. 27) just left of center (pp. 62, 105). This material appears integral to that area, so it did not move much, suggesting minimal displacement and no clean penetration by a jumbo jet. These huge airliners weigh 82 tons empty and have a maximum takeoff weight of up to 193 tons.

In the case of the South Tower, an engine from UAL Flight 175 (tail number N612UA and FAA-registered as still valid!) has not been recovered despite the fact that the flight trajectory of the video plane implied that the right engine would miss the South Tower. Photos showing minor engine parts on the ground are unconvincing, to put it mildly. Perhaps independent jet engine experts (retired?) can testify to the contrary. Further contradicting the official account, the beveled edge of the southeast side of the south tower was completely intact upon initial impact. The government never produced a jet engine yet claimed it recovered the passport of alleged hijacker Satam al Suqami unharmed by a fiery crash and catastrophic collapse of the North Tower. The government has not produced voice (CVR) or flight data recorders (FDR) in the New York attack either, so-called black boxes, a fact unprecedented in the aviation history of major domestic crashes.

Adding to the problems of the official theory is the fact that photos of the North Tower hole show no evidence of a plane either. There is no recognizable wreckage or plane parts at the immediate crash site. While the issue probably takes us too far afield, the landing wheel assembly that allegedly flew out of the North Tower and was found several streets away could easily have been planted by FEMA or other government agents. I�ve never seen any objective analysis of this wheel assembly though it would be welcome. In fact, the government has failed to produce significant wreckage from any of the four alleged airliners that fateful day. The familiar photo of the Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania (The 9/11 Commission Report, Ch. 9) shows no fuselage, engine or anything recognizable as a plane, just a smoking hole in the ground. Photographers reportedly were not allowed near the hole. Neither the FBI nor the National Transportation Safety Board have investigated or produced any report on the alleged airliner crashes.

The WTC 1 and Pentagon holes were not alone in being too small. Photos show that the hole in WTC 2 also was too small to have been caused by the crash of a Boeing 767. In fact, the South Tower hole is substantially smaller than the North Tower hole.

The next question is whether the fires were hot enough to cause the WTC buildings to collapse. In defending the official account and its clones that try to explain the unprecedented collapses of three steel-framed skyscrapers without demolition, heat arguably is more important than structural impact. That�s obviously true for building WTC 7 because there was no alleged airplane impact.

First, no steel-framed skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly hit by aircraft, the third not. These extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires made it all the more important to preserve the evidence, mostly steel girders, to study what had happened. On fire intensity, consider this benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia�s Meridian Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that "[b]eams and girders sagged and twisted," but "[d]espite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage" (quoted by Griffin, p. 15). Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance to what we observed at the WTC.

Second, severe structural damage to the WTC towers would have required fires that were not only large but growing throughout the buildings and burning for a considerable period of time. None of these conditions was present. "The lack of flames is an indication that the fires were small, and the dark smoke is an indication that the fires were suffocating," points out Hufschmid (p. 35). Eyewitnesses in the towers, as well as police and firefighters, reported (pp. 199–200) the same thing.

Third, the impact opening was 15 floors lower in the South Tower than in the North Tower, where core columns were thicker, so the South Tower fire had to produce more heat to raise the steel temperatures to soften up (thermally weaken) the steel columns. Yet its fires were considerably smaller and 30 minutes shorter in duration. The Tower collapsed after burning only 56 minutes. A prime candidate to explain why "the wrong tower fell first" is that the small dying fire in the South Tower forced the hand of the mass murderers who decided to trigger demolition earlier than planned in order to sustain the lie that fire caused the collapse. The North Tower stood for another 29 minutes and its core steel was thinner at its upper stories. The 1991 Meridian Plaza fire burned for 19 hours and the fire was so extreme that flames came from dozens of windows on many floors. It did not collapse.

Fourth, implicitly trying to explain away these difficulties, the current NIST investigation, conducted by "an extended investigation team of 236 people," makes "dislodged fireproofing" the key variable to explain the collapses. Supposedly, "the probable collapse sequence for the WTC towers are (sic) based on the behavior of thermally weakened structural components that had extensive damage to fireproofing or gypsum board fire protection induced by the debris field generated by aircraft impact" (p. 111). "Had fireproofing not been dislodged by debris field," this team of government-paid experts claims, "temperature rise of structural components would likely have been insufficient to induce global collapse" (p. 108). Perhaps acknowledging the lack of direct evidence for its conjectures, the NIST admits that "a full collapse of the WTC floor system would not occur even with a number of failed trusses or connections" and it "recognizes inherent uncertainties" (pp. 110 and 112). The NIST will have to boost its creativity to plausibly explain the WTC 7 collapse because it won�t have the benefit of tales of aircraft and debris fields.

Aside from specific defects in the fire collapse theory, a wide variety of facts undermine it:

Photos show people walking around in the hole in the North Tower "where 10,000 gallons of jet fuel were supposedly burning. The women (p. 27) seem to (sic) looking down to the ground" (the NIST "Response" pdf, p. 62, also shows a similar photo of the same blond woman with light-colored slacks looking over the edge of the 94th floor).
By the time the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower�s flames had already vanished, burning for only 16 minutes.
The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was suffocating rather than the sprinkler system dousing the fires.
FDNY fire fighters remain under a gag order (Rodriguezvs-1.Bush.pdf, p. 10) to not discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a 9/11 gag order.
Even the 9/11 Commission (Kean-Zelikow) Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible" (Ch. 9, p. 302). It shocked everyone that day, amateur and professional alike, although some firefighters realized that so-called secondary explosive devices were a risk.
Griffin (pp. 25–7) succinctly identifies the primary defects in the official account of the WTC collapses, and its sister theories. These problems were entirely ignored by The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), so the government appointees must have found it difficult to account for the following facts:

Firehadnever before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.
The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were small.
WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds.
WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams (pp. 68–9).
In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC lease-holder, recalled talking to the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 and said, "�maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.
FEMA, given the uninviting task of explaining the collapse of Building 7 with mention of demolition verboten admitted that the best it could come up with had "only a low probability of occurrence."
It�s difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.
Professional demolition, by contrast, can explain all of these facts and more. Demolition means placing explosives throughout a building, and detonating them in sequence to weaken "the structure so it collapses or folds in upon itself" (p. 44). In conventional demolitions gravity does most of the work, although it probably did a minority on 9/11, so heavily were the towers honeycombed with explosives.

Each WTC building collapse occurred at virtually free-fall speed (approximately 10 seconds or less).
Each building collapsed, for the most part, into its own footprint.
Virtually all the concrete (an estimated 100,000 tons in each tower) on every floor was pulverized into a very fine dust, a phenomenon that requires enormous energy and could not be caused by gravity alone ("�workers can�t even find concrete. �It�s all dust,� [the official] said").
Dust exploded horizontally for a couple hundred feet, as did debris, at the beginning of each tower�s collapse.
Collapses were total, leaving none of the massive core columns sticking up hundreds of feet into the air.
Salvage experts were amazed at how small the debris stacks were.
The steel beams and columns came down in sections under 30 feet long and had no signs of "softening"; there was little left but shorn sections of steel and a few bits of concrete.
Photos and videos of the collapses all show "demolition waves," meaning "confluent rows of small explosions" along floors (blast sequences).
According to many witnesses, explosionsoccurred within the buildings.
Each collapse had detectable seismic vibrations suggestive of underground explosions, similar to the 2.3 earthquake magnitude from a demolition like the Seattle Kingdome (p. 108).

Each collapse produced molten steel identical to that generated by explosives, resulting in "hot spots" that persisted for months (the two hottest spots at WTC-2 and WTC-7 were approximately 1,350o F five days after being continuously flooded with water, a temperature high enough to melt aluminum (p. 70).

Controlled demolition would have required unimpeded access to the WTC, access to explosives, avoiding detection, and the expertise to orchestrate the deadly destruction from a nearby secure location. Such access before 9/11 likely depended on complicity by one or more WTC security companies. These companies focus on "access control" and as security specialist Wayne Black says, "When you have a security contract, you know the inner workings of everything." Stratesec, a now-defunct company that had security contracts at the World Trade Center and Dulles International Airport, should be investigated, among others, because of the strange coincidence that President Bush�s brother, Marvin P. Bush, and his cousin, Wirt D. Walker III, were principals in the company, with Walker acting as CEO from 1999 until January 2002 and Marvin reportedly in New York on 9/11. At least one report claims that a "power down" condition prevailed on September 8–9 (pdf, p. 45) at WTC to complete a "cabling upgrade," presenting an opportunity to plant explosives with low risk of detection.

A related point is that demolition companies go to considerable expense to wire steel-framed skyscrapers with explosives to produce safe implosions, and they would love to do it more cheaply by simply setting two small fires like those that (allegedly) caved in building 7. Apparently, the terrorist-inventors have kept this new technology secret.

Why would the killers destroy WTC-7, especially since a collapse would arouse suspicion in some quarters? A logical if unproven theory is that the perpetrators used Mayor Giuliani�s sealed OEM "bunker" on the 23d story of WTC-7 to conduct the twin tower implosions and then destroyed the building and evidence to cover up their crimes, just as a murderer might set his victim�s dwelling ablaze to cover up the crime (one in four fires is arson). Giuliani�s "undisclosed secret location" was perfect because it had been evacuated by 9:45 a.m. on 9/11, it enabled unmolested work, provided a ringside seat, was bullet- and bomb-resistant, had its own secure air and water supply, and could withstand winds of 160 mph, necessary protection from the wind blasts generated by collapsing skyscrapers.

There is special import in the fact of free-fall collapse (item one in the list immediately above), if only because everyone agrees that the towers fell at free-fall speed. This makes pancake collapse with one floor progressively falling onto the floor below an unattractive explanation. Progressive pancaking cannot happen at free-fall speed ("g" or 9.8 m/s2). Free-fall would require "pulling" or removing obstacles below before they could impede (slow) the acceleration of falling objects from above. Sequenced explosions, on the other hand, explain why the lower floors did not interfere with the progress of the falling objects above. The pancake theory fails this test.

If we put the murder of 2,749 innocent victims momentarily aside, the only unusual technical feature of the collapses of the twin towers was that the explosions began at the top, immediately followed by explosions from below. WTC-7, by contrast, was entirely conventional, imploding from bottom up.

It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely prove to be sound. Revised engineering and construction practices, for example, based on the belief that the twin towers collapsed through airplane damage and subsequent fires is premature, to say the least.

More importantly, momentous political and social consequences would follow if impartial observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an "inside job" and a government attack on America would be compelling. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right, "though heaven should fall." Unfortunately, getting it right in today�s "security state" demands daring because explosives and structuralexperts have been intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.

June 9, 2005

Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D. [send him mail], is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University and former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX. He served as chief economist for the US Department of Labor during 2001–2, George W. Bush's first term.

Copyright 2005 LewRockwell.com

Morgan Reynolds Archives

Links referenced within this article

Morgan Reynolds
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reynolds/mailto:econrn@cox-internet.com
John Albanese
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/firefighter
Michael Henderson
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931788014/qid=1118167567/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-2604847-0883337
mainstream
http://ascelibrary.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=JSENDH&Volume=131&Issue=1#MAJOR3
experts
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/Media_Public_Briefing_040505_final.pdf
19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.htm
photos
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931947058/qid=1118170176/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
reveals
http://hereisnewyork.org/index2.asp
strong
http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2004-11-11-ryan.php
extremely strong
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931947058/qid=1118170176/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
a grid of steel
http://home.debitel.net/user/andreas.bunkahle/defaulte.htm
lightweight "truss" system
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/trusstheory.html
Thomas Eagar
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566565529/qid=1118171046/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/102-20604847-0883337
FEMA
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAN309A.html
quite
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/groundzero/cleanup.html#ref2
valuable
http://securitysolutions.com/ar/security_gps_job_massive/
NIST
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/Media_Public_Briefing_040505_final.pdf
slice steel
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1579121497/qid=1118171341/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-2604847-0883337?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
rather-neatly
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031712/qid=11181711870/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-20604847-0883337
shorn steel everywhere
http://www.september11news.com/
Hufschmid
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931947058/qid=1118170176/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Church street
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031712/qid=11181711870/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-20604847-0883337
atop WTC-5
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/aircraft.html
three feet
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/Media_Public_Briefing_040505_final.pdf
high
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931947058/qid=1118170176/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
WTC material
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931947058/qid=1118170176/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
left of center
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/Media_Public_Briefing_040505_final.pdf
193 tons
http://www.airliners.net/info/stats.main?id=103
FAA-registered
http://162.58.35.241/acdatabase/acmain.htm
unconvincing
http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/photos/index.html
impact
http://home.debitel.net/user/andreas.bunkahle/defaulte.htm
Satam al Suqami
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/deceptions/passport.html
planted
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/aircraft.html
The 9/11 Commission Report
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch9.htm
, Ch. 9
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch9.htm
no fuselage, engine or anything recognizable
http://thewebfairy.com/911/93/noplane.htm
smoking hole in the ground
http://commonwealthclub.org/archive/02/02-08longman-speech.html
too small
http://home.debitel.net/user/andreas.bunkahle/defaulte.htm
Griffin
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566565529/qid=1118171046/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/102-20604847-0883337
Hufschmid
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931947058/qid=1118170176/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
reported
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0971394245/qid=%3D1118173557/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/102-2064847-0883337
the same thing
http://globalresearch.ca.myforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=523&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
current NIST investigation
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/Media_Public_Briefing_040505_final.pdf
women
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931947058/qid=1118170176/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
NIST
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/Media_Public_Briefing_040505_final.pdf
gag order
http://www.911forthetruth.com/
9/11 Commission (Kean-Zelikow) Report
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch9.htm
Griffin
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1566565847/qid=1118174708/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847-0883337?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Fire
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5296
had
http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr69c.html
never before
http://home.comcast.net/~jeffrey.king2/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html
pp. 68–9
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931947058/qid=1118170176/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
p. 44
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1579121497/qid=1118171341/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-2604847-0883337?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
explosives
http://home.debitel.net/user/andreas.bunkahle/defaulte.htm
�It�s all dust,� [the official] said"
http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/abc_nosurvivors.html
explosions
http://xenonpuppy.net/collapse update/Engine-7.htm
occurred
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/eyewitnesses.html
p. 108
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1579121497/qid=1118171341/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-2604847-0883337?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
p. 70
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931947058/qid=1118170176/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-2604847?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Wayne Black
http://www.populist.com/03.02.burns.html
September 8–9
http://www.911forthetruth.com/
explosives
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/key_researcher.html
structural
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/albu.htm
experts
http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2004-11-11-ryan.php
send him mail
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reynolds/mailto:econrn@cox-internet.com
Morgan Reynolds Archives
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reynolds/reynolds-arch.html

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Bleier: Review Esssy: Griffin on 9/11 as an inside job

2005-10-17T16:11:00.000-07:00

Bleier: Review essay: Griffin on 9/11 as an inside job

Here’s a link and the first few paragraphs of my article summarizing some of the evidence suggesting that the official story of 9/11 is false and indeed, that 9/11 was an inside job.

I have organized the article chiefly around the work of David Ray Griffin who to my mind has written the most plausible, accessible and comprehensive books outlining the evidence against the official story.

As indicated, the article below is intended as Part 1 of a larger work, which will review many of the major events and circumstances surrounding 9/11.

http://desip.igc.org/GriffinReviewPt1_7-1-05.htm

9/11, An Inside Job?
A Review Essay based on David Ray Griffin’s research

Part I

by Ronald Bleier

June 2005

David Ray Griffin: The New Pearl Harbor Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 , Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press (2004)

David Ray Griffin: The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions. Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press (2005)

A: The air defense stand-down
We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty.
President G.W. Bush to the U.N. General Assembly, November 10, 2001

Was 9/11 an inside job? David Ray Griffin addresses this question in two books that critically examine the official account of the events of 9/11. Griffin’s books are masterpieces of concise compilations of the available plausible evidence suggesting that the attacks must have resulted from complicity at the highest levels of the United States government. This review essay treats both books as a unit, summarizes some of his most important findings, and includes relevant material from other researchers.

Like most Americans, Griffin, a retired professor of Philosophy at the Claremont School of Theology (California), at first viewed critics of the Bush administration’s account as crackpots. It seemed to him that conspiracy theories on this subject were below the threshold of possibility. In the 18 months following 9/11, he had not looked at any of the evidence challenging the government’s theory –- that the attacks were the responsibility of 19 Arab hijackers led by Osama Bin Laden. It seemed to him, as he writes in his introduction, “beyond belief that the Bush administration – even the Bush administration -- would do such a heinous thing.” (The New Pearl Harbor, [NPH], xvii-xviii)

But in the spring of 2003 a colleague prodded him to look at researcher Paul Thompson’s 9/11 timeline that is strictly limited to mainstream sources.[1] Griffin was “surprised, even amazed, to see how much evidence he had found that points to the conclusion that the Bush administration did indeed intentionally allow the attacks of 9/11 to happen.” Griffin began to look at the work of Nafeez Ahmed, an independent researcher in England, whose book “directly challenges the accepted wisdom about 9/11 which is that it resulted from a breakdown within and among our intelligence agencies. Ahmed, like Thompson, suggests that the attacks must have resulted from complicity in high places, not merely from incompetence in lower places.” Taken together, Griffin concludes, Ahmed and Thompson “provided a strong prima facie case for this contention.” Because the work of Ahmed and Thompson were not likely to reach many American readers, and because of the U.S. media’s failure to provide an in depth investigation, Griffin decided to write a magazine article which grew into his first book, The New Pearl Harbor. (NPH, xviii-xix)[2]

Griffin’s Title: The New Pearl Harbor
Griffin explains that the title of his first book, The New Pearl Harbor (NPH), alludes, in part, simply to the pointed references to Pearl Harbor that were made in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks. For example, President Bush wrote in his diary that evening: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” Henry Kissinger in an online post on 9/11 wrote that he hoped that the U.S. government’s response “will end the way that the attack on Pearl Harbor ended – with the destruction of the system that is responsible for it.” (NPH, xi)

The title also has a deeper meaning. Griffin cites a commentary by John Pilger suggesting that the events of 9/11 presented an opportunity that was predicted in 2000 by soon-to-be top Bush administration officials. The neoconservative Project for the New American Century September 2000 document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” written or subscribed to by such figures as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, reasoned that the changes they had in mind for the direction of U.S. policy would be difficult to achieve “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.” (NPH, xi) Griffin’s title is a reference to the Bush administration’s opportunistic use of the 9/11 terror events to embark on a plan of “aggressive imperialism” that has led to two wars, to sharp increases in military spending, a dramatic shift towards a national security state and a sustained attack on civil liberties. (NPH, xii)

Why a second book on 9/11?
As his title indicates, Professor Griffin’s second book on 9/11, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions (O&D), is intended as a response to the 9/11 Commission Report (July 2004), which gained immediate mainstream popularity and credibility. The New Pearl Harbor can be read as an investigation into an extraordinary crime perpetrated by the U.S. government on its own people, and Omissions and Distortions as an expose of the cover up of the crime (although each book contains elements of both). Readers open to the message of The New Pearl Harbor may divide as to the implications over the level of the Bush administration’s complicity in the terror events. Some may take the view that the success of the attacks was due merely to administration incompetence, combined with understandable mistakes, some foreknowledge and a willingness to let it happen, roughly the LIHOP school (Let It Happen On Purpose). Although Griffin presents considerable evidence supporting the stronger conclusions of the MIHOP school (Made It Happen On Purpose), many readers may assume that that evidence could be explained away.

However, readers of Griffin’s second book (especially after having read the first) are more likely to find that it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the White House must have been deeply involved in planning and executing the 9/11 attacks. The difference is that readers can see that although the 9/11 Commission had the opportunity to rebut the allegations summarized in the first book, they simply ignored most of them.

The strength and effectiveness of Griffin’s work comes in part from his mastery of the subject, the depth of his research, his brilliant organizational ability and the clarity with which he presents extremely detailed and complicated information. Those who agree with the author’s fundamental assumption, that there is a strong prima facie case for critically examining the official story, are likely to experience a sense of relief that an independent and competent authority is finally pulling back the immense curtain of fog behind which the terror attacks are still hidden. Griffin’s work empowers and helps to unify his readers who were confused and isolated by the shock of the attacks and their aftermath.

A hallmark of Griffin’s writing is his measured language. He is as precise as possible, cautiously never going beyond known facts and reasonable common sense deductions. In The New Pearl Harbor, while he presents information that could plausibly suggest the highest possible level of official complicity, Griffin pretty much limits himself to calling for an independent investigation of the many troubling and substantial issues raised by the 9/11 events.

In his second book, published after it became clear to Griffin and many other skeptics that there was to be no credible independent inquiry into the 9/11 events, the tone is often stronger and Griffin goes as far as speaking of the 9/11 Report’s “audacious lies,” in addition to detailing its often breathtaking “omissions and distortions.”

Nevertheless, for the most part, even in his second book, he conservatively limits himself to the conclusions that can fairly be drawn from the available evidence. Again Griffin shrinks from coming right out and accusing the Bush administration of planning and executing the 9/11 attacks. Rather he concludes his inquiry with a question: Why would the people in charge of writing the 9/11 Commission Report engage in such extraordinary deception if they were not trying to cover up very high crimes? (O&D, 291)

***

Griffin begins The New Pearl Harbor by examining some of the commonly accepted notions of the events of 9/11/2001. Critics claim that not one of the planes that hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon should have reached its target, let alone all three of them. In the normal course of events, military jets would have intercepted and if necessary shot down the errant airliners before they reached their targets. There are troubling aspects with Flight 93, the plane that reportedly went down in Shankesville, Pennsylvania. Skeptics cite testimony and other reasons to think that the U.S. Air Force shot it down. Moreover, the official story about the collapse of the Twin Towers and Building 7 of the World Trade Center is not credible. The commonly accepted view is that the Twin Towers collapsed due to the impact of the planes and the resulting fires and Building 7 from fire alone, but skeptics believe that they collapsed because of preplanned controlled demolitions. Finally, there are disturbing questions about the behavior of President Bush and the Secret Service that day that could point to guilty foreknowledge of a U.S. government conspiracy. (NPH, 3)

(For the continuation of this article, click on the link below or write to rbleier@igc.org)

http://desip.igc.org/GriffinReviewPt1_7-1-05.htm

Bleier's scenario + Kurt Nimmo on Huge Rucksack Photo

2005-07-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

Nimmo's post is a timely antidote for the apparent disinformation currently circulated by the security services and the media. The photo --all over the British media -- made the front page of the New York Times. Yesterday the WSJ referred to the youths as the _bombers_ without qualification as if it were already proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Here we have Nimmo raising the obvious question: how did such reclusive people have access to the most sophisticated explosives and expertise. The WSJ following the lead of the government suggested that they had help from outside. No proof. Simply an assertion or a guess.

As Nimmo suggests, the size of the rucksack is probably not first one a suicide bomber or any bomber would choose for such a mission. What if he was heading for a camping trip?

I'm wondering if it's too early to build a scenario or is this what many have been thinking for days?!
A. It was an inside job. The security services planned and executed it with the knowledge if not the cooperation of the Mossad and the CIA/FBI, etc.
B. Instead of having a cover story in place they figured they'd imporovise. After reviewing security tapes, they decided to use the inquiry by a mother of one of the victims (in all likelihood) to pin it on a Muslim group that happened to be travelling to London. Such a scenario would explain the several days delay in getting the cover story out.
C. Has anyone been able to independently verify the reason the group was in London? Is such an inquiry possible?

Kurt Nimmo wrote:
http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/?p=823
Huge Rucksack for a Ten Pound Bomb
Thursday July 14th 2005, 11:31 am

Here’s a still supposedly released from the CCTV footage showing the demonic terrorist (i.e., patsy) Hasib Hussain “on his way to carry out last Thursday’s Tavistock Square attack,” according to the Guardian. Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch has poured over “5,000 tapes of CCTV footage” and come up with one image for public consumption. Of course, considering how the British government lied about Saddam’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction and Blair’s “intelligence dossier” on Iraq was lifted, word for word, from an American student’s thesis, there is absolutely no reason for us to believe this single frame image means anything at all or is what Scotland Yard tells us it is and not fun with Photoshop. Anyway, let’s for a moment buy Scotland Yard’s assertion this is an image of Hussain “on his way” to kill people at Tavistock Square. Is there a reason this guy would need a huge rucksack (plainly visible in the above image) if he was carrying a mere ten pounds (or less) of explosives? Or maybe Hussain had his dirty laundry in the backpack too. “The explosives appear to be of military origin, which is very worrying,'’ Christophe Chaboud, chief of the French Anti-Terrorism Coordination Unit, explained two days ago. How did a kid from Leeds who stayed in his room reading the Koran get his hands on military explosives? ‘’Either by trafficking, for example, in the Balkans, or they had someone on the inside who enabled them to get them out of a military establishment.'’ Or maybe the military establishment pulled off the attacks. Of course, now that I have said that, I will be quoted on right-winger blogs as an American (or British) hating nutter.

London 7/7 UK "exercise" precisely follows bombings script

2005-07-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

London Underground Bombing 'Exercises' Took Place at Same Time as Real Attack
Culpability cover scenario echoes 9/11 war games

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet | July 9 2005

A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for an unnamed company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.

On a BBC Radio 5 interview that aired on the evening of the 7th, the host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a 'crisis management' advice company, better known to you and I as a PR firm.

Peter Power was a former Scotland Yard official, working at one time with the Anti Terrorist Branch.

Power told the host that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.

The transcript is as follows.

POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.

Click here for a clip of this dialogue. Click here for a longer clip where the comments can be heard in their full context.

The fact that the exercise mirrored the exact locations and times of the bombings is light years beyond a coincidence. Power said the drill focused around 'simultaneous bombings'. At first the bombings were thought to have been spread over an hour, but the BBC reports just today that the bombings were in fact simultaneous.

Mr. Power (pictured above) and Visor Consultants need not have been 'in on the bombing' or anything of that nature for this to be of importance. The British government or one of their private company offshoots could have hired Visor to run the exercise for a number of purposes.

We are not suggesting that Mr. Power had any knowledge of the real purpose of the exercise, and the open shock he exclaims in relating the story underlines this.

The exercise fulfils several different goals. It acts as a cover for the small compartamentalized government terrorists to carry out their operation without the larger security services becoming aware of what they're doing, and, more importantly, if they get caught during the attack or after with any incriminating evidence they can just claim that they were just taking part in the exercise.

This is precisely what happened on the morning of 9/11/2001. The CIA was conducting drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon at 8:30 in the morning.

It is clear that at least five if not six training exercises were in operation in the days leading up to and on the morning of 9/11. This meant that NORAD radar screens showed as many as 22 hijacked airliners at the same time. NORAD had been briefed that this was part of the exercise drill and therefore normal reactive procedure was forestalled and delayed.

The large numbers of 'blips' on NORAD screens that displayed both real and 'drill' hijacked planes explain why confused press reports emerged hours after the attack stating that up to eight planes had been hijacked.

The Anglo-American establishment that controls the military-industrial complex of the West has been caught over a hundred times carrying out bombings and other terrorist attacks around the world to further their corporate aims and to blame their enemies.

The US government has been caught planning to carry out attacks and carrying out attacks. The British government has been caught red-handed as well. Members of Vladimir Putin's FSB were caught planting bombs in a Russian apartment building in 1999 by the Moscow police.

This is not speculation. Kermit Roosevelt admited on NPR radio that in 1953 the CIA and British intelligence carried out a wave of bombings and shootings in Iran. He then went on to brag about how they subsequently blamed the bombings on Iran's President, Mossadegh. Do you understand, these people brag about what they do 40 years later?

The London bombings have the same signature as the Madrild bombings of 3/11. Both of these bombings are almost indistinguishable from the Bolognia bombing in 1980 that killed over 80 people.

The bombing in Bolognia was part of a CIA operation code named Gladio, where the US government would pay right-wing terrorists to carry out bombings to be blamed on leftists in Europe. All of this was blown wide open when two of the Bolognia bombers were convited in an Italian court, forcing them to spill their guts admitting that they were neo-fascists contracted by the CIA. Operation Gladio documents have since been declassified.

The London terror alert level was lowered before the bombings took place. This gave the purpotrators extra cover to plan and execute the attack without having to evade the most stringent security.

In any crime you look at history and motive, The British government has been caught in multiple examples of carrying out bombings in London which were then blamed on the IRA. They even had one of their own MI5 agents wihin the Omagh bomb squad. Click here for an archive of this evidence.

The wider agenda will become clearer when Blair firmly points the finger at the selected patsies designated to take the fall. But for the moment he's happy to grandstand as the courageous leader who immedately returned to London to take control of the chaos.

BBC polls that were showing 80 per cent plus opposed the ID card will now likely flip back in the opposite direction. Support for the European Union and increased globalization through the G8 will rise. Who stands to gain from all this? Who has the motive?

From Putin blowing up his own apartment buildings to Israel being behind Hamas, the evidence is consistently clear that large scale terrorism is always state sponsored.

The Madrid train bombing is another example. The bombers were found to be police informants with close links to the Spanish security services. They had access to the most secure areas of the Madrid train system. The Spanish government initially tried to blaim the Basque group ETA for the blast in the hope that the people would rally behind the government and get them re-elected. After ETA denied involvement and the people started saying the government was involved, the Spanish government had to blame Al-Qaeda and kill some patsies by claiming they blew themselves up during a raid.

The London Underground exercises were used as the fallback cover to carry out the attack. This is the biggest smoking gun yet pointing directly to the most secretive levels of the British establishment itself being behind the attack.

More on this story as and when it develops.
***

London Britches Falling Down [1]
7.11.05
The slip was showing On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, broadcast on prime time TV for all Britain to see on the evening of 7/7 - but almost no one noticed.

It happened on a special called Target London. Rescue workers on one half of the screen, and on the other, Peter Power, a British consultant, innocently giving the game away.

Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?

Power: Today we were running an exercise for a company .... 1000 people involved in the whole organization - with the crisis team. And the most peculiar thing was, it was we based on a scenario of simultaneous attacks on a underground and mainline station. So we had to suddenly switch an exercise from fictional to real....

Interviewer: Just to get this right, you were actually working today on an exercise that envisioned virtually this scenario?

Power: Almost precisely. [2]

Within the hour Mr. Power was on the radio too:

Power: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

Host: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

Power: Precisely. [3]

You might need to be a paranoid 9/11 conspiracy theorist like me to understand what Mr. Power was saying, since as a normal person, he himself was surprised but not suspicious.

Well, this was exactly how the covert perps or moles in the US air defence agencies covered for whatever they had in the air on 9/11: with a drill for the very attack they were carrying out.

Here is how Watson and Jones explain it:

The exercise fulfils several different goals. It acts as a cover for the small compartmentalized government terrorists to carry out their operation without the larger security services becoming aware of what they're doing, and, more importantly, if they get caught during the attack or after with any incriminating evidence they can just claim that they were just taking part in the exercise.

This is precisely what happened on the morning of 9/11/2001. The CIA was conducting drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon at 8:30 in the morning. [3]

Thus the drill also helps keep the number of witting accomplices small. You don’t need an entire agency made up of homicidal sociopaths.

Terrorism expert Webster G. Tarpley gives an example in his 9/11 Synthetic Terror:

Staff exercises or command exercises are perfect for a rogue network which is forced to conduct its operations using the same communications and computer systems used by other officers who are not necessarily party to the illegal operation, coup or provocation as it may be. A putschist officer may be working at a console next to another officer who is not in on the coup, and who might indeed oppose it if he knew about it. The putschist’s behavior is suspicious: what the hell is he doing? The loyal officer looks over and asks the putschist about it. The putschist cites a staff maneuver for which he is preparing. The loyal officer concludes that the putschist’s activities are part of an officially sanctioned drill, and his suspicions are allayed. The putschist may even explain that participation in the staff exercise requires a special security clearance which the loyal officer does not have. The conversation ends, and the putschist can go on with his treasonous work. [4]

How could this have worked in London? Mr. Powers would be like the loyal agent without the supersecret clearance; his job in the drill was to unwittingly help provide camouflage. Several participants could be given the “play-acting” role of terrorists who plant bags with “fake” bombs in them at the appropriate point in the scenario but this time, real bombs were substituted. Whether witting or not, they would run no risk of arrest it was “just a drill.” The WTC bombing of 1993 was perpetrated by the FBI in just this way: the patsies were told it was a sting operation to catch the terrorists, but at the last minute, live explosives were “somehow” used instead.

Hopefully, there are enough people out there who can add two and two together from Mr. Power’s candour. The drill and the confidential identity of the “client company” may have covered over the trail, so this might be the best smoking gun we on get 7/7.

Although it does seem this penchant for false flag ops is going to trip them up sooner or later. It’s gotten to be such an awfully regular habit, do they even know how to stop?

=========

[1] Lampooning tyrants can be a good way of opposing them. No disrespect is intended to the latest victims of London’s atrocities by the title of this article. Nonetheless, some hypocritical shills may snap at this with crocodile tears, so don’t be fooled.

[2] WMV video file at http://www.terrorize.dk/misc/london/resources.php

Complete transcript:

POWER: Today we were running an exercise for a company - bear in mind now that I'm in the private sector - and we sat everybody down in the city - 1000 people involved in the whole organization - with the crisis team. And the most peculiar thing was it was we based on a scenario of simultaneous attacks on a underground and mainline station. So we had to suddenly switch an exercise from fictional to real. And one of the first things is, get that bureau number, when you have a list of people missing, tell them. And it took a long time -

INTERVIEWER: Just to get this right, you were actually working today on an exercise that envisioned virtually this scenario?

POWER: Almost precisely. I was up to 2 oclock this morning, because it's our job, my own company. Visor Consultants, we specialize in helping people to get their crisis management response, how you jump from slow time thinking to quick time doing. And we chose a scenario with no assistance, which is based on a terrorist attack because they've been close to a property occupied by Jewish businessmen there in the city, and there are more American banks in this city than there are in the whole of New York - a logical thing to do.

INTERVIEWER: How extraordinary today must feel for you as it unfolds. You mentioned a few moments ago there our experience with Irish Republican terrorism. And of course it was very different wasn't it because however perverted their behavior, the IRA believed itself to have some sort of code of honour, and tended to issue some kind of warnings, of course they often came too late to do any good.

[3] Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones, London Underground Bombing 'Exercises' Took Place at Same Time as Real Attack, Prison Planet July 9 2005.

[4] 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, by Webster Griffin Tarpley, p. 204-205.

London Bombings: An Inside Job? Prison Planet 7.7.05

2005-07-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

Explosions In London - Who Stands To Gain? Israel Warned, Cover-up In Progress

Prisonplanet | July 07 2005

BREAKING: Scrambled cover-up to try and change prior knowledge story.

Original reports stated that Binyamin Netanyahu was warned BEFORE the first blast, now all the Associated Press reports are being changed to say he was warned AFTER the first blast, for example this article.

The article linked below that we saved in our own format (and the website that carried it has strangely since crashed) said that Netanyahu was warned before the first blast.

Israel are now denying they got a warning.

BREAKING: Scotland Yard says it got a warning before the attack and told Israel.

"The Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remaining in his hotel room rather than make his way to the hotel adjacent to the site of the first explosion, a Liverpool Street train station, where he was to address and economic summit."

Full article here.

The warning contradicts the fact that the original explanation of a power surge went out for an hour or more. They knew it was an attack but put out a false explanation. Plus why did Netanyahu get a warning and the victims didn't?

We have been told that the events unfolding today were "inevitable", London's transport network has been hit with multiple explosions. Both the Underground and Buses have been hit. Events are still unfolding.

We predicted this would happen over a year ago after analyzing the propaganda and fearmongering that was being ratcheted up to the extreme in London. Paul Joseph Watson has predicted these events as imminent several times on The Alex Jones Show in recent months.

Tony Blair is not in London but safely tucked up in Scotland with 7 other World Leaders including President Bush. The political eyes of the world are on Britain this week. The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone is in Singapore where the IOC has just awarded the Olympic Games to London, he is rushing back to the city.

Just like the events of 9/11, ask yourself, who stands to gain from this? Could this have been organized by any group other than one who has direct unlimited access to all areas of London's transport grid at all times?

The similarities with the Madrid bombing of 3/11/04, which we have persistently highlighted as an inside intelligence operation, are stark with bombs on separate trains set off within minutes of each other as the trains neared the stations. The so called perpetrators were quickly linked to an "Al Qaeda" cell in Europe but later as we reported were linked to the Spanish Security service. They then mysteriously Killed themselves as this information was seeping out. It then became apparent that Spain's government was using the bombings for its own gains and many went to the streets in Spain to declare they knew that their own government was behind the attacks. Further Intelligence was withheld by the government, we expect the same will happen in Britain after today's attacks.

This has MI5 written all over it. Just watch that national ID card legislation sail through. Only 15% of the country supported the government after the last election, this will ensure total fealty to a smarmy Blair and whatever he wants to do. Ken Livingstone and the opposition parties will now have no grounds to reject ID card legislation, especially with the Olympics coming to London in 2012.

The police state measures they'll get out of this will be overlaid onto all forms of transport. In fact, you won't be able to travel without the ID card. Although MI5 operations are normally more sophisticated than things like 9/11, in that the evidence linking it to the government is more carefully covered, just watch for the evidence of inside involvement to trickle out. MI5 have been caught involved in IRA bombings multiple times over.

Alex has said over and over that as attacks on different sections of the transportation grid occur they are going to have police state setup in the areas. Now it will be on the buses, subways etc.

FLASHBACK: Schumer Wants Airport Screening Technology in Malls

The military-industrial complex has the motive in this latest atrocity. Every major western government, including the British, has been caught red-handed carrying out bombings against their own people and blaming it on external enemies. It is mainstream news in Spain that the government was involved in the 3/11 bombing. The London 7/7 bombings are nothing different. Government ghouls are now all over television spreading the fear to encourage the people to submit to the war on terror. Support our work, spread the word, expose who is gaining power from terrorism, or our freedoms will be lost.

Hours after the attacks the media is still not providing extensive coverage. We would expect to see hundreds of eyewitness accounts and footage of the train stations. Independent London reporter Simon Aronowitz, who has a contact within the BBC, has reported that journalists are finding the coverage of the situation highly irregular. It seems that the information being released to the British public is being carefully stage managed.

2005-03-14T10:46:00.000-08:00

March 2005

WTC Building 7 – The 911 Smoking Gun?
by Ronald Bleier

Was 9/11 an inside job? Take 10 minutes to review video of the third building to collapse on 9/11, WTC Building 7; and a related slide show and then follow the logic: If Building 7 was destroyed through a controlled demolition so were the Twin Towers. If the Twin Towers were destroyed by demolition than Osama Bin Laden and his alleged conspirators didn’t do it.

One of the difficulties in determining whether or not to believe the official story about 9/11, is the enormous amount of information available on the Internet, in books, and perhaps a dozen videos dedicated to 9/11 inquiry. The very plethora of information (and disinformation) is daunting to many who can’t afford the time and energy to sift through the torrent of data and analysis in a timely manner.

One quick solution to help interested people decide whether 9/11 was an inside job is to recommend David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor (2004). Griffin’s book is a masterpiece of concise and coherent compilation of the available plausible evidence indicating that the official story -- that the attacks of 9/11 were planned and executed by al-Qaeda terrorists – cannot be accurate.

For those who are not yet ready to make the commitment to obtain and read a book on 9/11, but who wish to learn more, a ten-minute solution is available. It only takes a few minutes to view video on the Internet of the collapse of Building 7, the 47 story skyscraper located immediately north of the WTC complex about 300 feet from the North Tower. Viewers will note the almost vertical collapse of the building. Only controlled demolitions have achieved vertical collapses of upright steel structures.
After viewing the video, many will agree with Dan Rather who said on CBS News that very evening that the collapse of Building 7 was “reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen too much on television before when a building was destroyed by well placed dynamite to knock it down.”

In addition, viewers may like to put the remaining time to good use by screening the 17 slides that make up Jim Hoffman’s slide show presentation regarding Building 7’s collapse.

For those ready to perform the experiment, this may be a good time to view video of the collapse at: http://www.wtc7.net/vdocs/wtc7_collapse2.mpg and/or
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc7.html

Jim Hoffman’s 2003 slide show presentation can be found at
http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/b7/index.html

How did it happen that the nearly instant collapse of Building 7 involving the simultaneous destruction of its 58 perimeter steel columns and 25 core steel columns, all fireproofed, could have been disappeared so efficiently down the memory hole. As Jim Hoffman noted, the collapse of Building 7 did not even require a NOVA/Discovery Channel - style public relations campaign as explanation. Building 7 became a footnote, largely ignored by the public as well as the 9/11 Commission.
The Connection between the collapse of Building 7 and the Twin Towers
Once viewers are satisfied that Building 7 came down as a result of a controlled demolition, they may well ask whether its destruction entails that the Twin Towers also came down through similar means, and not because of the impact of the planes and the resulting fires. The question is critical because as Jim Hoffman argues, if the destruction of the Twin Towers (plus Building 7) were caused by demolition, the official story collapses since Osama Bin Laden did not have the means to demolish the buildings from within. “Demolition is an all or nothing proposition: There is no plausible deniability.”

Researcher Eric Hufschmid argues for a logical connection between the collapse of Building 7 and the Twin Towers and deduces that the only theory that makes sense is that the same group, which was responsible for bringing down Building 7, also brought down the Twin Towers. According to Hufschmid, anyone who suspects Building 7 was brought down by explosives “would have to come to the conclusion that explosives were used in the towers.”

Such a connection is controversial, since it effectively indicts the U.S. government for responsibility for 9/11. That is one reason that Jim Hoffman theorizes that WTC owner Larry Silverstein went on TV to admit that he and the NYC Chief of Police together agreed to “pull the building” with “pull” being slang for bringing the building down by means of controlled demolition. He believes that Silverstein, in an attempt to confuse the issue and to quell suspicion, was implicitly arguing that the issue of Building 7 was separate and distinct and had nothing to do with the collapse of the Twin Towers.

However that may be, David Ray Griffin believes that evidence points to the possibility that the 9/11 conspiracy involved U.S. government officials as well as outside parties, possibly WTC owner Larry Silverstein.

Why was Building 7 destroyed?
Since no serious investigation was permitted, researchers have been forced to speculate about the motives for including WTC 7 in the 9/11 destruction. Sufficient shock and awe had already been generated by the day’s events so it wasn’t necessary to add the destruction of Building 7 to the mayhem. On the contrary, its destruction through an all too evident controlled demolition would only prove to be an inexplicable embarrassment since a plane didn’t hit the building. Two motivations that seem the most promising to explore are a. destruction of evidence and b. insurance payouts to owner Larry Silverstein.

WTC 7 housed an emergency command center on the 23rd floor built in 1998 during Mayor Giuliani’s tenure at a cost of $15 million. I join many in the 9/11 inquiry movement who find it plausible that this fire and wind resistant unit housed the command center for the destruction of the Twin Towers as well as a homing device bringing the planes to their targets. Many think that the building was brought down to destroy the equipment and the computers involved in the conspiracy. Others have noted that Building 7 also contained offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission including files for approximately three to four thousand cases, including one that may have demonstrated the relationship between Citigroup and the WorldCom bankruptcy.

While destruction of the evidence has a strong appeal, I suspect that it was not the primary motive. For one thing, if the conspirators required that evidence needed to be destroyed in this way, I suspect they would have planned to bring the building down well before 5:20 PM.

Much more interesting as a line of investigation, it seems to me, is the insurance payout to Larry Silverstein. According to author Don Paul, Silverstein Properties won an $861 million award from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties’ estimated investment in WTC 7 was $386 million, netting a profit of about $500 million.

David Ray Griffin also suggests that Silverstein’s insurance considerations should be investigated as a motive in the destruction of the WTC buildings. Griffin points out that on April 26, 2001 Silverstein had taken out a lease on the WTC and wound up with a multibillion-dollar settlement when a federal jury ruled in December 2004 that the attacks constituted two occurrences.

More important perhaps, is that according to court filings, Silverstein had a plan to seek a huge profit from a small and brief investment in the World Trade Center apart from his claim for a double payment for the destruction of the Twin Towers. Griffin quotes court documents to the effect that Silverstein had only $14 million invested in the insurance deal for the Twin Towers (compared to 50 times as much by his lenders) through limited liability investment vehicles. The deal was structured to enable Silverstein to “walk away” from the lease if the buildings were destroyed, ending up with a balance of $1 billion. Griffin surmises that if the allegations are confirmed, “then it provides circumstantial support for those who believe that Silverstein took out the insurance with the knowledge that the buildings would be destroyed.” (Emphasis in original) Griffin believes that consideration of the “destruction of the WTC as an inside job cannot be ruled out a priori on the grounds that there would have been no conceivable motive.”

The logical connection
What is the logical connection between the collapses of the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11 and the 5:20 PM collapse of Building 7? Eric Hufschmid begins by pointing to two possibilities: either the conspirators decided to bring down Building 7 after they saw the Twin Towers collapse or they prepared a demolition scenario beforehand.

Hufschmid first dispenses with the possibility that the conspirators took measures to bring down Building 7 after they saw the Twin Towers collapse. Such a scenario would require that several people quickly come together and arrange to bring explosives into the area, plan and place the charges, a process that usually takes several days or more. They would have to manage countless details, including the removal of all Building 7 personnel and the control of access to the crime scene. All this would have had to be undertaken spontaneously in the hectic time between 10 AM and 5:20 PM.

Hufschmid concludes that it is most likely that plans for the demolition of WTC –7 were prepared before 9/11. He theorizes that explosives were set in place in good time and similarly the mechanics of setting off the demolition were arranged beforehand. In this case, Hufschmid argues, logic and/or common sense suggest that the same group of conspirators organized the destruction of all three towers.
Could Building 7 stand-alone as a case of solo collapse?

What would happen, Hufschmid asks, if, on 9/11, airplanes hit the towers but they didn’t collapse? Wouldn’t it be suspicious if Building 7 had collapsed from fires smaller than those in the Towers? Might not the firemen “respond that fires do not cause steel buildings to collapse? … Scientists and engineers would want to analyze the steel beams to see how fire did what no fire had done before.” Hufschmid argues that it would not be safe to destroy Building 7 unless the towers collapse first. “After the towers collapse, the collapse of Building 7 would appear to be just another weird event of that day’s bizarre disasters.” (Italics in original)

Hufschmid goes on to argue that there is likely to have been coordination between the people who set the explosives and the alleged hijackers; or that the conspirators had some kind of control over the hijackers since it wouldn’t make sense to prepare the explosives and then depend on the hijackers to follow through on their own. “What if the hijackers decide to switch from hitting the World Trade Center to hitting the U.S. Capitol… or they miss the towers and hit some other building?”

“An even more likely problem is that the hijackers get control of the aircraft…and then the FAA realizes that something is seriously wrong. The FAA contacts the military, and the military sends up a plane to investigate…” As David Ray Griffin and others have pointed out, military jet interceptions of wayward passenger jets is a routine occurrence. In the year before 9/11, from September 2000 through June 2001, there were 67 such interceptions, but there were none on 9/11/01. (If the major media had chosen to make public this information about these routine military interceptions, and their absence on 9/11, suspicion of U.S. government involvement would undoubtedly be more widespread.)

Hufschmid concludes that the plot to destroy Building 7 required the cooperation of the FAA and/or the military. In addition, the conspirators would need to have control of the investigations and to do so they would have to destroy the evidence that remained in the ruins of the buildings and the rubble, a crime. Thus, the conspirators would have to have “influence over our government.” In the event, U.S. government control over Ground Zero led to the hasty destruction of the rubble and the removal of most of the remaining steel to be destroyed in Indian and Chinese blast furnaces. In addition, FEMA investigators were prevented from free access to Ground Zero and to the evidence.

Once we conclude that Building 7 was brought down by a controlled demolition, it follows that the same group of conspirators also caused the collapse of the Twin Towers. It is also clear that such a conspiracy could not have been undertaken had it not been intimately connected to the highest levels of the U.S. military, in other words, the U.S. government.

The End

NOTES

1. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11
by David Ray Griffin Published by Interlink, March 1, 2004. If this link is used to purchase the book from Amazon.com, the DESIP website is afforded a small commission.

2. Quoted in Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, p. 177.

3. http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/towers/introduction.html

4. Eric Hufschmid, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (California, End Point Software, 2002), p. 82. See www.erichufschmid.net/PainfulQuestionsbook.html

5. Larry Silverstein’s comment about “pulling” Building 7 was made in a September 2002 PBS documentary, “America Rebuilds.” See http://www.rense.com/Datapages/WTC7.htm for more information and discussion of this and related WTC 7 issues.

6. See Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, p. 185.

7. Eric Hufschmid is particularly good on this aspect of the 9/11 attacks. His description of how the homing device may have operated to crash two aircraft into the Twin Towers provides an explanation of why the plane that hit the South Tower, took a circular route and hit the building from the south instead of flying directly into the Tower from its northerly origin. See Painful Questions, pp. 90-92.

8. http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/background/owners.html According to Don Paul Larry Silverstein already controlled more than 8 million square feet of New York City Real Estate. He also owned Runway 69, a nightclub in Queens that was alleged to be laundering money made through sales of Laotian heroin.

9. Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, pp. 183-84.

10. Hufschmid’s discussion of this theory will be found on Painful Questions, pp. 82-84.

11. Those in the 9/11 Truth movement point out that the use of the word hijacker concedes a part of the U.S. government’s official story, one for which no evidence has been presented.
12. William Thomas, Stand Down: Why America’s Air Defenses Failed on Sept 11

Kurt Nimmo (2/05) "9/11: A Guy in a Cave didn't do it"

2005-03-14T10:42:00.000-08:00

2.11.05
Intro by Ronald Bleier

Once again the inimitable Kurt Nimmo presents testimony that 9/11 was an inside job. He uses the recent courtroom testimony of a Moroccan held in a Canadian jail on suspicion of terrorist activities to emphasize the common sense notion that “some guy living in a cave doesn’t have the means to plan an attack against the most powerful nation in the world.” Among other evidence, he points to the still uninvestigated issue of the spikes in insider trading in the days just before 9/11 which resulted in perhaps billions in gains. Some have pointed out that the CIA (and doubtless other government agencies) monitors such trades in real time and that the names of those behind the trades could have been produced years ago.

Nimmo is careful to say that we “don’t’ know beyond a shadow of a doubt” whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. What’s not clear is whether he’s read the publications of David Ray Griffin (http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/Post911/Griffin1.html), Jim Hoffman (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc7.html), Eric Hufschmid http://guardian.150m.com/hufschmid/PainfulQuestions_1.htm) and others who have presented persuasive evidence that the official story cannot possibly be true and thus evidence of official complicity.

Instead Nimmo typically presents testimony from credible foreign observers and documentation of past CIA and Mossad involvement in similar black flag activities. We await Nimmo’s presentation of some of the extensive evidence by serious researchers. --Ronald Bleier

http://www.kurtnimmo.com/blog/

From Kurt Nimmo's Blog

February 10, 2005

Forget Ward Churchill, Adil Charkaoui Makes More Sense

“I’m not an expert but from what I read, some guy living in a cave doesn’t have the means to plan an attack against the most powerful nation in the world,” said Charkaoui, a Moroccan-born Canadian detained for nearly two years in Montreal on suspicion of being a terrorist. Charkaoui made the statement during a courtroom appearance.

“It could’ve been (Osama) bin Laden,” Charkaoui added. “But maybe it was done by ultra-conservatives in the United States for economic gain.”

Let’s take a look at the ballistics on this statement.

As we know, in the days and hours before the attacks, there were conspicuous spikes in trading activity in regard to the two airlines involved in the hijackings of Sept. 11. “There was a 9,000 percent jump in United Air Lines (UAL) put options between Sept. 6 and Sept. 10, with a huge spike 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack,” writes Christopher Bollyn. “American Airlines saw a 6,000 percent jump in put options [also known as short-selling] above normal the day before the attacks. However, there was no similar trading activity on any other airlines, according to market reports.”

Coincidence?

“The afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market,” CBS reported on September 19.

“This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” Dylan Ratigan wrote for Bloomberg Business News on September 20, “this would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence.”

It was no coincidence and for some reason you no longer hear about this strange trading behavior, except when the 9/11 Truth Movement mentions it. But then, of course, they are nothing but a bunch of tinfoil hatters.

But let’s move on.

Adil Charkaoui said he doesn’t believe “some guy living in a cave” in Afghanistan was able to pull off the attacks of September 11, 2001. He is not alone in this assertion.

Eckehardt Werthebach, former president of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, Verfassungsschutz, told AFP that “the deathly precision” and “the magnitude of planning” behind the attacks of September 11 would have needed “years of planning,” and not on the part of cave-dwelling Muslims. “Such a sophisticated operation, Werthebach said, would require the ‘fixed frame’ of a state intelligence organization, something not found in a ‘loose group’ of terrorists like the one allegedly led by Mohammed Atta while he studied in Hamburg,” Bollyn writes. “Many people would have been involved in the planning of such an operation and Werthebach pointed to the absence of leaks as further indication that the attacks were ’state organized actions.’”

“Terrorists could not have carried out such an operation with 4 hijacked planes without the support of a secret service,” said Horst Ehmke, who coordinated the German secret services directly under German prime minister Willi Brandt in the 70s.

“What I saw on September 11 was a perfectly executed act that could have happened only with the support of intelligence services, and whoever controlled it must have known [they] could only bring harm to the Muslim world,” Andreas von Bulow, who served on the parliamentary commission which oversees the three branches of the German secret service while a member of the Bundestag (German parliament) from 1969 to 1994, told Kate Connolly of the UK Telegraph. “I’m convinced that the US apparatus must have played a role and my theory is backed up by the [Bush] government’s refusal to present any proof whatsoever of what happened.”

Von Bulow believes the attacks were carried out by U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Israel, of course, has a long and sordid history of carrying out terrorist attacks and blaming it on Arabs, the most notable being the botched Operation Suzannah.

The Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, was characterized by the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies as follows: “Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act,” according to the Washington Times on September 10, 2001, a day before the fateful attacks.

“For years stories have circulated that Israeli agents—especially those of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad—have infiltrated Arab terrorist networks and have sometimes actually involved themselves in deceptive terroristic activities designed to appear as the work of Arabs,” notes Stephen J. Sniegoski. “For example, it has been claimed—by Victor Ostrovsky, for one—that the Mossad had foreknowledge of the attack on the U.S. Marine Barracks in Lebanon in 1983. Other observers allege that the Mossad thoroughly infiltrated the nefarious terrorist group Abu Nidal and even turned some of its terrorist activities to Israel’s benefit.”

The U.S., in particular the CIA, has an even longer and more sordid history of covert dirty tricks. From 1948 onward, when the CIA’s covert wing was created by Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner, the spook agency engaged in hundreds of destabilizing covert operations. In fact, the CIA’s secret charter, according to Steve Kangas, stated that its responsibilities included “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”

As we now know, Osama bin Laden was part of a CIA created “underground resistance group” in Afghanistan. “By 1984, [Bin Laden] was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar [MAK] which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war,” writes Michael Moran for none other than MSNBC. “What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation.”

“The US-led ‘proxy war’ model was based on the premise that Islamists made good anti-Communist allies,” writes Rahul Bedi for Jane’s. “The plan was diabolically simple: to hire, train and control motivated Islamic mercenaries. The trainers were mainly from Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and Navy SEALS in various US training establishments. Mass training of Afghan mujahideen was subsequently conducted by the Pakistan Army under the supervision of the elite Special Services Group (SSG), specialists in covert action behind enemy lines and the ISI.”

Note the sentence: “to hire, train and control motivated Islamic mercenaries.” Is it possible these same or similar “motivated Islamic mercenaries,” under the control of the CIA or Mossad, or both, were responsible—or at least patsies—for the attacks of September 11, 2001, attacks that “could not have [been] carried out … without the support of a secret service,” such as the CIA, DIA, Mossad, or possibly a combination these organizations?

Problem is, we don’t know beyond a shadow of a doubt—and probably never will. However, we do know these intelligence services have engaged in such behavior in the past, whereas a band of medieval Muslim terrorists, operating from remote caves in one of the remotest and most backward countries in the world, have no such history, that is not without the above mentioned assistance of Pakistan’s ISI and the CIA.

Ward Churchill likes to tell us Osama and crew were dedicated freedom fighters striking a blow at America—a fantasy at best, considering the above. In fact, Churchill believes it is racist to claim that cave-dwelling Arabs are incapable of such things. He conveniently ignores the uncomfortable fact—as stated by Werthebach, Ehmke, Von Bulow, and scores of others—that operations of such magnitude and planning require assets only available to states and intelligence services. Churchill may want Arabs to attack the United States—understandable, considering decades of U.S. and European (and Israeli) abuses in the Middle East—but fantasizing about it doesn’t make it so.

Adil Charkaoui is correct when he claims “some guy living in a cave doesn’t have the means to plan an attack against the most powerful nation in the world.”

For some odd reason, Charkaoui’s comments did not warrant attention in the United States, where the media is essentially controlled by the Bush Ministry of Disinformation (and Omission).
***

Ahmed on 9/11 left gatekeepers Corn and Albert

2004-12-22T10:44:00.000-08:00

For those interested in a rebuttal to such left gatekeepers Michael Albert of Z magazine and David Corn of the Nation who debunk 9/11 skeptics, Ahmed’s long essay is magnificent. --RB

http://www.globalresearch.org/view_article.php?aid=342536303

http://www.mediamonitors.net/onlineopinion/o_ief.html

9/11 "Conspiracies" and the Defactualisation of Analysis: How Ideologues on the Left and Right Theorise Vacuously to Support Baseless Supposition

by Nafeez Mossadeq AHMED
(2002)

Background
Introduction
Automatic Dismissal of a Legitimate Line of Inquiry
The “Incompetence Theory” of the 9/11 Intelligence Failure
David Corn and the Magic All-Explanatory “Incompetence Theory”
Michael Albert Knows What Bush Knew
Misconstruing the Anthrax Case
The Institutional Pattern of Provocation for War
The Irrationality of Attempts to Delegitimise 9/11 Inquiry
Whitewashing the Israeli Mossad
Whitewashing Pearl Harbour
Whitewashing the 9/11 Intelligence Failure
Missing the Point
Conclusions
NOTES
Background
9/11 "Conspiracies" and the Defactualisation of Analysis

How Ideologues on the Left and Right Theorise Vacuously to Support Baseless Supposition

A Reply to ZNet's 'Conspiracy Theory?' Section
http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm

(c) Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, June 2002

This paper was first published by the Wellington based news agency Scoop, accredited to the New Zealand Parliament Press Gallery (http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0206/S00123.htm), presented by the non-partisan network of American citizens calling for an independent investigation in the September 11 attacks, "UnAnswered Questions" (http://www.UnAnsweredQuestions.org)

Introduction
Acceptance of the official narrative of what happened on September 11, 2001 has become widespread, not merely on the right, but also on the left. In this paper, I take issue with the writings of several commentators who attempt to forcefully argue firstly that acceptance of the official narrative is justified, and secondly that certain kinds of inquiry into anomalies and inconsistencies in that narrative are illegitimate and unnecessary. The main bulk of this writing is available online at a new section at the well-known progressive website ZNet, and is somewhat representative of the mainstream approach to 9/11.[1]

In reviewing the work of these commentators on 9/11, I analyse in detail the failure of the U.S. intelligence community in preventing the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks; the casual repression and/or misrepresentation of facts related to 9/11; the failure of U.S. defence measures on 9/11; the historic and institutional basis for skepticism about the official narrative; and some salient facts which illustrate the need for proper research into the linkages between U.S. government, military, intelligence, and corporate policy, and the ease with which the September 11 terrorist attacks went ahead.

Automatic Dismissal of a Legitimate Line of Inquiry
Numerous respected commentators on both the left and right of the political spectrum have ardently criticised widespread speculation that the Bush administration had advanced warning of the September 11th terrorist attacks, sufficient to prevent them from occurring. When Democrat Party U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney called for a full investigation into the events surrounding September 11 – and particularly into the warnings received by the U.S. intelligence community suggesting that the administration may have known more than it is letting on – she was publicly derided. “We deserve to know what went wrong on September 11 and why”, stated McKinney.

“After all, we hold thorough public inquiries into rail disasters, plane crashes, and even natural disasters in order to understand what happened and to prevent them from happening again or minimizing the tragic effects when they do. Why then does the Administration remain steadfast in its opposition to an investigation into the biggest terrorism attack upon our nation?

“… Sadly, the United States government is being sued today by survivors of the Embassy bombings because, from court reports, it appears clear that the U.S. had received prior warnings, but did little to secure and protect the staff at our embassies. Did the same thing happen to us again?”[2]

Cynthia McKinney’s comments here echoed her earlier statements in a Pacifica radio interview: “We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11... What did this Administration know, and when did it know it about the events of September 11? Who else knew and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?”[3]

In response, on the right, Bush spokesman Scott McLellan declared: “The American people know the facts, and they dismiss such ludicrous, baseless views.”[4] Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, is quoted: “All I can tell you is the congresswoman must be running for the hall of fame of the Grassy Knoll Society.”[5] Nationally syndicated right-wing U.S. columnist Kathleen Parker joined the escalating chorus of condemnation:

“She’s black, which means people give her a pass lest they be perceived racist… None of which is to suggest that Cynthia McKinney is a terrorist, or a terrorist sympathizer, or even a socialist rabble-rouser who despises her own country. On the other hand, using McKinney’s own talent for inferential dot-connecting, she just might be.”[6]

And on and on. The right-wing chorus of automatic denunciation appears to be based on the implicit assumption that the Bush administration is entirely guilt-free of any sort of role in implementing policies that may have facilitated the September 11 attacks, knowingly or unknowingly (McKinney specifies neither). Unfortunately, leading commentators on the left-end of the political spectrum appear to have joined in the obligatory chorus of derision. They are supported in this by the mainstream assumption that the reason the U.S. intelligence community failed to prevent the attacks is simply because of bureaucratic incompetence.
The “Incompetence Theory” of the 9/11 Intelligence Failure
That assumption has been adopted even by the private U.S. intelligence firm Stratfor, which produces independent intelligence on worldwide affairs. On September 16th 2002, Stratfor commented:

“We have no doubt that, after the databases have been searched, it will be found that U.S. intelligence had plenty of information in some highly secure computer. The newspapers will trumpet, ‘CIA knew identity of attackers.’ That will be only technically true. Buried in the huge mounds of information perhaps once having passed across an overworked analyst’s desk, some bit of information might have made its circuit of the agencies. But saying that U.S. intelligence actually ‘knew’ about the attackers’ plots would be overstating it. Owning a book and knowing what’s in it are two vastly different things.”[7]

On 20th May, commenting on the outbreak of controversy in Washington DC over “what Bush knew and when”, Stratfor elaborated on this perspective in some detail, arguing that the colossal 9/11 intelligence failure was a consequence of the structural fragmentation of the U.S. intelligence community:

“The Central Intelligence Agency, as the name suggests, was founded to centralize the intelligence function of the United States. It was a good idea then and it is a good idea now. Unfortunately, it is an idea that has never been truly implemented and from which, over time, the government has moved intractably away. A centralized intelligence capability is essential if the United States is to have a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world. A bureaucratically fragmented intelligence community will generate a fragmented picture of the world. That is currently what we have.”[8]

While it is clear that a generally “fragmented picture of the world” is a likely consequence of a “bureaucratically fragmented intelligence community”, in itself this does not demonstrate that the capabilities of that community in developing specific intelligence on various aspects of the world is completely dysfunctional. Rather it suggests that the U.S. intelligence community will find it hard to develop an integrated, coherent understanding of world affairs and their interrelationships.

What is likely to be developed instead, are somewhat uncorrelated and/or disconnected pockets of intelligence on various aspects of world affairs. This, however, obviously does not entail in itself that the intelligence produced will be inaccurate with respect to those aspects. On the contrary, it simply indicates that while the U.S. intelligence community is capable of developing accurate intelligence on specific disparate aspects of world affairs, due to the structural fragmentation among the various agencies that constitute the intelligence community, a coherent overall intelligence picture of the world based on comprehension of the complex influences and interconnections between these disparate aspects will be extremely hard to form. Indeed, Stratfor itself grasps this implication:

“It is unclear whether any of these agencies completely understand their own internal vision, let alone that they are able to transmit a comprehensive picture to the CIA (which is supposed to integrate all this into a coherent world view and serve it up to the president and other senior officials for action).”

Clearly, the problem here does not necessarily relate to the task of focusing and gathering intelligence on a particular threat to U.S. national security – rather it relates to the integration of disparate intelligence into “a coherent worldview”. Structural stumbling blocks thus principally affect the coordination of the U.S. intelligence community in this respect. Attempting to account for a U.S. intelligence failure with respect to the specific issue of developing intelligence on a particular aspect of world affairs - such as a particular threat to U.S. national security – on the basis of such structural stumbling blocks, is therefore theoretically unwarranted.

In other words, while it is certainly possible that such structural stumbling blocks may have had some sort of role in any such intelligence failure, to suppose that they wholly account for the failure without an in-depth factual analysis of the failure itself (based on inspecting the collection and analysis of the related data) is nothing but gratuitous speculation. Indeed, given that such structural fragmentation principally affects the integration of intelligence into a “coherent worldview” (“a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world”) it is highly unlikely that this fragmentation alone would be sufficient to result in a wholesale intelligence failure on any isolated specific aspect of world affairs, i.e. a specific threat to U.S. national security.

Stratfor, however, makes the mistake of extending the scope of the implications of the structural fragmentation of the U.S. intelligence community to the community’s failure to act with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11th – which of course was a specific threat to U.S. national security. Yet clearly this is unfounded based on Stratfor’s own assessment. Stratfor does go on to provide a useful examination of the specific ways in which the relative fragmentation of the U.S. intelligence community can, and has, affected the integration of analysis of information, thus preventing the development of a coherent intelligence product on world affairs.

“… [T]he U.S. intelligence system is overwhelmingly geared toward the collection, rather than the analysis, of information. The result is inevitable: a huge amount of information is gathered, but it is never turned into intelligence… The collection capacity of the United States, both technical and human, is vast. But it is deliberately and institutionally compartmentalized in such a way that prevents a coherent perspective from emerging.”[9]

Without, however, factually assessing the information on the September 11 terrorist attacks collected and analysed by the U.S. intelligence community, it is impossible to know whether this problem of emphasising collection over and above analysis, was the principal reason for the intelligence failure. It is further unlikely that the institutional compartmentalisation of the U.S. intelligence community contributed to its failure to develop a coherent perspective on the specific threat to U.S. national security of Al-Qaeda, because that compartmentalisation primarily affects the development of “a coherent worldview” – not a specific aspect thereof. It is the connection and coordination of intelligence on different aspects of world affairs into an integrated whole that is institutionally problematic as a consequence of the intelligence community’s compartmentalisation. Intelligence on specific issues is not implicated here.

It is, therefore, both theoretically and empirically incorrect for Stratfor to claim that: “Given this incredible tangle of capabilities, jurisdictions and competencies, it is a marvel that a finished intelligence product is ever delivered to decision makers.” This extreme conclusion is contradicted by the fact that the U.S. intelligence community has a demonstrable record of success. U.S. military intelligence expert Richard K. Betts, Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, and former member of the National Commission on Terrorism, observes in Foreign Affairs: “Paradoxically, the news is worse than the angriest critics think, because the intelligence community has worked much better than they assume...

“Contrary to the image left by the destruction of September 11, U.S. intelligence and associated services have generally done very well at protecting the country. In the aftermath of a catastrophe, great successes in thwarting previous terrorist attacks are too easily forgotten - successes such as the foiling of plots to bomb New York City’s Lincoln and Holland tunnels in 1993, to bring down 11 American airliners in Asia in 1995, to mount attacks around the millennium on the West Coast and in Jordan, and to strike U.S. forces in the Middle East in the summer of 2001.”[10]

A particularly pertinent Yale University study by U.S. intelligence expert Loch K. Johnson – former Assistant to Defense Secretary Les Aspin and Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia – examines how, and how well, intelligence efforts have guarded and advanced perceived U.S. interests. Analysing in detail a series of intelligence successes and failures, Johnson refutes common charges of ineptitude that have followed embarrassments such as the Aldrich Ames case. He argues convincingly that the successes of the CIA and the intelligence community far outweigh such setbacks. Most crucially, he discusses how even the failures are often laid at the wrong door: good intelligence has often been ignored by the upper political echelons of the Washington bureaucracy.[11]

In this context, to prematurely presume in the absence of facts that an intelligence failure on a specific national security threat is because of incompetence induced by the institutional compartmentalisation of the intelligence community, is unwarranted. On the contrary, as documented by Johnson, most often such failures are not related to the quality of the intelligence product itself, but rather because the political bureaucracy does not act on accurate intelligence received.

Stratfor, at least, admits that: “We remain certain that if we searched all of the databases and memos we would find that the U.S. government had collected much of the information that would have been necessary to prevent Sept. 11. It was there.” Yet the organisation then makes a logical leap in assuming, without having actually examined the data itself and what was done with it, that this information “wasn’t collated, integrated, or analyzed and therefore could not be disseminated.” But in light of the above analysis, there is simply no good reason at all to assume that this is the case, particularly when we understand that the institutional compartmentalisation of the intelligence community only makes it unlikely that the CIA will be capable of developing “a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world”, rather than any coherent specific threat assessment. Indeed, this position is supported by the fact that there has been a string of U.S. intelligence successes in the last decade, in comparison to which there have been relatively few – though of course tragic - failures.
David Corn and the Magic All-Explanatory “Incompetence Theory”
Cruder renditions of the “incompetence theory” of the surprising lack of action on the part of U.S. intelligence in relation to September 11 have come from partisans of the left. These renditions are articulated in a much less sophisticated, and even more badly argued, manner than the position of groups such as Stratfor.

Washington Editor of The Nation, David Corn, for example, argues that: “… anyone with the most basic understanding of how government functions (or, does not function) realizes that the various bureaucracies of Washington - particularly those of the national security ‘community’ - do not work well together.”[12] Corn fails entirely, however, to specify exactly in what respect(s) this is the case. Unlike Stratfor, he does not clarify the nature of particular structural discontinuities between different bureaucratic and intelligence agencies and in what way they have problems integrating. As a consequence, his blanket statement about the national security community “not working well together” fails to actually communicate anything significant at all. Because the assertion is devoid of even a minimal attempt at factual specification of what this implies, it is effectively vacuous. But as we have seen above, while it is undoubtedly obvious that the intelligence community suffers from institutional compartmentalisation, this does not mean that the community is completely incompetent and dysfunctional. Rather, as Stratfor admits, it impairs the functioning of the community in the preparation of integrated intelligence to develop “a coherent worldview.” Corn’s attempt to apply the specific problems that these agencies have working together due to institutional compartmentalisation in an extended and general manner is without any foundation.

Indeed, Corn’s extreme portrayal is contradicted by a report in the Washington Post in May 2001 which observed that the two specialised U.S. intelligence agencies the FBI and the CIA have “in recent years” developed a very close “working relationship”. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh has been “credited with greatly improving the FBI’s ability to counter terrorist threats”, as well as “for altering the FBI’s working relationship with the CIA, which long had been strained.” As noted by CIA Director George J. Tenet: “Director Freeh’s vision, leadership and commitment have been directly responsible for the unprecedented strategic partnership between the FBI and the CIA”, a partnership that in the past few years has borne fruit in a verifiable record of frequent intelligence successes, outweighing failures. Tenet commented for instance that: “Very significant successes in the counterterrorism and counterintelligence areas… are evidence of the remarkable cooperation that has existed between our two agencies in recent years.”[13]

That assessment put forth by the Post and by Tenet is corroborated by the following conveniently ignored fact, demonstrating that federal agencies have been working together very well indeed on the issue of counter-terrorism: A body of experts known as the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) exists, which was effectively chaired by White House Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. The CSG constitutes a connecting point for “all federal agencies”, whose members are “drawn mainly from the C.I.A., the National Security Council, and the upper tiers of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and the State Department,” and who meet “every week in the White House Situation Room.” The CSG assesses “all reliable intelligence” related to counterterrorism received by these agencies and departments. The CSG was meeting almost every week in the period prior to the September 11 attacks, working incessantly on the specific threat of the impending Al-Qaeda plot.[14]

Nevertheless, Corn continues: “If there truly had been intelligence reports predicting the 9/11 attacks, these reports would have circulated through intelligence and policy-making circles before the folks at the top decided to smother them for geopolitical gain. That would make for a unwieldy conspiracy of silence.”[15] There is an elementary contradiction between this and Corn’s previous assertion. Here, Corn assumes that there could never have been any intelligence reports predicting the September 11 attacks, because if there had been, certainly “these reports would have circulated through intelligence and policy-making circles”. In other words, the reports would circulate around the intelligence community on the way to reaching the higher political echelons. That, of course, would require that at least in some significant respect, the agencies of the intelligence community are capable of coordinating and analysing information. Yet in his previous assertion, Corn assumes in a vague manner that the agencies of the “national security ‘community’” simply do “not work well together”. But these two generalised stances are mutually inconsistent.

The main problem here is that Corn keeps his commentary within the realm of theory, without actually assessing in a meaningful manner the available data on warnings of the 9/11 attacks received by the U.S. intelligence community.[16] And as we have shown above, the “incompetence theory” of the 9/11 intelligence failure is devoid of substantial factual basis.
Michael Albert Knows What Bush Knew
This style of “analysis” of the 9/11 intelligence failure has been adopted by other writers on the left. U.S. political commentator Michael Albert of ZNet, for example, states bluntly that: “Supposing we had the means to answer the question about Bush’s foreknowledge of 9/11, it would at most reveal that U.S. intelligence services lack competence.”[17]

Albert does not supply any evidence for why this is the case. Instead, having acknowledged the existence of a question “about Bush’s foreknowledge of 9/11”, he supplies a vague and ready-made answer that “at most”, the U.S. intelligence community “lacks competence.” But clearly Albert has no meaningful grasp of the structural discontinuities between various agencies in the U.S. intelligence community and what specific problems they create – instead he assumes the existence of a blanket wholesale “incompetence”, and decides without any factual basis that this is the only plausible explanation of why the U.S. government failed to foil the September 11 attack. For instance, he also flies in the face of the fact noted above, that on the specific issue of counter-terrorism U.S. intelligence agencies were very closely coordinating their operations and information, on a regular basis, in the months leading up to 9/11.

In other words, Albert gives the impression that he already has the answer to the question, and thus since the answer “at most” will be “incompetence”, then there is no need to pursue further inquiry. Unfortunately however, it appears that Albert arrives at this conclusion without any factual analysis or inquiry at all: “Of course these agencies lack competence. Moreover, what good does demonstrating the incompetence of U.S. intelligence agencies do peace and justice? Should bolstering surveillance budget allotments be a new progressive program plank?” Having decided from the outset that U.S. intelligence agencies “lack competence” – although like Corn, Albert fails to provide any specific factual insight into what exactly is implied by this blanket description – Albert assumes that this undefined “incompetence” undoubtedly explains the Bush administration’s failure to prevent the September 11 attacks. The way in which this undefined theory of “incompetence” magically explains all and every anomaly in the official mainstream 9/11 narrative is disconcerting.

But as discussed above, a proper understanding of the specific implications of the U.S. intelligence community’s institutional compartmentalisation does not lead one to the undefined blanket conclusion that the community suffers from a general “incompetence”, but rather that this compartmentalisation has very precise connotations for the integration of intelligence information into “a coherent worldview”. In other words, as already discussed, on both a theoretical level based on analysis of the structure of the intelligence community as well as on an empirical level based in part on comparative analysis of the record of U.S. intelligence successes and failures, the conclusion that the Bush administration’s failure to prevent the September 11 attacks was simply due to “incompetence” is premature.

Given that most intelligence failures appear to have resulted not from the inaccuracy of the intelligence product, but rather from good intelligence being ignored by the higher political echelon, there is no justification to simply assume that an “incompetence theory” of the U.S. failure to foil the 9/11 plot provides a sufficient explanation of that failure.[18] Albert’s underlying assumption of “incompetence” is thus baseless. Ultimately, we have to investigate the facts surrounding 9/11 before making a judgment on 9/11 – otherwise our judgment is will be devoid of any substantial and relevant factual basis.

Albert’s essential argument for why “the left” should stop asking “what Bush knew and when” is circular, and thus self-defeating. He assumes from the outset that the intelligence community failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks simply because of some vague and undefined “incompetence”. He then argues that since that it is the case, anybody calling for more understanding of “what Bush knew and when” is falling into the right-wing agenda of saying that since U.S. intelligence is incompetent, more U.S. dollars should be thrown at the CIA. He then argues that “the left” should not become party to a programme to mindlessly increase the U.S. intelligence and defense budget which will then be used for more wars and acts of terror worldwide.

But Albert’s entire argument rests on the assumption that he already knows (somehow) the generalities of “what Bush knew and when” – i.e. that he knows that Bush did not know. In other words, Albert begins his argument by assuming that he already knows that Bush failed to foil the attacks due to intelligence “incompetence”, and that since this is the case, there is no need to ask “what Bush knew and when”. This boils down to an elementary contradiction: We do not need to ask the question “what Bush knew and when” because we already know the answer, even though in fact we do not know the answer at all as evidenced by Albert’s total failure to prove his “incompetence” assumption. As such, Albert’s attempt to convince “the left” that they should not even bother asking the question “what Bush knew and when” is based on baldly (and falsely) assuming that he knows the fundamental essence of the answer, and that since the answer is “incompetence”, it is not worth pursuing. This, of course, is incoherent.
Misconstruing the Anthrax Case
Ironically, the only piece of “evidence” offered by Albert to support his thesis of the overarching “incompetence” of the U.S. intelligence community is that: “… these are the U.S. same [sic] intelligence agencies that can’t find the perpetrator of the recent anthrax attacks, even though the anthrax came from Fort Detrick, Maryland, and even though, given the skills required, the number of possible culprits is a handful.” Unfortunately, this particularly factoid is of Albert’s own construction. Anybody who has been following the anthrax case would be aware of credible evidence that U.S. intelligence does, in fact, know pretty much who the perpetrator of the attacks is, but has been prevented from arresting the individual under high-level government pressure.

This information comes from a leading U.S. expert on biological warfare, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Program for the Federation of American Scientists, and a Research Professor of Environmental Science at the State University of New York. Rosenberg, who according to BBC correspondent Susan Watts has high-level government connections, states that the FBI had already identified the perpetrator of the Winter 2001 anthrax attacks, but was “dragging its feet” in making an arrest and pressing charges, for fear that secret government activities would be exposed. The Trenton Times reported that according to Rosenberg, “the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a strong hunch about who mailed the deadly letters. But the FBI might be ‘dragging its feet’ in pressing charges because the suspect is a former government scientist familiar with ‘secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed’.”[19]

The charge was made in a February 18th address at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Citing sources she described as “government insiders” with whom she has been in contact, she testified that the FBI had known since last October the identity of the person who mailed lethal quantities of anthrax in letters to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Senator Patrick Leahy, and several media outlets. Her sources further informed her that although the individual in question had been interrogated several times, he had not been arrested. “We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it’s likely that he participated in the past in secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed,” Rosenberg said.

“And this raises the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.

“I know that there are insiders, working for the government, who know this person and who are worried that it could happen that some kind of quiet deal is made so that he just disappears from view.

“I hope that doesn’t happen, and that is my motivation to continue to follow this and to try to encourage press coverage and pressure on the FBI to follow up and publicly prosecute the perpetrator.”[20]

In light of Rosenberg’s revelations, other experts concur. Steven Block of Stanford University, for example - an expert on biological warfare - told the Dallas Morning News that: “It’s possible, as has been suggested, that they may be standing back because the person that’s involved with it may have secret information that the United States government would not like to have divulged.”[21]

U.S. investigative journalist and former National Security Agency official Wayne Madsen, who has also testified in hearings before U.S. Congress as an expert on U.S. covert foreign policies, has written a particularly insightful and comprehensive analysis of the available data on the anthrax attacks for Counterpunch, described as “America’s best political newsletter” by Out of Bounds Magazine. Madsen’s conclusions are worth noting:

“… the FBI has never been keen to identify the perpetrator because that perpetrator may, in fact, be the U.S. Government itself. Evidence is mounting that the source of the anthrax was a top secret U.S. Army laboratory in Maryland and that the perpetrators involve high-level officials in the U.S. military and intelligence infrastructure… Forget unfounded conspiracy theories. The evidence is overwhelming that the FBI has consistently shied away from pursuing the anthrax investigation [under government pressure].”[22]

It should be noted that in this case, again, the evidence suggests that the failure of U.S. intelligence lies not with the accuracy of the intelligence product, but with the refusal of the higher political echelon to act upon it. This is not the place to undertake a detailed analysis of the anthrax issue, but it suffices to conclude that Albert clearly has no basic grasp of this subject. Nevertheless, he comments on it in support of his argument. Unfortunately, this is representative of Albert’s entire approach to 9/11. He appears to have no understanding, nor any interest in evaluating the actual data around 9/11 and related issues such as anthrax, but still feels ready to comment on them anyway. The simple problem that this creates is that ultimately, Albert’s commentary on 9/11 ceases to retain credibility.
The Institutional Pattern of Provocation for War
Given that a proper analysis of the structure, capabilities, recent coordination and record of success of the U.S. intelligence community provides little – if any - support for the “incompetence theory” of a counterterrorist intelligence failure, it is likely that the 9/11 intelligence failure was a consequence of the higher political bureaucracy refraining from acting on intelligence. In this context, it is perfectly legitimate to investigate the 9/11 intelligence failure with due consideration given to both the admittedly unlikely “incompetence theory”, as well as what might be termed “the political inaction” theory, of which the “foreknowledge hypothesis” is one variation.

Either way, the likelihood of political inaction being behind the administration’s failure to foil the Al-Qaeda plot, in itself implicates the existence of a web of strategic and economic influences acting upon the political establishment, which resulted in such political inaction. And given that this is a far more tenable and probable possibility than mere “incompetence”, then it is essential to investigate the matter more thoroughly - including specifically an evaluation of the information (and what was done with it) about the 9/11 attacks available to the U.S. intelligence community.

It seems that the fundamental problem here is that the 9/11 intelligence failure is not seriously investigated, nor understood at all in any meaningful manner by Corn, Albert, and other similar commentators both on the left and right. Yet despite having no meaningful understanding of this failure, these commentators are happy to articulate their opinions on the matter anyway, by putting forth a variety of circular, inconsistent and/or effectively vacuous conclusions and statements about the very same failure. Those very vague conclusions are then taken as good reason to avoid investigating the 9/11 intelligence failure from certain angles, such as for instance the distinct possibility that the political bureaucracy did not act on good intelligence received. Ultimately then, pure speculation as a result of lack of understanding of the 9/11 intelligence failure, is used to justify that very lack of understanding.[23]

But there are, in fact, very pertinent reasons not to blindly accept the official “incompetence theory” adopted by so many in the mainstream, tolerated barely by elements of the right-wing to save face, and uncritically parroted by naïve commentators on the left. In a reply to Michael Albert’s ZNet commentary, Canadian social philosopher Professor John McMurtry at the University of Guelph refers to these reasons in detail:

“Shocking attacks on symbols of American power as a pretext for aggressive war is, in fact, an old and familiar pattern of the American corporate state. Even the sacrifice of thousands of ordinary Americans is not new, although so many people have never died so very fast... The basic point is that the U.S. ‘secret government’ (Bill Moyers’ phrase) has a very long record of contriving attacks on its symbols of power as a pretext for the declaration of wars, with an attendant corporate media frenzy focussing all public attention on the Enemy to justify the next transnational mass murder. This pattern is as old as the U.S. corporate state - from the sinking of the battleship Maine to start the Spanish-American War in 1898, through the fabricated attack on the U.S. battleship Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 along with the fabricated attack by Egypt on the client-state Israel in 1967, to a reiteration of the same general pattern in setting up the War Against Iraq from 1991 on - a war that has murdered by bombing and embargo intent an average of 5000 Iraqui children every month since. This executive branch war is still in motion. It started and it continues by the same overall pattern as 9-11. In the case of Iraq, the war was precipitated by the green light given by the U.S. Ambassador, April Glaspie, who said that the U.S. was ‘neutral’ regarding the climaxing dispute over oilfields between Iraq and Kuwait just before Saddam ordered troops into Kuwait. ‘Saddam fell into the trap’ were the insider words of Jordan’s foreign minister after the event.

“Throughout there is one constant to this long record of hoodwinking the American public into bankrolling ever rising military expenditures and periodic wars for corporate treasure. This decision structure ruled before and through 9-11, and has escalated after it - to fabricate or construct shocking attacks on U.S. symbols of power to provide the pretext and the public rage to launch wars of aggression against convenient and weaker enemies by which very major and many-levelled gains are achieved for the U.S. corporate-military complex.

“… Consider this earlier Republican version of 9-11. ‘Operation Northlands’ was a unanimous Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to ‘contrive’ the occurrence of an atrocity against U.S. citizens by Castro’s Cuba to justify a full-out U.S. invasion. Its scenarios included planting bombs and shooting down a U.S. passenger plane. There are many variations on this structure of geostrategic thinking. I analyse this regulating pattern in my new book, Value Wars, from Pluto Press.”[24]

Here, the essential implications of McMurtry’s point is the following: The possibility that the Bush administration had ample warning of the September 11 attacks but deliberately refused to act in order to generate a pretext for the consolidation of the U.S. corporate-military complex should not be discounted, in light of the well-documented historical record, which illustrates that such a policy is nothing new. On the contrary, McMurtry rightly notes that it is rather systematic. Given that the same essential decision-making structure responsible for that history continues to exist today, it is hardly reasonable to dismiss the need to discern whether the latest terrorist atrocity against the U.S. was not merely another element of the same underlying pattern. But that is exactly what Albert does, by refusing to even seriously consider whether that is the case – instead he only assumes the opposite without substantial basis.

U.S. political scientist Professor Steven R. Shalom of William Paterson University in New Jersey, co-writing with Michael Albert, extends the same vacuous style of analysis in a lengthy ‘ZNet Instructional’ on conspiracy theories.[25] Their paper begins with a detailed discussion comparing what they consider to be the fundamental elements of “conspiracy theory” with those of “institutional theory”. Their main concern appears to be to demonstrate that any consideration of whether the Bush administration played a deliberate role in facilitating the September 11 terrorist attacks amounts to indulging in “conspiracy theory”, which most of the time represents “a departure from rational analysis”, which is thus, most of the time, a priori incorrect – and thus not worth serious consideration:

“Conspiracy theorists begin their quest for understanding events by looking for groups acting secretly, either outside usual institutional norms in a rogue fashion, or, at the very least to manipulate public impressions, to cast guilt on other parties, and so on. Conspiracy theorists focus on conspirators’ methods, motives, and effects. Personalities, personal timetables, secret meetings, and conspirators’ joint actions claim priority attention. Institutional relations largely drop from view.

“... An institutional theory emphasizes roles, incentives, and other institutional dynamics that promote or compel important events and, most important, have similar effects over and over. Institutional theorists of course notice individual actions, but don't elevate them to prime causes. The point of an institutional explanation is to move beyond proximate personal factors to more basic institutional factors. The aim is to learn something about society or history, as compared to learning about particular culpable actors. If the particular people hadn't been there to do the events, most likely someone else would have.

“To the institutional theorist, the behavior of rogue elements is far less important than the ways in which the defining political, social, and economic forms lead to particular behaviors. An institutional theory of the U.S. missile attacks on Sudan or the Iran-Contra affair focuses on how and why these activities arose due to the basic institutions of U.S. society, not on the personal quirks of a womanizing Clinton or a loose-cannon Ollie North.”

While Shalom and Albert acknowledge that there are “of course, complicating borderline cases”, they fail to grasp the point articulated by McMurtry, that so-called conspiratorial behaviour is very often a direct consequence of a wider framework of institutional dynamics. Historically, political, social and economic forms in the United States have frequently led to such behaviour. By citing several well-known examples from the historical record, McMurtry highlights the fact that U.S. military intelligence “has a very long record of contriving attacks on its symbols of power as a pretext for the declaration of wars, with an attendant corporate media frenzy focussing all public attention on the Enemy to justify the next transnational mass murder. This pattern is as old as the U.S. corporate state.”[26] The existence of such a systematic historical pattern is evidence of a deeply-entrenched web of institutionalised decision-making structures at the helm of the U.S. military intelligence community. This institutional dynamic is what produces the pattern of manufacturing provocations for war, often by permitting or pushing forward attacks on symbols of American power. It is thus perfectly reasonable and legitimate to ask whether the September 11 terrorist attacks were also a late product of the same institutional dynamic.

Shalom and Albert, however, take issue with the citation of ‘Operation Northwoods’ as an example of this institutional dynamic:

“Conspiracy theorists have pointed to the Operation Northwoods document as proving that U.S. leaders were capable of 9-11. The document is a recently released top secret 1962 memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposing the staging of attacks on U.S. targets that would appear to be coming from Cuba, as a way to justify a U.S. attack on the island.”

Whether or not Northwoods is taken as an example of this institutional dynamic, previous instances of contriving attacks on U.S. symbols of power as a pretext for the declaration of wars are systematic enough to demonstrate that this is a method employed by U.S. decision-making structures when elite military, political, strategic and economic considerations converge on making such a method appear favourable, in terms of meeting elite institutional interests. Nevertheless, Shalom and Albert argue that Northwoods is not a relevant example here:

“But… the Joint Chiefs didn’t call for killing U.S. citizens. They did propose sinking a boatload of Cuban refugees (though we don’t know whether the Joint Chiefs would have arranged for a U.S. vessel to fortuitously be on hand to pick up the refugees in the water), but with regard to the shoot down of a plane filled with U.S. college students, the plan was to switch an actual planeload of students with an ‘unmanned’ drone that would be shot down, supposedly by Cuba. Elsewhere, Operation Northwoods proposes blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay in a ‘Remember the Maine’ replay, but explicitly refers to a ‘non-existent crew’. The document also suggests attacks on Cuban refugees in the United States ‘even to the extent of wounding.’ So if this document is supposed to show us what U.S. officials are morally capable of, it seems to suggest that they are capable of lying, deceit, conspiring to wage a war of aggression - but not killing U.S. citizens. Moreover, as far as we can tell, the plan proposed by the Joint Chiefs was rejected by the U.S. civilian leadership.”

Unfortunately, from the outset Shalom and Albert mistake the primary value of an analysis of the Operations Northwoods document to be that the U.S. decision-making structure is capable of arranging the killing of its own citizens. One does not need Northwoods to know, however, that the U.S. decision-making structure views U.S. citizens as expendable. The willingness of the government to send ever larger numbers of young soldiers to their death in the Vietnam War is a single obvious illustration of that expendability. Other examples are numerous, such as how the U.S. government has many times knowingly subjected its citizenry to a dangerous – and potentially lethal - test of biological weapons.[27] The primary value of analysing the plan hatched by the Joint Chiefs outlined in the Northwoods document is in providing proof of the U.S. military intelligence infrastructure’s willingness to resort to the long-standing method of, in McMurtry’s words, fabricating or constructing “shocking attacks on U.S. symbols of power to provide the pretext and the public rage to launch wars of aggression against convenient and weaker enemies by which very major and many-levelled gains are achieved for the U.S. corporate-military complex.”

As George Washington University’s National Security Archive records, Operation Northwoods “describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba…

“These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake ‘Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,’ including ‘sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),’ faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a ‘Remember the Maine’ incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.”[28]

Indeed, there are enough other examples from the historical record such as Pearl Harbour (discussed below), some mentioned by McMurtry, proving decisively that the U.S. decision-making structure at the helm of the U.S. military intelligence community is morally capable of allowing U.S. citizens to be killed to serve geostrategic interests.

Furthermore, simply because something did not happen in the past, certainly does not prove the lack of propensity for such an event to occur in the future, given the necessary conditions. As Shalom and Albert themselves admit, “it makes sense to develop institutional theories because they uncover lasting features with ubiquitous recurring implications. On the other hand, if an event arises from a unique conjuncture of particular people who seize extra-systemic opportunities, then even though institutions undoubtedly play some role, that role may not be generalizable and an institutional theory may be impossible to construct.”

Taking this admission a step further, it is certainly plausible that as a consequence of a very institutional dynamic, the system itself develops in a manner that is not necessarily the same as before, but institutionalises novel and perhaps unpredictable features. On a merely theoretical basis, therefore, one cannot fully predict the future (otherwise we would all be political astrologists), or assume that events will remain stuck within a particular institutional trajectory. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the very institutional trajectory of the U.S. decision-making structure has operated in such a manner as to develop and consolidate its power in progressively new, and even worse, features, than before. A close analysis of the Cabinet members of the current Bush administration, for instance, discloses therein the unprecedented conjuncture of officials representing the most powerful elements of the U.S. military, intelligence and corporate complex. Never before has an administration been so directly wired into the ruthless U.S. military-industrial complex.[29]

In that context, it is perfectly reasonable to consider the possibility that the September 11 terrorist attacks were the outcome of the same sort of considerations – rooted in long-standing political, social and economic forms - that gave rise to the Operation Northwoods plan, and other previous U.S. operations along similar lines.
The Irrationality of Attempts to Delegitimise 9/11 Inquiry
Shalom and Albert, however, appear intent on labeling any such inquiry as a plunge into irrationalism. Discussing the irrational element of “conspiracy theory”, they attempt to show that in general most “conspiracy theories” are unscientific:

“… it is a basic requirement of scientific beliefs that they be in principle falsifiable, that there be the possibility of disconfirming evidence. If a scientific hypothesis predicts X, and instead not-X occurs (and recurs repeatedly with no off-setting explanations for the discrepancy), then the hypothesis ought to be doubted. If the hypothesis flouts prior knowledge as well as current evidence, and is accepted nonetheless, then the behavior is often no longer scientific, nor even rational…

“Where God’s mysterious ways salvage the religious believers’ failed predictions, added layers of conspiracy salvage disconfirmed conspiracy theories. To the conspiratorial mind, if evidence emerges contradicting a claimed conspiracy, it was planted. If further evidence shows that the first evidence was authentic, then that further evidence too was planted.”

This description of such irrational, unscientific “conspiracy theory” is then applied to September 11. All those who argue the legitimacy of investigating whether the Bush administration may have deliberately facilitated the 9/11 attacks are lumped into one contrived category of “conspiracy theorists”, and subsequently dismissed for proposing absurd uninteresting ideas without foundation. This is achieved essentially by listing a large number of “conspiracy theories” - many of which are arguably untenable, a few of which are plausible - and then simply discarding them all as intrinsically absurd without even attempting to address the matter with a factual analysis:

“Here are some of the leading 9-11 conspiracy theories:

1. The World Trade Center was destroyed not by planes but by explosives.

2. The planes were not hijacked at all, but commandeered by remote control by NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command).

3. The planes were hijacked, but the hijackers were double-crossed and the planes were taken over by remote control by NORAD.

4. The hijackers were actually working for the U.S. government.

5. U.S. intelligence knew about the plot, but intentionally did nothing so as to cause massive deaths that would mobilize public support for a war on terrorism that would benefit the government.

6. The plot was actually organized by the Mossad.

7. The Mossad knew about the plot, but did nothing, hoping that the massive deaths would mobilize public support for Israel’s war on the Palestinians.

8. Tower 2 of the World Trade Center was hit by a missile.

9. There was a joint plot by rogue elements in the CIA, the Mossad, other U.S. government agencies, Mobil (being investigated in a criminal case, all of the evidence against whom was in FBI offices in the World Trade Center), and Russian organized crime (which profited especially from Afghan heroin with which the Taliban was interfering).

We should be forthright here. None of the above strike us as remotely interesting much less plausible.”

The entire approach here, however, is misleading. ZNet began its crusade against 9/11 “conspiracy theories” by criticising the idea of Bush foreknowledge of the attacks. Shalom and Albert, however, extend this criticism without warrant by lumping virtually all angles of analysis of the U.S. role which contradict the official narrative of 9/11 together, dismissing them all. In doing so, they also dismiss the distinctly plausible possibility already noted above that the Bush administration did receive sufficient warning of the attacks to prevent them, but failed to act. Crucially, at no point in their analysis do Shalom and Albert undertake a meaningful analysis of the relevant facts, which are widely available on the public record. They give no argument as to why this possibility is inherently implausible – nor for that matter do they give any good reason as to why any of the above theories are inherently implausible, other than asserting “forthrightly” that this is the case, and qualifying the assertion by noting that none of these theories happen to fit in with their personal understanding of “how the world works”. It is only because of this sleight-of-hand that their discussion appears to take the form of rationality. In fact, they are merely doing what they themselves criticise to be unscientific: theorising about 9/11 based on shoddy long-held but untenable assumptions, without any proper analysis of the available data.

Let us take, for example, their “conspiracy theory” number 4:

4. The hijackers were actually working for the U.S. government.

At face value, without bothering to look at relevant credible reports on this subject, it is easy to dismiss this as “implausible.” But a cursory analysis of relevant facts certainly strongly suggests that the hijackers had some sort of high-level U.S. military connection. According to reports in Newsweek, the Washington Post and the New York Times, after September 11, U.S. military officials gave the FBI information “suggesting that five of the alleged hijackers received training in the 1990s at secure U.S. military installations.”[30] Newsweek has further elaborated that U.S. military training of foreign students occurs as a matter of routine, with the authorisation - and payment - of respective governments, clarifying in particular that with respect to training of Saudi pilots, “Training is paid for by Saudi Arabia.” The hijackers, we should note, were almost exclusively Saudi; 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, mostly from wealthy families:

“U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday’s terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s. Another of the alleged hijackers may have been trained in strategy and tactics at the Air War College in Montgomery, Ala., said another high-ranking Pentagon official. The fifth man may have received language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Tex. Both were former Saudi Air Force pilots who had come to the United States, according to the Pentagon source… NEWSWEEK visited the base early Saturday morning, where military police confirmed that the address housed foreign military flight trainees… It is not unusual for foreign nationals to train at U.S. military facilities. A former Navy pilot told NEWSWEEK that during his years on the base, ‘we always, always, always trained other countries’ pilots. When I was there two decades ago, it was Iranians. The shah was in power. Whoever the country du jour is, that’s whose pilots we train.’ Candidates begin with ‘an officer’s equivalent of boot camp,’ he said. ‘Then they would put them through flight training.’ The U.S. has a long-standing agreement with Saudi Arabia - a key ally in the 1990-91 gulf war - to train pilots for its National Guard. Candidates are trained in air combat on several Army and Navy bases. Training is paid for by Saudi Arabia.”[31]

The U.S. government has attempted to deny the charges despite the name matches, alleging the existence of biographical discrepancies: “Officials stressed that the name matches may not necessarily mean the students were the hijackers because of discrepancies in ages and other personal data.” But measures appear to have been taken to block public scrutiny of these alleged discrepancies. On 16th September, news reports asserted that: “Officials would not release ages, country of origin or any other specific details of the three individuals.” This situation seems to have continued up to the time of writing. Even Senate inquiries into the matter have been studiously ignored by government law enforcement officials, who when pressed, have been unable to deny that the hijackers were training at secure U.S. military installations. When Senator Bill Nelson, for instance, in outrage asked the FBI whether the hijackers were being trained by the U.S. military, they refused to give a definitive answer, instead admitting that “they are trying to sort through something complicated and difficult.”[32]

Which leads us to wonder: What on earth has the U.S. military been up to in relation to Al-Qaeda? Is it not reasonable to consider whether these hijackers were working for the U.S. government in some way in light of these reports (especially given that it has happened before in relation to the U.S. embassy bombings in 1998, the perpetrator of which was a former U.S. Army Sergeant)? And given the non-response of the FBI to specific questions on the matter, does this not suggest that they are hiding something? There is not yet a clear-cut answer to these questions, but that is exactly why this issues need to be researched in greater depth. Clearly, this anomaly in the official narrative, which has broad implications in terms of the ramifications of U.S. military intelligence policy toward its Middle East allies, is worth exploring further. In their arbitrary wholesale rejection of so-called “conspiracy theories”, Shalom and Albert are clearly also debunking legitimate lines of inquiry that have basis in fact.
Whitewashing the Israeli Mossad
There are other examples of this. Let us take, for instance, their two Mossad-related “conspiracy theories”:

6. The plot was actually organized by the Mossad.

7. The Mossad knew about the plot, but did nothing, hoping that the massive deaths would mobilize public support for Israel’s war on the Palestinians.

By bluntly stating two variations of the possibility that the Israeli Mossad had some sort of connection/involvement in the September 11 terrorist attacks, and then dismissing them wholesale, Shalom and Albert seem to be suggesting that as far as “the left” is concerned, any attempt to investigate the evidence of an Israeli connection to 9/11 is inherently illegitimate. But by assuming from the outset, without basis, that the idea of an Israeli connection is implausible, they actually demonstrate only their ignorance of history.

It is certainly well-documented, for example, that Israel has quite regularly perpetrated terrorist attacks against its U.S. and British benefactors. This is nothing new, as documented by U.S. political commentator John Leonard in the Afterword to my 9/11 study, The War on Freedom. Leonard shows that there is in fact a rich history here, analysis of which discloses a consistent pattern of provocation. Menachim Begin[33] led the 1946 Zionist truck bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, timed to spur British troop withdrawals and give Zionist militias a free hand against the poorly armed Palestinians, taking the lives of just under 100 British guests.[34] Such covert Israeli intelligence operations have evolved into a sophisticated pillar of state strategy, from amateur beginnings in the 1950’s, when the exploits of some provocateurs became public. In the Lavon affair, Israeli “private citizens” blew up American and British property in Egypt, blaming it on the Muslim Brotherhood, but were caught by the police.[35] The bombing of synagogues in Iraq by Zionists inciting their brethren to flee to Palestine also became public knowledge.[36] The New Zealand Herald cites the testimony of an ex-Mossad agent on the Achille Lauro hijacking, who exposed the atrocity as an Israeli “black propaganda operation.”[37]

Does this, in itself, prove that the Israeli military intelligence infrastructure was in some way involved in 9/11? Of course not. But it proves propensity, since this infrastructure has a long record of conducting terrorist attacks – not only against U.S. and British targets but also against Jews (not to mention Palestinians). What brings this propensity into the limelight of a proper contemporary analysis of 9/11 are a number of facts, documented by Leonard in The War on Freedom, proving beyond doubt the reality of some sort of dubious Israeli involvement. Among the pertinent facts he plucks from the public record, are the following.

In the first of a four-part investigative documentary TV series on the Israeli connection to 9/11, FOX News correspondent Carl Cameron reported on how U.S. authorities had detained active members of an Israeli spy ring operating in the U.S., believed by authorities to be linked to the 9/11 attacks:

“A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States [emphasis added]… investigators suspect that they [sic] Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are – quote – ‘tie-ins’. But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, – quote – ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’ Fox News has learned that one group of Israelis, spotted in North Carolina recently, is suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs who the United States is also investigating for links to terrorism.”[38]

The Weekly Planet reports that “addresses of many” of the “Arabs under scrutiny by the U.S. government” systematically “correspond to the specific areas where the Israelis set up operations.” One extremely pertinent example is “an address for the Sept. 11 hijacking leader, Mohammad Atta,” which is “3389 Sheridan St. in Hollywood, Fla., only a few blocks and a few hundred feet from the address of some of the Israelis, at 4220 Sheridan.” The strange coordination between Atta and Israeli intelligence operatives is not an isolated case. About a “dozen Israelis, including the alleged surveillance leader, had been based in Hollywood, Fla., between January and June [2001] – quite possibly watching Arabs living nearby who are suspected of providing logistical support to Osama bin Laden’s network.” Indeed, ten of the 19 Al-Qaeda hijackers lived in Florida, bolstering conclusions reported by a FOX News reporter that “the students-cum-spies might have gained advance knowledge of aspects of the Sept. 11 terrorists” – or even worse, may have been directly involved in some way.[39] The respected French journal Le Monde further reports that there were “more than one-hundred Israeli agents, some presenting themselves as fine arts students, others tied to Israeli high-tech companies. All were challenged by the authorities, were questioned, and a dozen of them are still imprisoned. One of their tasks was to track the Al-Qaida terrorists on American territory – without informing the federal authorities.”[40]

The detained Israelis, in other words, had been part of an intelligence operation that had very possibly been tracking the hijackers, and had both the means and the opportunity to discover the terrorist plot. Indeed, somewhat ominously, the U.S. government has refused to disclose already existing “evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11,” ensuring instead that it remains “classified” (unlike direct evidence of an Al-Qaeda involvement). Most crucially, if U.S. authorities recognise the existence of an Israeli connection to 9/11, including the distinct possibility of foreknowledge (not to mention as yet undisclosed “tie-ins”), why are Shalom and Albert arbitrarily dismissing the same? There is no need to comment on this further – it is clear that the facts speak for themselves in warranting a further inquiry into an Israeli linkage to the September 11 attacks. Such an inquiry is clearly legitimate based on the facts. We do not need to delve into specific “conspiracy theories”, or a discussion of them, to understand the legitimacy – and necessity – of such an inquiry, which obviously has broad implications for the nature of the relationship between the United States and Israel, as well as the current direction of Israeli intelligence policy.

Ironically then, the “incompetence theory” of the 9/11 intelligence failure and other issues related to September 11 adopted by Shalom and Albert, fits nicely into their own description of an irrational and unscientific hypothesis: “If the hypothesis flouts prior knowledge as well as current evidence, and is accepted nonetheless, then the behavior is often no longer scientific, nor even rational.” It is noteworthy that their hypothesis not only flouts “prior knowledge” on the historic pattern of provocation for wars noted by McMurtry, Leonard, and others, but also completely ignores “current evidence” available on the 9/11 attacks. As such, their hypothesis is not only unscientific, it is irrational.
Whitewashing Pearl Harbour
A particularly stark example of this is their answer to their self-posed question “Do all the ignored warnings about 9-11 prove conspiracy or just incompetence?”:

“Actually, ignored warnings prove neither. It is possible, for example, that there were many warnings but that these warnings were not readily distinguishable from the thousands of other intelligence reports being received at the same time. Despite the conspiracy theories claiming FDR knew in advance about Pearl Harbor, it remains the case that the most compelling explanation for the missed warnings in 1941 was the inability to detect the significant information from the noise. (This is the argument of Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, 1962.)”

Many things are possible. What we are interested in, however, is not what was or was not “possible” in relation to September 11th, but what actually happened. Speculation on what could or could not have been the case is not always helpful in decisively discerning the reality of the matter. It is, of course, very easy for both “conspiracy theorists” and “institutional theorists” to continue sitting in their respective bubbles of irrelevant “theory” with respect to 9/11, Pearl Harbour, and any other event. None of them, however, will in reality have the slightest clue what they are talking about unless they leave the bubble of “theory” and enter into the domain of factual analysis. Shalom and Albert, however, like the extreme “conspiracy theorists” they criticise, completely fail to do this in a meaningful way. Their dismissal of the “conspiracy theories claiming FDR knew in advance about Pearl Harbor” is a particularly illustrative example of this. Instead of discussing the matter by referral to the documented facts, they cite the stale hypothetical argument of Roberta Wohlstetter put forth in 1962.

But that sort of blanket dismissal of the case for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advanced knowledge of Pearl Harbour is no longer tenable. The History Channel (U.S.A.) recently aired a BBC-produced documentary, Betrayal at Pearl Harbor, which demonstrated using, among other historical records declassified U.S. documents, that then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and his chief military advisers knew full well that Japan was about to spring a “surprise attack” on the U.S. under the latter’s provocation, but allowed the attack to occur to justify U.S. entry into war.[41] Detailed documentation of this fact has been provided by historian Robert Stinnett in his recent study, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. Stinnett served in the U.S. Navy from 1942-46 where he earned ten battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation. Examining recently declassified American documents, he concludes that far more than merely knowing of the Japanese plan to bomb Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt deliberately steered Japan into war with America.[42]

“Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, a U.S. Naval officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence, saw an opportunity to counter the U.S. anti-war movement by provoking Japan into a state of war with the U.S., and triggering the mutual assistance provisions of the Tripartite Pact. Memorialized in a secret memo dated October 7, 1940, McCollum’s proposal called for eight provocations aimed at Japan. President Roosevelt acted swiftly, and throughout 1941, implemented the remaining seven provocations. The island nation’s militarists used the provocations to seize control of Japan and organize their military forces for war against the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands. During the next 11 months, the White House followed the Japanese war plans through the intercepted and decoded diplomatic and military communications intelligence. At least 1,000 Japanese radio messages per day were intercepted by monitoring stations operated by the U.S. and her Allies, and the message contents were summarized for the White House. The intercept summaries from Station CAST on Corregidor Island were current—contrary to the assertions of some who claim that the messages were not decoded and translated until years later—and they were clear: Pearl Harbor would be attacked on December 7, 1941, by Japanese forces advancing through the Central and North Pacific Oceans.”[43]

Other elements of the case have also been put well by Daryl S. Borgquist, a U.S. Naval Reserve Public Affairs Officer and a Media Affairs Officer for the Community Relations Service Headquarters at the U.S. Department of Justice: “President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested the national office of the American Red Cross to send medical supplies secretly to Pearl Harbor in advance of the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack…

“Don C. Smith, who directed the War Service for the Red Cross before World War II and was deputy administrator of services to the armed forces from 1942 to 1946, when he became administrator, apparently knew about the timing of the Pearl Harbor attack in advance. Unfortunately, Smith died in 1990 at age 98. But when his daughter, Helen E. Hamman, saw news coverage of efforts by the families of Husband Kimmel and Walter Short to restore the two Pearl Harbor commanders posthumously to what the families contend to be their deserved ranks, she wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton on 5 September 1995. Recalling a conversation with her father, Hamman wrote:

‘… Shortly before the attack in 1941 President Roosevelt called him [Smith] to the White House for a meeting concerning a Top Secret matter. At this meeting the President advised my father that his intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on Pearl Harbor, by the Japanese. He anticipated many casualties and much loss, he instructed my father to send workers and supplies to a holding area at a P.O.E. [port of entry] on the West Coast where they would await further orders to ship out, no destination was to be revealed. He left no doubt in my father’s mind that none of the Naval and Military officials in Hawaii were to be informed and he was not to advise the Red Cross officers who were already stationed in the area. When he protested to the President, President Roosevelt told him that the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were attack [sic] within their own borders…

‘He [Smith] was privy to Top Secret operations and worked directly with all of our outstanding leaders. He followed the orders of his President and spent many later years contemplating this action which he considered ethically and morally wrong. I do not know the Kimmel family, therefore would gain nothing by fabricating this situation, however, I do feel the time has come for this conspiracy to be exposed and Admiral Kimmel be vindicated of all charges. In this manner perhaps both he and my father may rest in peace.’”

In a detailed historical account published by the respected journal Naval History, affiliated to the U.S. Naval Institute, Borgquist documents the U.S. government’s foreknowledge and provocation of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, through analysis of many other aspects of the relationship between the government and the Red Cross.[44]

Thus, we see how compelling evidence of the U.S. government’s role in both provoking and permitting the attack on Pearl Harbour is simply ignored by Shalom and Albert. As a result, their commentary on these matters fails to retain any credibility. Thus, they ignore a key example of how the U.S. government and military intelligence infrastructure has in the past deliberately provoked acts of terrorism against U.S. targets, anticipating U.S. casualties, in order to justify military action.
Whitewashing the 9/11 Intelligence Failure
Unsurprisingly then, their attempt to support the case for an “incompetence theory” of the 9/11 intelligence failure follows the same method of ignoring the most compelling facts:

“One of the main arguments for foreknowledge of 9-11 is that any rational person looking at the warnings and evidence accumulated by U.S. officials before 9-11 would have concluded that an attack was going to occur. To not have put in motion measures to stop it therefore proves complicity.

“Consider two clues:

“The FAA has a 'Red Team' whose job it is to try to smuggle explosives and weapons past airport checkpoints to test airport security. According to Bogdan Dzakovic, a member of the team, airport security failed 90 percent of the tests, but the FAA did nothing about it, essentially blocking further tests.

“A report by the Library of Congress to the National Intelligence Council stated: ‘Suicide bomber belonging to Al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the C.I.A. or the White House.’

“These clues would lead some to conclude that the president ‘must have known’: But the ‘president’ who must have known in these cases was Bill Clinton. Dzakovic had his tests squelched in 1998 (Blake Morrison, USA Today, 25 Feb. 2002, pp. A1, A4) and the Library of Congress study was written during the Clinton administration (quoted in William Safire, ‘The Williams Memo,’ New York Times, 20 May 2002, p. A19). So either Clinton too was in on the plot (and his top aides, Gore, Cohen, Albright?) or else it’s possible to have received such reports and still not done anything even though one wasn’t a conspirator.”

It is worth noting that this presentation of the “evidence” is nothing but a laughable straw man. Shalom and Albert thus achieve their objective of construing any consideration of “what Bush knew and when” to be absurd, by presenting as extremely weak a case as possible, and then observing that, of course, the case is extremely weak. But this is simply another vacuous circular argument.

We will here cite just a few documented facts from my more extensive study, "The War on Freedom" (www.thewaronfreedom.com), which demonstrate that the U.S. intelligence community had developed very precise information on the September 11 terrorist attacks prior to those attacks, information which was widely known among U.S. agencies.

The New Yorker reports that according to Richard A. Clarke, U.S. National Coordinator for Counterterrorism in the White House, about ten weeks before 11th September, the U.S. intelligence community was convinced that a terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda on U.S. soil was imminent. Seven to eight weeks prior to the 11th September attacks, all internal U.S. security agencies were warned of an impending Al-Qaeda attack against the Untied States that would likely occur in several weeks time: “Meanwhile, intelligence had been streaming in concerning a likely Al Qaeda attack. ‘It all came together in the third week in June,’ Clarke said. ‘The C.I.A.’s view was that a major terrorist attack was coming in the next several weeks’.” On July 5th, Clarke “summoned all the domestic security agencies—the Federal Aviation Administration, the Coast Guard, Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the F.B.I.” and informed them “of an impending attack.”[45]

Approximately 4 weeks prior to 11th September, the CIA took seriously specific information of an impending Al-Qaeda attack on U.S. soil. The Associated Press reports that: “Officials also said the CIA had developed general information a month before the attacks that heightened concerns that bin Laden and his followers were increasingly determined to strike on U.S. soil.” A CIA official affirmed that: “There was something specific in early August that said to us that he was determined in striking on U.S. soil.” AP elaborates that: “The information prompted the CIA to issue a warning to federal agencies.”[46]

So it is clear that the U.S. intelligence community was anxiously anticipating an imminent Al-Qaeda attack in the next few weeks. But that is not all. The specific method of the attacks – using planes as missiles or bombs – was also known by U.S. intelligence. The U.S. intelligence community received warnings six months before 11th September, warnings which were repeated again three months before that date, that “Middle Eastern terrorists” planned to hijack planes to use as missiles against prominent American buildings. These warnings were not ignored or dismissed. On the contrary, they were taken very seriously by the U.S. intelligence community. Newsbytes, an online division of the Washington Post, reported in mid-September that:

“U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals at least three months ago that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture, according to a story in Germany’s daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

“The FAZ, quoting unnamed German intelligence sources, said that the Echelon spy network was being used to collect information about the terrorist threats, and that U.K. intelligence services apparently also had advance warning. The FAZ, one of Germany’s most respected dailies, said that even as far back as six months ago western and near-east press services were receiving information that such attacks were being planned. Within the American intelligence community, the warnings were taken seriously and surveillance intensified, the FAZ said.”[47]

The last comment - “Within the American intelligence community, the warnings were taken seriously and surveillance intensified” - is crucial. It clearly indicates that in response to the ECHELON warnings, the entire U.S. intelligence community - all U.S. intelligence agencies - were on alert for a hijacking attempt that would attempt to hurl planes into “symbols of American” culture. So the U.S. intelligence community knew both that an Al-Qaeda attack was imminent, and also that the attack would attempt to use civilian planes as bombs to hit prominent U.S. targets.

John McMurtry cites another revealing piece of evidence indicating specifically that U.S. intelligence had been aware that these targets were located in lower Manhattan – the World Trade Center is of course the most prominent terrorist target in that district, particularly since it had already been targeted in the past by terrorists linked to bin Laden in 1993:

“Perhaps most remarkably, there had been direct warnings from the Republican Party’s own past Chief Investigative Council for the House Judiciary Committee to the closed decision circuits of Congress and the Bush administration. Representing F.B.I. special agents suing the U.S. Justice Department (along with Washington-DC Judicial Watch), David Philip Schippers reported in Houston on October 10 on the ‘Alex Jones Talk Show’ that these agents knew of a plan of bin Laden’s network to attack Lower Manhattan with ‘commercial airlines as bombs’ long before 9-11, but were blocked from investigative and preventative action by F.B.I. and U.S. Justice Department command, and threatened with prosecution under the National Security Act if they published this information. Attorney-General Ashcroft himself, reports Schippers, refused to return calls on this matter to his fellow senior Republican for four weeks before 9-11.”[48]

At the same time, U.S. intelligence was aware that suspected terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden were training at U.S. flight schools. The Washington Post reported, for instance, that the FBI had in fact known this for several years - yet, absolutely nothing had been done about it:

“Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States and abroad, according to interviews and court testimony… A senior government official yesterday acknowledged law enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin Laden had attended U.S. flight schools.”[49]

All this information was widely known in the U.S. intelligence community. U.S. intelligence operatives were fully aware of their dire implications. But they were forced into a state of inaction by the studious passivity of Washington. One active FBI counter-terrorism investigator, for instance, testifies that it was widely known “all over the Bureau, how these [warnings] were ignored by Washington...

“All indications are that this information came from some of [the FBI’s] most experienced guys, people who have devoted their lives to this kind of work. But their warnings were placed in a pile in someone’s office in Washington... In some cases, these field agents predicted, almost precisely, what happened on September 11th. So we were all holding our breath… hoping that the situation would be remedied.”[50]

David Schippers himself told me in an interview that according to his contacts in the intelligence community, who had approached him in May 2001 about an impending Al-Qaeda attack from the air on lower Manhattan, “there are others all over the country who are frustrated, and just waiting to come out.” The frustration of these intelligence officers, Schippers explained, was because of the obstructions of a “bureaucratic elite in Washington short-stopping information,” with the consequence that they have granted “terrorism a free reign in the United States.”

All this data, and much more, is extensively discussed in The War on Freedom. What is clear from this data is that it is wrong to assume that one agency had one bit of information, another agency had another, and due to incompetence either the information was not taken seriously or it was not connected, or both. On the contrary, the entire U.S. intelligence community was alerted to the relevant information, and took it seriously. Given that the White House Counterterrorism Security Group, coordinating the findings of all federal agencies, was working incessantly on the Al-Qaeda plot prior to 9/11, this is not surprising.

A few weeks prior to September 11th 2001, the intelligence community thus anticipated: an imminent Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on U.S. soil; the hijacking of civilian planes to be used as missiles to target iconic structures symbolic of American power; the targeting of buildings in lower Manhattan. But preventive action in response to this precise information – such as apprehending Al-Qaeda operatives at U.S. flight schools - was blocked from Washington.

The above analysis demonstrates that even a cursory inspection of some pertinent facts suffices to discredit the simplistic “incompetence theory”. Instead, the facts clearly indicate that the Washington political echelon simply refused to act on accurate and precise intelligence of the impending attacks. Why that might be is another matter that is also examined in my book.[51] But we may derive some insight into that by noting the acute observations of U.S. military expert Stan Goff – a former U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant and Lecturer in Military Science and Doctrine at West Point Military Academy - who points out that, contrary to the simplistic and misleading claim of Shalom and Albert that prior to 9/11 the Bush administration “already had immense power”, in fact “the U.S.’s ability to dominate the entire planet is unraveling…

“This is just part of a historical evolution that is at some point inevitable and I think it’s about to happen. I think what they’re doing now is not something they’re doing out of a position of strength but out of a position of desperation and panic. These are very panicked kind of moves in a sort of broad overall view of things which makes them exceedingly dangerous. I think historically we can go back and see that when big capital gets in trouble and the market’s not working for them anymore they have to find a way, cause right now there is a worldwide production over-capacity that’s created a recession that’s about to go deep and about to go long and one of the ways that they’ve traditionally gotten themselves out of that is to liquidate a bunch of that capital and the best way to liquidate capital real fast is war. That’s the way they correct the problem they use non-market mechanisms to correct for a fallen rate of profit within a market economy. And I think what’s even more dangerous is we are looking at this huge imperial power that’s the United States right now and they’re trying to control everything at once and their empire is beginning to unravel on them and I think what is particularly dangerous for people like me and probably people like y’all and a lot of your listeners is that in the process of doing this they’re going to have to exercise more and more despotic measures at home to step on resistance…”[52]

Unfortunately, Shalom and Albert are only able to argue their case by refusing to conduct a meaningful analysis of the relevant facts. By keeping their “analysis” within a bubble of theory rooted in false assumptions, they attempt to justify why “the left” should remain within the same bubble and not bother looking at the facts and their implications. Once again, this only shows that as commentators on the September 11 attacks, they retain no credibility, since they have no significant grasp of the related data. While they rightly criticise the automatic “Obviously the World Trade Center attack was a U.S. government hoax”-conspiracy-bandwagon, they fall into the opposite extreme of uncritically buying into the official 9/11 narrative of ‘Obviously the World Trade Center attack was not foiled because of U.S. incompetence.’ The reality is far more complex. Picking and choosing one’s facts according to what conveniently fits into the pre-established framework of one’s pre-determined “conspiracy theory” or “institutional theory”, is simply a recipe for being alienated from the real world.
Missing the Point
The rest of Shalom and Albert’s analysis continues to studiously miss the point, as usual by ignoring facts in an effort to justify why “the left” should also not bother to investigate the facts. They attempt to take on, for example, 9/11 “conspiracy theories” about President Bush allowing the attacks to go ahead by ensuring that the U.S. Air Force failed to respond on time. But they do not even attempt to assess the principal anomalies surrounding this whole issue, which have led many commentators to conclude that the official, magical, all-explanatory, undefined, catch-phrase “incompetence” is not sufficient to explain the scale of the breakdown of U.S. defence measures on September 11. The principal anomaly has, once again, been aptly and concisely articulated by Professor McMurtry:

“Although U.S. airforce interceptions of hijacked planes are normally only minutes-long, there was a stand-down of these automatic interception actions for all of the hijacked planes of 9-11, without one airforce plane turning a wheel for over two hours. The terrorists circled jumbo jets known to be hijacked around the military air-command’s front yard airspace until after all three of the buildings had been dive-bombed. Yet no disciplinary process nor formal investigation by the Pentagon, the F.B.I., Congress or the mass media was undertaken despite all the stunning breaches of defence routine, which together provided an open passage for the long-planned attack.”[53]

Veteran journalist George Szamuely – former editorial writer for The Times, The Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement; as well as an associate at the Manhattan Institute, editor at Freedom House, research consultant at the Hudson Institute, and a contributor to Commentary, American Spectator, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, National Interest, American Scholar among many others – pinpoints the fundamental problem in the official narrative with further elaboration:

“Passenger jet hijackings are not uncommon and the U.S. government has prepared detailed plans to handle them. On Sept. 11 these plans were ignored in their entirety… Here are the FAA regulations concerning hijackings: ‘The FAA hijack coordinator…on duty at Washington headquarters will request the military to provide an escort aircraft for a confirmed hijacked aircraft… The escort service will be requested by the FAA hijack coordinator by direct contact with the National Military Command Center (NMCC).’ Here are the instructions issued by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on June 1, 2001: ‘In the event of a hijacking, the NMCC will be notified by the most expeditious means by the FAA. The NMCC will…forward requests for DOD assistance to the Secretary of Defense for approval.’… The U.S. is supposed to scramble military aircraft the moment a hijacking is confirmed.”[54]

In this context, the official “incompetence theory” of this inexplicable lack of adherence to mandatory standard operating procedures on the part of the National Military Command Center begins to fall apart. Award-winning Canadian journalist and media analyst Barry Zwicker - former correspondent for the Toronto Sun and the Globe and Mail, and currently a media critic on CBC-TV, CTV’s News1, and Vision TV - observes:

“Throughout the northeastern United States are many air bases. But that morning no interceptors respond in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which have the longest lead time and are 12 miles from the White house.

“Whatever the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. This further weakens the ‘Incompetence Theory.’ Incompetence usually earns reprimands. This causes me to ask - and other media need to ask - if there were ‘stand down’ orders.”[55]

Again, this is a legitimate line of inquiry deserving of further attention. Within the strict hierarchy of decision-making in the U.S. military establishment, standard operating procedures cannot be systematically violated unless an appropriate command to do so is received from above, and would normally not be violated without severe reprimand and immediate rectification. Military experts such as Stan Goff have asserted that the issue needs to be investigated, noting of the Bush administration’s attempts to pretend procedures were followed that: “There is a story being constructed about these events”. Goff also observes: “[A]t a very bare minimum… we’ve either got a criminal conspiracy or we’ve got criminal negligence on the part of this Administration. But in either case, there are parts of this thing that could have been prevented but nobody did a thing.”[56] Given the nature of the massive collapse of almost all related defence measures on September 11, involving the violation of standard operating procedures, it is reasonable to investigate the matter further to discern whether the cause was likely to be, as is the obvious deduction, stand down orders – an admittedly plausible explanation in context with the convincing evidence for Washington’s deliberate inaction in response to intelligence warnings.

Similar concerns apply to the official version of Osama bin Laden’s relationship to the United States. Instead of taking note of anomalies suggesting that the U.S. relationship to Osama is far more complex than the conventional wisdom would have us believe, Shalom and Albert ridicule simplistic straw man fallacies such as that bin Laden’s “former ties to the U.S… reveal the secret roots of a conspiracy.”

But they ignore facts indicating that the U.S. government’s attitude to Al-Qaeda is not as hostile as the mainstream may presume. It is well-known, for instance, that Al-Qaeda receives millions of dollars in financial support from members of the Saudi royal family – Saudi Arabia of course being a major client regime of the United States - perhaps including the bin Laden family which is under investigation by the FBI for funding Osama.[57] Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker that: “Since 1994 or earlier, the National Security Agency has been collecting electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family, which is headed by King Fahd…

“The intercepts depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country’s religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channelling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it.”

Furthermore, the NSA intercepts “have demonstrated to analysts that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Central Asia, and throughout the Persian Gulf region.” According to one senior U.S. intelligence official, the Saudi regime had “gone to the dark side.”[58]

President George W. Bush had, for example, blocked intelligence investigations into Saudi terror connections prior to September 11. Here are just two credible press reports on this matter. BBC Newsnight reported high-level blocks on U.S. investigations into bin Laden-related terror connections, based on what appear to be attempts to protect U.S. corporate interests - including the fact that President Bush Jnr.’s fortune was built on doing business with the Saudi bin Laden family:

“The younger Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil company partly funded by Salem Bin Laden’s chief U.S. representative… Young George also received fees as director of a subsidiary of Carlyle Corporation, a little known private company which has, in just a few years of its founding, become one of Americas biggest defence contractors. His father, Bush Senior, is also a paid advisor. And what became embarrassing was the revelation that the Bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after September 11… I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a U.S. intelligence agency. He tells me that while there’s always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it’s gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to ‘back off’ investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents… FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings.”[59]

Bush Jr.’s order to “back off” the bin Laden family and Saudi royals followed previous orders dating back to 1996 – the year when Saudi funding of Al-Qaeda was uncovered - frustrating efforts to investigate the latter. The London Guardian has elaborated that: “FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the U.S. before the terrorist attacks of September 11…

“U.S. intelligence agencies have come under criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are complaining that their hands were tied… High-placed intelligence sources in Washington told the Guardian this week: ‘There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis.’ They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over this year. The intelligence agencies had been told to ‘back off’ from investigations involving other members of the Bin Laden family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan. ‘There were particular investigations that were effectively killed.’”[60]

Clearly, neither Saudi Arabia nor President Bush, are interested in genuinely cracking down on the funding of Al-Qaeda. That is clear from the blocks on Saudi terror connections imposed by Bush and his predecessors, for years. It is clear from the behaviour of Saudi royals, for years. The implications are even more damning when we consider credible reports that the bin Laden family, with whom the Bushes have very close financial ties, also funds Osama bin Laden.[61]

There is little doubt then that the Bush administration is effectively conniving with the Saudi support of Al-Qaeda terrorism, by allowing it to continue and even worse, actively protecting it from investigation by repeatedly obstructing U.S. intelligence inquiries. There are dire implications here that need to be investigated, perhaps in terms of the role international terrorism might play in providing a pretext for foreign and domestic policies, where otherwise a pretext could not be found. Is that why successive U.S. administrations tolerate the financial support of Al-Qaeda by their key clients? To what extent does the web of strategic and economic interests behind the decision-making structure responsible for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East lead successive administrations to form and protect regional alliances which are intrinsically unstable, despite knowing the domestic consequences and dangers in terms of international terrorism? Again, even a cursory inspection of a few relevant facts clarifies the legitimacy and necessity of this line of inquiry, and demonstrates that questioning the official narrative about the relationship between bin Laden and the U.S. is perfectly reasonable.

Shalom and Albert move on from this to tackle the question of “looking at who benefits to see who must be responsible – doesn’t that imply conspiracy?…

“First of all, we know from mystery writers that there is often more than one suspect with a motive. Does the U.S. government gain from 9-11? Yes. Does Israel? Yes. But what about Russia (which now has a freer hand in Chechnya)? Yes also. How about China? Yes, also, with its free hand in Xinjiang, and the far lower likelihood that the United States will try to isolate it. If one goes through history and uncritically and mechanically applies the ‘who benefits?’ principle, one finds it a poor guide to understanding.”

Their attempt here to equate “looking at who benefits to see who must be responsible” with a penchant held by “mystery writers” is disingenuous. As they themselves admit, looking at who benefits is “often useful, but hardly definitive”. But if we are at all mildly interested in understanding 9/11, then we will have to therefore admit the usefulness of asking the question “who benefits?”, and therefore the usefulness of analysing specific evidence for whether the prime beneficiaries contributed to the crime from they benefited. But Shalom and Albert sidestep that implication by equating the “who benefits?” principle with conspiratorial mystery writing. Indeed, no one is claiming that “who benefits?” as an isolated principle is automatically an all-explanatory catchphrase for all historical phenomena! Again, as usual Shalom and Albert fail to deal with the essentials of the argument and hence only refute another pathetic straw man.

In fact, “who benefits?” is a standard forensic question that is used by law enforcement officials when investigating a crime, in the attempt to isolate the main suspects. Of course, this forensic principle is not used to solve the crime, and therefore not definitive! But it is used as at least one basic criterion of gathering a legitimate/likely list of suspects to be investigated. There is nothing irrational, conspiratorial, or mysterious about this entirely normal method of initial forensic inquiry. Based on that method, it is reasonable to investigate the role of the Bush administration and the U.S. military-corporate complex, if any, in the September 11 attacks, with an open and impartial attitude – since they are the most direct, primary beneficiaries.

Shalom and Albert also fail to acknowledge that the issue of who benefits from 9/11 does provide a plausible explanation of why the Bush administration would refuse to act on accurate intelligence of an impending Al-Qaeda attack (an issue which they refuse to analyse in any meaningful manner). It is of course possible that they did not anticipate the extent of the destruction the 9/11 attacks would cause, as McMurtry notes:

“Shocking attacks on symbols of American power as a pretext for aggressive war is, in fact, an old and familiar pattern of the American corporate state. Even the sacrifice of thousands of ordinary Americans is not new, although so many people have never died so very fast. This scale of the 9-11 massacre is what makes most people doubt that even the ilk of Cheney, Rumsfield and Bush Jr. could be complicit in such a crime. There is a point to be made here. It is indeed likely that the deaths were not anticipated because of the unexpected tidal downsweep of igniting jet fuel through the Twin Tower elevator shafts. Even the most experienced New York firefighters were astonished by the building collapses that thus occurred.”[62]

Rather, Shalom and Albert present the forensic principle of “who benefits?” as if it is offered as the only piece of evidence that “implies conspiracy”. In fact, this standard forensic principle gives us a good reason to ask the question of whether the most immediate and direct beneficiaries – the Bush administration and the U.S. military-industrial complex – of the 9/11 attacks were in some way involved in those attacks.

In other words, it gives us good reason to begin an investigation into the subject, rather than fanatically dismiss the issue without any serious consideration, as Shalom and Albert do, and ask “the left” to do. Most crucially, the key point that they ignore is that the “who benefits?” principle, connected to the available data indicating that the Washington political echelon refused to act on accurate intelligence on the impending Al-Qaeda attack, provides a plausible explanation of that studious inaction, both prior to 9/11 and on the very day of the attacks.

That indeed is the assessment of leading U.S. intelligence expert Tyrone Powers, a former FBI Special Agent specialising in counterterrorism - now Professor of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice at Anne Arundel County Community College and Director of the Institute for Criminal Justice, Legal Studies and Public Service. I corresponded with Powers about the 9/11 intelligence failure in the aftermath of the recent controversy on Capitol Hill about “what Bush knew, when”. He told me that in his view, based on the facts that have recently surfaced on the public record, there was “credible information from the FBI, CIA and foreign intelligence services that an attack was imminent”. The information indicated that an Al-Qaeda hijacking attempt was probable. But no measures were enforced by the Bush administration – such as increasing security measures at airports in accordance with long-standing recommendations – to prevent such hijackings.

Powers puts this in context with what he describes as the “consequentialism” inherent to the decision making process of leaders, which he has witnessed firsthand in his intelligence and counter-intelligence background: “... on occasion, [damaging] acts are allowed if in the minds of the decision-makers, they will lead to ‘greater good’,” and as long as the damage is contained within certain limits. Powers further refers to a variety of combined institutional influences and issues: pressure on intelligence agencies to vastly reduce their powers; concern over the “blowback” from the controversies of the Presidential election; the desire on the part of elements of the intelligence community to “reconstitute the CIA” after its perceived “emasculation by the Clinton administration”; the belief among these elements that such a reconstitution required “a need, a demand and a free hand that would be given by a democratic Congress [only] if there was a National outcry”. He then told me that: “My experience tells me that these incidents would have reached the level at which the ‘consequentialism’ thought process would have been made a real option” - in other words, that elements of the intelligence community and the administration may have deliberately failed to act in the belief that the resultant damage would contribute to a “greater good”, providing a pretext for such policies as the reconstitution of the CIA. However, Powers emphasises that this policy would have been the result of a “miscalculation” - a failure to anticipate the extent of this damage: “But the amount of destruction wrought on a civilian population shocked even the advocates of this policy.”

In other words, the U.S. intelligence community had sufficient information of an impending Al-Qaeda hijacking attack, Powers argues reviewing the available evidence, but was probably blocked from undertaking preventive action from above. Elements of the Bush administration, he suggests, may have done so to protect or further their perceived interests - the “greater good” - perhaps in justifying domestic and foreign policies they are now pursuing.[63]

If a U.S. intelligence expert of Powers’ standing believes that this is a more plausible explanation of the available facts than the “incompetence theory”, how can Shalom and Albert dismiss it as not “remotely interesting, much less plausible”? Their stance is simply irrational.
Conclusions
The rest of the comments made by Shalom and Albert in their ‘ZNet Instructional’ are rooted in the body of fallacies, mistaken assumptions, vacuous analysis, and avoidance of facts that they amass in their previous observations. The fundamental problem with their work, and with the work of others who adopt the same frame of ideas, is that they do not appear to have any sort of handle on the facts – nor do they appear to have any “interest” in analysing them, basically due to their fundamental faith in the accuracy of the official 9/11 narrative.

Starting from the effective assumption that they know that Bush did not know, they attempt to convince “the left” that therefore we should not bother investigating the matter. The same circular principle is applied wholesale to every other gaping hole in the official 9/11 narrative. This, of course, does not do ZNet – an otherwise brilliant social justice resource – nor anyone else for that matter, any justice. As we have seen above, even a cursory inspection of the facts suffices to show that investigating the U.S. government role in relation to the September 11 terrorist attacks is a legitimate line of inquiry.

Furthermore, it is clear that the facts pose a considerable challenge to the conventional wisdom about the 9/11 attacks, exposing glaring anomalies that need to be addressed. These anomalies in the mainstream version of events suggest a much wider picture of long-standing institutional corruption, involving the intertwined relationship between the interests of the U.S. military-corporate complex and the operation of international terrorism.[64]
NOTES
[1] See http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm and scroll down to ‘Conspiracy Theory?’

[2] Statement of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, in interview with Dennis Bernstein, Flashpoints, News Radio, KPFA, 12 April 2002. Transcript available at Centre for Research on Globalisation, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MCK204B.html.

[3] Interview of Cynthia McKinney, Pacifica Radio, 25 March 2002.

[4] Washington Post, 12 April 2002.

[5] Atlanta-Journal Constitution, 12 April 2002.

[6] Parker Kathleen, ‘McKinney’s minions march to different drummer’, Tribune Media Services, 22 April 2002, http://www.townhall.com/columnists/kathleenparker/kp20020422.shtml; Parker, ‘Conspiracy Theories Laughable’, Tribune, 24 April 2002, http://www.townhall.com/columnists/kathleenparker/kp20020424.shtml.

[7] Stratfor, 16 September 2001, http://www.stratfor.com.

[8] Stratfor, ‘Sept 11: What Did Bush Know and When Did He Know It?’, Strategic Forecasting LLC, 20 May 2002.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Betts, Richard K., ‘Fixing Intelligence’, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2002. Excerpt available at http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20020101faessay6556/richard-k-betts/fixing-intelligence.html.

[11] Johnson, Loch K., Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World, Yale University of Press, 1996.

[12] Corn, David, ‘The Loyal Opposition: The 9/11 X-Files’, Tom Paine, 1 March 2002, http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/5206.

[13] Walsh, Edward and Vise, David A., ‘Louis Freeh To Resign As Director Of the FBI’, Washington Post, 2 May 2001, p. A01.

[14] Wright, Lawrence, ‘The Counter-Terrorist,’ New Yorker, 14 January 2002.

[15] Corn, David, ‘The Loyal Opposition: The 9/11 X-Files’, op. cit.

[16] For that sort of in-depth assessment, see Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq, ‘Did Bush Know? Warning Signs of 9-11 and Intelligence Failures’, Media Monitors Network, http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq36.html. This is Chapter 4 of my new study of the 9/11 attacks, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001, Media Messenger Books, June 2002, http://www.thewaronfreedom.com.

[17] Albert, Michael, ‘What Did Bush Know, When?’, ZNet, 21 May 2002, http://www.zmag.org/content/TerrorWar/albertbushknow.cfm.

[18] For such a comparative analysis see Johnson, op. cit.

[19] Dee, Joseph, ‘Anthrax Suspect ID’d’, Trenton Times, 19 February 2002, http://www.nj.com/mercer/times/index.ssf?/mercer/times/02-19-IZAR1IUB.html. Also see BBC Newsnight, ‘Anthrax attacks’, 14 March 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/audiovideo/programmes/newsnight/archive/newsid_1873000/1873368.stm.

[20] A detailed account drawing on several press reports is Martin, Patrick, ‘FBI knows anthrax mailer but won’t make an arrest, U.S. scientist harges’, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), 25 February 2002, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/feb2002/anth-f25.shtml.

[21] Madsen, Wayne, ‘Anthrax and the Agency: Thinking the Unthinkable’, Counterpunch, 8 April 2002, http://www.counterpunch.org/madsenanthrax.html.

[22] Ibid.

[23] To Corn’s credit, it should be noted, in other articles he has called for an investigation to 9/11, albeit primarily on grounds of uncovering “incompetence”. The only problem here is that if one begins an investigation having already made up one’s mind what the general problem was, the danger arises that the investigation will likely be skewered, limited and conditioned from the start by one’s assumptions, leading to evidence against one’s original assumptions being ignored.

[24] McMurtry, John, ‘Reply to ZNet Commentary of May 22, 2002: What Did Bush Know?’, ZNet, 8 June 2002, http://www.zmag.org/content/TerrorWar/mcmurty.cfm.

[25] Shalom, Stephen R. and Albert, Michael, ‘Conspiracies or Institutions: 9-11 and Beyond’, ZNet, 2 June 2002, http://www.zmag.org/content/Instructionals/shalalbcon.cfm.

[26] McMurtry, op. cit.

[27] See Madsen, op. cit.

[28] NSA News, ‘Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962’, National Security Archive, George Washington University, 30 April 2001, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430.

[29] This point is discussed lucidly and concisely by U.S military expert Stan Goff, a former U.S. Special Forces Master Sergeant and Lecturer in Military Science and Doctrine at the West Point Military Academy: “Start with Bush. Start with the de facto president right now. He was the CEO of Harken Energy. That is his own little company, you know. As it turns out, he wasn't very good at it. You know, his dad, was an oil man. So you've got two generations in oil right there. Okay. And his dad was also you know the former President, the former Vice-President, the director of Central Intelligence. George Herbert Walker Bush is on the board of Carlyle Group. Carlyle Group is right now a $12 billion dollar equity company, but it's heavily invested in all kinds of things, including oil and it's also I think 11th or 12th whatever, biggest defense contractors in the country right now. It's getting very incestuous. And in fact, Carlyle put Bush junior on the board of one of its subsidiaries, which is Cater Air. A little shuttle service, a little puddle jumper service. Sort of as a sop to dad. The new ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert Jordan, is a Dallas lawyer and an old Bush booster. Jordan works for a Baker Botts. That's a firm with offices in Riyadh. And Baker Botts represents Carlyle Group over there. And the Baker in Baker Botts is James Baker, who was Secretary of State for George Herbert Walker Bush, but he is also the guy that engineered the whole Florida coup d'etat, in the 2000 election. He was the midwife of that little venture. Some of the other folks in Carlyle, Fidel Ramos, former Chief of the Philippines. Park Tae Joon of South Korea. John Major. Everybody remember John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs? And you can go back with the Bush family. Prescott Bush, Rockefellers, Duponts, Standard Oil, Morgans, Fords, all these other folks were anti-Semites and anti-Communists way back. They also actually financed the rise to power of Adolph Hitler. They financed it. I mean, that's a historical fact. It's irrefutable. And Prescott Bush did business with the Nazis all the way up to 1942 until he was censured by the United States under the Trading with the Enemy Act. And after the War, he turned right around and ran for Congress in Connecticut and won. This is an interesting family. Anyway, Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton Oil. Got $34 million before he took office in stock options from Halliburton. As the CEO, Cheney, and I'm looking at my notes, oversaw $23.8 billion dollars in oil industry contracts to Iraq alone. Now this is interesting, because Cheney found the loopholes in the embargo on Iraq. Now the attack on Iraq was done when Cheney was the Secretary of Defense. He stepped down as Secretary of Defense and turned right around and became the CEO of Halliburton, took advantage of the loopholes and went back there and made $23.8 billion dollars in Iraq by rebuilding the infrastructure that we bombed out of existence. Halliburton is also involved with the Russian mob. They've got sort of two things going on. One is oil and the other is drug trafficking. Halliburton is a story all by itself. Secretary of State, Colin Powell. This man has no diplomatic credentials. He was the former chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff and all of sudden he is in charge of the entire diplomatic corps of the United States. That's interesting just by itself. He has cash holdings or stock holdings in a number of defense contractors. Tony Prinicipi, Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Lockheed Martin, defense contractor. The biggest defense contractor in the world. Andrew Card, Chief of Staff. . General Motors. Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England. General Dynamics. Secretary of the Airforce, James Roche, Northrup Grummond.. Secretary of the Army, General Thomas White retired. Enron Energy. These folks are (chuckles) all defense contractors or oil people. The whole bunch of them are. Donald Rumsfeld is Secretary of Defense. What people don't realize is he is also the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. They get big defense contracts. But he is also with General Signal Corporation, a defense contractor. And interestingly enough, he is also heavily invested in biotech, which is probably gonna make a killing here pretty soon with whatever Anthrax vaccines. Cheney and I've got a picture of Cheney and Rumsfeld in May 2000 at the Russian-American Business Leaders Forum together. Arms around each other, and smiling. Dick Armitage. Deputy Secretary of Defense, he's a guy like me, he's a former special ops guy, Seal. He had to leave the Reagan Administration because he was up to his neck in Iran contra drug problems. And now he's working directly with the Russian Mafia. And he is also a board member of Carlyle. Remember that? Chief of Carlyle is Mr. Carlucci, who is also with the Middle East Policy Council, you see how this stuff intersects? Commerce Secretary is Donald Evans who owns Colorado Oil Company. You have to take a very close look at this cabinet, which I think was constructed in a very systematic way to figure out what their foreign policy priorities are.” (Interview with Stan Goff by Mike McCormick, 24 October 2001, http://www.interlog.com/~cjazz/goff.htm)

[30] Wheeler, Larry, ‘Pensacola NAS link faces more scrutiny,’ Pensacola News Journal, 17 September 2001.

[31] ‘Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases,’ Newsweek, 15 September 2001.

[32] See my Chapter 4 of The War on Freedom, ‘Did Bush Know?’, op. cit.

[33] Begin was a leader of the Jewish underground, the Irgun, and of the Likud party. He served as Prime Minister, and shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat.

[34] ‘Mid-East: Palestine Time-Line,’ Index of articles on ‘Recovered History,’ from The Progressive Review, http://prorev.com/recovered.htm. Pittman, James O., ‘Negotiation Strategy in Hostage Situations,’ U.S. Army Medical Department Journal, May-June 1996, http://das.cs.amedd.army.mil/journal/J9636.HTM: “Menachim Begin, the former head of the state of Israel, who began his political growth as a member of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL), eventually rising to lead the IZL and participated in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in the name of Zionist liberation from British rule.”

[35] Hirst, David, ‘The Lavon Affair,’ in The Gun and the Olive Branch, Futura, 1984; relevant excerpts at www.mideastfacts.com/lavon_hirst.html. The scandal brought down the Israeli government, but the plotters got a hero’s welcome home.

[36] See first-hand testimony from an Iraqi Jew, Naeim Giladi, ‘The Jews of Iraq,’ The Link, published by Americans for Middle East Understanding (AMEU), Vol. 31, No. 2, April-May 1998. “About 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, most because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs,” recalls Giladi. “The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the ‘Oriental’ Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948… Documents, including some that I illegally copied from the archives at Yad Vashem, confirm what I saw myself, what I was told by other witnesses, and what reputable historians and others have written concerning the Zionist bombings in Iraq, Arab peace overtures that were rebuffed, and incidents of violence and death inflicted by Jews on Jews in the cause of creating Israel.” See Giladi’s book, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and Mossad Eliminated Jews, AMEU, 1992. See also Christian Science Monitor, ‘Israel’s Palestinian puppets:’ “the recruitment of collaborators has become a crucial plank of Israel’s security,” http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0522/p01s04-wome.html .

[37] According to testimony of ex-Mossad agent Ari Ben-Menashe in New Zealand Herald, October 2000, at http://www.howlingatthemoon.com/pacific_jihad_OCT2000.htm. More on Mossad is found in books like Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas, and By Way of Deception by ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky.

[38] FOX News, 11 December 2001. The transcript is available at http://www.firefox.1accesshost.com/cameron.html.

[39] Suggs, John F., ‘The Spies Who Came in from the Art Sale,’ Weekly Planet (Tampa Bay), March 20, 2002, http://www.weeklyplanet.com/2002-03-20/news_feature.htm.

[40] Cypel, Sylvain, ‘An Enigma: Vast Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the U.S.’, Le Monde, 5 March 2002, http://www.antiwar.com/rep/lemonde1.html.

[41] History Channel, ‘Betrayal at Pearl Harbor,’ 7 December 2001.

[42] Stinnett, Robert B., Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, Touchstone Books, 2001.

[43] Stinnett, ‘Pentagon Still Scapegoats Pearl Harbor Fall Guys,’ Providence Journal, The Independent Institute, Oakland, 7 December 2001.

[44] Borgquist, Daryl S., ‘Advance Warning? The Red Cross Connection,’ Navy History, The Naval Institute, May/June 1999.

[45] Wright, Lawrence, ‘The Counter-Terrorist,’ op. cit. Under pressure from Congress, the White House has finally officially admitted that the U.S. intelligence community had information that Al-Qaeda was planning an imminent attack through hijacking. However, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has gone on record denying that U.S. intelligence had any other specific information, such as that the planes might be used as missiles (BBC Newsnight, 16 May 2002). This denial, however, is patently false, as demonstrated by the reports on the public record discussed here. U.S. intelligence not only had the information, but had believed it, and acted upon it in the intensification of related surveillance.

[46] Solomon, John, ‘CIA Cited Risk Before Attack,’ Associated Press, 3 October 2001.

[47] Stafford, Ned, ‘Newspaper: Echelon Gave Authorities Warning of Attacks,’ Newsbytes, 13 September 2001, http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170072.html. ECHELON is a vast intelligence information collection system capable of monitoring all the electronic communications in the world. It is operated by the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. While no government agency has ever confirmed or denied its existence, an EU committee that investigated ECHELON for more than a year confirmed that the system does exist in early September 2001. The EU committee reported that Echelon sucks up electronic transmissions “like a vacuum cleaner”, using keyword search techniques to sift through enormous amounts of data. The system covers the whole world’s electronic communications with 120 satellites. For more on ECHELON see Bamford, James, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, Doubleday, 2001.

[48] McMurtry, John, ‘Decoding 9-11’, http://www.snowshoefilms.com/mcmurtryDecoding.html. This article is adapted from the Preface of McMurtry’s forthcoming book Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy, Pluto Press, London, August 2002.

[49] Fainaru, Steve and Grimaldi, James V., ‘FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools,’ Washington Post, 23 September 2001.

[50] Grigg, William Norman, ‘Did We Know What Was Coming?’, The New American, Vol. 18, No. 5, 11 March 2002, http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/03-11-2002/vo18no05_didweknow.htm.

[51] See my Chapter 7, ‘The New War: Power and Profit, at Home and Abroad’, in The War on Freedom, op. cit.

[52] Interview with Stan Goff, op. cit.

[53] McMurtry, op. cit.

[54] Szamuely, George, ‘Nothing Urgent,’ New York Press, Vol. 15, No. 2, http://www.nypress.com/15/2/taki/bunker.cfm

[55] Zwicker, Barry, ‘The Great Deception: What Really Happened on Sept. 11th Part 2,’ MediaFile, Vision TV Insight, 28 January 2002, http://www.visiontv.ca/programs/insight/mediafile_Jan28.htm.

[56] Interview with Goff, op. cit. Also see my Chapter 5, ‘The Collapse of Standard Operating Procedures on 9-11’, in The War on Freedom, op. cit.

[57] Extensive documentation on this and related issues is in my Chapter 6, ‘American Ties with the Most Wanted Man on Earth’, in The War on Freedom, op. cit.

[58] Hersh, Seymour, M., ‘King’s ransom: How vulnerable are Saudi royals?’, New Yorker, 22 October 2001. Also see Indyk, Martin S., ‘Back to the Bazaar,’ Foreign Affairs, January/February 2002.

[59] BBC Newsnight, ‘Has Someone Been Sitting On The FBI?’, BBC 2, 6 Nov. 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/events/newsnight/newsid_1645000/1645527.stm.

[60] Palast, Gregory and Pallister, David, ‘FBI claims Bin Laden inquiry was frustrated,’ The Guardian, 7 November 2001.

[61] Reports on this subject from respected sources such as ABC News, Judicial Watch, BBC Newsnight, and others are discussed in detail in Chapter 6 of The War on Freedom, op. cit.

[62] McMurtry, op. cit.

[63] Interview with Tyrone Powers, Institute for Policy Research & Development, 22 May 2002. Powers articulated the same views in an interview with Bob Slade on 98.7 Kiss FM, this May.

[64] Those anomalies and their implications are discussed extensively in my book, The War on Freedom, op. cit.

9/04 - Exchange on The New Pearl Harbor in The Nation

2004-12-01T09:24:00.000-08:00

David Ray Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbor, a book which raises questions about the official story of 9/11 responds to a review of his book in the Nation. There was no response printed to his letter in the Nation. The original review follows. (By chance, I've just begun reading Griffin's book. It's terrific.) --RB

David Ray Griffin,
Santa Barbara, Calif.
September 2004

I thank Robert Baer for his review of my book, The New Pearl Harbor ["Dangerous Liaisons," Sept. 27], in which he, perhaps using methods learned in the CIA, cleverly supports the book's argument while appearing to dismiss it. First, he begins by declaring, "Conspiracy theories are hard to kill." He thereby pretends not to know that in the book's introduction, I pointed out that the question is not whether one accepts or rejects a conspiracy theory about 9/11 but only whether one accepts the government's conspiracy theory or some other one. By pretending not to know this, Baer suggests that to take issue with the book one needs only to put it in the "conspiracy theory" genre, thereby dismissing it a priori.

Second, he warns readers not to be fooled into thinking the book is "a search for truth," because my "mind is all but made up." By pretending to equate my state of mind before I began my research with my state of mind after I finished it, he appears to warn readers that I arrived at my views before examining the evidence. However, since he must know otherwise (assuming he read the introduction), he has simply helped the reader notice that it is his own approach that he has described. For he then says, "Griffin simply cannot accept that our national security system totally failed all on its own on September 11." So, although my book revolves around the choice between these two theories--official complicity or massive official incompetence--Baer announces that the latter is the truth, saying that the attacks succeeded because of "a confluence of incompetence, spurious assumptions and self-delusion on a grand scale," thereby suggesting that my book can be dismissed not by refuting its evidence but by dogmatically accepting the incompetence theory.

Third, Baer says that the incompetence theory is really implausible. After pointing to the failure of NORAD to protect us on 9/11, he asks: "Can it really be that incompetent?" He also shows that the claims of the FBI and CIA to have been "surprised by 9/11" are implausible.

Fourth, Baer uses strong words to denounce the book's ideas, calling them "wacky," "monstrous," and referring to one of my sources as a "crackpot author." This resort to name-calling is Baer's clearest signal that in his view the book's evidence cannot be challenged on its own terms.

Fifth, after pointing out that the Bush Administration used 9/11 as a pretext for the war in Iraq, he calls it a "senseless war." He thereby pretends not to be aware that the desire for a pretext to take over a country with the world's second-largest known oil reserves could have provided a powerful motive.

At this point, I must add that despite my admiration for Baer's subtle way of supporting my case for an investigation into the charge of official complicity, he misleads readers by suggesting that the case for the claim that the Bush Administration reaped foreseeable benefits from 9/11 rests entirely on this pretext for the attack on Iraq. I pointed out, however, that 9/11 was also a pretext to pass the Patriot Act, to attack Afghanistan (for oil, gas and bases) and to jack up military spending, especially for the US Space Command, with its goal of weaponizing space. But this is a minor flaw in an otherwise splendid review.

DAVID RAY GRIFFIN

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040927&s=baer
Dangerous Liaisons

by ROBERT BAER

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11
by David Ray Griffin

[from the September 27, 2004 issue]

Conspiracy theories are hard to kill. They've dogged virtually every national tragedy in our history, from the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and what David Ray Griffin now claims is our new Pearl Harbor: 9/11. What's different about this conspiracy theory is the degree to which it has been helped along by its main suspect: the Administration of George W. Bush.

Bush's initial refusal to investigate September 11 started the ball rolling. When he caved in to political pressure and agreed to a commission, he picked the worst possible chairman, Henry Kissinger, whose legendary but secret client list no doubt includes countries suspected of involvement in the attack. The real traction, though, has come from Iraq. By consciously misleading Americans about Saddam Hussein's role in September 11 to justify an invasion, Bush answered the question every good conspiracy theory turns on: Who benefits?

Griffin's subtitle suggests this book is a search for truth, but don't let that fool you. His mind is all but made up. For a start, Griffin simply cannot accept that our national security system totally failed all on its own on September 11. What went wrong with an air defense system we'd been told would protect us from far more sophisticated attacks? Can the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) really be that incompetent? The FAA concluded that American Airlines Flight 11 had been hijacked at approximately 8:20 am. An hour and forty-three minutes later, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into the ground at Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In between, the few F-16s that did scramble seemed to have flown everywhere except in the right direction, but even if they had found the hijacked airplanes, authority from the White House to shoot them down arrived after the fact or was relayed too late.

Then there are the FBI and the CIA. The two federal agencies charged with protecting us from terrorist attacks say they were surprised by 9/11 even though bin Laden all but took out an ad in the New York Times telling us when and where he was going to attack. Nor was recent history mute on how such an attack might go down. In 1994 an Algerian Islamic group ideologically affiliated with bin Laden hijacked an Air France plane and would have flown it into the Eiffel Tower if the French hadn't stormed the plane during a refueling stop. A year later the Manila police uncovered a plot to blow up a dozen commercial airliners over the Pacific. Their investigation revealed that one of the Manila plotters, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had considered enticing some suicide-minded pilot to fly his airplane into the CIA headquarters. KSM, as we now know, would go on to mastermind 9/11.

Was anyone listening back then at the FAA or the Defense Department? Apparently not, but it gets worse. In January 2000, two members of KSM's cell managed to slip into the United States and set up in San Diego although the CIA had them on a watch list for plotting attacks in East Asia. We're told someone at the CIA neglected to inform the FBI, and the two made their flights on September 11. All this and still no one was fired or reprimanded?

So far, so good, but the 9/11 Commission has rendered much of the detail of this book stale news. What's notable about Griffin's take on these events is how easily he leaps to larger evils, a conspiracy at the top. Griffin is a thoughtful, well-informed theologian who before September 11 probably would not have gone anywhere near a conspiracy theory. But the catastrophic failures of that awful day are so implausible and the lies about Iraq so blatant, he feels he has no choice but to recycle some of the wilder conspiracy theories, several of which were popularized by the crackpot author Thierry Meyssan in L'Effroyable Imposture, a bestseller in France:

§ that the Pentagon was hit by a missile rather than by American Airlines Flight 77;

§ that since it was impossible for the World Trade Center to collapse under the impact of an airplane, it had to have been brought down by internal explosives;

§ that United Airlines Flight 93 was shot down when it was learned that the passengers had taken control of the airplane because the conspirators could not risk the passengers' getting off the plane and telling what really happened;

§ and that, most shocking of all, the Bush Administration knew the attack was coming and either let it happen or abetted the plotters as a way of jolting the nation into accepting its policy of pre-emptive warfare and transforming the Middle East.

It's a monstrous proposition, which makes this a monstrous but in some ways important book. Someone, after all, should be asking in print why our foreign policy seems to have fallen into the hands of some malevolent band of Marx Brothers. For all its merits, the 9/11 Commission Reportdoesn't even attempt to answer this question. Griffin's book does, but since he's an outsider to Washington's Byzantine ways, he falls back on wacky theories.

Halfway through this litany of what went wrong September 11 and why, I found myself thinking about one morning shortly after I joined the CIA. I was drinking a cup of coffee, reading the morning traffic, when a fellow desk officer sitting next to me said out of the blue: "You know, it was the CIA that took down Nixon." I waited for the punch line, but he wasn't joking. "The Watergate burglars taped the door open on purpose," he continued. "The plan was for a security guard to find the tape, call the police, and leave enough bread crumbs along the way to finger Nixon. Why else would they leave tape on the door like that?"

Working for an outfit that does break-ins for a living, I had to agree that leaving tape on the door was an act of gross incompetence. During basic training, the first thing they teach is that you always "pick to decode"-- make a key. One of the Watergate burglars, James McCord, had been a CIA security officer; he definitely knew that taping or jamming open a door is the quickest way to get caught in a black-bag operation. Stranger still, at the arraignment McCord volunteered that he was a CIA agent, another major Langley no-no. From my office mate's point of view, McCord was practically handing Nixon's head on a platter to the Washington Post. If I worked at it hard enough, I could have come up with a reason the CIA might have wanted to take Nixon down. (It wasn't so Spiro Agnew could take his place.) It was the idea of a conspiracy itself that I never could accept.

Yes, the CIA was formed, in essence, to conduct and foment conspiracies, but even within the vaulted offices of Langley, a secret like that couldn't have lasted twenty-four hours before it had been leaked to the Times, the Post and at least two of what were then the three major TV networks. And so it is with Griffin's Pearl Harbor hypothesis. Like most conspiracies, it has the allure of a deeper truth, but experience tells me that although this Administration is dedicated to keeping the truth away from the average citizen, it could never have acquiesced in so much human slaughter and kept it a secret. Especially when so many people would have to have been involved.

This is what I think happened on September 11. The trillions we put into national security were wasted. The military's early warning system, the CIA's and the FBI's ability to collect and process intelligence, and the White House's ability to deal with a national emergency never adapted to the new threat, terrorism, and the end of the cold war. Fail-safe procedures fail routinely, and depending on them is anything but safe. It wasn't a conspiracy of silence that allowed Osama bin Laden to succeed so spectacularly in his mission; it was a confluence of incompetence, spurious assumptions and self-delusion on a grand scale.

As more facts emerge about September 11, many of Griffin's questions should be answered, but his suspicions will never be put to rest as long as the Bush Administration refuses to explain why it dragged this country into the most senseless war in its history. Until then, otherwise reasonable Americans will believe the Bush Administration benefited from 9/11, and there will always be a question about what really happened on that day.