This might be the best post, ever. (other than my threads)
Awesome job.
Awesome job.
911- The government did it
- Thread starter blacktroop
- Start date
Al-Jazeera airs video of Al-Qaeda preparing 9/11 attacks
Al-Jazeera airs video of Al-Qaeda preparing 9/11 attacks
by Habib Trabelsi1 hour, 24 minutes ago
The Arab television channel Al-Jazeera broadcast video footage it said showed Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda suicide candidates preparing the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States.
Al-Jazeera had said earlier it would broadcast "video that included scenes showing for the first time Al-Qaeda leaders preparing the September 11 attacks and practicing for their execution."
The video showed Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and two of the 19 Islamist militants that took part in the attacks, Saudi nationals Hamza el-Ramdi and Wael el-Shemari.
The two bearded men spoke of the situation faced by Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya.
Fifteen of the 19 attackers on September 11 were Saudis, and Al-Jazeera said it had only aired a few minutes from a document which it said lasted about an hour and a half.
Bin Laden was shown in the company of several dozen men, walking in a deserted, rocky zone that was not identified.
Almost 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001 when suicide hijackers took control of four US passenger planes.
They smashed two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing them to collapse.
Another plane slammed into the Pentagon, the US military headquarters building near Washington, and the fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
The attackers were trained in the martial arts and were armed for the most part with simple box cutters.
The footage aired by Al-Jazeera Thursday showed hand-to-hand combat practice between people who wore masks over their heads, and one of whom appeared to be training with a knife.
The television station also broadcast a recording attributed to the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, in which he said he was sure of victory against US-led forces in the country.
The recording was posted on an Islamist Internet site as well, but its authenticity could not be immediately established.
In the Internet statement, Muhajer urged Sunni Muslims to kill at least one US citizen within the next two weeks.
"Oh followers of (Taliban leader) Mullah Mohammed Omar, oh sons of Osama bin Laden, oh disciples of (slain Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader) Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi ... I urge each of you to kill at least one American within a period not exceeding 15 days," Muhajer said.
The two broadcasts came four days before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
Muhajer had already issued a public statement in June, a few days after his predecessor Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was reportedly killed in a US air strike in Iraq.
In the recording released on Thursday, he said: "I do not doubt for an instant victory" against US-led forces in Iraq, calling President George W. Bush a "liar" and a "dog".
"Do not be proud of the number and the equipment" (of your army), Muhajer said.
"The war has just begun."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060907/wl_afp/iraqusattacksqaeda_060907194902
Al-Jazeera airs video of Al-Qaeda preparing 9/11 attacks
by Habib Trabelsi1 hour, 24 minutes ago
The Arab television channel Al-Jazeera broadcast video footage it said showed Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda suicide candidates preparing the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States.
Al-Jazeera had said earlier it would broadcast "video that included scenes showing for the first time Al-Qaeda leaders preparing the September 11 attacks and practicing for their execution."
The video showed Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and two of the 19 Islamist militants that took part in the attacks, Saudi nationals Hamza el-Ramdi and Wael el-Shemari.
The two bearded men spoke of the situation faced by Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya.
Fifteen of the 19 attackers on September 11 were Saudis, and Al-Jazeera said it had only aired a few minutes from a document which it said lasted about an hour and a half.
Bin Laden was shown in the company of several dozen men, walking in a deserted, rocky zone that was not identified.
Almost 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001 when suicide hijackers took control of four US passenger planes.
They smashed two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing them to collapse.
Another plane slammed into the Pentagon, the US military headquarters building near Washington, and the fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
The attackers were trained in the martial arts and were armed for the most part with simple box cutters.
The footage aired by Al-Jazeera Thursday showed hand-to-hand combat practice between people who wore masks over their heads, and one of whom appeared to be training with a knife.
The television station also broadcast a recording attributed to the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, in which he said he was sure of victory against US-led forces in the country.
The recording was posted on an Islamist Internet site as well, but its authenticity could not be immediately established.
In the Internet statement, Muhajer urged Sunni Muslims to kill at least one US citizen within the next two weeks.
"Oh followers of (Taliban leader) Mullah Mohammed Omar, oh sons of Osama bin Laden, oh disciples of (slain Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader) Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi ... I urge each of you to kill at least one American within a period not exceeding 15 days," Muhajer said.
The two broadcasts came four days before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
Muhajer had already issued a public statement in June, a few days after his predecessor Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was reportedly killed in a US air strike in Iraq.
In the recording released on Thursday, he said: "I do not doubt for an instant victory" against US-led forces in Iraq, calling President George W. Bush a "liar" and a "dog".
"Do not be proud of the number and the equipment" (of your army), Muhajer said.
"The war has just begun."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060907/wl_afp/iraqusattacksqaeda_060907194902
[frame]http://www.robert-fisk.com/usama_interview_ummat.htm[/frame]
well...
I'm a not mathematician, or an engineer. But I know ONE THING THAT YOU CAN TAKE TO THE BANK. : the gov. did allow this 9/11 to happen by easing the effort on terrorism (yep...they did). Everybody knew that there was something in the works....the signs were written in the sky.
Al qeda ,very active in the years preceding 9/11 was put way down on the priority list when Bush took over. Remember that the plans to ' redesign' the middle was drafted long before (by Cheney and company).
Now all they need was a pretext, an opportunity, and that's why you had sept. 11.
Remember ALL THOSE ROCK SOLID EVIDENCES THAT IMPLICATED IRAQ.? EVERYONE KNOWS THEY NEVER EXISTED. BUT ATTACKING SAUDI ARABIA WAS NOT IN THE PLANS. IRAQ WAS !!
My prediction: Once the US takes perfect control of Iraq, they will drop Saudi Arabia like a bag of dog shit, de-stabilize the country and stick 'democracy' up their ass. If I was part of the Royal Family, I would get the fuck out of there within a year.
neo
I'm a not mathematician, or an engineer. But I know ONE THING THAT YOU CAN TAKE TO THE BANK. : the gov. did allow this 9/11 to happen by easing the effort on terrorism (yep...they did). Everybody knew that there was something in the works....the signs were written in the sky.
Al qeda ,very active in the years preceding 9/11 was put way down on the priority list when Bush took over. Remember that the plans to ' redesign' the middle was drafted long before (by Cheney and company).
Now all they need was a pretext, an opportunity, and that's why you had sept. 11.
Remember ALL THOSE ROCK SOLID EVIDENCES THAT IMPLICATED IRAQ.? EVERYONE KNOWS THEY NEVER EXISTED. BUT ATTACKING SAUDI ARABIA WAS NOT IN THE PLANS. IRAQ WAS !!
My prediction: Once the US takes perfect control of Iraq, they will drop Saudi Arabia like a bag of dog shit, de-stabilize the country and stick 'democracy' up their ass. If I was part of the Royal Family, I would get the fuck out of there within a year.
neo
[frame]http://www.prisonplanet.com/alleged_hijackers_may_trained_us_bases.html[/frame]
[frame]http://www.prisonplanet.com/the_informant_who_lived_with_the_hijackers.htm[/frame]
<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8222225723593380081&hl=en"> </embed>
QueEx said:
Theories are created to be tested and rewritten, rely on information to prove or disprove them, Scientific Method...
Conspiracy or Conspiracy Theory
Well[FRAME]http://www.v911t.org/SergeantLauroChavez.php[/FRAME]
Well[FRAME]http://www.v911t.org/SergeantLauroChavez.php[/FRAME]
Re: Conspiracy or Conspiracy Theory
You don't, it's been merged.
Greed said:
You don't, it's been merged.
Re: Conspiracy or Conspiracy Theory
<font size="5"><center>The laughing 9/11 bombers</font size>
<font size="4">Exclusive film of suicide pilots at Bin Laden’s HQ </font size></center>
The Sunday Times (London)
Yosri Fouda
October 01, 2006
FILM of the ringleader of the September 11 hijackers reading his “martyrdom” will inside Afghanistan at Osama Bin Laden’s headquarters has emerged five years after the Al-Qaeda outrage.
It is the first time that a videotape has appeared of Mohammed Atta — who flew an American Airlines plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center — at a training camp in Afghanistan. It fills in a significant gap in the timing of the build-up to the attacks on the United States.
Dates on the tape show Atta was filmed on January 18, 2000, together with Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently stormed the flight deck.
The Sunday Times has obtained a copy of the video through a previously tested channel. The tape has no soundtrack and a US source said lip readers had tried without success to decipher what was being said.
Despite the deadly tasks the men had been assigned, they appear in high spirits, laughing and smiling in front of the camera. Only when Atta, with an AK-47 propped on a wall beside him, reads a document marked in Arabic “the will”, does he become solemn. Both are well groomed, without the haggard appearance of the identity mugshots issued after September 11.
The high quality, unedited film shows Bin Laden addressing his followers at the mud-walled complex near Kandahar. One of the main figures in the September 11 plot, Ramzi Binalshibh, is identifiable in the crowd, as is a bodyguard whose task was to kill Bin Laden with two bullets to the head if he faced capture.
Dating on the tape indicates that the Al-Qaeda leader was filmed on January 8, 2000, 10 days before Atta and Jarrah recorded their wills.
American and German investigators have struggled to find evidence of Atta’s whereabouts in January 2000 after he disappeared from Hamburg. The hour-long tape places him in Afghanistan at a decisive moment in the development of the conspiracy when he was given operational command. Months later both he and Jarrah enrolled at flying schools in America.
Investigators have also puzzled over the fact that unlike the rest of the hijackers — most of whom were young Saudi fundamentalists — Atta and Jarrah were well educated and appeared to fit into western society while studying in Germany. The video indicates how easily they slipped from a western identity to a fundamentalist one. It also shows up the subterfuge they maintained in Germany and America that they did not know each other, all part of evading detection.
<font size="5"><center>The laughing 9/11 bombers</font size>
<font size="4">Exclusive film of suicide pilots at Bin Laden’s HQ </font size></center>
The Sunday Times (London)
Yosri Fouda
October 01, 2006
FILM of the ringleader of the September 11 hijackers reading his “martyrdom” will inside Afghanistan at Osama Bin Laden’s headquarters has emerged five years after the Al-Qaeda outrage.
It is the first time that a videotape has appeared of Mohammed Atta — who flew an American Airlines plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center — at a training camp in Afghanistan. It fills in a significant gap in the timing of the build-up to the attacks on the United States.
Dates on the tape show Atta was filmed on January 18, 2000, together with Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently stormed the flight deck.
The Sunday Times has obtained a copy of the video through a previously tested channel. The tape has no soundtrack and a US source said lip readers had tried without success to decipher what was being said.
Despite the deadly tasks the men had been assigned, they appear in high spirits, laughing and smiling in front of the camera. Only when Atta, with an AK-47 propped on a wall beside him, reads a document marked in Arabic “the will”, does he become solemn. Both are well groomed, without the haggard appearance of the identity mugshots issued after September 11.
The high quality, unedited film shows Bin Laden addressing his followers at the mud-walled complex near Kandahar. One of the main figures in the September 11 plot, Ramzi Binalshibh, is identifiable in the crowd, as is a bodyguard whose task was to kill Bin Laden with two bullets to the head if he faced capture.
Dating on the tape indicates that the Al-Qaeda leader was filmed on January 8, 2000, 10 days before Atta and Jarrah recorded their wills.
American and German investigators have struggled to find evidence of Atta’s whereabouts in January 2000 after he disappeared from Hamburg. The hour-long tape places him in Afghanistan at a decisive moment in the development of the conspiracy when he was given operational command. Months later both he and Jarrah enrolled at flying schools in America.
Investigators have also puzzled over the fact that unlike the rest of the hijackers — most of whom were young Saudi fundamentalists — Atta and Jarrah were well educated and appeared to fit into western society while studying in Germany. The video indicates how easily they slipped from a western identity to a fundamentalist one. It also shows up the subterfuge they maintained in Germany and America that they did not know each other, all part of evading detection.
Re: Conspiracy or Conspiracy Theory
<font size="5"><center>Chilling message of the 9/11 pilots</font size>
<font size="4">A video shows two of the world’s most infamous
terrorists joking and laughing while filming their ‘death wills’
at Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan. The journalist and
author Yosri Fouda explains the terrible significance of the new find </font size></center>
The Sunday Times (London)
October 1, 2006
Two bearded young men laugh and joke for the camera. They appear relaxed, well groomed, intelligent; they might be high-achieving students quietly celebrating an exam success. They look at a piece of paper and laugh some more.
What is so funny? Certainly not the piece of paper. There is Arabic script on it. Easily decipherable is the word “al wasiyyah”. This means “the will”.
It is the handwritten last testament of Ziad Jarrah, the lighter-haired and better-looking of the two young men. A well educated, middle-class Lebanese, he has been studying in Germany. So has his dark-haired companion, Mohammed Atta, also middle class and university educated, but born in Egypt. Atta has his will, too. Unsmiling, both men read them to camera.
These images are part of a videotape, nearly an hour long, that was filmed at Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan 6½ years ago. They are revealed today for the first time, and they are a missing chapter in the searing story of the attacks on America on September 11, 2001.
Atta led the team of 19 suicide attackers and flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Jarrah piloted United Airlines flight 93. His assigned target was Capitol Hill, but the plane crashed.
ATTA and Jarrah have never been pictured together before. Indeed, a key element of their tradecraft was that they steered clear of each other. They were leading figures in the September 11 story, not only because they flew the planes but also because they apparently had everything to live for. Unlike most of the other hijackers, who were mainly provincial Saudi fundamentalists, Atta and Jarrah fitted easily into western society.
To the Germans who knew them in Hamburg they seemed entirely normal. The tape explains this mistake. It would be hard to look less homicidal — until the camera pulls back and reveals that Atta is sitting next to an AK-47.
So the tape not only fills a gap in the story of September 11 but also provides chilling proof of the difficulty of fighting Islamic terrorism: these two “normal”, happy, unthreatening individuals turned out to have an explosive effect on the history of the 21st century.
The unedited video was passed to The Sunday Times through a previously tested channel. On condition of anonymity, sources from both Al-Qaeda and the United States have confirmed its authenticity. It has no sound — and lip-readers have failed to decipher it, according to a US source — but the images speak loudly for themselves.
The tape not only features Atta and Jarrah. It also gives a rare and intriguing sight of Bin Laden with his inner court.
It opens with 100 or so Al-Qaeda hardcore members sitting on the ground in the open air, obviously expecting something to happen. Among them are several children.
A very tall man surrounded by three armed bodyguards arrives in a sedate, presidential manner. It is Bin Laden, dressed in white from head to toe with an all-enveloping, light brown robe. He looks serene as he makes his way to a makeshift podium and beings to speak into a microphone.
The date recorded on this section of the video is January 8, 2000. That makes the occasion Eid al Fitr, the end of Ramadan.
There are a few recognisable faces among the audience, including Ramzi Binalshibh, Atta’s Hamburg flatmate who was later to become the co-ordinator of the September 11 attacks. And among the bodyguards is Abu Jandal, who was the only one with the authority to put two bullets in Bin Laden’s head if he was about to fall into enemy hands.
In the background are the tall mud-red walls of an impressive compound. It is clear that the location is part of a complex of about 80 buildings called Tarnak Farm in the desert near Kandahar airport. It was Bin Laden’s clan base during his Afghan sojourn — where he lived with his family and the inner core of Al-Qaeda.
American intelligence knew all about Tarnak Farm. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, “CIA officers were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that belonged to Bin Laden’s wives and the one where he himself was most likely to sleep”.
Less than two years before the video was recorded, the CIA had a plan to work closely with some of the local tribes to grab Bin Laden as he slept. It was a clear-cut, well rehearsed “perfect operation”, according to Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA Bin Laden unit at the time. But it was never executed and there is still controversy in America about who cancelled it.
TEN days after Bin Laden’s Eid speech, according to the date on the film, Atta and Jarrah read their martyrdom wills to the camera. This proof of their presence in Afghanistan at that time is just about the final main piece of the jigsaw: Atta, the man who decided zero hour on September 11 is for the first time on video, getting ready to record his “martyrdom” will.
Investigators have pieced together most of Atta’s life from his childhood as the son of a lawyer in Giza, northern Egypt, to the moment he boarded flight 11 — except for an unexplained absence from Hamburg in early 2000. The date on the tape perfectly corresponds with this.
Those who have been closely following the story had little doubt where Atta had been. Binalshibh told me, “Afghanistan, what else?” when I asked him during a secret meeting four years ago. But in their painstaking efforts to find the proof that connected the dots, US investigators and, especially, their German counterparts, have struggled with little more than circumstantial evidence and presumed facts.
This played nicely into the hands of conspiracy theorists, both in the Muslim world and in the West. Now the investigators have the proof, and only the flakiest of anti-American fantasists can go on claiming that Bin Laden, Atta, Jarrah and co had no hand in September 11.
We can now even reveal Atta’s itinerary. On November 29, 1999 he boarded Turkish Airlines flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, Turkey, where he changed to flight TK1056 bound for Karachi, Pakistan. From there he would have crossed into Afghanistan by road, most probably through Quetta. On the return journey, he left Karachi on February 24, 2000 by flight TK1057 to Istanbul where he changed to flight TK1661 to Hamburg. Five months later he entered the United States to start flight training.
Unedited, the extraordinary footage also gives us a glimpse into the superficially ordinary character of the man who would later spearhead the devastating terrorist attack.
Wearing western clothes — black trousers and a dark brown, zip-collared sweater with zigzag stripes — Atta appears uncomfortable putting on a typical Pashtun hat.
He gives a how-do-I-look glance at the camera. The hat goes off, on, off and he throws it away with wry smile. Ready now. He crosses his legs and picks up his handwritten will.
Cool, gathered and deliberate, Atta reads to camera for 10 minutes before the tape cuts to a collector’s item: Atta and Jarrah together for the first time on camera.
With his stylish glasses, the handsome Lebanese is wearing a white, Saudi-style robe but appears to have western clothes on underneath.
Smiling, laughing and exchanging remarks, they discuss Jarrah’s will as he holds it — a superb set-up shot. Jarrah then gets his seven-minute exclusive appearance to tell the camera his last words.
THE significance of even a single frame of any of the September 11 pilots in Afghanistan could not be overestimated, let alone the sudden appearance of nearly 6,000 frames of the two most important and most puzzling hijackers.
Distinctively the black sheep of the whole lot — plotters and hijackers — Atta and Jarrah came from the two most liberal Arab countries, both from the heart of their respective communities, both from middle-class families, both intelligent, pleasant and trusted wherever they went, and both with impressive educational track records. Jarrah went to a Christian school in Beirut; Atta advanced his English at The American University in Cairo.
Then they both had ambitions beyond what they thought their countries could offer. They both went to Germany; Atta in 1992 to end up preparing a masters degree in city planning; and Jarrah in 1996 to end up preparing his in aeronautical engineering.
Again, they both could not cease to impress. So much so that Professor Dittmar Machule, who taught Atta at the Technical University in Harburg, a quiet suburb of Hamburg, still cannot understand what happened to the brilliant student he used to pick to fill in for him in seminars whenever he was busy.
While they lived in Hamburg, Atta and Jarrah were never meant to be seen together in one place at the same time, almost certainly on instructions.
Atta lived with other members of the Hamburg cell in a small flat while Jarrah was kept apart in a nicer part of Hamburg, living with a girlfriend and drinking alcohol. Yet in Afghanistan they appear at ease in each other’s company.
When in mid-2000 they travelled to Florida, they were separate once again — even though they enrolled at flying schools that stood virtually next to each other.
If the appearance of this video solves one mystery, the big question about both Atta and Jarrah is still with us: how on earth did such impressive young men with everything to live for develop such a mindset? Neither was mad and neither was brainwashed. If anything at all they were both the antithesis of such naive and easy explanations.
One would confidently argue that someone of the calibre of Mohammed Atta would have been incapable of being brainwashed.
When Atta taped his will, he was not yet the leader of the hijackers. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the organiser of the plot, had earmarked two other men — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar — as his spearhead and had sent them to flight school in California. But he quickly changed his mind.
His protégés failed to live up to his expectations. One flight instructor actually called them “dumb and dumber”.
Much more importantly, Atta’s exceptional abilities had just been discovered.
<font size="5"><center>Chilling message of the 9/11 pilots</font size>
<font size="4">A video shows two of the world’s most infamous
terrorists joking and laughing while filming their ‘death wills’
at Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan. The journalist and
author Yosri Fouda explains the terrible significance of the new find </font size></center>
The Sunday Times (London)
October 1, 2006
Two bearded young men laugh and joke for the camera. They appear relaxed, well groomed, intelligent; they might be high-achieving students quietly celebrating an exam success. They look at a piece of paper and laugh some more.
What is so funny? Certainly not the piece of paper. There is Arabic script on it. Easily decipherable is the word “al wasiyyah”. This means “the will”.
It is the handwritten last testament of Ziad Jarrah, the lighter-haired and better-looking of the two young men. A well educated, middle-class Lebanese, he has been studying in Germany. So has his dark-haired companion, Mohammed Atta, also middle class and university educated, but born in Egypt. Atta has his will, too. Unsmiling, both men read them to camera.
These images are part of a videotape, nearly an hour long, that was filmed at Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan 6½ years ago. They are revealed today for the first time, and they are a missing chapter in the searing story of the attacks on America on September 11, 2001.
Atta led the team of 19 suicide attackers and flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Jarrah piloted United Airlines flight 93. His assigned target was Capitol Hill, but the plane crashed.
ATTA and Jarrah have never been pictured together before. Indeed, a key element of their tradecraft was that they steered clear of each other. They were leading figures in the September 11 story, not only because they flew the planes but also because they apparently had everything to live for. Unlike most of the other hijackers, who were mainly provincial Saudi fundamentalists, Atta and Jarrah fitted easily into western society.
To the Germans who knew them in Hamburg they seemed entirely normal. The tape explains this mistake. It would be hard to look less homicidal — until the camera pulls back and reveals that Atta is sitting next to an AK-47.
So the tape not only fills a gap in the story of September 11 but also provides chilling proof of the difficulty of fighting Islamic terrorism: these two “normal”, happy, unthreatening individuals turned out to have an explosive effect on the history of the 21st century.
The unedited video was passed to The Sunday Times through a previously tested channel. On condition of anonymity, sources from both Al-Qaeda and the United States have confirmed its authenticity. It has no sound — and lip-readers have failed to decipher it, according to a US source — but the images speak loudly for themselves.
The tape not only features Atta and Jarrah. It also gives a rare and intriguing sight of Bin Laden with his inner court.
It opens with 100 or so Al-Qaeda hardcore members sitting on the ground in the open air, obviously expecting something to happen. Among them are several children.
A very tall man surrounded by three armed bodyguards arrives in a sedate, presidential manner. It is Bin Laden, dressed in white from head to toe with an all-enveloping, light brown robe. He looks serene as he makes his way to a makeshift podium and beings to speak into a microphone.
The date recorded on this section of the video is January 8, 2000. That makes the occasion Eid al Fitr, the end of Ramadan.
There are a few recognisable faces among the audience, including Ramzi Binalshibh, Atta’s Hamburg flatmate who was later to become the co-ordinator of the September 11 attacks. And among the bodyguards is Abu Jandal, who was the only one with the authority to put two bullets in Bin Laden’s head if he was about to fall into enemy hands.
In the background are the tall mud-red walls of an impressive compound. It is clear that the location is part of a complex of about 80 buildings called Tarnak Farm in the desert near Kandahar airport. It was Bin Laden’s clan base during his Afghan sojourn — where he lived with his family and the inner core of Al-Qaeda.
American intelligence knew all about Tarnak Farm. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, “CIA officers were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that belonged to Bin Laden’s wives and the one where he himself was most likely to sleep”.
Less than two years before the video was recorded, the CIA had a plan to work closely with some of the local tribes to grab Bin Laden as he slept. It was a clear-cut, well rehearsed “perfect operation”, according to Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA Bin Laden unit at the time. But it was never executed and there is still controversy in America about who cancelled it.
TEN days after Bin Laden’s Eid speech, according to the date on the film, Atta and Jarrah read their martyrdom wills to the camera. This proof of their presence in Afghanistan at that time is just about the final main piece of the jigsaw: Atta, the man who decided zero hour on September 11 is for the first time on video, getting ready to record his “martyrdom” will.
Investigators have pieced together most of Atta’s life from his childhood as the son of a lawyer in Giza, northern Egypt, to the moment he boarded flight 11 — except for an unexplained absence from Hamburg in early 2000. The date on the tape perfectly corresponds with this.
Those who have been closely following the story had little doubt where Atta had been. Binalshibh told me, “Afghanistan, what else?” when I asked him during a secret meeting four years ago. But in their painstaking efforts to find the proof that connected the dots, US investigators and, especially, their German counterparts, have struggled with little more than circumstantial evidence and presumed facts.
This played nicely into the hands of conspiracy theorists, both in the Muslim world and in the West. Now the investigators have the proof, and only the flakiest of anti-American fantasists can go on claiming that Bin Laden, Atta, Jarrah and co had no hand in September 11.
We can now even reveal Atta’s itinerary. On November 29, 1999 he boarded Turkish Airlines flight TK1662 from Hamburg to Istanbul, Turkey, where he changed to flight TK1056 bound for Karachi, Pakistan. From there he would have crossed into Afghanistan by road, most probably through Quetta. On the return journey, he left Karachi on February 24, 2000 by flight TK1057 to Istanbul where he changed to flight TK1661 to Hamburg. Five months later he entered the United States to start flight training.
Unedited, the extraordinary footage also gives us a glimpse into the superficially ordinary character of the man who would later spearhead the devastating terrorist attack.
Wearing western clothes — black trousers and a dark brown, zip-collared sweater with zigzag stripes — Atta appears uncomfortable putting on a typical Pashtun hat.
He gives a how-do-I-look glance at the camera. The hat goes off, on, off and he throws it away with wry smile. Ready now. He crosses his legs and picks up his handwritten will.
Cool, gathered and deliberate, Atta reads to camera for 10 minutes before the tape cuts to a collector’s item: Atta and Jarrah together for the first time on camera.
With his stylish glasses, the handsome Lebanese is wearing a white, Saudi-style robe but appears to have western clothes on underneath.
Smiling, laughing and exchanging remarks, they discuss Jarrah’s will as he holds it — a superb set-up shot. Jarrah then gets his seven-minute exclusive appearance to tell the camera his last words.
THE significance of even a single frame of any of the September 11 pilots in Afghanistan could not be overestimated, let alone the sudden appearance of nearly 6,000 frames of the two most important and most puzzling hijackers.
Distinctively the black sheep of the whole lot — plotters and hijackers — Atta and Jarrah came from the two most liberal Arab countries, both from the heart of their respective communities, both from middle-class families, both intelligent, pleasant and trusted wherever they went, and both with impressive educational track records. Jarrah went to a Christian school in Beirut; Atta advanced his English at The American University in Cairo.
Then they both had ambitions beyond what they thought their countries could offer. They both went to Germany; Atta in 1992 to end up preparing a masters degree in city planning; and Jarrah in 1996 to end up preparing his in aeronautical engineering.
Again, they both could not cease to impress. So much so that Professor Dittmar Machule, who taught Atta at the Technical University in Harburg, a quiet suburb of Hamburg, still cannot understand what happened to the brilliant student he used to pick to fill in for him in seminars whenever he was busy.
While they lived in Hamburg, Atta and Jarrah were never meant to be seen together in one place at the same time, almost certainly on instructions.
Atta lived with other members of the Hamburg cell in a small flat while Jarrah was kept apart in a nicer part of Hamburg, living with a girlfriend and drinking alcohol. Yet in Afghanistan they appear at ease in each other’s company.
When in mid-2000 they travelled to Florida, they were separate once again — even though they enrolled at flying schools that stood virtually next to each other.
If the appearance of this video solves one mystery, the big question about both Atta and Jarrah is still with us: how on earth did such impressive young men with everything to live for develop such a mindset? Neither was mad and neither was brainwashed. If anything at all they were both the antithesis of such naive and easy explanations.
One would confidently argue that someone of the calibre of Mohammed Atta would have been incapable of being brainwashed.
When Atta taped his will, he was not yet the leader of the hijackers. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the organiser of the plot, had earmarked two other men — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar — as his spearhead and had sent them to flight school in California. But he quickly changed his mind.
His protégés failed to live up to his expectations. One flight instructor actually called them “dumb and dumber”.
Much more importantly, Atta’s exceptional abilities had just been discovered.
Re: Conspiracy or Conspiracy Theory
<font size="5">Chilling message of the 9/11 pilots
Par Two
</font size>
The perfect soldier was here and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could not have asked for more. I would even argue that had not Atta accidentally appeared on Khalid’s radar, the “aeroplanes operation”, as it is known to Al-Qaeda, may never have stood a chance of success.
Yosri Fouda is the chief investigative reporter for Al-Jazeera Television Pictures: The Sunday Times Tarnak Farm, near Kandahar, where Mohammed Atta’s video was shot, has a special place in the history of Al-Qaeda: it was once Osama Bin Laden’s personal kingdom within Afghanistan.
Exclusively Arab, it was home for Bin Laden’s wives and children, as well as for the elite fighters being trained for special operations. And, as we now know, for a few weeks in early 2000 it was home to Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers.
The farm, which covered about 100 acres, lay on a patch of desert about three miles south of Kandahar airport. It had originally been constructed by the Afghan government as an agricultural co-operative.
A mud-brick wall was built 10ft high to create a compound; inside there were about 80 one and two-storey buildings, including dormitories, storehouses, a small mosque and a building that Bin Laden converted into a medical clinic for his family and followers.
US intelligence knew Bin Laden, already a wanted terrorist, used Tarnak as his base, and in spring 1998 the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center began working on a plan to capture him at the compound, partly with the help of Afghan tribal fighters.
Afghans scouted and mapped the farm, and the CIA photographed it from space. The plan called for about 30 fighters to assemble at a staging post before driving to a second position a few miles from Tarnak.
From there the main raiding party would walk to the farm, arriving at 2am and avoiding minefields by crawling through drainage ditches. A second group would make its way towards the front gate, taking out the two guards as the main party attacked the group of huts where Bin Laden’s wives slept.
The plan was to bundle Bin Laden into a Toyota Land Cruiser and drive him to to a cave complex 30 miles away already stocked with food and water.
However, getting the plan accepted at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, was not straightforward. It was known that dozens of women and children lived in the compound, and security chiefs feared there would be many casualties.
By June 1998, much to the disappointment of the field officers responsible for devising the plan, nobody at a senior level within the CIA seemed willing to support it. Nor was there any support within the White House.
The plan was called off shortly afterwards. CIA abandoned plan to snatch Bin Laden from Afghan farm
Atta's journey to mass murder
September 1, 1968 Born in Kafr el-Sheikh in the Nile delta, Egypt
October 1986 Joined Cairo University to study town planning; graduated in 1990
July 24, 1992 Arrived in Germany on a cultural exchange programme
November 23, 1992 Registered for a master’s degree in urban planning at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg
End 1997 Thought to have travelled to Afghanistan for the first time, staying close to the compound of Osama Bin Laden near Kandahar
November 1, 1998 Moved into an apartment in Germany with other members of what later became known as the Hamburg cell. Many Al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times; the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed visited repeatedly. Ziad Jarrah, the flight 93 pilot with whom Atta is pictured above, moved close by at about the same time
November 29, 1999 Atta flew from Istanbul to Pakistan. From there he travelled to Afghanistan
January 2000 At Bin Laden’s Tarnak Farm he is filmed laughing and joking with Jarrah while filming his last will and testament
March 2000 From Germany, Atta contacted 31 US flight schools to discuss pilot training
June 3, 2000 Entered US for the first time
July 2000 Atta enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Jarrah trains at a flight school nearby
November 2000 Both earned their instrument certificates from the FAA
December 29, 2000 Atta practised on a Boeing 727 simulator in Miami
January 4, 2001 Atta flew to Spain to co-ordinate with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key Al-Qaeda planner, returning to America a week later
April 11 2001 Atta rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida, and assisted with the arrival of other hijackers
July-September 2001 Atta made eight or nine flights around America, some to meet other hijackers, some to carry out reconnaissance
August 28, 2001 Atta and other hijackers buy flight tickets for September 11
The other hijackers
• Nineteen men hijacked four planes. They acted in teams of five, except on United Airlines 93, which had four hijackers led by Jarrah
• Fifteen of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates. Atta came from Egypt, while Jarrah came from Lebanon. Only Atta and Jarrah were highly educated
• Four weeks before the attacks Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, had been arrested, ostensibly on immigration charges, after the FBI became suspicious about his pilot training
• He later denied knowing about the September 11 attacks, but did plead guilty to conspiring to hijack planes. He is serving life in a US prison
• It is thought that 18 of the 19 terrorists recorded video wills. Before this weekend only five had come to light and none from the four pilots
The attacks and the toll
• United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001. A total of 2,602 people died in the towers and on the ground
• American Airlines flight 77, carrying 64 people, crashed into the Pentagon shortly afterwards: 125 people died on the ground
• United Airlines flight 93 is thought to have been heading for Capitol Hill. But it crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Forty crew and passengers died
• There were no survivors from any of the planes, which were carrying 265 people. In total, the September 11 attacks are thought to have killed 2,973 people, although some others are still listed as missing
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2382788_1,00.html
<font size="5">Chilling message of the 9/11 pilots
Par Two
</font size>
The perfect soldier was here and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could not have asked for more. I would even argue that had not Atta accidentally appeared on Khalid’s radar, the “aeroplanes operation”, as it is known to Al-Qaeda, may never have stood a chance of success.
Yosri Fouda is the chief investigative reporter for Al-Jazeera Television Pictures: The Sunday Times Tarnak Farm, near Kandahar, where Mohammed Atta’s video was shot, has a special place in the history of Al-Qaeda: it was once Osama Bin Laden’s personal kingdom within Afghanistan.
Exclusively Arab, it was home for Bin Laden’s wives and children, as well as for the elite fighters being trained for special operations. And, as we now know, for a few weeks in early 2000 it was home to Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers.
The farm, which covered about 100 acres, lay on a patch of desert about three miles south of Kandahar airport. It had originally been constructed by the Afghan government as an agricultural co-operative.
A mud-brick wall was built 10ft high to create a compound; inside there were about 80 one and two-storey buildings, including dormitories, storehouses, a small mosque and a building that Bin Laden converted into a medical clinic for his family and followers.
US intelligence knew Bin Laden, already a wanted terrorist, used Tarnak as his base, and in spring 1998 the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center began working on a plan to capture him at the compound, partly with the help of Afghan tribal fighters.
Afghans scouted and mapped the farm, and the CIA photographed it from space. The plan called for about 30 fighters to assemble at a staging post before driving to a second position a few miles from Tarnak.
From there the main raiding party would walk to the farm, arriving at 2am and avoiding minefields by crawling through drainage ditches. A second group would make its way towards the front gate, taking out the two guards as the main party attacked the group of huts where Bin Laden’s wives slept.
The plan was to bundle Bin Laden into a Toyota Land Cruiser and drive him to to a cave complex 30 miles away already stocked with food and water.
However, getting the plan accepted at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, was not straightforward. It was known that dozens of women and children lived in the compound, and security chiefs feared there would be many casualties.
By June 1998, much to the disappointment of the field officers responsible for devising the plan, nobody at a senior level within the CIA seemed willing to support it. Nor was there any support within the White House.
The plan was called off shortly afterwards. CIA abandoned plan to snatch Bin Laden from Afghan farm
Atta's journey to mass murder
September 1, 1968 Born in Kafr el-Sheikh in the Nile delta, Egypt
October 1986 Joined Cairo University to study town planning; graduated in 1990
July 24, 1992 Arrived in Germany on a cultural exchange programme
November 23, 1992 Registered for a master’s degree in urban planning at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg
End 1997 Thought to have travelled to Afghanistan for the first time, staying close to the compound of Osama Bin Laden near Kandahar
November 1, 1998 Moved into an apartment in Germany with other members of what later became known as the Hamburg cell. Many Al-Qaeda members lived in this apartment at various times; the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed visited repeatedly. Ziad Jarrah, the flight 93 pilot with whom Atta is pictured above, moved close by at about the same time
November 29, 1999 Atta flew from Istanbul to Pakistan. From there he travelled to Afghanistan
January 2000 At Bin Laden’s Tarnak Farm he is filmed laughing and joking with Jarrah while filming his last will and testament
March 2000 From Germany, Atta contacted 31 US flight schools to discuss pilot training
June 3, 2000 Entered US for the first time
July 2000 Atta enrolled at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Jarrah trains at a flight school nearby
November 2000 Both earned their instrument certificates from the FAA
December 29, 2000 Atta practised on a Boeing 727 simulator in Miami
January 4, 2001 Atta flew to Spain to co-ordinate with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key Al-Qaeda planner, returning to America a week later
April 11 2001 Atta rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida, and assisted with the arrival of other hijackers
July-September 2001 Atta made eight or nine flights around America, some to meet other hijackers, some to carry out reconnaissance
August 28, 2001 Atta and other hijackers buy flight tickets for September 11
The other hijackers
• Nineteen men hijacked four planes. They acted in teams of five, except on United Airlines 93, which had four hijackers led by Jarrah
• Fifteen of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates. Atta came from Egypt, while Jarrah came from Lebanon. Only Atta and Jarrah were highly educated
• Four weeks before the attacks Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, had been arrested, ostensibly on immigration charges, after the FBI became suspicious about his pilot training
• He later denied knowing about the September 11 attacks, but did plead guilty to conspiring to hijack planes. He is serving life in a US prison
• It is thought that 18 of the 19 terrorists recorded video wills. Before this weekend only five had come to light and none from the four pilots
The attacks and the toll
• United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001. A total of 2,602 people died in the towers and on the ground
• American Airlines flight 77, carrying 64 people, crashed into the Pentagon shortly afterwards: 125 people died on the ground
• United Airlines flight 93 is thought to have been heading for Capitol Hill. But it crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Forty crew and passengers died
• There were no survivors from any of the planes, which were carrying 265 people. In total, the September 11 attacks are thought to have killed 2,973 people, although some others are still listed as missing
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2382788_1,00.html
Re: Conspiracy or Conspiracy Theory
[frame]http://infowars.net/articles/October2006/051006Rumsfeld.htm[/frame]
[frame]http://infowars.net/articles/October2006/051006Rumsfeld.htm[/frame]
Terror warning color chart and warning analysis
[RM]http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/CountdownTerrorNexus512K.wmv[/RM]
[RM]http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/CountdownTerrorNexus512K.wmv[/RM]
I just downloaded the episode and it's topnotch. I must have replayed REALLY?!? 10 times in a row(16 minute mark).
It almost seems like the retarded group is the 75% because we actually seriously engage the other 25%.
South Park just made it so obvious how kooks should be treated, like kooks.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VTUB0PT8
It almost seems like the retarded group is the 75% because we actually seriously engage the other 25%.
South Park just made it so obvious how kooks should be treated, like kooks.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VTUB0PT8
84% of Americans are kooks, the other 16% are sheep. We're all fucked.
[frame]http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/13469[/frame]
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/13469
[frame]http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/13469[/frame]
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/13469
Last edited:
many people on this board would make great politicians.
"not sure" and "hiding something(maybe level of incompetence)" is lumped in with "mostly lying," so obviously they are all similar.
that's not dishonest at all. not in the least.
so, are you running for local or federal office AH?
"not sure" and "hiding something(maybe level of incompetence)" is lumped in with "mostly lying," so obviously they are all similar.
that's not dishonest at all. not in the least.
so, are you running for local or federal office AH?
City council.
conspiracy theory
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all im sayin is go to the link below and read completely through the website, u will be amazed
http://www.loosechange911.com/
http://www.loosechange911.com/
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Bump
The Kean Commission
The Official Commission Avoids the Core Issues
In the fall of 2002, the "National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States" was established, partly in response to pressure from families of victims of the 9/11/01 attack. Originally, President Bush appointed Henry Kissinger, famous for his role in cover-ups and widely considered a war criminal, as chairman of the Commission. However, Kissinger soon stepped down in order to avoid answering questions about potential conflicts of interest, which would have required him to disclose secret clients. Kissinger was replaced by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, and Lee H. Hamilton was selected as the vice chair. Thereafter the body became commonly known as the "Kean Commission" or the "9/11 Commission". 1 2
Senator Max Cleland, who initially served on the Commission, was the only outspoken member. He compared the Kean Commission to the Warren Commission:
The Warren Commission blew it. I'm not going to be part of that. I'm not going to be part of looking at information only partially. I'm not going to be part of just coming to quick conclusions. I'm not going to be part of political pressure to do this or not do that. 3
Philip Zelikow: Calling the Shots
Chairs Kean and Hamilton served as the public face of the Commission. Their conflicts of interest should be concern enough, but the real work of the Commission was in the hands of Philip Zelikow, a fact documented by David Ray Griffin, in his book devoted to exposing biases, omissions, and distortions in the Commission: The 9/11 Commission Report; Omissions and Distortions.
... as executive director, Zelikow was in charge of the Commission's staff, and it was these staff members -- not the Commissioners we saw on television -- who did most of the actual work of the Commission. The Commissioners would have carried out their own distinctive work -- their discussions and interviews -- on the basis of the material provided by the staff. Kean and Hamilton refer to this fact in their statement that the "professional staff, headed by Philip Zelikow, ... conducted the exacting investigative work upon which the Commission has built"
(xvi-xvii). 6
Griffin enumerates some of Zelikow's many connections to the Bush White House:
* Member of the National Security Council of the Bush I administration
* Aid to National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft under Bush I
* Co-Author of book with Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor for Bush II
* Director of Aspen Strategy Group, to which Rice, Scowcroft, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz belonged
* Member of Clinton to Bush II transition team
* Member of Bush II's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, until being appointed to 9/11 Commission
Because of the determinative role of Philip Zelikow in the Commission's work, Griffin dubbed the Commission's final report the "Kean-Zelikow Report."
The Final Report
On July 22, 2004, the Commission published its final report, the 9/11 Commission Report, of which we provide a local mirror to remedy deficiencies in the format of the report published on the Commission's website. The Commission closed on August 21, 2004.
The "Omission Commission"
The 9/11 Commission has earned the designation of the "Omission Commission" due to its refusal to even consider the vast body of evidence contradicting the official narrative of the attack. For example, the Commission decided not to hear from any of the fire fighters who witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center. 7 (The body of oral history testimony from the FDNY and EMS personnel remained suppressed until after the Commission had closed the doors.) The agenda of the Commission to rubber-stamp the official story, evident in the conduct of its hearings, became crystal-clear with the publication of its final report. Our critique of the Report shows that it has some outright lies and contradictions, but its principal method for avoiding troublesome facts is through omission. In essence the Commission performs the magician's sleight of hand -- diverting attention from the many red flags in the official story by weaving a detailed narrative about the alleged hijackers, terror networks, and breakdowns in systems that were supposed to deal with the threat.
Relying On and Sponsoring Torture
An NBC News analysis publicized in early 2008 reported that the Commission Report was heavily based on interrogations that used "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding -- widely recognized as forms of torture. 8 The conclusions of the analysis included:
* Information derived from the interrogations was "central to the Report’s most critical chapters."
* A second round of interrogations in early 2004 was performed specifically to answer Commission questions, at the request of Commission officials.
* At least four subjects whose interrogation was relied on by the Commission have claimed that they provided "critical information" as a way to stop their torture.
* 441 of the more than 1,700 footnotes in the Report refer to the CIA interrogations.
* The second round of interrogations prompted by the Commission involved more than 30 separate interrogation sessions.
http://911research.wtc7.net/post911/commission/index.html
The Official Commission Avoids the Core Issues
In the fall of 2002, the "National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States" was established, partly in response to pressure from families of victims of the 9/11/01 attack. Originally, President Bush appointed Henry Kissinger, famous for his role in cover-ups and widely considered a war criminal, as chairman of the Commission. However, Kissinger soon stepped down in order to avoid answering questions about potential conflicts of interest, which would have required him to disclose secret clients. Kissinger was replaced by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, and Lee H. Hamilton was selected as the vice chair. Thereafter the body became commonly known as the "Kean Commission" or the "9/11 Commission". 1 2
Senator Max Cleland, who initially served on the Commission, was the only outspoken member. He compared the Kean Commission to the Warren Commission:
The Warren Commission blew it. I'm not going to be part of that. I'm not going to be part of looking at information only partially. I'm not going to be part of just coming to quick conclusions. I'm not going to be part of political pressure to do this or not do that. 3
Philip Zelikow: Calling the Shots
Chairs Kean and Hamilton served as the public face of the Commission. Their conflicts of interest should be concern enough, but the real work of the Commission was in the hands of Philip Zelikow, a fact documented by David Ray Griffin, in his book devoted to exposing biases, omissions, and distortions in the Commission: The 9/11 Commission Report; Omissions and Distortions.
... as executive director, Zelikow was in charge of the Commission's staff, and it was these staff members -- not the Commissioners we saw on television -- who did most of the actual work of the Commission. The Commissioners would have carried out their own distinctive work -- their discussions and interviews -- on the basis of the material provided by the staff. Kean and Hamilton refer to this fact in their statement that the "professional staff, headed by Philip Zelikow, ... conducted the exacting investigative work upon which the Commission has built"
(xvi-xvii). 6 Griffin enumerates some of Zelikow's many connections to the Bush White House:
* Member of the National Security Council of the Bush I administration
* Aid to National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft under Bush I
* Co-Author of book with Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor for Bush II
* Director of Aspen Strategy Group, to which Rice, Scowcroft, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz belonged
* Member of Clinton to Bush II transition team
* Member of Bush II's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, until being appointed to 9/11 Commission
Because of the determinative role of Philip Zelikow in the Commission's work, Griffin dubbed the Commission's final report the "Kean-Zelikow Report."
The Final Report
On July 22, 2004, the Commission published its final report, the 9/11 Commission Report, of which we provide a local mirror to remedy deficiencies in the format of the report published on the Commission's website. The Commission closed on August 21, 2004.
The "Omission Commission"
The 9/11 Commission has earned the designation of the "Omission Commission" due to its refusal to even consider the vast body of evidence contradicting the official narrative of the attack.
For example, the Commission decided not to hear from any of the fire fighters who witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center. 7 (The body of oral history testimony from the FDNY and EMS personnel remained suppressed until after the Commission had closed the doors.) The agenda of the Commission to rubber-stamp the official story, evident in the conduct of its hearings, became crystal-clear with the publication of its final report. Our critique of the Report shows that it has some outright lies and contradictions, but its principal method for avoiding troublesome facts is through omission. In essence the Commission performs the magician's sleight of hand -- diverting attention from the many red flags in the official story by weaving a detailed narrative about the alleged hijackers, terror networks, and breakdowns in systems that were supposed to deal with the threat.Relying On and Sponsoring Torture
An NBC News analysis publicized in early 2008 reported that the Commission Report was heavily based on interrogations that used "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding -- widely recognized as forms of torture. 8 The conclusions of the analysis included:
* Information derived from the interrogations was "central to the Report’s most critical chapters."
* A second round of interrogations in early 2004 was performed specifically to answer Commission questions, at the request of Commission officials.
* At least four subjects whose interrogation was relied on by the Commission have claimed that they provided "critical information" as a way to stop their torture.
* 441 of the more than 1,700 footnotes in the Report refer to the CIA interrogations.
* The second round of interrogations prompted by the Commission involved more than 30 separate interrogation sessions.
http://911research.wtc7.net/post911/commission/index.html
Video tapes were confiscated and key people were refused interviews, more case in point...
9/11 ON TRIAL
By Tony Rennell – Daily Mail, Saturday 6th August, 2005
Full Pages 36, 37 & 38, although NOT included on the Daily Mail web site.
The plot by America’s military bosses was devilish in both design and intent – to fabricate an outrage against innocent civilians, fool the world and provide a pretext for war. In the pentagon, a top secret team drew up a plan to simultaneously send up two airliners painted and numbered exactly the same, one from a civil airport in America, the other from a secret military airbase nearby.
The one from the airport would have military personnel on board who had checked in as ordinary passengers under false names. The one from the airbase would be an empty drone, a remote-controlled unmanned aircraft.
Somewhere along their joint flight paths, the passenger-carrying plane would drop below radar height, and disappear, landing back at the airbase and unloading its occupants in secret.
Meanwhile, the drone would have taken up the other plane’s designated course. High over the island of Cuba, it would be exploded in mid-air after broadcasting an international distress call that it was under attack from enemy fighters.
The world would be told that a plane load of blameless American holidaymakers had been deliberately shot down by Fidel Castro’s Communists – and that the US had no choice but to declare war and topple his regime.
This ‘agent provocateur’ plan – code named OPERATION NORTHWOODS and revealed in official archives – dates from 1962 when the Cold War was at its height.
Four decades later, there are a growing number of people who look back at this proto-conspiracy and then to the events of 9/11 and see uncanny and frightening modern parallels.
For Cuba, read Iraq, say these skeptics. For the dummy airliner, read the Twin Towers in New York.
The Northwoods plan is crucial to the argument presented in a hugely provocative – many would say fantastical – yet, at times, genuinely disturbing new analysis of 9/11 by two radical British based journalists, Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan.
Did the CIA actively help the hijackers?
In it, they examine various conspiracy theories that suggest the Bush administration connived in the devastating aerial attacks on New York and Washington four years ago.
The reason? To give Bush the excuse he wanted to push ahead with his secret, long-held plane to invade Iraq and capture its oilfields.
As we shall see. Many of the theories they raise are outlandish in the extreme. It would be easy to dismiss them as hokum, the invention of over-active imaginations among those whose instinct is always to find some way to blame America for the world’s ills.
Are we really supposed to believe that the CIA actively helped the hijackers succeed – or even that the US government staged the whole attack and itself murdered thousands of its own citizens?
Some would say that even in discussing suck notions, we are lending comfort to terrorists and doing a disservice to the dead.
However, much of evidence the authors present is undeniably compelling – and their arguments sound rather less preposterous in the light of OPERATION NORTHWOODS all those years ago. That plan was proposed in all seriousness by America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff in a memo to the Secretary of Defence. It got as far as the Attorney General – Robert Kennedy, brother of the president, John Kennedy, before being vetoed.
It is proof, says Henshall and Morgan, that forces at the top of the US Government are capable of conceiving a deadly, devious and fraudulent plan to further their own secret ends – even under such a supposedly ‘nice guy’ president as JFK.
In which case, can the idea of a 9/11 plot by those who serve the deeply mistrusted Bush really be ruled out with total certainty, without at least considering the arguments?
Of course, the official explanation for 9/11 is that Al Qaeda just got lucky that sunny morning in September 2001.
The terrorists conducted their attacks without outside help, by this account, and intelligence and other blunders by the US authorities that contributed to their terrible success – for example, ignored warnings that an attack involving aeroplanes was likely, or issuing US entry visas to 19 Islamic fanatics set on murder – were just that: blunders.
This is the White House’s version and it was endorsed by a Washington commission of inquiry under Thomas Kean published last year.
But, according to Henshall and Morgan, the story is full of gaping holes and unanswered questions. And the most startling question, which remains unresolved, they say, is why the hijackers’ principal target, the two 110-storey towers at the World Trade Centre in New York crumbled so easily.
No-one who watched each building suddenly cascade into dust and debris in just 20 seconds will ever forget the slow-motion horror. But now the question is asked: was it all too pat, too neat?
Though 30 years old, the towers had expressly been built to survive the impact of a Boeing 707, a plane the same size and carrying as much fuel as the ones that struck. That they collapsed after being hit and fell at such speed was unprecedented in the history of architecture. It astonished many engineers.
The official explanation is known as the Pancake Effect – steel supports melting in the intense fireball, causing the floors to tumble down on each other.
The problem here is that the heat from the explosions was probably not nearly as great as people tend to assume.
There was indeed a lot of kerosene from the aircraft fuel tanks when flight 11 from Boston hit the North Tower between the 94th and the 98th floors but pictures show that most of this fireballed outwards. Experts have questioned whether the fire ever got hot enough to melt the buildings’ steel frames.
Oddly, too, original estimates by firefighters after the second plane, Flight 175, hit the South Tower, were that the blaze was containable.
Two firefighters actually reached the crash zone on the 78th floor and a tape exists of them radioing down that just two hoses would be enough to get the fire under control – in which ca\se the situation should have been little different from a ‘normal’ office fire, and no steel tower ever collapsed as the result of such a blaze.
‘The fire wasn’t hot enough to cause a collapse’
Kevin R Ryan, laboratory director at a US underwriting firm specializing in product safety, was sacked from his job last year after questioning the official explanation.
“The buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by the burning jet fuel”, he said. “If steel did soften or melt, this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans.”
Intriguingly, Ryan claimed that his firm had checked and approved the steel used in the towers when they were built. This was later vehemently denied by the bosses who sacked him.
To add to the mystery, the tape of the two firemen was kept secret and when relatives were finally allowed to listen to it, they had to sign strict confidentiality agreements.
If the Pancake Effect theory is wrong, there’s one obvious alternative: that the towers were brought down by the sheer impact of the planes hitting them. But this, according to the skeptics, ignores basic physics.
The initial hit on the North Tower, for example, destroyed 33 of the 59 columns in its north face. This meant the damage was asymmetrical, so any resulting collapse would surely have been lopsided.
In fact, the building fell evenly. The TV aerial on the summit sank vertically, in a straight line.
There were other strange anomalies. According to the Kean Commission, when the first plane struck: ‘A jet fuel fireball erupted and shot down a bank of elevators, bursting into numerous lower floors, including the lobby level, and the basement four storeys below ground.’
Unlikely, say Henshall and Morgan. A firm by a French documentary crew, who by chance were following a New York firefighting team that day, shows the first men arriving. The lobby was covered in fine debris and the windows were shattered but there was none of the soot or oily residue that burning jet fuel would have left behind.
Meanwhile down in the basement, a 50-ton hydraulic press was reduced to rubble and a steel and concrete fire door demolished. Witnesses there said the destruction was less like that from a fireball flash and more like that from a bomb.
Some firefighters told reporters that day that they thought there had been bombs in the building – before apparently being silenced by their chiefs. So had Al Qaeda cleverly placed explosives inside the rowers as well as attacking them from the air?
Or, as conspiracy theorists would have it, had some homegrown agency mined the towers to make sure they fell – but neatly without collapsing over the rest of Manhattan, America’s financial and business heartland?
The authors quote an expert demolition contractor from Pennsylvania, Michael Taylor, who said the fall of the buildings ‘looked like a controlled demolition’.
Another expert, Van Romero, vice-president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, reached the same opinion after studying videos of the disaster, and concluded that ‘explosive devices inside the buildings’ caused them to collapse.
Strangely and without explanation, he recanted that view just ten days after going public with it. Might he possibly have been leaned on?
Even stranger, say Henshall and Morgan, was the collapse of a third building on the World Trade Centre site, a smaller 47-storey block known as WTC7, which was largely ignored by the world’s media.
It had not been hit by a plane yet it, too, mysteriously fell many hours after the Towers had gone.
The official explanation for this was that fuel stores caught fire as a result of debris from the burning towers, the building began to bulge in one corner, and after that it was unsalvageable.
But remember that, according to Henshall and Morgan, a steel-framed building had never collapsed as a result of a fire before this day. And, again according to the authors, WTC7 appears almost untouched by fire in photographs taken at the time.
The landlord of the World Trade Centre site, Larry Silverstein, explicitly suggested at one point that WTC7 was deliberately demolished. He told a US TV documentary that a decision was taken to ‘pull’ the building rather than risk loss of life, though this was later denied.
Certainly, according to Henshall and Morgan, the building’s fall in seven seconds was just as textbook-tidy and suspicious as the collapse of the Twin Towers. Given that it also housed offices of the US Secret Service, the CIA and the Defence Department, this has led conspiracy theorists to give it a key role in the supposed 9/11 plot – as we will see shortly.
Part of the whole problem, according to Henshall and Morgan, is that vital evidence about what happened was destroyed or muddied in the wake of the atrocity.
One expert said there were bombs inside the towers
Ground Zero, the base of the towers, was fiercely protected by the authorities – understandably so because it not only contained human remains but a cache of seized drugs held in an FBI office and more than $1 billion of gold from bank vaults in the Buildings.
Yet what went on behind all the heavy security?
After most air disasters, the wreckage of the planes is meticulously gathered up and pieced together in search of clues.
Extraordinarily, in the course of removing the rubble from the Twin Towers to a nearby landfill site, the 9/11 salvage operation seems to have ‘lost’ four six-ton aircraft engines, besides failing to find the ‘black box’ flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders from either of the planes.
These data boxes – which could have revealed exactly what happened in the doomed jets – are deliberately designed to withstand heavy impacts and exceptionally high temperatures. It is, according to experts, very rare for them not to be recovered after an accident.
Unfortunately, according Henshall and Morgan, there was a singular lack of official zeal even to establish the very basic fact that the aircraft that hit the Twin Towers were the same as those that took off from Boston.
Perhaps, with almost the entire world watching the attacks on TV, it hardly seemed necessary to prove the glaringly obvious. But this failure to follow standard procedures for accident investigation once again gave encouragement to the conspiracy theorists.
And then there was the oddity of the single passport. The black boxes may have been destroyed and steel girders melted – yet somehow one of the hijackers’ passports avoided this inferno and was found intact in a nearby street by ‘a passer-by’.
To Henshall and Morgan, that seems absurd, as does the almost instant identification of this person as a hijacker rather than a passenger or a Twin Towers office worker. Conspiracy theorists suspect the passport was planted to help establish the official story in the first, critical hours after the disaster.
Why didn't fighter planes intercept the hijackers?
Still more unanswered questions surround what happened at the Pentagon in Washington, in the third successful terrorist attack that day.
After taking off from Dulles Airport, Washington, American Airlines Flight 77 dropped off the radar screens for 36 minutes when its transponders sending signals back to air traffic control were switched off.
When the blip reappeared, it was closing on the city but where precisely the aircraft had been for the past half an hour was a mystery. Nor could anyone in air traffic control figure out what it was.
Experienced officials apparently watched its speed and maneuverability and thought it must be a military plane. Conspiracy theorists maintain this is precisely what it was.
In a repeat of New York, no evidence has ever been produced from the wreckage to prove that it was Flight 77 that hurtled into the side of the Pentagon at 350mph.
Photographs show that the hole it made was large enough for the fuselage of a Boeing 757 but not for the wings and the tail, though these supposedly disappeared through the gap and then vapourised.
For the conspiracy theorists, this points to a conclusion that what hit was not Flight 77, and not even a jetliner.
Some witnesses claim the plane they say hit the Pentagon was a small one, an eight – or 12-seater, and that it did not have the roar of an airliner but the shrill whine of a fighter plane, One witness is convinced it was a missile.
The authors say the matter could be cleared up by CCTV footage of the crash from a nearby filling station, a hotel and traffic surveillance cameras. Unfortunately, the FBI seized all three videos within minutes of the crash and they have never been released.
The hole in the Pentagon was too small for a Boeing
If they were produced, they might lay to rest the theory that what hit the Pentagon was a military drone painted in airline livery and that just before impact it fired a missile to enable a clean entry which would explain the lack of debris. But until they are, the skeptics will continue to have a field day.
In essence, to the extreme conspiracy theorists, what took place on 9/11 was a repeat of the aborted OPERATION NORTHWOODS.
Far from being an attack by Islamic terrorists, they say, the events were a complete hoax, a conjuring trick by the US government in just the same way that Kennedy’s generals wanted to fool the world over Cuba.
Planes were swapped, ‘drones’ slammed into the World Trade Centre (which was mined with explosives as well) and the Pentagon, and the identities of alleged hijackers from the Middle East were stolen or invented to put the blame on Al Qaeda.
Along with the ‘passengers’ who apparently boarded the planes, the ‘suicide hijackers’ are now either dead or living under different identities, just as the pentagon planned fro the military personnel it was going to use back in 1962.
The theory seizes on the fact that, like the plane that apparently hit the Pentagon, both Flight 11 and Flight 175 switched off their transponders on their way to the Twin Towers and disappeared from Radar screens. According to the skeptics, this gave them time and opportunity to land at the handily located Griffiss Air Force Base, a Pentagon command center which also houses research laboratories into advanced computers and radar. There, they were supposedly replaced by remote-controlled substitutes.
In technical terms, this is not as far fetched as it sounds. The US military experimented with unmanned aircraft as far back as World War II and there have been successful jet models since. Well-connected conspirators, so the theory goes, would have little difficulty getting their hands on a system to fit in an airliner.
The switch would supposedly be foolproof because, as we have seen, the aircraft in the ruins would not be properly identified.
Then there was the smaller building known as WTC7. It was the obvious point from which to run the New York end of the scam, guiding the planes into their target. Afterwards, of course, the evidence had to be destroyed, hence its demolition.
Taken as a rush, and without looking at the detail this might seem vaguely plausible. But could we really have been so totally and utterly conned?
Common sense says no. An operation of such intricacy and complexity would require the co-operation – and the silence until death – of thousands of people. Everything we have read about the victims on the planes, and their heartbroken relatives, would be a carefully constructed sham.
It might just be possible in a totalitarian society but surely not in a flawed yet robust democracy like America. And with four missions (the hijackers of the fourth plane, Flight 93, were overthrown by its passengers), not just one as in OPERATION NORTHWOODS? No.
To be fair to Henshall and Morgan, they make it clear that they themselves are not advocating such an extreme theory of empty planes and hoax attacks.
They admit the Pentagon’s radar reconstructions suggest the planes were not switched, and that alleged Al Qaeda ringleaders are said by their interrogators to have confirmed the official account.
Instead of retreating into fantasy, they simply insist that something is being held back – that we have not been told the full story. And it’s hard to discount all their arguments.
Why, they ask, were air traffic controllers so slow to report suspected hijackings to the military that day in breach of standard procedures, with the result that fighter planes arrived too late to intercept?
Flight controllers in four separate incidents were unaccountably slow to realize that something was wrong and alert the military authorities. Even after one plane was definitely known to have been hijacked, they failed to respond promptly when others went missing.
The air force scrambled from the wrong base
For some reason, too, when fighter planes eventually were scrambled to New York, they were from an airbase 150 miles away, rather than the much closer one in New Jersey. The Twin Towers were ablaze before they got there.
All the while the local TV channels were smoothly getting eye-in-the-sky helicopters into the air over the World Trade Centre. In the words of the authors: “Their routine mobilizations stand in stark contrast to the apparent impotence and indecisiveness of the $350-billion-a-year US military.
Yet for all the shortcomings of the Federal Aviation Authority and the US Air Force that day, no-one was ever fired or reprimanded.
One explanation for this paralysis is that there was, as fate would have it, an air defence exercise going on in US airspace that same day, codenamed Vigilant Guardian. The air traffic controllers were confused by this, thinking the planes disappearing from their screens might be part of the exercise.
Coincidence? No say the 9/11 sceptics. This was exactly the sort of smokescreen operation that anyone wanting to make life easier for the hijackers would launch to paralyse any authorities that might get in the way.
When the first evidence came that hijackings were taking place, traffic control officials wasted valuable time wondering whether or not this was part of the Vigilant Guardian exercise.
Suck a smokescreen fits well with two types of government-inspired plot postulated by 9/11 sceptics – popularly known as ‘LIHOP’ and ‘MIHOP’.
‘LIHOP’ – ‘Let It Happen On Purpose’ – holds that since the turn of the new century, radical right-wingers in Washington (the so-called new-cons) had been keen to get a US military presence in the Middle East oilfields and were also desperate to do something about Al Qaeda, which had been targeting US interests overseas.
When evidence came in of an impending terrorist attack, they decided to ignore it. They intended that it should succeed. It would act at the very least as a ‘wake-up’ call to their apathetic fellow countrymen and at best as an excuse for war.
In the much the same way, some historians believe, President Roosevelt knew in advance from broken codes about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 – but let it happen, at the cost of 2,400 lives, because he wanted an excuse to join World War II.
‘MIHOP” takes a step on from this – ‘Make it Happen On Purpose’. This theory has the same motivation but the active involvement of US agents. Planted in Al Qaeda, they helped organize the plot, or at the very least cleared a path for the hijackers.
These agents may even have tried to keep down casualty figures, which some think were suspiciously small in the circumstances.
The plane that hit the Pentagon was seen to swerve at the last minute and hit an area of the building that was largely unoccupied – and which had just been fitted with reinforced external walls and blast-resistant windows. A crash into the other side would have killed and maimed many thousands instead of just 125.
In New York, too, more than 50,000 inhabitants of the Towers were targeted but just 2,600 killed – not least because of the orderly way in which the buildings collapsed, after most of the occupants had been evacuated. Was this an example of a ‘managed’ atrocity?
For most observers, the idea of US involvement in the attacks still strains credulity beyond breaking point. Yet that catalogue of unanswered questions remains troubling.
Some are very basic. How, for example, did the hijackers manage to slip past airport security with weapons?
The White House explanation is plastic knives, but there has never been any independent confirmation of how the men were armed. Some passengers who made phone calls from the doomed planes said they witnessed stabbings but others spoke of bombs and even guns being used.
To some, the official recourse to ‘plastic knives’ smacks of a cover-up to conceal security lapses – or worse, a deliberate turning of blind eyes.
So how did the passengers make those phone calls?
Another problem here is those very phone calls from the planes. Experts in Henshall and Morgan’s book say it is all but impossible to make a mobile phone call above 8,000 feet – let alone four times that altitude, as the jet passengers are alleged to have done.
So how were these calls on which so much of the 9/11 narrative has been built ever made? Could they possibly have been invented?
The authors write: ‘Few issues cause as much controversy amongst 9/11 sceptics as these, not least because they were cited – by Tony Blair among others – as eyewitness reports and proof positive the official narrative was true.’
Doubts are even raised over the gung-ho story of Flight 93, the fourth plane in the attacks, which passengers apparently seized back from the hijackers, causing it to crash into a field but miss Washington.
The legend of the heroic cockpit-storming, launched to cries of ‘Let’s Roll’, was a product of tapes that have never been authenticated or released to anyone other than the victims’ relatives, who were sworn to secrecy.
Henshall and Morgan say the matter could be cleared up if recordings or billing evidence from phone companies were produced but they never have been.
This call for transparency is the thrust of their whole argument. It is time, they say, for a full and truly independent inquiry into 9/11 that will reveal all the facts and silence the rumours.
One thing it could consider would be the anthrax attack on America three weeks after 9/11. Five recipients of contaminated letters died, postal facilities were closed, as were office buildings on Capitol Hill where hundreds of lawmakers and staff were tested and given an antibiotic.
At the time, this was seized on by the Washington power-brokers pressing for action against Iraq. ‘Who but Saddam Hussein could have supplied Arab terrorists with anthrax,’ they asked.
By contrast, skeptics about 9/11 see this as this finishing touch to the grand plot – an attempt to distract attention from any doubts about the atrocities and the lessons to be learned from them.
They may have a case. The letters mysteriously stopped and the anthrax spores were identified by scientists as a particular strain stemming only from the government’s own labs in Maryland.
But by then the scare had shut down congress at a crucial time, when questions about 9/11 were beginning to surface, and helped deepen the mood of fear and paranoia among ordinary Americans.
It was those fears, say the skeptics, that Bush exploited to get his way on Iraq. Had he plotted it that way all along? Henshall and Morgan raise enough awkward points to make it a thought that cannot simply be laughed out of court.
After all, Bush and Blair, took us to war assuring us that ‘the Iraq regime continues to possess some of the most lethal weapons ever devised’. Yet those weapons of mass destruction have not been found and many doubt they existed.
With public trust one of the major casualties of the war, can any of us be absolutely sure we have not been caught up in a lie and perhaps a bigger one even than we ever though possible?
In their inquiries Henshall and Morgan may have discover no smoking guns – but they have certainly left a whiff of something sinister in the air.
http://www.financialoutrage.org.uk/911_mainstream_media.htm
9/11 ON TRIAL
By Tony Rennell – Daily Mail, Saturday 6th August, 2005
Full Pages 36, 37 & 38, although NOT included on the Daily Mail web site.
The plot by America’s military bosses was devilish in both design and intent – to fabricate an outrage against innocent civilians, fool the world and provide a pretext for war. In the pentagon, a top secret team drew up a plan to simultaneously send up two airliners painted and numbered exactly the same, one from a civil airport in America, the other from a secret military airbase nearby.
The one from the airport would have military personnel on board who had checked in as ordinary passengers under false names. The one from the airbase would be an empty drone, a remote-controlled unmanned aircraft.
Somewhere along their joint flight paths, the passenger-carrying plane would drop below radar height, and disappear, landing back at the airbase and unloading its occupants in secret.
Meanwhile, the drone would have taken up the other plane’s designated course. High over the island of Cuba, it would be exploded in mid-air after broadcasting an international distress call that it was under attack from enemy fighters.
The world would be told that a plane load of blameless American holidaymakers had been deliberately shot down by Fidel Castro’s Communists – and that the US had no choice but to declare war and topple his regime.
This ‘agent provocateur’ plan – code named OPERATION NORTHWOODS and revealed in official archives – dates from 1962 when the Cold War was at its height.
Four decades later, there are a growing number of people who look back at this proto-conspiracy and then to the events of 9/11 and see uncanny and frightening modern parallels.
For Cuba, read Iraq, say these skeptics. For the dummy airliner, read the Twin Towers in New York.
The Northwoods plan is crucial to the argument presented in a hugely provocative – many would say fantastical – yet, at times, genuinely disturbing new analysis of 9/11 by two radical British based journalists, Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan.
Did the CIA actively help the hijackers?
In it, they examine various conspiracy theories that suggest the Bush administration connived in the devastating aerial attacks on New York and Washington four years ago.
The reason? To give Bush the excuse he wanted to push ahead with his secret, long-held plane to invade Iraq and capture its oilfields.
As we shall see. Many of the theories they raise are outlandish in the extreme. It would be easy to dismiss them as hokum, the invention of over-active imaginations among those whose instinct is always to find some way to blame America for the world’s ills.
Are we really supposed to believe that the CIA actively helped the hijackers succeed – or even that the US government staged the whole attack and itself murdered thousands of its own citizens?
Some would say that even in discussing suck notions, we are lending comfort to terrorists and doing a disservice to the dead.
However, much of evidence the authors present is undeniably compelling – and their arguments sound rather less preposterous in the light of OPERATION NORTHWOODS all those years ago. That plan was proposed in all seriousness by America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff in a memo to the Secretary of Defence. It got as far as the Attorney General – Robert Kennedy, brother of the president, John Kennedy, before being vetoed.
It is proof, says Henshall and Morgan, that forces at the top of the US Government are capable of conceiving a deadly, devious and fraudulent plan to further their own secret ends – even under such a supposedly ‘nice guy’ president as JFK.
In which case, can the idea of a 9/11 plot by those who serve the deeply mistrusted Bush really be ruled out with total certainty, without at least considering the arguments?
Of course, the official explanation for 9/11 is that Al Qaeda just got lucky that sunny morning in September 2001.
The terrorists conducted their attacks without outside help, by this account, and intelligence and other blunders by the US authorities that contributed to their terrible success – for example, ignored warnings that an attack involving aeroplanes was likely, or issuing US entry visas to 19 Islamic fanatics set on murder – were just that: blunders.
This is the White House’s version and it was endorsed by a Washington commission of inquiry under Thomas Kean published last year.
But, according to Henshall and Morgan, the story is full of gaping holes and unanswered questions. And the most startling question, which remains unresolved, they say, is why the hijackers’ principal target, the two 110-storey towers at the World Trade Centre in New York crumbled so easily.
No-one who watched each building suddenly cascade into dust and debris in just 20 seconds will ever forget the slow-motion horror. But now the question is asked: was it all too pat, too neat?
Though 30 years old, the towers had expressly been built to survive the impact of a Boeing 707, a plane the same size and carrying as much fuel as the ones that struck. That they collapsed after being hit and fell at such speed was unprecedented in the history of architecture. It astonished many engineers.
The official explanation is known as the Pancake Effect – steel supports melting in the intense fireball, causing the floors to tumble down on each other.
The problem here is that the heat from the explosions was probably not nearly as great as people tend to assume.
There was indeed a lot of kerosene from the aircraft fuel tanks when flight 11 from Boston hit the North Tower between the 94th and the 98th floors but pictures show that most of this fireballed outwards. Experts have questioned whether the fire ever got hot enough to melt the buildings’ steel frames.
Oddly, too, original estimates by firefighters after the second plane, Flight 175, hit the South Tower, were that the blaze was containable.
Two firefighters actually reached the crash zone on the 78th floor and a tape exists of them radioing down that just two hoses would be enough to get the fire under control – in which ca\se the situation should have been little different from a ‘normal’ office fire, and no steel tower ever collapsed as the result of such a blaze.
‘The fire wasn’t hot enough to cause a collapse’
Kevin R Ryan, laboratory director at a US underwriting firm specializing in product safety, was sacked from his job last year after questioning the official explanation.
“The buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by the burning jet fuel”, he said. “If steel did soften or melt, this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans.”
Intriguingly, Ryan claimed that his firm had checked and approved the steel used in the towers when they were built. This was later vehemently denied by the bosses who sacked him.
To add to the mystery, the tape of the two firemen was kept secret and when relatives were finally allowed to listen to it, they had to sign strict confidentiality agreements.
If the Pancake Effect theory is wrong, there’s one obvious alternative: that the towers were brought down by the sheer impact of the planes hitting them. But this, according to the skeptics, ignores basic physics.
The initial hit on the North Tower, for example, destroyed 33 of the 59 columns in its north face. This meant the damage was asymmetrical, so any resulting collapse would surely have been lopsided.
In fact, the building fell evenly. The TV aerial on the summit sank vertically, in a straight line.
There were other strange anomalies. According to the Kean Commission, when the first plane struck: ‘A jet fuel fireball erupted and shot down a bank of elevators, bursting into numerous lower floors, including the lobby level, and the basement four storeys below ground.’
Unlikely, say Henshall and Morgan. A firm by a French documentary crew, who by chance were following a New York firefighting team that day, shows the first men arriving. The lobby was covered in fine debris and the windows were shattered but there was none of the soot or oily residue that burning jet fuel would have left behind.
Meanwhile down in the basement, a 50-ton hydraulic press was reduced to rubble and a steel and concrete fire door demolished. Witnesses there said the destruction was less like that from a fireball flash and more like that from a bomb.
Some firefighters told reporters that day that they thought there had been bombs in the building – before apparently being silenced by their chiefs. So had Al Qaeda cleverly placed explosives inside the rowers as well as attacking them from the air?
Or, as conspiracy theorists would have it, had some homegrown agency mined the towers to make sure they fell – but neatly without collapsing over the rest of Manhattan, America’s financial and business heartland?
The authors quote an expert demolition contractor from Pennsylvania, Michael Taylor, who said the fall of the buildings ‘looked like a controlled demolition’.
Another expert, Van Romero, vice-president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, reached the same opinion after studying videos of the disaster, and concluded that ‘explosive devices inside the buildings’ caused them to collapse.
Strangely and without explanation, he recanted that view just ten days after going public with it. Might he possibly have been leaned on?
Even stranger, say Henshall and Morgan, was the collapse of a third building on the World Trade Centre site, a smaller 47-storey block known as WTC7, which was largely ignored by the world’s media.
It had not been hit by a plane yet it, too, mysteriously fell many hours after the Towers had gone.
The official explanation for this was that fuel stores caught fire as a result of debris from the burning towers, the building began to bulge in one corner, and after that it was unsalvageable.
But remember that, according to Henshall and Morgan, a steel-framed building had never collapsed as a result of a fire before this day. And, again according to the authors, WTC7 appears almost untouched by fire in photographs taken at the time.
The landlord of the World Trade Centre site, Larry Silverstein, explicitly suggested at one point that WTC7 was deliberately demolished. He told a US TV documentary that a decision was taken to ‘pull’ the building rather than risk loss of life, though this was later denied.
Certainly, according to Henshall and Morgan, the building’s fall in seven seconds was just as textbook-tidy and suspicious as the collapse of the Twin Towers. Given that it also housed offices of the US Secret Service, the CIA and the Defence Department, this has led conspiracy theorists to give it a key role in the supposed 9/11 plot – as we will see shortly.
Part of the whole problem, according to Henshall and Morgan, is that vital evidence about what happened was destroyed or muddied in the wake of the atrocity.
One expert said there were bombs inside the towers
Ground Zero, the base of the towers, was fiercely protected by the authorities – understandably so because it not only contained human remains but a cache of seized drugs held in an FBI office and more than $1 billion of gold from bank vaults in the Buildings.
Yet what went on behind all the heavy security?
After most air disasters, the wreckage of the planes is meticulously gathered up and pieced together in search of clues.
Extraordinarily, in the course of removing the rubble from the Twin Towers to a nearby landfill site, the 9/11 salvage operation seems to have ‘lost’ four six-ton aircraft engines, besides failing to find the ‘black box’ flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders from either of the planes.
These data boxes – which could have revealed exactly what happened in the doomed jets – are deliberately designed to withstand heavy impacts and exceptionally high temperatures. It is, according to experts, very rare for them not to be recovered after an accident.
Unfortunately, according Henshall and Morgan, there was a singular lack of official zeal even to establish the very basic fact that the aircraft that hit the Twin Towers were the same as those that took off from Boston.
Perhaps, with almost the entire world watching the attacks on TV, it hardly seemed necessary to prove the glaringly obvious. But this failure to follow standard procedures for accident investigation once again gave encouragement to the conspiracy theorists.
And then there was the oddity of the single passport. The black boxes may have been destroyed and steel girders melted – yet somehow one of the hijackers’ passports avoided this inferno and was found intact in a nearby street by ‘a passer-by’.
To Henshall and Morgan, that seems absurd, as does the almost instant identification of this person as a hijacker rather than a passenger or a Twin Towers office worker. Conspiracy theorists suspect the passport was planted to help establish the official story in the first, critical hours after the disaster.
Why didn't fighter planes intercept the hijackers?
Still more unanswered questions surround what happened at the Pentagon in Washington, in the third successful terrorist attack that day.
After taking off from Dulles Airport, Washington, American Airlines Flight 77 dropped off the radar screens for 36 minutes when its transponders sending signals back to air traffic control were switched off.
When the blip reappeared, it was closing on the city but where precisely the aircraft had been for the past half an hour was a mystery. Nor could anyone in air traffic control figure out what it was.
Experienced officials apparently watched its speed and maneuverability and thought it must be a military plane. Conspiracy theorists maintain this is precisely what it was.
In a repeat of New York, no evidence has ever been produced from the wreckage to prove that it was Flight 77 that hurtled into the side of the Pentagon at 350mph.
Photographs show that the hole it made was large enough for the fuselage of a Boeing 757 but not for the wings and the tail, though these supposedly disappeared through the gap and then vapourised.
For the conspiracy theorists, this points to a conclusion that what hit was not Flight 77, and not even a jetliner.
Some witnesses claim the plane they say hit the Pentagon was a small one, an eight – or 12-seater, and that it did not have the roar of an airliner but the shrill whine of a fighter plane, One witness is convinced it was a missile.
The authors say the matter could be cleared up by CCTV footage of the crash from a nearby filling station, a hotel and traffic surveillance cameras. Unfortunately, the FBI seized all three videos within minutes of the crash and they have never been released.
The hole in the Pentagon was too small for a Boeing
If they were produced, they might lay to rest the theory that what hit the Pentagon was a military drone painted in airline livery and that just before impact it fired a missile to enable a clean entry which would explain the lack of debris. But until they are, the skeptics will continue to have a field day.
In essence, to the extreme conspiracy theorists, what took place on 9/11 was a repeat of the aborted OPERATION NORTHWOODS.
Far from being an attack by Islamic terrorists, they say, the events were a complete hoax, a conjuring trick by the US government in just the same way that Kennedy’s generals wanted to fool the world over Cuba.
Planes were swapped, ‘drones’ slammed into the World Trade Centre (which was mined with explosives as well) and the Pentagon, and the identities of alleged hijackers from the Middle East were stolen or invented to put the blame on Al Qaeda.
Along with the ‘passengers’ who apparently boarded the planes, the ‘suicide hijackers’ are now either dead or living under different identities, just as the pentagon planned fro the military personnel it was going to use back in 1962.
The theory seizes on the fact that, like the plane that apparently hit the Pentagon, both Flight 11 and Flight 175 switched off their transponders on their way to the Twin Towers and disappeared from Radar screens. According to the skeptics, this gave them time and opportunity to land at the handily located Griffiss Air Force Base, a Pentagon command center which also houses research laboratories into advanced computers and radar. There, they were supposedly replaced by remote-controlled substitutes.
In technical terms, this is not as far fetched as it sounds. The US military experimented with unmanned aircraft as far back as World War II and there have been successful jet models since. Well-connected conspirators, so the theory goes, would have little difficulty getting their hands on a system to fit in an airliner.
The switch would supposedly be foolproof because, as we have seen, the aircraft in the ruins would not be properly identified.
Then there was the smaller building known as WTC7. It was the obvious point from which to run the New York end of the scam, guiding the planes into their target. Afterwards, of course, the evidence had to be destroyed, hence its demolition.
Taken as a rush, and without looking at the detail this might seem vaguely plausible. But could we really have been so totally and utterly conned?
Common sense says no. An operation of such intricacy and complexity would require the co-operation – and the silence until death – of thousands of people. Everything we have read about the victims on the planes, and their heartbroken relatives, would be a carefully constructed sham.
It might just be possible in a totalitarian society but surely not in a flawed yet robust democracy like America. And with four missions (the hijackers of the fourth plane, Flight 93, were overthrown by its passengers), not just one as in OPERATION NORTHWOODS? No.
To be fair to Henshall and Morgan, they make it clear that they themselves are not advocating such an extreme theory of empty planes and hoax attacks.
They admit the Pentagon’s radar reconstructions suggest the planes were not switched, and that alleged Al Qaeda ringleaders are said by their interrogators to have confirmed the official account.
Instead of retreating into fantasy, they simply insist that something is being held back – that we have not been told the full story. And it’s hard to discount all their arguments.
Why, they ask, were air traffic controllers so slow to report suspected hijackings to the military that day in breach of standard procedures, with the result that fighter planes arrived too late to intercept?
Flight controllers in four separate incidents were unaccountably slow to realize that something was wrong and alert the military authorities. Even after one plane was definitely known to have been hijacked, they failed to respond promptly when others went missing.
The air force scrambled from the wrong base
For some reason, too, when fighter planes eventually were scrambled to New York, they were from an airbase 150 miles away, rather than the much closer one in New Jersey. The Twin Towers were ablaze before they got there.
All the while the local TV channels were smoothly getting eye-in-the-sky helicopters into the air over the World Trade Centre. In the words of the authors: “Their routine mobilizations stand in stark contrast to the apparent impotence and indecisiveness of the $350-billion-a-year US military.
Yet for all the shortcomings of the Federal Aviation Authority and the US Air Force that day, no-one was ever fired or reprimanded.
One explanation for this paralysis is that there was, as fate would have it, an air defence exercise going on in US airspace that same day, codenamed Vigilant Guardian. The air traffic controllers were confused by this, thinking the planes disappearing from their screens might be part of the exercise.
Coincidence? No say the 9/11 sceptics. This was exactly the sort of smokescreen operation that anyone wanting to make life easier for the hijackers would launch to paralyse any authorities that might get in the way.
When the first evidence came that hijackings were taking place, traffic control officials wasted valuable time wondering whether or not this was part of the Vigilant Guardian exercise.
Suck a smokescreen fits well with two types of government-inspired plot postulated by 9/11 sceptics – popularly known as ‘LIHOP’ and ‘MIHOP’.
‘LIHOP’ – ‘Let It Happen On Purpose’ – holds that since the turn of the new century, radical right-wingers in Washington (the so-called new-cons) had been keen to get a US military presence in the Middle East oilfields and were also desperate to do something about Al Qaeda, which had been targeting US interests overseas.
When evidence came in of an impending terrorist attack, they decided to ignore it. They intended that it should succeed. It would act at the very least as a ‘wake-up’ call to their apathetic fellow countrymen and at best as an excuse for war.
In the much the same way, some historians believe, President Roosevelt knew in advance from broken codes about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 – but let it happen, at the cost of 2,400 lives, because he wanted an excuse to join World War II.
‘MIHOP” takes a step on from this – ‘Make it Happen On Purpose’. This theory has the same motivation but the active involvement of US agents. Planted in Al Qaeda, they helped organize the plot, or at the very least cleared a path for the hijackers.
These agents may even have tried to keep down casualty figures, which some think were suspiciously small in the circumstances.
The plane that hit the Pentagon was seen to swerve at the last minute and hit an area of the building that was largely unoccupied – and which had just been fitted with reinforced external walls and blast-resistant windows. A crash into the other side would have killed and maimed many thousands instead of just 125.
In New York, too, more than 50,000 inhabitants of the Towers were targeted but just 2,600 killed – not least because of the orderly way in which the buildings collapsed, after most of the occupants had been evacuated. Was this an example of a ‘managed’ atrocity?
For most observers, the idea of US involvement in the attacks still strains credulity beyond breaking point. Yet that catalogue of unanswered questions remains troubling.
Some are very basic. How, for example, did the hijackers manage to slip past airport security with weapons?
The White House explanation is plastic knives, but there has never been any independent confirmation of how the men were armed. Some passengers who made phone calls from the doomed planes said they witnessed stabbings but others spoke of bombs and even guns being used.
To some, the official recourse to ‘plastic knives’ smacks of a cover-up to conceal security lapses – or worse, a deliberate turning of blind eyes.
So how did the passengers make those phone calls?
Another problem here is those very phone calls from the planes. Experts in Henshall and Morgan’s book say it is all but impossible to make a mobile phone call above 8,000 feet – let alone four times that altitude, as the jet passengers are alleged to have done.
So how were these calls on which so much of the 9/11 narrative has been built ever made? Could they possibly have been invented?
The authors write: ‘Few issues cause as much controversy amongst 9/11 sceptics as these, not least because they were cited – by Tony Blair among others – as eyewitness reports and proof positive the official narrative was true.’
Doubts are even raised over the gung-ho story of Flight 93, the fourth plane in the attacks, which passengers apparently seized back from the hijackers, causing it to crash into a field but miss Washington.
The legend of the heroic cockpit-storming, launched to cries of ‘Let’s Roll’, was a product of tapes that have never been authenticated or released to anyone other than the victims’ relatives, who were sworn to secrecy.
Henshall and Morgan say the matter could be cleared up if recordings or billing evidence from phone companies were produced but they never have been.
This call for transparency is the thrust of their whole argument. It is time, they say, for a full and truly independent inquiry into 9/11 that will reveal all the facts and silence the rumours.
One thing it could consider would be the anthrax attack on America three weeks after 9/11. Five recipients of contaminated letters died, postal facilities were closed, as were office buildings on Capitol Hill where hundreds of lawmakers and staff were tested and given an antibiotic.
At the time, this was seized on by the Washington power-brokers pressing for action against Iraq. ‘Who but Saddam Hussein could have supplied Arab terrorists with anthrax,’ they asked.
By contrast, skeptics about 9/11 see this as this finishing touch to the grand plot – an attempt to distract attention from any doubts about the atrocities and the lessons to be learned from them.
They may have a case. The letters mysteriously stopped and the anthrax spores were identified by scientists as a particular strain stemming only from the government’s own labs in Maryland.
But by then the scare had shut down congress at a crucial time, when questions about 9/11 were beginning to surface, and helped deepen the mood of fear and paranoia among ordinary Americans.
It was those fears, say the skeptics, that Bush exploited to get his way on Iraq. Had he plotted it that way all along? Henshall and Morgan raise enough awkward points to make it a thought that cannot simply be laughed out of court.
After all, Bush and Blair, took us to war assuring us that ‘the Iraq regime continues to possess some of the most lethal weapons ever devised’. Yet those weapons of mass destruction have not been found and many doubt they existed.
With public trust one of the major casualties of the war, can any of us be absolutely sure we have not been caught up in a lie and perhaps a bigger one even than we ever though possible?
In their inquiries Henshall and Morgan may have discover no smoking guns – but they have certainly left a whiff of something sinister in the air.
http://www.financialoutrage.org.uk/911_mainstream_media.htm
You raise a valid point, the columns were designed to support a lot of weight but once the collapse started, they didn't slow it down at all.
I'd like to help you prove your theory. Let's show just how simple it is. Here's what I want you do to. Take the maximum weight you can bench press, say for example 250 lbs. Erect a platform the height of about 13 feet, and drop it on your strong column like arms. Then tell us just how much your arms slowed it down (if you are still alive that is). Thank you for your cooperation in this experiment.
Any other theories I can help you prove?
Home / News / Nation
<font size="5"><center>US says one 9/11 mystery is solved
Report cites fire in building collapse</font size></center>
ROBERTO BOREA/AP FILE PHOTO
Conspiracy theorists have long
argued that fire and damage
from falling debris could not
have brought down the 47-story
trapezoid-shaped World Trade
Center Building 7. (ROBERTO
BOREA/AP FILE PHOTO)
Associated Press
By Devlin Barrett
August 22, 2008
GAITHERSBURG, Md. - Federal investigators said yesterday that they have solved a mystery of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories.
The 47-story trapezoid-shaped building sat north of the World Trade Center towers, across Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. On Sept. 11, as the North Tower collapsed, falling debris damaged Building 7 and ignited several fires inside. Skeptics have long argued that fire and debris alone could not have brought down such a large steel-and-concrete structure.
Scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology say their three-year investigation of the collapse has determined that the building was the first skyscraper ever to be brought down by a fire.
"The reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery," said Shyam Sunder, the team's lead investigator.
Investigators also concluded that the collapse of the nearby towers broke a city water main, leaving the sprinkler system in the bottom half of the building without water.
The building has been the subject of a wide range of conspiracy theories for the last seven years, partly because the collapse occurred about seven hours after the twin towers came down. That fueled suspicion that the building was intentionally brought down in a controlled demolition.
Mike Berger of the group 9/11 Truth said he wasn't buying the government's explanation.
"Their explanation simply isn't sufficient," he said, arguing that there is other evidence suggesting explosives were used on the building. "We're being lied to."
Sunder said his team investigated the possibility that an explosion inside the building brought it down but found there was no large boom or other noise that would have occurred with such a detonation. Investigators also created a giant computer model of the collapse, based partly on video footage from CBS News that they say shows internal column failure brought down the building.
Investigators also ruled out the possibility that the collapse was caused by fires from a substantial amount of diesel fuel that was stored in the building.
The 77-page report concluded that the fatal blow to the building came when the 13th floor collapsed, weakening a critical steel support column that led to catastrophic failure.
"When this critical column buckled due to lack of floor supports, it was the first domino in the chain," said Sunder.
A spokeswoman for the leaseholder of the World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein, praised the government's work.
"Hopefully this thorough report puts to rest the various 9/11 conspiracy theories, which dishonor the men and women who lost their lives on that terrible day," spokeswoman Dara McQuillen said.
Sunder, the lead investigator, acknowledged that some may still not be convinced, but he insisted the science behind their findings is conclusive.
"The public should really recognize the science is really behind what we have said," he said. "The obvious stares you in the face."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/08/22/us_says_one_911_mystery_is_solved/
<font size="5"><center>US says one 9/11 mystery is solved
Report cites fire in building collapse</font size></center>
ROBERTO BOREA/AP FILE PHOTO
Conspiracy theorists have long
argued that fire and damage
from falling debris could not
have brought down the 47-story
trapezoid-shaped World Trade
Center Building 7. (ROBERTO
BOREA/AP FILE PHOTO)
Associated Press
By Devlin Barrett
August 22, 2008
GAITHERSBURG, Md. - Federal investigators said yesterday that they have solved a mystery of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories.
The 47-story trapezoid-shaped building sat north of the World Trade Center towers, across Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. On Sept. 11, as the North Tower collapsed, falling debris damaged Building 7 and ignited several fires inside. Skeptics have long argued that fire and debris alone could not have brought down such a large steel-and-concrete structure.
Scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology say their three-year investigation of the collapse has determined that the building was the first skyscraper ever to be brought down by a fire.
"The reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery," said Shyam Sunder, the team's lead investigator.
Investigators also concluded that the collapse of the nearby towers broke a city water main, leaving the sprinkler system in the bottom half of the building without water.
The building has been the subject of a wide range of conspiracy theories for the last seven years, partly because the collapse occurred about seven hours after the twin towers came down. That fueled suspicion that the building was intentionally brought down in a controlled demolition.
Mike Berger of the group 9/11 Truth said he wasn't buying the government's explanation.
"Their explanation simply isn't sufficient," he said, arguing that there is other evidence suggesting explosives were used on the building. "We're being lied to."
Sunder said his team investigated the possibility that an explosion inside the building brought it down but found there was no large boom or other noise that would have occurred with such a detonation. Investigators also created a giant computer model of the collapse, based partly on video footage from CBS News that they say shows internal column failure brought down the building.
Investigators also ruled out the possibility that the collapse was caused by fires from a substantial amount of diesel fuel that was stored in the building.
The 77-page report concluded that the fatal blow to the building came when the 13th floor collapsed, weakening a critical steel support column that led to catastrophic failure.
"When this critical column buckled due to lack of floor supports, it was the first domino in the chain," said Sunder.
A spokeswoman for the leaseholder of the World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein, praised the government's work.
"Hopefully this thorough report puts to rest the various 9/11 conspiracy theories, which dishonor the men and women who lost their lives on that terrible day," spokeswoman Dara McQuillen said.
Sunder, the lead investigator, acknowledged that some may still not be convinced, but he insisted the science behind their findings is conclusive.
"The public should really recognize the science is really behind what we have said," he said. "The obvious stares you in the face."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/08/22/us_says_one_911_mystery_is_solved/
Home / News / Nation
<font size="5"><center>US says one 9/11 mystery is solved
Report cites fire in building collapse</font size></center>
ROBERTO BOREA/AP FILE PHOTO
Conspiracy theorists have long
argued that fire and damage
from falling debris could not
have brought down the 47-story
trapezoid-shaped World Trade
Center Building 7. (ROBERTO
BOREA/AP FILE PHOTO)
Associated Press
By Devlin Barrett
August 22, 2008
GAITHERSBURG, Md. - Federal investigators said yesterday that they have solved a mystery of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories.
The 47-story trapezoid-shaped building sat north of the World Trade Center towers, across Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. On Sept. 11, as the North Tower collapsed, falling debris damaged Building 7 and ignited several fires inside. Skeptics have long argued that fire and debris alone could not have brought down such a large steel-and-concrete structure.
Scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology say their three-year investigation of the collapse has determined that the building was the first skyscraper ever to be brought down by a fire.
"The reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery," said Shyam Sunder, the team's lead investigator.
Investigators also concluded that the collapse of the nearby towers broke a city water main, leaving the sprinkler system in the bottom half of the building without water.
The building has been the subject of a wide range of conspiracy theories for the last seven years, partly because the collapse occurred about seven hours after the twin towers came down. That fueled suspicion that the building was intentionally brought down in a controlled demolition.
Mike Berger of the group 9/11 Truth said he wasn't buying the government's explanation.
"Their explanation simply isn't sufficient," he said, arguing that there is other evidence suggesting explosives were used on the building. "We're being lied to."
Sunder said his team investigated the possibility that an explosion inside the building brought it down but found there was no large boom or other noise that would have occurred with such a detonation. Investigators also created a giant computer model of the collapse, based partly on video footage from CBS News that they say shows internal column failure brought down the building.
Investigators also ruled out the possibility that the collapse was caused by fires from a substantial amount of diesel fuel that was stored in the building.
The 77-page report concluded that the fatal blow to the building came when the 13th floor collapsed, weakening a critical steel support column that led to catastrophic failure.
"When this critical column buckled due to lack of floor supports, it was the first domino in the chain," said Sunder.
A spokeswoman for the leaseholder of the World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein, praised the government's work.
"Hopefully this thorough report puts to rest the various 9/11 conspiracy theories, which dishonor the men and women who lost their lives on that terrible day," spokeswoman Dara McQuillen said.
Sunder, the lead investigator, acknowledged that some may still not be convinced, but he insisted the science behind their findings is conclusive.
"The public should really recognize the science is really behind what we have said," he said. "The obvious stares you in the face."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/08/22/us_says_one_911_mystery_is_solved/
<font size="5"><center>US says one 9/11 mystery is solved
Report cites fire in building collapse</font size></center>
ROBERTO BOREA/AP FILE PHOTO
Conspiracy theorists have long
argued that fire and damage
from falling debris could not
have brought down the 47-story
trapezoid-shaped World Trade
Center Building 7. (ROBERTO
BOREA/AP FILE PHOTO)
Associated Press
By Devlin Barrett
August 22, 2008
GAITHERSBURG, Md. - Federal investigators said yesterday that they have solved a mystery of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories.
The 47-story trapezoid-shaped building sat north of the World Trade Center towers, across Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. On Sept. 11, as the North Tower collapsed, falling debris damaged Building 7 and ignited several fires inside. Skeptics have long argued that fire and debris alone could not have brought down such a large steel-and-concrete structure.
Scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology say their three-year investigation of the collapse has determined that the building was the first skyscraper ever to be brought down by a fire.
"The reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery," said Shyam Sunder, the team's lead investigator.
Investigators also concluded that the collapse of the nearby towers broke a city water main, leaving the sprinkler system in the bottom half of the building without water.
The building has been the subject of a wide range of conspiracy theories for the last seven years, partly because the collapse occurred about seven hours after the twin towers came down. That fueled suspicion that the building was intentionally brought down in a controlled demolition.
Mike Berger of the group 9/11 Truth said he wasn't buying the government's explanation.
"Their explanation simply isn't sufficient," he said, arguing that there is other evidence suggesting explosives were used on the building. "We're being lied to."
Sunder said his team investigated the possibility that an explosion inside the building brought it down but found there was no large boom or other noise that would have occurred with such a detonation. Investigators also created a giant computer model of the collapse, based partly on video footage from CBS News that they say shows internal column failure brought down the building.
Investigators also ruled out the possibility that the collapse was caused by fires from a substantial amount of diesel fuel that was stored in the building.
The 77-page report concluded that the fatal blow to the building came when the 13th floor collapsed, weakening a critical steel support column that led to catastrophic failure.
"When this critical column buckled due to lack of floor supports, it was the first domino in the chain," said Sunder.
A spokeswoman for the leaseholder of the World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein, praised the government's work.
"Hopefully this thorough report puts to rest the various 9/11 conspiracy theories, which dishonor the men and women who lost their lives on that terrible day," spokeswoman Dara McQuillen said.
Sunder, the lead investigator, acknowledged that some may still not be convinced, but he insisted the science behind their findings is conclusive.
"The public should really recognize the science is really behind what we have said," he said. "The obvious stares you in the face."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/08/22/us_says_one_911_mystery_is_solved/
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