Muscatine

Mobay, type in "Pennsylvania plane crash" and read the whole presentation of Wikipedia on flight 93.   If you still think this is all a conspiracy, you are hopeless. 

The conspiracy would have to include a whole bunch of people who work at United Airlines,  a bunch of air traffic controllers, all the people who were on the plane (or I suppose in your mind supposedly on the plane), the witnesses on the ground who saw the crash, the Pennsylvania first responders, the coroner, the lab technicians who identified the body parts, those who excavated the site, some in the military, Wikipedia and  some more.

Wikipedia does show an engine being excavated.  

Note also how far below ground the bodies were when recovered.

The black boxes were recovered.

You might note the angle of the plane when it hit the ground.   Most plane crashes are more horizontal and leave more debris on the surface.

I hope this gets you off of thinking this didn't happen.

this is just a few chapters at the website 9/11 hard facts.

flight 93

  This is one of the shortest of this paper's headings/chapters. But it is no less compelling. The 'official' story of UA Flight 93, a Boeing 757 that was supposedly brought down in a field in Shanksville, PA by a small group of passenger 'heroes', is so absurd that to even consider and talk about it logically is to give it more weight and efficacy than it deserves. We have been told that this aircraft was allowed to fly around the skies of the United States for 1 hour and 49 minutes AFTER the first confirmed hijacking of Flight 11 and the onset of a series of events that included the crashing of two separate airplanes into the two most high profile buildings in the country, and a third into the nation's military headquarters. If this official story is true, it means our multi-trillion dollar, state-of-the-art, sophisticated military apparatus was unable to locate, engage, and defend this country against an enemy Air Force composed of one - one single, lumbering, unmaneuverable, unarmed, United Airlines jumbo jet that wandered unseen through our heavily restricted airspace for almost two hours after the beginning of the worst domestic attack in the country's history. Imagine an enemy Air Force composed of highly trained, lethally armed, multiple squadrons of professional fighter jets attacking from strategically coordinated multiple directions.

Either our entire military industrial society is a mockery of a farce in which every federal politician and military officer should be brought to trial and held accountable for collusion, incompetence, and high treason, or the official story is untrue. Clearly the former is not possible, so what did happen to Flight 93? As with the rest of the 'official' narrative of 9/11, the government's story is directly contradicted by available evidence and eyewitness reports. As a result, a number of side theories have emerged on an array of different web sites and through a number of published papers. (Google 'Flight 93' for examples.) Some of these theories are compelling. Some are outlandish. But none are more absurd than the one the government has told - the one repeated ad nauseam without any critical analysis in the mainstream press over the past five years.

All available evidence and eyewitness reports point to either a missile or a bomb as cause for Flight 93's demise. So why is the government, again, fabricating a nonsensical narrative that so blatantly contradicts available facts and evidence? Why is the public, yet again, so willing and eager to believe such nonsense? Why are family members and members of the press who were finally allowed to listen to the tape of the cockpit voice recorder NOT allowed to listen to its last three minutes? Why were these same press and family members legally barred from taking notes or receiving a copy of the tape recording? Why has that tape not been made public for the rest of us to hear and scrutinize? Why do we just sit here and take these decrees and declarations from the 'authorities' when it is they who work for and stand accountable to us? We as a nation believe in and stake claim to a free, open, democratic, orderly, and accountable society. In what way are we demanding, exercising, and animating these rights?

Ultimately, what actually happened to Flight 93 - missile, bomb, passenger heroes, etc. - is not fundamentally significant to the question of government complicity in 9/11. Ultimately, what is most compelling, is the fact that the government lied. The airplane was allowed to fly around our airspace for almost two full hours after the onset of the attacks. Why? And why have we been told some absurd narrative of switched off transponders, lost aircraft, and military confusion? Why were we told the airplane crashed into a field because of the actions of a few 'heroes' when all available evidence points to a much simpler explanation? Why the lies? Why the convoluted fabrications? Why the lack of accountability? Clearly the truth about Flight 93 reveals something the government wants covered up. The task of pulling off those covers is ours.

bin laden 'confession' tapes

    Defenders of the 'official story' like to point out to the skeptics of 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden was caught on video proudly confessing to the crime in front of a group of his peers. The now famous 'confession' video was released in December of 2001 by the Department of Defense under growing international pressure to provide definitive proof tying Bin Laden to 9/11. And the defenders of the government's narrative present this oft-broadcast video as tidy proof of that narrative's validity. But as with so much of the 'evidence' covered at length in this paper, this 'definitive' proof is riddled with conflicting facts, quantum leaps in judgment, and, ultimately, inadvertent support not for the official story, but for the very skepticism about 9/11 that the 'proof' was meant to quell.

First of all, Bin Laden's initial reaction to 9/11 was not to take credit for the crime at all. In fact, he continually denied any involvement in 9/11 up until the 'confession' video was mysteriously presented. Almost no one in the U.S. has read Bin Laden's first statement in response to 9/11, which so conflicts the later 'confession'. Here it is, from September 17, 2001:

We've been asked to accept without question his other statements of 'confession'. So how do we make sense of the above statement? Or how do we make sense of his second public statement in regards to 9/11, given on October 16, 2001:

These comments obviously do not prove that Bin Laden did not orchestrate 9/11. But they do raise a crucial question. Why would a man spend six weeks denying a crime, then suddenly flip-flop 180 degrees and happily start taking responsibility for the originally denied crime? Most people - including scientists, CIA analysts, FBI, and other independent investigators, etc. - who have a working familiarity with the 'confession' video, know the answer to this question. And that is that the man in the video making the 'confession' is almost certainly not Osama Bin Laden, and the tape is a fake. The man shown in the video, though bearded, Arabic, and of darkish complexion, is much heavier than all known photos and videos of the actual Bin Laden. The man in the video is seen writing something down with his right hand. Bin Laden is well-known to be left-handed. And there are scores of other reasons to question the validity of the tape. In fact, "the FBI's page on bin Laden as a 'Most Wanted Terrorist' does not list him as wanted for 9/11, and when asked why, a FBI spokesman said, 'because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11'." (Debunking 9/11 Debunking, pg. 21, David Ray Griffin, Olive Branch Press, 2007.) For a detailed analysis on the bin Laden tapes, click here or here.

But even if we take the hypothesis, for the moment, that the tape is real, then the government would suddenly find itself subject to an even more damning series of questions than if the tape was a fake. Because according to a recent investigation by journalist Ed Haas, the Bin Laden 'confession' video was not, as originally reported, acquired in November 2001. It was acquired in late September 2001, before the invasion of Afghanistan commenced. And if this is true, George W. Bush and Tony Blair could find themselves in deep, deep trouble. Because if this September timeline of receiving the tape is true, based on well-established precedents of international law, Bush and Blair are subject to execution for crimes against humanity.

This is not hyperbole. At the Nuremberg Trials after WW II, the Nazi leaders who were found guilty and later hung for their crimes were not tried for genocide. No one in the world ever stood trial for genocide until 1996. They were simply tried and executed for starting 'wars of aggression'. And this is problematic for Bush and Blair. Because in late September 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan had not yet begun. Only the drumb-beats of war had begun, and capturing Osama Bin Laden was Bush and Blair's given pretext for this potential war. So in response and in an effort to avoid armed hostilities with the two most powerful nations on earth, the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan responded by saying if proof of Bin Laden's connection to 9/11 could be provided, they would turn him over to the Americans. And if, as Ed Haas so clearly details in his above report, the 'confession' video was acquired not in late November, but in late September, then this establishes outright that Bush and Blair had the unequivocal proof of Bin Laden's connection to 9/11 before the invasion of Afghanistan, meaning the war and all its destruction and death could have been avoided.

But as most scholars now agree, capturing Osama Bin Laden was never the actual reason the U.S. and Britain invaded Afghanistan. Gaining strategic and territorial access to the huge reserves of natural gas and energy in the Central Asian countries of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc., then linking a pipeline from those reserves through business friendly Pakistan to the Indian sub-continent, and through the twisted arm of Iran and annexed Iraq to connect with the Persian Gulf to the west in order to prop up certain allies of multi-national corporations competing on the 'free' and 'open' market - that was the point of the invasion of Afghanistan, and later Iraq. (Here's a map, connect the dots). And by any reasonable definition or interpretation of international law, these are not viable excuses to justify war. They are crimes against humanity, and wars of aggression. The very same laws officially violated by Nazi war criminals.

No wonder George Bush no longer spends much time thinking about Osama Bin Laden. Osama Bin Forgotten.

For more on the Haas report, the Bin Laden tapes, and related analyses, click here.

too grand a conspiracy

Was the involvement of just too many people required to pull off the so-called 'conspiracy theory' posited by the 9/11 Truth momvement? Defenders of the 'official story' say yes. They claim the theory is too far-fetched because it is a plan that would have had to involve far too many people, far too many 'conspirators' to so smoothly have been pulled off. The idea being that at some point one of the 'conspirators' would have talked and/or come forward and/or refused to participate, etc. Some debunking websites and papers even claim the conspiracy would have needed the involvement of hundreds of people all coordinated not only operationally, but in their deviousness as well. And at first glance, this seems a reasonable point to make.

But there are ultimately two main problems with the argument. Firstly, it does not in any way answer any of the hard, relevant evidence relating to the case and narrative of 9/11 covered in this paper that does point to some kind of conspiracy. Instead, it is simply a stated notion of disbelief. And secondly, there did not, in actual fact, need to be that many people involved with the overall vision, of every detail and every implication of the plan. There only needed to be a select few people at the top of the chain of command who knew exactly what was being carried out, where and how to create confusion, and why. The military and intelligence community is made up of people accustomed to following orders, without question. And many researchers who have spent time in the CIA and military intelligence have stepped forward into the 9/11 truth movement to explain the notion of 'compartmentalization'. A phenomenon and strategy that explains why not very many people need be in on the overall plan and execution of a covert operation for it to be successful.

"Compartmentalization is an organizational strategy analogous to the old parable of the blind men and an elephant -- each of the men is asked to describe what the elephant is, and all accurately describe their perception (trunk, tusk, legs, ears, tail, body), but none of them understand what the entire elephant is. Covert operations succeed by keeping most of the participants focused on their particular task, unaware of the full situation. Compartmentalization means that only key people in key places need to know what their role in a covert operation is -- others nearby might not be aware of those ensuring the success of the operation. This practice refutes the claim that too many people would have had to know about 9/11 for a conspiracy to allow it to have been possible."

So, in other words, one person turns a particular screw here, another punches up a computer war game over there, someone else is told to 'mock-up' a phantom airplane to challenge controllers involved in the war game over there, another is told to leak a piece of information next door, another is told to delete some damaging information to protect their department downstairs, a commander from a squadron is told by his superiors that communication has been lost with the Pentagon and to 'wait' for further orders, tapes and testimony from principals involved are either 'lost', 'classified', or outright destroyed, and a few at the top who do know exactly what is happening just go on stirring the pot of chaos and confusion, pumping out subsequent PR material through their public network of channels to rewrite the story into everyone's consciousness before anyone has recovered sufficiently from the 'shock and awe' to start connecting the disparate dots.

For the particularly heavy and devious work - like the planting of explosives in the Towers, the aeronautical maneuvers and modifications, etc. - is it such a stretch to think that foreign mercenaries, with no emotional investment whatsoever in the well-being of potential victims, and with ample experience in all sorts of covert intelligence and military operations could be brought in to carry out the dirty work? Conservative and Nationalist elements within Israel benefited as much from 9/11 as did our own Neo-Con faction. Surely the Mossad has amply trained operatives with enough experience in counter-intelligence, weaponry, and explosives to have pulled off the rigging of the Towers and other sensitive aspects of the mission. Especially if they were being aided and abetted by folks with high-level security clearance in our own government. And indeed, there are well-documented stories of multiple Israeli links to 9/11, including a group of Israeli nationals arrested for some very bizarre behavior on the morning of 9/11. "(Counterpunch) has put together a phenomenal synthesis of the highly suspicious Israeli intelligence activities in the U.S. on and before 9/11. An enormous network of 'art students', many of whom were located just blocks from the (alleged) 9/11 hijackers; and a small group of five or six Israeli intelligence operatives who were witnessed by many celebrating on a rooftop, with surveillance equipment, very soon after the first plane hit the Trade Center."

Fear and intimidation are effective silencing tools that keep important stories like this out of the mainstream press. (See the Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame story as an exposed example of how this intimidation works.) And surely this story of Israel's connection to 9/11 is worth pursuing. But there are certain stories that the elite decision makers of this country will simply not allow to be printed in the major U.S. newspapers. The control of the flow of information, whether overt or subversive, is an age-old art. Again, think of the lead-up to the Iraq War and all the important information and analysis that wasn't printed. Is it really such a stretch to think that certain rogue elements within our own government are here again engaged in similar campaigns of cover-up and misinformation, fully confident the corporate media will not investigate, nor hold them accountable? Has not this control and spin of information been manipulated by governments for centuries? Are we 'Americans' really so different than the rest of humankind and human history? Has not the Bush/Cheney Administration gotten virtually every point on their policy wish list checked off as a result of 9/11? Do not the people who benefited most from 9/11 hold positions of immense power up and down the ranks of public and private decision-making organizations throughout the world? Is not the story of 19 bearded Arab men under the direction of a man in a cave in Afghanistan thwarting a multi-trillion dollar defense industry armed only with box-cutters the absurd conspiracy theory in need of our skepticism and derision?

David Ray Griffin, one of the leading scholars in the 9/11 truth movement, in response to this same notion that the theory put forth by the 9/11 truthers is just too grand a conspiracy to pull off, wrote this: "Another popular argument is that in any 'vast conspiracy…there's the likelihood that someone along the chain would squeal.' Even this administration - (defenders of the official story argue) - 'could never have acquiesced in so much human slaughter and kept it a secret. Especially when so many people would have to have been involved.' Although this argument may seem strong at first glance, it becomes less impressive under examination.

"This argument is, for one thing, based partly on the belief that it is impossible for big government operations to be kept secret very long. However, the Manhattan Project to create an atomic bomb, which involved some 100,000 people, was kept secret for several years. Also, the United States provoked and participated in a civil war in Indonesia in 1957 that resulted in some 40,000 deaths, but this illegal war was kept secret from the American people until a book about it appeared in 1995. It also must be remembered that if the government has kept several other big operations hidden, we by definition do not know about them. We cannot claim to know, in any case, that the government could not keep a big and ugly operation secret for a long time.

"A second reason to question this a priori objection is that the details of the 9/11 operation would have been known by only a few individuals in key planning positions. Also, they would have been people with a proven ability to keep their mouths shut. Everyone directly complicit in the operation, moreover, would be highly motivated to avoid public disgrace and the death penalty. The claim that one of these people would have come forward by now is irrational.

"When people suggest that whistleblowers would have come forward, of course, they usually have in mind people who, without being complicit in the operation, came to know about it afterward, perhaps realizing that some order they had carried out played a part in the overall operation. Many such people could be kept silent merely by the order to do so, along with the knowledge that if they disobeyed the order, they would be sent to prison or at least lose their jobs. (see Kevin Ryan as an example of this) For people for whom that would be insufficient intimidation, there can be threats to their families. How many people who have expressed certainty about whistleblowers would, if they or their families or their jobs would be endangered by coming forward with inside information, do so?

"In any case, the assumption that 'someone would have talked,' being simply an assumption, cannot provide a rational basis for refusing to look directly at the evidence." (From, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, by David Ray Griffin, pg.s 20 - 21, Olive Branch Press, 2007.)

here's a good look at how your corporate media works!!!

The Media, Official Investigations, Debunkers, and other Misinformation

   As covered in the previous section of this paper, defenders of the 'official story' consistently say that a conspiracy of 9/11's magnitude would be impossible to pull off. That though perhaps dishonest and unlawful, not even the Bush regime would stoop this low. That Americans don't kill Americans, that governments don't have the sophistication to pull 'conspiracies' like this off, that there would be a definitive whistleblower, etc. etc. All of these comments are understandable. September 11 is a confusing and emotionally volatile subject, and suggesting that the government may have been involved only amplifies the confusion and emotionality. But unfortunately, general statements of belief in regards to one's personal assessment as to what the U.S. government would or would not do has nothing to do with answering the evidence uncovered by a reasonable investigation into the actual event.

One of the most common reactions from people when presented with the notion that 9/11 was an inside job is that surely one of the official 'investigations' would have discovered something peculiar, something sinister, something suspicious. But the truth is, the official reports and investigations are rife with mistakes, selective analysis, disinformation, and bad science. Remember what Cofer Black, head of Counter Terrorism for the CIA, said about the mother of all official investigations, the 9/11 Commission. "…there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about." There have been many official 'reports' and 'investigations' surrounding 9/11. All of them proved to have certain things they wanted to know about, and certain things they did not want to know about. Below is a list of these official and semi-official reports and investigations, with a response to them all.

A. The Media

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." - Former CIA Director William Colby

Defenders of the 'official story' argue all the time that if the 'conspiracy theory' I allude to in this paper was true, some intrepid reporter in the media would have caught wind of some aspect of the story, and blown the whole thing wide open. I will ignore for the moment the fact that there are independent reporters all over the world who have done exactly this, and assume that most people are speaking of the 'mainstream media' in the U.S. and its reporters. But the simple answer to this query is that 'mainstream media' is now Big Business, and as such, it has no vested interest in telling the story. It is part of a bigger system that is wholly invested in the official myth of 9/11. Like any system that lasts, it has built-in safety nets and mechanisms - not only to shape the behavior of people participating in its existing network, but also to readily expel any serious challenges to its basic structure. In case you are wary of this analysis, think of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame as one example. Write an article too critical of the Bush Administration, have your CIA operative wife outed by the Vice President. Who in the 'mainstream media' is going to take on a subject as epic as 9/11 if well-documented lies told by the leaders of our country to drag us into an illegal war cannot even be reported without harsh payback? The truth about 9/11 is too significant a challenge to the basic systematic structure of the society the 'mainstream media' participates in and benefits from. Bringing out this hard truth is not yet an acceptable possibility.

Think on it. For individual reporters, newspapers and broadcast stations alike to sell their 'product', they know they need ready access to the highest, most important levels of society and government. A government and a society they are supposedly watching over and reporting on. But the way the system works now, if you challenge the structure of the system too much, your access to its intricate workings will quickly get pulled, and you will quickly be shut out and ostracized. Snuffing out your ability to do the job you set out originally to do. The system supports itself in this way without anyone having to pull any devious strings. It is endemic to its very structure. The Valerie Plame example is but one revealing the harsh reality of how things now work. So who the hell in their right mind would want all the trouble? The media, well aware of the practical reality of this system, censors itself unconsciously, simply to avoid the bullying and recompense that will undermine their ability to make a living and feed their families.

In this way, the mass media has made itself dependent on 'official sources'. And what do we expect official sources to tell us about topics involving their own interests? In the case of 9/11, the official narrative has simply been repeated ad nauseam, over and over and over until the story, whether factual or not, has become self-evident simply through the process of repetition. Take the Iraq War and the question of Weapons of Mass Destruction as a proven example of this formula. How did we, and the self-styled 'kings' of the intrepid media like Tom Friedman of the NY Times, get duped into the Iraq War and the story of WMDs? Because the media no longer reports on facts. They repeat stories given to them by 'official sources' and report on what is said about facts.

In times past, the WMD story would have been written something like this: 'The Bush Administration has reported that Iraq is not only aggressively pursuing a WMD program, but this program is weeks away from completion and might very well result in an imminent mushroom cloud rising over New York or Washington or Tel Aviv. But the Bush Administration is full of crap, and here are the facts as to how and why.' Now, the media hides behind a veil of 'un-bias', claiming to give equal time and print to 'both' sides of a story (presumably Republican and Democrat), even if one side of the story is wholly without merit. This was never the intended function of the media. In an actual democracy, the media is not supposed to report stated facts, they are supposed to report on the validity and truth of those stated facts.

As a result of this changed atmosphere, elite members of society holding positions of power can now easily spin their tale of interest through sophisticated, well-planned public relations statements, press releases, talk show sound bite tours, fund raising dinners, whisper campaigns, exclusive 'leaks', meaningful winks, etc. Until you end up with the Orwellian circus we now have where Clear Sky Initiatives are certain to foul the air, and 'slam dunk' intelligence reports given by CIA Directors and repeated by respected Secretaries of State in front of U.N. General Assemblies are sure to be filled with gross errors, falsified information, manipulated intelligence, and flat-out lies that have resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands innocent Iraqi (and American) men, women, and children.

And almost ALL of what people know about 9/11 has been fed and filtered through this broken system. All of the media reports about 9/11, about the official investigations, the facts, the studies, etc., have come from well-planned, sophisticated, carefully worded official source material. Creating the present reality where the popularly understood narrative of 9/11 has come from the mouths of, and information provided by, the very people who have such a vested interest in keeping the actual truth from coming out. Look at the amount of information I have covered in this paper. Surely some of it is worth writing about and investigating. So why hasn't anyone in the 'mainstream media' even touched it? Because no official source in their right mind would step into this maelstrom. And no reporter will step in either without the backing of the now obligatory 'official source'. And so we are left with unquestioned investigations that a leading NYC fire official called 'a half-baked farce', and reports that one eminent scholar said 'reads like a 585-page cartoon'. Below is a list of the officially sanctioned source material that people in the media, and in the general public, so often cite, and the fatal problems endemic to each.

B. 9/11 Commission Report

The mother of them all. The one people cite all the time, saying that surely a 'bi-partisan/neutral' Congressional Committee would have uncovered any 'conspiracy plot'. This is an understandable theory and sentiment. But if we look at the record, we see that this Commission was a complete and utter whitewash. This is a committee that Cheney and Bush vigorously fought from being formed for well over a year. Why would the President and the Vice President resist the formation of a bi-partisan investigation into what is surely one of the gravest crimes committed against the United States? Committees to investigate Pearl Harbor, Kennedy's assassination, the Challenger disaster, were all formed within one week of the event. And yet Cheney and Bush fought hard to not investigate the events of 9/11 for more than a year. Why?

Even when the Committee was finally formed, it was absurdly under-funded and grossly mis-managed. The 9/11 Commission received a paltry $15 million for their 'investigation'. Compare that to the $40 million given to investigate Bill Clinton's oral sex escapade in the Oval Office 5 years earlier. The Commission was headed by Thomas Kean, director of oil giant Amerada Hess, co-chairman of Homeland Security Project, and a man with strong business ties to Saudis Khalid bin Mahfouz. Hardly a man likely to seriously challenge the Bush/Cheney (fellow oilmen) conclusions hammered into the public's consciousness over the previous year. Moreover, the executive director of the Commission, and the man in charge of determining its use of funds, direction of inquiry, etc., was Philip Zelikow. This is a man who wrote a book with Condaleeza Rice, now acts as one of her senior advisors, was a member of George W. Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and a member of the Bush-Cheney transition team after their first election. The conflicts of interest are glaringly obvious, and Philip Zelikow was hardly the man equipped for the hard-nosed, deliberate investigation 9/11 so deserved. (For a quick general overview of the rest of the Commission and their inherent inability to do any kind of serious, probing investigation, see this link.

As cited many times in this paper, Cofer Black, head of counter terrorism for the CIA, "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about." So it is hardly surprising that the Commission made fatal errors in judgment, ignored whole swaths of evidence, re-arranged facts to fit their working/given narrative, and produced a document that has served only to further confuse and divert a serious investigation into 9/11. Examples are ubiquitous. The Commission, though well aware of a July 10, 2001 meeting between Cofer Black, George Tenet, and Condaleeza Rice in which the CIA officers warned Rice of an impending al-Qaeda attack on American soil, failed to mention this meeting. They failed to mention the Able Danger military operation that had tagged Mohammed Atta as a serious terrorist threat one full year before 9/11. They failed to mention that WTC Building 7, a massive 47-story high-rise in downtown Manhattan that was not hit by any airplane, crumbled to the ground in a neat foot-print at virtually free-fall speed in the exact manner of a controlled demolition because of damage sustained solely from fire - a new discovery about the nature of iron and steel that engineers, wood burning stove owners, and chefs with their expensive steel frying pans across the world would surely be interested in hearing more about. They failed to account for the nature and speed of the Twin Towers' collapse. They failed to mention Norman Mineta's damning testimony of VP Dick Cheney's incriminating behavior in the White House Bunker on the morning of 9/11. They changed FAA response times and military contact narratives. They made up stories of phantom flights, crowded radar screens, and operational chaos within organizations that have air-tight standard operating procedures that, by all other accounts, were strictly adhered to on the morning of 9/11. They refused to listen to oral testimony from NYC firefighters who were present at Ground Zero. The Report lied, contradicted itself, and shaped its narrative through a systematic and continual omission of pertinent facts and evidence.

For a thorough, detailed, academic dismantling of the 9/11 Commission and its Report, see this link.

C. NIST Report

The National Institute of Standards and Technology was a government appointed agency charged with investigating the structural collapse of the World Trade Center. They have been touted as the group of engineers whose work and findings serve to wholly put to rest any notions of a 'conspiracy theory', positing that damage from the impact of the airplanes, and the subsequent fires, led to the scientifically explainable collapse of the Towers. To further this supposition, they first published a 10,000 page report, then a 250 page condensed version. All perhaps geared to look impressive and official from the outside looking in.

But if and when a curious individual actually bothers to read these reports, they will find a 'scientific' investigation that is almost comical in its approach. Most crimes are investigated and solved by collecting evidence, pouring over said evidence, testing all available hypotheses, plugging evidence into said hypotheses, and working from the bottom up to create a sensible narrative and explanation of events. NIST did the exact opposite. Almost no evidence was collected. The steel beams, girders, joists, panels, columns, perimeter plates, flooring, sub-basement material, etc. was quickly gathered, transported to ship yards in and around NYC, cut up, and shipped off to Asia where it was sold for recycling. While some engineers were allowed to 'tour' the site at Ground Zero, virtually NO evidence was collected for the NIST investigation.

In a gross violation of the scientific method, NIST was given a self-evident conclusion by its employers (the Unites States Government) - that 19 Arab hijackers flew airplanes into buildings, fires followed, and buildings collapsed - and they were told to figure out on computer models how this scenario was possible and explainable. What followed was a farcical, top-down investigation - where facts and variables were neatly arranged to reproduce given results. When the building fires in their computer models didn't burn hot enough to soften the Tower's steel, they simply added phantom variables to produce more oxygen and fuel. And like with the 9/11 Commission, all pertinent evidence that contradicted their desired results was simply ignored. For example, when NIST was questioned by certain scientists who discovered that their 10,000 page report STILL did not account for the Towers' impossible rate and method of collapse, NIST responded that their investigation studied the events leading up until the moment the Towers were 'poised for collapse'. Not beyond. Another in a long line of absurd responses that have proven so common to all the 'official' investigations.

There are a number of engineers and researchers who are eminently more qualified to speak to the specific anomalies of the NIST report than I. And I have provided links to their excellent, comprehensive work below. But it is worth mentioning something much simpler, something that can easily and simply undermine any authority NIST and its engineers may once have held. And it is the fact that these NIST engineers, whom defenders of the 'official story' so trust and laud as un-biased and thorough investigators, have now admitted that their first theory, the 'pancake collapse' theory showcased on NOVA, the Discovery Channel, in the NY Times, etc. for more than two years, has been proven wholly unreasonable and beyond scientific probability. NIST, without any sense of responsibility to explain their mistakes, has now simply agreed to scrap their first explanation, and they have moved on to a new 'pile driver' theory to replace their old theory, with all sorts of other fancy computer models, jargon, and convoluted narratives offered as proof. But if their first theory, paraded out with other similar computer graphics and plot lines, has been admitted fictitious and filled with errors, why are we now to believe the new and improved version of the story?

Perhaps 10,000 page reports, which the authors knew no one would read, simply serve to push peoples' doubts and minds away from alarming questions and inexplicable phenomena, charming the public with impressively long 'official investigations' and the protective cloak of 'science'. Regardless of how bad those reports and the science are. If this is the case, then NIST and the government have done a masterful job. But for those interested in actually looking into the report and investigation, the NIST documents and methodology serve to reinforce suspicions and doubts about the official stories and narratives of 9/11. The following two links are from two men who have actually combed through the reports. They are both excellent, thorough, and well-respected researchers. And what they find in their investigation of the NIST report is further proof that some conspirators within the U.S. government had to be involved in the planning and execution of 9/11.

D. NOVA Documentary

PBS television carries an ongoing scientific learning program called NOVA. NOVA featured an entire episode dedicated to explaining the reasons for the WTC Towers' collapse (they ignored Building 7). Many people, including members of my own family, cite this NOVA special as further proof of the viability of the 'official story', arguing that surely a group of benign scientists and producers from PBS are not involved in any conspiracy or cover-up. Well, no, clearly they are not. But their entire documentary, along with its state of the art graphics and long fact sheet, is based entirely upon the same initial computer modeling investigation used by NIST (see previous paragraph). NOVA spent months putting together a program and promoting a hypothesis, namely the 'pancake theory' structural collapse hypothesis, that has now been wholly dismissed by NIST and the government engineers who first authored it. If produced today, the NOVA special would never make it to air. Yet it is still used and cited by people working to debunk the 9/11 truth movement.

E. Popular Mechanics

In 2005, this magazine published a feature article "to refute the most persistent conspiracy theories of September 11." It then followed up with a book written from the same source material used in the article. Owned by the Hearst Corporation, Popular Mechanics put all its corporate weight into a nationwide promotional tour to sell the book, getting the book and its authors featured on many television and radio talk shows across the country. Popular Mechanics describes itself as "a service magazine covering a variety of information on home improvement, automotive needs, electronics, computers, telecommunications, etc." And while they are certainly free to write about whatever they want, these credentials hardly make them definitive experts on the array of intelligence, engineering, aeronautical, and military anomalies uncovered by the 9/11 truth movement.

But more importantly, Popular Mechanics carefully chose the most controversial aspects of the 'conspiracy theories' for their story, and hammered away at them as if they were the only salient points of the 9/11 truth movement worth addressing. As an example, only one of their 16 points chosen for the article and book would have in any way responded to the huge amount of evidence I presented in this one paper and website. They do not mention PNAC, the intelligence breakdowns, the Towers' explosive collapse, the aeronautical miracles, Cheney's behavior in the bunker, the problems of the freefall speed in the WTC building collapses, FAA air traffic controller testimony, firefighter testimony, lack of terrorists listed on passenger manifests, the atrocious work of the 9/11 Commission, video and eyewitness evidence of underground explosions, illegally destroyed evidence from Ground Zero, Steven Jones' thermite hypothesis, the power downs and evacuations in the Towers in the weeks before 9/11, Marvin Bush's security firm, Larry Silverstein's insurance policy, etc. etc. They do discuss WTC 7, but they cite 'classified' photos that the public has never seen, and make huge errors in assumption and calculation. The following are two links written by two different researchers, both in response to the selective work and research done by Popular Mechanics.

And in the spring of 2007, David Ray Griffin published his fifth book on the story of 9/11, this time a direct response to Popular Mechanics and other defenders of the 'official story'. It is entitled, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory. It is readily available online, or from Olive Branch Press.

F. Manuel Garcia/Counterpunch

In the periodical Counterpunch, scientist Manuel Garcia wrote three separate articles offering his expert opinion on many of the physics and structural questions and anomalies of 9/11 and the collapse of the WTC buildings. It should be noted that Garcia works for the Lawrence Livermore Lab. A famous California lab in charge of weapons development, making Garcia an employee of the U.S. government. While this does not bar Garcia from writing or offering his opinion, it is a fact worth noting nonetheless. More importantly, however, his research and analysis falls prey to the exact same problems and methodology found in ALL the other 'scientific' research into the matter.

G. Miscellaneous

There have been other articles written in major publications claiming to debunk the 'conspiracy theories'. One in Rolling Stone, another in the Nation, the American Thinker, etc. All of them are available online, and all of them suffer from the same lack of a comprehensive, working knowledge of the whole matrix of events in play. They all seem to share a general notion that people within the 9/11 truth movement are a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists. And they pick out certain aspects of the personalities within the movement to support their supposition. All typical reaction pieces. Where derogatory names are tossed about in order to discredit various authors and researchers, and very little data or information is specifically answered or accounted for. I, for one, am not a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Instead, in over two years of persistent research, I have simply uncovered a whole mountain of damning evidence that directly implicates some level of U.S. Government involvement in the planning and execution of the 9/11 plot. So far, in all the so-called debunking pieces, articles, and books, on all the debunking websites, in all the so-called investigations and official reports, NONE of the material I have raised in this paper has been coherently explained.

But I urge you not to believe me. Don't have any faith in me. Just use my research as background and one piece of the puzzle. Then look into it yourself. The information is out there. It takes a while to sift through it, but the story becomes clear rather quickly as to what questions have been answered, and what questions have been ignored. And it is the questions that have been ignored and left unanswered that prove, over and over, to be the most conclusive proof of, indeed, a high level conspiracy theory.

Just like with Copernicus and Galileo in the past, there will be scientific apologists, most of them working for the U.S. government, who will try to debunk the work of the 9/11 'truth movement'. This will go on, undoubtedly, for years. But all of them will fail. They may succeed for some time in swaying an uninformed public opinion to their side - like in the time of Copernicus and Galileo before, or with the more recent example of global warming - but over time they will fail. The truth cannot be suppressed forever. And people like Kevin Ryan, Steven Jones, and Jim Hoffman will be, one day, seen as visionaries. The question for the rest of us to answer is whether or not it will be too late for that truth to even be of any relevance anymore.

'Truth prevails, if at all, only after so much time has passed that it has become meaningless' - Michael Dibdin

9/11 politics