September 11, 2001 Events in the U.S.: Reflections to Mark the Twentieth Anniversary
Prepared by Dmorista for Leftist Politics.
(Author’s Note) I apologize to Leftist Politics readers for the overlong rambling nature of this article/essay. But the press of personal life, and an injury to a finger that slowed down my keyboarding speed over the last couple of weeks all limited my ability to properly trim and streamline this work. Still with the efforts of the Corporate Controlled Media to commemorate 9-11 a seen in its the “Official Story” version requires some sort of response.
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The 20th Anniversary of the September 11, 2001 events will soon occur, and the Corporate Controlled Media will mark it with various programs that support the “Official Story”. The Corporate Controlled Media, the U.S. Government, and most of the “alternative media”, took great pains to support the “Official Story” in the years since the 9-11 events. That story tells the tale of 19 hijackers working for Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, taking control of the 4 planes and crashing 3 of them into the World Trade Center Towers 1 & 2 and the Pentagon, and losing control of the 4th plane in a battle with the passengers, that being the plane that supposedly crashed into the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Many important events have taken place in the 20 years that have passed since those events occurred. Most immediate among the direct consequences of the 9-11 attacks, is the recent collapse of the U.S. Client State in Afghanistan, a collapse that took place in a mere 10 days.
Putting 9-11 in Context
There is an immense amount of forensic evidence that has led to skepticism about the “official story”. This is true about the collapses of WTCs 1, 2, & 7, as well as the events at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, That evidence has been taken on in great detail by; numerous books written by a variety of authors; thousands of websites of varying quality but many of them very good; the Journal of 9-11 Studies; the organizations of professionals who don’t believe the Official Story led by Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, (AE911-Truth), an entity that inspired a plethora of similar organizations such as Pilots for 9-11 Truth, Scholars for 9-11 Truth, Scientists for 9-11 Truth, and many others; and numerous conferences that took place in large numbers for about the first 10 -15 years following the events of that day. This article will review a small amount of that evidence later.
However, as L. Fletcher Prouty told New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, concerning the John F. Kennedy assassination, questions about who shot what weapon from where, and so on, were details that would not get his investigation any closer to solving the case. One important component among the techniques that criminal investigators use to solve crimes is applying the concept of Cui Bono? (Who Benefits?) in their investigations. Other major issues, after a major political crime, is to examine who has the power to conduct a cover-up, who is able to control the dialogue in the dominant organs of the Corporate Controlled Media, who is able to silence critics and skeptics of the “official story”, sometimes including killing the most dangerous and persistent ones.
The main beneficiaries of the 9-11 attacks were: 1). the far-right factions of the U.S. ruling class who were able to codify in law their long-term wish list of police state measures; 2). the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and the related Covert Operations agencies and contractors who were funded to the tune of several Trillion Dollars; 3). the far-right forces among the Israelis and their Zionist allies in the U.S.
In the immediate period following the attacks there were significant changes in U.S. laws, these were largely written into legislation starting with The Patriot Act, a several hundred page long grab bag of police state measures passed shortly after the 9-11. Later these legal changes also included a couple of the National Defense Authorization Acts that were larded down with punitive social control clauses, and several other Federal level laws. These laws were used selectively against regime opponents but still have not been applied on a wide scale so far; there have not been wide scale round ups or mass arrests. Still these laws have negated rights formalized in the Magna Carta from A.D. 1215. And these police state laws now are part of the legal arsenal wielded by the U.S. ruling class against the populace.
After 9-11, the MIC and Covert Operations agencies received lavish funding, 70% of which went to private contractors like Booze Allen Hamilton, and a new “counter-terrorism” industry emerged that occupied an immense amount of office space in Washington D.C. and its suburbs while it consumed hundreds of billions of dollars of Federal monies. The U.S. military was committed to military interventions, to one degree or another, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, in Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen allies or proxy forces were the main players. Nowhere was an outright victory achieved but several muslim countries were shattered and converted into places where different groups battled for dominance and the central state was destroyed. No Israeli military ground forces were used in these operations, though by the time of the attack on Syria the Israeli Air Force was in action. The Israelis have long made no secret of their desire for the U.S. to attack Iran; but the U.S. military high command refused to undertake a military operation against Iran during the War in Iraq, when they knew U.S. forces were already in big trouble.
The management of the Corporate Controlled Media to act as the major cheerleaders for the official story for explaining the 9-11 events was extremely tight. Early on there were some leaks of stories about explosions in the buildings; questions about what had happened at the Pentagon; reports of fighter aircraft shooting down Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; a couple of famous gaffes in which news readers reported that WTC 7 had already collapsed (when it was still standing in the background behind them); and even Dan Rather exclaimed on live TV coverage that the events resembled the controlled demolitions of old casinos in Las Vegas and other high rise buildings. But within a few hours the Corporate Controlled Media expunged most of these anomalies and began slavish support for the “official story”, for the police state measures in the U.S., and for the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that was first implemented in Afghanistan. The events that took place on Flight 93 were turned into a quasi-religious belief system centered on Todd Beamer’s phone call with his estranged wife that promoted the “inspirational story”. Beamer’s wife copyrighted the phrase “Let’s Roll” and otherwise attempted to cash in on the new mythology of passenger resistance. Hollywood obligingly produced a movie with a heroic version of the events during the last moments on that plane. Meanwhile critics noted that there was virtually no wreckage at the “crash site”. Generally crash sites are strewn with luggage, bodies, and most notably the jet engines, that are composed of significant quantities of titanium. There is precious little evidence of such material at the supposed Flight 93 crash site, and before and after photos don’t show much change in “the crater” either.
The Supposed Flight 93 Crash Site Near Shanksville
Cass Sunstein, a supposedly liberal law professor at Harvard, discussed the role of the Federal Government in maintaining social control over dissidents and skeptics, in a 2008 article in which he and his co-author wrote: “However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).” {those three proposals are “(3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help.}” (Emphasis added) (See, “Conspiracy Theories”, Cass R. Sunstein & Adrian Vermeule, John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 387, 2008: and Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee's Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory, David Ray Griffin, 2010, Olive Branch Press). Anybody using the web to look at material for controversial issues, particularly 9-11, has no doubt noted that there is a lot more censorship on the web now and also that the internet is alive with crazed ultra-reactionary material. Youtube's that advertise items for sale, or that present non-political programming abound, but hard-hitting material is frequently taken down. Of course new channels, that you have to take out a pay subscription for, are coming online and at least the corporate censors cannot just axe that material. The Sunstein - Vermeule article was a publicly published element in the type of ruling class debates that precede major policy decisions. Decisions and policies that closely resemble the suggestions that Sunstein and Vermeule made.
The 9-11 events were a major success for the factions of the U.S. ruling class that had long wanted to implement draconian police state measures in the U.S. itself, greatly increase the military posture and interventions in the Third World areas, and to cut even further the already meager social spending inside the U.S. There were various efforts aimed at silencing inquisitive journalists and investigators, inconvenient witnesses, honest police, military, and other governmental officials. One glaring case of a likely assassination was the killing of Phillip Marshall, in a suspicious possible “hit” that local authorities wrote off as a murder - suicide. “... In February 2012, Philip Marshall, a veteran airline pilot, published The Big Bamboozle: 9/11 and the War on Terror, which documents the role of Saudi Arabia in running the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and of the Bush Presidency in facilitating it by standing down. One year after his book was published, on Feb. 2, 2013, Marshall was found dead, along with his two teenage children and his dog, at his home in a rural subdivision in Calaveras County, California.
“Local police have called it a murder/suicide. But former National Security Agency officer Wayne Madsen, who spent a week at the scene investigating, says that it was a black-ops assassination, not only for what Marshall reveals in the book, but also for what he might have revealed in the future.
“In addition to being an experienced pilot — Marshall had captain ratings on the Boeing 727, 737, 747, 757, and 767s — and was familiar with the training needed to fly such planes, and to carry out such manuevers (sic) as the 9/11 hijacker pilots did, …” (See, “Was It Murder? Philip Marshall, Author of ‘Big Bamboozle,’ Dead”, William F. Wertz, Jr., Mar 15, 2013, Executive Intelligence Review, pp 22: “Phil Marshall's killers linked to 9/11, Pinal Air Park, and Iran-contra”, Wayne Maden, June 28-30, 2013, Wayne Madsen Report, at < http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20130628 >: “Philip Marshall”, anon, n.d., WikiSpooks, at < https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Marshall >).
Marshall was working on a second book about 9-11, that he told friends would break the case wide open, and was poking around in the aircraft graveyards in the deserts near Tucson, Arizona; looking for planes that might have played a role in the operation and that had been disposed of in those airliner disposal sites. He was also in contact with former Florida Governor and Senator Bob Graham about his research. Wertz points out on page 23 of the same article that “... Hunter S. Thompson also allegedly committed suicide while working on a major article on 9/11.”, and that in a less directly related incident “... J.H. Hatfield, author of The Fortunate Son, in which he reported that George W. Bush’s “missing year” was spent in drug rehab, was also found dead, allegedly by suicide, on July 18, 2001; …”. The U.S. ruling class plays hardball in its responses to investigative journalism that imperils their interests, a level of repression that includes murders disguised as suicides. That is, of course, the most draconian way of silencing critics and reporters, that also includes less drastic measures.
The First “Bookend” the John F. Kennedy Assassination
9-11 compares closely to the assassination of John F. Kennedy; in that it was the precipitating event that paved the way for a series of extremely unfavorable and negative events perpetrated by the most extreme elements of the U.S. ruling class. Where the JFK assassination and 9-11 differ is in the very different condition of the U.S. itself, and in American relationships with other power centers in 1963 vs 2001. In the case of the JFK assassination, that event led to the massive U.S. military commitment to the S.E. Asian Wars, the coup in Indonesia in 1965, the occupation of Santo Domingo and the Dominican Republic, and a significant increase in military spending to support the SE Asian Wars. In the case of 9-11 the events led to the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and attacks on 6 or 7 muslim majority countries, an implementation of the long-term goals of the Committee on the Present Danger and other militant right-wing organizations that wanted to confront the “enemies” of U.S. led Capital, and a major increase in military spending. In both cases many of the same armaments companies, and their wealthy owners, were major beneficiaries.
The 9-11 events, like the John F. Kennedy Assassination, provoked a huge amount of “citizen-journalist” activity. In both cases the ruling class, whether they had any actual involvement or not, just wanted the population to accept the “Official Story” and acquiesce to the new post-event reality. Of course in both cases the ruling class was surprised by the reaction to the precipitating event. Lively movements of skeptics and doubters arose both times.
In the case of the JKF assassination this included the SE Asian Wars, many World Systems Theorists and related theorists think the U.S. defeat in those wars, and concomitant changes in Global Capitalism, marked the end of “Strong Hegemony” and the beginning of “Weak Hegemony” (Joshua Goldstein), the “Signal Crisis” (Giovanni Arrighi) the beginning of “Deligitimation” (George Modelski), or the end of “The Period of Uncontested Hegemony” (Immanuel Wallerstein). All these theorists agree that these changes marked the beginning of the serious transition to Finance Capital from Productive Capital in the U.S., the hegemonic power of that time. (For a more detailed review of these concepts see, “Long-Term Global Trends Affecting the U.S.: Analysis of Historical Global Developments and their Relevance to the Internal Situation of the United States”, Sep 28, 2020, dmorista, Leftist Politics, at < https://leftist---politics.blogspot.com/2020/09/historicalglobal-developments-and-their.html >)
Writers and figures from L. Fletcher Prouty to John Newman have pointed out that JFK was planning on totally removing the 16,000 U.S. “advisors” from South Vietnam in his second term and had issued an order to remove the first 1,000 during late 1963. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, and just 4 ½ years later of his brother Robert F. Kennedy ensured that electoral politics would not be allowed to move the country towards reduced interventions in the Third World, and a reinvigoration of the New Deal coalition domestically.
The JFK assassination thus served as the precipitating event, some 12 years before the transition from “Strong to Weak Hegemony”, the “Signal Crisis”, the beginning of “Delegitimation” and/or the end of “The Period of Uncontested Hegemony”. JFK was killed on a Friday, by the next Tuesday National Security Action Memorandum 263, (NSAM), that ordered the removal of the 1,000 advisors, was replaced by Lyndon Johnson’s NSAM-273, which rescinded the removal of those advisors. Johnson oversaw the massive build-up of the U.S. military in Vietnam to 549,500 personnel at the peak in 1968. Not only did 58,000+ Americans die there, plus some 5 - 6 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed; but in addition the U.S. lost on the order of 50,000 helicopters, hundreds of jet fighters and fighter-bombers, and even a significant number of B-52 heavy bombers, plus large amounts of ground warfare materiel. The armaments industry, the entire MIC, and the military high command all prospered greatly, but the U.S. as a viable society was deeply harmed. The targeted SE Asian nations were devastated.
The Second “Bookend” the 9-11 Events
The situation in 2001 was in some ways quite different. The U.S., after 30 years of “Weak Hegemony”, the ongoing “Signal Crisis”, “Delegitimation”, and operating during “The Period of Contested Hegemony”, had become a much weaker and less capable society. The U.S. ruling class, that was forced to make significant concessions to the working class during the New Deal, principally because they had massive amounts of domestic “fixed capital” (i.e. factories, mines, power companies, transportation systems, etc.) and were vulnerable to strikes and other labor actions. For the first 30 years after WW 2 the ruling class managed to operate by using purges of progressives in the unions, the universities, Hollywood, and even the public High Schools.
But by the mid 1970s those strategies had run their course. From the mid-1970s to 2001, as the U.S. ruling class concentrated on swindles and other financial manipulations, they also moved as much of their fixed capital out of the U.S. as possible, allowed a million immigrants a year into the U.S., used the lowered wages to ensure that almost all American women had to work, and replaced large numbers of American workers with machines. The working class was greatly weakened by these developments; but U.S. based power, economic, military, and political were diminished even more. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. was joined by allies that voluntarily participated in funding and prosecuting the war. For the first Gulf War in 1991, Bush the Elder was able to recruit allies and funders with a PR campaign and a “charm offensive”. By 2001 the decline of the U.S. was severe enough that no such support was in the offing and the “Coalition of the Willing”, declared by Bush the Younger, was mocked as the “Coalition of the Bribed and Coerced”. In World Systems Theory terms, the September 11, 2001 events, mark the beginning of the end of even “Weak Hegemony”, the start of the “Terminal Crisis”, the end of the process of “Delegitimation” and the beginning of “DeConcentration”, and the end of even “Contested Hegemony” for the U.S.
Of course the obscure Salafist figure (Salafist is the anthropologically correct term for extreme Islamic Fundamentalists), Osama Bin Laden, was focused on. After the relatively low-tech and minimally sophisticated car bomb attacks on the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that were no doubt actual Al Qaeda operations; Osama Bin Laden was anointed as the new Hitlerite figure for propaganda and disinformation purposes. The presentation of Bin Laden as a virulent boogeyman ignored the facts, neither known nor understood by the great majority of the U.S. population, that the U.S. “intelligence agencies” had been increasingly involved with Salafist movements, including Bin Laden, since the late 1970s. This increasing involvement was prompted by the Church Committee in the Senate when the Congress attempted to exercise some control over the CIA and other intelligence agency operations. The response of the intelligence agencies was to seek other sources of funds. There were numerous meetings between CIA officials and Saudi and Gulf Emirates operatives at a former luxurious hunting lodge in Kenya named the Safari Club. Adnan Kashoggi had purchased the Safari Club and many agreements concerning the funding of covert operations in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia (namely Afghanistan), the Central American Death Squad campaigns including the Iran-Contra operations (in which both Kashoggi and the Israelis played vital roles), as well as operations of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) were discussed there. This was the period when the First Afghan War (involving U.S. support from 1979 - 1989) and a few years later the First Gulf War (1991) were waged. In 1997 Brzezinski wrote his geostrategic work The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he discussed the reluctance of the American population to support more wars for the Empire and in which he posited the need for a Pearl Harbor type event to motivate the American people.
In the late 1990s new iterations of right-wing pressure groups, like the earlier Committee on the Present Danger arose to function in the internal battles to shape policy decisions. One that became well-known was the aggressive new organization the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In one of their better known publications prominent PNAC authors discussed the need for a “New Pearl Harbor” to motivate the American people to support massive new armaments programs and military interventions.. After the Bush the Younger appointment to the Presidency in 2000, a large part of the staff positions in the Defense Department were occupied by Neo-Con militarists, the majority of them ultra Zionists, some of them dual Israeli / U.S. citizens.
Anomalies in the “Official Story”
The “Official Story” asks us to believe that gravity supplied enough energy to: 1). transform 800,000 cubic yards of concrete (from just WTCs 1 & 2) into dust (the dust particles, ranged from 10 - 100 microns in diameter); 2). the dust created by this supposed gravity powered collapse also included gypsum and hydrocarbons and other materials from the office furnishings; 3). break up huge amounts of the 200,000 tons of structural steel in the two buildings into 30 and 40 foot pieces (very handy for the hurried removal for shipment to China and melting); 4). create the extremely hot conditions in the debris “Pile” that frequently contained glowing and molten steel and that stayed hot for nearly 3 months; 5). and in addition gravity supplied enough energy for the actual collapse that occurred at near free fall speed in about 12 - 15 seconds for each building; 6). and this “Gravity powered” collapse scenario for WTCs 1 & 2 was symmetrical for the two buildings that had both suffered asymmetrical damage. The fact of the matter is that the amount of energy necessary to accomplish this variety of tasks was far more than the potential energy of gravity.
This last point is particularly important as under the plane impact areas, with their office fires ignited by the kerosene jet fuel, the large majority of each building's area with its completely intact structures. The most important anomalous issues, noted in points 5 and 6 above, are that the Official Story’s gravity powered collapse supposedly took down the two buildings each in around 15 seconds, crushing its way through 75+ and 90+ intact floors respectively at near free fall speed; and that amazingly both buildings collapsed in a symmetrical manner after sustaining asymmetrical damage. In fact, the collapse process in each of the two buildings flung about 80% of the material outside of the footprint of the buildings, but with the center of the mass located inside each building's footprint.
A reasonable estimate is that about 1/2 of the jet fuel/kerosene was burned up in the immediate explosion event fireballs when the two planes hit the towers, and certainly more than 1/2 for WTC 1 that was hit by a more glancing blow. This left the other half, or less, of the jet fuel that started the office furnishing fires. Those both before too long became relatively cool fires with plenty of black sooty smoke. The kerosene could not be the source of the heat that weakened the structural elements to provide for a near free fall speed collapse event.
The experts for making judgments, on the spot during a disastrous event, about the condition and stability of a steel frame building; are the firefighters of major cities of the world that have lots of steel frame high rise buildings. This contrasts with various engineers and other experts who examine the situation after the fact from the safety of their desks, computer screens, and armchairs. Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer, accompanied by fireman Bucca, made it to the 78th floor of WTC 2 and radioed in that the fires were not very serious; and if a couple of hoses could be deployed they should be able to put the fires out. Palmer and Bucca actually rode up to the 41st floor in one of the elevators. This radio transmission was, tragically, sent only a few minutes before WTC 2 collapsed, and both Palmer and Bucca were killed. (See, "Lost Voices of Firefighters, Some on the 78th Floor", Jim Dwyer & Ford Fessenden, Aug. 4, 2002, New York Times, at < https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/04/nyregion/lost-voices-of-firefighters-some-on-the-78th-floor.html >)
Another issue is the 115 people, mostly firefighters, and a few policemen who reported hearing various explosions during the events. The NYFD recorded interviews with the firefighters and a few police officers shortly after the events of the day and then tried to keep the recordings secret. The NY Times sued and forced the NYFD to make those recordings public. Grahme MacQueen a professor from Canada wrote an article analyzing this issue. (See, "118 Witnesses: The Firefighter’s Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers", Graeme MacQueen, August 2006, Journal of 9-11 Studies, Vol 2, pp 47 - 107, at < http://www.journalof911studies.com/118-witnesses-the-firefighters-testimony-to-explosions-in-the-twin-towers/ >: and, Dr. Graeme MacQueen, "Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers: Testimony for the Toronto Hearings, Day 3, Sept. 10, 2011", The Mind Renewed, at < https://www.themindrenewed.com/in-the-media/713-news156 > )
I have read various kinds of 9-11 Truth debunker articles. Alexander Cockburn posted a series of articles at Counter Punch critiquing 9-11 Truthers (these were mostly written by engineer and physicist Manuel Garcia Jr.). In one of the articles that Cockburn actually wrote himself, he quoted a letter to him from retired structural engineer Herman Soifer; in which Soifer stated that "The Towers were basically tubes, essentially hollow". (See, "The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the American Left", Alexander Cockburn, November 28, 2006, <i>CounterPunch</i>, at < https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/11/28/the-9-11-conspiracists-and-the-decline-of-the-anmerican-left/ >). Despite the many perceptive points that Cockburn made in the article about the limitations of the American Left; this characterization of the WTC towers is not correct. In fact, somewhat more than half of the structural strength of the two towers was in the 47 columns in the center of the buildings. Early debunking attempts frequently made this erroneous assertion. Later, after that incorrect postulate had been repeatedly pointed out by truthers, more sophisticated debunker arguments were developed. This photo below demonstrates the robustness of that central column structure, apparently with cross-bracing at the corners of the central columnar arrangement.
A lot of other assertions and accusations have been made to explain why the Towers were so suspiciously weak (that is, if we believe the “Official Story”). I saw a claim that the buildings used inferior brittle steel for the structural elements and that was made possible by special regulations in the Port Authority controlled areas. Of course the architect, Minoru Yamasaki, chosen specifically because he was also an excellent engineer purchased the structural steel from Japan. The industrial decay of the U.S., in which the steel industry was one of the first businesses to decline in competence and competitiveness, had already reached a point that to get top-quality steel at the best price Yamasaki had to buy it from Japanese companies. Yamasaki, as an American-Born man of Japanese heritage, was in a position to obtain the best steel that the Japanese produced.
Another issue sometimes brought up by proponents of the “Official Story”, is the L'Ambiance Plaza collapse in 1987 and how that serves as a model for the office fire and gravity powered collapses of WTCs 1, 2, and 7. However, Jim Hoffman points out that:
"Unlike the WTC skyscrapers, L'Ambiance Plaza:
1). Was under construction, employing temporary structures
2). Violated design specifications
3). Left rubble with recognizable floor slabs
4). Did not produce an explosion and dust cloud on collapsing”
(See < http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/collapse/lambianceplaza.html >)
John Skilling, the head structural engineer on the WTC 1 & 2 project stated for an interview in the Seattle Times, that according to an analysis his team conducted, the two towers would survive an impact from a Boeing 707 (that is very similar in size to the planes that actually hit the buildings). Skilling was one of the top structural engineers in the world, he lived in Seattle. Skilling stated ‘We looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings, even to the extent of an airplane hitting the side, ... Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed,’ he said. ‘The building structure would still be there.’ ” This article was occasioned by the 1993 bombing in the WTC basement parking area. (See, "Twin Towers Engineered To Withstand Jet Collision", Eric Nalder, Feb 27, 1993, Seattle Times, at < https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930227&slug=1687698 >).
Of course there is also the fact that the collapse WTC 2, which was hit lower down and fell before WTC-1, had some unique weird anomalies. This photo below, of the beginning of the collapse of WT 2 shows a couple of these. First the top 30+ floors are clearly falling over to one side. They would have only hit a couple of floors of the building below, along the far corner, as this big piece of WTC 2 fell over beside the main footprint of the building. Thus, this huge part of the building was essentially not available to act as a "pile driver", smashing down on the intact building below. No recognizable remnant of this 30+ floor piece of WTC 2 was found below, it apparently exploded and was dustified during its trip to the ground. Furthermore we see large dust clouds pushing out from the top of the 78 floor remainder of WTC 2. How was this dust generated?: clearly the 30+ floor upper chunk was already falling away from the part of the building highlighted in this photo here below and it was not responsible for that dust. Certainly that would have been the case farther down after the 30+ floor upper section was falling by itself alongside the remainder of WTC 2.
Top 30 Floors of South Tower Fall Over to
One Side as the Collapse Begins
The Debunker community is big on citing "Occam's Razor" to bolster their version of events. And maybe, if the actual collapse of the 2 buildings was all we had to consider, the use made of it would be justified. However this is a vast situation with 3 separate incidents, a huge cast of possible villains and perpetrators (not just this absurd B.S. about Osama Bin Laden with his laptop and his Chromium Phone, supposedly directing all this from his cave in Afghanistan), a major cover-up effort, including suppression of dissent effort following the events, control of the Corporate Controlled Media, that is now working up a the full-court press for the 20th anniversary, and the use of the propaganda value of the events to justify two invasions.
There were, in addition to domestic actors in these events, foreign players, and their allies in the U.S. The U.S. ruling class, long under thrall to the Israelis and their Zionist allies in the U.S., took actions inimical to U.S. interests but quite favorable to those of the far-right Likudnik Israeli agenda. The right in Israel, and their allies in the U.S., were by far the major beneficiaries of the resultant Global War on Terror (GWOT). GWOT attacks on Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen were carried out without mobilizing so much as even one Israeli soldier or without the expenditure of one shekel, from Israel's national budget. The U.S. military high command’s reluctance, and strong public opposition, has so far prevented an overt military attack on Iran. A lot has been made about the Saudis getting to evacuate some of their nationals (including some Bin Ladens) from the U.S. a few days after 9-11 before regular air traffic began again. But the Corporate Controlled Media will not discuss a report that on the very afternoon of 9-11 an El Al 747 loaded with Mossad Agents, explosives experts, and other inconvenient Israelis departed from JFK Airport for Israel. This was revealed by an Ecuadorian immigrant to the U.S., who worked on the El Al ground crew at JFK Airport.
The dust from the 9-11 events was full of nano-thermite chips and iron rich micro-spheres. There were literally trillions of iron-rich micro-spheres in the 9-11 dust. These could only be generated by either liquified steel or vaporized steel that condensed into various spherical objects as it cooled. The nano-thermite chips were left-overs that had not ignited during the demolition process. Those chips were evidence of cutting edge technology only available to a very limited number of people, most certainly not including Al Qaeda.
The presence of the nano-thermite chips and the iron-rich micro-spheres in the dust was reported in "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World TradeCenter Catastrophe", Niels H. Harrit*,, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones*,, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley and Bradley R. Larsen, The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, Volume 2
“Abstract: We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red material contains grains approximately 100 nm across which are largely iron oxide, while aluminum is contained in tiny plate-like structures. Separation of components using methyl ethyl ketone demonstrated that elemental aluminum is present. The iron oxide and aluminum are intimately mixed in the red material. When ignited in a DSC device the chips exhibit large but narrow exotherms occurring at approximately 430 °C, far below the normal ignition temperature for conventional thermite. Numerous iron-rich spheres are clearly observed in the residue following the ignition of these peculiar red/gray chips. The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.”
Danny Jowenko, a Dutch controlled demolition expert, was shown video of the WTC-7 collapse for the first time (that was in 2011 and he had not even heard of the third building that collapsed that day, he was not any sort of 9-11 truth figure). He expressed the opinion that the collapse of WTC-7 was clearly a controlled demolition. He was dead within about 2 weeks after that interview, the victim of a "mysterious" accident in which his car hit a tree. Conditions were dry and visibility was excellent. It was a one vehicle accident. (See, “Danny Jowenko on WTC 7 controlled demolition”, < https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2p3q4h >)
There are many many other issues that surround these extremely fishy events. Why did “Lucky Larry” Silverstein, and both his son and daughter all miss events that they were scheduled for on the morning; all events that would have put them in areas from which nobody emerged alive. Another 9-11 figure, L. Paul Bremer, was scheduled to be at his desk, from which he managed Marsh McClennan, in a place exactly where one of the planes hit the building, just all lucky I guess. Bremer was at the studios of a major TV network promulgating the Official Story within an hour of the attacks. Lucky Larry actually said that afternoon, that we decided “to pull it” about WTC 7. He, in his career as a real estate mogul, certainly knew that that was a demolition industry term for setting off the charges to bring a building down.
Then there are the actions of Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who took on all 95 of the cases of people who refused to take the Victim’s Compensation Fund monetary payouts. Hellerstein, a dedicated Zionist, used all kinds of methods to keep these people from actually pursuing their lawsuits. He was assisted in this by Sheila Birnbaum who took over as the lead assistant litigator for the Victims Compensation Fund for 9-11, and she resolved 92 of the 95 cases. What is most amazing is that Hellerstein’s son, another extreme Zionist who lives between some posh digs in the West Bank and Tel Aviv, was legal counsel for the Israeli owned company that handled airline security operations at Logan and Dulles airports. That fact alone should have disqualified Hellerstein from presiding over these cases. Then we have Michael Mukasey and Michael Chertoff, who between them made sure that the 200 “Israeli Art Students”, arrested by alert U.S. local police before the 9-11 events, were eventually freed and allowed to return to Israel. Included in that number were numerous Israel Defense Force veterans who were explosives experts. Chertoff also made sure that the 5 “Dancing Israelis”, who were observed filming the burning towers and triumphantly lighting their lighters and “high-fiving” one another, were also freed and allowed to return to Israel. Israel has no extradition treaty with other countries, certainly none with the U.S.
There were nearly 50 drills and exercises associated with 9-11. Nearly 30 were in operation the day of the attacks. The number of jet fighters available to intercept airliners was greatly reduced as some were sent to the Caribbean and others to the Arctic for maneuvers that day. It also turns out that supposed ring-leader Mohammed Atta, unusual for a devout Isamic Extremist Operative, liked pork chops, expensive liquor, and naked female dancers; and he lived with an “exotic” dancer in Florida.
Even the “last phone calls'' made to spouses and parents turned out to be suspicious. A group of skeptics hired a private plane a few days after the 9-11 events and started climbing. They found that one after another the cell phones they took with them quit working. By about 5,000 feet of altitude none of the phones worked. But, of course, the phone calls were supposedly made from around 30,000 feet, the cell phone technology of that time could not support the calls, many of which had been recorded on people’s answering machines and voice mail. Early in the propaganda and disinformation campaign the calls were touted as extremely powerful and emotive evidence, when the calls started to become problematic they were dropped from Corporate Controlled Media news stories. Ted Olson, Solicitor General during the Bush the Younger regime, supposedly talked with his wife on her cell phone. After doubt was spread over that story, it was changed to one that she called him on an airphone in the plane, then it turned out that that particular plane did not have airphones installed on it. The revised “airphone” story was allowed to die quietly, and no Corporate Controlled Media outlet brought it up again. There have been some suggestions as to how these calls took place, some inane others pretty extreme.
These are just a few of the endless supply of suspicious situations associated with this epochal attack on the U.S. The arguments about the physics (and the chemistry, metallurgy, aeronautics, communications science) of the 9-11 attacks are really only a limited part of what we need to understand this complex and epochal event.
Respect for the Honored Dead and Surviving Family Members.
The argument is frequently made by advocates of the “official story” that it is disrespectful and sacreligious to even question that version of events, as it offends the families of those killed. However, the most well known of all survivors, “The Jersey Girls” sent this letter below to AE911-Truth expressing their gratitude to that organization for its efforts to uncover the real story.
The Jersey Girls Letter:
We must applaud Mr. Richard Gage and his colleagues, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, for their tenacity in seeking to answer lingering questions concerning the total destruction of the World Trade Center complex, in particular Buildings 1, 2, and 7.
As with any scientific report, conclusions must be able to be replicated and verified by subsequent public peer reviews. Mr. Gage and his colleagues have attempted to do just that with NIST's Final Report of the Collapse of the World Trade Center. There seem to be discrepancies and omissions in NIST's conclusions, which Mr. Gage and his colleagues have brought to light.
With their combined professional training and work experience, this group of professionals is uniquely qualified to address the myriad oddities resulting in the collapse of the WTC high-rise buildings — including WTC 7, which was not hit by an airplane. This chosen course of action by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth has often come at a high cost to them personally and professionally, making this endeavor all the more admirable.
As family members of 9/11 victims, we have been seeking truth and transparency since 2001. Many years later, in spite of the NIST Investigation and the 9/11 Independent Commission, a vast majority of our questions remain unanswered.
It was always our hope that both of these government investigations would uncover the cause of the WTC destruction and any loopholes or lapses in security protocols that could be remedied to protect us in the future. In this case, it was of utmost importance to determine what actually caused the collapses to ensure the future safety of high-rise buildings. Since the government failed to do that, we applaud Mr. Richard Gage and the many other professionals who are spending their own time attempting to seek the truth.
Sincerely,
Patty Casazza
Lorie Van Auken
Mindy Kleinberg
Monica Gabrielle
Conclusion and The Ongoing Struggle Against Capitalism and the Far-Right
We face a serious challenge from the far-right. In addition to making strong moves to end whatever political and socioeconomic advantages can be gained in electoral campaigns, they have also advanced a bold attack on Abortion and general reproductive rights recently. The right, and their noise machine, are adept at coopting ideas that originated with the left and applying them on a mass scale to mobilize and motivate their base of supporters. The general high level of suspicion and skepticism of the U.S. population to ongoing events, that began with the 7 notable political assassinations of the 1960s (JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, Thomas Merton, Fred Hampton, and Walter Reuther) and the many lies involved with the SE Asian Wars, has been weaponized by the right and is now aimed straight at us as; most recently in "Stop the Steal", the January 6th Political Prisoners memes, and the virulent resistance to public health measures and vaccinations to Covid by right-wing loyalists.
The concept of the "Deep State" that was first advanced by Turkish academics to explain malignant events there, and that was introduced to the U.S. dialogue on the Left by careful scholar Peter Dale Scott, was successfully weaponized by Trump and others on the right (such as Steve Bannon). The lavishly funded right-wing noise machine is very good at doing this sort of thing. This is life and death stuff, but I don't see where swallowing the 9-11 "Official Story", without so much as questioning some of its more outrageous aspects, furthers our position. The Left needs to become more adept at packaging its ideas in short simple snappy expressions.
