April 4, 2004
For those who have attempted to determine what really happened before, during and after September 11, 2001 and who have followed the tortured efforts of the bereaved families of the 9/11 victims to get at the truth, it is apparent that our leadership has engaged in intense efforts to keep essential information not only from the public but also from properly appointed investigators, including the commission that is currently investigating the events leading up to the attack upon the World Trade Center. The nine reasons set out below for disbelieving the official version of events are not in any particular order of importance and do not exhaust the field. Together, however, they cast serious doubt on any version of events that exclude either incompetency or complicity of the Bush administration.
Because the writer does not believe the official story of 9/11 in its entirety should not be taken to imply that he thinks he knows what really happened. The writer has suspicions, opinions, hypotheses, inferences, and conjectures, but cannot claim actual knowledge.
There is plenty of evidence that high officials in the Bush administration knew that a major terrorist attack was going down soon and that it had to do with the scheduled airlines. According to the New York Times, the Bush administration was warned on August 16, 2001 that Osama Bin Laden planned to hijack commercial aircraft. The administration was specifically briefed that Bin Laden planned to use explosives.
Newsweek reported that on September 10 top officials in the Pentagon suddenly cancelled travel plans for the next morning due to security concerns. Mayor Willie Brown got a call from airport security eight hours before the hijacking, warning him not to fly. Attorney General John Ashcroft was advised by the FBI prior to September 11 not to fly on any commercial aircraft for the rest of his term in office.
According to The Independent (UK), Sibel Edmonds, a former translater for the FBI with top-secret security clearance said she provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened. Further, she stated that Condoleezza Rice's denial that "we" received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles was an "outrageous lie."
Given the vast quantity of warnings and the action of administration and military officials in avoiding commercial air travel, one must conclude that the administration knew far more prior to September 11 that it is willing to admit.
References:
Administration foreknowledge:http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/nationworld/bal-te.rice29jul29,0,2620591.story?coll=bal-business-headlines
French warnings: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0222/ridgeway2.php
Mubarak warning: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D16F73B5E0C778CDDAF0894DA404482 (You must pay to get the entire article)
Israeli warning: http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$52PMOXQ AADW5PQFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2001/09/16/wcia16.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/09/16/ixhome
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=77744
British Intelligence warnings: http://www.sundayherald.com/24822
SF Mayor Willie Brown: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/09/12/MN229389.DTL
Ashcroft flying private: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/26/national/printable303601.shtml
Summary of references on TFF site: http://www.transnational.org/features/2004/911-links.html
Bush was informed shortly before entering a second grade classroom at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, that a plane had been flown into one of the World Trade Center buildings. While Vice President Cheney was being hustled into an undisclosed command station, the president chose to spend the next half hour in a photo op. After he had been sitting in the class for a while, he was informed that a plane had struck the second tower and that the nation was under attack. He showed no emotion and remained sitting in the classroom listening to the children tell a story about a goat for approximately seven more minutes, while the nation was under attack. He lingered after the children were finished.
After he left the classroom, he stayed at the school for another 20 minutes, talking to Washington and giving his planned address, before heading to the airport.
Frankly, this behavior on the part of the commander-in-chief in the face of an attack upon the U. S. homeland is inexplicable. What was going on here? He exhibited all the coolness of a Michael Corleone at a baptism. Draw your own conclusions.
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/index.jsp
During the long, painful flights of the four aircraft in question, not a single fighter jet intercepted them on the way to their destination, with the possible exception of Flight 93, which, by accounts of numerous eyewitnesses, exploded in the air above the Pennsylvania countryside before crashing to earth in pieces. This is simply impossible without monumental incompetence or intent.
Andrews AFB, just a short distance from the nations's capital, hosts a fighter squadron that is supposed to be in a state of readiness. Jets from Otis AFB and Langley AFB were dispatched too late to intercept the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, respectively. The delay in dispatching the planes has never been explained or accounted for. Tapes of the air traffic controllers have never been released. Given the fact that conversations between air traffic controllers, aircraft, and NORAD are recorded, the sequence of events that occurred on 9/11, including the precise times that information was passed from the controllers to NORAD and then to the operational units, is precisely determinable. That information has been denied to the American people.
By all reports, it took the both towers roughly ten seconds to fall completely to earth. A brick, dropped in a vacuum, will fall a distance s = 16*(t^2) feet, where t is the time in seconds and s is in feet. Solving this equation for t, we can determine the length of time it takes for a brick to fall s feet in a vacuum:
t = sqrt(s/16)
Given that the two towers were 1368 and 1362 feet high, it follows that a brick dropped from the top of either one of them would have taken 9.24 and 9.22 seconds respectively to fall to the ground in a vacuum. In the atmosphere it would have taken a little longer, due to air friction.
A building designed to withstand 160 m.p.h. winds and with a central support column designed to support several times the weight of the floors will offer significant resistance to a collapse of the upper floors. The idea that the top of the building would reach the ground in the same time as a free-falling brick is simply preposterous.
Secondly, the fact that the twin towers fell straight down into their own footprint (as well as Building 7), rather than falling over--due to the uneven destruction pattern caused by the aircraft--is inherently unbelievable. It was all too neat, too perfect.
A more detailed (but highly biased) discussion can be found at : http://www.attackonamerica.net/proofofcontrolleddemolitionatwtc.htm
Of all the strange events of September 11, the mysterious fall of WTC Building 7, about a block away from the towers, is the strangest of all. It is doubly strange because the fall has seldom been discussed in the media.
WTC7, a 47-story steel-frame skyscraper collapsed into its footprint at 5:20 PM on September 11. It was not struck by an aircraft, and at the most had several fires, presumably caused by falling debris from the two towers. A steel-frame, concrete skyscraper has never collapsed due to fire before or after 9/11.
For movies and a discussion of WTC7, see:
http://www.wtc7.net/
and especially the videos of the collapse at
http://www.wtc7.net/videos.html
Serious study of the sites (as well as casual photography) was forbidden and the ruins were, within a matter of a few weeks, hauled off. The steel was ultimately sold to overseas scrap metal firms. After the unprecedented collapse of three major skyscrapers, presumably due to fire, it is inconceivable that the ruins were not thoroughly examined, with detailed chemical analyses made.
It is clear that the authorities did not want the ruins analyzed, for reasons that can only be surmised.
The Bush administration and its Republican majority in Congress have used every possible excuse and legal device to foreclose a genuine investigation. The members of the 9/11 Committee are virtually all compromised. The administration has refused to allow key members to testify in public under oath, citing executive privilege. One can only conclude that the administration has much to hide.
By any measure, the 9/11 attacks represent the most massive and egregious security failure in the history of the United States. Consider what the attackers would have to accomplish in order to do what they are accused of doing:
- First they must enter the U.S., enroll in U.S. flight schools, learn to fly large, complex passenger jets and all the time must escape the watchful eye of the CIA, the FBI, the FAA, the INS and local law enforcement.
- Second, they must be funded from overseas from sources that would ordinarily attract the attention of the aforementioned agencies.
- Third, they must make it through airport security with weapons.
- Fourth, they must overpower the pilots of each airplane and seize control of the planes and then avoid interception by NORAD fighters;
- Fifth, and perhaps the most difficult, they must pilot large, complex machines into the two towers and the Pentagon, and they must do it visually.
The government agencies charged with the responsibility in each of these areas failed to detect any of these activities. Had the attackers been thwarted at any single one of those steps, there would have been no attack, period.
There were detection systems and procedures in place to do exactly that. All of them failed.
Normally--under the set of circumstances we have been given by the administration and echoed by the media-- the cause of the failures would be determined and the individuals responsible would be fired or demoted.
That hasn't happened. No one has been fired. No air traffic controllers, no NORAD personnel, no airport security--nobody. Nobody did anything wrong. There is no accountability within the system for the disaster.
As this is a nonsensical outcome, given the assumed facts, there are only two conclusions: 1) the administration at its highest level is composed of fools and idiots or, more darkly, 2) the "assumed" facts are not entirely true.
The government, through the media, has fed the public stories over and over which contradict each other and contradict common sense. The mental fog created by this cacophony of information has served well to obscure the real facts. An exhaustive (and exhausting) reconstruction of the disinformation campaign has been undertaken by Chaim Kupferberg and can be downloaded from the web site of the Centre for Research on Globalisation at
Truth, Lies and the Legend of 9/11