Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11? by David Ray Griffin

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Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11?

David Ray Griffin

Much of America’s foreign policy since 9/11 has been based on the
assumption that it was attacked by Muslims on that day. This assumption
was used, most prominently, to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It is now widely agreed that the use of 9/11 as a basis for attacking
Iraq was illegitimate: none of the hijackers were Iraqis, there was no
working relation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and Iraq
was not behind the anthrax attacks. But it is still widely believed that
the US attack on Afghanistan was justified. For example, the New York Times, while referring to the US attack on Iraq as a “war of choice,” calls the battle in Afghanistan a “war of necessity.” Time
magazine has dubbed it “the right war.” And Barack Obama says that one
reason to wind down our involvement in Iraq is to have the troops and
resources to “go after the people in Afghanistan who actually attacked
us on 9/11.”

119_atta_florida_drivers_license1The
assumption that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11 also lies
behind the widespread perception of Islam as an inherently violent
religion and therefore of Muslims as guilty until proven innocent. This
perception surely contributed to attempts to portray Obama as a Muslim,
which was lampooned by a controversial cartoon on the July 21, 2008,
cover of The New Yorker.
As could be illustrated by reference to many other post-9/11
developments, including as spying, torture, extraordinary rendition,
military tribunals, America’s new doctrine of preemptive war, and its
enormous increase in military spending, the assumption that the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by Muslim hijackers has had
enormous negative consequences for both international and domestic
issues.1

Is it conceivable that this assumption might be false? Insofar as
Americans and Canadians would say “No,” they would express their belief
that this assumption is not merely an “assumption” but is instead based
on strong evidence. When actually examined, however, the proffered
evidence turns out to be remarkably weak. I will illustrate this point
by means of 16 questions.

1. Were Mohamed Atta and the Other Hijackers Devout Muslims?

The picture of the hijackers conveyed by the 9/11 Commission is that
they were devout Muslims. Mohamed Atta, considered the ringleader, was
said to have become very religious, even “fanatically so.”2 Being devout Muslims, they could be portrayed as ready to meet their Maker—as a “cadre of trained operatives willing to die.”3

But this portrayal is contradicted by various newspaper stories. The San Francisco Chronicle
reported that Atta and other hijackers had made “at least six trips” to
Las Vegas, where they had “engaged in some decidedly un-Islamic
sampling of prohibited pleasures.” These activities were “un-Islamic”
because, as the head of the Islamic Foundation of Nevada pointed out:
“True Muslims don’t drink, don’t gamble, don’t go to strip clubs.” 4

One might, to be sure, rationalize this behavior by supposing that
these were momentary lapses and that, as 9/11 approached, these young
Muslims had repented and prepared for heaven. But in the days just
before 9/11, Atta and others were reported to be drinking heavily,
cavorting with lap dancers, and bringing call girls to their rooms.
Temple University Professor Mahmoud Ayoub said: “It is incomprehensible
that a person could drink and go to a strip bar one night, then kill
themselves the next day in the name of Islam. . . . Something here does
not add up.”5

In spite of the fact that these activities were reported by mainstream newspapers and even the Wall Street Journal editorial page,6
the 9/11 Commission wrote as if these reports did not exist, saying:
“we have seen no credible evidence explaining why, on [some occasions],
the operatives flew to or met in Las Vegas.”7

2. Do Authorities Have Hard Evidence of Osama bin Laden’s Responsibility for 9/11?

Whatever be the truth about the devoutness of the hijackers, one
might reply, there is certainly no doubt about the fact that they were
acting under the guidance of Osama bin Laden. The attack on Afghanistan
was based on the claim that bin Laden was behind the attacks, and the
9/11 Commission’s report was written as if there were no question about
this claim. But neither the Bush administration nor the Commission
provided any proof for it.

Two weeks after 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking to
Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” said he expected “in the near future . .
. to put out . . . a document that will describe quite clearly the
evidence that we have linking [bin Laden] to this attack.”8
But at a press conference with President Bush the next morning, Powell
reversed himself, saying that although the government had information
that left no question of bin Laden’s responsibility, “most of it is
classified.”9 According to Seymour Hersh, citing officials
from both the CIA and the Department of Justice, the real reason for the
reversal was a “lack of solid information.”10

That same week, Bush had demanded that the Taliban turn over bin
Laden. But the Taliban, reported CNN, “refus[ed] to hand over bin Laden
without proof or evidence that he was involved in last week’s attacks on
the United States.” The Bush administration, saying “[t]here is already
an indictment of Osama bin Laden” [for the attacks in Tanzania, Kenya,
and elsewhere],” rejected the demand for evidence with regard to 9/11.11

The task of providing such evidence was taken up by British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, who on October 4 made public a document entitled
“Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States.”
Listing “clear conclusions reached by the government,” it stated: “Osama
Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he heads, planned
and carried out the atrocities on 11 September 2001.”12

Blair’s report, however, began by saying: “This document does not
purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a
court of law.” This weakness was noted the next day by the BBC, which
said: “There is no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama
Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks. At best the evidence is
circumstantial.”13
After the US had attacked Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official said:
“We have asked for proof of Osama’s involvement, but they have refused.
Why?”14 The answer to this question may be suggested by the
fact that, to this day, the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorist” webpage on bin
Laden, while listing him as wanted for bombings in Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania, and Nairobi, makes no mention of 9/11.15

When the FBI’s chief of investigative publicity was asked why not, he
replied: “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s
Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin
Laden to 9/11.”16

It is often claimed that bin Laden’s guilt is proved by a video,
reportedly found by US intelligence officers in Afghanistan in November
2001, in which bin Laden appears to report having planned the attacks.
But critics, pointing out various problems with this “confession video,”
have called it a fake.17 General Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistan’s ISI, said: “I think there is an Osama Bin Laden look-alike.”18
Actually, the man in the video is not even much of a look-alike, being
heavier and darker than bin Laden, having a broader nose, wearing
jewelry, and writing with his right hand.19 The FBI, in any case, obviously does not consider this video hard evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for 9/11.

What about the 9/11 Commission? I mentioned earlier that it gave the
impression of having had solid evidence of bin Laden’s guilt. But Thomas
Kean and Lee Hamilton, the Commission’s co-chairs, undermined this
impression in their follow-up book subtitled “the inside story of the
9/11 Commission.”20

Whenever the Commission had cited evidence for bin Ladin’s
responsibility, the note in the back of the book always referred to
CIA-provided information that had (presumably) been elicited during
interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives. By far the most important of
these operatives was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), described as the
“mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks. The Commission, for example, wrote:

Bin Ladin . . . finally decided to give the green light
for the 9/11 operation sometime in late 1998 or early 1999. . . . Bin
Ladin also soon selected four individuals to serve as suicide
operatives. . . . Atta—whom Bin Ladin chose to lead the group—met with
Bin Ladin several times to receive additional instructions, including a
preliminary list of approved targets: the World Trade Center, the
Pentagon, and the U.S. Capitol.21

The note for each of these statements says “interrogation of KSM.”22

Kean and Hamilton, however, reported that they had no success in
“obtaining access to star witnesses in custody . . . , most notably
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”23 Besides not being allowed to
interview these witnesses, they were not permitted to observe the
interrogations through one-way glass or even to talk to the
interrogators.24 Therefore, they complained: “We . . . had no
way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information. How could we
tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed . . . was telling us the
truth?”25

An NBC “deep background” report in 2008 pointed out an additional
problem: KSM and the other al-Qaeda leaders had been subjected to
“enhanced interrogation techniques,” i.e., torture, and it is now widely
acknowledged that statements elicited by torture lack credibility. “At
least four of the operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11
Commission Report,” this NBC report pointed out, “have claimed that they
told interrogators critical information as a way to stop being
‘tortured.’” NBC then quoted Michael Ratner, president of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, as saying: “Most people look at the 9/11
Commission Report as a trusted historical document. If their conclusions
were supported by information gained from torture, . . . their
conclusions are suspect.”26

Accordingly, neither the White House, the British government, the
FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission has provided solid evidence that Osama bin
Laden was behind 9/11.

3. Was Evidence of Muslim Hijackers Provided by Phone Calls from the Airliners?

Nevertheless, many readers may respond, there can be no doubt that
the airplanes were taken over by al-Qaeda hijackers, because their
presence and actions on the planes were reported on phone calls by
passengers and flight attendants, with cell phone calls playing an
especially prominent role.

The most famous of the reported calls were from CNN commentator
Barbara Olson to her husband, US Solicitor General Ted Olson. According
to CNN, he reported that his wife had “called him twice on a cell phone
from American Airlines Flight 77,” saying that “all passengers and
flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the
plane by . . . hijackers [armed with] knives and cardboard cutters.”27

Although these reported calls, as summarized by Ted Olson, did not
describe the hijackers so as to suggest that they were members of
al-Qaeda, such descriptions were supplied by calls from other flights,
especially United 93, from which about a dozen cell phone calls were
reportedly received before it crashed in Pennsylvania. According to a Washington Post story of September 13,

[P]assenger Jeremy Glick used a cell phone to tell his
wife, Lyzbeth, . . . that the Boeing 757?s cockpit had been taken over
by three Middle Eastern-looking men. . . . The terrorists, wearing red
headbands, had ordered the pilots, flight attendants and passengers to
the rear of the plane.28

A story about a “cellular phone conversation” between flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw and her husband gave this report:

She said the plane had been taken over by three men with
knives. She had gotten a close look at one of the hijackers. . . . “He
had an Islamic look,” she told her husband.29

From these calls, therefore, the public was informed that the hijackers looked Middle Eastern and even Islamic.

Still more specific information was reportedly conveyed during a
12-minute cell phone call from flight attendant Amy Sweeney on American
Flight 11, which was to crash into the North Tower of the World Trade
Center.30 After reaching American Airlines employee Michael
Woodward and telling him that men of “Middle Eastern descent” had
hijacked her flight, she then gave him their seat numbers, from which he
was able to learn the identity of Mohamed Atta and two other hijackers.31
Amy Sweeney’s call was critical, ABC News explained, because without it
“the plane might have crashed with no one certain the man in charge was
tied to al Qaeda.”32

There was, however, a big problem with these reported calls: Given
the technology available in 2001, cell phone calls from airliners at
altitudes of more than a few thousand feet, especially calls lasting
more than a few seconds, were not possible, and yet these calls, some of
which reportedly lasted a minute or more, reportedly occurred when the
planes were above 30,000 or even 40,000 feet. This problem was explained
by some credible people, including scientist A.K. Dewdney, who for many
years had written a column for Scientific American.33

Although some defenders of the official account, such as Popular Mechanics, have disputed the contention that high-altitude calls from airliners were impossible,34
the fact is that the FBI, after having at first supported the claims
that such calls were made, withdrew this support a few years later.

With regard to the reported 12-minute call from Amy Sweeney to
Michael Woodward, an affidavit signed by FBI agent James Lechner and
dated September 12 (2001) stated that, according to Woodward, Sweeney
had been “using a cellular telephone.”35 But when the 9/11
Commission discussed this call in its Report, which appeared in July
2004, it declared that Sweeney had used an onboard phone.36

Behind that change was an implausible claim made by the FBI earlier
in 2004: Although Woodward had failed to mention this when FBI agent
Lechner interviewed him on 9/11, he had repeated Sweeney’s call verbatim
to a colleague in his office, who had in turn repeated it to another
colleague at American headquarters in Dallas, who had recorded it; and
this recording—which was discovered only in 2004—indicated that Sweeney
had used a passenger-seat phone, thanks to “an AirFone card, given to
her by another flight attendant.”37

This claim is implausible because, if this relayed recording had
really been made on 9/11, we cannot believe that Woodward would have
failed to mention it to FBI agent Lechner later that same day. While
Lechner was taking notes, Woodward would surely have said: “You don’t
need to rely on my memory. There is a recording of a word-for-word
repetition of Sweeney’s statements down in Dallas.” It is also
implausible that Woodward, having repeated Sweeney’s statement that she
had used “an AirFone card, given to her by another flight attendant,”
would have told Lechner, as the latter’s affidavit says, that Sweeney
had been “using a cellular telephone.”

Lechner’s affidavit shows that the FBI at first supported the claim
that Sweeney had made a 12-minute cell phone call from a high-altitude
airliner. Does not the FBI’s change of story, after its first version
had been shown to be technologically impossible, create the suspicion
that the entire story was a fabrication?

This suspicion is reinforced by the FBI’s change of story in relation
to United Flight 93. Although we were originally told that this flight
had been the source of about a dozen cell phone calls, some of them when
the plane was above 40,000 feet, the FBI gave a very different report
at the 2006 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker.
The FBI spokesman said: “13 of the terrified passengers and crew members
made 35 air phone calls and two cell phone calls.”38 Instead
of there having been about a dozen cell phone calls from Flight 93, the
FBI declared in 2005, there were really only two.

Why were two calls still said to have been possible? They were
reportedly made at 9:58, when the plane was reportedly down to 5,000
feet.39 Although that was still pretty high for successful
cell phone calls in 2001, these calls, unlike calls from 30,000 feet or
higher, would have been at least arguably possible.

If the truth of the FBI’s new account is assumed, how can one explain
the fact that so many people had reported receiving cell phone calls?
In most cases, it seems, these people had been told by the callers that
they were using cell phones. For example, a Newsweek story about United
93 said: “Elizabeth Wainio, 27, was speaking to her stepmother in
Maryland. Another passenger, she explains, had loaned her a cell phone
and told her to call her family.”40 In such cases, we might
assume that the people receiving the calls had simply mis-heard, or
mis-remembered, what they had been told. But this would mean positing
that about a dozen people had made the same mistake.

An even more serious difficulty is presented by the case of Deena
Burnett, who said that she had received three to five calls from her
husband, Tom Burnett. She knew he was using his cell phone, she reported
to the FBI that very day and then to the press and in a book, because
she had recognized his cell phone number on her phone’s Caller ID.41 We cannot suppose her to have been mistaken about this. We also, surely, cannot accuse her of lying.

Therefore, if we accept the FBI’s report, according to which Tom
Burnett did not make any cell phone calls from Flight 93, we can only
conclude that the calls were faked—that Deena Burnett was duped.
Although this suggestion may at first sight seem outlandish, there are
three facts that, taken together, show it to be more probable than any
of the alternatives.

First, voice morphing technology was sufficiently advanced at that time to make faking the calls feasible. A 1999 Washington Post
article described demonstrations in which the voices of two generals,
Colin Powell and Carl Steiner, were heard saying things they had never
said.42

Second, there are devices with which you can fake someone’s telephone
number, so that it will show up on the recipient’s Caller ID.43

Third, the conclusion that the person who called Deena Burnett was
not her husband is suggested by various features of the calls. For
example, when Deena told the caller that “the kids” were asking to talk
to him, he said: “Tell them I’ll talk to them later.” This was 20
minutes after Tom had purportedly realized that the hijackers were on a
suicide mission, planning to “crash this plane into the ground,” and 10
minutes after he and other passengers had allegedly decided that as soon
as they were “over a rural area” they must try to gain control of the
plane. Also, the hijackers had reportedly already killed one person.44
Given all this, the real Tom Burnett would have known that he would
likely die, one way or another, in the next few minutes. Is it
believable that, rather than taking this probably last opportunity to
speak to his children, he would say that he would “talk to them later”?
Is it not more likely that “Tom” made this statement to avoid revealing
that he knew nothing about “the kids,” perhaps not even their names?

Further evidence that the calls were faked is provided by timing
problems in some of them. According to the 9/11 Commission, Flight 93
crashed at 10:03 as a result of the passenger revolt, which began at
9:57. However, according to Lyzbeth Glick’s account of the
aforementioned cell phone call from her husband, Jeremy Glick, she told
him about the collapse of the South Tower, and that did not occur until
9:59, two minutes after the alleged revolt had started. After that, she
reported, their conversation continued for several more minutes before
he told her that the passengers were taking a vote about whether to
attack. According to Lyzbeth Glick’s account, therefore, the revolt was
only beginning by 10:03, when the plane (according to the official
account) was crashing.45

A timing problem also occurred in the aforementioned call from flight
attendant Amy Sweeney. While she was describing the hijackers,
according to the FBI’s account of her call, they stormed and took
control of the cockpit.46 However, although the hijacking of
Flight 11 “began at 8:14 or shortly thereafter,” the 9/11 Commission
said, Sweeney’s call did not go through until 8:25.47 Her
alleged call, in other words, described the hijacking as beginning over
11 minutes after it, according to the official timeline, had been
successfully carried out.

Multiple lines of evidence, therefore, imply that the cell phone
calls were faked. This fact has vast implications, because it implies
that all the reported calls from the planes, including those from
onboard phones, were faked. Why? Because if the planes had really been
taken over in surprise hijackings, no one would have been ready to make
fake cell phone calls.

Moreover, the FBI, besides implying, most clearly in the case of
Deena Burnett, that the phone calls reporting the hijackings had been
faked, comes right out and says, in its report about calls from Flight
77, that no calls from Barbara Olson occurred. It does mention her. But
besides attributing only one call to her, not two, the FBI report refers
to it as an “unconnected call,” which (of course) lasted “0 seconds.”48
In 2006, in other words, the FBI, which is part of the Department of
Justice, implied that the story told by the DOJ’s former solicitor
general was untrue. Although not mentioned by the press, this was an
astounding development.

This FBI report leaves only two possible explanations for Ted Olson’s
story: Either he made it up or else he, like Deena Burnett and several
others, was duped. In either case, the story about Barbara Olson’s
calls, with their reports of hijackers taking over Flight 77, was based
on deception.

The opening section of The 9/11 Commission Report is
entitled “Inside the Four Flights.” The information contained in this
section is based almost entirely on the reported phone calls. But if the
reported calls were faked, we have no idea what happened inside these
planes. Insofar as the idea that the planes were taken over by hijackers
who looked “Middle Eastern,” even “Islamic,” has been based on the
reported calls, this idea is groundless.

4. Was the Presence of Hijackers Proved by a Radio Transmission “from American 11??

It might be objected, in reply, that this is not true, because we
know that American Flight 11, at least, was hijacked, thanks to a radio
transmission in which the voice of one of its hijackers is heard.
According to the 9/11 Commission, the air traffic controller for this
flight heard a radio transmission at 8:25 AM in which someone—widely
assumed to be Mohamed Atta—told the passengers: “We have some planes.
Just stay quiet, and you’ll be okay. We are returning to the airport.”
After quoting this transmission, the Commission wrote: “The controller
told us that he then knew it was a hijacking.”49 Was this transmission not indeed proof that Flight 11 had been hijacked?

It might provide such proof if we knew that, as the Commission claimed, the “transmission came from American 11.”50
But we do not. According to the FAA’s “Summary of Air Traffic Hijack
Events,” published September 17, 2001, the transmission was “from an
unknown origin.”51 Bill Peacock, the FAA’s air traffic director, said: “We didn’t know where the transmission came from.”52
The Commission’s claim that it came from American 11 was merely an
inference. The transmission could have come from the same room from
which the calls to Deena Burnett originated.

Therefore, the alleged radio transmission from Flight 11, like the
alleged phone calls from the planes, provides no evidence that the
planes were taken over by al-Qaeda hijackers.

5. Did Passports and a Headband Provide Evidence that al-Qaeda Operatives Were on the Flights?

However, the government’s case for al-Qaeda hijackers on also rested
in part on claims that passports and a headband belonging to al-Qaeda
operatives were found at the crash sites. But these claims are patently
absurd.

A week after the attacks, the FBI reported that a search of the
streets after the destruction of the World Trade Center had discovered
the passport of one of the Flight 11 hijackers, Satam al-Suqami.53
But this claim did not pass the giggle test. “[T]he idea that [this]
passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged,” wrote one British
reporter, “would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the
FBI’s crackdown on terrorism.”54

By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission was discussing the alleged
discovery of this passport, the story had been modified to say that “a
passer-by picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective shortly before
the World Trade Center towers collapsed.”55 So, rather than
needing to survive the collapse of the North Tower, the passport merely
needed to escape from the plane’s cabin, avoid being destroyed or even
singed by the instantaneous jet-fuel fire, and then escape from the
building so that it could fall to the ground!

Equally absurd is the claim that the passport of Ziad Jarrah, the
alleged pilot of Flight 93, was found at this plane’s crash site in
Pennsylvania.56 This passport was reportedly found on the
ground even though there was virtually nothing at the site to indicate
that an airliner had crashed there. The reason for this absence of
wreckage, we were told, was that the plane had been headed downward at
580 miles per hour and, when it hit the spongy Pennsylvania soil, buried
itself deep in the ground. New York Times journalist Jere
Longman, surely repeating what he had been told by authorities, wrote:
“The fuselage accordioned on itself more than thirty feet into the
porous, backfilled ground. It was as if a marble had been dropped into
water.”57 So, we are to believe, just before the plane buried
itself in the earth, Jarrah’s passport escaped from the cockpit and
landed on the ground. Did Jarrah, going 580 miles per hour, have the
window open?58

Also found on the ground, according to the government’s evidence presented to the Moussaoui trial, was a red headband.59
This was considered evidence that al-Qaeda hijackers were on Flight 93
because they were, according to some of the phone calls, wearing red
headbands. But besides being absurd for the same reason as was the claim
about Jarrah’s passport, this claim about the headband was problematic
for another reason. Former CIA agent Milt Bearden, who helped train the
Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, has pointed out that it would have
been very unlikely that members of al-Qaeda would have worn such
headbands:

[The red headband] is a uniquely Shi’a Muslim adornment.
It is something that dates back to the formation of the Shi’a sect. . . .
[I]t represents the preparation of he who wears this red headband to
sacrifice his life, to murder himself for the cause. Sunnis are by and
large most of the people following Osama bin Laden [and they] do not do
this.60

We learned shortly after the invasion of Iraq that some people in the
US government did not know the difference between Shi’a and Sunni
Muslims. Did such people decide that the hijackers would be described as
wearing red headbands?

6. Did the Information in Atta’s Luggage Prove the Responsibility of al-Qaeda Operatives?

I come now to the evidence that is said to provide the strongest
proof that the planes had been hijacked by Mohamed Atta and other
members of al-Qaeda. This evidence was reportedly found in two pieces of
Atta’s luggage that were discovered inside the Boston airport after the
attacks. The luggage was there, we were told, because although Atta was
already in Boston on September 10, he and another al-Qaeda operative,
Abdul al-Omari, rented a blue Nissan and drove up to Portland, Maine,
and stayed overnight. They caught a commuter flight back to Boston early
the next morning in time to get on American Flight 11, but Atta’s
luggage did not make it.

This luggage, according to the FBI affidavit signed by James Lechner,
contained much incriminating material, including a handheld flight
computer, flight simulator manuals, two videotapes about Boeing
aircraft, a slide-rule flight calculator, a copy of the Koran, and
Atta’s last will and testament.61 This material was widely taken as proof that al-Qaeda and hence Osama bin Laden were behind the 9/11 attacks.

When closely examined, however, the Atta-to-Portland story loses all credibility.

One problem is the very idea that Atta would have planned to take all
these things in baggage that was to be transferred to Flight 11. What
good would a flight computer and other flying aids do inside a suitcase
in the plane’s luggage compartment? Why would he have planned to take
his will on a plane he planned to crash into the World Trade Center?

A second problem involves the question of why Atta’s luggage did not
get transferred onto Flight 11. According to an Associated Press story
that appeared four days after 9/11, Atta’s flight “arrived at Logan . . .
just in time for him to connect with American Airlines flight 11 to Los
Angeles, but too late for his luggage to be loaded.”62 The 9/11 Commission had at one time evidently planned to endorse this claim.63 But when The 9/11 Commission Report
appeared, it said: “Atta and Omari arrived in Boston at 6:45? and then
“checked in and boarded American Airlines Flight 11,” which was
“scheduled to depart at 7:45.”64 By thus admitting that there
was almost a full hour for the luggage to be transferred to Flight 11,
the Commission was left with no explanation as to why it was not.

Still another problem with the Atta-to-Portland story was the
question why he would have taken this trip. If the commuter flight had
been late, Atta, being the ringleader of the hijackers as well as the
intended pilot for Flight 11, would have had to call off the whole
operation, which he had reportedly been planning for two years. The 9/11
Commission, like the FBI before it, admitted that it had no answer to
this question.65

The fourth and biggest problem with the story, however, is that it
did not appear until September 16, five days after 9/11, following the
collapse of an earlier story.

According to news reports immediately after 9/11, the incriminating
materials, rather than being found in Atta’s luggage inside the airport,
were found in a white Mitsubishi, which Atta had left in the Boston
airport parking lot. Two hijackers did drive a blue Nissan to Portland
and then take the commuter flight back to Boston the next morning, but
their names were Adnan and Ameer Bukhari.66 This story fell
apart on the afternoon of September 13, when it was discovered that the
Bukharis, to whom authorities had reportedly been led by material in the
Nissan at the Portland Jetport, had not died on 9/11: Adnan was still
alive and Ameer had died the year before.67

The next day, September 14, an Associated Press story said that it
was Atta and a companion who had driven the blue Nissan to Portland,
stayed overnight, and then taken the commuter flight back to Boston. The
incriminating materials, however, were still said to have been found in
a car in the Boston airport, which was now said to have been rented by
“additional suspects.”68 Finally, on September 16, a Washington Post
story, besides saying that the Nissan had been taken to Portland by
Atta and al-Omari, specified that the incriminating material had been
found in Atta’s luggage inside the Boston airport.69
Given this history of the Atta-to-Portland story, how can we avoid the conclusion that it was a fabrication?

7. Were al-Qaeda Operatives Captured on Airport Security Videos?

Still another type of evidence for the claim that al-Qaeda operatives
were on the planes consisted of frames from videos, purportedly taken
by airport security cameras, said to show hijackers checking into
airports. Shortly after the attacks, for example, photos showing Atta
and al-Omari at an airport “were flashed round the world.”70
However, although it was widely assumed that these photos were from the
airport at Boston, they were really from the airport at Portland. No
photos showing Atta or any of the other alleged hijackers at Boston’s
Logan Airport were ever produced. We at best have photographic evidence
that Atta and al-Omari were at the Portland airport.

Moreover, in light of the fact that the story of Atta and al-Omari
going to Portland was apparently a late invention, we might expect the
photographic evidence that they were at the Portland Jetport on the
morning of September 11 to be problematic. And indeed it is. It shows
Atta and Omari without either jackets or ties on, whereas the Portland
ticket agent said that they had been wearing jackets and ties.71 Also, a photo showing Atta and al-Omari passing through the security checkpoint is marked both 05:45 and 05:53.72

Another airport video was distributed on the day in 2004 that The 9/11 Commission Report was published. The Associated Press, using a frame from it as corroboration of the official story, provided this caption:

Hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar . . . passes through the
security checkpoint at Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Va.,
Sept. 11 2001, just hours before American Airlines Flight 77 crashed
into the Pentagon in this image from a surveillance video.73

However, as Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall have pointed out,

a normal security video has time and date burned into the
integral video image by proprietary equipment according to an
authenticated pattern, along with camera identification and the location
that the camera covered. The video released in 2004 contained no such
data.74

The Associated Press notwithstanding, therefore, this video contains no evidence that it was taken at Dulles on September 11.

Another problem with this so-called Dulles video is that, although
one of the men on it was identified by the 9/11 Commission as Hani
Hanjour,75 he “does not remotely resemble Hanjour.”
Whereas Hanjour was thin and had a receding hairline (as shown by a
photo taken six days before 9/11), the man in the video had a somewhat
muscular build and a full head of hair, with no receding hairline.76

In sum: Video proof that the named hijackers checked into airports on
9/11 is nonexistent. Besides the fact that the videos purportedly
showing hijackers for Flights 11 and 77 reek of inauthenticity, there
are no videos even purportedly showing the hijackers for the other two
flights. If these 19 men had really checked into the Boston and Dulles
airports that day, there should be authentic security videos to prove
this.

8. Were the Names of the “Hijackers” on the Passenger Manifests?

What about the passenger manifests, which list all the passengers on
the flights? If the alleged hijackers purchased tickets and boarded the
flights, their names would have been on the manifests for these flights.
And we were told that they were. According to counterterrorism
coordinator Richard Clarke, the FBI told him at about 10:00 that morning
that it recognized the names of some al-Qaeda operatives on passenger
manifests it had received from the airlines.77 As to how the
FBI itself acquired its list, Robert Bonner, the head of Customs and
Border Protection, said to the 9/11 Commission in 2004:

On the morning of 9/11, through an evaluation of data
related to the passenger manifest for the four terrorist hijacked
aircraft, Customs Office of Intelligence was able to identify the likely
terrorist hijackers. Within 45 minutes of the attacks, Customs
forwarded the passenger lists with the names of the victims and 19
probable hijackers to the FBI and the intelligence community.78

Under questioning, Bonner added:

We were able to pull from the airlines the passenger
manifest for each of the four flights. We ran the manifest through [our
lookout] system. . . . [B]y 11:00 AM, I’d seen a sheet that essentially
identified the 19 probable hijackers. And in fact, they turned out to
be, based upon further follow-up in detailed investigation, to be the
19.79

Bonner’s statement, however, is doubly problematic. In the first
place, the initial FBI list, as reported by CNN on September 13 and 14,
contained only 18 names.80 Why would that be if 19 men had already been identified on 9/11?

Second, several of the names on the FBI’s first list, having quickly
become problematic, were replaced by other names. For example, the
previously discussed men named Bukhari, thought to be brothers, were
replaced on American 11?s list of hijackers by brothers named Waleed and
Wail al-Shehri. Two other replacements for this flight were Satam
al-Suqami, whose passport was allegedly found at Ground Zero, and Abdul
al-Omari, who allegedly went to Portland with Atta the day before 9/11.
Also, the initial list for American 77 did not include the name of Hani
Hanjour, who would later be called the pilot of this flight. Rather, it
contained a name that, after being read aloud by a CNN correspondent,
was transcribed “Mosear Caned.”81 All in all, the final list
of 19 hijackers contained six names that were not on the original list
of 18—a fact that contradicts Bonner’s claim that by 11:00 AM on 9/11
his agency had identified 19 probable hijackers who, in fact, “turned
out to be. . . the 19.”

These replacements to the initial list also undermine the claim that
Amy Sweeney, by giving the seat numbers of three of the hijackers to
Michael Woodward of American Airlines, allowed him to identify Atta and
two others. This second claim is impossible because the two others were
Abdul al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami,82 and they were replacements for two men on the original list—who, like Adnan Bukhari, turned up alive after 9/11.83 Woodward could not possibly have identified men who were not added to the list until several days later.84

For all these reasons, the claim that the names of the 19 alleged
hijackers were on the airlines’ passenger manifests must be considered
false.

This conclusion is supported by the fact that the passenger manifests
that were released to the public included no names of any of the 19
alleged hijackers and, in fact, no Middle Eastern names whatsoever.85 These manifests, therefore, support the suspicion that there were no al-Qaeda hijackers on the planes.

It might appear that this conclusion is contradicted by the fact that
passenger manifests with the names of the alleged hijackers have
appeared. A photocopy of a portion of an apparent passenger manifest for
American Flight 11, with the names of three of the alleged hijackers,
was published in a 2005 book by Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers.86 McDermott reportedly said that he received these manifests from the FBI.87 But the idea that these were the original manifests is problematic.

For one thing, they were not included in the evidence presented by the FBI to the Moussaoui trial in 2006.88 If even the FBI will not cite them as evidence, why should anyone think they are genuine?

Another problem with these purported manifests, copies of which can be viewed on the Internet,89
is that they show signs of being late creations. One such sign is that
Ziad Jarrah’s last name is spelled correctly, whereas in the early days
after 9/11, the FBI was referring to him as “Jarrahi,” as news reports
from the time show.90 A second sign is that the manifest for
American Flight 77 contains Hani Hanjour’s name, even though its absence
from the original list of hijackers had led the Washington Post to wonder why Hanjour’s “name was not on the American Airlines manifest for the flight.”91
A third sign is that the purported manifest for American Flight 11
contains the names of Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, Satam al-Suqami,
and Abdul al-Omari, all of whom were added some days after 9/11.

In sum, no credible evidence that al-Qaeda operatives were on the flights is provided by the passenger manifests.

9. Did DNA Tests Identify Five Hijackers among the Victims at the Pentagon?

Another type of evidence that the alleged hijackers were really on
the planes could have been provided by autopsies. But no such evidence
has been forthcoming. In its book defending the official account of
9/11, to be sure, Popular Mechanics claims that, according to a
report on the victims of the Pentagon attack by the Armed Forces
Institute of Pathology: “The five hijackers were positively identified.”92 But this claim is false.

According to a summary of this pathology report by Andrew Baker,
M.D., the remains of 183 victims were subjected to DNA analysis, which
resulted in “178 positive identifications.” Although Baker says that
“[s]ome remains for each of the terrorists were recovered,” this was
merely an inference from the fact that there were “five unique
postmortem profiles that did not match any antemortem material provided
by victims’ families.”93

A Washington Post story made even clearer the fact that this
conclusion—that the unmatched remains were those of “the five
hijackers”—was merely an inference. It wrote: “The remains of the five
hijackers have been identified through a process of exclusion, as they
did not match DNA samples contributed by family members of all 183
victims who died at the site” (emphasis added).94 All the
report said, in other words, was that there were five bodies whose DNA
did not match that of any of the known Pentagon victims or any of the
regular passengers or crew members on Flight 77.

We have no way of knowing where these five bodies came from. For the
claim that they came from the attack site at the Pentagon, we have only
the word of the FBI and the military, which insisted on taking charge of
the bodies of everyone killed at the Pentagon and transporting them to
the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.95

In any case, the alleged hijackers could have been positively
identified only if samples had been obtained from their relatives, and
there is no indication that this occurred. Indeed, one can wonder why
not. The FBI had lots of information about the men identified as the
hijackers. They could easily have located relatives. And these
relatives, most of whom reportedly did not believe that their own flesh
and blood had been involved in the attacks, would have surely been
willing to supply the needed DNA. Indeed, a story about Ziad Jarrah, the
alleged pilot of Flight 93, said: “Jarrah’s family has indicated they
would be willing to provide DNA samples to US researchers, . . . [but]
the FBI has shown no interest thus far.”96

The lack of positive identification of the alleged hijackers is
consistent with the autopsy report, which was released to Dr. Thomas
Olmsted, who had made a FOIA request for it. Like the flight manifest
for Flight 77, he revealed, this report also contains no Arab names.97

10. Has the Claim That Some of the “Hijackers” Are Still Alive Been Debunked?

Another problem with the claim that the 19 hijackers were correctly
identified on 9/11, or at least a few days later, is that some of the
men on the FBI’s final list reportedly turned up alive after 9/11.
Although Der Spiegel and the BBC claim to have debunked these
reports, I will show this is untrue by examining the case of one of the
alleged hijackers, Waleed al-Shehri—who, we saw earlier, was a
replacement for Adnan Bukhari, who himself had shown up alive after
9/11.

In spite of the fact that al-Shehri was a replacement, the 9/11
Commission revealed no doubts about his presence on Flight 11,
speculating that he and his brother Wail—another replacement—stabbed two
of the flight attendants.98 But the Commission certainly should have had doubts.

On September 22, 2001, the BBC published an article by David Bamford
entitled “Hijack ‘Suspect’ Alive in Morocco.” It showed that the Waleed
al-Shehri identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers was still alive.
Explaining why the problem could not be dismissed as a case of mistaken
identity, Bamford wrote:

His photograph was released by the FBI, and has been
shown in newspapers and on television around the world. That same Mr
Al-Shehri has turned up in Morocco, proving clearly that he was not a
member of the suicide attack. He told Saudi journalists in Casablanca
that . . . he has now been interviewed by the American authorities, who
apologised for the misunderstanding.99

The following day, September 23, the BBC published another story,
“Hijack ‘Suspects’ Alive and Well.” Discussing several alleged hijackers
who had shown up alive, it said of al-Shehri in particular: “He
acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach. .
. . But, he says, he left the United States in September last year,
became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further
training course in Morocco.”100

In 2003, an article in Der Spiegel tried to debunk these two
BBC stories, characterizing them as “nonsense about surviving
terrorists.” It claimed that the reported still-alive hijackers were all
cases of mistaken identity, involving men with “coincidentally
identical names.” This claim by Der Spiegel depended on its
assertion that, at the time of the reports, the FBI had released only a
list of names: “The FBI did not release photographs until four days
after the cited reports, on September 27th.”101 But that was
not true. Bamford’s BBC story of September 22, as we saw, reported that
Waleed al-Shehri’s photograph had been “released by the FBI” and “shown
in newspapers and on television around the world.”

In 2006, nevertheless, the BBC used the same claim to withdraw its
support for its own stories. Steve Herrmann, the editor of the BBC News
website, claimed that confusion had arisen because “these were common
Arabic and Islamic names.” Accordingly, he said, the BBC had changed its
September 23 story in one respect: “Under the FBI picture of Waleed al
Shehri we have added the words ‘A man called Waleed Al Shehri…’ to make
it as clear as possible that there was confusion over the identity.”102
But Bamford’s BBC story of September 22, which Herrmann failed to
mention, had made it “as clear as possible” that there could not have
been any confusion.

These attempts by Der Spiegel and the BBC, in which they
tried to discredit the reports that Waleed al-Shehri was still alive
after 9/11, have been refuted by Jay Kolar, who shows that FBI
photographs had been published by Saudi newspapers as early as September
19. Kolar thereby undermines the only argument against Bamford’s
assertion, according to which there could have been no possibility of
mistaken identity because al-Shehri had seen his published photograph
prior to September 22, when Bamford’s story appeared.103

The fact that al-Shehri, along with several other alleged hijackers,104
was alive after 9/11 shows unambiguously that at least some of the men
on the FBI’s final list were not on the planes. It would appear that the
FBI, after replacing some of its first-round candidates because of
their continued existence, decided not to replace any more, in spite of
their exhibition of the same defect.

11. Is There Positive Evidence That No Hijackers Were on the Planes?

At this point, defenders of the official story might argue: The fact
that some of the men labeled hijackers were still alive after 9/11 shows
only that the FBI list contained some errors; it does not prove that
there were no al-Qaeda hijackers on board. And although the previous
points do undermine the evidence for such hijackers, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

Evidence of absence, however, is implicit in the prior points in two
ways. First, the lack of Arab names on the Pentagon autopsy report and
on any of the issued passenger manifests does suggest the absence of
al-Qaeda operatives. Second, if al-Qaeda hijackers really were on the
flights, why was evidence to prove this fact fabricated?

Beyond those two points, moreover, there is a feature of the reported
events that contradicts the claim that hijackers broke into the pilots’
cabins. This feature can be introduced by reference to Conan Doyle’s
short story “Silver Blaze,” which is about a famous race horse that had
disappeared the night before a big race. Although the local Scotland
Yard detective believed that Silver Blaze had been stolen by an
intruder, Sherlock Holmes brought up “the curious incident of the dog in
the night-time.” When the inspector pointed out that “[t]he dog did
nothing in the night-time,” Holmes replied: “That was the curious
incident.”105 Had there really been an intruder, in other
words, the dog would have barked. This has become known as the case of
“the dog that didn’t bark.”

A similar curious incident occurred on each of the four flights. In
the event of a hijacking, pilots are trained to enter the standard
hijack code (7500) into their transponders to alert controllers on the
ground. Using the transponder to send a code is called “squawking.” One
of the big puzzles about 9/11 was why none of the pilots squawked the
hijack code.
CNN provided a good treatment of this issue, saying with regard to the first flight:

Flight 11 was hijacked apparently by knife-wielding men.
Airline pilots are trained to handle such situations by keeping calm,
complying with requests, and if possible, dialing in an emergency four
digit code on a device called a transponder. . . . The action takes
seconds, but it appears no such code was entered.106

The crucial issue was indicated by the phrase “if possible”: Would it
have been possible for the pilots of Flight 11 to have performed this
action? A positive answer was suggested by CNN’s next statement:

[I]n the cabin, a frantic flight attendant managed to use
a phone to call American Airlines Command Center in Dallas. She
reported the trouble. And according to “The Christian Science Monitor,” a
pilot apparently keyed the microphone, transmitting a cockpit
conversation.107

If there was time for both of those actions to be taken, there would
have been time for one of the pilots to enter the four-digit hijack
code.

That would have been all the more true of the pilots on United Flight
93, given the (purported) tapes from this flight. A reporter at the
Moussaoui trial, where these tapes had been played, wrote:

In those tapes, the pilots shouted as hijackers broke
into the cockpit. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” a pilot screamed in the
first tape. In the second tape, 30 seconds later, a pilot shouted:
“Mayday! Get out of here! Get out of here!”108

According to these tapes, therefore, the pilots were still alive and
coherent 30 seconds after realizing that hijackers were breaking into
the cockpit. And yet in all that time, neither of them did the most
important thing they had been trained to do—turn the transponder to
7500.

In addition to the four pilots on Flights 11 and 93, furthermore, the
four pilots on Flights 175 and 77 failed to do this as well.
In “Silver Blaze,” the absence of an intruder was shown by the dog that
didn’t bark. On 9/11, the absence of hijackers was shown by the pilots
who didn’t squawk.

12. Were bin Laden and al-Qaeda Capable of Orchestrating the Attacks?

For prosecutors to prove that defendants committed a crime, they must
show that they had the ability (as well as the motive and opportunity)
to do so. But several political and military leaders from other
countries have stated that bin Laden and al-Qaeda simply could not have
carried out the attacks. General Leonid Ivashov, who in 2001 was the
chief of staff for the Russian armed forces, wrote:

Only secret services and their current chiefs—or those
retired but still having influence inside the state organizations—have
the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such
magnitude. . . . . Osama bin Laden and “Al Qaeda” cannot be the
organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not
have the necessary organization, resources or leaders.

Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the former foreign minister of Egypt, wrote:

Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation
of this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaida as if it was
Nazi Germany or the communist party of the Soviet Union, I laugh
because I know what is there.

Similar statements have been made by Andreas von Bülow, the former
state secretary of West Germany’s ministry of defense, by General Mirza
Aslam Beg, former chief of staff of Pakistan’s army, and even General
Musharraf, the president of Pakistan until recently.109

This same point was also made by veteran CIA agent Milt Bearden.
Speaking disparagingly of “the myth of Osama bin Laden” on CBS News the
day after 9/11, Bearden said: “I was there [in Afghanistan] at the same
time bin Laden was there. He was not the great warrior.” With regard to
the widespread view that bin Laden was behind the attacks, he said:
“This was a tremendously sophisticated operation against the United
States—more sophisticated than anybody would have ascribed to Osama bin
Laden.” Pointing out that a group capable of such a sophisticated attack
would have had a way to cover their tracks, he added: “This group who
was responsible for that, if they didn’t have an Osama bin Laden out
there, they’d invent one, because he’s a terrific diversion.”110

13. Could Hani Hanjour Have Flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon?

The inability of al-Qaeda to have carried out the operation can be
illustrated in terms of Hani Hanjour, the al-Qaeda operative said to
have flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

On September 12, before it was stated that Hanjour had been the pilot
of American 77, the final minutes of this plane’s trajectory had been
described as one requiring great skill. A Washington Post story said:

[J]ust as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission
into the White House, the unidentified pilot executed a pivot so tight
that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver. . . . Aviation
sources said the plane was flown with extraordinary skill, making it
highly likely that a trained pilot was at the helm.111

But Hani Hanjour was not that. Indeed, a CBS story reported, an
Arizona flight school said that Hanjour’s “flying skills were so bad . .
. they didn’t think he should keep his pilot’s license.” The manager
stated: “I couldn’t believe he had a commercial license of any kind with
the skills that he had.”112 A New York Times story,
entitled “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence,” quoted one of his
instructors as saying that Hanjour “could not fly at all.”113

The 9/11 Commission even admitted that in the summer of 2001, just
months before 9/11, a flight instructor in New Jersey, after going up
with Hanjour in a small plane, “declined a second request because of
what he considered Hanjour’s poor piloting skills.”114 The
Commission failed to address the question of how Hanjour, incapable of
flying a single-engine plane, could have flown a giant 757 through the
trajectory reportedly taken by Flight 77: descending 8,000 feet in three
minutes and then coming in at ground level to strike Wedge 1 of the
Pentagon between the first and second floors, without even scraping the
lawn.

Several pilots have said this would have been impossible. Russ
Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after
serving as a fighter pilot in Vietnam, says it would have been “totally
impossible for an amateur who couldn’t even fly a Cessna” to fly that
downward spiral and then “crash into the Pentagon’s first floor wall
without touching the lawn.”115 Ralph Omholt, a former 757
pilot, has bluntly said: “The idea that an unskilled pilot could have
flown this trajectory is simply too ridiculous to consider.”116
Ralph Kolstad, who was a US Navy “top gun” pilot before becoming a
commercial airline pilot for 27 years, has said: “I have 6,000 hours of
flight time in Boeing 757?s and 767?s and I could not have flown it the
way the flight path was described. . . . Something stinks to high
heaven!”117

The authors of the Popular Mechanics book about 9/11 offered
to solve this problem. While acknowledging that Hanjour “may not have
been highly skilled,” they said that he did not need to be, because all
he had to do was, using a GPS unit, put his plane on autopilot.118
“He steered the plane manually for only the final eight minutes of the
flight,” they state triumphantly119—ignoring the fact that it was
precisely during those minutes that Hanjour had allegedly performed the
impossible.

14. Would an al-Qaeda Pilot Have Executed that Maneuver?

A further question is: Even if one of the al-Qaeda operatives on that
flight could have executed that maneuver, would he have done so? This
question arises out of the fact that the plane could easily have crashed
into the roof on the side of the Pentagon that housed Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and all the top brass. The difficult maneuver
would have been required only by the decision to strike Wedge 1 on the
side.

But this was the worst possible place, given the assumed motives of
the al-Qaeda operatives: They would have wanted to kill Rumsfeld and the
top brass, but Wedge 1 was as far removed from their offices as
possible. They would have wanted to cause as much destruction as
possible, but Wedge 1—and only it—had been renovated to make it less
vulnerable to attack. Al-Qaeda operatives would have wanted to kill as
many Pentagon employees as possible, but because the renovation was not
quite complete, Wedge 1 was only sparsely occupied. The attack also
occurred on the only part of the Pentagon that would have presented
physical obstacles to an attacking airplane. All of these facts were
public knowledge. So even if an al-Qaeda pilot had been capable of
executing the maneuver to strike the ground floor of Wedge 1, he would
not have done so.

15. Could al-Qaeda Operatives Have Brought Down the World Trade Center Buildings?

Returning to the issue of competence, another question is whether
al-Qaeda operatives could have brought down the Twin Towers and WTC 7?

With regard to the Twin Towers, the official theory is that they were
brought down by the impact of the airplanes plus the ensuing fires. But
this theory cannot explain why the towers, after exploding outwards at
the top, came straight down, because this type of collapse would have
required all 287 of each building’s steel columns—which ran from the
basement to the roof—to have failed simultaneously; it cannot explain
why the top parts of the buildings came straight down at virtually
free-fall speed, because this required that the lower parts of the
building, with all of their steel and concrete, offered no resistance;
it cannot explain why sections of steel beams, weighing thousands of
tons, were blown out horizontally more than 500 feet; it cannot explain
why some of the steel had melted, because this melting required
temperatures far hotter than the fires in the buildings could possibly
have been; and it cannot explain why many firefighters and WTC employees
reported massive explosions in the buildings long after all the
jet-fuel had burned up. But all of these phenomena are easily
explainable by the hypothesis that the buildings were brought down by
explosives in the procedure known as controlled demolition.120

This conclusion now constitutes the consensus of independent
physicists, chemists, architects, engineers, and demolition experts who
have studied the facts.121 For example, Edward Munyak, a
mechanical and fire protection engineer who worked in the US departments
of energy and defense, says: “The concentric nearly freefall speed
exhibited by each building was identical to most controlled demolitions.
. . . Collapse [was] not caused by fire effects.”122 Dwain
Deets, the former director of the research engineering division at
NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, mentions the “massive structural
members being hurled horizontally” as one of the factors leaving him
with “no doubt [that] explosives were involved.”123

Given the fact that WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, its vertical
collapse at virtually free-fall speed, which also was preceded by
explosions and involved the melting of steel, was still more obviously
an example of controlled demolition.124 For example, Jack
Keller, emeritus professor of engineering at Utah State University, who
has been given special recognition by Scientific American, said: “Obviously it was the result of controlled demolition.”125
Likewise, when Danny Jowenko—a controlled demolition expert in the
Netherlands who had not known that WTC 7 had collapsed on 9/11—was asked
to comment on a video of its collapse, he said: “They simply blew up
columns, and the rest caved in afterwards. . . . [I]t’s been imploded. .
. . A team of experts did this.”126

If the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were brought down by explosives, the
question becomes: Who would have had the ability to place the
explosives? This question involves two parts: First, who could have
obtained access to the buildings for all the hours it would have taken
to plant the explosives? The answer is: Only someone with connections to
people in charge of security for the World Trade Center.

The second part of the question is: Who, if they had such access,
would have had the expertise to engineer the controlled demolition of
these three buildings? As Jowenko’s statement indicated, the kind of
controlled demolition to which these buildings were subjected was
implosion, which makes the building come straight down. According to
ImplosionWorld.com, an implosion is “by far the trickiest type of
explosive project, and there are only a handful of blasting companies in
the world that possess enough experience . . . to perform these true
building implosions.”127

Both parts of the question, therefore, rule out al-Qaeda operatives.
The destruction of the World Trade Center had to have been an inside
job.

16. Would al-Qaeda Operatives Have Imploded the Buildings?

Finally, we can also ask whether, even if al-Qaeda operatives had
possessed the ability to cause the World Trade Center buildings to
implode so as to come straight down, they would have done so? The answer
to this question becomes obvious once we reflect upon the purpose of
this kind of controlled demolition, which is to avoid damaging near-by
buildings. Had the 110-story Twin Towers fallen over sideways, they
would have caused massive destruction in lower Manhattan, destroying
dozens of other buildings and killing tens of thousands of people. Would
al-Qaeda have had the courtesy to make sure that the buildings came
straight down?

Conclusion

All the proffered evidence that America was attacked by Muslims on
9/11, when subjected to critical scrutiny, appears to have been
fabricated. If that is determined indeed to be the case, the
implications would be enormous. Discovering and prosecuting the true
perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks would obviously be important. The most
immediate consequence, however, should be to reverse those attitudes and
policies that have been based on the assumption that America was
attacked by Muslims on 9/11.

————–
David Ray Griffin is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion at
Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University. He has
published 34 books, including seven about 9/11, most recently The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008).

© Copyright David Ray Griffin, OpEdNews.com, 2008

Notes

1. On the ways in which torture, extraordinary rendition, government
spying, and the military tribunals have undermined US constitutional
principles, see Louis Fisher, The Constitution and 9/11: Recurring
Threats to America’s Freedoms (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2008).

2. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, authorized
edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 160 (henceforth 9/11CR).

3. 9/11CR 154.

4. Kevin Fagan, “Agents of Terror Leave Their Mark on Sin City,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 October 2001 (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/04/MN102970.DTL).

5. See ibid.; David Wedge, “Terrorists Partied with Hooker at Hub-Area Hotel,” Boston Herald, 10 October, 2001 (http://web.archive.org/web/20011010224657/http://www.bostonherald.com/attack/investigation/ausprob10102001.htm); and Jody A. Benjamin, “Suspects’ Actions Don’t Add Up,” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 16 September 2001 (http://web.archive.org/web/20010916150533/http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-warriors916.story).

6. “Terrorist Stag Parties,” Wall Street Journal, 10 October 2001 (http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001298).

7. 9/11CR 248.

8. “Meet the Press,” NBC, 23 September, 2001 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/nbctext092301.html).

9. “Remarks by the President, Secretary of the Treasury O’Neill and
Secretary of State Powell on Executive Order,” White House, 24 September
2001 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010924-4.html).

10. Seymour M. Hersh, “What Went Wrong: The C.I.A. and the Failure of American Intelligence,” New Yorker, 1 October 2001 (http://cicentre.com/Documents/DOC_Hersch_OCT_01.htm).

11. “White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You,’” CNN, 21 September 2001 (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/09/21/ret.afghan.taliban).

12. Office of the Prime Minister, “Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States,” BBC News, 4 October 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1579043.stm).

13. “The Investigation and the Evidence,” BBC News, 5 October 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1581063.stm).

14. Kathy Gannon, “Taliban Willing to Talk, But Wants U.S. Respect,” Associated Press, 1 November 2001 (http://nucnews.net/nucnews/2001nn/0111nn/011101nn.htm#300).

15. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Most Wanted Terrorists: Usama bin Laden” (http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm).

16. Ed Haas, “FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11?” Muckraker Report, 6 June 2006 (http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html).

17. See my discussion in The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the
Cover-Up, and the Exposé (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008), 208-11.

18. BBC News, “Tape ‘Proves Bin Laden’s Guilt,’” 14 December 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1708091.stm).
19. See “The Fake 2001 bin Laden Video Tape” (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html).

20. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, with Benjamin Rhodes, Without
Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2006).

21. 9/11CR 149, 155, 166.

22. See 9/11CR Ch. 5, notes 16, 41, and 92.

23. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 118.

24. Ibid., 122-24.

25. Ibid., 119.

26. Robert Windrem and Victor Limjoco, “The 9/11 Commission
Controversy,” Deep Background: NBC News Investigations, 30 January 2008 (http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx).

27. Tim O’Brien, “Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane,” CNN, 11 September 2001 (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/pentagon.olson).
28. Charles Lane and John Mintz, “Bid to Thwart Hijackers May Have Led to Pa. Crash,” Washington Post, 13 September 2001 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14344-2001Sep11).

29. Kerry Hall, “Flight Attendant Helped Fight Hijackers,” News & Record (Greensboro, N.C.), 21 September 2001 (http://webcache.news-record.com/legacy/photo/tradecenter/bradshaw21.htm).

30. 9/11CR 6.

31. Gail Sheehy, “Stewardess ID’d Hijackers Early, Transcripts Show,” New York Observer, 15 February 2004 (http://www.observer.com/node/48805).

32. “Calm Before the Crash: Flight 11 Crew Sent Key Details Before Hitting the Twin Towers,” ABC News, 18 July 2002 (http://web.archive.org/web/20020803044627/http://abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/DailyNews/primetime_flightattendants_020718.html).

33. A. K. Dewdney, “The Cellphone and Airfone Calls from Flight UA93,” Physics 911, 9 June 2003 (http://physics911.net/cellphoneflight93.htm). For discussion of this issue, see The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 112-14.

34. See Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts: An In-Depth Investigation by Popular Mechanics, ed. David Dunbar and Brad Reagan (New York: Hearst Books, 2006), 83-86.

35. Lechner FBI Affidavit; available at Four Corners: Investigative TV Journalism (http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/resources/documents/fbiaffidavit1.htm).
Woodward and Sweeney are not identified by name in the affidavit, which
refers simply to the former as “an employee of American Airlines at
Logan” and to the latter as “a flight attendant on AA11.” But their
names were revealed in an “investigative document compiled by the FBI”
to which Eric Lichtblau referred in “Aboard Flight 11, a Chilling
Voice,” Los Angeles Times, 20 September 2001 (http://web.archive.org/web/20010929230742/http://latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092001hijack.story).

36. 9/11CR 453n32.

37. Gail Sheehy, “9/11 Tapes Reveal Ground Personnel Muffled Attacks,” New York Observer, 24 June, 2004 (http://www.observer.com/node/49415).

38. Greg Gordon, “Prosecutors Play Flight 93 Cockpit Recording,” McClatchy Newspapers, KnoxNews.com, 12 April 2006 (http://www.knoxsingles.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=MOUSSAOUI-04-12-06&cat=WW). The quoted statement is Gordon’s paraphrase of the testimony of “a member of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

39. See United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Exhibit Number P200054 (http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html).
This graphics presentation can be more easily viewed in “Detailed
Account of Phone Calls from September 11th Flights” at 9-11 Research (http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html).

40. “The Final Moments of United Flight 93,” Newsweek, 22 September 2001 (http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/attack/msnbc_finalmomentsF93.html).

41. See “Interview with Deena Lynne Burnett (re: phone call from
hijacked flight),” 9/11 Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological,
September 11, 2001, Intelfiles.com, 14 March 2008 (http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html); Greg Gordon, “Widow Tells of Poignant Last Calls,” Sacramento Bee, 11 September 2002 (http://holtz.org/Library/Social%20Science/History/Atomic%20Age/2000s/Sep11/Burnett%20widows%20story.htm);
and Deena L. Burnett (with Anthony F. Giombetti), Fighting Back: Living
Beyond Ourselves (Longwood, Florida: Advantage Inspirational Books,
2006), where she wrote: “I looked at the caller ID and indeed it was
Tom’s cell phone number” (61).

42. William M. Arkin, “When Seeing and Hearing Isn’t Believing,” Washington Post, 1 February 1999 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm).

43. Although Brickhouse Security’s advertisement for Telephone Voice Changers (http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/telephone-voice-changers.html)
has been modified in recent years, it previously included a device
called “FoneFaker,” the ad for which said: “Record any call you make,
fake your Caller ID and change your voice, all with one service you can
use from any phone.”

44. For Deena Burnett’s reconstruction of the calls, see http://www.tomburnettfoundation.org/tomburnett_transcript.html.

45. See The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 122.

46. Lichtblau, “Aboard Flight 11, a Chilling Voice” (see note 34, above).

47. 9/11CR 4, 6.

48. See note 38, above.

49. 9/11CR 19.

50. Ibid.

51. “Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events: September 11, 2001,” FAA, 17 September 2001 (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB165/faa7.pdf).

52. Frank J. Murray, “Americans Feel Touch of Evil; Fury Spurs Unity,” Washington Times, 11 September 2002 (http://web.archive.org/web/20020916222620/http://www.washtimes.com/september11/americans.htm).

53. “Ashcroft Says More Attacks May Be Planned,” CNN, 18 September 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/17/inv.investigation.terrorism/index.html); “Terrorist Hunt,” ABC News (http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/abc_hunt.html).

54. Anne Karpf, “Uncle Sam’s Lucky Finds,” Guardian, 19 March 2002 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,669961,00.html). Like some others, this article mistakenly said the passport belonged to Mohamed Atta.

55. Statement by Susan Ginsburg, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, at the 9/11 Commission Hearing, 26 January 2004 (http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing7/9-11Commission_Hearing_2004-01-26.htm).
The Commission’s account reflected a CBS report that the passport had
been found “minutes after” the attack, which was stated by the
Associated Press, 27 January 2003.

56. Sheila MacVicar and Caroline Faraj, “September 11 Hijacker Questioned in January 2001,” CNN, 1 August 2002 (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/08/01/cia.hijacker/index.html); 9/11 Commission Hearing, 26 January 2004.

57. 9/11CR 14; Jere Longman, Among the Heroes: United 93 and the
Passengers and Crew Who Fought Back (New York: HarperCollins, 2002),
215.

58. In light of the absurdity of the claims about the passports of
al-Suqami and Jarrah, we can safely assume that the ID cards of Majed
Moqed, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Salem al-Hazmi, said to have been discovered
at the Pentagon crash site (see “9/11 and Terrorist Travel,” 9/11
Commission Staff Report
[http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/911_TerrTrav_Monograph.pdf],
27, 42), were also planted.

59. For a photograph of the headband, see 9-11 Research, “The Crash of Flight 93? (http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/deceptions/flight93.html).

60. Quoted in Ross Coulthart, “Terrorists Target America,” Ninemsn, September 2001 (http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/transcript_923.asp).

61. Lechner FBI Affidavit (see note 34, above).

62. Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 2001; Boston Globe, 18 September, 2001.

63. The 9/11 Commission’s Staff Statement No. 16, dated 16 June 2004 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5224099),
said: “The Portland detour almost prevented Atta and Omari from making
Flight 11 out of Boston. In fact, the luggage they checked in Portland
failed to make it onto the plane.”

64. 9/11CR 1-2.

65. 9/11CR 451n1; FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, “Statement for
the Record,” Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry, 26 September 2002 (http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/092602mueller.html).

66. “Two Brothers among Hijackers,” CNN Report, 13 September 2001 (http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200109/13/eng20010913_80131.html).

67. “Feds Think They’ve Identified Some Hijackers,” CNN, 13 September 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/12/investigation.terrorism).

68. “Portland Police Eye Local Ties,” Associated Press, Portsmouth Herald, 14 September 2001 (http://archive.seacoastonline.com/2001news/9_14maine2.htm).

69. Joel Achenbach, “‘You Never Imagine’ A Hijacker Next Door,” Washington Post, 16 September 2001 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A38026-2001Sep15).

70. Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 181.

71. David Hench, “Ticket Agent Haunted by Brush with 9/11 Hijackers,” Portland Press Herald, 6 March 2005 (http://www.spartacus.blogs.com/ticketagent.htm).

72. This photo can be seen at http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a553portlandfilmed&scale=0.

73. Associated Press, 22 July 2004. The photo with this caption can
be seen in Morgan and Henshall, 9/11 Revealed, 117-18, along with a
genuine security video (with identification data), or at http://killtown.911review.org/flight77/hijackers.html (scroll half-way down).

74. Rowland and Henshall, 9/11 Revealed, 118.

75. 9/11CR 452n11.

76. Jay Kolar, “What We Now Know about the Alleged 9-11 Hijackers,”
in Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11 (New York: Seven
Stories, 2008), 3-44, at 8 (emphasis Kolar’s).

77. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 13.

78. “Statement of Robert C. Bonner to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,” 26 January 2004 (http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing7/witness_bonner.htm).

79. Ibid.

80. “FBI: Early Probe Results Show 18 Hijackers Took Part,” CNN, 13 September 2001 (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/13/investigation.terrorism); “List of Names of 18 Suspected Hijackers,” CNN, 14 September 2001 (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/bn.01.html).

81. “List of Names of 18 Suspected Hijackers.”

82. Gail Sheehy, “Stewardess ID’d Hijackers Early, Transcripts Show,” New York Observer, 15 February 2004 (http://www.observer.com/node/48805).

83. Satam al-Suqami replaced a man named Amer Kamfar, and Abdulaziz
al-Omari replaced a man with a similar name, Abdulrahman al-Omari; see
Kolar, “What We Now Know,” 12-15.

84. Another problem with the claim that Woodward had identified these
three men is that the seat numbers reportedly used to identify Atta and
al-Omari (see Gail Sheehy, “Stewardess ID’d Hijackers Early”) did not
match the numbers of the seats assigned to these two men (9/11CR 2).

85. All four passenger manifests can be found at http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/AA11.victims.html.

86. Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They
Were, Why They Did It (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), photo section
after p. 140.

87. This is stated at “The Passengers,” 911myths.com (http://911myths.com/html/the_passengers.html).

88. Although discussions on the Internet have often claimed that
these manifests were included in the FBI’s evidence for the Moussaoui
trial, several researchers failed to find them. See Jim Hoffman’s
discussion at http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/passengers.html.

89. To view them, see “Passenger Lists,” 9-11 Research (http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/passengers.html#ref9). To download them and/or read cleaned-up versions, see “The Passengers,” 911myths.com (http://911myths.com/html/the_passengers.html).

90. “Hijackers Linked to USS Cole Attack? Investigators Have
Identified All the Hijackers; Photos to Be Released,” CBS News, 14
September 2001 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/12/national/main310963.shtml); Elizabeth Neuffer, “Hijack Suspect Lived a Life, or a Lie,” Boston Globe, 25 September 2001 (http://web.archive.org/web/20010925123748/boston.com/dailyglobe2/268/nation/Hijack_suspect_lived_a_life_or_a_lie+.shtml).

91. “Four Planes, Four Coordinated Teams,” Washington Post, 16 September 2001 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/graphics/attack/hijackers.html).

92. David Dunbar and Brad Reagan, eds., Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why
Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts (New York: Hearst Books,
2006), 63.

93. Andrew M. Baker, M.D., “Human Identification in a Post-9/11
World: Attack on American Airlines Flight 77 and the Pentagon
Identification and Pathology” (http://www.ndms.chepinc.org/presentations/2005/266.pdf).

94. Steve Vogel, “Remains Unidentified for 5 Pentagon Victims,” Washington Post, 21 November 2001 (http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/pentagon-unidentified.htm).

95. See my discussion in Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory, revised & updated edition (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2007), 268-69.

96. “Ziad Jarrah,” Wikipedia, as the article existed prior to
September 8, 2006. On that date, that passage was removed. However, the
earlier version of the article, containing the passage, is available at http://www.wanttoknow.info/articles/ziad_jarrah.

97. Thomas R. Olmsted, M.D. “Still No Arabs on Flight 77,” Rense.com, 23 June 2003 (http://www.rense.com/general38/77.htm).

98. 9/11CR 5.

99. David Bamford, “Hijack ‘Suspect’ Alive in Morocco,” BBC, 22 September 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1558669.stm).

100. “Hijack ‘Suspects’ Alive and Well,” BBC News, 23 September 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm).

101. “Panoply of the Absurd,” Der Spiegel, 8 September 2003 [http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,265160,00.html]).

102. Steve Herrmann, “9/11 Conspiracy Theory,” The Editors, BBC News, 27 October 2006 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2006/10/911_conspiracy_theory_1.html).

103. Jay Kolar, “Update: What We Now Know about the Alleged 9-11
Hijackers,” Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11: 293-304, at
293-94.

104. For discussion of some of these other men, see ibid., 295-98.

105. The story “Silver Blaze” is available at Wikisource (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Silver_Blaze).

106. “America Under Attack: How could It Happen?” CNN Live Event, 12 September 2001 (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/12/se.60.html).

107. Ibid. This was the “radio transmission” discussed earlier.

108. Richard A. Serrano, “Heroism, Fatalism Aboard Flight 93,” Los Angeles Times, 12 April 2006 (http://rednecktexan.blogspot.com/2006/04/heroism-fatalism-aboard-flight-93.html).

109. All of these statements are contained in the section headed
“Senior Military, Intelligence, Law Enforcement, and Government
Officials” at Patriots Question 9/11 (http://www.patriotsquestion911.com).

110. “9/12/2001: CIA Veteran Doubts Bin Laden Capable of 9/11
Attacks, Suspects Larger Plot,” Aidan Monaghan’s Blog, 11 March 2008 (http://www.911blogger.com/blog/2074).

111. Marc Fisher and Don Phillips, “On Flight 77: ‘Our Plane Is Being Hijacked,’” Washington Post, 12 September 2001 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A14365-2001Sep11).

112. “FAA Was Alerted To Sept. 11 Hijacker,” CBS News, 10 May 2002 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/10/attack/main508656.shtml).

113. Jim Yardley, “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence,” New York Times, 4 May 2002 (http://newsmine.org/content.php?ol=9-11/suspects/flying-skills/pilot-trainee-noted-for-incompetence.txt).

114. 9/11CR 242.

115. Greg Szymanski, “Former Vietnam Combat and Commercial Pilot Firm
Believer 9/11 Was Inside Government Job,” Arctic Beacon, 17 July 2005 (http://www.arcticbeacon.citymaker.com/articles/article/1518131/29392.htm).

116. Email from Ralph Omholt, 27 October 2006.

117. Alan Miller, “U.S. Navy ‘Top Gun’ Pilot Questions 911 Pentagon Story,” OpedNews.com, 5 September 2007 (http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alan_mil_070905_u_s__navy__top_gun__.htm).

118. Dunbar and Reagan, eds., Debunking 9/11 Myths, 6.

119. Ibid.

120. These problems and more are discussed in The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, Ch. 1.

121. For such people who have been willing to go public, see Patriots Question 9/11 (http://PatriotsQuestion911.com).

122. Patriots Question 9/11 (http://PatriotsQuestion911.com/engineers.html#Munyak).

123. Stated at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (http://www.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=998819).

124. For anyone aware of the facts, NIST’s report on the collapse of
WTC 7, issued August 22, 2008, is laughable. For one thing, as I had
predicted (Ch. 1 of The New Pearl Harbor Revisited), NIST simply ignored
all the facts to which its fire theory cannot do justice, such as the
melted steel, the thermite residue, and the reports of explosions in the
building.

125. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (http://www.ae911truth.org/profile.php?uid=998929).

126. This interview can be seen at “Controlled Demolition Expert and WTC7? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3DRhwRN06I). A portion is contained in the film Loose Change Final Cut.

127. “The Myth of Implosion” (http://www.implosionworld.com/dyk2.html).