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.

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)

9/11 Unveiled (part 10 of 10): Boomerang

By March 2003, with the Commission’s staff barely in place, a detailed outline, complete with “chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings” of The 9/11 Commission Report had been prepared (Shenon, p389). At the first public hearing, Chairman Kean asked, “What kind of fanaticism drove them to do this?”

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

There is little if any hard evidence, available to the public, that American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 flying from Washington Dulles International Airport, crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

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).

9/11 Unveiled (part 8 of 10): Flight 93

There's no hard evidence that Flight 93 ploughed into the ground at the Pennsylvania ‘crash site.’

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.

9/11 Unveiled (part 7 of 10): The Achilles Heel

Achilles, the son of King Peleus of Thessaly and the shape-changing nymph Thetis, is the central character of Homer’s great poem, the Iliad. The Achilles’ heel is named for the only part of the body of the Greek hero that was vulnerable.

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.

'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 6 of 10): 7 World Trade Center

On September 11, 2001, around 5:20 p.m. 47-story Building 7 of the World Trade Center (WTC 7) collapsed in about seven seconds.

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.