The 911 Consensus Project has developed a list of 37 questions that are designed to undo the lies the government and the media require us to believe to be admitted into polite society. Today I want to examine the first 20.
1) Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
FBI spokesman Rex Tomb said the FBI had no evidence linking Osama bin Laden to 911. Secretary of State Colin Powell, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the 9/11 Commission promised to provide evidence of Bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11. But they failed to do so.
2) The 911 Commission said: “Exhaustive investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, FBI, and other agencies have uncovered no evidence that anyone with advance knowledge of the attacks profited through securities transactions.”
A more comprehensive study, by professors at the Swiss Finance Institute and the Swiss Banking Institute, shows that 15 million dollars were likely obtained by insiders using put options for Boeing, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Bank of America stocks.
3) The Twin Towers were brought down by airplane impacts, jet fuel, and office fires.
Experience, based on physical observation and scientific knowledge, shows that office fires, even with the aid of jet fuel, could not have reached temperatures greater than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius).
But multiple scientific reports show that metals in the Twin Towers melted. These metals included steel, iron, and molybdenum – which normally do not melt until they reach 2,700˚F (1482˚C), 2,800˚F (1538˚ C), and 4,753˚F (2,623˚C), respectively.
Notes: WTC 7 was not hit by a plane and had no jet fuel to aid the fires. Thermite was invented in 1895. It is a metal oxide used by welders to cut metals. Nanothermite is available only from military sources. Nano particles have a large surface area and small volumes. Nanothermite can be sprayed on a target. Its small size let’s it burn quickly. Try 5,200 degrees Fahrenheit (2,871 Celsius) burning through steel girders in 2 seconds.
4) The Twin Towers were destroyed by three and only three causes: the impacts of the airliners, the resulting fires, and gravity.
During the destruction of the Twin Towers, huge sections of the perimeter steel columns, weighing many tons, were ejected horizontally as far as 500 to 600 feet, as seen in multiple photographs and maps.
These high-speed ejections of heavy structural members cannot be explained by the fires, the pull of gravity, or the airplane impacts (which had occurred about an hour earlier).
Human bone fragments4 approximately 1 cm long were found in abundance on the roof of the Deutsche Bank following the Towers’ destruction, which further points to the use of explosives. Pancaking or tamping of floors from above would tend to trap bodies, not hurl splintered bones over 500 feet horizontally.
5) NIST wrote as if no one – including members of the Fire Department of New York – gave evidence of explosions in the Twin Towers.
Over 100 of the roughly 500 members of the FDNY who were at the site that day reported what they described as explosions in the Twin Towers. Similar reports were given by journalists, police officers, and WTC employees.
6) On 9/11, the Twin Towers came down because of damage produced by the impact of the planes combined with fires ignited by the jet fuel. After burning for 101 and 56 minutes, respectively, the north and south towers came down rapidly but without the aid of explosives.
The Twin Towers were built to withstand the impacts of airliners having approximately the size and speed of those that struck them. And office fires, even if fed by jet fuel (which is essentially kerosene), could not have weakened the steel structure of these buildings sufficiently to collapse as suddenly as they did.
Only the top sections of these buildings were damaged by the impacts and the resulting fires, whereas their steel structures, much heavier towards the base, were like pyramids in terms of strength. So the official account, which ruled out explosives, cannot explain why these buildings completely collapsed.
7) Although NIST did not perform any tests to determine whether there were incendiaries (such as thermite) or explosives (such as RDX and nanothermite) in the WTC dust, it claimed that such materials were not present.
Unreacted nanothermitic material, “which can be tailored to behave as an incendiary (like ordinary thermite), or as an explosive,” was found in four independently collected samples of the WTC dust (as reported in a multi-author paper in a peer-reviewed journal).
8) The Claim That There Was No Molten Steel Or Iron in the WTC Buildings
According to the official account, the Twin Towers were brought down by airplane impacts and fire, and in the case of WTC 7, by fire alone. One implication of this account is that the destruction would have produced no molten steel — or iron, which is produced when steel is melted by certain substances, such as thermite): Structural steel does not begin to melt until it reaches about 1,482°C (2,700°F), and iron does not melt until it reaches 1,538°C (2,800°F). The fires ignited by the plane crashes, even with the help of jet fuel, could not have been hotter than 1,000°C (1,832°F), meaning that they would have been at least 1000 degrees F. cooler than what would be necessary to melt steel/iron. The presence of molten steel or iron, therefore, would have implied that the building steel had been melted by something other than the airplane impacts and the resulting fires.
The Official Account
There is no evidence that any molten steel or iron was found in any of the WTC buildings.
The NIST report showed that the Twin Towers were brought down by the airplane impacts and the resulting fires, which were ignited by jet fuel. WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane, was brought down by fire alone. There would, therefore, have been no reason for molten steel or iron to have been produced.
Molten steel or iron was not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, the NIST report about the Twin Towers, or the NIST report about WTC 7. This silence about molten steel or iron implies its absence.
The existence of molten steel (or iron) was inexplicitly denied by one of the authors of the NIST reports, engineer John L. Gross.[8] At a lecture at the University of Texas in October, 2006, Gross was asked a question about “a pool of molten steel,” to which he replied:
“Let’s go back to your basic premise that there was a pool of molten steel. I know of absolutely nobody — no eyewitnesses said so, nobody’s produced it.”
In a post-report publication (September 2011), NIST wrote: ”NIST investigators and experts from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEONY)—who inspected the WTC steel at the WTC site and the salvage yards—found no evidence that would support the melting of steel in a jet-fuel ignited fire in the towers prior to collapse.
Moreover, this report said:
The condition of the steel in the wreckage of the WTC towers (i.e., whether it was in a molten state or not) was irrelevant to the investigation of the collapse since it does not provide any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers were standing.
Finally, this report said:
Under certain circumstances it is conceivable for some of the steel in the wreckage to have melted after the buildings collapsed. Any molten steel in the wreckage was more likely due to the high temperature resulting from long exposure to combustion within the pile than to short exposure to fires or explosions while the buildings were standing.”
In summary:
1) The NIST reports attributed the collapses to jet fueled fires, which were not hot enough to produce molten steel or iron.
2) There was no evidence for molten steel or iron, and there was no reason to expect it.
3) Even if there had been molten steel or iron in the debris afterwards, it would have been irrelevant to the cause of the collapses.
The Best Evidence
Not one of those claims can be maintained:
1) The evidence of molten steel or iron cannot be called “irrelevant,” given the fact that the building fires, as NIST pointed out, cannot explain it. The only explanation NIST suggested was that, if there was molten steel or iron, it would have been “due to the high temperature resulting from long exposure to combustion within the pile.” But NIST claimed that the buildings were brought down by building fires, which at most could have reached 1,000°C(1,832°F.) So the idea that burning debris from these buildings could have reached anywhere close to the temperature needed to melt structural steel (1,482°C, 2,700°F), without the help of explosive or incendiary material, is implausible.
It is also unscientific. Physicist Steven Jones has written: “Are there any examples of buildings toppled by fires or any reason other than deliberate demolition that show large pools of molten metal in the rubble? I have posed this question to numerous engineers and scientists, but so far no examples have emerged. Strange then that three buildings in Manhattan, supposedly brought down finally by fires, all show these large pools of molten metal in their basements post-collapse on 9-11-2001. It would be interesting if underground fires could somehow produce large pools of molten steel, for example, but then there should be historical examples of this effect since there have been many large fires in numerous buildings. It is not enough to argue hypothetically that fires could possibly cause all three pools of orange-hot molten metal.” The fact that the pools metal had an orange color was crucial, Jones explained, because something had raised the temperature of iron to more than 2,000°C [3,632°F).
2) There were two types of evidence for molten steel or iron in the debris:
I. Physical evidence, which was presented in a 2002 report by FEMA and elsewhere.
II. Testimonial evidence from many credible witnesses, including firefighters and other professionals.
I. Physical Evidence
I-A. The 2002 FEMA Report
New York Times journalist James Glanz, writing near the end of 2001 about the collapse of WTC 7, reported that some engineers said that a “combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down,” but that this “would not explain,” according to Dr. Barnett, “steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures.”
Glanz was referring to Jonathan Barnett, a professor of fire protection engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Early in 2002, Barnett and two WPI colleagues published an analysis of a section of steel from one of the Twin Towers, along with sections from WTC 7, as an appendix to FEMA’s 2002 World Trade Center Building Performance Study.[14] Their discoveries were also reported in a WPI article entitled “The ‘Deep Mystery’ of Melted Steel,” which said:
“[S]teel – which has a melting point of 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit – may weaken and bend, but does not melt during an ordinary office fire. Yet metallurgical studies on WTC steel brought back to WPI reveal that a novel phenomenon – called a eutectic reaction – occurred at the surface, causing intergranular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese.”
Stating that the New York Times called these findings “perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation,” the article added:
“A one-inch column has been reduced to half-inch thickness. Its edges – which are curled like a paper scroll – have been thinned to almost razor sharpness. Gaping holes – some larger than a silver dollar – let light shine through a formerly solid steel flange. This Swiss cheese appearance shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to see distortion and bending – but not holes.”
In discussing “the deepest mystery,” the New York Times story said: “The steel apparently melted away, but no fire in any of the buildings was believed to be hot enough to melt steel outright.” That was an understatement, because a building fire, even with a perfect mixture of air and fuel, could at most reach 1,000°C (1,832°F). In fact, Professor Thomas Eagar of MIT estimated that the fires were “probably only about 1,200 or 1,300˚F [648 or 704°C].”
I-B. The RJ Lee Report
In May 2004, the RJ Lee Group issued a report, entitled “WTC Dust Signature,” at the request of the Deutsche Bank, in order to prove (to its insurance company) that the building was “pervasively contaminated with WTC Dust, unique to the WTC Event.” The report listed five elements in this signature, one of which was: “Spherical iron and spherical or vesicular silicate particles that result from exposure to high temperature.” This was the only statement about iron’s being modified by high temperature in this 2004 report.
However, RJ Lee had written an earlier report in 2003, entitled “WTC Dust Signature Study,” which contained much more about iron. It said: “Particles of materials that had been modified by exposure to high temperature, such as spherical particles of iron and silicates, are common in WTC Dust . . . but are not common in ‘normal’ interior office dust.” This 2003 version of the report even pointed out that, whereas iron particles constitute only 0.04 percent of normal building dust, they constituted an enormous amount of the WTC dust: 5.87 percent (meaning that there was almost 1,500 times more iron in the dust than normal). This earlier version also explicitly stated that iron and other metals were “melted during the WTC Event, producing spherical metallic particles.”
In addition, whereas the 2004 report did not use the word “vaporize,” this earlier version spoke of temperatures “at which lead would have undergone vaporization.” Accordingly, whereas the 2004 report referred to “high temperatures,” the earlier report indicated that the temperatures were not merely high but extremely high, because for lead to boil and hence vaporize, it must be heated to 1,749°C (3,180°F).
I-C. The USGS Report
In 2005, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) published a report entitled “Particle Atlas of World Trade Center Dust,” which was intended to aid the “identification of WTC dust components.” Among the components, it reported, were “metal or metal oxides” (which could not be distinguished by the USGS’s methods). “The primary metal and metal-oxide phases in WTC dust,” the report said, “are Fe-rich [iron-rich] and Zn-rich [zinc-rich] particles.” The report included a micrograph of an “iron-rich sphere.”
These iron-rich spherical particles – or “spherules,” as they are sometimes called – could only come about if iron is melted and then “sprayed into the air so that surface tension draws the molten droplets into near-spherical shapes.”
Accordingly, the USGS report mentioned (without explaining) the existence of particles in the dust that should not have been there, according to the NIST explanation of the collapses.
I-D. Report by the Steven Jones Group
NIST also ignored a third scientific report describing phenomena in the WTC dust that could have been produced only by extremely high temperatures. Entitled, in fact, “Extremely High Temperatures during the World Trade Center Destruction,” this report, written by Steven Jones and seven other scientists, pointed out the existence of particles in the dust that required even higher temperatures than those implied by the RJ Lee and USGS reports.
Jones and his colleagues performed tests using their own samples of WTC dust, which had been collected shortly after the destruction of the WTC – either very shortly afterwards or from the inside of nearby buildings (which means that the dust could not have been contaminated by clean-up operations at Ground Zero). They reported finding “an abundance of tiny solidified droplets roughly spherical in shape (spherules),” which were primarily “iron-rich . . . and silicates.” The iron-rich spherules would have required a temperature of 1,538°C (2,800°F). The silicates often contained aluminum, and aluminosilicate spherules, which were found in abundance in the dust, would have required a temperature of 1,450°C (2,652°F).
Iron could not have arisen from the steel alone and should not have been found in the rubble. The iron, which needs to be accounted for, is a byproduct of the thermite reaction.
Still more remarkable, the Jones group reported, was a spherule found in the dust that was not mentioned in USGS’s “Particle Atlas,” and which was obtained only through an FOIA request, namely, “a molybdenum-rich spherule,” which had been observed and studied by the USGS team. This information is remarkable, because molybdenum (Mo) is “known for its extremely high melting point”: 2,623°C (4,753°F). The presence of this molybdenum-rich spherulein the WTC dust was not mentioned by NIST, although it could have learned about it from the article by the Jones group or directly from the USGS.
II. Testimonial Evidence
II-A. Testimony from Firefighters:
New York Fire Department Captain Philip Ruvolo said: “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel, molten steel, running down the channel rails, like you’re in a foundry, like lava.”
Joe O’Toole, a Bronx firefighter who worked on the rescue and cleanup efforts, reported that one beam lifted from deep below the surface months later, in February 2002, “was dripping from the molten steel.”
New York firefighters recalled in the documentary film “Collateral Damages, “heat so intense they encountered rivers of molten steel.”
II-B Testimony from Other Professionals:
Leslie Robertson, a member of the engineering firm that designed the World Trade Center, said 21 days after the attack: “When we were down at the B1 level, one of the firefighters said, ‘I think you’d be interested in this,’ and they pulled up a big block of concrete and there was a, like a little river of steel, flowing.”
Ron Burger, a public health advisor at the National Center for Environmental Health who arrived at Ground Zero September 12, 2001, said: “Feeling the heat, seeing the molten steel, the layers upon layers of ash, like lava, it reminded me of Mt. St. Helen’s and the thousands who fled that disaster.”
In late fall 2001, Dr. Alison Geyh of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health reported: “Fires are still actively burning and the smoke is very intense. In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten steel.”
Joe Allbaugh, the Director of FEMA, said in an October 2001 interview on CBS: “It’s just too hot for rescuers to get into [some] areas. So we do not know yet what’s in those areas, other than very hot, molten material.”
Dr. Keith Eaton reported in Structural Engineer: “They showed us many fascinating slides . . . ranging from molten metal which was still red hot weeks after the event, to 4-inch thick steel plates sheared and bent in the disaster.”
Don Carson, a hazardous materials expert from the National Operating Engineers Union, said six weeks after 9/11: “There are pieces of steel being pulled out from as far as six stories underground that are still cherry red.”
II-C. Testimony from Other Credible Witnesses:
Greg Fuchek, vice president of a company that supplied computer equipment used to identify human remains, reported that “sometimes when a worker would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam would be dripping molten steel.”
Sarah Atlas, of New Jersey’s Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue, arrived at Ground Zero on September 11 and reported that “fires burned and molten steel flowed in the pile of ruins still settling beneath her feet.”
Tom Arterburn, writing in Waste Age, reported that the New York Department of Sanitation removed “everything from molten steel beams to human remains.”
Rebuttal of Official Claims: Summary
1. The claim that no evidence of any molten steel or iron was found in any of the WTC buildings is strongly refuted by three scientific reports, one from a government agency (USGS).
2. John Gross’s claim that “no eyewitnesses said” that there was molten steel (or iron) was strongly and repeatedly contradicted.
3. The claim that molten steel or iron would be irrelevant because it could have been produced in the combustion pile: This would mean claiming, with no scientific evidence and no plausibility, that combustion in an oxygen-starved pile of rubbish could have heated steel to at least 1500°C (2800° F).
4. With regard to the NIST claim that molten steel or iron is “irrelevant to the investigation of the collapse” because “it does not provide any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers [including WTC 7] were standing”: Given the fact that the molten steel or iron in the debris could not have been produced without incendiaries or explosives, the presence of either of them indicates that some of the steel was melted before, or during, the final moments of the collapses.
5. With regard to NIST’s statement in its post-report publication that there was no evidence for “the melting of steel in a jet-fuel ignited fire in the towers”: This is a statement that is truly irrelevant. The whole point is that the presence of melted steel and/or iron is an indication that the buildings must have been brought down by something other than fire.”
Conclusion
None of the official claims about the non-existence of molten iron or steel in the destroyed WTC buildings withstand scrutiny. The fact that the rubble contained steel or iron that had been melted shows that the buildings were destroyed by something other than fire and airplane impact. Especially dramatic evidence of various types was provided by several facts: that the original RJ Lee report showed that there was almost 1,500 times more iron in the dust than normal; that the rubble contained steel with gaping holes, manifesting a “Swiss cheese appearance” that shocked the three “fire-wise professors” from Worcester Polytechnic Institute; that lead had been vaporized; that molybdenum and been melted; and that the metal pools contained iron that had been heated, as shown by the orange color, above 2,000°C (3,632°F).
When all of this physical evidence is combined with the testimony about explosions from many types of professionals, the claim that the Twin Towers were brought down by nothing other than the airplane impacts and resulting fires is simply not credible.
9) Why Did the Twin Towers Collapse? The Seismic Evidence
Introduction
Seismic waves were detected at seismograph stations in New York and four neighboring states on September 11, 2001, during the period when WTC 1 and 2 (the North and South Towers) were struck by airliners and collapsed. Scientists at the Lamont Doherty-Earth Observatory (LDEO) at Columbia University published analyses of the seismographic data from the WTC, based on raw data from the Palisades, NY, station. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) relied upon the LDEO analysis in their publications on the events at the World Trade Center. The 9/11 Commission Report also cited the LDEO analysis, although it did not confirm LDEO’s analysis of plane-impact times, basing its own conclusions on ground radar data instead of seismic wave data.
But independent analyses have disputed LDEO’s conclusions and thereby the conclusions reached by FEMA and NIST. These independent analyses dispute even more the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission.
The Official Account
The seismic waves were caused by the airplane impacts into the Twin Towers and the resulting collapses of the buildings. The magnitudes of the airplane impact shocks at WTC 2 and WTC 1, respectively, were 0.7 and 0.9. The collapse of WTC 2 caused a shock of magnitude 2.1; the collapse of WTC 1 caused a shock of magnitude 2.3. The signals were used to determine accurately when the plane impacts and collapses occurred.
The Best Evidence
The results of independent research conflict with the conclusions by LDEO (Lamont Doherty-Earth Observatory) that the waves were caused by airplane impacts and resulting building collapses.
In 2006, engineers Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross showed that the plane impacts could not have caused the seismic signals attributed to them by LDEO, because they originated several seconds before the 9/11 Commission’s radar-based times of impact.
The seismic events, therefore, must have resulted from causes of a different type. The best (and probably only plausible) candidate for these causes would seemingly be explosions in the basements of the Twin Towers, for which there is abundant physical and testimonial evidence.
Although the present Point deals only with the seismic evidence, much of the physical and testimonial evidence is documented in Point TT-8: Why Did the Twin Towers Collapse? The Physical and Testimonial Evidence.
The conclusion of Furlong and Ross – that seismic evidence does not fit the official story (in any of its versions) – was reinforced in 2012 by a French geophysicist, Dr. André Rousseau, who reanalyzed the seismic wave data.
Rousseau concluded that the LDEO report is flawed in three significant respects:
The radar-based timing of the airplane impacts does not match the origin-times of the seismic waves (as indicated by the data);
The lack of explanation of why, although the two towers were destroyed in essentially the same way, the data show large differences between them in terms of released energy;
The frequencies of the waves are much too low to have been caused by plane impacts and building collapses (although they match those of underground explosions).
The Timing of the Wave Origins: LDEO in 2001 published a report giving the times at which four wave signals began. It correlated these times with the two airplane impacts and the two collapses. The LDEO researchers stated that they derived these times by calculation from the times the signals were received at the Palisades station. The 9/11 Commission Report, however, published very different impact times, based on ground radar data, which tracked the airplanes’ approaches to, and collisions with, the buildings. The differences are greatest with regard to WTC 1 (which was first): Rousseau, like Furlong and Ross, pointed out thatthe radar-based times, being approximately 15 seconds later than the times that could be plausibly inferred from the Palisades data, do not support the correlation of the seismic wave-forms with the plane impacts.
Event Magnitudes: “[I]t is strange that identical events . . . at the same location,” said Rousseau, “would have generated seismic sources of different magnitudes.”[11] This discrepancy occurred both for the plane impacts and the building collapses. For the two waves attributed by LDEO to the impacts, the magnitudes of the signals[12] are different (0.9 for WTC 1, 0.7 for WTC 2), despite the similarity of the two plane crashes into the virtually identical buildings. The signals assigned to the collapses of the Twin Towers also display significant differences (magnitudes 2.1 for WTC-2 and 2.3 for WTC-1), again despite the similarity of the events resulting in the disintegrations of the two essentially identical buildings. Although the difference between 2.1 and 2.3 might seem minor, the unique (logarithmic) way in which seismic events are measured means that a shock that registers a magnitude of 2.3 releases twice as much energy as a magnitude 2.1 event, so the discrepancy is too large to have been due to an error. Rousseau concluded that the waves had to have been caused by something else (which, given the evidence provided in Point TT-8, points to explosives).
Wave Frequencies: The frequencies of waves caused by plane impacts, reported Rousseau, are typically much greater – one to two orders of magnitude higher – than the frequencies of the waves that were, according to LDEO, caused by the plane impacts into WTC 1 and 2. That is, the frequencies of waves typically caused by plane impacts range from (roughly) 10 to 100 Hertz (Hz), whereas the waves that were said by LDEO to be caused by the plane strikes are on the order of only 1Hz. The idea that the seismic waves in question were caused by plane impacts was, therefore, highly unlikely. Furthermore, the recording equipment at Palisades had a range of only 0.6-5Hz, so it was incapable of recording waves generated by typical plane impacts.
Conclusion
The discrepancies described above indicate that the LDEO conclusions about the nature of the events that generated the signals recorded at Palisades cannot be correct. Most strikingly, the ground radar data, which is very precise, showed WTC 1 to have been struck 15 seconds later than the Palisades-recorded seismic activity, which LDEO scientists attributed to an airplane impact. The radar also shows WTC 2 to have been struck later than the seismic activity attributed to it. The seismic activity, therefore, must have been produced by something other than the crashes of the airliners into the two buildings.
Rousseau, like Furlong and Ross, provided reasons to conclude that the signals that the official story attributed to airplane impacts had actually been caused by something else – which, as evidence documented in Point TT-8 suggests, was shocks, explosive in nature, that had occurred at the bases of the buildings. Rousseau further demonstrated that the wave details themselves were characteristic of such explosions, not of plane impacts or building collapses.
10) Why Did the Twin Towers Collapse? The Physical and Testimonial Evidence
According to the various official versions of the destruction of the Twin Towers, the buildings were brought down by the impact of the airplanes and the resulting fires. But independent evidence – both physical and testimonial – challenges this conclusion.
The Official Account
The Twin Towers collapsed solely because of the impact of the airliners and the resulting fires. This conclusion was first reached by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report of 2002. It was reaffirmed by The 9/11 Commission Report of 2004. And it was then confirmed by the most extensive report, which was issued in 2005 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology {NIST), which later added: “NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition.” In particular, NIST said, “there was no evidence . . . of any blast or explosions in the region below the impact and fire floors.” (This qualification was important, because there could have been explosions caused by fires on floors where they were burning.)
The Best Evidence
A combination of testimonial and physical evidence shows the official story – in any of its versions – to be false. Mark Loizeaux, the head of Controlled Demolition, Inc., has been quoted as saying: “If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure.”
A combination of testimonial and physical evidence suggests that this was what happened.
Testimonial Evidence
Many firefighters and others reported explosions below the impact and fire floors. For example:
Genelle Guzman, the last survivor to be rescued from the WTC 1 rubble, reports that when she got down to the 13th floor some 20 minutes before the North Tower collapsed, she heard a “big explosion” and “[t]he wall I was facing just opened up, and it threw me on the other side.”
Firefighter Edward Cachi said: “As my officer and I were looking at the South Tower, it just gave. It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit. . . . [I]t went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down.”
Firefighter Kenneth Rogers said: “[T]here was an explosion in the South Tower [WTC 2]. . . . Floor after floor after floor. One floor under another after another and when it hit about the fifth floor, I figured it was a bomb, because it looked like a synchronized deliberate kind of thing.”
Stephen Evans, a New York-based correspondent for the BBC, said: “I was at the base of the second tower . . . that was hit. . . . There was an explosion. . . . The base of the building shook. . . . [T]hen there was a series of explosions.”
Firefighter Louie Cacchioli reported that upon entering the WTC’s lobby, he saw elevator doors completely blown out. “I remember thinking,” he said, “how could this be happening so quickly if a plane hit way above?” When he reached the 24th floor, he encountered heavy dust and smoke, which he found puzzling in light of the fact that the plane had struck the building over 50 stories higher.
There were also reports of explosions in the basements themselves. For example:
Janitor William Rodriguez reported that he and 14 others in the North Tower heard and felt an explosion below the first sub-level office before the aircraft impact, he said, the floor beneath his feet vibrated and “everything started shaking.” Seconds later, he added, “I hear another explosion from way above. . . . Although I was unaware at the time, this was the airplane hitting the tower.” In any case, he said, co-worker Felipe David, who had been in front of a nearby freight elevator, came into the office with severe burns on his face and arms yelling, “explosion! explosion! explosion!”[10]
Rodriguez’s account was corroborated by José Sanchez, who was in the workshop on the fourth sub-level. Sanchez said that he and a co-worker heard a big blast that “sounded like a bomb,” after which “a huge ball of fire went through the freight elevator.”
Engineer Mike Pecoraro, who was working in the North Tower’s sixth sub-basement, said that after an explosion he and a co-worker went up to the C level, where there was a small machine shop. “There was nothing there but rubble,” said Pecoraro. “We’re talking about a 50 ton hydraulic press – gone!” They then went to the parking garage, but found that it was also gone. Then on the B level, they found that a steel-and-concrete fire door, which weighed about 300 pounds, was wrinkled up “like a piece of aluminum foil.”
Moreover, if there were explosions in the basements of the towers before they came down, we would expect them to have caused the ground to shake. And several people did, in fact, report shaking.
Medical technician Lonnie Penn said that just before the collapse of the South Tower, “I felt the ground shake, I turned around and ran for my life. I made it as far as the Financial Center when the collapse happened.”
Fire patrolman Paul Curran said that he was standing near the North Tower when, “all of a sudden the ground just started shaking. It felt like a train was running under my feet. . . . The next thing we know, we look up and the tower is collapsing.”
Lieutenant Bradley Mann of the Fire Department saw both buildings come down. “Shortly before the first tower came down,” he said, “I remember feeling the ground shaking. I heard a terrible noise, and then debris just started flying everywhere. People started running.” After they returned to the area, he said, “we basically had the same thing: The ground shook again, and we heard another terrible noise and the next thing we knew the second tower was coming down.”
Physical Evidence
In addition to the testimonial evidence about explosions in the towers, there was physical evidence provided by the nature of the collapses, which involved features generally only consistent with intentional collapses brought about via controlled demolition. For example:
Sudden Onset: In controlled demolition, the onset of the collapse is sudden: One moment, the building is perfectly motionless; the next moment, it suddenly starts coming down. But when steel is heated, it does not suddenly buckle or break, but bends and sags. So if heat could induce a collapse, the onset would be gradual. But as videos show, the buildings were perfectly motionless up to the moment they began their collapse.
Straight Down: The most important thing in a controlled demolition of a tall building, which is close to other buildings, is that it comes straight down. Mark Loizeaux has said that careful planning is needed in setting the charges “to bring [a building] down as we want, so . . . no other structure is harmed.” If the 110-story Twin Towers had fallen over, rather than coming straight down, they would have caused an enormous amount of damage to buildings covering many city blocks; but they did not.
Rapid constant acceleration: Measurements show that when the North Tower collapsed, it accelerated constantly at approximately two-thirds the rate of gravity. Such acceleration is incompatible with the official explanation of the building collapse. The official explanation of the collapse of each of the Towers claims that the top part of the building, above where the planes struck, came down on the structure below and initiated total collapse. If that were what happened, the lower stories would have provided significant resistance and a deceleration of the top section would have been observed, had there been an impact. As videos show, and as careful measurements of the motion of the top section confirm, the upper stories of the building fell down through the lower stories with a high rate of constant acceleration and no associated deceleration or impact. This means that the official explanation is false.
It is clear that most of the columns of the lower stories must have been destroyed by some force other than gravity, such as explosive force, so that when the upper stories came down they encountered little resistance.
This analysis has been validated by measurements of the Verinage Technique of building demolitions, which actually uses the momentum and kinetic energy of a falling upper section to break up the lower section without the use of explosives. In those cases, deceleration of the top section is clearly observed.
A further analysis showing that the columns of the North Tower could not have been involved in resisting the collapse has recently been published.
Total Collapse: These 110-story buildings collapsed into piles of rubble only a few stories high, even though the buildings contained a remarkable 283 columns supporting each story, with 236 closely spaced large steel box columns as part of a robust Vierendeel truss network on the exterior, and in the core of each tower 47 steel box columns, the bases of which were massive.
Pulverization and Dust Clouds: “At the World Trade Center sites,” said Colonel John O’Dowd of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “it seemed like everything [except the steel] was pulverized.” Although this was an exaggeration, much of the non-metallic contents of the buildings was indeed pulverized into tiny particles of dust, giving rise to enormous dust clouds, which impeded visibility for a half hour after each collapse – even though, according to the official theory, the only physical agencies involved, after the impact of the airplanes, were gravitational acceleration and fire.
In disputing the view that the destruction of the towers was the result of controlled demolition, NIST said: “Video evidence . . . showed unambiguously that the collapse progressed from the top to the bottom.”
The implicit argument being made by NIST was based on two presuppositions: 1. Controlled demolition must begin from the bottom. 2. The collapses of the Twin Towers began at the top.
However, both of these presuppositions are false.
1. As the first statement by Mark Loizeaux quoted above indicates, controlled demolition usually begins from the bottom. However, physicist Steven Jones has pointed out, the top-down destruction of the towers “is unusual for controlled demolition, but clearly possible, depending on the order in which explosives are detonated.” Conversely, a natural gravitational top down collapse replicating the observed phenomena is impossible.
2. Although the collapses appeared, to people watching them on TV, to have begun with the impacts and resulting fires, they for the most part began, as testimonies above indicated, with explosions in the basements. Interestingly, they also initiated just above the impact damage.
Seismic Evidence
Seismic waves provide one more type of evidence that the buildings were brought down by explosives that were below ground at the beginning. That issue is explored in Point TT-7: Why Did the Twin Towers Collapse? The Seismic Evidence.
Conclusion
Defending its claim that the Twin Towers were brought down solely by the plane impacts and the resulting fires, NIST argued that there was no evidence that they were brought down by controlled demolition and that, in particular, there were no explosions below the floors on which fires burned.
However, there were many reports of explosions below the fire floors, including massive explosions in the basements, and reports of the ground shaking outside.
In addition to this testimonial evidence, the collapses exemplified various features characteristic of controlled demolitions that could not plausibly be explained in any other way.
One more type of physical evidence, provided by seismic graphs, is discussed as mentioned in Point TT-7.
It can safely be concluded, therefore, that the position presented by FEMA, the 9/11 Commission, and NIST
– that there is no evidence of explosions in the Twin Towers before their collapses occurred –
is indefensible.
11) NIST originally suggested that WTC 7 was brought down by structural damage combined with a raging fire fed by diesel fuel. However, in its Final Report (of November 2008), NIST declared that neither diesel fuel nor structural damage played a role in this building’s collapse, and that this building, which was not struck by a plane, was brought down by fire alone.
Before or after 9/11, no steel-frame high-rise building had ever collapsed due to fire. If fire were to cause such a building to collapse, the onset would be gradual, whereas the videos show that WTC 7, after being completely stable, suddenly came down in virtual free fall. This building’s straight-down, symmetrical collapse, with the roofline remaining essentially horizontal, shows that all 82 of WTC 7’s support columns had been eliminated by the time the top started down.
12) Having denied for years that WTC 7 came down at free fall acceleration, NIST repeated this position in August 2008, when it issued a report1 on WTC 7 in the form of a Draft for Public Comment.
Scientific analysis by mathematician David Chandler shows that WTC 7 came down in absolute free fall for a period of about 2.25 seconds. In its Final Report, NIST provided a detailed analysis and graph that conceded that WTC 7 came down at free-fall acceleration for over 100 feet, or about 2.25 seconds, consistent with the findings of Chandler and Jones.
Note: Free fall speed in a building collapse means that all of the connections between the steel columns and the floors were severed at the same time which indicates a controlled demolition. The Twin Towers had 283 columns going from the foundation to the 110th floor. For all those supports to be severed within 2 seconds of each other you would need cutting charges. 110 floors times 283 columns times 2 buildings equals 62,260 floor-column-connections that must be severed simultaneously.
13) In its Final Report on WTC 7, issued in November 2008, NIST finally acknowledged that WTC 7 had entered into free fall for more than two seconds. NIST continued to say, however, that WTC 7 was brought down by fire, with no aid from explosives.
Scientific analysis shows that a free-fall collapse of a steel-framed building could not be produced by fire, that is, without explosives (a fact that NIST’s lead investigator, Shyam Sunder acknowledged3 in his discussions of NIST’s Draft Report for Public Comment in August 2008).
14) WTC 7 collapsed because of fire alone. Here are the central features of the collapse:
Intense heating on the 12th floor caused an overhead beam to lengthen, due to thermal expansion, and to push a 13th-floor girder off of the seat that had connected it to interior column #79.
This failure propagated for several floors, leaving column 79 unsupported, thereby causing it to buckle. Nearby columns were unable to absorb the transfer of load. This inability initiated a progressive collapse, which led to catastrophic failure of the entire building.
This collapse of the building, which appeared to be sudden although in reality it was progressive, is shown to be plausible by computer simulations.
A building undergoing progressive collapse would come down in a sequential manner. Sections would be expected to fail as they lost support. However, from measurements of the collapse time, it could not have been progressive or sequential:
From the time of the collapse of the East Penthouse to the onset of global collapse, the building appeared, from all external signs, to retain its overall integrity. The transition from total support to freefall was sudden. The building fell with a horizontal roofline, implying that catastrophic failure across the entire width of the building (100 meters east to west) occurred virtually simultaneously within a fraction of a second.
2. In addition to the fact that the collapse of a steel-framed building entering into freefall in the absence of explosives to remove the steel supports is inherently implausible, the graphical output from NIST’s computer simulations does not match the actual observations at all.
15) The attack on the Pentagon by American 77 (under the control of al-Qaeda) could not have been prevented for four reasons.
First, although the FAA had received multiple signs before 9:00 AM that this plane was suffering an in-flight emergency, the FAA did not notify the military about this flight until 9:24 – at which time it reported that the flight, which may have been hijacked, appeared to be heading back toward Washington.
Second, although Andrews Air Force Base was only a few miles away, it had no fighters on alert.
Third, the only fighters on alert in the Eastern United States were two at Otis Air Force Base, which were already occupied protecting New York City against further attacks, and two fighters 130 miles away at Langley Air Force Base.
Fourth, the Langley fighters, which did not get airborne until 9:30, were still 105 miles away when the Pentagon was struck at 9:38.
Discrepancies in both time-lines and aircraft availability challenge the given reasons for the claim that the attack at the Pentagon could not have been prevented:
First, an FAA memorandum of May 21, 2003, to the 9/11 Commission said: “Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center at 8:46, the FAA immediately established . . . phone bridges [with the military]. . . . [T]he FAA made formal notification about American Flight 77 at 9:24 AM, but information about the flight was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges before the formal notification.” This statement was read into the 9/11 Commission’s record. Loss of communication with American 77 was reported by the FAA Indianapolis Center “[s]shortly after 9:00.”
Second, Colin Scoggins, the military specialist at the FAA’s Boston Center, stated that although the District of Columbia Air National Guard (DCANG) did not “have an intercept mission” – it was not one of the country‘s seven military bases that are ready to intercept flights every hour of the year – it did “fly every morning” and that under the circumstances NEADS “could have grabbed . . . those aircraft.”
Third, Scoggins said that fighters at Atlantic City, Burlington, Selfridge, Syracuse, and Toledo would also have also been ready to go. Shortly after the second tower was hit at 9:03, an ANG commander at Syracuse told NORAD: “Give me 10 minutes and I can give you hot guns.” If this request had been made at 9:10, this statement indicates, these fighters could have been in the air in time to protect the Pentagon.
Fourth, even if fighters had to be sent from Langley Air Force Base (as the official story claimed in bullets 3 and 4, above), they should have been airborne long before 9:30.
16) The military could not have intercepted American 77, the 9/11 Commission reported, because it “never received notice that American 77 was hijacked.”
The truth of the 9/11 Commission’s second account may be questioned on two grounds:
First, the charge that the testimony of General Arnold and other military leaders was “incorrect” amounts to the charge that they lied. But if the Commission’s new story were true, military leaders would not have invented the original story – which implies that the military was guilty of standing down, or at least of incompetence. This would have been an irrational fabrication.
Second, the Commission’s revised account contradicted several facts:
1. The FAA’s memo of May 21, 2003, said that the military was notified earlier than 9:24, not later.
2. The FAA memo was supported by a story published four days after 9/11, which said: “During the hour or so that American Airlines Flight 77 was under the control of hijackers, up to the moment it struck the west side of the Pentagon, military officials in a command center on the east side of the building were urgently talking to law enforcement and air traffic control officials about what to do.”
3. The Commission claimed that, although the FAA’s Command Center had known about American 77’s troubles since 9:20 AM, this knowledge did not get passed to the military. However, Ben Sliney, the operations manager at the FAA Command Center, said that the Command Center had a “military cell, which was our liaison with the military services. They were present at all of the events that occurred on 9/11. . . . [E]veryone who needed to be notified about the events transpiring was notified, including the military.”
17) The 911 Commission Report holds that American Flight 77, a Boeing 757, was flown by al-Qaeda pilot Hani Hanjour into the Pentagon. After disengaging the autopilot, he executed a 330-degree downward spiral through 7000 feet in about three minutes, then flew into Wedge 1 of the Pentagon between the first and second floors at 530 mph.
Several former airliner pilots have stated that Hanjour could not possibly have maneuvered a large airliner through the trajectory allegedly taken by Flight 77 and then hit the Pentagon between the first and second floors without touching the lawn.
Russ Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after serving in Vietnam as a fighter pilot, says it would have been “totally impossible for an amateur who couldn’t even fly a Cessna” to have flown that downward spiral and then “crash into the Pentagon’s first floor wall without touching the lawn.”
“Former Vietnam Combat and Commercial Pilot Firm Believer 9/11 Was Inside Government Job,” Lewis News, January 8, 2006.
Ralph Omholt, a former 757 pilot, said: “The idea that an unskilled pilot could have flown this trajectory is simply too ridiculous to consider.”
Note: The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology did DNA tests of the remains and found no Arab DNA at the Pentagon crash site. Dulles had 300 video cameras. No hijackers were seen boarding the planes.
18) The 9/11 Commission Report holds that four airplanes (American Airlines flights 11 and 77, and United Airlines flights 93 and 175) were hijacked on 9/11.
Pilots are trained to “squawk” the universal hijack code (7500) on a transponder if they receive evidence of an attempted hijacking, thereby notifying FAA controllers on the ground. But leading newspapers and the 9/11 Commission pointed out that FAA controllers were not notified.
A CNN story said that pilots are trained to send the hijack code “if possible.” But entering the code takes only two or three seconds, whereas it took hijackers, according to the official story, more than 30 seconds to break into the pilots’ cabin of Flight 93.
The fact that not one of the eight pilots performed this required action casts serious doubt on the hijacker story.
19) The 9/11 Commission reported that United Flight 93, having been taken over by an al-Qaeda pilot, was flown at a high speed and steep angle into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In response to claims that United Airlines Flight 93 was shot down, the US military and the FBI said that United 93 was not shot down.
Residents, the mayor, and journalists near Shanksville reported that no airliner was visible at the designated crash site; that contents were found as far as eight miles from the designated crash site; and that parts – including a thousand-pound engine piece – were found over a mile away.
20) Critical to the success of the 9/11 attacks was the element of surprise, which was emphasized by key White House and Pentagon officials. The element of surprise, as the 9/11 Commission pointed out, rested on two factors: Hijacked planes were used as weapons – a departure from predictable, traditional hijackings; The attacks originated, unpredictably, from within the country, rather than from outside.
The military had trained for the possibility of hijacked planes used as weapons, including hijacked planes originating within the country. Professor John Arquilla, a Special Operations expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, stated in 2002 that “the idea of such an attack [using hijacked airliners for suicide attacks against major buildings] was well known, had been wargamed as a possibility in exercises before Sept. 11, 2001, and previous airline attacks had been attempted.”4
Multiple training drills using planes as weapons had taken place before September 11, 2001.
In October 2000, a military exercise had created a scenario of a simulated passenger plane crashing into the Pentagon. The exercise was coordinated by the Defense Protective Services Police and the Pentagon’s Command Emergency Response Team.5
US Medicine reported that two health clinics housed within the Pentagon trained for a hijacked airplane to hit the Pentagon in May 2001. “Though the Department of Defense had no capability in place to protect the Pentagon from an ersatz guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner, DoD medical personnel trained for exactly that scenario in May.”
The Department of Transportation in Washington held an exercise on August 31, 2001, which Ellen Engleman, the administrator of the department’s Research and Special Projects Administration, described thus:
“Ironically, fortuitously, take your choice, 12 days prior to the incident on September 11th, we were going through a tabletop exercise. It was actually much more than a tabletop…in preparation for the Olympic…which was a full intermodal exercise… Part of the scenario, interestingly enough, involved a potentially highjacked plane and someone calling on a cell phone, among other aspects of the scenario that were very strange when twelve days later, as you know, we had the actual event.”
“In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating…hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties….[O]ne operation, planned in July 2001 and conducted later, involved planes from airports in Utah and Washington state that were hijacked.”
Contrary to claims by The 9/11 Commission Report, US military exercises prior to 9/11 involved hijackings – within as well as outside US airspace – in which planes were used as weapons.
Any new investigation should ask why the highest responsible officials denied that such preparation had preceded the attacks on 9/11, and why, given that preparation, no effective actions were taken to stop the hijacked planes from reaching their targets.
18) Until September 11, 2001, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted four major annual war exercises a year. These aerial practice drills, run cooperatively with the US Strategic Command and the US Space Command, simulated war situations for a period of one or two weeks.
The two largest, Global Guardian and Vigilant Guardian, were command level (high level) exercises that ran together, involved all levels of command, and were designed to exercise most aspects of the NORAD mission.
Global Guardian also linked with other exercises sponsored by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Unified Commands — which included Amalgam Warrior, Apollo Warrior, and Crown Vigilance.2
These exercises, traditionally held in October or November, were all running on September 11, 2001.
The Official Account
The 9/11 Commission Report states that when Boston FAA Flight Center called NEADS (NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector) to report the hijacking of Flight 11, NEADS asked, “Is this real world or exercise?”
The Commission’s footnote to this question reported that the large-scale exercise Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union, had not compromised the military response. This statement reflected the claims of several military officers:
According to General Ralph Eberhart, Commander of NORAD at Peterson Air Force Base, “it took about 30 seconds” to make the adjustment to the real-world situation.
Although the 9/11 Commission mentioned only one military exercise – Vigilant Guardian – that was scheduled for 9/11, evidence shows that at least 12 exercises had been scheduled for that day:
Vigilant Guardian: An annual NORAD exercise held traditionally in October,8 often in conjunction with Global Guardian.9 On 9/11, all levels of command at NORAD Headquarters, including NEADS, were participating in this command-post exercise (CPX), “24/7”.
Global Guardian: A massive annual Command Post-Exercise (CPX) and Field Training Exercise (FTX), which was sponsored jointly by the U.S. Strategic Command, US Space Command, and NORAD, and was linked to Vigilant Guardian and Amalgam Warrior.Global Guardian is traditionally held in October or November each year. According to a military newspaper dated March 23, 2001, the over-arching Global Guardian exercise had indeed been originally scheduled for October, but was subsequently moved to early September.
Crown Vigilance was sponsored by Air Combat Command and was linked to Global Guardian.
Amalgam Warrior was also running — a large-scale live-fly exercise involving two or more NORAD regions, traditionally held twice a year in April and October.
Amalgam Virgo: NORAD officers told the 9/11 Commission Team 8: “On 9/11 there were two FDX exercises planned: Amalgam Virgo and Amalgam Warrior.“
Northern Vigilance: A large annual real-world NORAD operation that on 9/11 diverted much of the US air defense fleet to Canada and Alaska to counteract a Russian drill.20 This operation involved NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC) in Colorado.
Apollo Guardian, linked to Global Guardian and run by the US Space Command, was also running on September 11, 2001. “Hijacks were included in these exercises to exercise transition in Rules of Engagement (ROE).”
W-105at Otis Air Force Base: Six F-15′s from Otis (out of a contingent of 18) took off on a routine ocean training exercise at 9:00 AM, eight minutes after two “alert” F-15′s on the same runway were scrambled in response to the first WTC attack. The six training jets were recalled at 9:25 AM to be armed and to join the response.
Andrews Air Force Base (outside Washington, DC): There were only seven pilots available in the AAFB 121st Fighter Squadron on 9/11 because many had not returned from the large-scale training exercise “Red Flag” in Las Vegas. Three F-16 fighter jets took off on a training exercise at 8:36 AM from Andrews AFB and did not return until 2:35 PM. Flight strips indicated that Andrews-based fighters were not scrambled in response to the hijackings until 11:12 AM.
New Jersey Air National Guard: When the World Trade Center was hit, two F-16 fighters from the 177th Fighter Wing based in Atlantic City were on a routine training mission eight minutes flying time away from New York, but the pilots were not informed of the hijackings until after the second Tower was hit at 9:03 AM. Two other fighters from this Wing were also on a routine training exercise. No jets took off from Atlantic City in response to the attacks until after the Pentagon was hit at approximately 9:37.
Washington DC Army Aviation Support Unit: Members of this Unit were attending annual weapons training, 90 minutes drive away. The Unit’s mission was to maintain “a readiness posture in support of contingency plans,” to exercise “operational control” of the Washington area airspace, and to provide “aviation support for the White House, US government officials, Department of Defense, Department of the Army, and other government agencies,” including the Pentagon.
National Reconnaissance Office: NRO, a large intelligence agency of the Department of Defense, had planned a 9:32 AM simulation of a small plane crashing into one its own towers near Washington’s Dulles Airport.
The rescheduling from October to early September of seven aerial drills — the two largest having been Global Guardian and Vigilant Guardian, and the five related aerial drills that accompanied them — resulted in an unprecedented number of simultaneous drills that morning.
This was an enormous departure from other years.
These drills included at least two hijackings (a Boeing 747 flying from Tokyo to Anchorage, and a Korean Airlines Boeing 747 flight from Seoul to Anchorage), and one drill in which a plane was planned to simulate hitting a building (the National Reconnaissance Office).
II. One would expect that having so many exercises would have caused some confusion, which might have slowed down the military response. Indeed, statements to this effect have been made:
According to a summary of a 9/11 Commission interview with Canadian Lt. Gen. Rick Findley, who was at NORAD as the Battle Staff Director at Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC) on September 11,2001, there was, following the second attack on the Twin Towers, “confusion as to how many, and which aircraft, were hijacked. There was no situational awareness that was directly credible, and CMOC was relying on the communications over the phone lines with its operations sectors. Findley opined that AA 11 was reported still airborne and headed towards Washington, D.C. because of the added confusion of many hijack reports.”
At Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, DC, FAA Air Traffic Controller James Ampey, stationed at Andrews Tower, reported in a 9/11 Commission interview that there were an unusually high number of aircraft taking-off and landing at Andrews that morning because previously scheduled military exercises were underway. The radar screens were showing “emergencies all over the place.”
General Larry Arnold, commander of NORAD’s Continental U.S. Region, said: “By the end of the day, we had 21 aircraft identified as possible hijackings.”
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke: “There were lots of false signals out there. There were false hijack squawks, and a great part of the challenge was sorting through what was a legitimate threat and what wasn’t.”
FAA Deputy Administrator, Monte Belger, said:“Between 9:20-9:45 there were many confusing reports about various aircraft being unaccounted for.”
An independent study in 2011 gave detailed accounts of nine falsely reported hijackings on 9/11, plus nine other reported aircraft emergencies.
Because of the rescheduling of military exercises normally scheduled for different times, there were an extraordinary number of exercises underway the morning of September 11, 2001.
The Department of Defense and the 9/11 Commission failed to report all but one of the exercises that occurred that morning.
They also denied that such exercises slowed down military responses to the attacks.
Had the 9/11 Commission reported the full extent of the exceptional number of exercises it knew were operating that morning, the above-quoted statements by military officers such as Eberhart, Marr, and Myers – that the exercises did not, by causing confusion, slow down the military response – would have seemed implausible.
Any new investigation should probe the fact that, taken together, this evidence suggests that:
(1) the Pentagon, after creating conditions that confused the military response to the attacks, sought to cover up its creation of these conditions, and that
(2) the 9/11 Commission facilitated this cover-up by not making public the information held in its records cited above.
According to Robert Marr, “we found that the response was, if anything, expedited by the increased number of staff at the sectors and at NORAD because of the scheduled exercise.”
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concurred, saying in 2005 that the exercises “actually enhanced the response.”
Notes: Most of the military men in charge were out of the office that day or in two cases were new to their jobs. There were many computer generated false positives for hijacked airlines as part of the drills. Air controllers screamed demanding these simulations be removed from their screens. They were not. Eberhart refused to cancel the drills so they could respond to the threats. The planes returning from the drills did not have enough fuel to respond. There were only 4 planes left capable of flying in the sector under attack. Air National Guard planes which were available were not called up. Donald Rumsfeld who should have taken charge was running around on the lawn of the Pentagon.
11 years earlier on 9-11-1990 George H W Bush made a call for a New World Order under Global control. All Presidents since Bush have had records as CIA agents and assets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txukr5zgHnw
This was Part I.
Part 2 is here:
http://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/911-consensus-points-contradict-the-government-lies-part-ii/
Part 3 is here:
http://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/911-consensus-points-contradict-the-government-lies-part-iii/
The complete list of questions together with the notes and other research tools can be found here. I will post part 2 tomorrow.
http://www.consensus911.org/the-911-consensus-points/
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