Why A British Physics Teacher Stopped Believing The 9/11 Myth

[Tony Gosling]

We still have the right to know the truth

http://whyistoppedbelieving911myth.wordpress.com/
http://whyistoppedbelieving911myth.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/why-i-stopped-believing-the-911-myth1.doc

More than a decade on and the horrific attacks of 
September 11th 2001 continue to cast a long 
shadow over all of us. The ridiculous “war on 
terror” that commenced after the Twin Towers had 
crumbled to dust is still determining the foreign 
and domestic policies of many governments throughout the world.
9/11, as the atrocity was quickly re-branded, has 
been used to legitimise not only the subsequent 
neo-imperialist adventuring into Afghanistan, 
Iraq and beyond, but also the opening of 
Guantanamo and with it, the approved use of 
torture. At the same time, the “war of terror” is 
still used to justify the escalating assault on 
personal privacy, on freedom of speech, and our 
right to dissent. The decade long crackdown on 
civil and human rights that began with 9/11 has 
now culminated in America with the removal of 
habeas corpus – under the Obama authorised NDAA 
2012, the indefinite detention of US citizens 
being made permissible on the ill-defined grounds 
of having “substantially supported” terrorists or 
their “associated forces,” and without properly 
defining what any of these terms precisely mean.
For all these reasons, 9/11 remains vitally 
important, and yet the events of that terrible 
morning have still never been properly 
investigated. My attempt here is put forth 
another challenge to the commonly held opinion 
that the case should now be closed, and to shed a 
little light into the many areas of darkness that 
remain. In doing so I have tried to investigate 
the details of the case as accurately as I can, 
with objections to the official narrative being 
backed up with more detailed footnotes. If there 
are errors within my analysis then please feel 
free to send updated evidence that refutes any of 
my statements. On the other hand, if you are 
simply intent to darken the debate with lies and 
obfuscation then your comments will be deleted.
The survivors, the first responders, and the 
families of the victims of the September 11th 
attacks, many of whom continue their fight for a 
full and independent inquiry, deserve our respect and our support.
It should be noted that these pages (which follow 
sequentially) were originally written four years 
ago in 2008 and that they have since been 
collecting digital dust. I have decided to 
release them now on the eleventh anniversary 
because I think it is important that those who 
call for a re-opening of the inquiry maintain 
their commitment to the cause and so this 
represents my own small contribution to the continuing the fight for justice.
Since 2008 the story has moved on in that Bin 
Laden is now officially dead and buried. The 
prime suspect in the 9/11 case has thereby been 
eliminated and in consequence we will never hear 
his testimony. Meanwhile, the end of Bin Laden 
has not ended any of the wars that began in his name.
“During times of universal deceit, telling the 
truth becomes a revolutionary act” – attributed to George Orwell

Why I Stopped Believing The 9/11 Myth
"Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy 
theories concerning the attacks of September the 
11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the 
blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty."
George Bush addressing the United Nations General 
Assembly on November 10th 2001.

It has become a media cliche that everyone 
remembers what they were doing the day Kennedy 
was assassinated, but it is a cliche that I 
haven't heard in years (just about seven years to 
be more accurate). Today we live with the 
aftermath of a different event that binds the 
collective psyche –  an event that was both more 
terrible and more shocking. So shocking indeed 
that, rather like death itself, it is still only 
rarely mentioned in polite company.

I was teaching when I first heard news of what 
was happening on the morning of September 11th 
2001. I was trying to explain the importance of 
error analysis in science to my latest class of 
first year students, when one of them cut in. 
Sorry, he said, can I just tell you something. 
And then he began explaining how both of the twin 
towers had been struck by aircraft and that the 
first had already collapsed. You might easily 
imagine that I had no idea at all what to say. 
Certainly, I didn't reprimand him for listening 
to his radio when he was supposed to be learning 
about experimental uncertainty. I didn't even ask 
him to turn the radio off. Instead I simply asked 
him whether what he was telling me was true 
(since it sounded like pure fiction) and then 
after a few seconds of bewildered silence, I 
turned back to the board and continued with the 
lesson. But then I doubt there is anything you 
could meaningfully say at such a moment.

Driving home, I put the radio on. With the 
rolling accounts and reports, my dim imaginings 
began to reify into a more solid horror. Arriving 
back I wondered whether or not I should turn the 
TV on to watch such carnage. It was obviously so 
dreadful and I wondered what could justify 
wanting to see it at all. Could I really have 
become so ghoulish? I watched of course, and then 
who didn't. We all had to watch the horror, if only to make it believable.

Next day, still trying to make sense of the new 
reality, I went out for a walk by the river, and 
I remember thinking how odd it was that nothing 
had changed. That the river flowed by just as 
reliably as ever, that the birds sang no less 
surely, and that what had so irrevocably shaken 
the world had somehow left no obvious indelible 
mark away from its own margin. I realise, of 
course, that these are more commonly the kinds of 
thoughts that accompany a bereavement. But this 
wasn't mourning in any ordinary sense, since you 
cannot feel bereft of those you never knew – the 
vicarious grief displayed at Diana's funeral a 
few years earlier having been nothing but a grim 
emotional tourism. No, the loss that so many of 
us felt after September 11th was real and 
different in kind from the morbidity in the 
aftermath Diana's demise. It involved something like the loss of innocence.

Later, in the pub I got talking with some 
friends. Aside from the horror there were still 
many questions. Who did it and why? And what were 
the likely repercussions? Already the media talk 
was focussing on the effects to international 
finance, but James, my economist friend, told us 
that he didn't think the markets would be 
seriously affected. (A matter on which he was 
proved largely correct as it mapped out.) As for 
who did it, well it just wasn't clear. Perhaps it 
was another attack like the Oklahoma bombing, 
carried out by an internal militia; after all, 
prior to September 11th, Oklahoma had been the 
most serious terrorist attack on American soil. 
Certainly, there was no tangible evidence of 
involvement by a militant Islamic group, or 
obvious links to Osama Bin Laden. Such proof of 
an Al Qaeda mission only came to light later, on 
the day after the attacks, after the FBI had 
discovered the car, hired by Mohammed Atta, and 
subsequently abandoned at Boston airport. A 
flight manual in Arabic and a copy of the Koran 
had been left behind. And meanwhile, George W. 
Bush, Condoleezza Rice and others in the 
administration were maintaining that the 
intelligence services had received no forewarning 
of any sort of imminent attack. No clues 
whatsoever that any group had plans to use 
domestic airliners as missiles. Well, actually it 
turns out that this wasn't quite true either.[1]

But hold on, already something is more profoundly 
wrong here. Because within hours of the attacks 
on the day itself, the news reports on American 
networks were already talking about "all the 
hallmarks of an Al Qaeda attack" (in spite of its 
obviously unprecedented method and magnitude). 
Pure conjecture and guesswork, then. Yet given 
the surprise of the attacks, how on earth could 
the networks have seemingly been more clued-up 
than the White House. Well, it turns out that we've missed a bit again...

By an extraordinary fluke, we later learned that 
Mohammed Atta's luggage had failed to meet its 
connecting flight. And that, by virtue of this 
good fortune, the FBI were, within only a few 
hours, able to establish a list of details 
including names, dates of birth, known 
residences, visa status, for all of the 
hijackers. This, at least, is the official story 
(as it now stands – as opposed to the one we were 
originally told), and so it follows that the 
networks may indeed have known more than they 
were letting on. Or does it go too far to 
speculate that they may have received some form of special briefing?

*

But then another odd thing occurred. On September 
16th, a video was broadcast on Al Jazeera in 
which Osama Bin Laden denied all responsibility:

"I stress that I have not carried out this act, 
which appears to have been carried out by 
individuals with their own motivation."

To many, including myself, it seemed strange that 
the orchestrator of such a devastating attack had 
refused to take credit for his success. Oh, don't 
worry about that, we were told, this is not the 
way the Islamists do business. They much prefer 
to lurk in the shadows. In any case, Mohammed 
Atta's suitcase would provide reason enough to 
send the first waves of troops into Afghanistan, 
and the media's attention (which gets shorter by 
the year) soon switched to covering the vastly 
more exciting spectacle of war. As for Bin Laden, 
well apparently, they'd be "smoking him out" and 
bringing him home "dead or alive." But like many 
things surrounding the September 11th attacks, 
even the urgent manhunt for Bin Laden has been 
largely forgotten. Bin Laden will surely never be 
found and judging by later reports no one, and 
least of all George Bush, is terribly bothered.

In any case, and as luck would have it again, 
another video of Bin Laden was quickly unearthed. 
Whilst carrying out their mission, U.S. forces 
had stumbled on the tape, recovering it from the 
ruins of house in Jalalabad. The tape, broadcast 
on various news networks from December 13, 2001, 
shows Bin Laden apparently laughing and joking 
with Khaled al-Harbi[2], sharing delight in their 
reminiscence of the atrocity, and of course, 
freely admitting to their own responsibility. But 
then it's just a videotape – a tape that many experts believe to be a fraud.[3]

*

At the time it never occurred to me that this 
official version of events might be significantly 
untrue. Certainly I was surprised by how quickly 
the FBI had recovered their evidence, and there 
were a few other reasons to doubt the whole truth 
of the official version. Taking flight 
simulations on a hijacking caused me to think 
only of the hapless German pilot in the vintage 
British comedy Those Magnificent Men in their 
Flying Machines, desperately trying to avoid 
descent into the sea whilst the pages of his 
flight manual are blown to the wind. There was 
also the more mind-boggling question of why one 
of the alleged hijackers had packed his last will 
and testament. I mean just what sort of goon 
would bring their will when embarking on a 
suicide mission? As for the miraculous survival 
of a passport from one of the hijackers that 
escaped the fires and the subsequent collapse of 
the World Trade Centre, to float down fully 
intact a few blocks away, well...[4]  Here was 
George Monbiot's considered opinion at the time:

"Then there was the passport. The security 
services claim that a passport belonging to one 
of the hijackers was extracted from the rubble of 
the World Trade Center. This definitive 
identification might help them to track the rest 
of the network. We are being asked to believe 
that a paper document from the cockpit of the 
first plane – the epicentre of an inferno which 
vapourised steel –  survived the fireball and 
fell to the ground almost intact. When presented 
with material like this, I can't help suspecting 
that intelligence agents have assembled the 
theory first, then sought the facts required to fit it."[5]

But, but, surely that would mean the evidence was planted?

Yet, in spite of such ludicrous coincidences and 
inconsistencies, and though undoubtedly it had 
flashed through my mind that somehow the people 
in charge – people I generally wouldn't trust to 
tell me the correct time – might have contrived 
just to "let it happen", well even this seemed a 
wrongful thought. Not wrong, but indecent. As if I were treading on graves.

Over a year passed. Back home in America the 
tough guys were now shifting the blame for 
September 11th onto Saddam Hussein[6] This was 
crazy, of course – surely everyone knew it wasn't 
true. So in Britain we got the other story. The 
one that said Iraq was swarming with so-called 
WMDs – when the truth, as we all knew, was that 
most of the world's "weapons of mass destruction" 
are still mostly packed into silos in America. In 
any case the media were already happily chasing 
off in the new direction, as the bunker-busting 
bombs in the Tora Bora mountains became 
yesterday's news, and the sound of sabre rattling 
toward Baghdad grew to a second crescendo.

Meantime, an official inquiry into the events of 
September 11th had finally been opened in late 
November (441 days after the dust first began to 
settle on Ground Zero), though it would take a 
further year and a half before, in summer 2004, 
the Kean-Hamilton Commission issued their final 
report. News of testimony from that inquiry 
barely dribbled back to Britain, lost for the 
most part amidst the rising tides of bellicose hysteria about Saddam's WMDs.

*

By 2004, I'd more or less stopped thinking about 
September 11th. If Al Qaeda hadn't carried out 
the attacks then surely it must have been another 
terrorist group, and probably one with similar 
Islamic origins and shared anti-American 
intentions. The official story remained the only 
credible account –  even when parts of that 
account were altogether implausible. For 
instance, what really did happen to Flight 93, or 
the fourth plane? Had it really been brought down 
in a courageous attempt by the passengers to 
overthrow the hijackers? There certainly wasn't 
much wreckage on the ground near Shanksville. And 
how was it that yet another passport had survived 
unscathed, along with an immaculate bandana, when 
the plane itself was almost nowhere to be found? 
Like many, I imagined that it had most likely 
been shot down, which was not merely 
understandable, but given such circumstances, 
might have been obligatory. It was conceivable 
that the more heroic Hollywood version had simply 
been overwritten. Lies, perhaps, given the 
circumstances did it really matter... hadn't America suffered enough already?

Then, out of the blue, my brother-in-law loaned 
me a copy of a book entitled "9/11: The New Pearl 
Harbour". You might be interested in this, he 
told me, though admitting that he hadn't yet read 
it himself. Suddenly my doubts were about to grow.

*

Authored by Christian theologian David Ray 
Griffin, I really wasn't sure what I was 
expecting to find as I first turned over the 
pages. What I didn't expect was such a complex 
and varied assortment of pieces. A welter of 
detailed and well-reasoned criticisms and 
questions. Griffin's assault picking at every 
strand of the official story, and revealing how 
it was compromised by more than a hundred serious 
inconsistencies, retractions, and distortions.

Why, I wondered as I read on, were the mainstream 
media not interested in the same questions that 
Griffin was asking. Of the reports of prior 
warnings, the curtailment of investigations that 
might have closed the net on Mohammed Atta and 
other hijackers, and most significantly the total 
failure of air defences to intercept the planes 
when such emergency interceptions are regularly 
accomplished under standard and mandatory procedures.

All this was startling enough, but Griffin's 
questions didn't end there. His book, which 
correlates the findings of many researchers, was 
certainly not afraid to venture down stranger 
avenues and into darker corridors. For instance, 
aside from disappearance of Flight 93, there was, 
he points out, no substantial aircraft wreckage 
found at the site of Flight 77 into the Pentagon. 
So why, he asks, is the material evidence for 
these two plane crashes so inconclusive?

But even all the bizarre questions surrounding 
Flights 77 and 93 represented only a fraction of 
Griffin's questions. And as if vanishing aircraft 
wasn't already enough to be thinking about, 
Griffin was also claiming that the World Trade 
Center towers themselves may have been 
intentionally brought down using explosive 
charges. Now obviously that's just going too far. 
It was time, I decided, to put the book down and come back to planet Earth.

*

Then, no sooner than I'd finished reading 
Griffin's book, or at least as much of it as my 
reason would then permit, there happened to be a 
Channel Four documentary called The 9/11 
Conspiracies.[7] It was the first extended 
mainstream analysis of the subject – and it 
claimed to have taken Griffin's book as its 
template. Obviously I was interested. 
Principally, I wondered what light it might shed 
on the ineffectiveness of US air defences. Why 
had the well-established procedures failed? And 
what should we make of the evidence that Cheney 
actually ordered a stand-down?[8] (Questions that 
plainly deserved closer scrutiny.)

But, to my surprise (and at the time I genuinely 
had higher expectations of the media) the 
programme offered nothing in the way of fresh 
insights. Systems failure and incompetence 
supposedly explained everything away, whilst the 
glaring fact that in the wake of such multiple 
and egregious incompetence not a single 
individual had been so much as reprimanded (let 
alone prosecuted) wasn't deemed important enough 
by the programme makers to even warrant 
mentioning. In fact, as I quickly realised, the 
programme makers had no real interest in testing 
any of the challenges raised by Griffin's book, 
preferring instead just to challenge the book itself.
Griffin must be wrong. This was the place from 
where their own 'investigation' started – not 
necessarily wrong in every detail but, more 
importantly, wrong in his suspicions. The 
approach then involved a kind of inverse 
investigative journalism; setting off with the 
officially sanctioned story, which was assumed 
implicitly to be true, and then seeking to 
discredit just as many claims made in the book as 
time would permit – and given just fifty minutes 
of airtime, just how deep could any  serious 
investigation have delved into such a complex issue?

So it was the book and not the official story 
that was on trial, which is rather odd when you 
think about it? For one thing, it obviously 
presupposes that the official investigations had 
been thorough-going. Or why else begin from the 
official story? Which is where we come back to 
the primary objection made by Griffin in the 
first place. For the Kean-Hamilton commission 
inquiry on which the official story is based was, 
as Griffin is constantly at pains to point out, a 
total sham. So why have I still never seen any 
mainstream documentary that challenges the 9/11 inquiry?

*

Now it's important to remind ourselves how the 
inquiry first came about. It was not the US 
administration, and certainly not the embarrassed 
Pentagon, who had sought to get to the bottom of 
whatever failures had occurred that day. Instead 
it had been William Rodriguez, the former 
caretaker of the World Trade Center, who having 
helped so many others escape from the smoke and 
flames inside twin towers was briefly recognised 
as a national hero. It was Rodrigeuz along with 
another brave group of four called "the Jersey 
girls", each of whom had suffered the loss their 
husband in the attack[9], who had pushed so hard 
for an inquiry in the first place; the White 
House showing no immediate or even later concern 
for finding out the truth. As members of the 
Family Steering Committee they were also in 
attendance throughout the commission's hearings.

Here then are a catalogue of the key objections 
which the Family Steering Committee make of the 
Kean-Hamilton commission and its findings:

i)          that the entire investigation was 
unduly delayed and grossly under-funded.

ii)         that every piece of evidence and line 
of testimony included in the final report had to 
be sanctioned by Philip Zelikow, a man who was 
known to have extremely close ties with the White 
House. Indeed, Zelikow's appointment had been 
officially objected to by the Family Steering 
Committee, having already successfully challenged 
the appointment of none other than Henry Kissinger.

iii)         that the commission had not invoked 
its powers to subpoena important witnesses, 
whilst, additionally, a great deal of important 
testimony was conducted in camera, and never made 
available to public scrutiny – of the twelve 
hundred plus witness testimonies, only around one 
hundred and fifty having been publicly conducted. 
Rodrigeuz tells us that the families had wished 
the commission to hear the testimony of 17 
firefighters and 22 survivors, but that none of 
those selected was ever called. In any case, the 
vast majority of the testimony that was given 
then found no inclusion in the final report – by 
way of an excellent example, the testimony of 
Rodriguez had itself been conducted behind closed 
doors and his evidence excluded from the final report.

iv)        Bush and Cheney were permitted the 
quite extraordinary privilege of taking the stand 
together. Their joint testimony, which was not 
under oath, being neither recorded nor 
transcripted, and presented under such secrecy 
that neither the press nor even the families were 
invited to attend. One can't help wondering why 
Bush or Cheney actually bothered to turn up at all.

These then are the detailed criticisms, but more 
generally, and as Griffin makes pains to 
emphasise, the Kean-Hamilton inquiry – or more 
properly "The National Commission on Terrorist 
Attacks Upon the United States" – had been loaded 
from the outset. It had set off with the 
overriding presumption that Al Qaeda had carried 
out the attacks and acted alone. This being 
axiomatic, it logically followed that certain 
avenues of inquiry couldn't warrant any formal 
investigation. Questions about unusual 
stock-market trading, for instance, were not 
considered on the grounds that there could be no 
probable connections to Al Qaeda. As for who 
specifically funded the mission, well, it hardly 
mattered – after all, US Special Forces would 
find them cowering in a cave soon enough.

According to Griffin then, the commission's final 
report was inevitably incomplete and inaccurate 
because the commission itself had been obstructed 
and very deliberately misdirected – points which 
Kean and Hamilton have since acknowledged, 
washing their hands of the matter in a jointly 
authored work called Without Precedent: The 
inside story of the 9/11 commission.[10]

Griffin's main charge is indeed the whole 9/11 
Commission inquiry had been flawed by design. 
This very serious charge is also leveled by other 
serious 9/11 investigators, and, perhaps most 
significantly, by many of those who actually 
attended the hearings. Yet the programme makers 
at Channel 4 made the decision to ignore all 
criticism relating to the independence and 
inadequacies inquiry itself, and by doing so they 
had misrepresented the biggest part of Griffin's case entirely.

*

There are few more perplexing questions regarding 
the attack of September 11th than those 
surrounding the crash of Flight 77 into the 
Pentagon. I mean surely we should be certain by 
now that the Pentagon was at least hit by a 
plane. Or at least we would be, but for the 
unhelpful fact that videos from cameras in the 
near vicinity which ought to have conclusively 
shown a Boeing 757, were immediately confiscated 
and most of the footage has never been publicly 
released. So we've been left with a few frames of 
footage from just two cameras within the Pentagon 
itself that somehow got leaked onto the internet.

This wouldn't be so bad if the hole in the 
Pentagon had actually been wide enough for such a 
large aircraft to have smashed through it. But 
the hole was barely big enough to contain even 
the fuselage, so we have been told to believe 
that the wings and the tail fin must have folded 
back on impact. Now, as a physicist, I feel very 
uncomfortable with this unlikely explanation. The 
rapid change of direction of the massive engines 
that would be required seems to be in 
contradiction of everything I understand from the 
laws of inertia and the conservation of momentum. 
Perhaps it is possible, but the forces required 
would need be extraordinary. Huge resistance in 
parts of the wall where the wings collided and 
relatively little where the nose-cone impacted. 
By reconstructing a similar impact involving an 
identical plane flown by remote control into an 
identical wall, we could find for certain, but of 
course, such a reconstruction is unlikely to ever happen.

Many (pilots included) have also asked if such an 
extraordinary flight-path was actually possible 
at all, given the obstacle course of street-lamps 
and the fact that airliners are not designed to 
fly at high speed so close to the ground? Which 
is another thing that could easily be tested one 
way or the other given a brave enough pilot. And 
finally, could Hani Hanjour, an amateur pilot of 
questionable abilities[11], ever have 
accomplished such a feat? Executing such an 
incredibly tight and controlled final manoeuvre 
that air traffic controllers assumed this was the 
track of a fighter jet. Such "sophisticated" 
piloting even impressed one-time flying ace 
George W. Bush, at least if we accept the account 
of the final 9/11 commission report.[12]

But then, in May 2006, and thus also half a 
decade after the attack, there was a breakthrough 
of sorts. One of the questions still hanging so 
perplexingly suddenly got a headline mention on 
the ITN ten o'clock news (followed-up by a 
fifteen minute slot on BBC2's Newsnight that same evening).

Bong! Here is the news. Bong! Pentagon releases 
new security camera footage. Bong! New pictures 
show a Boeing did strike the Pentagon. Bong!

These were glad tidings of a sort. After all, if 
Flight 77 hadn't hit the Pentagon then what had, 
and more perturbingly, what had happened to the 
plane that took off with its passengers and crew? 
And here again, the official story is 
astonishing. To account for why so little of the 
plane was actually recovered, the explanation is 
that most of the wreckage was either destroyed by 
the explosive impact or vaporised by the intense 
fires. Yet this theory, extraordinary as it is, 
becomes still more astounding again when one 
considers that in spite of the disappearance of 
most of the plane wreckage, investigators still 
managed to recover and the positively identify 
the remains of nearly all 189 victims from DNA 
samples.[13] So how could a fire that incinerated 
almost all of the aluminium and titanium wreckage 
of the plane itself, not also have incinerated 
most of the human remains? Comparison with the 
magic passport found at the World Trade Center is obvious enough.

Symptomatic of the kinds of anomaly that riddle 
the official version of events, the unsettling 
implications in this instance altogether defy 
cool-headed reason. I mean, what are we to make 
of the eyewitnesses who reported seeing the 
plane, immediately prior to, or actually 
impacting the building. Surely if people saw a 
plane... well, then there must have been a plane. 
And yet it is well understood and accepted that 
eye-witness testimony is extremely unreliable.

So just imagine for a second, that you'd seen 
what appeared to be a low flying missile cross 
the lawns that front the Pentagon. What would you 
think? Keep in mind how quickly this would all 
unfold. Chances are you'll only see the last 
moments of its flight. Keep in mind that you've 
probably never seen a missile before in your 
whole life. Was it a missile or something more 
familiar? And what if others, including news 
channels across the world, quickly confirmed that 
it was indeed a plane –  could you still be sure? 
This is the problem with eyewitness accounts, and 
especially ones involving extraordinary and 
traumatic events. So unlike the eyewitness 
reports, clear video footage of the attack would 
finally put the whole matter to rest once and for 
all. If videos had captured a plane rather than a 
missile then the matter was closed... I the news 
watched expectantly and hopefully.

But what was this? Pictures, yes, but showing 
what precisely? A Boeing 757? Where was the 
Boeing 757?  In fact there was nothing new at all 
in this supposed news. Just the same old footage 
that had mysteriously been leaked onto the 
internet years some beforehand, and one or two 
additional frames slipped in, but that was all. 
On one of the newly released frames, there 
appeared to be some kind of flying object, but, 
as bad luck would have it, the flying object 
itself was almost entirely obscured behind a 
post. Almost nothing of it was visible except for its thin vapour trail[14].

And then, on the following frame, nothing but an 
intensely white explosive impact, transformed 
into bright orange on the next and the next. But 
no trace whatsoever in any of the available 
frames that even halfway resembled a commercial 
airliner. So why did the newscaster insist that 
this was the new film which finally showed a 
plane crashing? Why was I hearing one thing as I watched something else?

The fact that the video evidence is still 
withheld leaves us with two alternatives. Either 
The Pentagon have something to hide, or, more 
curiously, they are wanting us to suspect that 
they have something to hide. But we have the 
right to know, and there can be justification for 
failing to publicly present such vital evidence.

*

If it was Griffin's book that had first ignited 
my suspicions about the official story of the 
events on September 11th, then it has been the 
response of the media that fanned the flames. No 
television network or mainstream newspaper has 
respectfully represented any challenges to the 
official story. No mainstream outlet has even 
seriously examined the 9/11 Commission itself.

In seven years, I have seen just two documentary 
examinations of 9/11 – the aforementioned one on 
Channel 4, and a later documentary made by the 
BBC called "911: The conspiracy files", which, 
though more comprehensive and rather slicker than 
the Channel 4 offering, was hardly more 
objective. (And for a fuller response to the 
BBC's mistreatment feel free to read my formal 
letter of complaint in Appendix A.[15])

I estimate that in Britain, and out of a total 
quarter of a million hours, there have been less 
than three hours of designated terrestrial 
airtime given over to re-examining the evidence 
on September 11th. The media silence has been 
deafening. And the justification for such 
mainstream disinterest is simple and can be 
summed up in just two words: "conspiracy theory".

This is a perjorative, of course, which is meant 
to be unconsciously translated and understood to 
mean “paranoid rubbish”. Latent within it is an 
absolute denial to free speech, if only on the 
basis of embarrassment and taboo, and yet it is a 
surprisingly powerful tool for enforcing the 
permitted boundaries to what we may be allowed to 
ask and what we dare to really think. These same 
two words, “conspiracy theory”, nowadays 
providing our governments and their many useful 
servants within the media, with a quick and 
convenient means of shutting down all kinds of 
legitimate public debate. We hardly need the 
Thought Police when we can be trained to so 
assiduously police our own thoughts.

*

A few commentators on the Left have been 
particularly vocal in their attacks against those 
calling for a re-opening into the investigation 
of 9/11. Regarding the perpetuation of such 
errant nonsense as a sort of disease, they 
caution that lurking behind all the jumbled 
thinking that really doesn't add up to a hill of 
beans, a dangerous credence is lent, whether 
intentionally or otherwise, to reactionary 
standpoints and also to racial (specifically 
anti-Semitic) bigotry. At best, they say, the 
"truthers" are misguided people searching for 
simple answers in a complex and frightening world 
– conspiracy theories are, after all, a comfort blanket.

"There is a virus sweeping the world." George 
Monbiot intones, his words drawing humorously on 
Marx's famous opening to the Communist Manifesto, 
"It infects opponents of the Bush government, 
sucks their brains out through their eyes and 
turns them into gibbering idiots. First 
cultivated in a laboratory in the US, the strain 
reached these shores a few months ago. In the 
past fortnight, it has become an epidemic. 
Scarcely a day now passes without someone 
possessed by this sickness, eyes rolling, lips 
flecked with foam, trying to infect me."[16]

This new scourge is, at least according to 
Monbiot, distracting opponents of Bush and Blair 
from the real issues of illegal wars and the rise 
of a global corporate hegemony threatening us 
all. It is, after all, "a coward's cult".

"There is no reasoning with this madness. People 
believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed 
world: comprehensible, controllable, small. 
Despite the great evil that runs it, it is more 
companionable than the chaos that really governs 
our lives, a world without destination or 
purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away 
from real issues – global warming, the Iraq war, 
nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality – 
while permanently wrecking their credibility. 
Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did 
follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose 
Change says, by the Project for the New American 
Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean 
of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can 
never again be taken seriously."[17]

And here's Monbiot again, two weeks later with 
the same diagnosis, writing in his Guardian 
comment beneath the banner "Bayoneting a scarecrow":

"Why do I bother with these morons? Because they 
are destroying the movements which some of us 
have spent a long time trying to build. Those of 
us who believe that the crucial global issues 
–  climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear 
proliferation, inequality – are insufficiently 
debated in parliament or congress; that corporate 
power stands too heavily on democracy; that war 
criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to 
account, have invested our efforts in movements 
outside the mainstream political process. These, 
we are now discovering, are peculiarly 
susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish."[18]

Yet as Monbiot openly admits, he is attacking a 
straw man, and the straw man he chooses 
principally to bayonet is the internet-hit 
documentary film called “Loose Change”. A tightly 
edited montage of collected footage, put together 
on home computers by a small group of amateur 
film-makers led by Dylan Avery, it was the first 
film to present any overall catalogue of the 
sorts of hanging questions than are still 
awaiting answers. As a first attempt, it got 
things wrong and speculated too wildly, and it 
became hugely successful mainly because it filled 
a vacuum that the mainstream media had left.

Unfortunately, by presenting such an astonishing 
weight of evidence, there is an inherent weakness 
to the Loose Change formula. Why? Because truly 
the questions surrounding the events of September 
11th come from so many and such various 
directions, and in consequence such a broad-brush 
approach makes for mountains of research whilst 
leaving writer and director, Dylan Avery, open to attack from all directions.

What are the chances that Avery will be right on 
every assertion, when he doesn't even pretend to 
be. But then why does George Monbiot feel it's 
his responsibility to discredit “Loose Change”? 
Why not face the argument squarely, and consider 
the objections of others more qualified to speak, 
rather than attempting to discredit the whole 
issue of any kind of 9/11 cover-up through ad 
hominem attacks on those much less respected than 
himself? Instead of obsessing over the rights and 
wrongs of the analysis of Dylan Avery and David 
Ray Griffin, he might more bravely have picked 
his fight with someone his own size or even 
bigger. There have been plenty of potential targets:

"If my books are moronic nonsense," wrote David 
Ray Griffin in angry response to Monbiot's 
column, "then people who have endorsed them must 
be morons. Would Monbiot really wish to apply 
this label to Michel Chossudovsky, Richard Falk, 
Ray McGovern, Michael Meacher, John McMurtry, 
Marcus Raskin, Rosemary Ruether, Howard Zinn, and 
the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin, who, after a 
stint in the CIA, became one of America’s leading 
civil rights, anti-war, and anti-nuclear activists?

"If anyone who believes that 9/11 was an inside 
job is by definition an idiot, then Monbiot would 
have to sling that label at Colonel Robert 
Bowman, former head of the U.S. “Star Wars” 
program; Andreas von Bülow, former State 
Secretary in the German Federal Ministry of 
Defense; former CIA analysts Bill Christison and 
Robert David Steele; former Scientific American 
columnist A. K. Dewdney; General Leonid Ivashov, 
former chief of staff of the Russian armed 
forces; Colonel Ronald D. Ray, former U.S. Deputy 
Assistant Secretary of Defense... "[19]

Griffin might also have added the names of former 
Italian President, Francesco Cossiga; the 
so-called "Father of Reagan-omics", Paul Craig 
Roberts; former FBI translator Sibel Edwards; and 
respected political commentator, Gore Vidal, who 
had close personal acquaintance with the Kennedy 
family, and so presumably knows a thing or two 
about politics and power. (And it is worth noting 
that Gore had even publicly endorsed Griffin's book.[20])

Then we come to Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, the grand 
old man of the intellectual Left, who has devoted 
so many years to studying and uncovering the 
Machiavellian politics of his homeland. Using 
what he knows from linguistics and psychology, 
Chomsky has done much to elucidate how propaganda 
and media manipulation are used. He has so often 
written and spoken about how the elite are able to "manufacture consent".

You would think that Chomsky is hardly the sort 
to accept things at face value – to trust in any 
official story. Yet, when it comes to 9/11, 
Chomsky finds no good reason to challenge the 
official story at all, showing no interest 
whatsoever in any of the questions raised. That 
passport which certainly worried Monbiot, at 
least in the early days, doesn't even raise an 
eyebrow. The odd lapses in security and air 
defense are brushed aside. The strange money 
transfers and dodgy stock-market deals are of no 
concern. But he also takes a different tack to 
Monbiot – and a far less confrontational one. 
When asked about 9/11, he says this:

"Did they plan it in any way? Or know anything 
about it? This seems to me extremely unlikely. I 
mean for one thing they would have had to have 
been insane to try anything like that. If they 
had it's almost certain that it would have 
leaked... secrets are very hard to keep... and if 
it had they would have all been before firing 
squads and the end of the Republican Party 
forever... it was completely unpredictable what 
was going to happen. You couldn't predict that a 
plane would actually hit the World Trade Center. 
Happened it did but could easily have missed... 
so you could hardly control it."[21]

But this mixes the whole lot up together. Since 
they couldn't control all the events, Chomsky 
simply presumes that they couldn't even have 
known anything about it. Truly this is a non 
sequitur unworthy of a man of Chomsky's obvious 
intelligence. And he is also strangely off-target 
in his assessment of the scientific evidence, telling his audience:

"Anyone who knows anything about the sciences 
would instantly discount that evidence. I mean 
there's plenty of coincidences and unexplained 
phenomena – you know and why did this happen and 
why did that happen and so on – but if you look 
at a controlled scientific experiment same thing 
is true. I mean when somebody carries out a 
controlled scientific experiment at the best 
laboratories, at the end there are a lot of 
things that are unexplained. There are funny 
coincidences and this and that... That's the way 
the world is. And when you take a natural event – 
not something that's controlled – most of it will be unexplained."

Well, I'd say that it's a pretty poor sort of a 
scientist who at the end of a controlled 
experiment concludes: "Geez, I don't know – I 
guess some sort of weird shit just happened."

In truth, Chomsky brings nothing to the debate at 
all. Like Monbiot and many others, he prefers to 
stick to more "serious issues". Any idea of 
re-opening the inquiry is not a serious 
consideration apparently, but a distraction from 
issues that matter, and that's the end of it. 
Well, that's almost an end to it – but Chomsky 
also says something more astonishing. He suggests 
that uncovering the truth wouldn't help those of 
the political left in any case, which then brings 
him to reach this altogether startling conclusion:

"I mean even if it were true – which is extremely 
unlikely – who cares? I mean it doesn't have any significance"

So there we have it: Noam Chomsky actually 
dismisses what might conceivably be the greatest 
manufacturing of consent in history, as a matter 
without significance. And this revered political 
activist and humanist says of the cold-blooded 
murder of 3000 people "who cares." I must confess 
that when I first heard him say this, I was dumbfounded.

*

The official story remains so absolutely riddled 
with omissions, contradictions, and quite 
outrageous coincidences that I must restrict 
myself to outlining and summarising only a sample 
of the most troubling of these lingering questions:

i)  What happened to America's air defences on 
the morning of September 11th? It is a statutory 
procedure that once an aircraft has wandered off 
its flight-path, fighter planes must be sent up 
to investigate. This is a common occurrence and 
interceptors are stationed and ready to intercept 
such flights within a few minutes. So why weren't 
any of the flights intercepted?

The official explanation is bad luck and 
incompetence, but this does little to explain how 
Flight 77 apparently crashed into the Pentagon 
over fifty minutes after it was first 
commandeered. Just how could a commercial 
airliner, flown by an amateur pilot, have so 
successfully evaded all attempts at interception, 
and collided into what one might reasonably 
presume to be the world's most well defended 
buildings around an hour later? Surely that's 
more than enough time for the entire US defences to thwart such a plan.

It would be perfectly justifiable to draw the 
line right there. To say this is too much already 
– that it is simply impossible – and that only a 
“stand down” order could have prevented any such 
attempted attack from being instantly shot out of 
the sky – but then if we scratch a little deeper 
another truth begins to reveal itself. Because it 
turns out that on the morning of September 11th, 
the US military was engaged in a number of 
war-game activities – and although only one, 
Vigilant Guardian, is included in the 9/11 
Commission report, there is actually evidence of 
multiple war-game exercises. It was these, many 
believe, that hampered and delayed the response.

You may recall the desperate air-traffic 
controller asking "Is this real world or 
exercise?" A full transcript of this dramatic 
conversation is laid out on page twenty of the 
9/11 Commission report.[22] But for an actual 
reference to the on-going war game exercise that 
was causing such terrible confusion in the first 
place, we need also to follow to a footnote. It reads:

"On 9/11, NORAD [the North American Aerospace 
Defense Command] was scheduled to conduct a 
military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which 
postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet 
Union. We investigated whether military 
preparations for the large-scale exercise 
compromised the military's response to the 
real-world terrorist attack on 9/11. According to 
General Eberhart, "it took about 30 seconds" to 
make the adjustment to the real-world situation. 
Ralph Eberhart testimony, June 17, 2004. 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."[23]

So what do we learn from this – aside from the 
fact that the Cold War is presumably on-going. 
Well the question is, had US air defences been 
compromised in some important way by this 
"large-scale" war-game exercise? And the given 
answer – no, no, not in the least, quite the 
opposite in fact: the exercise purportedly having 
"expedited" the normal military response! – and 
yet this purported enhancement to US air-defence 
response wasn't finally incapable of protecting 
the Pentagon against the nose-dive of a 
relatively slow moving and unarmed passenger plane.

ii) What has happened to so much of the physical 
evidence? Where, for instance, are the security 
camera images showing the passengers and 
hijackers boarding the doomed flights? The 
pictures we have been shown only involve their 
arrival of two of the hijackers meeting a 
connecting flight. But then why weren't the 
hijacker's names recorded on the flight lists? 
Whilst regarding the disappearance of more solid 
objects, and aside from the surprising lack of 
wreckage of the planes themselves (especially 
around the crash site in Shanksville), what 
became of almost all of the flight-box recorders? 
At the World Trade Center it seems that 
everything was more or less crushed out of 
existence, with not a single one of the four 
flight box recordings having been recovered. But 
then there's the passport which somehow floated 
away unscathed. Entire fuselages are missing and 
yet significant pieces of clothing and paper 
documents kept on handily turning up. The 
disappearance or else sudden emergence of so much 
of the material evidence being altogether too miraculous.

iii) Perhaps most importantly of all, what are 
the actual links remain between the US 
intelligence and Al Qaeda? And what are we to 
make of the $100,000 wired to Mohammed Atta by 
the Pakistani secret service ISI. This especially 
surprising given that the head of ISI was 
actually on a visit to Washington during the time 
of the attacks. On the morning of September 11th 
the ISI chief, Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad, was 
having breakfast with senator Bob Graham and the 
soon-to-be crowned as first Director of the 
Central Intelligence Agency[24], Porter Goss. But 
odder again, the FBI has still never claimed that 
Osama Bin Laden had any links to the September 
11th attacks – though he has, of course, been 
asked to help with some of their other inquiries[25].

iv) The behaviour of George Bush at the Booker 
Elementary School in Sarasota is also surprising. 
Arriving at the school, he is aware of the first 
plane crash into the World Trade Center, but 
apparently believes it be an accident. Then a 
whisper into his shell-like informs him that 
another plane has hit the second tower. So 
America is obviously under attack and presumably 
he could be next. His response? To continue 
reading that story about the pet goat. But then 
Bush is an incompetent buffoon, right? So he's 
acting like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Okay then fine.

But what of the security service who were there 
to protect him – shouldn't they have taken 
executive action? Well, the fog of war had 
descended, and so everyone was panicked and 
confused. However, the story suddenly gets 
stranger again when three months after the 
attack, Bush himself decides to describe his own 
part in the events, and it goes like this:

"I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to 
go in and I saw an aeroplane hit the tower. You 
know the TV was obviously on and I used to fly 
myself – I said: "There's one terrible pilot" and 
I said it must have been a horrible accident. But 
I was whisked off then and didn't have much time to think about it."[26]

Isn't that interesting, because what he says is 
perfectly impossible. There was no TV footage of 
the first plane hitting the tower. What we've all 
watched is a video of the impact (captured by 
French film-makers the Naudet brothers who, by 
coincidence, happened to be making a film about 
the NYFD) that wasn't made available until the 
following day. So what's going on here? Did Bush 
really have privileged access to a secret 
transmission, or was he just getting his facts 
mixed up as usual? Can't he even accurately 
remember what he was doing on the morning of September 11th 2001?

Now Bush obviously has a natural advantage here. 
How so? Because he's a well-known moron. A man 
who once said, and with no less conviction than 
any of his other banal utterances: "I know that 
human beings and fish can co-exist peacefully." 
In a saner world, the voting public would have 
sat up and taken notice. Here's a man so 
disconnected from his own mind, they would have 
said, that he mouths gibberish beyond all 
comprehending. So why be suspicious then? I mean 
why would anyone want to bother Bush with a 
secret transmission, especially when he's already 
got that pet goat to be worrying about? But such 
questions are not mine to answer.

When the time comes, with enough people demanding 
that the 9/11 investigation simply has to be 
re-opened, it will be for Bush to be 
cross-examined on those remarks and on his 
conduct more generally that day. Taking the stand 
alone and without Cheney's shoulder to lean on, 
having actually sworn to tell the truth, the 
whole truth and nothing but the truth: an oath we 
can surely expect such a devout Christian to 
honour. His testimony may or may not prove 
insightful. Whatever the outcome I'm sure he'll 
welcome the opportunity to get a few things off 
his chest, and to finally dispel any lingering suspicions.

*

For the last few years I have spent a lot of time 
looking for answers to the questions still 
hanging over the events of September 11th, but 
the longer I've searched for answers the more the 
questions have mounted up. Perhaps the most 
extraordinary question I've struggled over is 
this one: what caused the collapse of the Solomon 
Brothers Building at the World Trade Center (also 
known as World Trade Center building 7)?

When I'd first come across the collapse of WTC7 
in Griffin's book I'd put it mentally aside, 
considering both irrelevant and more or less 
preposterous. Why bang on about another building 
collapse, I wondered, when it obviously has 
nothing to do with the main event. After all, 
WTC7 fell at 5:20 pm., almost seven hours after 
the collapse of the twin towers, and since no 
planes had impacted then it's logical to conclude 
that the collapse must have been a consequence of 
structural damage sustained by falling debris 
from the twin towers. So what was the big fuss about?

Well, they say that seeing is believing. So it's 
one thing to read about the spontaneous collapse 
of a forty-seven storey skyscraper, but quite a 
different thing to see it. And on this occasion, 
quite a number of amateur film-makers had 
captured the event; films that would on most 
other days have made the headline news. A huge 
Manhattan skyscraper melting into a cloud of 
dust. "Amazing, incredible, pick your word..." 
This is not my description but the spontaneous 
response of veteran newscaster Dan Rather, seeing 
the footage for the first time. Immediately afterwards, Rather adds:

"It's reminiscent of those pictures we've all 
seen too much on television before, when a 
building was deliberately demolished by well-placed dynamite to knock it down."

On seeing it then, the questions hanging over the 
collapse of WTC7 became perfectly obvious. For it 
certainly looks for all the world like a classic 
demolition: a tall building descending perfectly 
upright, sinking rapidly and smoothly beneath the 
city skyscape. Telescoping into itself, almost 
magically, similar in kind to the earlier 
collapses of each of the twin towers – which 
likewise took only a few seconds – although WTC7 
falls a little differently. Whereas each of the 
main towers had crumbled from around the impact 
zones, here the collapse clearly takes place at 
the base, which is indeed just like those films 
of every other explosive demolition I've ever 
seen. Not that appearance alone is proof of 
demolition, of course. But why had I never seen 
this extraordinary footage before I wondered?

Well, one reason is that thankfully no-one was 
killed, the building having been evacuated 
earlier in the morning. Whilst another, perhaps, 
is that like a good many things it was buried in 
the mayhem of that day. Lost in the chaos and 
forgotten along with – amongst many incidents – 
the capture of suspected terrorists driving a van 
loaded with explosives on the George Washington 
Bridge. Whatever happened to those other goons, I wonder.[27]

But there is an even more astonishing part to the 
story of the collapse of WTC7. For it turns out 
that the BBC had indeed reported on its collapse 
later in the evening (about the time many in 
Britain were asleep). As it transpires, however, 
they hadn't reported the collapse quite late 
enough, because directly at the time of 
broadcast, WTC7 itself hadn't actually collapsed!

Am I sure? Positively certain. The pictures are 
irrefutable. WTC7 is very clearly visible and 
very evidently intact, and almost directly over 
the shoulder of the news reporter Jane Standley 
as she is exaggerating its earlier demise. Indeed 
WTC7 was to stand for a good ten minutes longer, 
outlasting the live link, which being abruptly 
lost may perhaps have saved our reporter the 
indignity of turning around to see it disappear for real.

When recordings of this blunder first appeared on 
the internet, the BBC were quick to dispel all 
rumours. We didn't receive a special advance 
warning of the WTC7 collapse, they assured us, 
and in this regard I happen to believe them. For 
starters, they weren't first to report the event 
– that dubious honour goes to CNN, who reported 
its collapse an hour earlier again.[28] But don't 
the chaps at CNN or the BBC actually check their 
information before a broadcast? Obviously, this is a rhetorical question.

There is another point here: for how did anyone 
have such expert foresight to know that WTC7 was 
even on the point of catastrophic failure? Was it 
simply a piece of inspired guesswork from whoever 
at Reuters first released the story? And what had 
led newscaster Philip Hayton into speculations that:

"It seems that this was not the result of a new 
attack. It was because the building had been 
weakened during this morning's attacks."

Please remember that this is at a time when the 
building is still standing perfectly square!

And there's very little precedence for 
steel-framed skyscrapers suffering such 
catastrophic collapse. In fact prior to September 
11th there were precisely no cases in history. So 
given that the North and South Towers had 
apparently been felled due to the highly 
exceptional impacts of the jetliners, then why 
should anyone at all – let alone a BBC newscaster 
– begin supposing that a different skyscraper, a 
few blocks removed, and hours later, would to succumb to an exactly same fate?

*

The BBC has very recently had a whole lot more to 
say about the collapse of WTC7. Since I penned my 
remarks above, they have devoted a further hour 
long documentary to this single issue.[29], its 
release timed to coincide with the soon to be 
announced final conclusions from the National 
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). And 
in contrast to the earlier BBC broadcast, on this 
second outing of The Conspiracy Files: 9/11, the 
programme did at least address the central issues 
of the case, rather than drawing attention only 
to the least plausible and most peripheral of the many claims.

For instance, it presented the testimony from 
eyewitnesses who said they definitely hadn't 
heard explosions in any of the towers, which 
challenges the testimony of the many others, 
including William Rodrigeuz, who are equally 
adamant that they did.[30] Rodrigeuz indeed goes a great deal further.

Aside from describing an explosion in the 
basement that quite literally blew him off his 
feet, and caused serious injury to many around 
him, he further claims that this basement 
explosion occurred seconds prior to the impact of 
the first plane. But this got no mention of 
course – after all the programme was about the 
collapse of WTC7, "the third tower". So we heard 
instead from an eyewitness who said he saw 
substantial fires in WTC7, fires which had caused 
its walls to visibly bow outwards, such that it 
was quite obviously in imminent danger of 
collapsing. Yet this again is a direct 
contradiction to the accounts of others who 
insist that the damage appeared more 
superficial.[31] But then eyewitness reports are 
notoriously unreliable. So who are we to believe?

Well, one person who were featured in the 
programme was Barry Jennings, the deputy director 
of the Emergency Services Department of the New 
York City Housing Authority. Jennings along with 
another man called Michael Hess, of New York 
City's corporation counsel, had independently 
headed to the Office of Emergency Management's 
Emergency Operating Center. The EOC was a special 
bomb-proof bunker which had years earlier been 
built high up into the 23rd floor of WTC7.

Jennings says that he was expecting to be met by 
Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but instead had found the 
place had been deserted, going on to describe how 
they even found half-eaten sandwiches and still 
warm cups of coffee. Wondering what was going on, 
Jennings says he phoned down and was told to 
leave the building immediately. However, before 
they had reached the lobby, Jennings says there 
was a big explosion, which forced both men to 
climb back to the eighth level where they remained trapped for several hours.

Jennings, still bruised and covered in dust, 
relates this whole story via a live link to the 
on-the-scene reporter for ABC news. Shortly after 
their rescue by fire-crews, another on-the-spot 
reporter, Frank Ucciardo had managed to get a 
separate interview with Michael Hess. Also aired 
live, this time on Channel 9 news, Michael Hess's 
own first account of events, accurately 
corroborates the story being told by Jennings. 
Yet according to timeline of their arrival and 
rescue, their report of a big explosions inside 
WTC7 must have occurred prior to the collapse of 
the towers. What this means of course, is that 
Jennings and Hess could not have mistaken the 
explosion inside the separate WTC7 with damage 
caused by falling debris – which certainly did 
smash through one side of the building. Indeed, 
on a second interview, conducted in mid 2007 by 
Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas (and to be included 
in the final version of Loose Change), Avery 
raises the point directly. Jennings sticks to his original account.

On the BBC documentary, we also hear testimony 
from Barry Jennings, however Jennings now seems 
less certain. Although in actual fact, he does 
not retract any of his original statements, 
significantly he makes no mention of the big 
explosion that in the immediate aftermath, both 
he and Michael Hess, had independently cited as 
the original cause of their entrapment.

In response to the BBC programme, Dylan Avery has 
now released the uncut version of the interview 
with Barry Jennings he made for Loose Change[32]:

"My mind is still there, you know," Jennings 
says, responding to Dylan Avery's invitation to 
make any final comments, "That day I'll never 
forget. And the explanations that were given me: 
totally unacceptable - totally unacceptable."

Sadly, Barry Jennings died on August 19th 2008, 
only a month after his appearance on BBC and just 
days prior to the release of the NIST Final Report on the collapse of WTC7.

*

The BBC programme makers also paid attention to 
the reaction of Dutch demolition expert, Danny 
Jowenko, who on being shown the collapse of WTC7 
for the first time (unaware of the context of 
what he was seeing and therefore making his 
judgement without any prejudice) came to the 
unequivocal conclusion that here was a controlled 
demolition.[33] However, a different American 
demolition expert called Mark Loizeaux, who is 
the President of Controlled Demolition, 
apparently begs to differ. And so that's again that.

Different experts have reached different 
conclusions: stalemate; with the implication that 
expert opinion is also unreliable. But instead of 
leaving matters there, the programme makers might 
instead have approached Jowenko directly, to ask 
whether he remained sure of his convictions, 
given the disagreement they'd found from Loizeaux 
and others. They didn't, but had they done so, 
they'd have found Jowenko remains just as adamant 
as when he'd first watched the footage, whilst 
offering cautious reason to doubt the judgement 
of anyone from the trade who's reliant on future business in America:

"When the FEMA makes a report that it came down 
by fire, and you have to earn your money in the 
States as a controlled demolition company and you 
say, "No, it was a controlled demolition", you're gone."[34]

In such a fashion then, the programme makers set 
about the theory for controlled demolition, 
repudiating selected eyewitness testimony by 
presenting contrary testimony and refuting expert 
testimony with further expert testimony: every 
positive eliminated by a cancelling negative. A 
process of neutralisation, in which all testimony 
would be equal, but for the fact that it is 
opposition to the official story, rather than the 
official story as such, that is under scrutiny.

This is not the proper format of a journalistic 
investigation, where "there's nothing to see 
here..." is the message again and again. The best 
hope, the narrator concludes lamely, is that 
following NISTs final report, the victims and the 
families of the victims might at last to be 
allowed to move on. By falsely insinuating that 
this is all a lot of hokum, cooked up by a bunch 
of self-interested outsiders, the programme 
finally closes, just as the first had, with an 
outrageously sweeping misrepresentation of the truth movement itself.

*

But there was one way that we could have been 
absolutely certain whether or not WTC7 had been 
demolished. A proper forensic examination of the 
steel would have unequivocally settled the 
matter. The lessons learned from such a full 
forensic investigation might also have protected 
buildings and people in the future – after all, 
this was an unprecedented collapse (as everyone 
agrees) – and if fire alone had caused the 
structure to fail then we need to know exactly 
how. Such analysis is not merely an academic 
exercise, but potentially a matter of life and 
death. Yet, we learn that not a single sample of 
steel was saved from WTC7. Not one. When surely 
such a wholesale destruction of evidence would be nothing short of criminal.

And so we learn that as early as January 2002, 
Bill Manning, the editor in chief of Fire 
Engineering magazine, was already shining a 
spotlight on the altogether slipshod 
investigation, castigating FEMA (the Federal 
Emergency Management Agency) in no uncertain 
terms, and candidly expressing his concerns of a deeper cover-up:

"Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that 
the "official investigation" blessed by FEMA and 
run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is 
a half-baked farce that may already have been 
commandeered by political forces whose primary 
interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure."[35]

Concerns that raise yet another important 
question: on whose authority was this removal of 
evidence permitted. The BBC programme touched on 
all of this, and yet it failed to delve into the matter at all.

"As things now stand and if they continue in such 
fashion, the investigation into the World Trade 
Center fire and collapse will amount to paper- 
and computer-generated hypotheticals." writes 
Manning again (in the same article), correctly 
foreseeing that in the absence of all forensic 
analysis, the future teams of investigators, such 
as those working at NIST would have to rely solely on computer simulations.

Now in fairness this has obviously made their 
task a great deal tougher than it ought to have 
been, and so it may perhaps be forgiven if their 
original report of 2005[36] didn't bother to 
present any theory of any kind to account for the 
collapse of WTC7. However, they have since spent 
a further three years (seven in total) tweaking 
the parameters of their finite-element analysis 
routines and at last they might have figured out 
a possible mechanism. The entire collapse must 
have been caused by ordinary office fires, 
they'll say, because what is NIST's alternative? 
To return yet another report that explains why 
they still haven't got a clue, or as FEMA put it 
rather more tortuously in the conclusion to their 
own first report that: "...the best hypothesis 
has only a low probability of occurrence."[37]

Yes, the scientists and engineers at NIST have 
been tasked with a seriously tricky problem. To 
establish a mechanism involving such rapid and 
simultaneous failure to ensure a perfectly 
symmetrical collapse at close to free-fall 
speeds. A failure instigated by fires which were 
at their most intense on the lower and middle 
levels, yet causing a collapse that began with 
the penthouse, and then, almost immediately, 
shattered the building progressively from the 
base upwards. A process that caused the building 
to fold inwards, pulverising itself into dust, 
and causing what little rubble remained to tumble 
almost vertically rather than taking paths of 
least resistance (and with other parts toppling 
over). And a mechanism that could leave a neat 
pile of smouldering remains that would continue 
to glow for more than a month afterwards.

They'll be doing well to account for any of this, 
basing their theory on randomly situated office 
fires, but still one piece of evidence remains 
that no theory of natural collapse can ever 
provide a feasible account for: it is the 
numerous reports from first-responders who saw 
"pools" and "rivers" of molten steel, with one 
firefighter comparing the scene to being "like a 
foundry".[38] In order to see why this is such a 
big ask, I'll need to make a considerable 
digression to more closely consider all of the 
physics involved. However, since many readers 
will find such technical arguments tiresome, I 
have decided to save that more detailed analysis for a separate Appendix B.

*

For now I wish leave aside any closer inspection 
of questions surrounding the collapse of WTC7 and 
the other towers. The NIST final report has been 
published, and as expected it explains everything 
in terms of the fires, which means that once 
again they have failed to take account of all the 
evidence (the various reports of molten steel 
being quite impossible to square with such a low 
temperature theory). I could go on much further 
and talk about the unexplained sulphidation of 
the samples that were tested by FEMA, and other 
evidence supporting theories that a substance 
like thermite could have been used to cut through 
the girders[39]. I realise that for many people 
the very idea that a criminal branch of the US 
administration would, or even could, have planted 
explosives in the buildings represents an 
apparent leap into madness. So let's move on.

Let's also now leave aside Thierry Meyssan's 
theory that it was a missile and not a plane that 
hit the Pentagon, which opens another bag of 
worms again. There's more than enough food for 
thought without the missing planes and the 
unparalleled collapse of buildings. My real aim 
here has been to show that far from being 
madness, the theory that the buildings were 
demolished, mostly especially in the strange case 
of WTC7, still remains the only available theory 
that accounts for every piece of the surviving evidence.

The collapse of WTC7 has every feature associated 
with a controlled demolition and there is nothing 
about the collapse that has been shown to deviate 
from the characteristics of other controlled 
demolitions; whereas, for it to have collapsed 
'naturally' in such a characteristic way would 
require nothing less than a miracle.

When it comes to the case of WTC7, the objections 
put forward by “debunkers” of controlled 
demolition tend only to speculate on the hows and 
whys: how could the building have been rigged 
with explosives? and why would anyone blow up 
WTC7 in the first place? But the answer to such 
questions we can only speculate on, where 
speculation inevitably means coming up with some 
additional “conspiracy theories”. The better 
approach, I think, is simply to call for a new 
investigation that is amply funded, fully 
independent and encouraged to investigate every 
last detail of all the events of 9/11. For on 
what grounds would anyone oppose the re-opening 
of the inquiry into 9/11, other than the spurious 
claim that we already know all the answers?

*

On November 10th 2001, George W. Bush addressed 
the United Nations General Assembly with these words:

"We will remember every rescuer who died in 
honor. We will remember every family that lives 
in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the 
last phone calls, the funerals of the children."

True to their word, Bush, Cheney and the rest of 
the gang have indeed remembered the victims, 
especially whenever it helped to disguise their 
imperialist ambitions, or enabled them to 
undermine the American constitution, or, and most 
deplorably of all, to legitimise false 
imprisonment and the use of torture. They have 
never once shirked from reminding us of those 
horrific deaths of thousands, when seeking an 
excuse to inflame new wars and spread more terror of their own making.

Yet we've seen how Bush, and the White House 
administration as a whole, made no great efforts 
to find out what really happened on September 
11th. Indeed, they first delayed, and then 
hampered at every turn, an investigation that 
they were eventually forced to conduct. So, 
overarching all the other questions about what 
really happened on the morning of September 11th 
2001, is this: cui bono? Who actually benefited?

Was it Osama Bin Laden, already suffering from 
kidney failure (or is he?) and now forced to 
scuttle around from cave to cave, presumably with 
his dialysis machine in tow, as bunker-busting 
bombs and "daisy-cutters" flattened all around him? Perhaps –

Or how about the Neo-con administration in 
Washington, suddenly positioned and enabled to 
embark on an endless war against a mysterious "axis of evil".

The Kean-Hamilton report is revealing here too. 
It is a surprising read. For instance, of the 
four-hundred plus pages, you discover that a mere 
fifty are addressed to the main events of the day 
itself. These few pages cover the total evidence 
from all the testimony of fire-fighters and other 
eyewitnesses including the first responders. All 
condensed to fill just a single chapter: "Heroism 
and Horror". Whilst, in the next chapter, 
something more startling is revealed.

Entitled "Wartime", the discussion has already 
moved on. Having no direct bearing on the events 
of September 11th - and thus more in keeping with 
the report in general – the emphasis returns to 
background events and here to the urgency of an 
effective response. The concluding section to the 
chapter being subtitled: "'Phase two' and the 
question of Iraq", begins as follows (and this is a direct quote):

"President Bush had wondered immediately after 
the attack whether Saddam Hussein's regime might 
have had a hand in it. Iraq had been an enemy of 
the United States for 11 years, and was the only 
place in the world where the United States was 
engaged in on-going combat operations. ... He 
told us he recalled Iraqi support for Palestinian 
suicide terrorists as well. Speculating about 
other possible states that could be involved, the 
President told us he also thought about Iran. 
[Richard] Clarke has written that on the evening 
of September 12, President Bush told him and some 
of his staff to explore possible Iraqi links to 
9/11. "See if Saddam did this," Clarke recalls 
the President telling them. "See if he's linked in anyway."[40]

Presumably then, this is how America of the 
twenty-first century constructs its foreign 
policy. Founding it on the hunches and 
suppositions of its great leader. Meanwhile, we 
learn that September 11th was the ideal cover for 
governments to "bury bad news" as someone once 
carelessly put it. So what ought we to make of 
Donald Rumsfeld announcing the disappearance of 
some 2.3 Trillion Dollars from US Defense expenditure accounts.

Hey, 2.3 Trillion is one hell of a lot of money 
by anyone's standards. So much in fact that 
Rumsfeld himself remarked that: "In fact, it 
could be said it's a matter of life and death." 
But when precisely did Rumsfeld sound the public 
alarm on this unprecedented loss of government 
revenues? Would you believe September 10th? There 
really couldn't have been any better occasion to bury some bad news.[41]

*

Chasing after justice, a few of the victims 
(including first responders, many of whom have 
later died, or are dying, of respiratory 
illnesses caused by inhaling toxic dust that the 
government was also fully aware of) got to have 
an inquiry. Right from the start they were deeply 
unhappy with how it had been delayed, was 
underfunded, and lacked independence. Afterwards, 
when they'd read the commission report, they felt 
betrayed for a second time. In response, they put 
together a documentary film called "9/11: Press 
for Truth".[42]  It is compelling viewing and should be aired worldwide.

But there is another point here, and within the 
bigger scheme it is the more important one. All 
the delays, the distortions, the changes in 
timelines, the endless deceptions that frustrated 
Kean and Hamilton[43] (by their own account 
“Without Precedent”), presents us with the 
proverbial elephant in the living room. 
Naturally, we may presume, as Kean and Hamilton 
do, that those in charge were simply covering 
their collective backs. No doubt, this is enough 
to persuade many that although the failures of 
the commission are very evident and rather 
serious, there is really nothing to be concerned 
about. Well, okay, let's say, for the sake of 
argument, that all the events of September 
11th  are entirely accountable through a 
unfortunate combination of incompetence and bad 
luck. And that the delays and obstructions and 
often blatant lies were used only to protect 
those working within the highest levels of the 
security services and perhaps all the way up to 
the White House itself from charges amounting to 
dereliction of duty. Well doesn't it remain the 
job of a supposedly free media to keep asking the 
awkward questions? Just like the commission 
itself, those who work within it have a 
responsibility. They must try to establish, to 
the best of their ability, truth from fiction, 
even if it's only apportion blame. This is what 
we expect inquiries to do, and if the inquiry 
can't do it then the journalists must step in.

Colonel Robert Bowman, a physicist who headed the 
"Star Wars" project, and also a former combat 
pilot who flew over a hundred missions during the 
Vietnam War, has put it this way:

"What are they trying to hide? Are they trying to 
hide guilt or incompetence? We don't know, but we 
should know. Either way the American people deserve to know."

Yes, and the world more widely needs to know. Yet 
during the four hundred and forty days when the 
administration dragged its heels before 
reluctantly opening its inquiry, just where were 
the media? Pushing hard alongside William 
Rodriguez and the families of the victims 
themselves, or taking a more "impartial" stance? 
Neutrality is not the same as turning away with indifference.

Bob Bowman, ran for Congress as a Democrat 
candidate in 2006, determinedly trying to raise 
support for a full and totally independent 
re-investigation. He has frequently described the 
official theory of 9/11 as "a bunch of hogwash", 
and sums up the case against the administration with these words:

"The very kindest that we can say is that they 
were aware of the impending attacks and let them 
happen. Now some people will say that's much too 
kind. However, even that is high treason and conspiracy to commit murder."

*

The “conspiracy theorist”, we are often told 
(especially by the media), is unable to deal with 
the complex reality of the world as it really is. 
A world where no one really knows exactly what's 
going on, let alone controls it. A world of 
uncertainties and potential chaos. So, let's take 
this idea on a little and apply it to the 
terrible and terrifying events of September 11th 
2001. And since, implicitly, this involves 
comparison between two opposing outlooks, let's 
consider the position of both the “conspiracy 
theorist” against, if you like, that of the 
“cock-up theorist”. Which of these outlooks is 
actually the most psychologically reassuring?

Firstly then, and according to the “cock-up 
theorists”, the events of 9/11 (along with nearly 
all of the other recent terrorist attacks) were 
staged solely by Islamic fundamentalists who had 
been trained and supported by – or more vaguely “had links to” – Al Qaeda.

9/11 was simply the most devastating attack ever 
masterminded by Osama Bin Laden; that well-known 
face of global Islamic terrorism who issues all 
his commands from his cave in Afghanistan. The 
attackers involved were relatively few in number, 
poorly trained and, it is surely reasonable to 
assess, psychologically unstable. They had no 
weapons besides box-cutters or else (in other 
attacks) used rather crude “home-made” explosives.

Meanwhile, everyone working for the British and 
American security services were very actively 
intent on protecting the public, which is their 
primary responsibility and duty. Post 9/11, those 
same intelligence agencies have been strengthened 
and are now better prepared and ever more 
vigilant in their efforts to prevent future atrocities.

Okay then, how scary was that? Presumably, no one 
is naïve enough to imagine our nation has no real 
enemies, so if the most dangerous threat we 
currently face is from random attacks by an 
occasional suicide bomber with explosives packed 
in his pants then shouldn't we actually be sleeping rather soundly.

But what about the alternative? How much scarier 
is the idea that our own governments, or more 
precisely a very powerful, secret and 
self-selecting elite that controls a part of 
those governments, have planned and are still 
planning to sometimes undermine the safety of 
their own people? That the ultimate powers that 
be – whatever or whoever they may be – powers 
that are interested solely in directing the 
course of events to ensure their own 
self-interested ends, are therefore taking 
decisions that occasionally allow a few pawns to be sacrificed along the way.

That, as a consequence, the public face not one 
enemy but two, and that the stronger of these is 
also, most disturbingly, our primary defence 
against the weaker force (currently Al Qaeda). 
Well clearly this is by far and away the greater 
nightmare. An outlook that offers no comfort 
whatsoever but only increased fear, and if these 
fears are admitted, being faced by an altogether 
more personal peril. Because “to believe in 
conspiracy theories” is psychologically 
dangerous, and this is true whether or not the 
theories themselves are based on delusion or hard 
fact. And let's remember that there still is no 
word for being paranoid but correct.

To judge then from the “conspiracy theorist” side 
of the fence (if this is where I stand), it is 
tempting to hold up a mirror to the “cock-up 
theorists” and to echo a reply: this accusation 
you make about us “conspiracy kooks” needing our 
comfort blankets looks a lot like what 
psychologists call 'projection'. It is easy to 
find the faults in others, but those who believe 
that “conspiracy theorists” (i.e. those who 
contend against the official version of certain, 
often major, political events) are all cowards, 
would be advised to think again. Facing the truth 
as it is found, and not always as it is presented 
to us, requires an enormous act of courage.

*

Appendix A: my response to the BBC in the form of an official complaint

Re: 9/11: The conspiracy files (Sunday 18th February 2007)

Dear Sir,

There are two general points I would like to 
make, interspersed by more specifically addressed 
and detailed points. Firstly, and with regards to 
truth, and I do not have any serious issues 
regarding the facts as they were stated in the 
programme (or such as they are understood by the 
producers), however, there are more ways to be 
deceptive than simply lying. So let me list a 
few. Most importantly there is where you choose 
to shine the light, since what is covered and 
what is ignored is often just as important as the facts themselves.
             The questions about 9/11 go deep 
into many areas but naturally enough you skim 
through a few (this is a question of time, since 
a thorough analysis and one that considered the 
events with due gravity could fill number of 
documentaries). So this alone might be forgiven 
if the questions you choose to consider were ones 
that might be key to finding out what really 
happened. But instead of this you quickly glossed 
over the most important questions. Here are a few:
             Why was the investigation of the 
potential hijackers blocked and hampered? Why 
were none of the planes intercepted? How did the 
pilots fly with such unerring accuracy after so 
little training and zero experience of flying jet 
airliners? Why did the buildings collapse so 
quickly and completely? Why did building 7 fall 
at all given that it was never hit by a plane? 
How did one plane ever manage to strike the 
Pentagon when it's surely one of the most well 
defended areas on earth? Why have we still never 
seen any film of the plane crashing into the 
pentagon when it is also surely has some of the 
highest surveillance in the world?
             At least your programme did point 
out that secrecy is a key ingredient to what 
makes so many of us suspicious, though failing to 
recognise that it is generally the case that 
secrecy also suggests there could something to 
hide – even if it isn't that a missile hit the 
Pentagon, which could very well be a piece of 
deliberate misinformation to distract attention 
from more significant factors, as some 
researchers have already acknowledged – see 9/11 
Research. There are also many important and 
hanging questions that were missed altogether. Here again are a few of those:
             What is the link between the alleged 
terrorists and the Pakistani intelligence agency 
ISI (which has links to the CIA)? Why have 7 of 
the 19 alleged terrorists been reported alive and 
well (on BBC website)? Why did we hear nothing of 
the many eyewitness reports of explosions in the 
towers and why no mention of former janitor 
William Rodriguez (the last civilian to be 
rescued, he was briefly a national hero) who says 
he felt explosions in the basement before the 
first plane struck? Why no consideration of the 
very suspicious stock market speculation with 
high levels of trading on put options for both 
United Airlines and American Airlines?
             In addition to this glossing over of 
the most serious questions and allegations, the 
programme also adopts a cherry-picking style to 
its selection of evidence. It talks to a woman 
who took a Delta flight – a flight that has 
nothing to do with the main events of 9/11 aside 
from an idea that happens to have been suggested 
as one explanation for the unproven disappearance 
of flight 77 (a speculation made by a 
film-maker). In an overly extended analysis it 
even asks the passenger in question why people 
believe in these “stories”. Such a blatantly 
loaded question of absolutely no relevance 
whatsoever. The programme then switches to 
allegations of warnings given to the Jewish community prior to the attacks.
             Apparently there is some kind of 
deplorably anti-Semitic and dopey notion that the 
NY Jewish community had been tipped off. Again 
the programme makers decided to trace the origins 
of such an obvious lie in another extended 
diversion away from the main issues. Finally they 
interview one of the Jewish family victims, with 
emotional footage showing her clutching her hand 
around a wire fence and weeping, asking what she 
thinks about the people who believe in “these 
conspiracy theories.” In watching this most 
sickening exploitation of a person's grief, what 
are we supposed to think? That all the families 
of the victims feel the same? But this again is a 
huge deception of course, since it was largely 
due to pressure from other families of victims 
that the 9/11 commission was finally set up. A 
hundred family members have now signed a petition 
calling for a re-opening of the investigation and 
a smaller number also collaborated to launch the film 9/11 Press for Truth.
             This was followed by an interview 
with an X-Files scriptwriter (cue music!) who had 
accidentally written scenes reminiscent of the 
9/11 attacks a few months earlier. Having trawled 
through the internet for reports and evidence for 
literally hundreds of hours it seems odd to me 
that you focus such profligate attention on 
something I'd never before heard about.
             And then, as previously, you feel 
obliged to ask what the scriptwriter thinks about 
“this conspiracy theory.” But that's irrelevant 
of course, as are his views as to whether or not 
some senior members of the Bush administration 
are mass murderers. This is thankfully not how 
evidence of guilt is ever legally considered.
             And so to my second point, a point 
about impartiality. Just as truth is never as 
simple as merely not telling lies, so 
impartiality is never as simple as giving both 
sides of an argument equal amounts of attention. 
It also depends on how you frame things. From the 
outset the programme claims that there are more 
than 50 “conspiracy theories” (and using the 
words “conspiracy theories” immediately 
stigmatises anyone who defends those views). But what is a conspiracy theory?
             It might be reasonably argued that 
in this instance there are only two basic ones. 
There is the official government theory involving 
an unanticipated attack by a group of Islamic 
fundamentals and there is another that claims some form of direct government
involvement. This alternative account might 
simply mean that some part of the American 
administration allowed fully formulated attacks 
to go ahead without intervention or it may make 
more dramatic claims that either parts of the government assisted a pre-planned
attack or that they acted alone. But to say there 
are many theories obviously creates the 
impression that the entire 9/11 truth movement is 
at loggerheads, which is plainly untrue (since 
all the main websites carry more or less the same 
concerns) and I believe deliberately intended to mislead the audience.
             We were also presented with an 
understanding that on the one hand there are a 
few “self-styled” reporters and investigators and 
on the other “nuts and bolts” honest and 
independent experts working for the highly 
respected journal Popular Mechanics, so what are 
you leading us to conclude? What is a 
“self-styled” journalist anyway? Is it anyone who 
is not affiliated to any major news organisation? 
Because suppose there happened to be no news 
organisations either willing or interested to 
investigate a story? Surely we would then have to 
rely on such “self-styled” investigation.
             And then why did you linger over a 
framed picture of Jesus with the caption 
“employee of the month” in the office of the 
Loose Change producers? A deliberate attempt to 
arouse suspicion or ridicule in a largely 
agnostic audience? Perhaps in way of balance you 
might have also been reminding us of George 
Bush's much professed belief in the same God. But 
we didn't actually need to see any of this, and 
as with much else in the film such as the 
constantly inter-cut caption reading “conspiracy” 
at the end of every section, the spooky or else 
stirring music, the constant reminders that 
“these people” need to “find comfort”, the 
impression was deliberately slanted in favour of 
the proponents supporting the official story and 
against the “self-styled” “conspiracy theorists” 
so desperate to keep hold of their “comfort 
blanket.” This is an utterly bogus portrayal and 
deeply patronising to a very large number of 
people who have looked into the claims and 
counter-claims about 9/11 with justified 
suspicion. And to suppose that it offers anyone 
comfort that the American government may have 
committed one of the greatest of all peace-time 
atrocities, is to presume any skeptic of the 
official account must be callous or frankly 
psychopathic. What is this supposed comfort in 
believing that the world may be controlled by a 
select group of first degree murderers?
             But the real issue is not about the 
“conspiracy theorists” or even about any competing
“conspiracy theories.”  We may never know what 
happened and so inevitably there will be guesses, 
but wrong guesses prove nothing. Instead, this is 
a matter of searching for answers to a great many 
very important and as yet unanswered questions 
(some of which were completely overlooked in your 
film). The 9/11 truth movement wants full answers 
to what is a most horrific and deplorable crime, 
so it is both dishonest and disgraceful to 
dismiss such concerns without close scrutiny and 
proper consideration. To conclude then, I regard 
this “self-styled” investigative documentary to 
be at best a wholly trivial and biased 
mistreatment of what is a matter for the gravest 
seriousness, and at worst, worry that here was 
yet another example of the sort of poisonous 
propaganda which the cowed post-Hutton BBC 
constantly serves up in the place of serious journalism.

*

Appendix B: Collapse of the towers – the application of some basic physics.

I have seen and read through quite a number of 
attempts to challenge the official theory of 
progressive collapse for the Twin Towers and for 
Building 7 by appealing to violations of the laws 
of physics. This may seem odd to those who are 
not trained as scientists, yet it is perhaps the 
most logical starting point for anyone who has 
been. Why? Because, showing any breach of the 
fundamental laws of physics would be quite 
sufficient to render all other evidence 
unnecessary. In this instance then, physics 
appears tantalisingly to offer the possibility of 
irrefutable proof one way or the other, which, 
with so little direct forensic evidence having 
been preserved, no other analysis can. For 
whatever the reliability of the witnesses, and 
regardless of all other distractions and 
deceptions that must be negotiated, the physics can NEVER be wrong.

Taking this approach then, some have presented 
the case that following the law of conservation 
of momentum, the collapse rate would have to be 
significantly below free-fall speeds. This is a 
relevant and interesting argument, but one that, 
due to various unknowns about the collapse 
mechanism, is actually quite difficult to 
demonstrate conclusively without recourse to 
computer simulations. So having acknowledged this 
I have decided to leave the question there for others to consider.

The law of the conservation of energy, however, 
offers a more straightforward route. For those 
who don't remember the law then let me briefly 
summarise it as follows: it says in a nutshell 
that energy can never be created or destroyed. 
And just like many of the laws of physics, it is 
really a profoundly simple rule. That is, it is 
simple to understand, but more importantly it also simplifying.

It means that we only need to think about two 
things: the situation before and the situation 
afterwards. Whatever happened during the collapse 
is not at all important, just so long as we know 
how much energy we had to begin with and how much 
energy we would have needed to break everything 
to pieces. Well given this fact, it's possible to 
make some useful estimates and indeed many have already done so.

They have calculated the initial "available 
energy", which is easy enough because this must 
have been almost entirely the gravitational 
potential energy of the building, which is 
something anyone with a GCSE in the subject ought 
to be able to estimate. So everyone agrees on 
this part, more or less, accepting a figure of 
around a thousand billion Joules, which I've seen 
compared to "about 1% of energy released by a 
small nuclear bomb". Sounds a lot when put like 
that. So that's what we have at the start.

Now we need to estimate the amounts of energy 
that must have been involved in tearing the whole 
structure apart, into such small pieces that most 
of it was easily loaded onto trucks. We'll need 
to include the energy required to blast some of 
the debris horizontally, and perhaps more 
significantly, we also need to add in the energy 
needed to pulverise huge quantities of the 
concrete into those large clouds of fine dust that settled across New York.

There are indeed already estimates for all of 
this, and much more besides, and those who have 
sat down and done the sums have frequently 
claimed to find an energy deficit. They find much 
more energy was needed than was ever available. 
They say that gravity alone just wasn't 
sufficient to cause such total destruction. But 
these kinds of analysis are complicated, 
especially if we are seeking real precision 
rather than ball-park estimates. Having said that 
such an approach is far less complicated that 
NISTs use of finite element analysis. Here is 
certainly one way that a fully independent 
scientific investigation, run in tandem with a 
fully independent commission, might be able to 
settle the question one way or the other.

Now, back to the matter in hand. The molten 
steel. In order to melt steel from room 
temperature you have to add heat – lots and lots 
of heat. Well, actually that isn't strictly true. 
And we'll need to be careful about our terms. So 
let's leave "heat" aside for a moment. Stating 
matters a little more scientifically then, we 
should talk instead about the "internal energy". 
In layman's language "raising the internal 
energy" is the same as "raising the heat", it 
either makes the thing hotter or it melts it. But 
physicists prefer to use the term "internal 
energy" rather than "heat" because they need to 
distinguish between the different ways in which 
internal energy can be raised. "Heating", then, 
in this more precise description, involves the 
transfer energy from something hotter to 
something cooler. This is a one-way process, 
which occurs when you heat your saucepans on a 
hob, or leave your coffee to go cold.

You may have noticed that your pans don't melt 
into the hob no matter how long you leave them, 
and that your coffee cools never down below room 
temperature. There is reason for this. We say 
that a some point the pan or the coffee has 
reached what is called "thermal equilibrium" with 
its surroundings. From this point on no further 
heat transfer can occur, because nothing can ever 
get hotter (reach a higher temperature) than the 
thing that's heating it. To do so would violate 
the famous second law of thermodynamics and as 
the physicist Eddington once famously remarked: 
"if your theory is found to be against the second 
law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; 
there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

Going back to the question of melting steel then, 
it's certain that we would require fires hotter 
than the melting point of steel, which is about 
1500C, whereas jet fuel doesn't burn at 
temperatures nearly high enough. NIST in fact 
agree that the jet fuel and office fires in the 
towers could not have exceeded 2000F (about 
1100C), and consequentially, they have never 
claimed that the original fires melted the steel. 
Indeed, according to their own report, the effect 
of the fires was only to cause weakening of the 
steel sufficient to initiate the collapse.[44] So 
what do NIST make of the reports of molten 
steel...? Well, I'll come back to that a little 
later, but first we must consider more of the physics.

Okay then, we've dealt with heating, but, as I 
mentioned earlier, there are other ways to raise 
the "internal energy" of a material. For 
instance, you might run an electric current 
through it, or instead you might apply forces to 
bend or compress or stretch it, perhaps over and 
over again. Stretching, bending, twisting and 
compressing and so on also causes materials to 
get hotter or potentially to melt, and these 
alternative ways of increasing internal energy 
are what physicists call generically "doing 
work".  So perhaps then we can account for the 
molten steel found in the ruins of the WTC by 
virtue of "work done" as it twisted and ripped 
apart. If we needed to consider every snapped 
rivet and twisted beam in isolation that would 
involve an incredibly complex analysis too, 
fortunately however there is a law of physics 
which rides to our rescue: it's our old friend 
the theory of the conservation of energy.

I am about to present something known in the 
trade as "a back of the envelope calculation". It 
is an attempt to provide an estimate for the 
addition temperature gain (beyond the 1100C of 
the fires) that could have occurred as the 
building smashed to pieces, but it will involve 
making certain approximations and assumptions, 
all of which I will endeavour to justify.

My prime assumption is as follows: that ALL of 
the available energy was ultimately absorbed by 
the steel alone, causing it to get hotter. This 
is a crazy assumption of course. It takes no 
account of energy absorbed by the concrete, 
making it hotter too. Of losses due to air 
resistance, which we should suppose might be 
considerable given that each floor would have to 
push the air out of the way like a plunger. It 
ignores the fact that since so much of the 
concrete was ground to dust, its own available 
gravitational energy would have been lost as it 
floated gently down to earth, taking with it 
whatever internal energy it might have gained 
from the process of being crushed. It ignores the 
fact that the ground itself must have absorbed a 
significant part of the energy as it gave way a 
little, and that some of that energy then caused 
tremors and therefore, though indirectly, rocked 
the other buildings in the close vicinity a 
little. For all these important reasons, my 
answer is likely to be a gross over-estimate of 
what was really possible, representing only the 
extreme upper limit on any true answer. But then 
remember that it's only a back of the envelope estimation.

My next assumption is that the centre of mass of 
the building is exactly halfway up. In point of 
fact, the centre of mass must have been 
significantly below halfway because obviously the 
structure towards the bottom needed to be ever 
stronger to support the greater weight above. I 
also fail to take account of the fact that a 
significant part of the building's mass lay in 
its foundations and the basements which had 
nowhere to fall. This means that I have again 
substantially over-estimated the available 
energy, forcing my final estimate to be an even 
higher upper limit. (Although, provided with full 
knowledge of the design of the building we could 
eliminate the biggest part of this second error.)

These then are the positives, if you like – 
factors which force the figure up – but there are 
also a few negatives. There is the additional 
weight of fixtures and fitting, of furnishing, 
and of the victims themselves. (Others, often far 
better qualified than myself, have attempted more 
accurate calculations with estimates on all of 
the above – they involve only modest 
adjustments). For our purposes then, it's quite 
reasonable to say that these negatives are 
negligible, especially when offset against such 
enormous positives as all those listed above. As 
for the additional energy contained in the jet 
fuel (which is small when considered in the 
greater scheme), well this is irrelevant anyway 
since it has already been used to heat the steel. 
But it can only heat the steel to 1100C at most, 
whereas we are trying to account for temperatures 
above those generated by the fire. Right then, we 
can now do a very simply calculation. If all of 
the initial energy had somehow diffused evenly 
throughout the steel, how much would its 
temperature rise? Well, the answer is a mere 20C 
(with the relevant equation and figures given below).[45]

In other words, even if every last drop of energy 
went into heating the steel (which we presume is 
already 1100C – again a high estimate, with most 
the steel never reaching temperatures anywhere 
close to this upper limit) it would still need 
nineteen times more again to even reach melting 
point.  Whilst we must remember that much more 
energy would again be required to melt any 
significant portion of it.[46] In the case of the 
lower-level WTC7, this energy shortfall is exacerbated still further.

Being approximately half the height, and all 
other things remaining about equal, the estimate 
must also be halved, generating an average rise 
of 10C at the very most. So given these numbers, 
how can anyone seriously propose that the steel 
was melted as a consequence of the additional energy gain during collapse?[47]

Or let's look at this all another way. Take a 
lump of steel (and mix in some concrete if you 
like) and drop it from the height of the twin 
towers. Will any of it melt when it hits the 
ground? And when cars or trains or even planes 
crash and get all crumpled up, and the kinetic 
energy converts into internal energy, do we ever 
expect to find even small puddles of molten 
metal? For such collisions generally occur at 
similar and at frequently higher speeds than the 
speed of the falling rubble.[48] And the reason 
why cars, trains and planes don't melt on impact 
is simply this: that small increases in internal 
energy require a whole lot of mechanical "work" 
input. It is for a similar reason we don't try to 
boil water by shaking it around in a vacuum 
flask, a handy method for a stranded hiker. It is 
theoretically possible to heat water by 
elbow-grease alone, indeed the water temperature 
will measurably rise, but if you're planning to 
make a cup of tea then just don't hold your breath.

Nevertheless, I have come across just such 
implausible explanations presented by a few of 
those who wish "to debunk" the case for 
demolition and explain away the molten metal. 
That said, the guys at NIST have taken better 
care to avoid such utterly improbable 
conclusions. Instead, when it comes the question 
of the origin of molten steel they have provided the following answer:

"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 yards­found no evidence that 
would support the melting of steel in a jet-fuel 
ignited fire in the towers prior to collapse. 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."[49]

Now, please read that back again. I'm right, 
yeah? They're saying they did bother studying the 
steel in the wreckage "whether it was in a molten 
state or not" because it couldn't provide any 
information on its condition prior to the 
collapse. That's a strange admission isn't it. I 
mean if you want to find out how anything broke 
then in general it helps if you look at the 
pieces afterwards. I admit though I'm no expert.

They also say this, which I find still harder to fathom:

"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."[50]

Now quite frankly, I wouldn't let my first year 
students get away with such meaningless 
obfuscation! Higher temperatures due to longer 
exposure times – give me a break. As if exposure 
time makes all the difference, when hotness is 
limited, let us remind ourselves, such that 
nothing can EVER (no matter how long the exposure 
time) become hotter than that which is heating 
it. So a "long exposure" to what exactly? "To 
combustion within the pile". Oh really – and just 
what could have been burning so ferociously down 
in the rubble that wasn't already burning when 
the building was standing tall and supplied with 
oxygen all around? As I say, I'm no expert, but 
I've used a Bunsen burner now and again and it 
certainly won't get hotter when you shut the air down.




[1]             "I don't think anyone could have 
predicted that they would try to use an airplane 
as a missile - a hijacked airplane as a missile." 
Condoleezza Rice (C-Span). "Nobody in our 
government at least, and I don't think the prior 
government could envisage flying airplanes into 
buildings." George W. Bush (C-Span). But this 
again turns out to be untrue. "In 1998, U.S. 
intelligence had information that a group of 
unidentified Arabs planned to fly an 
explosives-laden airplane into the World Trade 
Center, according to a joint inquiry of the House 
and Senate intelligence committees." reported by 
CNN on Thursday, September 19, 2002. You may also 
recall that in December 1994 an Air France flight 
was hijacked in Algiers by members of the Armed 
Islamic Group (GIA), who had plans to crash it 
into the Eiffel Tower. Fortunately, French 
Special Forces successfully stormed the plane on 
the ground. It turns out that far from being 
unimaginable, various agencies had been preparing 
for actions of precisely this kind. Here is a 
report entitled "NORAD had drills of jets as 
weapons" by Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri, USA 
TODAY, from 18th April 2004: "In the two years 
before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American 
Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises 
simulating what the White House says was 
unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used 
as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass 
casualties. One of the imagined targets was the 
World Trade Center." Of course we have also since 
learnt that, in the words of George J. Tenet, the 
former director of central intelligence, "The 
system was blinking red". His words in fact 
became the title of Chapter 8 of the Kean/Commission Report.
[2]             "A longtime associate of al Qaeda 
leader Osama bin Laden surrendered to Saudi 
Arabian officials Tuesday, a Saudi Interior 
Ministry official said. But it is unclear what 
role, if any, Khaled al-Harbi may have had in any 
terror attacks because no public charges have 
been filed against him. And though a Saudi 
security official called al-Harbi "a big fish," a 
U.S. intelligence official told CNN he was 'not 
particularly significant.'" from CNN, Wednesday, posted July 14, 2004
[3]             A great many video and audiotapes 
have surfaced and been reported as Osama Bin 
Laden declaring his intentions. Questions hang 
over the authenticity of many. The sound and 
picture quality of the tape in question (December 
13th 2001) are dreadfully poor. Here an Osama who 
looks different in many ways from the genuine 
Osama (particular attention should be paid to the 
nose, here much thicker and shorter than in his 
younger days), is apparently claiming 
foreknowledge, if not actual responsibility, for 
the September 11th attacks, and then chortling 
over their success. The authenticity of this tape 
has been so widely questioned that outside the 
mainstream media is widely referred to as the 
"fatty bin laden" video. The next tape to be 
verified as authentic by the CIA was on audiotape 
only. It was delivered to Al Jazeera in Autumn 
2002 but then quickly discredited by experts. 
Here's an article from taken BBC News Friday, 29 
November, 2002: entitled 'Bin Laden tape 'not 
genuine'': "Researchers in Switzerland have 
questioned the authenticity of the recent audio 
recording attributed to Osama Bin Laden. A team 
from the Lausanne-based Dalle Molle Institute for 
Perceptual Artificial Intelligence, Idiap, said 
it was 95% certain the tape does not feature the 
voice of the al-Qaeda leader." The BBC's Ian 
McWilliam also reported that "Their computer 
found differences compared to older Bin Laden tapes"
[4]                      Here is a rather 
skeptical report from Anne Karpf of The Guardian, 
Tuesday March 19, 2002: 'Uncle Sam's lucky 
finds': "In less than a week came another find, 
two blocks away from the twin towers, in the 
shape of Atta's passport. We had all seen the 
blizzard of paper rain down from the towers, but 
the idea that Atta's passport had escaped from 
that inferno unsinged would have tested the 
credulity of the staunchest supporter of the 
FBI's crackdown on terrorism." In point of fact 
the passport that had supposedly survived so 
miraculously - in contrast to all four black-box 
recorders from flights AA11 and UA175 that were 
apparently all destroyed - belonged to Satam Al 
Suqami and NOT to alleged ring-leader Mohammed Atta as is commonly misreported
[5]             Extract from "Collateral repair: 
A massive aid programme for Afghanistan will help 
bring down the Taliban" by George Monbiot, 
published in The Guardian on Tuesday September 25th, 2001.
[6]             "You can't distinguish between Al 
Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the War on 
Terror." George W. Bush on September 25th 2002. 
"Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, 
including members of Al Qaeda. Secretly, and 
without fingerprints, he could provide one of his 
hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop 
their own. Before September 11th many in the 
world believed that Saddam Hussein could be 
contained." from George W. Bush's State of the 
Union Address on January 28th 2003.
[7]             "The 9/11 Conspiracies" broadcast 
in September 2004; Polly Morland (Director/Producer)
[8]             At the Kean-Hamilton Commission 
hearing, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta 
gave the following testimony regarding Vice 
President Dick Cheney's response to the approach 
of Flight 77 towards the Pentagon: "There was a 
young man who would come in and say to the Vice 
President [Dick Cheney], "The plane is 50 miles 
out. The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got 
down to "The plane is 10 miles out", the young 
man also said to the Vice President,"Do the 
orders still stand?" And the Vice President 
turned and whipped his neck around and said,"Of 
course the orders still stand - have you heard 
anything to the contrary?" Are these orders to 
shoot the plane down? If so, then why was no 
action taken by the military? And why has no-one ever been reprimanded?
[9]             The Jersey Girls are Lorie Van 
Auken, Mindy Kleinberg, Patty Casazza, and 
Kristen Breitweiser. They form a part of the 9/11 
Family Steering Committee who attended and 
criticized the Kean-Hamilton Commission enquiry.
[10]           "Fog of war could explain why some 
people were confused on the day of 9/11, but it 
could not explain why all of the after-action 
reports, accident investigation, and public 
testimony by FAA officials and NORAD officials 
advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue." 
Passage from "Without Precedent: The inside story 
of the 9/11 commission" co-authored by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, 2006.
[11]           'Ultimately, administrators at the 
school told Mr. Hanjour that he would not qualify 
for the advanced certificate. But the ex-employee 
said Mr. Hanjour continued to pay to train on a 
simulator for Boeing 737 jets. ''He didn't care 
about the fact that he couldn't get through the 
course,'' the ex-employee said. Staff members 
characterized Mr. Hanjour as polite, meek and 
very quiet. But most of all, the former employee 
said, they considered him a very bad pilot. ''I'm 
still to this day amazed that he could have flown 
into the Pentagon,'' the former employee said. 
''He could not fly at all."' Extract from "A 
Trainee Noted for Incompetence" by Jim Yardley, 
published in New York Times on May 4th, 2002. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/04/national/04ARIZ.html
[12]           "As a former pilot, the President 
was struck by the apparent sophistication of the 
operation and some of the piloting, especially 
Hanjour's high-speed dive into the Pentagon." 
Extract taken from Kean-Hamilton 9/11 commission 
report, p.334, Section 10.3 entitled "Phase two" and the question of Iraq.
[13]            "All 64 people on board the 
airliner were killed, as were 125 people inside 
the Pentagon (70 civilians and 55 military 
service members)." from the 9/11 Commission 
Report, p. 314.  "At the Pentagon, military 
medical examiners linked remains to 179 victims, 
including passengers aboard American Airlines 
Flight 77 and people working in the facility. 
Five people who perished at the Pentagon could 
not be matched to remains." from USA Today, 11th September, 2006
[14]  A vapour trail is actually something you 
would not expect behind a commercial jet flying 
at such low altitude (approx ground level). If 
anything, it therefore provides yet more support 
for the contention that this was some kind of missile
[15]           "9/11: the conspiracy files" was 
broadcast on BBC2 on Sunday 18th February 2007. 
Following the broadcast, I posted an official 
complaint to the BBC, detailing how the arguments 
and the evidence had been entirely slanted in 
favour of the official story. I received a 
cursory and evidently standard reply.  You can 
read my letter of complaint in the appendix.
[16]           "A 9/11 conspiracy virus is 
sweeping the world, but it has no basis in fact" 
from the Guardian Comment by George Monbiot on Tuesday February 6th, 2007.
[17]           "A 9/11 conspiracy virus is 
sweeping the world, but it has no basis in fact" 
from the Guardian Comment by George Monbiot on Tuesday February 6th, 2007.
[18]            "Bayoneting a scarecrow: The 9/11 
conspiracy theories are a coward’s cult." from 
the Guardian Comment by George Monbiot on Tuesday February 20th 2007.
[19]           "...all the members of Scholars 
for 9/11 Truth, Scholars for 9/11 Truth and 
Justice, Veterans for 9/11 Truth, and Pilots for 
9/11 Truth; and most of the individuals listed 
under “Professors Question 9/11” on the “Patriots 
Question 9/11” website." taken from "Morons and 
Magic: A Reply to George Monbiot" by David Ray 
Griffin posted on 03/07/07 at 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17256.htm
[20]           "It's very thorough, it's not - 
you know - a hectic prose. Fingers are pointed. A 
lot of it is questions that never got answered. I 
recommend this book - it's very disturbing - 
because you really realise that there's a lot of 
menace around. And it's since we don't have a 
free press or media, since it all belongs to the 
same sort of people who benefit from these 
wars... we have no redress. We have no place to 
turn." Gore Vidal reviewing David Ray Griffin's book.
[21]           Author's transcription of Noam 
Chomsky's reply to an audience question taken 
from a post on You Tube - details regarding time 
and place were unfortunately not available.
[22]           FAA: Hi. Boston Centre TMU 
[Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem 
here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards 
New York, and we need you guys to, we need 
someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.
                 NEADS: Is this real-world or exercise?
                 FAA: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.
[23]             Footnote 116 on the 
Kean-Hamilton 9/11 commission report, which 
refers to Robert Marr interview (Jan. 23, 2004).
[24]           “On the morning of Sept. 11, Goss 
and Graham were having breakfast with a Pakistani 
general named Mahmud Ahmed -- the 
soon-to-be-sacked head of Pakistan's intelligence 
service. Ahmed ran a spy agency notoriously close 
to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.” From and 
article entitled “A Cloak But No Dagger” written 
by Richard Leiby, published in the Washington 
Post on May 18, 2002. 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36091-2002May17?language=printer

                 Porter Johnston Goss was the 
last Director of Central Intelligence and the 
first Director of the Central Intelligence Agency 
following the passage of the 2004 Intelligence 
Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which abolished the DCI position.
[25]           "Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden 
is a longtime and prominent member of the FBI's 
"Ten Most Wanted" list, which notes his role as 
the suspected mastermind of the deadly U.S. 
embassy bombings in East Africa on Aug. 7, 1998. 
But another more infamous date -- Sept. 11, 2001 
-- is nowhere to be found on the same FBI notice. 
The curious omission underscores the Justice 
Department's decision, so far, to not seek formal 
criminal charges against bin Laden for approving 
al-Qaeda's most notorious and successful 
terrorist attack." Extract from article by Dan 
Eggen published in the Washington Post, Monday, 
August 28, 2006; Page A13. 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/27/AR2006082700687.html 

[26]           George W. Bush speaking at the 
Orange County Convention Centre in Orlando, 
Florida on December 4th 2001 (transcribed by the author).
[27]           "Two suspects are in FBI custody 
after a truckload of explosives were discovered 
around the George Washington Bridge. That bridge 
links New York to New Jersey over the Hudson 
River. Whether the discovery of those explosives 
had anything to do with other events today is 
unclear, but the FBI, has two suspects in hand, 
said the truckload of explosives, enough 
explosives were in the truck to do great damage 
to the George Washington Bridge..." Transcript of 
Dan Rather's CBS report broadcast live to 
millions of viewers on September 11th 2001. 
"American security services overnight stopped a 
car bomb on the George Washington Bridge 
connecting New York and New Jersey. The van, 
packed with explosives, was stopped on an 
approach ramp to the bridge. Authorities suspect 
the terrorists intended to blow up the main 
crossing between New Jersey and New York, Army 
Radio reported." taken from report in Jerusalem 
Post on Wednesday 12th September 2001.
[28]           Here the live reporter Aaron Brown 
says: "We are getting information now that one of 
the other buildings, building 7 in the world 
trade center complex, is on fire and... has 
either collapsed or is collapsing, and I... I... 
Y..You, to be honest, can see these pictures a 
little bit more clearly than I." But actually 
World Trade Centre building 7 is shown in 
close-up and quite clearly still standing.
[29]           "The conspiracy files: 9/11 - The 
third tower", directed by Mike Rudin, and first 
broadcast BBC2 on Sunday 6th July, 2008.
[30]           There are many dozens of reports 
from eyewitnesses, first responders, and also 
from TV reporters of explosions inside the WTC. 
These can be found posted on internet sites or 
else cut together into short presentations on You 
Tube. I have decided to cite the account of just 
one of those eyewitnesses. Craig Bartmer, a NYPD 
officer, heard the breaking news-story on the 
television and made the decision to join the 
emergency teams in order to help his colleagues. 
As a consequence he saw the collapse of WTC7 from 
very close quarters: "I was real close to 
Building 7 when it fell down - and - running away 
from that sucked. That's one of the things I live 
with all the time - and - I don't [know] but that 
didn't sound like just a building fall[ing] down 
to me, as I was running away from it. There's a 
lot of eyewitness testimony down there about 
hearing explosions. I didn't see any reason for 
that building to fall down the way it did. And a 
lot of guys should be saying the same thing. I 
don't know what the fear is in coming out and 
talking about it - I don't know - but it's the 
truth." Transcript made by the author of an 
interview with Craig Bartmer posted on youtube.
[31]           Craig Bartmer again: "I walked 
around it - I saw a hole. I didn't see a hole big 
enough to knock a building down, though. Saw, you 
know, yeah there was definitely fire in the 
building, you know but, I didn't hear any, you 
know - maybe this is movie crap - you know, I 
didn't hear any creaking or I didn't hear any - 
any indication that it was going to come down. 
And all of a sudden the radios exploded and 
everyone starts screaming "get away! get away! 
get away from it!" And I was like a deer in 
headlights. And I look up and - it was nothing 
I'd ever imagine seeing in my life. You know the 
whole thing started peeling into itself. And I 
mean there was an umbrella of crap seventy [?] 
feet over  my head that I just stared at. And 
some one grabbed my shoulder and I started 
running. And the shit's hitting the ground behind 
me. And the whole time you're hearing THUM, THUM, 
THUM, THUM - so I think I know an explosion when 
I hear it. " Craig Bartmer also worked in the 
rubble at Ground Zero, helping out in the 
original rescue effort, and as a consequence has 
since developed severe respiratory illness due to 
inhaling toxic dust from the site. Like many of 
the first responders, he also suffers from 
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, although he is 
keen to point out that this does not impair his memory of the events.
[32]           Dylan Avery has since explained 
his decision to release the uncut Barry Jennings 
interview on his own website at www.loosechange911.com. It reads as follows:
                 "I’ve been sitting on this 
interview for a while, but after viewing the 
latest BBC piece on WTC7, I feel the time has 
come to release it in its entirety. After 
locating Barry in mid 2007, Jason and I visited 
him and he graciously granted us an interview 
during a lunch break. He had agreed to grant us 
an interview under the conditions that we, at no 
time, associate his interview with his place of employment.
                 Jason and I were so thrilled 
with the content of the interview that we decided 
to release a few bits and pieces of it on both 
our show and Alex’s. A few months later, as the 
film was nearing completion, I called Barry again 
to touch base and see how things were going. It 
took him a bit to remember who I was, but as soon 
as he did, he began complaining about phone calls 
to his place of employment and that he was in 
danger of losing his job. He requested to have 
his interview pulled from Loose Change, and I honored his request.
                 Fast forward to February, 2008, 
where I’m doing an interview with the BBC, and 
I’m informed by their crew that Barry told them 
the reason he asked for it to be pulled was 
because of the article on Prisonplanet claiming 
he was stepping over dead bodies, which he denies 
saying. I call Barry to attempt to rectify the 
situation, and he is adamant that he did not use 
the phrase “we were stepping over people”
                 Fast forward one more time to 
two days ago, when the BBC piece finally aired. I 
now feel an obligation to release his interview, 
in its entirety, into the public where it belongs for three reasons:
                 1) To see the difference between 
the interview he gave us, and the interview he gave the BBC.
                 2) To establish Barry’s timeline in his own words.
                 3) To preserve his testimony, in 
his own words, for the historical record.
                 I have remained true to my word 
and kept his interview out of the film, however, 
I can no longer keep it from the public. They 
deserve to hear Barry’s story, out of his own mouth.
                 As I say in the end of the 
video, I would appreciate it if Barry could enjoy 
his privacy and live his life in peace. My 
intention with releasing this is so his story can 
be told, not to cause him any further grief or suffering
[33]           Danny Jowenko is the Proprietor of 
Jowenko Explosieve Demolitie B.V., a European 
demolition and construction company, with offices 
in the Netherlands.  Founded 1980, Jowenko 
Explosieve Demolitie is certified and holds 
permits to comply with the Dutch Explosives for 
Civil Use Act and the German Explosives 
Act.  Jowenko's explosives engineers also hold 
the German Certificate of Qualifications and the 
European Certificate for Shotfiring issued by The 
European Federation of Explosive Engineers. Here 
is a transcript of Jowenko's remarks about the 
collapse of WTC7, taken from a report for Zembla, Dutch Television from 2006:
                 DJ: That is controlled demolition
                 Reporter: Absolutely?
                 DJ: Absolutely. It's been 
imploded. It's a hired job done by a team of experts.
                 Reporter: But it happened on 9/11
                 DJ: The same day? - Are you 
sure? - And you're sure it was the 11th? - That can't be.
                 Reporter: Seven hours after the World Trade Center
                 DJ: Really? - Then they worked hard...
[34]             The following is a telephone 
interview with Jeff Hill from February 22th 2007:
                 Jeff Hill:  I was just wondering 
real quickly, I know you had commented on World 
Trade Center Building 7 before.
                 Danny Jowenko:  Yes, that's right.
                 J H:  And I've come to my 
conclusions, too, that it couldn't have came down by fire.
                 D J:  No, it -- absolutely not.
                 J H:  Are you still sticking by 
your comments where you say it must have been a controlled demolition?
                 D J:  Absolutely.
                 J H:  Yes?  So, you as being a 
controlled demolitions expert, you've looked at 
the building, you've looked at the video and 
you've determined with your expertise that --
                 D J:  I looked at the drawings, 
the construction and it couldn't be done by fire. So, no, absolutely not.
                 J H:  OK, 'cause I was reading 
on the Internet, people were asking about you and 
they said, I wonder -- I heard something that 
Danny Jowenko retracted his statement of what he 
said earlier about World Trade Center 7 now 
saying that it came down by fire.  I said, "There's no way that's true."
                 D J:  No, no, no, absolutely not.
                 J H:  'Cause if anybody was -- 
Like when I called Controlled Demolition here in 
North America, they tell me that , "Oh, it's 
possible it came down from fire" and this and that and stuff like that --.
                 D J:  When the FEMA makes a 
report that it came down by fire, and you have to 
earn your money in the States as a controlled 
demolition company and you say, "No, it was a 
controlled demolition", you're gone.  You know?
                 J H:  Yeah, exactly, you'll be 
in a lot of trouble if you say that, right?
                 D J:  Of course, of 
course.  That's the end of your -- the end of the story.
                 J H:  Yeah, 'cause I was calling 
demolitions companies just to ask them if they 
used the term, "Pull it" in demolition terms and 
even Controlled Demolitions, Incorporated said 
they did.  But the other people wouldn't -- 
didn't want to talk to me about Building 7 really 
because obviously 'cause they knew what happened 
and they didn't want to say it.
                 D J:  Exactly  .
[35]           "Did they throw away the locked 
doors from the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire? Did they 
throw away the gas can used at the Happyland 
Social Club Fire? Did they cast aside the 
pressure-regulating valves at the Meridian Plaza 
Fire? Of course not. But essentially, that's what 
they're doing at the World Trade Center. For more 
than three months, structural steel from the 
World Trade Center has been and continues to be 
cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that 
could answer many questions about high-rise 
building design practices and performance under 
fire conditions is on the slow boat to China, 
perhaps never to be seen again in America until 
you buy your next car. Such destruction of 
evidence shows the astounding ignorance of 
government officials to the value of a thorough, 
scientific investigation of the largest 
fire-induced collapse in world history. I have 
combed through our national standard for fire 
investigation, NFPA 921, but nowhere in it does 
one find an exemption allowing the destruction of 
evidence for buildings over 10 stories tall." 
extract from article in Fire Engineering, January 
2002, written by editor in chief Bill Manning, 
that called for a comprehensive investigation 
into the WTC collapse entitled: "Burning Questions...Need Answers"
[36]           FEMA's original explanation of a 
"pancake collapse" of the twin towers was 
rejected by a later investigation by the National 
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 
which was issued in October 2005 as: "Final 
Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers."
[37]           "The specifics of the fires in 
WTC7 and how they caused the building to collapse 
remain unknown at this time. Although the total 
diesel fuel on the premises contained massive 
potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a 
low probability of occurrence." Federal Emergency 
Management Agency World Trade Center Building 
Performance Study, published May 2002.
[38]           There are a great many reports of 
molten steel and also of the intense fires that 
persisted for weeks after the collapse and so 
this is necessarily only a small sample.
                 A member of the New York Air 
National Guard's 109th Air Wing was at Ground 
Zero from September 22 to October 6. He kept a 
journal on which an article containing the 
following passage is based: "Smoke constantly 
poured from the peaks. One fireman told us that 
there was still molten steel at the heart of the 
towers' remains. Firemen sprayed water to cool 
the debris down but the heat remained intense 
enough at the surface to melt their boots." 
extract from "Serving on 'sacred ground'", 
National Guard,  Dec 2001  by Guy Lounsbury.
                 Another article in The 
Newsletter of the Structural Engineers 
Association of Utah  that describes a speaking 
appearance by Leslie Robertson (structural 
engineer responsible for the design of the World 
Trade Center) contains the following passage: "As 
of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still 
burning and molten steel was still running."
                 A report in the John Hopkins 
Public Health Magazine (2002) entitled 
"Mobilizing Public Health" says: "It is 4 a.m. in 
New York City as four researchers from the School 
enter the site of the World Trade Center disaster 
on foot. Each is lugging from 50 to 90 pounds of 
air-monitoring equipment onto Ground Zero. In the 
dark, the tangled pile of wreckage takes on a 
distinctly hellish cast. 'Fires are still 
actively burning and the smoke is very intense,' 
reports Alison Geyh, PhD. 'In some pockets now 
being uncovered, they are finding molten steel.'"
                 Whilst from "Messages in the 
Dust: What are the lessons of the environmental 
health response to the terrorist attacks of 
September 11th" written by Francesca Lyman, 
published by the National Environmental Health 
Association in September 2003 we read the 
following: "Into this devastated, almost 
apocalyptic war zone of a landscape marched a 
host of different players from government, 
nonprofit groups, hospitals and medical 
institutions, and private industry. To some, it 
was an environmental health disaster from the 
very first. “Standing down there, with your eyes 
closed,” says Ron Burger, a public health advisor 
at the National Center for Environmental Health, 
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who 
arrived in New York to help September 11th but 
didn’t arrive to the Ground Zero the site until 
the night of September 12th, “it could have been 
a tornado or an avalanche or a volcano.” A 
veteran of disasters from the Mississippi floods 
Mt. St. Helens, Burger said it reminded him most 
of the volcano, if he forgot he was in downtown 
Manhattan. “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,” he said."
[39]           I refer the reader to Appendix C 
of the " Federal Emergency Management Agency 
World Trade Center Building Performance Study, 
published May 2002, which is entitled "Limited 
Metallurgical Examination". The conclusion states 
that: "The severe corrosion and subsequent 
erosion of Samples 1 and 2 are a very unusual 
event. No clear explanation for the source of 
sulfur has been identified." I sent a copy of 
this Appendix to a friend who happens to have 
studied his PhD in the study of corrosion 
fatigue. He sent back the following rather 
technical reply: Erosion is speculated upon but 
the author seems to conclude that it is corrosion 
that caused the gross sectional thinning.
                 First of all, considering high 
temperature corrosion in the absence of sulphur, 
such corrosion rates are unacceptably high for 
non-stainless steels to be employed in service at 
these temperatures. Iron oxidises rapidly to 
wustite (FeO) above 570 deg C. Nevertheless, 
this  doesn't seem to cause a big problem in 
itself for structural steels within the timescale 
of a building fire as evinced by the fact that no 
other buildings in the world have collapsed due 
to failure of structural steel alone in severe fires.
                 I don't know exactly what 
sulphur does to structural steel at 1,000 deg C 
but it is generally a highly significant element 
in all forms of corrosion (i.e. high temperature 
oxidation such as this and lower temperature 
aqueous corrosion) and is generally very 
aggressive. Iron sulphide (FeS) is soft. 
(Sometimes sulphur is added deliberately to steel 
to form iron sulphides so that cheap components 
can be easily machined.) I would guess that 
there's a very high chance that the presence of 
sulphur would greatly accelerate the corrosion of steel at this temperature.
                 The author comments about how 
the rates of corrosion are unknown. This is 
probably why he goes on to say that it may have 
occurred in the ground after the collapse since 
he doesn't know whether there would have been 
sufficient time for this amount of corrosion to 
have occurred in the fire before the collapse. 
This is obviously a very important point. If 
sulphur was implicated in the collapse, we would 
have to ask how it got to where it was. For a 
large city centre office tower block, no obvious 
source comes to mind! I wonder if he was being 
diplomatic when he suggested that it may have 
occurred slowly in the ground after the collapse. 
I doubt if there are any corrosion rate data 
already available for this situation as it is too 
extreme to be useful to anyone (except forensic 
fire investigators looking at this unique case). 
Data would probably need to be specially 
generated by experiment to determine roughly what rates are plausible.
                 If the sulphidation occurred in 
the ground, then we need to ask, how did the 
sulphur get to be there. I think the whole thing looks highly suspicious."
[40]           Extract from Kean-Hamilton 9/11 
commission report, p.334, Section 10.3 entitled 
"Phase two" and the question of Iraq.
[41]           "On Sept. 10, Secretary of Defense 
Donald Rumsfeld declared war. Not on foreign 
terrorists, "the adversary's closer to home. It's 
the Pentagon bureaucracy," he said. He said money 
wasted by the military poses a serious threat. 
"In fact, it could be said it's a matter of life 
and death," he said. Rumsfeld promised change but 
the next day – Sept. 11-- the world changed and 
in the rush to fund the war on terrorism, the war 
on waste seems to have been forgotten.
                 "According to some estimates we 
cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," 
Rumsfeld admitted. $2.3 trillion ­ that's $8,000 
for every man, woman and child in America. "
                 extract from "The War On Waste: 
Defense Department Cannot Account For 25% Of 
Funds ­ $2.3 Trillion" CBS News, Los Angeles, Jan. 29, 2002.
[42]           "Like Paul Thompson [author of The 
Complete 9/11 Timeline], twenty-something 
filmmakers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy had 
been touched by September 11th but never thought 
much further about it. In the spring of 2003, 
during their last semester of film school at 
Columbia College in Chicago, a friend mentioned 
The Complete 9/11 Timeline in passing. That 
evening, Duffy and Nowosielski decided to take a 
look. They found themselves unable to stop 
reading, scrolling through the web site until 
being interrupted by sunrise. Though the 
filmmakers had never had any interest in the 
genre of documentary, as the months passed, they 
grew to believe that this was a story the 
American public needed to hear. By the 2nd 
anniversary of September 11th, they were seeking 
the funding for what would eventually become 
'9/11 Press for Truth'." taken from official 
website at http://www.911pressfortruth.com/#

[43]           “Some staff members and 
commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded 
that the Pentagon's initial story of how it 
reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have 
been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the 
commission and the public rather than a 
reflection of the fog of events on that day, 
according to sources involved in the debate.

                 “Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so 
deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret 
meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, 
debated referring the matter to the Justice 
Department for criminal investigation, according 
to several commission sources. Staff members and 
some commissioners thought that e-mails and other 
evidence provided enough probable cause to 
believe that military and aviation officials 
violated the law by making false statements to 
Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide 
the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

                 “In the end, the panel agreed to 
a compromise, turning over the allegations to the 
inspectors general for the Defense and 
Transportation departments, who can make criminal 
referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

                 “"We to this day don't know why 
NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told 
us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the 
former New Jersey Republican governor who led the 
commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . 
. . It's one of those loose ends that never got 
tied."” extract from “9/11 Panel Suspected 
Deception by Pentagon: Allegations Brought to 
Inspectors General” written by Dan Eggen, 
Washington Post Staff Writer, from Wednesday, August 2, 2006; A03
[44]           "In no instance did NIST report 
that steel in the WTC towers melted due to the 
fires. The melting point of steel is about 1,500 
degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit). 
Normal building fires and hydrocarbon (e.g., jet 
fuel) fires generate temperatures up to about 
1,100 degrees Celsius (2,000 degrees Fahrenheit). 
NIST reported maximum upper layer air 
temperatures of about 1,000 degrees Celsius 
(1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) in the WTC towers (for 
example, see NCSTAR 1, Figure 6-36). However, 
when bare steel reaches temperatures of 1,000 
degrees Celsius, it softens and its strength 
reduces to roughly 10 percent of its room 
temperature value." from NIST's Answers to 
Frequently Asked Questions (August 30, 2006).
[45]           mass of building x g x height/2 = 
mass of steel x c x change in temperature
                  where mass of each tower = 
500,000 tons, height of towers = 411m, mass of 
steel = 100,000 tons, and specific heat capacity 
of steel = 500 J/Kg/K (this value may vary 
between 400-600 depending on composition).
[46]           the specific latent heat of fusion 
of steel is about 270,000 J/Kg. So to melt just 
10 tons of the original 100,000, would require 
2.7 billion Joules of energy, which is about a 
quarter percent of the total available (at a conservative estimate).
[47]           You might argue that by assuming 
all the energy was evenly distributed I have 
greatly under-estimated what could have happened 
on a local scale. That some parts of the building 
would have been significantly more bent or 
twisted or otherwise deformed than other parts. 
That they could have got substantially hotter 
than the average. This is true, of course, but 
then we might very reasonably expect that it was 
those regions regions lower down in the building 
that would experienced the greatest forces and 
impacts. But since these are areas at the 
furthest distances away from the fires we would 
expect the steel in those areas to be cool - 
around room temperature - and therefore requiring 
substantially greater increases in internal 
energy to reach melting point. It should also be 
noted that the steel framework of the building 
would have acted like a giant heat sink 
continually conducting heat away to cooler 
regions and so continually distributing the 
internal energy more evenly throughout.
[48]           The average kinetic energy per 
unit mass is commensurate and so we might reasonably expect similar effects.
[49]           from NIST's Answers to Frequently 
Asked Questions (August 30, 2006).
[50]           ibid.




--
+44 (0)7786 952037
http://groups.google.com/group/uk-911-truth
http://www.youtube.com/user/PublicEnquiry
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Diggers350/
http://www.reinvestigate911.org/
http://www.thisweek.org.uk/
http://www.911forum.org.uk/
"Capitalism is institutionalised bribery."
_________________
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.globalresearch.ca
www.public-interest.co.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/Bristol+Broadband+Co-operative
www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1407615751783.2051663.1274106225&l=90330c0ba5&type=1
<http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf>http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf 

"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic 
poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
<https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/>https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/

Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered 
that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that 
shall not be made known. What I tell you in 
darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye 
hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. Matthew 10:26-27

Die Pride and Envie; Flesh, take the poor's advice.
Covetousnesse be gon: Come, Truth and Love arise.
Patience take the Crown; throw Anger out of dores:
Cast out Hypocrisie and Lust, which follows whores:
Then England sit in rest; Thy sorrows will have end;
Thy Sons will live in peace, and each will be a friend.
http://tinyurl.com/6ct7zh6  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/mailman/private/diggers350/attachments/20120911/97b2d285/attachment.html>