|
Archive for September, 2007
August 21, 2007 Former Chief of NIST’s Fire Science Division Calls for Independent Review of World Trade Center Investigation By Alan Miller
James Quintiere, Ph.D., former Chief of the Fire Science Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has called for an independent review of NIST’s investigation into the collapses of the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11. Dr. Quintiere made his plea during his presentation, “Questions on the WTC Investigations” at the 2007 World Fire Safety Conference. “I wish that there would be a peer review of this,” he said, referring to the NIST investigation. “I think all the records that NIST has assembled should be archived. I would really like to see someone else take a look at what they’ve done; both structurally and from a fire point of view.” “I think the official conclusion that NIST arrived at is questionable,” explained Dr. Quintiere. “Let’s look at real alternatives that might have been the cause of the collapse of the World Trade Towers and how that relates to the official cause and what’s the significance of one cause versus another.” Dr. Quintiere, one of the world’s leading fire science researchers and safety engineers, also encouraged his audience of fellow researchers and engineers to scientifically re-examine the WTC collapses. “I hope to convince you to perhaps become ‘Conspiracy Theorists’, but in a proper way,” he said. In his hour-long presentation, Dr. Quintiere discussed many elements of NIST’s investigation that he found problematic. He emphasized, “In every investigation I’ve taken part in, the key has been to establish a timeline. And the timeline is established by witness accounts, by information from alarm systems, by any video that you might have of the event, and then by calculations. And you try to put all of this together. And if your calculations are consistent with some of these hard facts, then perhaps you can have some comfort in the results of your calculations. I have not seen a timeline placed in the NIST report.” Dr. Quintiere also expressed his frustration at NIST’s failure to provide a report on the third skyscraper that collapsed on 9/11, World Trade Center Building 7. “And that building was not hit by anything,” noted Dr. Quintiere. “It’s more important to take a look at that. Maybe there was damage by the debris falling down that played a significant role. But other than that you had fires burning a long time without fire department intervention. And firefighters were in that building. I have yet to see any kind of story about what they saw. What was burning? Were photographs taken? Nothing!” World Trade Center Building 7 was 610 feet tall, 47 stories, and would have been the tallest building in 33 states. Although it was not hit by an airplane on 9/11, it completely collapsed into a pile of rubble in less than 8 seconds at 5:20 p.m. on 9/11. In the 6 years since 9/11, NIST has failed to provide any explanation for the collapse. In addition to NIST’s failure to provide an explanation, absolutely no mention of Building 7’s collapse appears in the 9/11 Commission’s “full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.” [To watch a video of the collapse, click here http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/WTC7_Collapse.wmv ] Dr. Quintiere said he originally “had high hopes” that NIST would do a good job with the investigation. “They’re the central government lab for fire. There are good people there and they can do a good job. But what I also thought they would do is to enlist the service of the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives], which has an investigation force and a laboratory of their own for fire. And I thought they would put people out on the street and get gumshoe-type information. What prevented all of this? I think it’s the legal structure that cloaks the Commerce Department and therefore NIST. And so, instead of lawyers as if they were acting on a civil case trying to get depositions and information subpoenaed, those lawyers did the opposite and blocked everything.” In his presentation, Dr. Quintiere also criticized NIST’s repeated failures to formally respond to serious questions raised about its conclusions regarding the WTC building collapses and the process it employed to arrive at those conclusions. “I sat through all of the NIST hearings. I went to all of their advisory board meetings, as an observer. I made comments at all.” Responding to a comment from a NIST representative in the audience, Dr. Quintiere said, “I found that throughout your whole investigation it was very difficult to get a clear answer. And when anyone went to your advisory panel meetings or hearings, where they were given five minutes to make a statement; they could never ask any questions. And with all the commentary that I put in, and I spent many hours writing things, and it would bore people if I regurgitated all of that here, I never received one formal reply.” Although Dr. Quintiere was strongly critical of NIST’s conclusions and its investigatory process, he made it clear he was not a supporter of theories that the Twin Towers were brought down by pre-planted explosives. “If you go to World Trade Center One, nine minutes before its collapse, there was a line of smoke that puffed out. This is one of the basis of the ‘conspiracy theories’ that says the smoke puffing out all around the building is due to somebody setting off an explosive charge. Well, I think, more likely, it’s one of the floors falling down.” Dr. Quintiere summarized the NIST conclusion about the cause of the collapses of the Twin Towers. “It says that the core columns, uninsulated due to the fact that the aircraft stripped off that insulation; they softened in the heat of the fire and shortened and that led to the collapse. They pulled in the external columns and it caused it to buckle. They went on further to say that there would be no collapse if the insulation remained in place.” Dr. Quintiere then presented his and his students’ research that contradicts the NIST report and points to a different cause for the collapses; the application of insufficient fire-proofing insulation on the truss rods in the Twin Towers. “I suggest that there’s an equally justifiable theory and that’s the trusses fail as they are heated by the fire with the insulation intact. These are two different conclusions and the accountability for each is dramatically different,” he said. Dr. Quintiere’s presentation at the World Fire Safety Conference echoed his earlier statement to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Science, on October 26, 2005, during a hearing on “The Investigation of the World Trade Center Collapse: Findings, Recommendations, and Next Steps”, at which he stated: “In my opinion, the WTC investigation by NIST falls short of expectations by not definitively finding cause, by not sufficiently linking recommendations of specificity to cause, by not fully invoking all of their authority to seek facts in the investigation, and by the guidance of government lawyers to deter rather than develop fact finding. “I have over 35 years of fire research in my experience. I worked in the fire program at NIST for 19 years, leaving as a division chief. I have been at the University of Maryland since. I am a founding member and past-Chair of the International Association for Fire Safety Science—the principal world forum for fire research. … “All of these have been submitted to NIST, but never acknowledged or answered. I will list some of these. 1. Why is not the design process of assigning fire protection to the WTC towers fully called out for fault? … 2. Why were not alternative collapse hypotheses investigated and discussed as NIST had stated repeatedly that they would do? … 3. Spoliation of a fire scene is a basis for destroying a legal case in an investigation. Most of the steel was discarded, although the key elements of the core steel were demographically labeled. A careful reading of the NIST report shows that they have no evidence that the temperatures they predict as necessary for failure are corroborated by findings of the little steel debris they have. Why hasn’t NIST declared that this spoliation of the steel was a gross error? 4. NIST used computer models that they said have never been used in such an application before and are the state of the art. For this they should be commended for their skill. But the validation of these modeling results is in question. Others have computed aspects with different conclusions on the cause mechanism of the collapse. Moreover, it is common in fire investigation to compute a time-line and compare it to known events. NIST has not done that. 5. Testing by NIST has been inconclusive. Although they have done fire tests of the scale of several work stations, a replicate test of at least & [sic] of a WTC floor would have been of considerable value. Why was this not done? … 6. The critical collapse of WTC 7 is relegated to a secondary role, as its findings will not be complete for yet another year. It was clear at the last NIST Advisory Panel meeting in September [2005] that this date may not be realistic, as NIST has not demonstrated progress here. Why has NIST dragged on this important investigation?” [The full text of Dr. Quintiere’s statement to the Science Committee can be found at http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/science/hsy24133.000/hsy24133_0f.htm ] Dr. Quintiere is one of the world’s leading fire science researchers and safety engineers. He served in the Fire Science and Engineering Division of NIST for 19 years and rose to the position of Chief of the Division. He left NIST in 1990 to join the faculty of the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland, where he still serves. Quintiere is a founding member and Past Chair of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). He is also a Fellow of the Society of Fire Protection Engineering and a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He has received numerous awards for his contributions to fire science research and engineering, including: · The Department of Commerce Bronze Medal (1976) and Silver Medal (1982) · The Howard W. Emmons Lecture Award from the IAFSS in 1986 · The Sjölin Award in 2002 for outstanding contribution to the science of fire safety by the International Forum of Fire Research Directors, NIST · The 2006 Guise Medal by the National Fire Protection Association His presentation “Questions on the WTC Investigations” was given twice at the 2007 World Fire Safety Conference; Education Session M21 on June 4 (69 minutes) and Spotlight Session T54 on June 5 (102 minutes). Recordings of the presentations can be purchased from the National Fire Protection Association at http://www.fleetwoodonsite.com For a list of over 180 other engineers and architects who question the official investigation into the events of 9/11, please visit http://PatriotsQuestion911.com Original Content at www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alan_mil_070820_former_chief_of_nist.htm
Fox News/CNN Sold Us Out & Destroyed The Evidence I had some rare time home from work on 9/11 and watched the whole production from soup to nuts, thanks to my wife who woke me up and advised me to check out FOX News. CBS, NBC, and ABC did not break from their regular programming until shortly before the South Tower was attacked. There were glaring discrepancies on the part of FOX/CNN from the very outset, which somehow have managed to remain totally obscured from 9/11 discussions. The footage I am referring to was very damning, and shortly after the tragedy I set out to find it in what would become an endless search. It consumed literally all of my spare time which was very limited, as I wasn’t home very much between 2000-05. My job required extensive travel and I had to drive from place to place, hauling my tools around and living in hotels. Many times my wife and daughter would catch a flight to the various cities so we could spend weekends together. Initially, I looked for help on internet forums and was either completely ignored or relentlessly ridiculed (kook, tin foiler, etc) into submission. Back then, the ‘party liners’ were uber-aggressive and my posts would quickly get buried by these ‘patriots’. What these people were doing on conspiracy forums, I have not a clue [/sarcasm]. What it all boils down to is this: The incriminating footage of FOX/CNN was not entered into news archives on the internet, niether in video form nor text dialogue. I used every search tool and key word I could think of to no avail…for years. There still isn’t even an essay or editorial on the subject that I can find. There are video archives available now that are being represented as recordings of the live reports. These are fake reproductions that do not vaguely resemble what was shown on TV. Here is my description of what my wife and I saw on FOX/CNN during the opening act of 9/11: When the biggest story of the century initially broke, the reports were sketchy at best. The consensus was that a Cessna type plane had somehow hit the WTC North Tower and the situation was being portrayed as non-threatening. The damage was reported as mostly cosmetic in nature; affecting only a small area inside the tower which did not pose any threat to workers in the rest of the building. There was no reason to doubt the story; the images they were showing fit the description. Nonetheless, this was certainly an unusual development and the news anchors appeared to be nervous and lacking their usual continuity. Meanwhile, a slightly out of focus camera shot showed the WTC with just a faint wisp of smoke wafting out of the wound. The camera did not zoom in on the damage for a closer look and I remember squinting at the TV. They didn’t pan down to the street level and when FOX went to commercial, I flipped the channel to CNN only to see the exact same angle from a stationary camera with no audio. (After later seeing video footage shot by various eyewitnesses which showed that heavy smoke was billowing from the North Tower, the images being broadcast live to the masses must have been from a premade recording of some sort) There were not any field reporters dispatched to the WTC by CNN or FOX. No colorful eye witness accounts live at the scene that you would expect. Nope.. nothing like that. They must not have fielded any phone calls from good sources, looked out the window, or removed their heads from their collective asses that morning. At this early juncture of 9/11, there was a clear and present danger. What happened next was incomprehensible. The news anchors on both CNN and FOX News encouraged people who worked in and around the WTC that it was business as usual. Pressing on their ear pieces and hesitating between sentences, it was as if someone was carefully choosing their words for them. They SPECIFICALLY and repeatedly advised employees of Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley that it was going to be a BIG TRADING DAY and they were going to miss out on hefty commissions if they didn’t come in to work. This was extremely peculiar. An obvious question would be why did the NYSE even sound the opening bell that day? Anyone see a pattern yet? Instead of warning of the inherent dangers and urging people to stay clear of the WTC, they were actually giving the “all clear”. Something was important enough to put more lives in harms way while risking that which is supposedly dearest to news agencies – a little thing called CREDIBILITY. Who is responsible for the muzzle of secrecy that was firmly imposed on the media the morning of 9/11? How much did FOX/CNN get in return for their souls? I guess we’ve all been led to believe that in an age of breaking news stories from highly competitive networks who thrive on being the first on the scene; a jumbo jet could roar into NYC striking a national landmark during RUSH HOUR while being mistaken for a CESSNA. We’ve all heard the old adage ‘bad news travels fast’. Maybe it headed out across the Atlantic Ocean and had to circumnavigate the globe on 9/11, along with those scrambled F-15 fighters. It wasn’t until the second tower exploded that the nightmarish pseudo-reality became apparent to the viewing public in a sick example of shock TV. Wouldn’t you just know it…that coincidentally, NOBODY was on commercial break at 9:03 when the real fireworks started. The money shot. The shock value was so great that the media’s previous total and utter lack of news gathering capabilities went virtually unnoticed. Then, and only then; CNN and Fox News finally started performing the job that their trusting viewers had come to expect: ‘Heroically’ reporting on the worst ‘terrorist’ attack ever, while solidifying their bond with one of the most terrified, naive herd of sheep in the world. The NYSE didn’t close until 9:32AM, despite the financial district being surrounded by death and destruction. Some timelines have no record of it opening at all. I wonder how many people in the news industry took the time to make a few trades during this little window of opportunity? Peter Jennings wasn’t in on it. He called them out live on TV, referencing controlled demolition. Rest in peace brother
Picknett, Lynn and Prince, Clive. The Stargate Conspiracy: The Truth About Extraterrestrial Life and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt. New York: Berkley Books, 2001. 425 pages. What do Egyptology, the secrets of the pyramids, remote viewing, Freemasonry, Henry Wallace, NASA missions that return photographs that look like faces on Mars, New Age groups in California, the Gorbachev Foundation, Uri Geller, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, Edgar Cayce, ufology, and SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) have in common? You may be surprised. Some of the same names run through many of these, and they have connections to U.S. intelligence. That’s what these authors call the “conspiracy.” It’s all apparently orchestrated by an elite group of elders that go back nearly fifty years, and are connected at the highest political levels. To what purpose? Well, it seems that “the conspirators are creating the perfect conditions for something to happen to effectively give them control over the masses — over us. As we have seen, this could amount to the return of the ancient gods [who may have built the pyramids], or — much more likely — merely empty promises and cynically manufactured expectations.” (p.331) The truth be known, at NameBase we’re new to all this esoterica. But we know a spook vibe when we feel one, and there are some noteworthy intelligence connections mentioned in this book.
9/11 Carbon Credit Murders for A Faculty of Fraud Synopsis: Invitation to dialog on “Carbon Credit Murders for A Faculty of Fraud” with David Hawkins, Captain Field McConnell, and Peter Tedesco, Forensic Economists at Hawks’ CAFE Open e-mail invitation sent July 23, 2007 to: Dr. Thomas Barnett, tom@thomaspmbarnett .com Senior Managing Director Enterra Solutions Washington Operations Center Enterra Solutions, LLC, 11955 Freedom Drive, Suite 7500 Reston, Virginia 20190 Tel: 571.336.0072 Dr. John M. Deutch jmd@mit.edu Department of Chemistry, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 6-215 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA Phone: (617) 253-1479 Invitation to dialog on “Carbon Credit Murders for A Faculty of Fraud” with David Hawkins, Captain Field McConnell, and Peter Tedesco, Forensic Economists at Hawks’ CAFE http://www.hawkscafe.com/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hawkscafe/ Copies: Representative Ron Paul, 14th. District of Texas, rep.paul@mail. house.gov, Representative Duncan Hunter, 52nd District of California bre@gohunter08. com Michael Badnarik, ‘Lighting the Fires of Liberty’ scholar@Constitutio nPreservation. org Alex Jones aaron@infowars. com Copies to file: Re: Carbon Credit Murders for A Faculty of Fraud DH: Peter, why did Saddam’s Oil-for-Food bank, Paribas, join the May 2000 war games pitting Dr. Barnett’s Naval War College or Dr. Deutch’s CIA agents against traders employed by Cantor Fitzgerald, Espeed and CO2e.com atop the North Tower? PT: [BNP] Paribas hired agents to infiltrate and surveil Cantor’s offices and subsidiaries for two reasons; first, to obtain intelligence about CO2e.com’s daily carbon offset and emissions trading operations and its security measures and, second, to learn how to use Espeed’s TreasuryConnect software and switch Cantor’s $70 trillion per year sovereign debt and CO2 trades to Paribas investors (including OBL and Saddam!). By 9/11, after months of war gaming, the agents had learned how to switch trades to Paribas and the kickback trustees of their own pension funds after a real-staged terror event. DH: Field, could Dr. John Deutch’s Raytheon-Thales and Citigroup-AMEC partnerships have placed incendiary-laden planes or Otis elevators just below Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices so that 652 victims would be burnt alive or forced to jump on 9/11 and help Dr. Barnett produce what he claims to be “the first live-broadcast mass snuff film in history”? FM: Yes, in fact either or both. I opine they did both for two reasons; greater probability of success and greater difficulty for crime scene investigators in the Ground Zero rubble, to determine the method of introduction of the two halves (Otis elevators and Boeing planes) of what are “binary incendiary cluster bombs”. Raytheon-Thales modified Boeing war game jets illegally with QRS11 GyroChips embedded in flight guidance hardware. On 9/11, Deutch’s backers guided the Boeing drones precisely into targeted floors and used AMEC sabotage tests to conceal the same type of explosives in elevator cars, elevator machinery room and elevator shafts at the floors hit by the Boeings. When private equity, profit and intelligence are mixed the product is treason and public carnage. DH: Peter, why were the NYC firefighters Motorola radios swapped out in Q1, 2001? Why did the repeater antenna on WTC#5 fail on 9/11? Why did Dr. Barnett bring 50 now-terrified FDNY senior officers to the US Naval War College in December 2001? PT: A media search shows the antiquated Motorola Saber III systems ‘failed’ on 9/11 and were reintroduced supposedly or only because the new Motorola XTS 3500 digital radios acquired by the NYPD were not available for the FDNY. On 9/11, the repeater control center originally located in WTC 5, was transferred to the lobbies of WTC 1 and 2 respectively. http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/NISTNCSTAR1-8Executive%20Summary.pdf . I suggest firefighters’ communications were sabotaged during bogus 9/11 war games in a deception operation staged for Barnett and Deutch by the Office of Naval Intelligence or the CIA. FDNY whistleblowers who knew of the ambush, the deception, the murder for hire and use of incendiaries to destroy evidence, then became targets for threats or bribes (pension fund kickbacks) at the meeting with Barnett (?) at the US Naval War College. DH: Peter, Barnett is a former professor of Marxism and knows nothing about global warming so was he hired to arrange war-game murders of Espeed staff and extort carbon credit traders to enrich BNP Paribas and its private-equity World Trade Center network? PT: To paraphrase Dr. Barnett, the ‘great struggle of the age’, whether it be the war on terror or global warming, is designated as such by its potential to further globalization. He makes it abundantly clear that he prefers to classify global warming as the overarching issue of the age because it is more pragmatic in achieving global transformation. Through this lens, we can then understand the rationale of his alleged employers on 9/11 – stage a terror attack and in the process, seize control of the carbon credit trading industry, a surely profitable market if the ‘great struggle of the age’ is to be global warming. http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/jul/15/barnett-ending-todays-crisis-easy-naming-tomorrows/ DH: Field, who could have coordinated the likes of Raytheon-Thales, AMEC-Citigroup, CAI-Carlyle Canada private equity groups, CIA, Naval War College and Boeing through assassinations, triphibious war games and event arbitrage or hedge fund frauds of 9/11? FM: Only people with access to virtual private networks and the common operational picture for both the red-team attackers and the blue-team defenders. By a process of elimination, I end up with Barnett and Deutch as principal suspects; Barnett used the Office of Naval Intelligence Detachment (ONI DET) and Deutch used MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence to execute 9/11. DH: Peter and Field, is there enough evidence to indict Drs. Barnett and Deutch for securities fraud in respect of their apparent churning, insider/outsider trading and pump-and-dump of carbon credits and their apparent racketeering use of credits to pay for war-game murders of Espeed staff and share kickbacks with Paribas’ private-equity partners? PT: Well, incendiaries have destroyed much of that evidence needed by a jury beyond reasonable doubt to convict them for murder-for-hire operation where assassins are paid with carbon credit. I think however that we can win our claim for damages in a Federal civil court in respect of the 9/11 wrongful deaths and carbon credit frauds by showing that Drs. Barnett and Deutch are related through a RICO murder-for-hire enterprise. DH: Peter and Field, what message would you like to send to Drs. Barnett and Deutch? PT: We welcome their comments to ’show cause’ by e-mail or phone and would publish same to our readers, but I don’t anticipate this type of respnse to be forthcoming. FM: I would like to meet with you one-on-one or together and make a video recording to share with the American public your knowledge and interpretation of the events of 9/11. I can travel to any place at any time and date of your choosing. I warn you however that while the maxim of Hawks CAFE’s forensic economists is “Accuse no innocent. Shelter no guilty”, we intend to avenge the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans in general and, in particular, the murder of Chic Burlingame, my USNA classmate and the captain of AA77 who was killed by a conspiracy of cowards who appear to be in your faculty of friends on the morning of September 11, 2001. I suggest you invite your friends to the meeting to learn the difference between war gaming for carbon credits and warfare with their fellow citizens. Field McConnell, Tel: 218 329 2993 David Hawkins Tel: 604 542-0891 Notes: “Carbon Credit Murders for A Faculty of Fraud” “Ending today’s crisis as easy as naming tomorrow’s scarier one [related to alleged violations by Thomas Barnett of False Claims Act re fraudulent claims of links between CO2 emissions and global warming] By Thomas P.M. Barnett (Contact) Sunday, July 15, 2007 Read article here: http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/jul/15/barnett- ending-todays- crisis-easy- naming-tomorrows / “List of Presentations Given [related to alleged violations by Thomas Barnett of False Claims Act re fraudulent claims of links between CO2 emissions and global warming] Our summary brief was presented to the following individuals/ entities (in addition to representatives from other organizations who attended one or more of our four workshops in 1998-1999): http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/projects/y2k/y2k_index.htm President and Provost, U.S. Naval War College (numerous times) Vice Chief of Naval Operations Under Secretary of the Navy (2X) N3/5 (Policy and Plans), OPNAV (2X) J7 Staff, Joint Staff National Contracts Management Association/ Rhode Island Chapter (2X) J38, Joint Staff J2 Y2K Planning Cell, Joint Staff Principle Deputy & Deputy Asst. Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications & Intelligence (2X) University of Virginia (2X) Defense Intelligence Agency Central Intelligence Agency National Intelligence Council Y2K National Intelligence Estimate Team Cantor Fitzgerald LP (2X) Center for Naval Analyses (2X) Y2K National Contingency Planning Group, Government of Canada J2/J3 Staff of Joint Force Headquarters, Government of Canada Chief of Naval Operations, Republic of Turkey Staff , U.S. Senate Special Committee for the Year 2000 Technology Problem U.S. Atlantic Command Staff Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems (DoDIIS) 1999 Global Conference Defense Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence Operations Staff U.S. Central Command Staff Chief Information Officer, Department of Navy (2X) U.S. Information Agency International Y2K Staff U.S. Air Force Y2K Director National Security Council Senior Director and Staff U.S. Air Force Year 2000 Technical Exchange Meeting U.S. Southern Command Staff Electric Power Research Institute’s 6th Y2K Embedded Chip Workshop U.S. Special Operations Command Staff Deputy Commander-in- Chief , U.S. Central Command Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence Principal Director, Year 2000, Office of ASD C3I Deputy Secretary of Defense Director, President’s Council for Year 2000 Conversion Information Coordination Center (and senior staff) Chair, President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion The Arlington Institute The Industrial College of the Armed Forces Commander in Chief and Senior Command Officers, U.S. Special Operations Command U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) Naval Special Warfare Command (NSWC) Student Body and Teaching Staff , U.S. Naval War College Asst. Secretary of Navy, RD&A CINCUSNAVEUR Command Staff U.S. Agency for International Development USAID Bureau for Europe and Eurasia Y2K Consequence Management Workshop (representatives also from World Bank, Department of State, USAID Management Bureau, USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Response, and the Russian Republic Y2K Office) USAID-wide Y2K Consequence Management Workshop (representatives also from Department of State) Dept. of Navy Chief Information Officer Y2K Expert Forum Workshop Brainstorm National Year 2000 Symposium Series ( New York ) Brown University “Virtual Y2K” Conference USAID Administrator, Dep. Administrator, and all Assistant Administrators USAID Asia and Near East (ANE) Bureau Mission Directors Banking Industry Technology Secretariat/ The Bankers Roundtable Prof. Betty Sue Flowers, University of Texas Electronic Funds Transfer Association National Intelligence Council Executive Roundtable at Booz-Allen & Hamilton. http://www.thomaspm barnett.com/ projects/ y2k/y2k_index. htm In an analogy with the US army use of deception below, we allege that Dr. Barnett’s Naval War College, the Office of Naval Intelligence Detachment and the CIA office in WTC#7 were staffed to deceive and defraud civilians during the 9/11 war games. “Deception Staff Element A focal point for deception planning and execution is crucial to successful deception operations. At the joint force level, the deception staff element (DSE) plans, coordinates, and monitors deception operations. The DSE is headed by a deception officer who reports directly to the J3 . Other joint force staff members required to plan a particular deception are assigned to the DSE as needed. For example, the DSE should include representatives from the joint force special operations component (JFSOC) when it is part of the deception plan. In addition, representatives from the component staffs would participate in DSE activities as required. The DSE is responsible for — Planning deception activities based on the commander’s guidance — Coordinating deception operations among components — Monitoring ongoing operations in order to plan future deceptions — Integrating C3CM deception into overall theater campaign planning as requested by the C3CM planning cell. As members of the commander’s operational staff, DSE personnel are familiar with the commander’s desires, policies, and operational schemes. They function as a coordinated and integrated element to develop deception concepts and plans. The JFC designates DSE personnel based on expertise and the desired level of security. Generally, the three levels of DSE access are commander only, limited staff, and full staff. Commander Only – The JFC keeps the details of deception planning to himself. He implements deception through direct orders to his staff and subordinate commanders. The staff and component commanders are never fully aware of the JFC’s intentions. This technique has the advantage of high OPSEC and presents virtually all the support patterns of an actual commander’s plan. Potential disadvantages are — The lack of full staff expertise during planning and execution — The chance of the staff working at cross-purposes and degrading the effectiveness of the deception and the actual operation. Limited Staff – The JFC details limited numbers of personnel from the joint staff to assist the deception officer in planning. The deception officer coordinates the completed plan with selected joint staff section heads and components and sends the plan to the JFC for approval. Expeditious handling and good OPSEC are advantages of this technique. However, the plan may fail to take full advantage of the collective expertise of the entire joint staff. Full Staff – The JFC expands participation in the planning and execution to more elements of his staff. Additionally, deception officers from the component commands may also participate. This method uses the full resources and expertise of the joint and component staffs. Since more people are aware of the planned deception, OPSEC is more difficult.” http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm90-24/ch2.htm#2-1 incoherent, not enough context or background or even sourced information. my internship centers around carbon credit research, and I’m interested in this subject (and possible loose connections to 9/11) in lieu of the global financial industry’s interest in carbon markets (AIG, JP Morgan, etc.). I recently contributed to: “State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2007″ Hi there, I am sorry this posting was not detailed enough for you. Here is a summary of what we at http://www.hawkscafe.com believe occurred on 9/11 re: the Carbon Credit Trade. I hope this can boost your opinion of the post from a 1 to a 10!: Between May 2000 and September 2001, Dr. Thomas Barnett of the US Naval War College conducted “war games” with Cantor Fitzgerald and its emissions brokerage subsidiary CO2e.com. You can read about this in his own words here: http://www.knoxnews .com/news/ 2007/jul/ 15/barnett- ending-todays- crisis-easy- naming-tomorrows. Now, as all of us know, Cantor Fitzgerald lost 650+ employees on 9/11 when the first drone struck the North Tower. In the process, the brokerage business of CO2e.com ended up in the custody of BNP Paribas. We allege that Dr. Barnett was commissioned by Paribas agents to infiltrate Cantor’s operations in the run up to 9/11 to guarantee a smooth seizure of assets. By 9/11, after months of war gaming, the agents had learned how to switch trades to Paribas and the kickback trustees of their own pension funds after a real-staged terror event. Three of Dr. Barnett’s US Naval War College Colleagues signed the infamous PNAC document. In addition, he has referred to 9/11 as the “”first live-broadcast, mass snuff film in human history.” I encourage you to join our ongoing discussion and pursuit of justice at [[http://www.hawkscafe.com]] where you can sign up to our yahoo group. interesting stuff here: I’ve been aware of Hawks cafe since Valis initially hosted his site. The investigations are interesting, however a lot it is often speculation based on loose association of certain entities and their actions. When I get out of work today, I’ll definitely give this a closer look.
SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity. Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens. Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card. Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights. The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency. Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common. “If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology. Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money. Shenzhen, a computer manufacturing center next to Hong Kong, is the first Chinese city to introduce the new residency cards. It is also taking the lead in China in the large-scale use of law enforcement surveillance cameras — a tactic that would have drawn international criticism in the years after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989. But rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition software as well. New York police announced last month that they would install more than 100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in the area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether face recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without the risk of false arrests. Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and the police will have the right to link them on request into the same system as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public Security. Some civil rights activists contend that the cameras in China and Britain are a violation of the right of privacy contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Large-scale surveillance in China is more threatening than surveillance in Britain, they said when told of Shenzhen’s plans. “I don’t think they are remotely comparable, and even in Britain it’s quite controversial,” said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel of Human Rights Watch in New York. China has fewer limits on police power, fewer restrictions on how government agencies use the information they gather and fewer legal protections for those suspected of crime, she noted. While most countries issue identity cards, and many gather a lot of information about citizens, China also appears poised to go much further in putting personal information on identity cards, Ms. PoKempner added. Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system. “We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like I.B.M., Cisco, H.P., Dell,” said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of China Public Security. “All of these U.S. companies work with us to build our system together.” The role of American companies in helping Chinese security forces has periodically been controversial in the United States. Executives from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems testified in February 2006 at a Congressional hearing called to review whether they had deliberately designed their systems to help the Chinese state muzzle dissidents on the Internet; they denied having done so. China Public Security proudly displays in its boardroom a certificate from I.B.M. labeling it as a partner. But Mr. Huang said that China Public Security had developed its own computer programs in China and that its suppliers had sent equipment that was not specially tailored for law enforcement purposes. The company uses servers manufactured by Huawei Technologies of China for its own operations. But China Public Security needs to develop programs that run on I.B.M., Cisco and Hewlett-Packard servers because some Chinese police agencies have already bought these models, Mr. Huang said. Mr. Lin said he had refrained from some transactions with the Chinese government because he is the chief executive of a company incorporated in the United States. “Of course our projects could be used by the military, but because it’s politically sensitive, I don’t want to do it,” he said. Western security experts have suspected for several years that Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this. When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour. All Chinese citizens are required to carry national identity cards with very simple computer chips embedded, providing little more than the citizen’s name and date of birth. Since imperial times, a principal technique of social control has been for local government agencies to keep detailed records on every resident. The system worked as long as most people spent their entire lives in their hometowns. But as ever more Chinese move in search of work, the system has eroded. This has made it easier for criminals and dissidents alike to hide from police, and it has raised questions about whether dissatisfied migrant workers could organize political protests without the knowledge of police. Little more than a collection of duck and rice farms until the late 1970s, Shenzhen now has 10.55 million migrants from elsewhere in China, who will receive the new cards, and 1.87 million permanent residents, who will not receive cards because local agencies already have files on them. Shenzhen’s red-light districts have a nationwide reputation for murders and other crimes. Sept 11, 2001 – Attack in NYC When Bush Sr. asked/ordered Israel to leave Lebanon, Sharon responded by bombing Beirut at 2:42 and 3:38, in flagrant rejection of the UN Resolutions. Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the September 11, 1990 “We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/papers/1990/90091101.html 1998 – Independent counsel Kenneth Starr sends a report to the U.S. Congress accusing President Bill Clinton of 11 possible impeachable offenses. 1994 – Frank Eugene Corder steals a Cessna plane, intending to crash it into the White House. 1978 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter, President Sadat of Egypt, and Prime Minister Begin of Israel met at Camp David and agreed on a framework for peace between Israel and Egypt and a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. 1959 – Lee Harvey Oswald is discharged from the United States Marine Corps.
BTW, if you’re going back as far as the 1600’s with the 9/11 dates, you’ve Heres a few more
Bummer… BUT, all was not lost..
The Partial Observer – Bitter Melodies Turning Your Orbit Around by James Leroy Wilson
I am not making this up, because I wouldn’t admit it if it weren’t true. I once had a very disturbing dream. I was watching a legitimate documentary about how pornography exploded in popularity in the 1970’s and was threatening to go mainstream and respectable. Most disturbing was a scene in which major stars were signing on, first Sydney Poitier, and then Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson. (The dream did not get explicit.) Of all the people in Hollywood, those were the two least likely to do such a thing, and for a variety of reasons we need not get into here, dreaming about either in porn is wrong on so many levels. I woke up quite disturbed. But I felt better about myself a few days later when I read a piece by Jesse Walker in Reason which reviewed Guess Who, the remake of Poitier’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and then the documentary Inside Deep Throat about the 1970’s porn movie that enjoyed mainstream popularity. In the Guess Who section, Walker discusses the original and Poitier. So my dream was perhaps not so disturbing; it foreshadowed a link between Poitier and porn came to be when Walker reviewed Guess Who and Inside Deep Throat in the same piece. And Florence Henderson? Well, while I was reading Walker’s piece, in the next room people were watching the movie Yours, Mine, and Ours, a movie that inspired The Brady Bunch. It was “psychic” phenomena, vague enough to lack predictive value obvious when the dream “comes true.” We can not consciously choose what we dream, which means our dreams come from deep within our subconscious, or from outside our bodies, or both. Things appear in our heads that we do not choose to be there, or we think of a “neat idea” but don’t know why. In May, 2001, hip-hop group The Coup shot this cover for their CD Party Music, scheduled for release that November:
After September 11, the easy decision was made to replace the cover. Member “Boots” Riley says, “Any similarities are totally coincidental, and it was originally supposed to be more of a metaphor for destroying capitalism — where the music is making capitalist towers blow up. The politics of the Coup have more to do with the people organizing each other. ” What if the CD was actually released on September 11? That would have been freaky. Even more freaky than a CD that did come out that day. As Jason W. Smith reported that October on the Slayer album God Hates Us All:
What’s that? The story is well-known among rock devotees. Wikipedia provides a good summary: Though “Jesus, Etc.” and elements of other songs (in addition to the album cover itself) are sometimes thought to have been created in memory of the September 11th attacks, the entire album was completed before the attacks; September 11, 2001 was in fact the original intended release date for the album. The album features recordings from numbers stations, and is named after one of them: a looped recording at the end of the song “Poor Places” of a mysterious female voice reciting “yankee hotel foxtrot” over and over. The woman recorded in the clip is alleged to be a Mossad agent. Time Warner, one of the pillars of the American plutocracy, pulls the plug on the Sept 11 release date, only to re-sign with Wilco and release the album seven months later. Was this a blunder by Time Warner, or a “conspiracy” it made with Wilco management to generate more buzz for the album? In any case, the album foreshadows not just the 9-11 attacks, but also the sinister, conspiratorial aspects of an event that raises far more questions than even the JFK assassination. Oh, yeah, the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album cover:
Maybe not the Twin Towers, but twin towers nonetheless. Wilco is a Chicago band. But for freaky “coincidences” in rock, the best place to go is Pink Floyd’s classic album Dark Side of the Moon, and play it while watching The Wizard of Oz. The “Dark Side of Oz” page can help you set things up, and lists some, but by no means all, of the matches between music and movie. Most noteworthy is that the synchronicity between lyric and the on-screen action exists not just through the first play of the album, but continues by playing the album again and again until the movie ends (while you hear “Home, home again.” And yes, you can be amazed by it even when completely sober. Could Pink Floyd have striven to synchronize the album with The Wizard of Oz? It’s possible to do that through one play, if there were means in 1972 for Pink Floyd to have access to the movie in the studio while they recorded. Moon’s engineer Alan Parsons denies that The Wizard of Oz was ever even discussed, and adds, “There simply wasn’t the mechanics to do it. We had no means of playing videotapes in the room at all. I don’t think VHS had come along by ‘72, had it?” And then to do it again and again, with ever-changing situations and actions in the movie, until the movie ends? It is impossible to accept that the members of Pink Floyd consciously planned an alternative soundtrack to Wizard of Oz, or that members of Slayer, P.O.D., or Wilco consciously anticipated a terrorist attack on their albums’ planned release dates. They seem to be manifestations of what Carl Jung called “synchronicity” and the “collective unconscious.” After all, who believed before 9-11 that everything in America will go on swimmingly for the indefinite future? There were several (ignored) commentators and academics who predicted “blowback,” terrorist reprisals from the USA’s unceasing interventions in other countries, particularly in the Middle East. Prophesies do not go into details. A vague sense of doom and gloom is just that – a sense. But it’s something we can having without wishing to have it. It can nevertheless direct what we do or what we write. I see the possibility of words and phrases taking on meanings not consciously intended by the author. But when something, whether it is an idea or a lyrical line, just “pops” into one’s head, is that the product of conscious thought? Or does it come from a higher, more powerful Mind, and we just become its unwitting agents? When this is done by Christians, it is called the Holy Spirit working, or answered prayer. Self-help and get-rich gurus talk about the “Law of Attraction,” in which thoughts are energy, and energy attracts like energy. (The gurus say that quantum physics affirms this worldview, though I haven’t checked up on that.) It isn’t just conscious thoughts, but “unconscious” thoughts perhaps not created through ourselves, that attract. In a multi-dimensional universe in which linear time is an illusion, thoughts and images can “attract” each other even when separated by days, months or even decades. The themes of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot have nothing to do with terrorism, and the themes of Dark Side of the Moon have nothing to do with The Wizard of Oz. Yet they are connected all the same. Do we live in a world of blind, unintelligent chance? Do we live in a world of coincidence? Is that the most rational explanation for things we can’t otherwise explain? Or does thought exist as energy at the smallest sub-atomic energy, bringing forces together for specific purposes? I do not believe in coincidence. We seem to be conscious agents both of our own will, but also unconscious agents of powers beyond ourselves. We receive messages that come to us in dreams or just pop into our heads. We are unwitting psychics and prophets. We do things that attract other things we do not expect or plan. Our world is more wonderful than we can even imagine. About the Author:
Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups (Paperback)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com From Library Journal
Inside This Book (learn more) First Sentence:
9/11: DAVID RAY GRIFFIN (Authorized Version) 30mar2006 Notes: This lecture was delivered March 30, 2006, to a sell-out crowd of over 800 people at Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, California for Progressive Democrats of the East Bay. Over 100 people were unable to enter because the seating capacity had been reached. Abbreviated versions of it were given in San Francisco for the Democratic World Federalists on April 2 and the Commonwealth Club on April 3. Download MP3 file of lecture as broadcast by KMUD that evening Although I am a philosopher of religion and theologian, I have spent most of my time during the past three years on 9/11—studying it, writing about it, and speaking about it. In this lecture, I will try to make clear why I believe this issue worthy of so much time and energy. I will do this in terms of the distinction between myth and reality. I am here using the term “myth” in two senses. In one sense, a myth is an idea that, while widely believed, is false, failing to correspond with reality. In a deeper sense, which is employed by students of religion, a myth serves as an orienting and mobilizing story for a people, a story that reminds them who they are and why they do what they do. When a story is called as a myth in this sense—which we can call Myth with a capital M—the focus is not on the story’s relation to reality but on its function. This orienting and mobilizing function is possible, moreover, only because Myths with a capital M have religious overtones. Such a Myth is a Sacred Story. However, although to note that a story functions as a Myth in the religious sense is not necessarily to deny its truth, a story cannot function as a Sacred Myth within a community or nation unless it is believed to be true. In most cases, moreover, the truth of the Myth is taken on faith. It is not a matter of debate. If some people have the bad taste to question the truth of the Sacred Story, the keepers of the faith do not enter into debate with them. Rather, they ignore them or denounce them as blasphemers. According to the official story about 9/11, America, because of its goodness, was attacked by fanatical Arab Muslims who hate our freedoms. This story has functioned as a Sacred Myth for the United States since that fateful day. And this function appears to have been carefully orchestrated. The very next day, President Bush announced his intention to lead “a monumental struggle of Good versus Evil.”1 Then on September 13, he declared that the following day would be a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims of the Terrorist Attacks. And on that next day, the president himself, surrounded by Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi, and an imam, delivered a sermon in the national cathedral, saying:
Through this unprecedented event, in which the president of the United States issued a declaration of war from a cathedral, French author Thierry Meyssan observed in 2002, “the American government consecrated . . . its version of events. From then on, any questioning of the official truth would be seen as sacrilege.”3 That attitude has remained dominant in the public sphere until this day, as the official account has continued to serve as a Sacred Story. When people raise questions about this story, they are either ignored, ridiculed as conspiracy theorists, or—as Charlie Sheen has recently experienced—attacked personally. When anyone asks what right the administration has to invade and occupy other countries, to imprison people indefinitely without due process, or even to ignore various laws, the answer is always the same: “9/11.” Those who believe that US law and international law should be respected are dismissed as having “a pre-9/11 mind-set.” Given the role the official account of 9/11 has played and continues to play, the most important question before our country today is whether this account, besides being a Myth in the religious sense, is also a myth in the pejorative sense—that is, whether it is simply false. As a philosopher of religion, I would emphasize that the fact that a story has served as a Myth in the religious sense does not necessarily mean that it fails to correspond with reality. Many religious accounts contain at least a kernel of truth that can be defended in terms of a rational examination of the relevant evidence. In many cases, however, stories that have served as religious Myths cannot stand up to rational scrutiny. When such a story is stripped of its halo and treated simply as a theory, rather than an unquestionable dogma, it cannot be defended as the best theory to account for the relevant facts. The official account of 9/11 is such a theory. When challenges to it are not treated as blasphemy, it can easily be seen to be composed of a number of ideas that are myths in the sense of not corresponding with reality. Using the word “myth” from now on only in this pejorative sense, I will discuss nine of the major myths contained in the official story about 9/11. I will thereby show that the official account of 9/11 cannot be defended, in light of the relevant evidence, against the main alternative account, according to which 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by people within our own government. I will begin with a few myths that prevent many people from even looking at the evidence for this alternative account. Myth Number 1: Our political and military leaders simply would not do such a thing. This idea is widely believed. But it is undermined by much evidence. The United States, like many other countries, has often used deceit to begin wars—for example, the Mexican-American war, with its false claim that Mexico had “shed American blood on the American soil,”4 the Spanish-American war, with its “Remember the Maine” hoax,5 the war in the Philippines, with its false claim that the Filipinos fired first,6 and the Vietnam war, with its Tonkin Gulf hoax.7 The United States has also sometimes organized false flag terrorist attacks—killing innocent civilians, then blaming the attacks on an enemy country or group, often by planting evidence. We have even done this in allied countries. As Daniele Ganser has shown in his recent book NATO’s Secret Armies, NATO, guided by the CIA and the Pentagon, arranged many such attacks in Western European countries during the Cold War. These attacks were successfully blamed on Communists and other leftists to discredit them in the eyes of the voting public.8 Finally, in case it be thought that US military leaders would not orchestrate such attacks against US citizens, one needs only to read the plan known as Operations Northwoods, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff worked up in 1962, shortly after Fidel Castro had overthrown the pro-American dictator Batista. This plan contained various “pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.” American citizens would have been killed in some of them, such as a “Remember the Maine” incident, in which: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba.”9 At this point, some people, having seen evidence that US leaders would be morally capable of orchestrating 9/11, might avoid looking at the evidence by appeal to Myth Number 2: Our political and military leaders would have had no motive for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks. This myth was reinforced by The 9/11 Commission Report. While explaining why al-Qaeda had ample motives for carrying out the attacks, this report mentions no motives that US leaders might have had. But the alleged motive of al-Qaeda—that it hated Americans and their freedoms—is dwarfed by a motive held by many members of the Bush-Cheney administration: the dream of establishing a global Pax Americana, the first all-inclusive empire in history. This dream had been articulated by many neoconservatives, or neocons, throughout the 1990s, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union made it seem possible. It was first officially articulated in the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted by Paul Wolfowitz on behalf of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney—a document that has been called “a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony”10 and Cheney’s “Plan . . . to rule the world.”11 Achieving this goal would require four things. One of these was getting control of the world’s oil, especially in Central Asia and the Middle East, and the Bush-Cheney administration came to power with plans already made to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. A second requirement was a technological transformation of the military, in which fighting from space would become central. A third requirement was an enormous increase in military spending, to pay for these new wars and for weaponizing space. A fourth need was to modify the doctrine of preemptive attack, so that America would be able to attack other countries even if they posed no imminent threat. These four elements would, moreover, require a fifth: an event that would make the American people ready to accept these imperialistic policies. As Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, the American people, with their democratic instincts, are reluctant to authorize the money and human sacrifices necessary for “imperial mobilization,” and this refusal “limits . . . America’s . . . capacity for military intimidation.”12 But this impediment could be overcome if there were “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat”13 —just as the American people were willing to enter World War II only after “the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”15 This same idea was suggested in 2000 in a document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which was put out by a neocon think tank called the Project for the New American Century, many members of which—including Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz—became central members of the Bush administration. This document, referring to the goal of transforming the military, said that this “process of transformation . . . is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”15 When the attacks of 9/11 occurred, they were treated like a new Pearl Harbor. Several members of the Bush administration spoke of 9/11 as providing opportunities. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that 9/11 created “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.”16 It created, in particular, the opportunity to attack Afghanistan and Iraq; to increase the military budget enormously; to go forward with military transformation; and to turn the new idea of preemptive warfare into official doctrine. This doctrinal change was announced in the 2002 version of the National Security Strategy, which said that America will “act against . . . emerging threats before they are fully formed.”17 So, not only did the Bush administration reap huge benefits from 9/11. These were benefits that it had desired in advance. The idea that it would have had no motives for orchestrating 9/11 is a myth. But there is one more myth that keeps many people from looking at the evidence. This is Myth Number 3: Such a big operation, involving so many people, could not have been kept a secret, because someone involved in it would have talked by now. This claim is based on a more general myth, which is that is impossible for secret government operations to be kept secret very long, because someone always talks. But how could we know this? If some big operations have remained secret until now, we by definition do not know about them. Moreover, we do know of big some operations that were kept secret as long as necessary, such as the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb, and the war in Indonesia in 1957, which the United States government provoked, participated in, and was able to keep secret from its own people until a book about it appeared in 1995.18 Many more examples could be given. We can understand, moreover, why those with inside knowledge of 9/11 would not talk. At least most of them would have been people with the proven ability to keep secrets. Those who were directly complicit would also be highly motivated to avoid public disgrace and the gas chamber. Those people who had knowledge without being complicit could be induced to keep quiet by means of more or less subtle threats—such as: “Joe, if you go forward with your plans to talk to the press about this, I don’t know who is going to protect your wife and kids from some nutcase angered by your statement.” Still another fact is that neither the government nor the mainstream press has, to say the least, shown any signs of wanting anyone to come forward. I come now to Myth Number 4: The 9/11 Commission, which has endorsed the official account, was an independent, impartial commission and hence can be believed. One needs only to look at the reviews of The 9/11 Commission Report on Amazon.com to see that this assumption is widely accepted. Perhaps this is partly because in the Preface, the Commission’s chairman and vice chairman tell us that the Commission sought “to be independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan.” But these terms do not describe the reality. The Commission’s lack of impartiality can be partly explained by the fact that Chairman Thomas Kean, most of the other commissioners, and at least half of the members of the staff had conflicts of interest.19 The most serious problem, however, is that the executive director, Philip Zelikow, was essentially a member of the Bush-Cheney administration. He had worked with Condoleezza Rice on the National Security Council in the administration of the first President Bush. When the Republicans were out of office during the Clinton administration, Zelikow and Rice wrote a book together. Rice then, as National Security Advisor for the second President Bush, had Zelikow help make the transition to the new National Security Council. After that, Zelikow was appointed to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Zelikow was, therefore, the White House’s man inside the 9/11 Commission. And yet, as executive director, he guided the staff, which did virtually all the work of the Commission.20 Zelikow was in position, therefore, to decide which topics would be investigated and which ones not. One disgruntled member reportedly said at the time, “Zelikow is calling the shots. He’s skewing the investigation and running it his own way.”21 Accordingly, insofar as the Commission was supposed to be investigating the failure of the Bush administration to prevent the attacks, the Commission was no more independent and impartial than if Dick Cheney had been running it. (The only difference is that no one got shot.) Zelikow’s ideological and personal closeness to the Bush administration is shown by one more fact that has until now not been widely known, even within the 9/11 truth movement. I mentioned earlier the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy statement of 2002, in which the new doctrine of preemptive warfare was articulated. The primary author of this document, reports James Mann in Rise of the Vulcans, was none other than Philip Zelikow. According to Mann, after Rice saw a first draft, which had been written by Richard Haass in the State Department, she, wanting “something bolder,” brought in Zelikow to completely rewrite it.22 The result was a very bellicose document that used 9/11 to justify the administration’s so-called war on terror. Max Boot described it as a “quintessentially neo-conservative document.”23 We can understand, therefore, why the Commission, under Zelikow’s leadership, would have ignored all evidence that would point to the truth: that 9/11 was a false flag operation intended to authorize the doctrines and funds needed for a new level of imperial mobilization. The suggestion that 9/11 was a false flag operation brings us to: Myth Number 5: The Bush administration provided proof that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists under the direction of Osama bin Laden. One of the main pieces of alleged proof involved the claim that the baggage of Mohamed Atta, called the ringleader of the hijackers, was discovered at the Boston airport, from which Flight 11 departed. This baggage, besides containing Atta’s passport and driver’s license, also contained various types of incriminating evidence, such as flight simulator manuals, videotapes about Boeing airliners, and a letter to other hijackers about preparing for the mission. But the bags also contained Atta’s will. Why would Atta have intended to take his will on a plane that he planned to fly into the World Trade Center? There are also many other problems in this story.24 We appear to have planted evidence. Another element of the official story about the alleged hijackers is that they were very devout Muslims. The 9/11 Commission Report said that Atta had become very religious, even “fanatically so.”25 The public was thereby led to believe that these men would have had no problem going on this suicide mission, because they were ready to meet their maker. Investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, however, discovered that Atta loved cocaine, alcohol, gambling, pork, and lap dances.26 Several of the other alleged hijackers, the Wall Street Journal reported, had similar tastes.27 The Commission pretends, however, that none of this information was available. While admitting that Atta met other members of al-Qaeda in Las Vegas shortly before 9/11, it says that it saw “no credible evidence explaining why, on this occasion and others, the operatives flew to or met in Las Vegas.”28 Another problem in the official account is that, although we are told that four or five of the alleged hijackers were on each of the four flights, no proof of this claim has been provided. The story, of course, is that they did not force their way onto the planes but were regular, ticketed passengers. If so, their names should be on the flight manifests. But the flight manifests that have been released contain neither the names of the alleged hijackers nor any other Arab names.29 We have also been given no proof that the remains of any of these men were found at any of the crash sites. One final little problem is that several of these 19 men, according to stories published by the BBC and British newspapers, are still alive. For example, The 9/11 Commission Report named Waleed al-Shehri as one of the hijackers and reproduced the FBI’s photograph of him. It even suggested that al-Shehri stabbed one of the flight attendants shortly before Flight 11 crashed into the north tower.30 But as BBC News had reported 11 days after 9/11, al-Shehri, having seen his photograph in newspapers and TV programs, notified authorities and journalists in Morocco, where he works as a pilot, that he is still alive.31 But if there are various problems with the government’s story about the hijackers, surely it presented proof that Osama bin Laden was behind the operation? Insofar as this belief is widely held, it also is a myth. Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to provide a white paper providing proof that the attacks had been planned by bin Laden, but this paper was never produced. British Prime Minister Tony Blair did provide such a paper, which was entitled “Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States.” But it begins with the admission that it “does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Usama Bin Laden in a court of law.”32 (So, evidence good enough to go to war, but not good enough to go to court.) And although the Taliban said that it would hand bin Laden over if the United States presented evidence of his involvement in 9/11, Bush refused.33 This failure to provide proof was later said to be unnecessary because bin Laden, in a video allegedly found in Afghanistan, admitted responsibility for the attacks. This “confession” is now widely cited as proof. However, the man in this video has darker skin, fuller cheeks, and a broader nose than the Osama bin Laden of all the other videos.34 We again seem to have planted evidence. There are, moreover, other problems in the official account of Osama bin Laden. For one thing, in June of 2001, when he was already America’s “most wanted” criminal, he reportedly spent two weeks in the American Hospital in Dubai, at which he was treated by an American doctor and visited by the local CIA agent.35 Also, after 9/11, when America was reportedly trying to get bin Laden “dead or alive,” the US military evidently allowed him to escape on at least four occasions, the last one being the “battle of Tora Bora,” which the London Telegraph labeled “a grand charade.”36 Shortly thereafter, Bush said: “I don’t know where he [bin Laden] is. . . . I just don’t spend that much time on him. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him.”37 (Sometimes the truth slips out.) In any case, the idea that the Bush administration has provided proof for its claims about Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda hijackers is a myth. I turn now to: Myth Number 6: The 9/11 attacks came as a surprise to the Bush administration. Nothing is more essential to the official story than this idea. About 10 months after 9/11, for example, FBI Director Robert Mueller said: “To this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot.”38 There is much evidence, however, that counts against this claim. The 9/11 Commission tried to show these suspicions to be unfounded. It claimed, for example, that the purchases for United Airlines do not show that anyone other than al-Qaeda had foreknowledge of the attacks, because 95 percent of these options were purchased by “[a] single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda.”40 But the Commission thereby simply begged the question at issue, which is whether some organization other than al-Qaeda was involved in the planning. Also, the Commission ignored the other crucial point, which is that US intelligence agencies closely monitor the stock market, looking for any anomalies that might provide clues about untoward events in the works.41 Therefore, regardless of who orchestrated the attacks, the US government would have had intelligence suggesting that United and American airliners were to be used for attacks on the World Trade Center. Bush and the Secret Service: Further evidence of advance knowledge is shown by the behavior of President Bush and his secret service agents during the photo-op at the school in Florida that morning. According to the official story, when Bush was first told that a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers, he dismissed the incident as merely a “horrible accident,” which meant that they could go ahead with the photo-op.42 News of the second strike, however, would have indicated—assuming that the strikes were unexpected—that terrorists were using planes to attack high-value targets. And what could have been a higher-value target than the president of the United States? His location at the school had been highly publicized. The Secret Service agents should have feared, therefore, that a hijacked airliner might have been bearing down on the school at that very minute, ready to crash into it. It is standard procedure for the Secret Service to rush the president to a safe location when there is any sign that he may be in danger. And yet these agents allowed the president to remain another half hour, even permitting him to deliver an address on television, thereby announcing to the world that he was still at the school. Would not this behavior be explainable only if the head of the Secret Service detail knew that the planned attacks did not include an attack on the president? The 9/11 Commission, of course, did not ask this question. It was content to report that “[t]he Secret Service told us they . . . did not think it imperative for [the president] to run out the door.”43 Maintaining decorum, in other words, was more important than protecting the president’s life. Can anyone seriously believe that highly trained Secret Service agents would act this way in a situation of genuine danger? Mineta’s Report about Cheney: The attack on the Pentagon, as well as the attack on the World Trade Center, was said to be a surprise, even though it occurred over a half hour after the second strike on the Twin Towers. A Pentagon spokesperson, in explaining why the Pentagon was not evacuated before it was struck, claimed that “[t]he Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way.”44 The 9/11 Commission claimed that there was no warning about an unidentified aircraft heading towards Washington until 9:36 and hence only “one or two minutes” before the Pentagon was struck at 9:38.45 But this claim is contradicted by Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta’s testimony about an episode that occurred in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House. In open testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Mineta gave this account:
Mineta said that that this final exchange occurred at about 9:25 or 9:26.47 According to Mineta’s account, therefore, Cheney knew about an approaching aircraft more than 12 minutes before 9:38, when the Pentagon was struck. Assuming that Cheney would not have kept this information from his good friend Donald Rumsfeld, Mineta’s testimony contradicts the claim of the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission that there was no advance knowledge, at least not sufficient advance knowledge to have evacuated the Pentagon, which would have saved 125 lives. This example gives us one of the clearest examples of the fact that the Zelikow-led 9/11 Commission cannot be trusted. Having claimed that there was no knowledge that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon until the last minute or so, it simply omitted Mineta’s testimony to the contrary, which had been given in open testimony to the Commission itself, from its final report. Then, to rule out even the possibility that the episode reported by Mineta could have occurred, it claimed that Cheney did not even arrive in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center until almost 10:00 o’clock, hence about 20 minutes after the Pentagon was struck.48 But this claim, besides contradicting Mineta’s eyewitness testimony that Cheney was already there when Mineta arrived at 9:20, also contradicts all other reports as to when Cheney had arrived there, including a report by Cheney himself.49 In light of this information about the put options, the Secret Service, and Mineta’s testimony, we can reject as a myth the idea that the attacks were unexpected. However, even if the attacks had been unexpected, should they not have been intercepted? This brings us to: Myth Number 7: US officials have explained why the hijacked airliners were not intercepted. Actually, there is a sense in which this statement is true. US officials have explained why the US military did not prevent the attacks. The problem, however, is that they have given three explanations, each of which is contradicted by the others and none of which is a satisfactory explanation. I will explain. According to standard operating procedures, if an FAA flight controller notices anything that suggests a possible hijacking, the controller is to contact a superior. If the problem cannot be fixed quickly (within about a minute), the superior is to ask NORAD—the North American Aerospace Defense Command—to send up, or “scramble,” jet fighters to find out what is going on. NORAD then issues a scramble order to the nearest air force base with fighters on alert. The jet fighters at NORAD’s disposal could respond very quickly: According to the US Air Force website, F-15s can go from “scramble order” to 29,000 feet in only 2.5 minutes, after which they can fly over 1800 miles per hour.50 Therefore–according to General Ralph Eberhart, the head of NORAD—after the FAA senses that something is wrong, “it takes about one minute” for it to contact NORAD, after which, according to a spokesperson, NORAD can scramble fighter jets “within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States.”51 These statements were, to be sure, made after 9/11, so we might suspect that they reflect a post-9/11 speed-up in procedures. But an Air Traffic Control document put out in 1998 warned pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behavior “will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes.”52 If these procedures had been carried out on the morning of 9/11, AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175 would have been intercepted before they could have reached Manhattan, and AA Flight 77 would have been intercepted long before it could have reached the Pentagon. Such interceptions are routine, being carried out about 100 times a year. A month after 9/11, the Calgary Herald reported that in the year 2000, NORAD had scrambled fighters 129 times. Do these scrambles regularly result in interceptions? Just a few days after 9/11, Major Mike Snyder, a NORAD spokesperson, told the Boston Globe that “[NORAD's] fighters routinely intercept aircraft.”53 Why did such interceptions not occur on 9/11? During the first few days, the public was told that no fighter jets were sent up until after the strike on the Pentagon at 9:38. However, it was also reported that signs of Flight 11’s hijacking had been observed at 8:15. That would mean that although interceptions usually occur within “10 or so” minutes after signs of trouble are observed, in this case 80 or so minutes had elapsed before fighters were even airborne. This story suggested that a “stand-down” order had been issued. Within a few days, however, a second story was put out, according to which NORAD had sent up fighters but, because notification from the FAA had been very slow in coming, the fighters arrived too late. On September 18, NORAD made this second story official, embodying it in a timeline, which indicated when NORAD had been notified by the FAA about each airplane and when it had scrambled fighters in response.54 Critics showed, however, that even if the FAA notifications had come as late as NORAD’s timeline indicated, NORAD’s jets would have had time to make the interceptions.55 This second story did not, therefore, remove the suspicion that a stand-down order had been given. Hoping to overcome this problem, The 9/11 Commission Report provided a third account, according to which, contrary to NORAD’s timeline of September 18, 2001, the FAA did not notify NORAD about Flight 175 until after it had struck the south tower or about Flight 77 until after it had struck the Pentagon. But there are serious problems with this third story. One problem is the very fact that it is the third story. Normally, when a suspect in a criminal investigation keeps changing his story, we get suspicious. Let’s say that the police ask Charlie Jones where he was Saturday night. He says he was at the movie theater, but they say, “No, the movie theater has been closed all week.” Then Charlie says, “Oh, that’s right, I was with my girl friend.” But, the police say, “No, we checked with her and she was home with her husband.” If at that point Charlie says, “Oh, now I remember, I was home reading my Bible,” you are probably not going to believe him. And yet that’s what we have here. The military told one story right after 9/11, another story a week later, and a third story through The 9/11 Commission Report in 2004. A second problem with this third story is that it contradicts several features of the second story, which had served as the official story for almost three years. For example, NORAD’s timeline of September 18, 2001, had indicated that the FAA had notified it about Flight 175 exactly 20 minutes before it hit its target and about Flight 77 some 14 minutes before the Pentagon was struck. The 9/11 Commission maintains that both of these statements were “incorrect”—that, really, there had been no notification about these flights until after they hit their targets. This, it claims, is why the military had failed to intercept them.56 But if NORAD’s timeline was false, as the Commission now claims, NORAD must have been either lying or confused. But it is hard to believe that it could have been confused one week after 9/11. So it must have been lying. But if the military’s second story was a lie, why should we believe this third one? Further scepticism about this third story arises from the fact that it is contradicted by considerable evidence. For example, the Commission’s claim that the military did not know about Flight 175 until it crashed is contradicted by a report involving Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD’s headquarters in Colorado. According to a story in the Toronto Star, Jellinek was on the phone with NORAD as he watched Flight 175 crash into the south tower. He then asked NORAD: “Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with?”–to which NORAD said “yes.”57 The 9/11 Commission’s claims about Flights 175 and 77 are also contradicted by a memo sent to the Commission by Laura Brown of the FAA. Her memo stated that at about 8:50 the FAA had set up a teleconference, in which it started sharing information with the military about all flights. She specifically mentioned Flight 77, indicating that the FAA had been sharing information about it even before the formal notification time of 9:24. Her memo, which is available on the Web,58 was discussed by the 9/11 Commission and read into its record on May 23, 2003.59 But Zelikow’s 9/11 Commission Report fails to mention this memo. Because of these and still more problems, which I have discussed in my book on the 9/11 Commission’s report and also in a lecture called “Flights of Fancy”,60 this third story does not remove the grounds for suspicion that a stand-down order had been issued. There is, moreover, ear-witness testimony for this suspicion. An upper management official at LAX, who needs to remain anonymous, has told me that he overheard members of LAX Security–including officers from the FBI and LAPD—interacting on their walkie-talkies shortly after the attacks. In some cases, he could hear both sides of the conversation. At first, the LAX officials were told that the airplanes that attacked World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been intercepted because the FAA had not notified NORAD about the hijackings. But later, he reports, they were told that NORAD had been notified but did not respond because it had been “ordered to stand down.” When LAX security officials asked who had issued that order, they were told that it had come “from the highest level of the White House.”61 Accordingly, the idea that the attacks could not have been prevented is a myth. I turn now to: Myth Number 8: Official Reports have explained why the Twin Towers and Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed. This claim suffers from the same problem as the previous one: We have had three explanations, each of which contradicts the others and none of which is anywhere close to adequate. The first explanation, widely disseminated through television specials, was that the buildings collapsed because their steel columns were melted by the jet-fuel-fed fires. But this explanation contained many problems, the most obvious of which is that steel does not begin to melt until about 2800 degrees F, while open fires based on hydrocarbons such as kerosene—which is what jet fuel is—cannot under the most ideal circumstances rise above 1700 degrees. A second explanation, endorsed by The 9/11 Commission Report, is a “pancake” theory, according to which the fires, while not melting the steel, heated it up sufficiently to cause the floors weakened by the airplane strikes to break loose from the steel columns—both those in the core of the building and those around the outside. All the floors above the strike zone hence fell down on the floor below the strike zone, causing it to break free, and this started a chain reaction, so the floors pancaked all the way down. But this explanation also suffered from many problems, the most obvious of which was that it could not explain why the buildings collapsed into a pile of rubble only a few stories high. The core of each of the Twin Towers consisted of 47 massive steel columns. If the floors had broken loose from them, these columns would have still been sticking up a thousand feet in the air. The 9/11 Commission Report tried to cover up this problem by claiming that the core of each tower consisted of “a hollow steel shaft.”62 But those massive steel columns could not be wished away. The definitive explanation was supposed to be the third one, issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, often simply called NIST. The NIST Report claimed that when the floors collapsed, they, rather than breaking free from the columns, pulled on them, causing the perimeter columns to become unstable. This instability then increased the gravity load on the core columns, which had been weakened by tremendously hot fires in the core, which, NIST claims, reached 1832°F, and this combination of factors resulted in “global collapse.”63 But, as physicists Jim Hoffman and Steven Jones have shown, this account is riddled with problems. One of these is that NIST’s claim about tremendously hot fires in the core is completely unsupported by evidence. NIST’s own studies found no evidence that any of the core columns had reached temperatures of even 482°F (250°C).64 A second problem is that, even if this sequence of events had occurred, NIST provided no explanation as to why it would have produced global—that is, total—collapse. The NIST Report asserts that “column failure” occurred in the core as well as the perimeter columns. But this remains a bare assertion. There is no plausible explanation of why the core columns would have broken, or even buckled, so as to produce global collapse.65 And this is only to begin to enumerate the problems in NIST’s theory, all of which follow from the fact that it, like the previous two theories, is essentially a fire theory, according to which the buildings were brought down primarily by fire. In the case of the Twin Towers, of course, the impact of the airplanes is said to have played a role. But most experts who support the official theory attribute the collapses primarily to the fires. NIST, for example, says that the main contribution of the airplanes, aside from providing jet fuel, was to dislodge a lot of the fire-proofing from the steel, thereby making it vulnerable to the fires.66 But these fire-theories face several formidable problems. First, the fires in these three buildings were not very hot, very big, or very long-lasting, compared with fires in some steel-frame high-rises that did not collapse. A 1991 fire in Philadelphia burned 18 hours, and a 2004 fire in Caracas burned 17 hours, without causing even a partial collapse.67 By contrast, the fires in the north and south towers burned only 102 and 56 minutes, respectively, before they collapsed, and neither fire, unlike the Philadelphia and Caracas fires, was hot enough to break windows. Second, total collapses of steel-frame high-rise buildings have never—either before or after 9/11—been brought about by fire alone, or fire combined with externally produced structural damage. The collapse of Building 7 has been recognized as especially difficult to explain. It was not hit by a plane, so the explanation has to rely on fire alone, and yet, because there was no jet fuel to get a big fire started, this building had fires on only two or three floors, according to several witnesses68 and all the photographic evidence.69 FEMA admitted that the best explanation it could come up with it had “only a low probability of occurrence.”70 The 9/11 Commission Report implicitly admitted that it could not explain the collapse of Building 7 by not even mentioning it. The NIST Report, which could not claim that the fire-proofing had gotten knocked off the steel of this building, has yet to offer an explanation as to why it collapsed. And NIST, like the 9/11 Commission, evidently did not want citizens asking why Building 7 collapsed even though it was not hit by a plane. On its Website, it says that one of its objectives is to determine “why and how World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 collapsed after the initial impact of the aircraft”—thereby implying that building 7, like the Twin Towers, was hit by a plane.71 In any case, a third problem with the official account of the collapse of these three buildings is that all prior and subsequent total collapses of steel-frame high-rises have been caused by explosives in the procedure known as “controlled demolition.” This problem is made even more severe by the fact that the collapses of these three buildings manifested many standard features of the most difficult type of controlled demolition, known as implosion. I will mention seven such features. First, the collapses began suddenly. Steel, if weakened by fire, would gradually begin to sag. But as one can see from videos available on the Web,72 all three buildings are completely motionless up to the moment they begin to collapse. Second, if these huge buildings had toppled over, they would have caused enormous death and destruction. But they came straight down. This straight-down collapse is the whole point of the type of controlled demolition called implosion, which only a few companies in the world can perform.73 Third, these buildings collapsed at virtually free-fall speed, which means that the lower floors, with all their steel and concrete, were offering no resistance to the upper floors. Fourth, as mentioned earlier, the collapses were total collapses, resulting in piles of rubble only a few stories high. This means that the enormous steel columns in the core of each building had to be broken into rather short segments—which is what explosives do. Fifth, great quantities of molten steel were produced, which means that the steel had been heated up to several thousand degrees. Witnesses during the clean-up reported, moreover, that sometimes when a piece of steel was lifted out of the rubble, molten metal would be dripping from the end.74 Sixth, according to many fire fighters, medical workers, journalists, and World Trade Center employees, many explosions went off before and after the collapses. For example, Fire Captain Dennis Tardio, speaking of the south tower, said: “I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom.“75 Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: “It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.”76 Thanks to the release in August of 2005 of the oral histories recorded by the Fire Department of New York shortly after 9/11, dozens of testimonies of this type are now available. I have published an essay on them, which will be included—along with an essay on “The Destruction of the World Trade Center,” which I am here summarizing—in a forthcoming book on 9/11 and Christian faith.77 A seventh feature of controlled implosions is the production of large quantities of dust. In the case of the Twin Towers, virtually everything except the steel—all the concrete, desks, computers—was pulverized into very tiny dust particles.78 The official theory cannot explain one, let alone all seven, of these features—at least, as Jim Hoffman and Steven Jones have pointed out, without violating several basic laws of physics.79 But the theory of controlled demolition easily explains all these features. These facts are inconsistent with the idea that al-Qaeda terrorists were responsible. Foreign terrorists could not have obtained access to the buildings for the hours needed to plant the explosives. Terrorists working for the Bush-Cheney administration, by contrast, could have gotten such access, given the fact that Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III—the president’s brother and cousin, respectively—were principals of the company in charge of security for the World Trade Center.80 Al-Qaeda terrorists would also probably not have had the courtesy to ensure that these huge buildings came straight down, rather than falling over onto other buildings. They also would not have had the necessary expertise. Another relevant fact is that evidence was destroyed. An examination of the buildings’ steel beams and columns could have shown whether explosives had been used to slice them. But virtually all of the steel was removed before it could be properly examined,81 then put on ships to Asia to be melted down.82 It is usually a federal offense to remove anything from a crime scene. But here the removal of over 100 tons of steel, the biggest destruction of evidence in history, was carried out under the supervision of federal officials.83 Evidence was also apparently planted. The passport of one of the hijackers on Flight 11 was allegedly found in the rubble, having survived the fire caused by the crash into the north tower and also whatever caused everything else in this building except the steel to be pulverized.84 As a story in the Guardian said, “the idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI’s crackdown on terrorism.”85 To sum up: The idea that US officials have given a satisfactory, or even close to satisfactory, explanation of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings is a myth. And they have implicitly admitted this by refusing to engage in rational debate about it. For example, Michael Newman, a spokesman for NIST, reportedly said during a recent interview that “none of the NIST scientists would participate in any public debate” with scientists who reject their report. When Newman was asked why NIST would avoid public debate if it had confidence in its report, Newman replied: “Because there is no winning in such debates.”85 In that same interview, Newman had compared people who reject the government’s account of the collapses with people who believe in Bigfoot and a flat earth.86 And yet he fears that his scientists would not be able to show up these fools in a public debate! In any case, I come now to the final myth, which is: Myth Number 9: There is no doubt that Flight 77, under the control of al-Qaeda hijacker Hani Hanjour, struck the Pentagon. There are, in fact, many reasons to doubt this claim. We have, in the first place, reasons to doubt that the aircraft that hit the Pentagon was under the control of Hani Hanjour. For one thing, the aircraft, before striking the Pentagon, reportedly executed a 270-degree downward spiral, and yet Hani Hanjour was known as a terrible pilot, who could not safely fly even a small plane.87 Russ Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after serving in Vietnam as a fighter pilot, says that it would have been “totally impossible for an amateur who couldn’t even fly a Cessna to maneuver the jetliner in such a highly professional manner.”88 Moreover, as a result of that very difficult maneuver, the Pentagon’s west wing was struck, but terrorists brilliant enough to get through the US military’s defense system would have known that this was the worst place to strike, for several reasons: The west wing had been reinforced, so the damage was less severe than a strike anywhere else would have been. This wing was still being renovated, so relatively few people were there; a strike anywhere else would have killed thousands of people, rather than 125. And the secretary of defense and all the top brass, whom terrorists would presumably have wanted to kill, were in the east wing. Why would an al-Qaeda pilot have executed a very difficult maneuver to hit the west wing when he could have simply crashed into the roof of the east wing? A second major problem with the official story: There are reasons to believe that the Pentagon was struck only because officials at the Pentagon wanted it to be struck. For one thing, Flight 77 allegedly, after making a U-turn in the mid-west, flew back to Washington undetected for 40 minutes. And yet the US military, which by then clearly knew that hijacked airliners were being used as weapons, has the best radar systems in the world, one of which, it brags, “does not miss anything occurring in North American airspace.”89 The idea that a large airliner could have slipped through, especially during a time of heightened alert, is absurd. Also, the Pentagon is surely the best defended building on the planet.90 It is not only within the P-56-A restricted air space that extends 17 miles in all directions from the Washington Monument, but also within P-56-B, the three-mile ultra-restricted zone above the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. The Pentagon is only a few miles from Andrews Air Force Base, which has at least three squadrons with fighter jets on alert at all times. (The claim by The 9/11 Commission Report that no fighters were on alert the morning of 9/11 is wholly implausible, as I have explained in my critique of this report.91) The Pentagon, moreover, is reportedly protected by batteries of surface-to-air missiles, so if any aircraft without a US military transponder were to enter the Pentagon’s airspace, it would be shot down.92 Even if the aircraft that hit the Pentagon had been Flight 77, therefore, it could have succeeded only because officials in the Pentagon turned off its missiles as well as ordering the fighters from Andrews to stand down. A third major problem with the official story is that there is considerable evidence that it could not have been Flight 77 because it was not a Boeing 757. For one thing, the strike on the Pentagon, unlike the strikes on the Twin Towers, reportedly did not create a detectable seismic signal.93 Also, according to several witnesses and many people who have studied the available photographs, both the damage and the debris were inconsistent with a strike by a large airliner. That issue, however, is too complex to discuss here, as is the issue of the what should be inferred from the conflicting eyewitness testimony. Deferring those topics to another time, I will conclude by pointing out that the suspicion that the Pentagon was not struck by a 757, as the government claims, is supported by the fact that evidence was destroyed. Shortly after the strike, government agents picked up debris and carried it off.94 Then the entire lawn was covered with dirt and gravel, so that any remaining forensic evidence was literally covered up.95 Also, the videos from security cameras on the nearby Citgo gas station and Sheraton Hotel, which would show what really hit the Pentagon, were immediately confiscated by agents of the FBI, and the Department of Justice has to this day refused to release them.96 If these videos would prove that the Pentagon was really hit by a 757, most of us would assume, the government would release them. Conclusion It would seem, for many reasons, that the official story of 9/11, which has served as a religious Myth in the intervening years, is a myth in the pejorative sense of a story that does not correspond to reality. One sign of a story that is a myth in this sense, I have pointed out, is that it cannot be rationally defended, and the official story has never been publicly defended against informed criticism by any member of NIST, the 9/11 Commission, or the Bush administration. An illustration: After Charlie Sheen had made public his skepticism about the official story, CNN’s “Showbiz Tonight” wanted to have a debate, about the points he had raised, between a representative of the government and a representative of 9/11Truth.org. But the producers reportedly could find no member of the government willing to appear on the show. In this unwillingness of the government to appear on an entertainment show to answer questions raised by an actor, we would seem to have the clearest possible sign that the government’s story is myth, not reality. If so, we must demand that the government immediately cease implementing the policies that have been justified by this myth. When charges were brought against some members of Duke University’s lacrosse team in March of 2006, the president of the university immediately cancelled all future games until the truth of the charges could be decided. But surely, as serious as the charges were in that case, the charges against the official story of 9/11 are far more serious, for this story, serving as a national religious Myth, has been used to justify two wars, which have caused many tens of thousands of deaths; to start a more general war on Islam, in which Muslims are considered guilty until proven innocent; to annul and violate civil rights; and to increase our military spending, which was already greater than that of the rest of the world combined, by hundreds of billions of dollars, partly so that weapons can be put into space. Congress needs to put the implementation of these policies on hold until there is a truly independent investigation, carried out by qualified individuals who are not members of the very circles that, if 9/11 truly was a false flag operation, planned it, carried it out, and then covered it up. NOTES 1. “Remarks by the President in Photo Opportunity with the National Security Team” (www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010912-4.html), quoted in Thierry Meyssan, 9:11: The Big Lie (London: Carnot, 2002), 77. 2. “President’s Remarks at National Day of Prayer and Remembrance” (www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010914-2.html), quoted in Meyssan, 9/11: The Big Lie, 76-77. 3. Meyssan, 9/11: The Big Lie, 79. 4. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980; New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 150. Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (1960; New York, Norton, 1974), 143. 5. Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 11. 6. Ibid., 57-62. 7. George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How American Became Involved in Vietnam (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987), 220; Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 119. 8. Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Frank Cass, 2005). 9. This memorandum can be found at the National Security Archive, April 30, 2001 (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430). It was revealed to US readers by James Bamford in Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-secret National Security Agency (2001: New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 82-91. 10. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44. 11. David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” Harper’s, October, 2002. 12. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 35-36. 13. Ibid., 212. 14. Ibid., 212, 24-25. 15. Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org), 51. 16. “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times,” New York Times, October 12, 2001. Similar sentiments were expressed by Condoleezza Rice and President Bush. On Rice, see Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1), and Rice, “Remarks by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Terrorism and Foreign Policy,” April 29, 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov); on Bush, see “Bush Vows to ‘Whip Terrorism,’” Reuters, Sept. 14, 2001, and Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 32. 17. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html), cover letter. 18. Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 19. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition [New York: W. W. Norton, 2004], xv. David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2005), 285-95. 20. Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, in their Preface, say: “The professional staff, headed by Philip Zelikow, . . . conducted the exacting investigative work upon which the Commission has built” (The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition [New York: W. W. Norton, 2004], xvi-xvii). 21. These statements are quoted in Peter Lance, Cover Up: What the Government is Still Hiding about the War on Terror (New York: Harper-Collins/ReganBooks, 2004), 139-40. 22. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 316, 331. 23. Max Boot, “Think Again: Neocons,” Foreign Policy, January/February 2004, 18 (http://www.cfr.org/publication/7592/think_again.html). 24. See Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 180-83. 25. The 9/11 Commission Report, 116. 26. Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida (Eugene: MacCowPress, 2004). These details from Hopsicker’s book are summarized in his “Top Ten things You Never Knew about Mohamed Atta,” Mad Cow Morning News, June 7, 2004 (www.madcowprod.com/index60.html), and in an interview in the Guerrilla News Forum, June 17, 2004 (www.guerrillanews.com/intelligence/doc4660.html), summarized in NPH, 2nd ed., 243n1. 27. “Terrorist Stag Parties,” Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001 (http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001298). 28. The 9/11 Commission Report, 248. 29. The flight manifest for AA 11 that was published by CNN can be seen at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/AA11.victims.html. The manifests for the other flights can be located by simply changing that part of the URL. The manifest for UA 93, for example, is at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/ua93.victims.html. 30. The 9/11 Commission Report, 19-20. 31. David Bamford, “Hijack ‘Suspect’ Alive in Morocco,” BBC News, Sept. 22, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1558669.stm). Several other alleged hijackers were reported to be alive in David Harrison, “Revealed: The Men with Stolen Identities,” Telegraph, September 23, 2001 (www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml). At least one of these claims, that involving Ahmed al-Nami, was based on a confusion. The al-Nami contacted by Harrison was 33, whereas the man of that name who was supposedly on Flight 93, which supposedly crashed in Pennsylvania, was only 21. See Christine Lamb, “The Six Sons of Asir,” Telegraph, September 15, 2002 (http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/09/15/wdoss215.xml). But no such explanation seems possible with Waleed al-Shehri, since the FBI photograph is clearly of a still-living man of that name. 32. Francis A. Boyle, “Bush, Jr., September 11th and the Rule of Law,” which can be found in The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence: Could The US War On Terrorism Go Nuclear? (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2002) or at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/CrimNukDetSI.html. 33. “White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You’” (CNN.com, Sept. 21, 2001). Four weeks after the attacks began, a Taliban spokesman said: “We are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama’s involvement, but they have refused. Why?” (Kathy Gannon, AP, “Taliban Willing To Talk, But Wants U.S. Respect” [http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/focus/terrorism/archives/ ...]). 34. See “The Fake bin Laden Video” (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html). 35. Richard Labeviere, “CIA Agent Allegedly Met Bin Laden in July,” Le Figaro, Oct. 31, 2001. This story was also reported in Anthony Sampson, “CIA Agent Alleged to Have Met Bin Laden in July,” Guardian, Nov. 1, and Adam Sage, “Ailing bin Laden ‘Treated for Kidney Disease,’” London Times, Nov. 1. 36. Telegraph, Feb. 23, 2002; Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 60. 37. President George W. Bush, Conference, March 13, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020313-8.html). 38. Philip Shenon, “FBI Gave Secret Files to Terrorist Suspect,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 2002, citing Mueller’s testimony to Congress on June 18, 2002. 39. San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 29, 2001. 40. The 9/11 Commission Report, 499 n. 130. 41. Investigative journalist Michael Ruppert, a former detective for the Los Angeles Police Department, has written: “It is well documented that the CIA has long monitored such trades–in real time–as potential warnings of terrorist attacks and other economic moves contrary to U.S. interests” (“Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly into the CIA’s Highest Ranks,” From the Wilderness Publications (www.fromthewilderness.com or www.copvcia.com), Oct. 9, 2001. Nafeez Ahmed, besides quoting Ruppert’s remark, points out that “UPI reported that the U.S.-sponsored ECHELON intelligence network closely monitors stock trading,” citing United Press International, Feb. 13, 2001. See Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked September 11, 2001 (Joshua Tree, Calif.: Tree of Life Publications, 2002), 120. 42. CNN, Dec. 4, 2001, The Daily Mail, Sept. 8, 2002, and ABC News, Sept. 11, 2002. 43. The 9/11 Commission Report, 39. 44. “Air Attack on Pentagon Indicates Weaknesses,” Newsday, September 23, 2001. 45. The 9/11 Commission Report, 34. 46. “Statement of Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, May 23, 2003″ (available at www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2003/commissiontestimony052303.htm). 47. Ibid. 48. The 9/11 Commission Report, 40. 49. See the summary of evidence in Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 241-44, which includes discussion of the fact that the Commission cited no evidence for its revisionist timeline. 50. Cited in Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 140. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 141. 53. See the Calgary Herald, Oct. 13, 2001, and Glen Johnson, “Otis Fighter Jets Scrambled Too Late to Halt the Attacks,” Boston Globe, Sept. 15, 2001 [http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=print]). At an average of 100 scrambles a year, fighters would have been scrambled about 1000 times in the decade prior to 9/11. One of the many falsehoods in a essay entitled “9/11: Debunking Myths,” which was published by Popular Mechanics (March 2005), is its claim that in the decade before 9/11, there had been only one interception, that of golfer Payne Stewart’s Learjet. This essay’s “senior researcher,” 25-year old Benjamin Chertoff, has (on a radio show) tried to reconcile this claim with the fact that fighters are scrambled about 100 times per year by saying that these statements speak only of scrambles, not interceptions. But Chertoff’s position would require the claim that only one of the 1000 scrambles in that period resulted in interceptions—that the other 999 fighters were called back before they actually made the interception. Besides being highly improbable, this interpretation contradicts Major Snyder’s statement that interceptions are carried out routinely. 54. Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 141-43. 55. Ibid., 139-48. 56. Ibid., 192. 57. Ibid., 176. 58. Laura Brown, “FAA Communications with NORAD on September 11, 2001,” available at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2004081200421797. 59. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, May 23, 2003 (http://www.911commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm). Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, who read the memo into the record, reported that he had been told that it had been authored by two “high level individuals at FAA, Mr. Asmus and Ms. Schuessler.” However, I was told by Laura Brown during a telephone conversation on August 15, 2004, that she had written the memo. 60. Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 155-226; “Flights of Fancy: The 9/11 Commission’s Incredible Tales of Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93,” Global Outlook, 12 (Fall-Winter 2006), and in Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). 61. “My Observation of LAX Security Events on 9/11,” by an Upper Management LAX Official. Although this official needs to remain anonymous, he has said that he would be willing to take a polygraph test if his anonymity could be protected. 62. The 9/11 Commission Report, 541 note 1. 63. Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers (Draft), June, 2005, usually called the NIST Report, 28, 143. 64. And, as Jim Hoffman says, NIST’s claim about these tremendously hot fires in the core is especially absurd given the fact that the core “had very little fuel; was far from any source of fresh air; had huge steel columns to wick away the heat; [and] does not show evidence of fires in any of the photographs or videos.” All the evidence, in other words, suggests that none of the core columns would have reached the temperatures of some of the perimeter columns (“Building a Better Mirage: NIST’s 3-Year $20,000,000 Cover-Up of the Crime of the Century,” 911 Research, Dec. 8, 2005 (http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/index.html). 65. See Hoffman, ibid., and Stephen E. Jones, “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink, 2006); also available at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html. 66. The NIST Report (xliii and 171) says: “the towers withstood the impacts and would have remained standing were it not for the dislodged insulation (fireproofing) and the subsequent multifloor fires.” 67. “High-Rise Office Building Fire One Meridian Plaza Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” FEMA (http://usfa.fema.gov/fire-service/techreports/tr049.shtm); “Fire Practically Destroys Venezuela’s Tallest Building” (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/venezuela_fire.html). 68. Chief Thomas McCarthy of the FDNY said that while the firefighters “were waiting for 7 World Trade to come down,” there was “fire on three separate floors” (Oral History of Thomas McCarthy, 10-11). Emergency medical technician Decosta Wright said: “I think the fourth floor was on fire. . . . [W]e were like, are you guys going to put that fire out?” (Oral History of Decosta Wright, 11). These quotations are from the 9/11 oral histories recorded by the New York Fire Department at the end of 2001 but released to the public (after a court battle) only in August 2005, at which time they were made available on a New York Times website (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/ …). 69. A photograph taken by Terry Schmidt can be seen on page 63 of Eric Hufschmid’s Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (Goleta, Calif.: Endpoint Software, 2002) or on Schmidt’s website (http://www.nycwireless.net/Images/wtc2/). According to Schmidt, this photo was taken between 3:09 and 3:16 PM, hence only a little over two hours before Building 7 collapsed. It shows that on the north side of the building, fires were visible only on floors 7 and 12. Therefore, if there were more fires on the south side, which faced the Twin Towers, they were not big enough to be seen from the north side. 70. FEMA Report #403, World Trade Center Building Performance Study, May 2002 (www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm), Ch. 5, Sect. 6.2, “Probable Collapse Sequence.” 71. Reported in Ed Haas, “Government spokesman says, ‘I Don’t Understand the Public’s Fascination with World Trade Center Building Seven,’” Muckraker Report, March 21, 200 (http://www.teamliberty.net/id235.html), referring to NIST’s “Investigation of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center Disaster” (http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs.htm), as accessed on March 20, 2006. 72. See Jim Hoffman’s website (http://911research.wtc7.net/index.html) and Jeff King’s website (http://home.comcast.net/~jeffrey.king2/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html), especially “The World Trade Center Collapse: How Strong is the Evidence for a Controlled Demolition?” 73. Implosion World (http://www.implosionworld.com/dyk2.html). 74. Professor Allison Geyh of Johns Hopkins, who was part of a team of public health investigators who visited the site shortly after 9/11, wrote: “In some pockets now being uncovered they are finding molten steel,” Magazine of Johns Hopkins Public Health, Late Fall, 2001. Dr. Keith Eaton, who somewhat later toured the site with an engineer, said that he was shown slides of “molten metal, which was still red hot weeks after the event” (The Structural Engineer, Sept. 3, 2002: 6). On the dripping steel, see Trudy Walsh, “Handheld APP Eased Recovery Tasks,” Government Computer News, 21/27a, Sept 11, 2002 (http://www.gcn.com/21_27a/news/19930-1.html) and Jennifer Lin, “Recovery Worker Reflects on Months Spent at Ground Zero,” Knight Ridder, May 29, 2002 (http://www.messenger-inquirer.com/news/attacks/4522011.htm). 75. Quoted in Dennis Smith, Report from Ground Zero: The Story of the Rescue Efforts at the World Trade Center (New York: Penguin, 2002), 18. 76. Oral History of Richard Banaciski, 3-4. See next note. “Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories,” in Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11. It is also available at 911Truth.org (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060118104223192). The oral histories of 9/11 recorded by the Fire Department of New York are available at a NYT website (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/ …). 78. Jim Hoffman, “The North Tower’s Dust Cloud: Analysis of Energy Requirements for the Expansion of the Dust Cloud Following the Collapse of 1 World Trade Center,” Version 3, 9-11 Research.wtc7.net, Oct. 16, 2003 (http://911research.wtc7.net/papers/dustvolume/volume.html). The available evidence, Hoffman says, suggests that the dust particles were very small indeed—on the order of 10 microns. Also Colonel John O’Dowd of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said: “At the World Trade Center sites, it seemed like everything was pulverized” (“The World Trade Center: Rise and Fall of an American Icon,” The History Channel, September 8, 2002). 79. Jones, “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” See also David Ray Griffin, “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True,” in Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, March, 2006), and in Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11. This essay is also available at 911Review.com, December 9, 2005 [http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html]). For Hoffman’s analyses, see http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/index.html. For videos of the WTC collapses, see in particular “9/11/01 WTC Videos” (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/videos/index.html). 80. See Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 31-32. 81. The official investigators found that they had less authority than the clean-up crews, a fact that led the Science Committee of the House of Representatives to report that “the lack of authority of investigators to impound pieces of steel for examination before they were recycled led to the loss of important pieces of evidence” (see the report at http://www.house.gov/science/hot/wtc/charter.htm). 82. “Baosteel Will Recycle World Trade Center Debris,” Eastday.com, January 24, 2002 (http://www.china.org.cn/english/2002/Jan/25776.htm). 83. This removal was, moreover, carried out with the utmost care. Each truck was equipped with a Vehicle Location Device, connected to GPS. “The software recorded every trip and location, sending out alerts if the vehicle traveled off course, arrived late at its destination, or deviated from expectations in any other way” (Jacqueline Emigh, “GPS on the Job in Massive World Trade Center Clean-Up,” July 1, 2002 [http://securitysolutions.com/ar/security_gps_job_massive]). 84. Another problem with this story is that there were at least two versions of it. One said that the passport was found in the rubble the day after 9/11, the other that it was found minutes after the attack (see Morgan and Henshall, 9/11 Revealed, 68). 85. Anne Karpf, “Uncle Sam’s Lucky Finds,” Guardian, March 19, 2002 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,669961,00.html). 86. Haas, “Government spokesman says, ‘I Don’t Understand the Public’s Fascination with World Trade Center Building Seven.’” 87. New York Times, May 4, 2002, and CBS News, May 10, 2002, quoted under “Was Hani Hanjour Even on Flight 77 and Could He Have Really Flown It to Its Doom?” in Killtown’s “Did Flight 77 Really Crash into the Pentagon?” (thewebfairy.com/killtown/flight77), Oct. 19, 2003. Even The 9/11 Report acknowledge that Hanjour was “a terrible pilot” in some passages (225-26, 242, 520n56). 88. Greg Szymanski, “Former Vietnam Combat and Commercial Pilot Firm Believer 9/11 Was Inside Government Job,” Lewis News, Sunday, January 8, 2006 [http://www.lewisnews.com/article.asp?ID=106623]). 89. “PAVE PAWS, Watching North America’s Skies, 24 Hours a Day” (www.pavepaws.org). 90. Besides the fact that this is what we would expect, this is evidently what Pentagon officials tell their employees. April Gallop, who was working in the Pentagon on 9/11, has reportedly said that during her classified tour when she was first assigned to the Pentagon, she was told that it was the best-defended building in the world (John Judge, “Pentagon and P-56 Preparations and Defenses and the Stand-Down on 9/11,” Ratville Times, Jan. 11, 2006 [www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/P56A.html]). 91. See the evidence in Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 159-64. 92. Thierry Meyssan, who has referred to these anti-missile batteries (Pentagate [London: Carnot, 2002], 112, 116), has said with regard to his source of information: “The presence of these anti-missile batteries was testified to me by French officers to whom they were shown during an official visit to the Pentagon. This was later confirmed to me by a Saudi officer.” John Judge, co-founder of 9-11 Citizens Watch, has reported that he learned about the missiles from his father, John Joseph Judge, a WWII Army Air Corps veteran who worked at the Pentagon after the war until his death in 1965. Young John Judge, whose mother also worked at the Pentagon, spent much time there. In the late 1950s, he says, his father pointed out the location of an air-to-surface missile. Judge also reports that in 1998, he was given a tour of the Pentagon by Colonel Robinson, the long-time director of security. While they were outside talking about threats from terrorists, Robinson pointed to the roof and said, “we have cameras and radar up there to make sure they don’t try to run a plane into the building.” Since cameras and radars by themselves would not stop anything, Judge concluded, Robinson’s statement implicitly referred to anti-aircraft missiles (John Judge, “Pentagon and P-56 Preparations and Defenses and the Stand-Down on 9/11,” Ratville Times, Jan. 11, 2006 [www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/P56A.html]. The Pentagon, to be sure, has denied that it had any anti-aircraft batteries at that time, saying that they had thought them “too costly and too dangerous to surrounding residential areas” (Paul Sperry, “Why the Pentagon Was So Vulnerable,” WorldNetDaily, Sept. 11, 2001 [http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24426]). But can anyone believe that Pentagon officials would have let such considerations prevent them from protecting themselves? 93. Won-Young Kim and Gerald R. Baum, “Seismic Observations during September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attack” (http://www.mgs.md.gov/esic/publications/download/911pentagon.pdf). 94. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was working at the Pentagon that morning, reports that “any physical remains of the aircraft that hit the Pentagon were quickly carted away to some unknown location, so we have no physical evidence that the aircraft really was Flight 77 or even a Boeing 757″ (“Assessing the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory,” in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink, 2006). Photographic evidence of this removal can be seen on Eric Hufschmid’s video, “Painful Deceptions” (available at www.EricHufschmid.Net). 95. A photograph showing this literal cover-up can be seen in Ralph Omholt, “9-11 and the Impossible: Part One of an Online Journal of 9-11″ (http://www.physics911.net/omholt.htm). 96. On the confiscation of the film from the Citgo gas station and the Sheraton Hotel, respectively, see Bill McKelway “Three Months On, Tension Lingers Near the Pentagon,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dec. 11, 2001 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/1211_wirepentagon.html), and Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, “Inside the Ring,” Washington Times, Sept. 21, 2001. Scott Bingham, who has tried to get videos of the Pentagon strike released under the Freedom of Information Act, has his lawsuit and the official response posted on his website (http://www.flight77.info). See also “Government Responds to Flight 77 FOAI Request,” 911Truth.org, Aug. 2005 (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050824131004151). source: http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=200604051126229825apr2006 © David Ray Griffin. 911truth.org hereby grants to all readers of this website permission to link to any and all articles found in the public areas of the website, www.911truth.org, so long as the full source URL (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060405112622982 in this case) is posted with the article.
The Ground Zero Grassy KnollA new generation of conspiracy theorists is at work
|
based on 35 reviews. (
|
To send us your comments, questions, and suggestions click here |
ParaPolitical News- Sarah Kruzan
- BBC NEWS – Berlusconi immunity law overruled
- Posada Carriles Built Bombs for, and Informed on, Jorge Mas Canosa, CIA Records Reveal
- FLASHBACK: Luis Posada Carriles, a terror suspect abroad, enjoys a ‘coming-out’ in Miami – Los Angeles Times
- FBI Veteran Executive Calls For Special Counsel Investigation, Prosecutions in Sibel Edmonds Case
- NH tax evader gets 35 years in prison for standoff – washingtonpost.com
- A Free-Market Guide to Fixing Healthcare – Mises.org – Mises Institute
- Brian Rawson Steps Down as Texas CTO
- How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie – Telegraph Blogs
- Campaign asks for international treaty to limit war robots – New Scientist
- ParaPolitical News
- Colombia's politicians: Dynasties, paramilitaries and celebrities - Colombia Reports
- Colombian party accused of 'parapolitics' - Colombia Reports
- Colombian congresswoman dismissed for parapolitics - Colombia Reports
- Colombia's illegitimate Congress - Colombia Reports
- 18 Congress candidates implicated in parapolitics and FARC activity - Colombia Reports
- 'Don Mario' accuses more politicians of parapolitics - Colombia Reports
- Ex-senator's 'parapolitics' trial kicks off in Cali - Colombia Reports
- Cousin of Colombia President Alvaro Uribe rearrested - BBC News
- Former president attacks Uribe - Colombia Reports
- Blogging ParaPolitics
- Colombian party accused of 'parapolitics'
- 'Don Mario' accuses more politicians of parapolitics
- Ex-senator's 'parapolitics' trial kicks off in Cali
- MAMA Radio: The "Para-Politics" Saga Continues, This Time Taking ...
- Colombia: VP called to respond to "parapolitics" allegations
- VP called to respond to parapolitics allegations
- An Introduction To The All New 'Parapolitics' Website « Norfolk ...
- 'Jorge 40' accuses Colombian VP of parapolitics
- Senator implicated in 'para-politics' gets 7-year sentence
- Bibliophiles.TK: Government of the Shadows - Parapolitics and ...
- Cryptogon
- French Bread Spiked with LSD in CIA Experiment
- Cryptogon Reader Sends $25
- Mass School Closures Approved in Kansas City
- Papal Aide Linked to Vatican Gay Prostitution Ring
- Chief Exorcist: “The Devil Is at Work Inside the Vatican”
- New York State Assemblyman Trying to Outlaw the Use of Salt in the Preparation of Food in Restaurants
- Another Deficit Record Set in February
- NSA Communication System Interfering with Garage Door Openers?
- Cryptogon Reader Sends $500
- Airlines Will Cancel Flights to Avoid Risk of Fines for Delays
- Original AntiWar Headlines