Tuesday, September 13, 2011
9/11: Enver Masud interviewed on TeleSUR
This TeleSUR interview (Spanish) was broadcast to North America, South America, Europe, Northern Africa on September 11, 2001.
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Muslims didn't do it
2000+ military, intelligence, industry professionals do not believe the official account of 9/11
"All the proffered evidence that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11, when subjected to critical scrutiny, appears to have been fabricated." . . .
(for full text, click on title)
"All the proffered evidence that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11, when subjected to critical scrutiny, appears to have been fabricated." . . .
(for full text, click on title)
9/11 Unveiled (part 10 of 10): Boomerang
With the goal set, contradictory evidence was excluded; the final report was fatally flawed.
Bin Laden is not wanted by the FBI for 9/11.
There were no Arab names on the published passenger lists, several of the hijackers are reported to be alive, the 9/11 Commission ignored the discrepancies.
Aircraft impact and the resulting fires could not have brought down the Twin Towers—evidence of explosives was ignored by the 9/11 Commission.
The collapse of the 47-story 7 World Trade Center in about seven seconds has yet to be explained —NIST’s computer simulation is inconclusive.
There’s little or no evidence that Flight 93 ploughed into the ground at the Pennsylvania “crash site”.
There’s no hard evidence that Flight 77 struck the Pentagon—photos, videos, and other evidence is being withheld by the U.S. government.
The architects of the 9/11 attacks have yet to be unveiled. To begin to identify them one needs to answer: Who is responsible for the continuing cover-up? Who had the motive, means, and opportunity to carry out these attacks? Who benefited?
But the U.S. government is anxious to avoid having The 9/11 Commission Report scrutinized too closely, and is not interested in an independent investigation.
According to Sahr MuhammedAlly, who observed part of the proceedings at Guantanamo, during the war crimes tribunal—the first since WWII—convened to try Bin Laden’s onetime driver, Salim Hamdan, the government claimed that The 9/11 Commssion Report—a New York Times bestseller—was classified and could not be used in the trial (democracynow.org, August 7, 2008)!
The credibility of the Bush administration, and America’s reputation, are at an all-time low. The dollar has plunged, the U.S. economy is in recession, and taxpayers are stuck with about a trillion dollar bill to bailout failing banks. The “peace dividend” has been squandered.
When the Euro was launched on January 2, 2002, it could be purchased for about a dollar. Today, it takes about a $1.60 to purchase. A costlier Euro, and costlier foreign currencies, means Americans pay more for imports.
The war on Islam has boomeranged.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, and Harvard economist Linda Bilmes, estimate the cost of the Iraq war at $3 to $5 trillion. At a time when funds are needed for health care, education, infrastructure, that’s $10,000 to over $16,000 for every American.
This is in addition to the $481 billion budgeted for defense in 2008. Compare this to $500 billion budgeted by the rest of the world combined!
It is reported that more than 4000 American soldiers have died, 320,000 had brain injuries, and 300,000 U.S. veterans have mental problem (Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press, April 17, 2008).
The United Nations Compensation Commission imposed a total of $53 billion in war reparations charges against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. What does the U.S. owe Iraq in reparations?
In the 10 years prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 500,000 children and old people died as a result of U.S.-UN sanctions. More than 1.1 million have died as a result of the invasion
(Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, January/February 2008):
[A] Johns Hopkins study estimated that, as of July 2006, 655,000 Iraqis had been killed, about 600,000 of them violently and at least 30 percent directly by coalition forces. It updated an earlier study (Lancet, 10/29/04) that estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died during the first year of the war. An extrapolation of the Johns Hopkins estimate of violent deaths done by Just Foreign Policy (9/18/07) currently stands at over 1.1 million.
In the U.S., “North Korea and Iran are seen as the biggest risks. However, the youngest U.S. respondents share the Europeans’ view that theirs is the biggest threat, with 35 per cent of American 16- to 24-year-olds identifying it [U.S.] as the chief danger to stability”, according to a survey by Harris Research for the Financial Times (July 1, 2007).
The American Human Development Report (July 16, 2008) funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad Hilton Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation, found that the U.S. had slumped from 2nd place in 1990 to 12th place.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. needed new “enemies” to justify maintaining the bloated military-industrial complex, and to control the resources and markets of other countries which it has done for decades.
U.S. strategists settled on creating the “Islamic fundamentalist” threat (Leon T. Hadar, Cato Institute, August 27, 1992).
“Islamic fundamentalist” evolved, and became the “rogue states and nuclear outlaws,” the “axis of evil,” the “war on terror,” and “Islamo-fascism.”
Veteran journalists Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wrote (It Was Oil, All Along, Truthout, June 28, 2008):
Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be . . . It is about oil.
While most Americans seek an end to the Iraq war, “Israel and its Fifth Column in this city seek to stampede us into war with Iran” writes Patrick J. Buchanan —senior adviser to American presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan.
Meanwhile the killing goes on.
Americans and Muslims are dying in wars promoted by the military, industrial, congressional complex, global corporations, Israel, and Christian Zionists.
Despite what they tell us, Afghanistan is not the “good war.”
Former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the first Nuremberg trial, has called waging aggressive war “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (Benjamin B. Ferencz, Salzburg Law School, Summer 2004).
For the military-industrial complex and global corporations wars are for profit. For Israel, wars are for land, water, and regional supremacy. For Christian Zionists the target is Islam. For the U.S. wars are largely for control of resources and markets—particularly the energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia.
In February 24, 1948, George Kennan—one of the most influential figures of the Cold War, stated in the top secret Policy Planning Study 23 for the U.S. Department of State:
we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 % of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. . . . Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity . . .
According to historian R. T. Naylor (Standard Schaeffer, CounterPunch, June 21, 2003):
Al-Qaeda itself does not exist, except in the fevered imaginations of neo-cons and Likudniks . . . who find it extremely useful as a bogeyman to spook the public and the politicians to acquiesce in otherwise unacceptable policy initiatives at home and abroad. Very simply, what you have are loose networks of likeminded individuals . . . They conduct their operations strictly by themselves, even if they may from time to time seek advice.
In Who Speaks for Islam?, a product of the Gallup World Poll’s massive research, authors John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed find that Muslims around the world want basically what Americans want. They reject terrorism, they admire the West for its technology and democracy. What they least admire about the West is its perceived moral decay and breakdown of traditional values. They criticize or celebrate countries based on their politics, not based on their culture or religion.
The “clash of civilizations” exists only in the imaginations of those who lead us to war for money or power. Ultimately, most wars are a clash of values—greed versus justice.
9/11 Unveiled (part 9 of 10): The Pentagon
At the Dept. of Defense (DoD) News Briefing on September 12, 2001, American Airlines, Flight 77, Boeing, Dulles, and passengers were not mentioned.
Standing in front of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s senior Pentagon correspondent since November 1992, reported:
From my close up inspection there’s no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. . . . . The only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you could pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage—nothing like that anywhere around which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon. . . . It wasn’t till about 45 minutes later . . . that all of the floors collapsed.
Arlington County Fire Chief Ed Plaugher, incident commander at the Pentagon on September 11, corroborates Jamie McIntyre’s report. At the September 12, 2001, DoD briefing, when asked: “Is there anything left of the aircraft at all?” said: “there are some small pieces of aircraft ... there’s no fuselage sections and that sort of thing.”
Victoria Clarke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs—“presenter” of the DoD briefing, did not contradict Plaugher. National news media failed to follow up on Plaugher’s comment.
Another question put to Chief Plaugher at the September 12, 2001, DoD briefing was:
Chief, there are small pieces of the plane virtually all over, out over the highway, tiny pieces. Would you say the plane exploded, virtually exploded on impact due to the fuel?”
“I’d rather not comment on that,” replied Plaugher.
How did “small pieces of the plane” end up “out over the highway” when the plane is reported to have disintegrated inside the Pentagon after it crossed the highway? If it disintegrated outside the Pentagon why is there nothing that looks like a Boeing 757 on the Pentagon lawn? If it disintegrated either inside or outside the Pentagon what caused the hole in C-ring?
When asked, “Have you removed the bodies?” Chief Plaugher replied, “We have no information on any type of casualty or body counts at this time.”
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who from her fifth-floor, B-ring office at the Pentagon, witnessed “an unforgettable fireball, 20 to 30 feet in diameter,” writes in 9/11 and American Empire: Muslims, Jews, and Christians Speak Out, that she was called for stretcher duty as she and others
stared in disbelief at a smoking gash in the Pentagon . . . But no person or thing emerged from that side of the Pentagon. We heard that survivors and injured folks were being rescued from the inside, . . . and out the River exit into ambulances.
Kwiatkowski continues that there was
a strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner. This visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the secretary of defense, who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon as a ‘missile’.
Barbara Honegger, military affairs journalist and former White House policy analyst, writes NORAD’s
Gen. Larry Arnold, revealed that he ordered one of his jets to fly down low over the Pentagon shortly after the attack that morning, and that his pilot reported back that there was no evidence that a plane had hit the building.
Questions about what hit the Pentagon on September 11, continued to be raised at the Dept. of Defense News Briefing on September 15, 2001.
Honegger adds an intriguing statement:
Multiple standard-issue, battery-operated wall clocks . . . stopped between 9:31 and 9:32-1/2 on September 11. . . .
The Pentagon was attacked by bomb(s) at or around 9:32 a.m., possibly followed by an impact from an airborne object significantly smaller than Flight 77, a Boeing 757.
Fort Meyer Fire Department Unit 161 was reported on fire at the Pentagon at 9:38 a.m. (National Fire Protection Association Journal, November 1, 2001).
“Captain [Michael] Defina drove onto the heliport and directed Foam Unit 331 to set up there, where Fort Myer Unit 161 had established a hydrant water supply.” National Airport’s aircraft rescue firefighters “knocked down the bulk of the fire in the first seven minutes after their arrival”.
The hole in the Pentagon wall—prior to the collapse of the roof—is too small to accommodate a Boeing 757, and supporting columns seen in photographs appear to be bowed out, not in—which is what one would expect from the impact of a Boeing 757.
If only the fuselage penetrated the Pentagon, then the wings would have remained outside. But no large debris—anything resembling the Boeing 757 wings and fuselage—is visible on the Pentagon lawn, and the lawn itself shows no sign that a Boeing 757 skidded across it or struck it.
The engines of the Boeing 757 would have survived the impact and heat. An engine from a plane that struck the World Trade Center was shown on network television, and so was an engine from American Airlines Flight 587 which crashed shortly after takeoff from New York on November 12, 2001.
One photo from the Pentagon crash site shows what could be an engine part about 30 inches in diameter outside the Pentagon. Another photo shows what could be an engine part (its size is difficult to determine) inside the Pentagon.
These parts, and other debris on the Pentagon lawn, that could identify Flight 77 have been withheld.
According to George Nelson, Colonel, USAF (ret.), serial numbers on aircraft parts could confirm the plane’s identity.
Col. Nelson writes:
In all my years of direct and indirect participation, I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft—and in most cases the precise cause of the accident.
This is because every military and civilian passenger-carrying aircraft have many parts that are identified for safety of flight. . . . these parts are individually controlled by a distinctive serial number and tracked by a records section of the maintenance operation and by another section called plans and scheduling.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Aidan Monaghan for “documentation confirming the recovery and positive identification of debris from the commercial aircraft allegedly used in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001”, David M. Hardy of the FBI’s Records Management Division, on September 24, 2007, replied “the material requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure”.
Photos and videos of the Pentagon—which may be viewed at twf.org/911.html—reveal yet more curious sights: a trailer, light poles, and a highway sign in front of the damaged area still intact after a Boeing 757 is alleged to have flown through there; a computer monitor which survived the fire that is alleged to have vaporized the Boeing 757, but left human bodies in good enough condition to be identified; “50 FBI officers” walking “shoulder-to-shoulder across the south grounds of the Pentagon, picking up debris and stuffing it into brown bags” (Washington Post, September 12, 2001).
Then there’s the testimony of Norman Y. Mineta, Former Secretary of Transportation, that Vice President Richard B. Cheney may have given a do not shoot order to facilitate an attack on the Pentagon.
In response to a question by the Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Mr. Mineta states:
There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, “The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to, “The plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the vice president, “Do the orders still stand? ”And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”
Five video frames initially released by the Pentagon raised more questions than they answered—no Boeing 757 was visible. Videos released on May 16, 2006, pursuant to a FOIA request by Judicial Watch, are as inconclusive as the first five frames.
Prosecution Trial Exhibits P200023 through P200041 of the Pentagon, presented in United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui (2006), reveal even less than the photographs available on the Internet (twf.org).
On September 12, 2001, the Washington Post reported two phone calls from Barbara Olson to her husband Theodore Olson—42nd Solicitor General of the United States: “She called from the plane while it was being hijacked,” he said.
The 9/11 Commission Report states these two calls were made between 9:16 and 9:26.
However, exhibit P200054 contradicts the Solicitor General’s account. It shows that Barbara Olson made only one “unconnected call”—it lasted for 0 seconds.
Further doubt has been cast on the official account of Flight 77 by Pilots for 9/11 Truth founded by Robert Balsamo. They claim that “video captured by the parking gate cam is in direct conflict with the Aircraft Flight Data Recorder data released by the NTSB.”
The 9/11 Commission Report animation (July 2004) shows an aircraft flying south of the Navy Annex, and the video captured by Pentagon security cameras shows an object flying level before striking the Pentagon. The NTSB data animation (January 2002), according to the pilots’ organization, shows an aircraft flying north of the Navy Annex, not leveling off, and being too high to have hit the Pentagon.
Eyewitnesses interviewed by the Citizen Investigation Team—Pentagon police officers Sgt William Lagasse and Sgt Chadwick Brooks—confirm seeing a plane flying along a path north of the CITGO gas station which sits east and slightly north of the Navy Annex.
The U.S. Department of Justice has yet to respond to an October 24, 2005 FOIA appeal, filed by Scott A. Hodes for 85 videotapes of the September 11, 2001 crash of Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
And there are unresolved issues regarding the complex maneuver executed by the alleged pilot of Flight 77, and the identities of the alleged hijackers.
CBS News reported: “Radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes. . . . the complex maneuver suggests the hijackers had better flying skills than many investigators first believed.”
The New York Times (May 4, 2002) reported that Hani Hanjour “could not fly at all.”
Also, Hanjour’s “name was not on the American Airlines manifest for the flight because he may not have had a ticket” (Four Planes, Four Coordinated Teams, Washington Post).
How then did Hanjour get on the flight, and how was he able to approach the Pentagon?
“Only a military aircraft, not a civilian plane flown by al Qaeda, would have given off the ‘Friendly’ signal needed to disable the Pentagon’s antiaircraft missile batteries as it approached the building” writes Honegger.
Furthermore, the official account of Flight 77 on September 11, 2001 defies the laws of science.
Calculations based on its Flight Data Recorder (FDR)—obtained pursuant to a FOIA request by
Pilots for 9/11 Truth—show that Flight 77 would have encountered a G-Force of around 33 times its normal weight when it would have to level out, about 150 yards in front of the Pentagon, and fly across the Pentagon lawn at “530 miles per hour” with “the top of the fuselage of the aircraft no more than 20 ft above the ground” (Pentagon Building Performance Report, p14) in order to strike the first floor of the 5-story, 71 feet tall Pentagon.
Had Flight 77 attempted this maneuver, it would have crashed on the lawn in front of the Pentagon.
Just prior to September 11, 2001, a congressional committee was investigating unaccounted funds at the DoD—$2.3 trillion in FY 1999, and $1.1 trillion in FY 2000. The section of the Pentagon destroyed housed records of DoD spending, and the personnel for monitoring that spending.
The Pentagon crash may be the only commercial airline crash in modern history in which most of the available evidence has been withheld from the public. Reporters on the scene were “handcuffed and dragged away” (DoD News Briefing, September 12, 2001).
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
9/11 Unveiled (part 8 of 10): Flight 93
Rare television footage from September 11, 2001 contradicts the generally accepted explanation that United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m., 125 miles from Washington, DC, after four passengers attacked the hijackers in an attempt to gain control of the airplane.
According to The 9/11 Commission Report, at 8:42 United Airlines Flight 93 took off from Newark, NJ, bound for San Francisco. It’s last “normal contact” with the FAA was at 9:27.
Around 9:28 the Cleveland, OH, controller heard “a radio transmission of unintelligible sounds of possible screaming or a struggle from an unknown origin.”
Other transmissions followed, and at 9:30 Ziad Jarrah, the alleged hijacker—a fragment of whose passport was found at the crash site—(CNN, August 1, 2002), was heard saying, “There is a bomb on board and are going back to the airport, and to have our demands [unintelligible]. Please remain quiet.”
“The FBI believes Jarrah, a Lebanese national, was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93, . . . U.S. officials believe the plane’s target was the White House.”
CNN adds that Jarrah “was stopped and questioned in the United Arab Emirates in January 2001 at the request of the CIA, nearly nine months before the attacks”.
At 10:01 another aircraft is reported to have witnessed “radical gyrations in what investigators believe was the hijackers’ effort to defeat the passenger assault.”
However, television footage from September 11, 2001 tells a different story.
NBC Reporter: “The debris here is spread over a 3 to 4 mile radius which has now been completely sealed off, and is being treated according to the FBI as a crime scene. This is one of those cases where the pictures really do tell the story . . . one of the most horrifying aspects of this is how little debris is visible . . . that’s all you see, just a large crater in the ground, and just tiny, tiny bits of debris . . . the investigators out there, and there are hundreds of them, have found nothing larger than a phone book.”
A Fox News reporter is heard talking to a Fox affiliate photographer Chris Kanicki [sic].
Fox Reporter: “I’ve seen the pictures, and it looks like there’s nothing there except a hole in the ground.”
Chris : “Basically that is right . . . The only thing you could see was a big gouge in the earth, and some broken trees . . .”
Fox Reporter: “Any large pieces of debris?”
Chris: “There was nothing that you could distinguish that a plane crashed there . . . nothing going on down there, no smoke, no fire . . .you couldn’t see anything, you could see dirt, ash, and people walking around.”
Fox Reporter: “How big would you say that hole was?”
Chris: “From my estimate it was 20 to 15 feet long . . . 10 feet wide.”
Fox Reporter: “What could you see on the ground other than dirt, ash?”
Chris: “You couldn’t see anything . . . just dirt, ash, and people walking around.”
Both NBC and Fox reporters make no mention of the Boeing 757’s fuselage, tail, landing gear, and engines which would have been found at the “crash site” had the plane plunged to the ground while the “pilot struggled with hijackers.”
Elias Davidsson, a researcher in Iceland, reveals anomalies that cast doubt on the authenticity of the transcript from Flight 93’s Cockpit Voice Recorder. He writes (The Events of September 11, 2001 and the Right to the Truth, April 14, 2008, p16):
The transcripts of CVRs from other crashes around the world . . . mention numerous engine and ambient sounds . . . The transcript of Flight UA 93’s CVR does not mention any such sounds and particularly no crash sound at the end . . . the released transcript differed significantly from authentic CVR transcripts by failing to mention the aircraft’s ID, the name of the person and agency who issued the transcript and the date the transcript was issued. Furthermore, serious discrepancies have been revealed between what family members heard when the transcript was first played to them by the FBI on April 2, 2002, and what the 9/11 Commission reported to have heard.
Popular accounts of Flight 93 mention several phone calls describing the passengers’ struggle with the hijackers, but this is contradicted by the FBI.
According to an FBI report presented as evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006, Griffin writes (Canadian, October 8, 2007):
there were only two cell phone calls from United 93, and they were made at 9:58, shortly before the plane crashed, when it was down to 5,000 feet. . . . (These two low-altitude calls from Flight 93 were, according to the FBI report, the only two cell phone calls made from all four flights).
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, during a Christmas Eve address to U.S. troops in Baghdad, said “the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania.”
The Pentagon says Rumsfeld “simply misspoke.”
There’s also the statement by Lee Hamilton, Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission.
While questioning Norman Y. Mineta, Former Secretary of Transportation, Mr. Hamilton asked Mineta about an “order given, I think by the President, that authorized the shooting down of commercial aircraft that were suspected to be controlled by terrorists.”
The video of Mineta’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission has been removed from the archives of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, but links to a copy may be found at The Wisdom Fund’s website (twf.org).
Vice President Cheney admitted to giving the order to shoot hijacked aircraft.
Philip Shenon, an investigative reporter at the New York Times where he has worked since 1981, in The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (Twelve, 2008, p264), narrates this exchange between Cheney and Tim Russert (Meet the Press, April 4, 2004):
Russert asked Cheney what was the most difficult decision made during the course of the day [September 11, 2001].
“Well, I suppose the toughest decision was this question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft,” Cheney said, referring to the decision to order military jets to shoot down passenger planes that approached Washington.
Russert asked: “And you decided . . .”
Cheney corrected Russert. “We decided to do it.” He was referring to himself and Bush.
“So if the United States government became aware that a hijacked commercial airliner was was destined for the White House or the Capitol, we would take the plane down?” Russert continued.
“Yes,” Cheney said somberly.
There is yet another twist to the saga of Flight 93.
ABC affiliate WCPO in Cleveland reported:
A Boeing 767 out of Boston made an emergency landing Tuesday at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport due to concerns that it may have a bomb aboard, said Mayor Michael R. White. . . . United identified the plane as Flight 93.
However, in February 2006, Liz Foreman, whose name was attached to the original story, stated that
an Associated Press bulletin, was posted on WCPO.com during the morning of September 11, 2001. The story stated that Flight 93 landed in Cleveland. This was not true. Once the AP issued a retraction a few minutes later, we removed the link.
On April 28, 2009, Pilots for 9/11 Truth reported that Air Traffic Control radar shows Flight 93 airborne after its reported crash.
Monday, September 05, 2011
9/11 Unveiled (part 7 of 10): The Achilles Heel
Stretching the metaphor a bit, the collapse time, i.e. the time from the initiation of collapse to the total collapse of One and Two World Trade Center, and 7 World Trade Center, is the Achilles’ heel of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory.
The official theory is also vulnerable to the challenges outlined in the two previous sections.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology estimates (NIST FAQ, October 5, 2007)
the elapsed times for the first exterior panels to strike the ground after the collapse initiated in each of the towers to be approximately 11 seconds for WTC 1 and approximately 9 seconds for WTC 2. These elapsed times were based on: (1) precise timing of the initiation of collapse from video evidence, and (2) ground motion (seismic) signals recorded at Palisades, N.Y.
NIST adds:
significant portions of the cores of both buildings (roughly 60 stories of WTC 1 and 40 stories of WTC 2) are known to have stood 15 to 25 seconds after collapse initiation before they, too, began to collapse. Neither the duration of the seismic records nor video evidence . . . are reliable indicators of the total time it took for each building to collapse completely.
The 9/11 Commission Report simply states (p322): “the South Tower collapsed in ten seconds”.
These collapse times are close to that of a billiard ball dropped from the top of WTC 1 or 2. The time is calculated using the equation taught in high school physics classes:
Distance = 0.5 X Acceleration X Time Squared.
Using this equation a billiard ball dropped from the top of the 1368 feet tall WTC 1 or 2 would travel 1296 feet in 9 seconds—it would reach the ground in 9.2 seconds (assuming acceleration due to gravity of 32 feet per second per second, and no wind resistance).
The towers’ collapse at near free-fall speed, due solely to airplane impact and the resulting fires, defies logic.
Section 6.14.4 of NIST NCSTAR 1, NIST states:
the structure below the level of collapse initiation offered minimal resistance to the falling building mass at and above the impact zone. The potential energy released by the downward movement of the large building mass far exceeded the capacity of the intact structure below to absorb that energy through energy of deformation.
NIST (a) offers no calculations to support this theory, (b) does not explain the symmetry of collapse, and (c) does not explain how “falling building mass” retains enough energy to destroy the floors below.
The “building mass” has to stay intact in order to cause the structure below it to collapse.
But as we saw on television broadcasts, the concrete floors of the Twin Towers exploded—into dust, according to many reports—as they came crashing down, and steel beams were hurled outwards.
For the sake of argument only, Prof. Kenneth L. Kuttler assumed One World Trade Center’s floors “floating in the air” which did not move till struck from the floors above. Even with this idealized problem, and conservative safety factors in the building’s design, Kuttler calculated collapse times of more than 25 seconds due to a gravity only collapse (Journal of 9/11 Studies, May 9, 2007).
This result, writes Kuttler “is consistent with the prediction of Gordon Ross in his analysis which concluded that the fall of the North Tower should have been arrested with much of the lower portion of the Tower standing.”
Of course, this is not what happened, and no official explanation of the collapse time has been offered.
Friday, September 02, 2011
'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 6 of 10): 7 World Trade Center
7 World Trade Center was not struck by plane, its collapse is not mentioned in The 9/11 Commision Report, and few know that even existed.
The World Trade Center consisted of seven buildings: the Twin Towers and Buildings 3, 4, 5, and 6 taking up the equivalent of about nine city blocks, and across the street—North of the Twin Towers—Building 7.
Buildings 3, 4, 5 and 6 sustained much greater damage than Building 7. They also collapsed, but not in the manner that the Twin Towers, and Building 7 collapsed.
The 9/11 Commission Report tells us that the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management was located on the 23rd floor of WTC 7, and at 8:48 a.m. the Emergency Operations Center was activated, but it fails to mention the collapse of WTC 7.
Major news media remained silent about this glaring omission for about seven years.
Videos of the collapse of the 47-story WTC 7—which would have been the tallest building in most countries and U.S. states—while readily available on alternative news sites, have generally not been shown to the public after September 11 by major news media.
The collapse of the 9-story Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 was repeatedly shown on television, and initially blamed on Muslim terrorists.
Dr. Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, writes: “The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse [“official theory”] remain unknown at this time.”
Prof. Jones attempted to make his point on MSNBC’s The Situation with Tucker Carlson on November 15, 2005, but was prevented from doing so.
CNN’s Aaron Brown and BBC’s Jane Standley reported that Building 7 “has collapsed or is collapsing” before it collapsed—the picture in the BBC television broadcast is time stamped 21:54 London time which is 16:54 or 4:54 PM EST.
Diane Sawyer, an award-winning investigative journalist, interviewed a firefighter on ABC News Live who said: “At Building 7 there was no fire there whatsoever, but there was one truck putting water on the building, but it collapsed completely.”
Some claim that “diesel fuel stored in the building somehow caught fire, and created a towering inferno.” But a report from FEMA (World Trade Center Building Performance Study, May 2002) states that this scenario had “only a low probability of occurrence.”
Dan Rather, at the time anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News, while reporting on the collapse of Building 7, said:
For the third time today, it’s reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen too much on television before. A building was deliberately destroyed by well placed dynamite to knock it down.
Indira Singh, a first responder on September 11, said during an appearance on KPFA that by “noon or one o’clock”, the Fire Department was telling them that they had to move the triage site because “we’re going to have to bring it down.”
Larry Silverstein, the WTC leaseholder who stood to profit from the collapse of the WTC (Greg Levine, Forbes, December 6, 2004), was shown on PBS saying:
I remember getting a call from the ER, Fire Department Commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made the decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.
If Building 7 was “pulled”—a demolition term, when were the explosives planted? This would have had to be done several weeks before 9/11—it takes that long to place and wire the explosives.
Who had access to the building for a period long enough to plant explosives while bypassing the building’s security?
Securacom, now Stratesec, was in charge of security for the World Trade Center. During the time that a new security system was being installed, the president’s brother, Marvin Bush, was a director of Securacom.
The collapse of Building 7 is unprecedented.
No steel-frame, high-rise building has collapsed from fire, either before September 11, 2001 or after September 11, 2001.
On February 23, 1991, a 38-story tower in Philadelphia burned for 18 hours; on October 17, 2004, a 56-story tower in Caracas burned for 17 hours; on February 12, 2005, a 32-story tower in Madrid burned for 24 hours; on February 19, 2009, Beijing’s newest skyscraper burned for 6 hours.
None of these collapsed like World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7. Why then should we believe that on September 11, 2001, three steel-framed, high-rise buildings collapsed from fire?
Following the inconclusive, FEMA investigation of May 2002, the “free press” ignored the issue.
On August 21, 2008, Shyam Sunder, lead investigator at NIST, presented NIST’s findings at a press briefing. A draft Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 was made available on the Internet later in the day.
“Video and photographic evidence combined with detailed computer simulations show that neither explosives nor fuel oil fires played a role in the collapse of WTC 7,” Sunder said.
NIST claims that the collapse was due to “some structural damage to the southwest perimeter” by falling debris, and to “ordinary building content fires” on floors 7 through 9, and 11 through 13. This caused “buckling of a critical interior column”, followed by “progressive collapse”.
Engineers routinely design structures to withstand expansion of steel members. Sunder did not explain why similar building fires, either before 9/11 or after 9/11, did not cause buildings to collapse like Building 7.
The photographic evidence regarding fires is helpful, and it does show some damage to WTC 7. However, NIST admits:
Although the visual evidence for WTC 7 was not nearly as rich as for WTC 1 and WTC 2, the fire simulation did exploit as much as possible the few photographs showing the location of severe fire activity in WTC 7 at various time during the afternoon of September 11, 2001.
Computer simulation, without satisfactory validation of the model, proves nothing—those sumo wrestlers transforming into an airplane taking off, in the United Airlines commercial broadcast during the Beijing Olymics, were computer simulations.
Model validation—a crucial step in the modeling process—requires that “inferences made in establishing the model are checked by observing if the model behaves as expected” (Simulation and Modeling, Prentice Hall, 1969).
In the NIST reports we were unable to find NIST’s model validation criteria, the results of model validation tests, and discussion of other instances where the models used by NIST (LS-DYNA—“a general purpose transient dynamic finite element program”—developed by Livermore Software Technology Corp, and ANSYS), had been successfully applied to similar problems, or how the NIST model behaved with other disturbances.
NIST writes that “damage criteria required adjustment to obtain the appropriate strength and ductility of the structures” (p542), and damage estimated by ANSYS “was input to the LS-DYNA model as the final step before analyzing the structural response” (p565).
In other words, NIST adjusted model inputs to obtain the outputs it desired.
Others dispute Sunder’s claim that explosives played no role, and videos appear to show explosions. Buildings that have collapsed without explosives do not come straight down on their own footprint. Forensic evidence from the structural steel is necessary to rule out the use of explosives in WTC 7.
Absent satisfactory answers to these issues, one cannot have confidence in the NIST computer simulation.
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth argue that NIST does not address why the collapse exhibits none of the characteristics of destruction by fire, such as slow onset with large visible deformations that would cause the building to fall to the side most damaged by fire.
NIST also does not address why the collapse does exhibit all the characteristics of a classic controlled demolition with explosives such as rapid onset of collapse, sounds of explosions at ground floor a full second prior to collapse, symmetrical collapse through the path of greatest resistance at nearly free-fall speed with the steel skeleton broken up for shipment, massive volume of expanding pyroclastic dust clouds, tons of molten metal found by Controlled Demolition, Inc., the chemical signature of thermate (a high tech incendiary) found in slag, solidified molten metal, and dust samples by Prof. Jones, and rapid oxidation and intergranular melting on structural steel samples examined by FEMA.
Indeed a newly found video shows windows being blown out from the bottom toward the top of WTC7 just prior to its collapse—see video at twf.org/911.html at the beginning, and at 33 seconds.
When I worked for the U.S. Department of Energy, it would have been highly unusual that a report such as NIST’s were presented to the news media without it first being presented to outside peer review. In fact we had critics review progress of our research at critical stages. NIST has sought to avoid answering its critics.
Except for the photos in the draft report, NIST did not release the photos and videos they referred to at the press briefing for examination by other experts.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 5 of 10): One, Two World Trade Center
Two World Trade Center, the South Tower, collapsed at 9:59 a.m. One World Trade Center, the North Tower, collapsed at 10:28 a.m. At 10:03 a.m., CNN reported: “THIRD EXPLOSION SHATTERS WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK”. At 10:06 a.m., CNN reported: “THIRD EXPLOSION COLLAPSES WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK”.
According to U.S. government reports, aircraft impact would not have caused the Twin Towers to collapse.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. government agency responsible for analyzing the collapse of the Twin Towers, included a memo dated February 3, 1964 in Appendix A of their report Baseline Structural Performance and Aircraft Impact Damage Analysis of the World Trade Center Towers (April 26, 2006) that states:
The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707 - DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result only in local damage which would not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.
The memo further states:
The structural analysis carried out by the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson is the most complete and detailed of any ever made for any building structure.
Executive Summary, Table E-8 of the NIST report estimates aircraft impact speeds at 443 mph plus or minus 30 for AA 11 (WTC 1), and 542 mph plus or minus 24 for UAL 175 (WTC 2).
The Boeing 767s that hit the North and South Towers were slightly heavier than a Boeing 707-. Calculations show that they would have caused less damage than the Boeing 707 travelling at 600 mph in Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson’s structural analysis (Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, p146).
Executive Summary, Finding 18 states: “the tower still had reserve capacity after losing a number of columns and floor segments due to aircraft impact.”
Despite the preceding statements, in an August 30, 2006 Fact Sheet, NIST stated:
NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers.”
NIST’s evidence and conclusions are challenged by other experts, and NIST appears to concede to their criticism.
Thomas Eager, professor of materials engineering at MIT, who contributed to the official account of 9/11 says the impact of the airplanes would not have been significant.
Kevin Ryan, a division director who was terminated by Underwriters Laboratories for challenging the NIST analysis, wrote:
Of course, those of us who have actually followed NIST’s investigation know that they could not produce any ‘robust criteria’ to establish that fireproofing was lost through forces of vibration. Instead, NIST performed a shotgun test to see if the fireproofing could have been lost through shearing forces.
The shotgun test not only failed to support NIST’s predetermined conclusions, as was the case for all of their other physical tests, but it actually proved that the fireproofing could not have been sheared off because too much energy would be needed.
The Twin Towers had 240 perimeter columns, and 47 massive, box columns in the core. NIST’s damage assessment for the towers was as follows (Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, p146):
North Tower: 35 exterior columns severed, 2 heavily damaged; 6 core columns severed, 3 heavily damaged; 43 of 47 core columns stripped of insulation on one or more floors.
South Tower: 33 exterior columns severed, 1 heavily damaged; 10 core columns severed, 1 heavily damaged; 39 of 47 core columns stripped of insulation on one or more floors.
Engineering News-Record explained in 1964:
one could cut away all the first story columns on one side of the building, and part way from the corners of the perpendicular sides, and the building could still withstand design live loads, and a 100 mph wind force from any direction.
To make the Commission’s theory appear plausible, The 9/11 Commission Report claims (541), falsely, that the core of the towers “was a hollow steel shaft.”
In response to an April 12, 2007 “Request for Correction,” NIST’s Catherine S. Fletcher, Chief, Management and Organization Division, appears to concede—at least partially—to the critics.
In her letter dated September 27, 2007, she states:
NIST Computer Simulations: NIST has used an extensive database of photographic and video evidence to validate the models used to analyze the behavior of the towers up to the point of initiation of collapse. . . .
The WTC Steel Temperature: While NIST did not find evidence that any of the recovered core columns experienced temperatures in excess of 250° C, it is not possible to extrapolate from such a small sample size to state that none of the core columns on the fire affected floors reached temperatures in excess of 250° C. . . .
The Goal of the WTC Report and Its Overall Analysis: NIST has stated that it did not analyze the collapse of the towers. NIST carried its analysis to the point where the buildings reached global instability. . . . we were unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse.
NIST’s analysis ends with the “initiation of collapse.” NIST admits that “it did not analyze the collapse of the towers.”
In room fires (Dr. Vytenis Babrauskas, 2006)
the maximum value which is fairly regularly found . . . turns out to be around 1200°C, although a typical post-flashover room fire will more commonly be 900~1000°C. The time-temperature curve for the standard fire endurance test, ASTM E 119 goes up to 1260°C, but this is reached only in 8 hr.
NIST also admits that physical evidence does not support their conclusion of fire temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius. In the samples taken from the site, there’s no evidence that any core column experienced temperatures in excess of 250° C.
Since steel loses 50% strength at 650° C, and melts at 1500° C, if one were to assume—for the sake of argument only—that the fire was large enough, the fire was neither hot enough, nor long-lasting enough (major fires lasted less than15 minutes), to significantly weaken the towers.
Richard Gage, founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth—with 400-plus members, makes the following points regarding the NIST report:
The destruction occurred with rapid onset, at virtually free-fall speed, and with radial symmetry.
One hundred eighteen first responders described hearing, seeing and feeling explosions and seeing flashes of light at the onset of destruction.
The concrete floors were almost completely pulverized into dust and gravel.
The structural steel framework was largely dismembered into shippable lengths. Much of it was hurled outside the Twin Towers’ perimeters, some as far as 500 feet away.
Tons of molten metal were seen by FDNY and others, and was described as “flowing like lava” for weeks after 9/11, yet its existence was denied by NIST.
Proven chemical evidence of thermate, an incendiary material which produces molten iron as its by-product, found on the columns and beams, previously molten metal, and iron-rich micro-spheres in the dust by Dr. Steven Jones (and corroborated by the U.S. Geological Survey, but never explained).
“These features are characteristic of controlled demolitions, and not office or jet fuel fires”, writes Gage.
And explosions were reported on television news.
MSNBC Reporter: At 10:30 I tried to leave the building, but as soon as I got outside, I saw [sic] the second explosion, an another rumble, and more dust. I ran inside the building . . . and then a fire marshall came in and said we had to leave because if there was a third explosion this building might not last.
CBS Channel 2 Reporter: New York’s bravest never had a chance.
Firefighter on CBS Channel 2: We never got that close to the building. The explosion blew, and it knocked everybody over.
Fox News Reporter: The FBI is here as you can see . . . they were taking photographs and securing this area just prior to that huge explosion that we all heard and felt.
NBC Reporter: Most of the victims so far were outside the blownup building.
Witness on NBC: It sounded like gunfire—bang, bang, bang, bang. Then all of a sudden three big explosions.
Among those who testified to explosions at the 9/11 Commission hearings was William Rodriguez, “honored by the White House” for his rescue efforts.
Since the force exerted by the impact of the aircraft was within the Twin Towers’ design criteria, and the fires were neither hot enough, large enough, nor long-lasting enough to have caused the collapse, there had to have been another source of energy to cause collapse.
Leslie Robertson, structural engineer responsible for the design of the World Trade Center, is reported to have said at the National Conference of Structural Engineers on October 5, 2001: “As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning, and molten steel was still running.”
In their investigation, both the 9/11 Commission and NIST, ignored testimony and evidence not consistent with their collapse theory.
NIST says (FAQ, August 30, 2006):
The condition of the steel in the wreckage of the WTC towers (i.e., whether it was in a molten state or not) was irrelevant to the investigation of the collapse since it does not provide any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers were standing.
The molten steel may not provide “any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers were standing”, but it is very relevant to the evaluation of hypotheses of why the towers collapsed. The steel at the bottom of the debris pile did not spontaneously get hot and melt after collapse.
NIST did not evaluate the use of explosives.
NIST rejects the “pancake theory” for the collapse (August 30, 2006 Fact Sheet) popular in some circles, but NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder contradicts NIST.
Sunder says that the squibs (puffs or jets of smoke and dust caused by the detonation of explosives) seen in videos of the collapse are caused by the “floor pancaking” (Popular Mechanics, March 2007).
In September 2006, Mete Sozen and Christoph M. Hoffmann, professors at Purdue University, claimed to have an answer.
Sozen and Hoffman concluded that
the weight of the fuel acted like a flash flood of flaming liquid, knocking out essential structural columns within the building and removing fireproofing insulation from other support structures.
These researchers simulated the “top 20 stories” for “3/4 seconds real-time”. Their simulation, like NIST’s, says nothing about the collapse itself—it stops at the initiation of collapse.
By extrapolation, a simulation of the 102 real-time minutes from impact to collapse—which would have to make many arguable assumptions—could take 652,800 hours or about 75 years.
Even though the “criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be kept for forensic analysis. FEMA had steel recovered from the building rubble destroyed or shipped” to India and China before it could be examined for traces of explosives (sourcewatch.org).
A paper by Niels H. Harrit and others (The Open Chemical Physics Journal) has confirmed the presence of thermitic material in dust samples from the WTC.
'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 4 of 10): The 'Hijackers'
On September 12, 2001 ABC News reported that “investigators have identified all the hijackers”.
Among those identified was “Satam Suqami, a Saudi national on American Airlines Flight 11, whose passport was [miraculously] recovered in the rubble.”
The next day, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller announced that the FBI had “identified most of the hijackers responsible”. Mueller is reported to have said (CBS, 60 Minutes II, September 10, 2003):
A flight attendant on American Flight 11, Amy Sweeney, had the presence of mind to call her office as the plane was hijacked and give them the seat numbers of the hijackers.
Peter Finn and Charles Lane wrote that an attendant on Flight 11 used a cell phone (Washington Post, October 6, 2001), but six years later, the FBI admitted that two low-altitude calls from Flight 93 were the only cell phone calls made from all four of the 9/11 planes (Griffin, Canadian, October 8, 2007).
If an Airfone was used, billing records could provide confirmation of Sweeney’s phone call.
On September 21, 2001, Nick Hopkins of the Guardian reported:
After analysis of the passenger lists of the four hijacked flights and other immigration documents, investigators identified Salem Al-Hazmi and Abdulaziz Al-Omari as two of the terrorists.
The real Salem Al-Hazmi, however, is alive and indignant in Saudi Arabia, and not one of the people who perished in the American Airlines flight that crashed on the Pentagon.
On September 23, 2001 BBC News reported that four of the hijack “suspects”—Waleed Al Shehri, Abdulaziz Al Omari, Saeed Alghamdi, and possibly Khalid Al Midhar were—alive, and Director Mueller acknowledged “that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.”
The same day, David Harrison of the Telegraph reported:
The men—all from Saudi Arabia—spoke of their shock at being mistakenly named by the FBI as suicide terrorists. None of the four was in the United States on September 11 and all are alive in their home country.
On September 17, 2001, the Associated Press published passenger lists for AA Flight 11, UA Flight 175, AA Flight 77, and UA Flight 93, based on information supplied by “family members, friends, co-workers and law enforcement”—the same list appears on CNN and the websites of several other news organizations.
There were no Arab names on these lists!
The “terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta”—identified by a suitcase and will allegedly left behind at Boston airport (Peter Finn, Washington Post, October 6, 2001)—was not listed on the passenger list for American Airlines Flight 11.
Hani Hanjour’s “name was not on the American Airlines manifest for the flight because he may not have had a ticket” according to the Washington Post. How then did he get on the flight?
The passenger lists published by the Associated Press, USA Today, and others note that these are, “Partial lists of passengers and crew killed in Tuesday’s terrorist attacks, according to family members, friends, coworkers and local law enforcement.”
“This is a very strange way to source such information,” said Gerard Holmgren. He asks,
Why not get it from American Airlines or the FBI? If neither of these were consulted, how did USAT know who’s “family members, friends, co-workers” to go looking for? Or if AA and the FBI were the first source of inquiry, why a partial list from hearsay sources?
Gary North, an historian, also expressed concern:
How did the airlines know how many people were on each of these flights? The airlines must have had a list for each flight. What possible reason could they have had for not releasing the full lists?
On April 19, 2002, Mueller said in speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco,
In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper—either here in the United States, or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot.
In July of 2006, in connection with the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui—the “20th hijacker,” the U.S. government published documents containing the names of the alleged hijackers, and aircraft layouts showing the seats occupied by the hijackers.
The 9/11 Commission Report, published July 22, 2004, left unresolved the discrepancies in the passenger lists.
Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer wrote (Washington Post, March 21, 2006):
An FBI agent who interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui before Sept. 11, 2001, warned his supervisors more than 70 times that Moussaoui was a terrorist and spelled out his suspicions that the al-Qaeda operative was plotting to hijack an airplane, according to federal court testimony yesterday.
Lawyers for Moussaoui who pleaded guilty, and is the only person criminally charged by the U.S. with participating in 9/11, allege that the government knew more about the conspiracy than did the defendant (CNN, February 2, 2006).
'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 3 of 10): Bin Laden
Bin Laden is the “prime suspect” in the September 11 attacks, said President Bush on September 17, 2001, and pledged to capture him “dead or alive.”
Bin Laden, in a September 28, 2001 interview with the Pakistani newspaper Ummat, is reported to have said:
I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.
Experts dismiss the video tape “discovered in a private home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan” which allegedly shows Bin Laden confessing to the September 11 attacks (NPR, September 13, 2001)—another lucky find, like the passports in the rubble of the World Trade Center, and at the Flight 93 “crash site.”
In a December 20, 2001 broadcast by German TV channel Das Erste “two independent translators and an expert on oriental studies found the White House’s translation not only to be inaccurate, but manipulative.”
In a radio interview with Kevin Barrett, Prof. Bruce Lawrence, editor of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, called the video “bogus.”
As of July 2008, the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists web page makes no reference to Bin Laden being wanted for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI states:
Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world.
When asked why is there no mention of 9/11 on the FBI’s web page, Rex Tomb, the FBI’s Chief of Investigative Publicity, is reported to have said, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”
In the months leading up to September 11, 2001, the Taliban “outlined various ways bin Laden could be dealt with. He could be turned over to the EU, killed by the Taliban, or made available as a target for Cruise missiles” (Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch, November 1, 2004).
On September 20, 2001 the Taliban “offered to hand Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic country for trial if the US presented them with evidence” that he was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The US rejected the offer (George Monbiot, Guardian, November 11 2003).
“The Bush administration said yesterday,” reported the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (September 24, 2001), “that it would release evidence that Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden masterminded the attacks” on 9/11.
I am absolutely convinced that the al-Qaida network, which he heads, was responsible for this attack,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Powell said the government would “put before the world, the American people, a persuasive case that ... it is al-Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden, who has been responsible.
The Bush administration’s case, Powell’s case, has yet to be “put before the world”.
On March 29, 2006, on The Tony Snow Show, Vice President Dick Cheney stated: “So we’ve never made the case, or argued the case, that somehow Osama Bin Laden was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been forthcoming.”
On September 11, 2001, several military exercises were taking place: Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Guardian, Northern Vigilance. What role, if any, these played on 9/11 has not been explained.
'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 2 of 10): Pretexts and Coverups
Suez Canal
Britain and France had their plan for taking back the Suez Canal after it was nationalized by President Nasser of Egypt on July 26, 1956. “France secretly enlisted the help of Israel,” writes James Bamford—former Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings (Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, 2001).
The intrigue involved Israel launching a war against Egypt. Then, once Egypt began defending itself, England and France would go in as “peacekeepers.” As part of the “peace,” the canal would be taken from Egypt and kept by Britain and France. Israel would capture the Sinai from Egypt.
The plan was agreed to by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, defense minister Shimon Peres, armed forces chief Moshe Dayan, and Britain’s Prime Minister Anthony Eden.
USS Liberty
While falsely blaming “enemies,” the U.S. government, and America’s “free press,” have sacrificed Americans in order to cover-up for “friends.”
On June 8, 1967, a U.S. Navy intelligence ship, the USS Liberty, was attacked in international waters by Israel’s air and naval forces. (USS Liberty Memorial website—http://www.gtr5.com/).
USS Liberty was identified as a US naval ship nine hours before the attack by Israeli reconnaissance aircraft and continuously tracked by Israeli radar and aircraft thereafter. Sailing in international waters at less than five knots, with no offensive armament, [the] ship was not a military threat to anyone.
Thirty four Americans were killed in the attack and another 174 were wounded.
For 40 years, survivors of the USS Liberty have been forbidden “to tell their story under oath to the American public.” The cover-up of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, begun under the Johnson administration, continues to this day.
What have successive U.S. administrations been covering up?
On the morning of June 8, the USS Liberty, sailing a few miles off El Arish in Israel, was secretly listening in on the Israelis who were then attacking Arab air bases from Damascus in Syria to Luxor in Egypt. The Israelis had occupied the Jordanian section of Jerusalem, and captured Sharm al-Sheikh.
And while the USS Liberty eavesdropped (Bamford, Body of Secrets):
a scant dozen or so miles away, Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds, a fact that the entire Israeli army leadership knew about and condoned, according to the army’s own historian. . . .
At the time, Israel was loudly proclaiming—to the United States, to the United Nations, and to the world—that it was the victim of Egyptian aggression . . . Israel’s commanders would not have wanted tape recordings of evidence of the slaughters to wind up on desks at the White House, the UN, or the Washington Post.
The pattern set in 1967—covering up for Israeli aggression, has been a major contributor to U.S. problems in the Middle East.
Cuba
Following the failed, Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 17, 1961, by 1,300 members of a CIA-supported counterrevolutionary Cuban exile force, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) drew up and approved plans for “launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.”
Bamford writes:
Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plan . . . called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer [Chairman JCS] and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.
Accidents, writes Bamford, were to be used to advance U.S. interests. Had the February 20, 1962 launch of John Glenn—the first American to orbit the earth, later a U.S. presidential candidate—not been successful, the JCS were prepared to use John Glenn’s possible death as a pretext for war.
The flight was to carry the banner of America’s virtues of truth, freedom, and democracy into orbit high over the planet. But Lemnitzer and his Chiefs had a different idea. They proposed to Lansdale [U.S. general in charge of Operation Mongoose—covert operations against Cuba] that, should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, “the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . . . the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic].” This would be accomplished, Lemnitzer continued, “by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”
In 1963, writes Bamford, the JCS proposed secret U.S. attacks on Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago.
Both were members of the British Commonwealth; thus, by secretly attacking them and then falsely blaming Cuba, the United States could lure England into the war against Castro.
Vietnam
On August 5, 1964, President Johnson announced retaliatory attacks on Vietnamese targets alleging that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had attacked two American destroyers on routine patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin—the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy.
The Maddox was in fact gathering intelligence for coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, July 27, 1994).
In 2005, an NSA declassified report revealed that the USS Maddox first fired warning shots on the August 2 incident and that there may not have been any North Vietnamese boats at the August 4 incident (R. J. Hanyok, Cryptologic Quarterly, February 24, 1998).
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
The Viet Nam war led to 58,217 American deaths, and as many as two million Vietnamese casualties.
Diego Garcia
John Pilger’s documentary, “Stealing a Nation,” describes how in the 1960s, as Britain was dismantling its colonies, the U.S. conspired with Britain to receive secretly, gratis, and for 50 years, the Chagos Archipelago.
Between 1965 and 1973, to clear the largest island in the archipelago, Diego Garcia, for a listening post for the U.S. National Security Administration, every man, woman, and child was physically removed from the islands, and placed “bewildered and frightened,” on the islands of Mauritius and Seychelles.
At first, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving; those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning. As the Americans began to arrive and build the base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the “sanitizing,” ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. . . .
The islanders took this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase.
Recently, David Vine revealed (Foreign Policy in Focus, April 3, 2008) that this
huge U.S. air and naval base has been a major, if little known, launch pad for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . .The island has also been part of the CIA’s secret ‘rendition’ program for captured terrorist suspects.
Iraq
Dr. George Friedman, founder of Stratfor—dubbed by Barron’s as “The Shadow CIA,” wrote in America’s Secret War that the United States “had supported the Shah’s Iran in a war against Iraq in the 1970s,” but after the Iranian revolution, “the Americans were looking for a lever to control Iran”.
Friedman added:
The Carter administration wanted to motivate Saddam to fight, but he had little to gain simply by fighting Iran. . . . He was . . . quietly assured by the United States that it would have no objection to his claiming his prize—Kuwait—once he defeated Iran.
In a July 25, 1990 meeting with U.S. ambassador April Glaspie, Saddam Hussein was informed, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” Meanwhile, the U.S. encouraged Kuwait to continue its slant drilling into Iraqi oil fields. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait.
A high point of the public relations campaign to justify war against Iraq, was the testimony of a Kuwaiti refugee, before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 15, 1990, who told of Iraqi troops removing over 300 babies from incubators in Kuwait City hospital, and dumping them on the floor to die.
On January 6, 1992, Harper’s Magazine, revealed that “Nayirah,” the alleged refugee, was the daughter of Saud al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and that Hill and Knowlton, a large public relations firm, had helped prepare her testimony, which she had rehearsed before video cameras in the firm’s Washington office.
“When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf,” wrote Scott Peterson (Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002),
part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.
Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.
But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border—just empty desert.
Scott Ritter, former UN Special Commission inspector, claims that Richard Butler, former chief UN weapons inspector, “deliberately planned UN inspections in 1998 to orchestrate a confrontation between Iraq and the UN so the United States could carry out its threats to bomb Iraq.” Ritter makes the allegations in a documentary film, In Shifting Sands . . . the Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq, shown to journalists at the UN (Ronni Berke, CNN, July 19, 2001).
Eurasia
Former National Security Advisor to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote (The Grand Chessboard, 1997):
A power that dominates Eurasia [the territory east of Germany and Poland, stretching all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean—including the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent] would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination,
. . . About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.
The key to controlling Eurasia, says Brzezinski, is controlling the Central Asian Republics.
The “United States is pitted in this struggle against Russia, China, and Iran, all competing to dominate the Caspian region, its resources and pipeline routes” (Lutz Kleveman, The New Great Game, 2004).
President George W. Bush has frequently stated that the U.S. would leave Iraq if asked by Baghdad’s leadership. Now that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has asked for a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal, the Bush administration and the U.S. military leadership are continuing to pressure their client regime to accept the U.S. demand for long-term military bases in Iraq (Patrick Cockburn, Independent, June 6, 2008).
The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, . . .
Iraqi officials say that, last year, they wanted to diversify their holdings out of the dollar, as it depreciated, into other assets, such as the euro, more likely to hold their value. This was vetoed by the US Treasury because American officials feared it would show lack of confidence in the dollar.
And sources in Iraq’s parliament told Press TV (May 29, 2008) that Washington has offered three-million dollar bribes to lawmakers who sign the “framework accord” which will permit U.S. bases in Iraq after the UN mandate expires at the end of 2008.
'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 1 of 10): Attack, Response
At 8:47 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 out of Boston, bound for Los Angeles, crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York.
At 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 out of Boston, bound for Los Angeles, crashed into the south tower.
At 9:38 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 out of Washington’s Dulles International Airport, bound for Los Angeles, crashed into the western wall of the Pentagon.
At 10:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 out of Newark, bound for San Francisco, crashed near Pittsburgh.
The 110-story towers of the World Trade Center were obliterated. The Pentagon suffered massive damage. Aircraft debris was found in Pennsylvania.
According to reports, the death toll was 2750 persons—mostly civilian nationals of 90 countries—at the World Trade Center, 125 persons at the Pentagon, and 265 passengers and crew on the four planes.
Seven years later, what really happened on 9/11, remains shrouded in a veil of doubts and secrecy.
Terrorists were reported to have hijacked the planes, and two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell identified Osama Bin Laden as the prime suspect.
Europol’s director, Jurgen Storbeck, stated (Telegraph, September 15, 2001): “It’s possible that he [bin Laden] was informed about the operation; it’s even possible that he influenced it; but he’s probably not the man who steered every action or controlled the detailed plan.”
On September 16, President Bush, brushing off doubts about Osama bin Laden, declared a “crusade” to “rid the world of evil-doers”.
On the day of the attack on America, the Washington Times quoted a paper by the Army School of Advanced Military Studies which said that the MOSSAD, the Israeli intelligence service, “Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”
After 9/11, dozens of Israelis were reported to have been arrested, but the role played by this “huge Israeli spy ring that may have trailed suspected al-Qaeda members in the United States without informing federal authorities” remained unclear, and “it is no longer tenable to dismiss the possibility of an Israeli angle in this story,” wrote Justin Raimondo (antiwar.com, March 8, 2002).
Field reports by the Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and other U.S. law enforcement officials, on the alleged Israeli spy ring have been compiled in a 60-page document (John F. Sugg, Weekly Planet, April 22, 2002).
DEA agents say that the 60-page document was a draft intended as the base for a 250-page report. The larger report has not been produced because of the volatile nature of suggesting that Israel spies on America’s deepest secrets.
Others suggest that Israel’s MOSSAD had foreknowledge of 9/11. Fox News’ Carl Cameron did a 4-part series on this episode (December 2001).
The attacks on 9/11 led to the U.S. war on Afghanistan—a war planned prior to 9/11, after negotiations with the Taliban for a pipeline had broken down.
The Taliban, after initially negotiating with Unocal, had begun showing a preference for Bridas Corporation of Argentina. During the negotiations—which ocurred prior to 9/11—“U.S. representatives told the Taliban (Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, Bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth), ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs’.”
Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October (BBC News, September 18, 2001).
And the Irish Times (February 11, 2002) reported:
The Pakistani President, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and the Afghan interim leader, Mr. Hamid Karzai, agreed yesterday that their two countries should develop “mutual brotherly relations and cooperate in all spheres of activity”— including a proposed gas pipeline from Central Asia to Pakistan via Afghanistan.
It’s curious that these two leaders, who only later vowed to “bury the recent history of poisonous relations” between their nations (Washington Post, April 3, 2002), could agree so quickly to the pipeline. Afghanistan’s interim president Hamid Karzai, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush-appointed special envoy to Afghanistan, probably facilitated the agreement.
According to George Monbiot (Guardian, February 12):
Both Hamid Karzai, the interim president, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy, were formerly employed as consultants to Unocal, the U.S. oil company which spent much of the 1990s seeking to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.
Zalmay Khalilzad drew up Unocal’s risk analysis on its proposed trans-Afghan gas pipeline. In 2003, Zalmay Khalizad became the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and on June 22, 2005 was sworn in as ambassador to Iraq.
While the identities of the hijackers remained in doubt, despite U.S. statements that 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that the Taliban had stated their willingness to give up Osama bin Laden for trial to an international court, on October 7, 2001, without the benefit of a UN resolution, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom launched their war on Afghanistan—one of the world’s poorest countries, already devastated by 23 years of war and civil strife resulting from the Russian invasion of 1979.
U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said (Irwin Arieff, Reuters, October 8, 2001), in a letter to the 15-nation Security Council, that the investigation into the attacks on his country “has obtained clear and compelling information that the al-Qaeda organization, which is supported by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, had a central role in the attacks.”
The letter added, “there is still much we do not know. Our inquiry is in its early stages”—but that did not prevent the U.S. from launching a war on Afghanistan.
The war in Afghanistan created a million new refugees (adding to the existing five or six million), caused the death of 5,000 civilians by bombing, another 20,000 were killed indirectly.
President George H. W. Bush is reported to have told U.S. troops in Kuwait that they were “doing the Lord’s work” (AFP, January 19, 2000). President George W. Bush would claim “he was told by God to invade Iraq and attack Osama bin Laden’s stronghold of Afghanistan” (Independent, October 7, 2005).
More than six months after the U.S. launched its “war on terrorism,” hard evidence regarding the 9/11 attack remained scarce.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III admitted (Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2002):
In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper—either here in the United States, or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot.
The war on Afghanistan seemed to follow the script written by The Project for the New American Century.
Award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker, John Pilger, wrote (December 16, 2002):
Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W. Bush said what America needed was ‘a new Pearl Harbor’. Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true.
Thousands of Muslim immigrants were rounded up after the attacks of September 11. They were subjected to long-term detentions without due process of law, and immediate deportation. The homes and offices of prominent Muslim leaders were raided. There was FBI surveillance of Muslim activity, secret evidence was used by government prosecutors, and several Islamic charities were closed.
Next it was Iraq’s turn—the decision had been made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 2004):
In the hours immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks . . . Rumsfeld again insisted that Iraq should be “a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism.” The president allegedly replied that “public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible”.
Prodded by the neocons, on March 19, 2003, the U.S. launched a preemptive war on Iraq.
Israeli journalist Ari Shavit (Haaretz, April 5, 2003) wrote:
The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history.
In June 2005, Michael Smith, a reporter for the Sunday Times of London, revealed the secret Downing Street memo, dated July 23, 2002, outlining an agreement between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to fix the facts and intelligence on Iraq.
Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
To further prepare Americans for war, they were led to believe that Islamic extremists were responsible for anthrax attacks in the U.S. that began on September 18, 2001, and continued for several weeks.
White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by al-Qaeda (James Gordon Meeks, New York Daily News, August 2, 2008).
On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, “There may be some possible link” to Bin Laden, adding, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden’s henchmen were trained “how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.”
But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon.
On October 18, 2001, Senator McCain, on the David Letterman show, said the anthrax may have come from Iraq, and that Iraq was the “second phase” of the war in Afghanistan.
Several days later, on Meet the Press, Joe Lieberman made a “concerted effort to try and link the anthrax in the public mind to Saddam Hussein” and to Iraq and Islamic radicalism (democracynow.org, August 4, 2008).
9/11 was a godsend for the U.S. military-industrial complex. A $48 billion increase in the defense budget sailed through both houses of Congress, bringing U.S. military spending to $379 billion.
This represented (Washington Post, January 27, 2002)
the biggest one-year rise since the Reagan buildup two decades ago and a suspension of “the peace dividend.” . . . It matches the combined military spending of the 15 countries with the next biggest defense budgets.
U.S. energy companies also received a dividend.
In July 2008, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Total were granted no-bid contracts in Iraq (Naomi Klein, democracynow.org, July 15, 2008)
to manage existing fields in Iraq and hold onto 75 percent of the worth of those contracts and leave only 25 percent for Iraqis . . . where 51 percent for the country is the baseline for new exploration, for new fields.
In the past couple of years, many Americans have begun to believe that the U.S. government’s version of 9/11 is either incomplete, or incorrect.
In August 2006, Scripps Howard News Service reported:
More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.
In September 2006, Time magazine reported that 36 percent of Americans believed the government’s complicity in the events of 9/11.
In October 2006, Angus Reid Global Monitor reported:
Many adults in the United States believe the current federal government has not been completely forthcoming on the issue of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 53 per cent of respondents think the Bush administration is hiding something, and 28 per cent believe it is lying.
The 9/11 Commission’s chairman Thomas H. Kean and vice-chairman Lee H. Hamilton have written that they were “setup to fail” (Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, 2007). Senator Max Cleland resigned from the 9/11 Commission saying “It’s a scam”. Senator Bob Kerrey “threatened to resign”.
The 9/11 investigation was directed by Philip Zelikow who seemed to have little interest in finding out what really happened on 9/11. This is clear from the way he structured the investigation.
Zelikow divided the staff into nine teams: al-Qaeda and its history, intelligence collection, counter-terrorism policy, terrorist financing, border security and immigration, the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agency, aviation and transportation security, emergency response, federal government’s emergency response (Philip Shenon, The Commission, 2008, p86).
Zelikow, author of The National Security Strategy of the United States—the new preemptive war doctrine of the Bush administration written for then NSC Director, Condoleezza Rice—had worked on the Bush transition team. He had a hidden agenda: connect al-Qaeda and Iraq (Shenon, p130).
The rationale for the war on Iraq, to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, soon unravelled, and gave a boost to the “9/11 Truth” movement.
The Family Steering Committee were the first to push for an investigation of 9/11. A milestone of sorts was C-Span’s broadcast of Prof. David Ray Griffin’s talk from Wisconsin in April 2005—arranged by Kevin Barrett, of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth. Now Scholars for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and others demand a new investigation, and the issue is about to be placed on the ballot in New York.
The demands for a new investigation are based on fatal flaws in The 9/11 Commission Report. The following sections reveal what did, or did not, happen on 9/11. But first . . .
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