The casual reader who picks up this book will probably assume that it is about radical jihadists who dream of spreading their brand of Islam everywhere, of establishing a global caliphate, and putting everyone under Sharia law. While there may be those out there who have those dreams, this book is about a plot closer to home and one that is possibly more distressing. It involves a small element within the U.S. government and likely within the Israeli and Saudi governments, as well. The author makes no claims to know with certainty who those individuals are, though suspicions abound.
This is a book, in other words, about a conspiracy theory and, thus, a word should be said about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. First, conspiracies do happen. Charles deGaulle's generals conspired to assassinate him over his decision to grant Algeria independence. The plot was discovered before they could attempt it. Hitler's generals plotted to assassinate him. The plot failed when the oak table they were sitting at shielded Hitler from the blast of a bomb placed in a briefcase under the table. And, of course, the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar succeeded.
Those plots, of course involved small numbers of people, and, while a 9/11 plot didn't necessarily involve very large numbers, they must have been in the hundreds. How could they keep it secret? Governments do manage to keep secrets. The Manhattan Project employed thousands, but the American public was in the dark about it. A small cadre of people who are committed to a plan can keep secrets. And if that isn't enough, there are always threats, intimidation, financial ruin, and worse. Secret keeping can, in other words, be a pretty nasty business.
The reader will object that 9/11 was a heinous act, one that could only be conceived and carried out by the most desperate fanatics. How could it be planned and carried out by members of the American government and what possible motive could they have? I will try to answer that as best I can and to the degree that I understand the motive or motives. But, for now, I would just say that, in wartime, a general may devise a tactic which involves sacrificing some troops to win the battle. Civilians, of course, aren't soldiers. However, suppose terrorists were to get a hold of some kind of weapon of mass destruction and kill ten or even a thousand times the number that died on 9/11. Wouldn't the American people be outraged and ask of their leaders, "Why weren't you on top of this?" And yet, had the leaders asked the people to make some sacrifices, accept some restrictions of personal liberties in advance, and so on, would the people have acquiesced, seeing no immediate threat? That is one of the questions we will consider. There are others.
But I prefer to start with the how rather than the why. If the reader is patient and keeps an open mind, he or she will see that there is no possible way that 9/11 could have happened the way we were told, and that it takes no special technical knowledge to evaluate most of the evidence. This writer doesn't possess any such special knowledge and, thus, when I veer into speculation later on, I will alert the reader that what I say is only my own personal, very non-expert opinion.
I will take the events in the reverse order in which they happened. The reason for that will become clear when I turn to New York and the World Trade Center. In that case, there are technical considerations which I can't resolve beyond a shadow of a doubt, and I will make it clear that these are speculation on my part and the part of others. But, by that time, I hope to have convinced the reader that this was a complex operation, involving many moving parts, a good deal of technology, and intricate planning and timing.
There are many people pursuing the real story about 9/11, having become convinced that the official story is merely a cover. Some of these are relatives of the victims, such as the so-called Jersey Wives who pressed for the 9/11 Commission inquiry, and Bob McIlvaine whose son died at the World Trade Center and has been tireless in his insistence that the official story doesn't add up.
Still, memorials and museums have been built which thousands of people visit every year and find solace. Are people expected to believe the government has constructed monuments to a fraud? Yes and no. The victims really died. It's just that they didn't die at the hands of hijackers or in the places we have been told. So the memorials are valid. But their significance will be different in the future, I believe.
And what of the relatives of the victims on Flight 93 which allegedly crashed in Shanksville, PA? They at least have the consolation of knowing their friends and family members died heroes. Am I to take that little consolation away from them? I believe the cold light of truth will be better than a comforting illusion concocted by individuals in government. Knowing the who, how, and why, will, I believe, bring more closure than a false narrative.
If people think the 9/11 conspiracy theories are hard to swallow, saying they were part of a larger plot to rule the world sounds just a little bit more daft. The entire operation was complex and it was long in the making. The planners had ideas about why they were doing what they were doing. Creating a benign American global empire was their apparent goal. Others, notably very wealthy and powerful people who seem to have been kept apprised of the progress of the plot, had other ideas.
After scanning articles about 9/11 conspiracy theories, as well as others, I feel I should say a bit more about why the press is generally dismissive of the notion. Few journalists do real investigation. Most take quotes from sources and duly pass them on to the public. One former CIA analyst calls them “government stenographers”. Few have served in the military or have any direct experience with the intelligence agencies or the vast scope of the military contracting business -- including its secret wing.* They seem to have paid little attention to politicians like Bill Clinton, who told a reporter, “There’s a government within the government and I don’t run it.” Or the late Daniel Inouye, former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee who told the joint Iran-Contra hearings that “there exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”
* For an exception, see Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin.
These aren’t people in tinfoil hats trying to prove the earth is flat. Still, the September 11 events were huge and traumatizing. To say that elected and unelected officials were responsible requires proof and a sufficient motive. I will try to give both.
I use the word “rule” in the subtitle advisedly. It has the connotation of the iron fist. This wasn’t the intention of the actual planners. Others had other ideas.
People in the 9/11 Truth movement call 9/11 many things -- a hoax, a false flag, an inside job. I prefer to call it a psyop or psychological operation. Wikipedia defines psychological operations this way:
Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.
If this was the aim of the plotters of 9/11, it would seem to have succeeded.
I want to acknowledge a group that calls itself the Citizen Investigation Team who had the novel idea of actually going and interviewing eyewitnesses. They did the legwork that made most of the rest of this possible.
I think the first person I heard claim that 9/11 was an inside job was entertainer Rosie O'Donnell. Still, I thought, that was Rosie being Rosie. I hadn't heard of the 9/11 truth movement until I ran across a book by Jonathan Kay, reporter for the Toronto Star, who was incredulous that so many believed in what he considered to be rank nonsense. In the interest of keeping an open mind, I viewed some of the conspiracy videos on YouTube and some of the debunking videos, and there I left it, believing that it wasn't worth my time. I had read a bit about the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories and was unsatisfied that any progress could be made, assuming it had really been the result of a conspiracy.
Then, in this summer of 2016, I got a post from the group Anonymous on my Facebook page. It was about Philip Marshall, an ex-CIA Pilot who had written a novel based on his experiences and then two non-fiction books about 9/11. He was coming out with a third when he was found dead along with his two children and the family dog. It was ruled a murder-suicide. Police said he was despondent about his impending divorce, though friends said he was excited about his forthcoming book. He claimed to have evidence that some of the hijackers had had flight training on US military bases.
Neighbors heard no shots, a door that was always kept locked was open, and he was shot in the left temple, though he was right handed. Neighbors did say they saw a black SUV with strange antennas on top parked in front of the house for several days after. A former member of the National Security Agency claimed that that would be a cleanup crew eliminating evidence of a government hit.
Not being the most trusting person of our intelligence agencies, that piqued my interest. For the record, the journalist Hunter Thompson was said by a friend to be working on a 9/11 story and was worried that some government types would get to him. He allegedly killed himself with a shotgun soon after, though his son was home and heard nothing louder than what he thought was a book falling to the floor.
In any case, I began by looking at the Pentagon. I especially noticed the lawn which was untouched. I tried to imagine a 757 hitting the ground floor of the Pentagon without so much as singeing the grass and couldn't. The same went for the field in Shanksville. I had never seen pictures of a plane crash site without wreckage.
Thus began my journey down the 9/11 rabbit hole, a journey which would lead me to view the world in new and very different ways. The reader should be forewarned that the trip will lead into X-files territory. The skeptical reader can read it as entertainment if he or she likes. I'll try to summarize as concisely as possible so as not to waste anyone's time.
It is an AQM-37 Jayhawk target drone. Another view:
Of all the craft I looked at, this was the only one that fit the description. I sent the photo to the witness by mail and she emailed me back that it was close but that she didn't think it had the front fins. But as one can see from the lower picture, they're easy to miss, even in a photograph, to say nothing of when it surprises you by flying over your van at ten AM in rural Pennsylvania. I felt pretty sure I had found the right thing. It is air launched, so it would likely have been launched from the fighter jet that she saw. It is radar-guided which explains the flickering lights and electronic interference. The sound of its launch would also be what witnesses took to be the firing of a missile. And it is fourteen feet long, only four feet longer than her model minivan.
The next craft I tried to identify was the small white aircraft the woman said was barely big enough for one person. I guessed it might be a Predator drone:
The black objects under the wings are Hellfire missiles. It would probably not have been armed since, I believe, the Predator was only fitted for missiles after 2001. It was primarily designed for surveillance with cameras in the small pod on the bottom front. It made me wonder if this is what the woman who said she saw an aircraft flying upside down had seen. With the unusual downward-pointing tail fins, it could make someone believe it was upside down.
So if these two drones were what witnesses saw, what were they doing there? Why would a surveillance drone be there before the crash, and why would a target drone, which is used for gunnery and air-to-air missile practice, be there in rural Pennsylvania? There are no nearby military bases of any kind, from what I can see.
And what of the airliner and the small, white jet? The airliner was seen west of the official route.
Based on eyewitness accounts, the Citizen Investigation Team determined that it had taken a roundabout route to the crash site, rejoining the official route just north of the field. So why did the flight data recorder record a different route? And why did the seismology station record an explosion three minutes after the time of the crash? And why did the witnesses see the airliner go down at a much steeper angle than that recorded on the FDR?
It took a while to figure out. The key was finding out that the Jayhawk target drone comes equipped with a Flight Termination System, that is, a self-destruct system that can be triggered remotely if the drone should go astray.
I came to believe a swap had been made. The real Flight 93 left Newark forty minutes late, after mail and luggage had been transferred from that plane to another airliner. At a certain point, near Cleveland, Flight 93 turned off its transponder which identifies the plane for mission control. There were early reports that it had landed in Cleveland and taxied to a NASA hanger, but those reports were later claimed to be erroneous.
At any rate, the small white jet and the airliner were flying close together, too close to be distinguished on radar. The small jet's transponder was identifying it as Flight 93, making it look as though United Flight 93 had turned around and was now heading southeast toward Washington.
As they approached Shanksville, the airliner broke off and dipped to a low altitude, below radar, The small jet, meanwhile, continued along the official route. The pilots were two of the alleged hijackers who had received training at air bases in the US. They rocked the wings to simulate trying to knock the passengers off their feet. The airliner was also seen to rock its wings. The pilots of the small jet spoke to the "passengers" and each other for the benefit of the cockpit voice recorder. Then, approaching the field, they did a forty-degree dive, turned off the transponder, the FDR, and the CVR, pulled out and began flying around waiting for the airliner -- not looking for something as witnesses thought.
The airliner rejoined the official route. A map made by the CIT based on eyewitness accounts gave the extra distance traveled. Assuming it was flying only around a hundred miles an hour or so, the time it took would be about three minutes.
It flew low over the house of the witness who lived just north of the field. She ran out to see what was causing the roaring, but not in time to see the airliner. She saw the Predator following the airliner which would have had the sound of its motor drowned out. Thus she thought that was what was making the din.
As the airliner approached, a pre-planted explosive blew off one engine fan which landed in the pond. That was the first bang that the witness hanging laundry heard and accounts for the funny sound of the engine. Then a second explosive blew a hole in the fuselage, drawing out mail and personal belongings of the passengers of Flight 93. The plane then did a steep dive, which witnesses saw, pulled out and climbed rapidly, trailing debris and making a high whining sound as noted by the fisherman on Indian Lake. At that moment, the drone was detonated, making a convincing plane crash for eyewitnesses, who, because the field was surrounded on all sides by trees and a high berm, could not see the field itself.
In researching the Predator, I found an interesting fact. The Predator's control unit is contained in a portable container somewhat like a freight container.
It can be transported by rail, truck, ship, and aircraft, as in the cargo hold of a C-130. So it is very likely that the crew controlling the Predator and triggering the Jawhawk were in the cargo hold of the C-130 headed to Hibbing from Andrews. The pilots themselves need not have even been aware of what they were carrying.
The route from Andrews AFB to Hibbing.
An old, abandoned landing strip would have been a good place from which to launch and land the Predator.
Meanwhile, the airliner headed southeast over Indian Lake. The last bit of debris was found in New Baltimore, about eight miles away from Shanksville. The plane was last seen by radar at Johnstown Airport flying at five thousand feet at a latitude and longitude that put it near a place called Paw Paw, West Virginia on the Maryland border.
Extending the line from that point leads straight to Langley Air Base in Virginia.
While the plane might have landed elsewhere, it had to have been somewhere where the planners had control, since a plane landing with one engine fan and a hole in the fuselage would raise questions.
After the "crash", the witness just north of the field heard another loud roar and went out to see what she said was the nose of a larger white plane coming right at her. The description of a plane with eyeballs has caused a lot of puzzlement. I thought at first she might have been referring to the camera lenses of the Predator catching the sunlight. But I recently went back and listened to her testimony again and realized that this plane was headed away from the field. Guessing that it may have been the small, white jet, I Googled images of private jets to see if any models had what might look like "eyeballs" and the first thing that caught my eye was this:
A plane with eyeballs. She would have seen it at an only slightly lower angle. It was bigger than the Predator, which is what she meant when she said the second plane was the bigger. She said it was tearing out of there, headed northwest, toward Jennerstown, which would be in the general direction of Cleveland.
It was an extremely clever simulation of a plane crash. One can't help but admire the skill with which it was planned and carried out. The pilots of the airliner, I'm guessing, were not the alleged hijackers. It would take ace pilots to do a steep dive from a low altitude with one engine and a hole in the fuselage. Not something amateurs with a little training in a flight simulator could be expected to pull off.
There were pre-existing ditches in the field. The alleged crash site is marked in yellow. By having the drone embed itself in the center of the ditch and then detonating it, they obtained a pretty good simulation of an impact crater made by the body and two wings. The plane was flying southeast but the burn pattern in the woods points to the southwest. The drone, coming from the south and banking from the northeast, would have embedded itself at an angle, with most of it exposed to the southwest. This was the safest way to avoid shrapnel hitting the airliner or the Predator while still making convincing evidence that a southbound plane had crashed there.
A picture of the "crash site" shows the ditch which is intended to be the indentation of one of the wings, though grass is growing in it, an impossibility.
A photo taken by a witness living east of the field has caused some controversy because the rising smoke cloud seems to be in the wrong place. Itt seems to be too far south of the crater.
However, the photo supports the theory. If most of the explosion went toward the southwest, the smoke cloud would have risen at a point on a line drawn from the crater, through the point of the burned spot, to the sight-line of the witness' camera, making it appear as though the smoke was rising from a point too far south.
Seeing how it was done and how the eyewitness testimony fits together, we can definitely say that the evidence from Shanksville alone constitutes conclusive proof that this was planned and executed by elements within the US government. But there is more evidence from Washington and New York.
According to the official story, Flight 77 took off from Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia at 8:20, bound for Los Angeles. Less than thirty-five minutes into the flight, five hijackers commandeered the plane, turning it back toward Washington, D.C. where they would crash it into the Pentagon, killing fifty-three passengers and themselves.
Hani Hanjour, a native of Saudi Arabia was allegedly at the controls. The plane came from the west, did a long spiral descent, toppling light polls before hitting the Pentagon. According to professional pilots, this would be a very difficult maneuver for a commercial airliner. It is even more remarkable when one considers that, according to his flight instructors at the Florida flight school where some to lessons, Hanjour couldn't fly to save his life. Not only did he do a difficult turn, he successfully negotiated a forest of road signs over the highway and kept the plane flying while striking light poles. Was he secretly an ace pilot? Why pretend to be inept?
The first thing the Citizen Investigation Team noticed when they started interviewing witnesses was that people were reporting planes in two different locations. One was seen south of the Citgo station across from the Pentagon. This was the one that apparently knocked down light poles. The other was seen north of the Citgo station. It was seen flying over the Naval Annex from the west. (Neither the Naval Annex nor the Citgo station are there today.) If the plane flying north of the Citgo station were seen first and the other only later, that would square with the official story. But witnesses who saw the north plane, which included the owner of the Citgo and two Pentagon police officers, said that the plane they saw hit the Pentagon, though they couldn’t actually see the impact from their perspective.
Witnesses of the south plane also said that the craft they saw hit the Pentagon. Some said the wall seemed to explode slightly before the craft got there. One witness was a pilot and an EMT. He said the aircraft he saw was no bigger than a private jet. As an EMT, he went down to see if he could help. He said the ground was littered with black, fibrous material and shards of aluminum. One person said it looked like a humpback whale.
People who saw the plane flying north of the Citgo station said it was definitely an airliner, and one individual said it was dark on the bottom and light on the top. Another thought it might be a US Air airliner.
A number of people reported seeing a C-130. One said it was following the jet. A USA Today reporter thought it was an EC-130 electronics warfare plane. The Pentagon said that they had asked the C-130 on its way to Minnesota to see if they could find Flight 77. The pilots spotted it and followed it, but they say they couldn’t keep up and never got close enough to see where it crashed. The conflicting accounts were never resolved.
Strangely, a woman, a scientist using a Geiger counter downwind from the Pentagon, reported a spike in radioactivity just after the crash.
And a man leaving the building from an exit around the corner from the crash site says he heard the explosion, looked up, and saw a large plane flying over the roof of the Pentagon.
So, once again, we have a confusing set of accounts. I tended to rely on the testimony of the two Pentagon police officers as trained observers, and that of the pilot, assuming he knew aircraft. I also relied on the word of the witnesses who noticed details, like the odd description of the south aircraft as looking like a whale.
After tracking down the drones in Shanksville, I was fairly familiar with various aircraft. The description of the south aircraft as a humpback whale made me think of the Global Hawk:
It is an apt description. The Global Hawk is 47 feet long, not as long as Gulfstream 100 private jet, but with a wingspan comparable to a 737. It’s body is made of carbon-fiber composite, and the wings are light aluminum, so perhaps this is what that is what the pilot saw scattered on the ground. It flies above radar, so could have entered Washington airspace undetected.
Next, I looked at still images from the two closed-circuit television cameras that had been released by the Pentagon in 2006.
I tried to sharpen this as best I could. It’s fairly clear that there is what appears to be the tail of an aircraft with the American Airlines logo partially visible. The fact that only the left A and part of one of the wings on the logo are visible indicates that the craft is angled away from the camera, in accord with eyewitness accounts and the official story which claim that the plane hit the building on an angle. But if that’s the case, why is that smoke trail coming from the right side of the photo? We’re told that that is smoke coming from a damaged engine. But it can’t be coming from an engine if the plane is coming from the background. Doing a little more searching, I found this image:
It didn’t seem like anything was making that smoke trail. I suspected the photo had been altered, so I tried a few things, including inverting the colors, and came up with this:
I thought it might be a cruise missile, but I showed it in an email to someone who was ex-military and he wrote back that it was a Maverick air-to-ground missile.
The top fin can be faintly seen before the gap and the rectangular back fin. I believe it was fitted with a depleted-uranium armor-piercing round to penetrate the newly-reinforced Pentagon wall. This would explain the spike of radioactivity on the scientist’s Geiger counter. It’s also noteworthy that when the Pentagon was choosing paving for the 9/11 memorial, they chose crushed granite which absorbs radioactivity.
There also appears to be a pod attached underneath. It seems to have an Air Force insignia. That, perhaps, was for extra explosive to ensure that it looked like a 757 had blown up within the Pentagon. It’s also worth noting that survivors in that area of the building reported smelling cordite, the explosive used in ordnance, much more than jet fuel. And the first reporter on the scene, a journalist from CNN, reported that it didn’t look like a plane had crashed there and that all he could see was a hole in the wall about seventeen feet wide.
So, feeling that I had a pretty good handle on what people had seen on the south side of the Citgo station, I turned to the north aircraft.
There is a helicopter hovering above the explosion which is circled. I looked at this photo for quite a while before I realized that the tail was too high for a plane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon on the ground floor.
I enlarged and enhanced it:
Clearly, the nose of the plane isn’t hitting the wall of the Pentagon. It is dark on the bottom and light on the top as witnesses described. My guess is that it was a drone -- remotely controlled by the EC-130 following it.
If the USA Today reporter knew aircraft well enough to distinguish an EC-130 from a C-130, he was probably right. The antennae on the tail section are distinctive of the EC-130. So the pilots of the plane going to Hibbing were telling the truth. They weren’t flying the aircraft that people at the Pentagon saw.
Because of the nose of the airliner, I thought at first it might be a 737. However, when I first was trying to enhance the image, I noticed this odd object by the tail:
I thought at first it just might be an artifact from blowing up a grainy picture, but it seems to reflect light and be solid. It also appears to be mounted by brackets. Looking again at this recently, I concluded that the plane couldn’t be a 737 since there is no where to mount a device in that manner near the tail of a 737. I believed it would have to have been a tri-jet, with two engines under the wings and one mounted forward of the tail.
The best match, I believe, is the Lockheed L-1011.
The nose is similar and, unlike other tri-jets, the intake of the center engine and the exhaust aren’t in line. The intake would have provided a solid base on which to mount the object. What it actually is, I can only speculate. My guess is that the plane was wired with explosives in case anything went wrong. This might be a detonation device that could be triggered by a laser or infrared light or something else, since a radio signal would have been picked up within the Pentagon. But that is just a guess.
In any case, this airliner certainly didn’t crash and is, no doubt, the plane which the witness saw fly over the Pentagon roof. As to why no one else saw it, that has to do with a bit of sleight of hand which was used all through the 9/11 operation. There’s a video on YouTube which involves counting how many times a basketball is passed between people moving around. Watch it and you’ll be amazed at how you can miss something seemingly obvious.
Explosive bolts were probably used to bring down the light poles as the event unfolded. One seems to have fallen the wrong way on to a cab on the highway. A man in a suit walked up and helped the cab driver pull the lamp post out and walked away without saying a word. The driver doesn’t give many interviews and doesn’t say much when he does.
In this photo, the fire is on the far right, the fire engine is on the far left. One might think they could have gotten a little closer, but the water makes an effective screen for whatever is going on behind. I distinctly remember a reporter giving a report from the Pentagon when a large explosion went off. It was described as a “secondary explosion” but was probably pre-planted explosives to blow out larger sections of the wall to make it look more like the impact of the plane’s wings. The sections were then cleared while the fire truck fights the fire. What we see later isn’t what the CNN reporter at the scene described early on. An interesting fact to note is that the reconstruction work in the that part of the building was done by a firm for which Donald Rumsfeld formerly worked.
So that was how the Pentagon event was done. Again, a clever and fairly daring operation. The loss of life in the Pentagon was limited due to the fact that section of the building had just undergone renovation to make it bomb proof. The only people in there were a group from Naval Intelligence who were investigating financial irregularities in dealings with Russian oligarchs soon after the fall of the Soviet Union and another which had been tasked with tracking down the $2.3 trillion that the Pentagon managed to misplace. All but one were killed. What became of the real Flight 77 is unknown to this author, but it is unlikely they are living among us. They were victims, but not in the way we thought.
So we come to the biggest and most complex of the operations. Here, eyewitnesses have not been as much help, though there were millions, on the street and watching TV. Yet, the first impact in the North Tower was seen by few, though recorded on video tape. The second was televised, though what exactly we saw is still hard to say.
As at the Pentagon, a witness said the craft that hit the North Tower was no bigger than a private jet. Those who saw the vehicle that hit the South Tower were of various opinions about what it was. Many thought it was a military plane -- gray and, according to some, without windows. There were a number of people with video cameras who caught the plane on tape. Most of those were subsequently turned over to the FBI.
According to the official story, American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767, took off from Boston’s Logan Airport, bound for Los Angeles. At 8:46 AM, it crashed into the North Tower killing 92 people including passengers, crew, and the hijackers.
United Airlines 175, also a 767, took off from Boston, also bound for Los Angeles. It was hijacked and, at 9:03 AM, crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. All sixty-five people on board were killed.
The sole video of the North Tower impact was recorded by the Naudet brothers, Jules and Thomas, French-born American filmmakers making a documentary on the New York City Fire Department.
I tried taking a look at stills from the video to see what could be seen.
The D-shaped exhaust is somewhat similar to the Global Hawk. The tail would have been modified with a single vertical stabilizer. The wingspan seems similar and it is notable that there are no obvious engines under the wings in the North Tower craft.
A single engine can be seen in the center of the impact hole, rather than an engine to each side as one would expect with a 767. The Global Hawk uses a Rolls-Royce AE 3007 engine which is about 9.5 feet long. It’s difficult to judge the length of that engine since it is hard to see where it begins and ends and hard to find a scale of reference. The spandrels include three columns plus an extra length on each side, making them 10 feet wide. By that measure, the engine looks bigger, but again, it is difficult to tell.
Turning to the South Tower and Flight 175, I looked at this still from one of the videos taken of the impact.
It’s a little hard to see in this image, but what struck me as odd was that the rear exhaust pointed slightly downward rather than horizontally. For want of anything better to do, I put it in a filter in Windows Photos.
Here it’s easier to see the downward tilt. In an airliner, that is the exhaust for the auxiliary engine which provides power when the plane is on the ground and the main engines aren’t running.
In an airliner, the exhaust projects straight back, horizontal with the plane.
What was odder is that the “plane” seemed to be transparent and to have structures inside. Here's what I got when I enlarged it:
It appeared the “plane” was only a dashed outline and the objects inside were far more solid. The downward pointing tail looked like an exhaust pipe. There is what appears to be a bomb with tail fins and a rectangular structure with two holes that I couldn’t identify. A closer view:
So my first question was, is this a hoax? Had someone, for some reason erased Flight 175 from the still and replaced it with this odd assemblage and covered it with a computer graphic image of a plane? Looking closely at CGI stills, it was possible to see the same sort of dashed outline. While it was certainly possible, I couldn’t think why someone would go to the trouble. Hoaxers usually like to see the results of their work. If a person faked this in order to claim a discovery, why didn’t he? My meager skills with a photo editor don’t extend to creating convincing computer images.
Besides, if I were to do something like this, I would just take a photo of a cruise missile, insert it in the photo and cover it with the image of the plane. I certainly wouldn’t think to come up with all that.
My second question was, if it is real, how did it fly? I see no real wings or tail section. If there is a cruise missile hidden in there with all the other things cobbled together around it, it isn’t apparent. Still, it is possible.
I put the questions aside and went on to other evidence. Many people reported seeing a flash in a number of videos, just before the plane hits the tower:
Some speculate that a missile was fired from what they see as a “pod” underneath the plane.
Others speculated that it was a laser, and still others thought it was simply an electrostatic discharge as the nose of the plane got near the building.
I could never decide about the so-called pod. Some believe people are just mistaking a part of the aircraft for something anomalous. If the strange object I found in the still is real, it may be something attached to that which protrudes.
Of course, if that object is real, what is the “plane”? Witnesses did see what they took to be a real plane, even if they couldn’t identify it as a United Airlines plane.
Leaving those questions aside, I began to research high-powered lasers. At the time of 9/11, the military was showing off its high energy lasers, capable of shooting down missiles.
These, of course, are far too large to fit on that craft. However, if the military is showing something publicly, it can, according to some, be assumed that the secret technology is ten to twenty years ahead.
The lasers are various types of chemical lasers, all of which need to exhaust the smoke from the reactions. I thought of the “exhaust pipe” and went to look if I could see something.
Sure enough, a plume of black smoke could be seen emerging from the back of the aircraft. The wall also begins to bulge in the center rather than near the corner where the plane is entering as one would expect.
So, having gotten a clue that a laser may have been used, I looked at the North Tower aircraft:
In the video, that white spot is a flash that disappears before impact. Interestingly, someone who was in the North Tower said he heard a bang before the explosion.
In the frame marked 7 from the Naudet video, we see the shadow of the craft on the building. In frame 8, it is obscured. In frame 9, it reappears with a faint wisp of smoke above it.
In frames 10 and 11, a black ball of smoke forms, then in frame 12, it dissipates.
So that seemed to be good evidence that a laser was used. In addition to that, someone found this object in the rubble:
It appears to be a laser flash tube. Compare:
While it’s perfectly possible that some company in the World Trade Center was experimenting with lasers, it is an odd coincidence. An office building is also not the first place one would think to put a lab doing potentially hazardous work.
Below is another object of much speculation. It could be, that if the laser weakened the steel, this was a kind of battering ram that broke through, continued through the building, and emerged out the other side.
Although it doesn’t look like much, the white dot [below] on the south side of the South Tower is significant. The still is taken from the video by Jennifer Spell who was using one of the early digital video cameras. The spot, which looks like it just might be a piece of paper, travels down from the upper left to the lower right side of the wall and stops, just above the point of impact. The person that spotted it and posted it says it is an infrared targeting light, visible only to digital cameras. (Point your TV remote at the camera in your cell phone to see.)
This [below] was spotted by an Australian man who called himself Bluebeard 2011.
It is the object in the lower-right corner which flies past the towers very fast at the exact moment of impact of the aircraft with the South Tower. Rectangular tail fins are faintly visible. Bluebeard says that it is a so-called bunker-buster bomb -- a bomb which penetrates hardened defenses before exploding -- headed for WTC Building 6. I have scanned through other videos of the impact and have been unable to find another shot of this object. I can’t find Gamma Press either, although it is linked to the bbc.uk in the URL. It may be that this video never went to the FBI and so the object was never erased from the video. I caught it a moment earlier in its flight:
The white object is debris from the tower. Looking for military ordinance that resembled that object, I came upon this:
It’s a Paveway II bunker-buster laser-guided bomb. The tail fins deploy in flight. It has a timer or can probably be detonated by remote signal. It seems to have been detonated to coincide with the fall of the South Tower.
The light-colored smoke and dust in the left photo is coming from the area of Building 6. The light smoke plumes are coming from air vents in the lot on the corner opposite Building 6. Since the South Tower is down the street, it is more likely the smoke and dust is coming from Building 6. The right-hand picture was taken by photographer Bill Biggart who lost his life on that day.
This is a picture released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology:
It was taken by an NYPD police detective from a helicopter. Some sharp-eyed person spotted the small flying craft in the distance. This is after the fall of the North Tower. He enlarged it:
I enlarged it again:
It bears some resemblance to the South Tower Craft. the nose seems to be similar to the “battering ram” I believe emerged from the South Tower. This also seems to have an exhaust and may have a bomb attached to the bottom. I believe it was headed to Building 4, which was mostly obliterated. The idea that the large white square was the target for a laser has to do with a theory I was working on. The white object I tentatively labeled a wing, really doesn’t look much like a wing, and, again, this craft doesn’t seem aerodynamic.
In the course of my journey through the wild-and-wooly world of Internet conspiracy theories, I came across the concept of anti-gravity. Unable to think how this and the South Tower object otherwise flew, I began to read, somewhat reluctantly, about the possibility that the government might actually have the technology of anti-gravity flight. I say reluctantly because I was not a big believer in the idea that the government had secret technology that exotic. I had read enough about science to have some grasp about what was known to academic science. Was it really possible that there was a whole secret science hidden from the public?
It’s a long story that goes back to the twenties and thirties and the work of Thomas Townsend Brown, among others. The principle is amazingly simple. Gravity, according to the theory, is polarized like electricity and magnetism. In fact, it is a theory that unifies all three and is properly called electrogravitics. It allegedly is the unification of electromagnetism and gravity that Einstein was searching for up to the time of his death.
The details are beyond the scope of this book, but I will list some references to books and scientific papers in the public domain that deal with this and other somewhat exotic technologies.
One of those technologies I was considering was the mid-air projection of holograms. If the South Tower and Building 4 flying objects were real, were they cloaked by holograms? Nowadays, holograms are used in entertainment. But even now, a 3D image projected in mid-air is not quite achievable. Could it have been possible in 2001? One has to remember that, on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense at the time, gave a speech at the Pentagon in which he announced that some $2.3 trillion had somehow gone missing from the Pentagon’s accounts. To put that in some perspective, if our galaxy, the Milky Way, has approximately 200 billion stars, as scientists estimate, then $2.3 trillion is roughly a dollar for every star in ten galaxies the size of the Milky Way. Talk about astronomical sums.
So, consider the difference between academic science where funding is always a problem and science in the world of black projects where funding is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited.
So, if holograms were used, where were they projected from? I said before I was working on the theory that the large square on the flying object was a target of some kind. Many people said they saw a white plane flying around. Could this have been the cloak for the craft heading to Building 4? There was also an explosion heard on top of the Woolworth Building, a building that otherwise had nothing to do with the events of the day. Could the hologram projector have been there and been destroyed, given that security was on high alert and there was not much chance of getting it back down unnoticed?
As for the South Tower object, a researcher in England, Rich Hall, did an analysis of civilian and military radar and found their tracking of “Flight 175” was off by a consistently large amount all the way to impact. Since it is unlikely either radar had a large calibration error, he speculates that there was something there not visible to the naked eye. It could be that another craft was flying alongside the South Tower craft, projecting the hologram. A craft that could generate a strong electrogravitic field could bend light rays, making it invisible to the naked eye or cameras.
Again, I will list references to articles indicating that these are fields of research even in the non-classified world.
Whether or not there were explosives used to bring down the towers and Building 7 has been a source of endless controversy. I’m certainly not qualified to pronounce either way. I will say that the event was not entirely without precedent. On a foggy Saturday night in 1945, a military transport crashed into the Empire State Building, leaving a gaping hole and the tail section on the ground below. Fire crews put out the fire quickly (the highest high-rise fire fought to that date). Not only did the Empire State Building not collapse, but it was open for business the next Monday morning.
The Twin Towers were constructed with that event in mind. The head engineer says they were designed to withstand the impact of two Boeing 707s each, the largest plane of the time. While 767s are larger, their mass is apparently comparable to the 707 because of the lighter materials in use today. So the failure of the towers would seem to be an enormous engineering failure, yet there is little attempt to really understand it. One would think engineers the world round would want to know exactly what failed in order to avoid the same mistakes, but there is no great todo about it. A gargantuan failure of two of the strongest, most robust buildings in the world has been greeted with a collective shrug.
As for Building 7, the architect Richard Gage of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth says he talks to other architects who don’t even know Building 7 came down on the same day.
To sum up the evidence that seems relevant to me:
Activist Susan Lindauer says a source told her that white vans arrived at the towers night after night during the summer before 9/11. They arrived after the cleaning crews left and before the first workers arrived.
A group which was allegedly Israeli art students had the run of the buildings throughout the summer. A former flight attendant who has researched 9/11 is in possession of a photo of the alleged art students among boxes of fuse holders of the kind used in controlled demolition.
A security guard says he went to one of the unoccupied floors and heard work being done, including what sounded like heavy pallets being rolled across the floor. No work was scheduled for those floors.
So-called squibs of smoke and dust can be seen shooting from floors several stories below the collapsing floors. These are alleged to be from air pressure, but they occur uniformly in the center of each wall at the same time, rather than at random points as one would expect.
Steel-frame buildings have burned for twenty-four hours before being extinguished, and the frame hasn’t collapsed. The towers burned for no more than an hour. Building 7 was said to have collapsed due to two small office fires. If that were the case, no high-rise building in the world would be safe, and, in fact, we would be seeing them collapse all the time.
Flakes of what is thought to be thermite were found in the dust. Thermite is a combination of a powdered metal oxide, such as iron oxide, and another powdered metal, such as aluminum. When ignited, the oxygen migrates from the oxide to the other metal releasing enough energy to burn through a car’s engine block. Nanothermite, which is thermite milled to nano-sized particles and thoroughly mixed to create an explosive was also found. Microspherules of iron which are produced by a thermite reaction were found, as well. They occur naturally when meteors burn up in the atmosphere, but not in the abundance found in the WTC dust.
The arguments about whether the buildings were demolished by explosives, nevertheless goes on and on. Being neither an architect, an engineer, or a scientist, I’ll attempt to take what I consider to be a common-sense approach.
As I understand it, NIST’s first theory was that fire had weakened the steel in the impact zone, causing it to fail and create a “pancaking” effect. When it was objected that that theory didn’t match the evidence at Ground Zero, NIST revised its theory to say that the buildings imploded when the sagging steel pulled on the walls, causing them to collapse inward. Either theory seems to depend on a domino or chain-reaction effect. The heat, however, affected only the steel in the impact zone. Structural damage would also have been caused by the impact, but that, too, would have been limited to the affected floors. However, even if such a chain-reaction had started, the buildings themselves became more robust toward the bottom, with the center columns being many inches thick at the base. Why should we expect that in a contest, the mass of the upper stories should win out over the mass in the lower?
In addition, there were no large slabs of concrete from the floors found in the rubble. One has to stretch, it seems to me, to explain the process by which most of the concrete was turned to dust by the effect of gravity alone.
NIST, itself, admitted that the collapse of Building 7 would be the first example of a steel-frame building from fire alone.
So, while we might expect a partial collapse in the towers around the impact zone, the massive failure of two 110-story buildings and one 47-story building in one day seems extraordinary. Again, the Twin Towers were two of the strongest buildings in existence, if they fell from plane impact and fire, no building should be considered safe.
Along with the collapse of the buildings themselves, there is the fact that the rubble piles weren’t big enough. There should, according to experts, have been roughly twelve stories of rubble left from the Twin Towers. There were only three. Where did the other nine stories go?
The official theory is that the top blocks of the tower ground the rest of the mass as they fell. One problem with that is that the top blocks can be seen disintegrating before they start falling. Another is that steel beams couldn’t have been ground to powder that way. Another is that the contents of the building -- including people -- seem to have been disintegrated as well. One worker said they never found anything bigger than part of a telephone keypad.
Another theory from the truth community is that mini-nukes -- low-yield devices that leave little radiation behind -- were used along with other explosives. There were radioactive isotopes found and the bedrock showed signs of having become vitreous from enormously high heat which could only have come from a nuclear device. And some workers contracted testicular cancer which can only be contracted by exposure to radiation.
One theory that seems outlandish but has some evidence, is directed-energy beam weapons. In the early twentieth century, Nicola Tesla, inventor of alternating current, said he discovered a different type of electricity, one which traveled longitudinally like sound waves rather than transversely like ripples on a pond. He felt it had potential for wireless communication, for the wireless transmission of electric power, and as a weapon that, idealist that he was, all nations would possess, making war impossible.
At his death, some of his papers were seized by the FBI and some went back to the Tesla Museum in his native Serbia. It is rumored that the Soviets were extremely interested in his work and may have developed a beam weapon with the potential to be bigger and more destructive than the nuclear bomb.
Belatedly, it is said, the US government began researching and developed its own beam weapon. This, some think, is what was used on the towers and Building 7 to reduce the amount of solid matter by turning it to dust.
A second theory is that the beam used was a laser in the infrared spectrum, invisible to the naked eye. A former NASA engineer believes the military put a satellite armed with a laser weapon into geo-synchronous orbit and that was what was used on 9/11.
This is Building 6 showing a number of circular cutouts. There are similar features in Building 5:
They could have been made by spherical or cylindrical objects but there aren’t any objects of that shape left in the debris. It’s not proof of a beam weapon, but the cutouts are hard to explain.
There were other strange things: a car flipped on its hood while remaining in the same parking space; a cameraman who reports being lifted off his feet and carried backwards a block where he landed gently; a person who took shelter under a car only to have the car lifted up and put down elsewhere. These weren’t the results of high winds or bomb blasts. There were none. Strong electromagnetic fields, however, have been shown to be capable of levitating physical objects.
There are also strange burn patterns, missing door handles, etc. on cars, some of them quite far away from the WTC. One person, based on the location of the cars, traced the source back to Long Island. Since the beam can be created by radar arrays which generate longitudinal beams which release energy at the target where they cross, the suspicion would focus on the Montauk base at the tip of Long Island and the Brookhaven Laboratory, both of which have radar arrays. I will put references to papers, books, and websites for the interested reader.
In any event, the towers were built on bedrock with retaining walls to keep out the East River. Had the total weight of the towers come down, there was a good chance those retaining walls -- known as “the bathtub” -- would cave in creating a catastrophic flood in lower Manhattan. So any plan would have had to find a way to eliminate most of that mass. It seems a beam weapon was used on Building 7 as well, but not to the same extent, since it wasn’t as critical to reduce much of its mass to dust. Thus, a 47-story building, roughly half the height of the towers, made little dust, while the towers made a dust cloud that could be seen from space.
In addition to all of that, the boots of the workers kept disintegrating rapidly in the weeks following the event. A major proponent of the beam theory points out that dust in the street seemed to keep getting finer, rising up rather than settling down. What looked like smoke rising from Ground Zero for months afterward, was really dust rising from the surface. Truckloads of earth were brought in to cover Ground Zero immediately after September 11.
I wrote to a professor of electrical engineering who had written on so-called scalar energy and its potential for use as a weapon. I showed him this picture:
One thing to notice about the picture is that there is no smoke coming from the impact hole. This was supposed to be a raging inferno that took about an hour to weaken steel sufficiently to cause a collapse. The second thing to notice is that what looks like smoke is white, where all the smoke from the impact zones was black, indicating a lack of oxygen. Also, there are no visible fires and no obvious broken windows. In addition, most of the “smoke” is coming from far above the impact hole rather than just above and below as one would expect. Also, the smoke or dust is being whipped around on the left of the picture, even though there was only a light breeze.
Based on what the professor had written, I gave him my theory that a scalar weapon had started a kind of “cold fission” process that continued so long as there was material left to react. He didn’t respond to my theory, but he did say that he hoped the picture had been photoshopped “or we’re in trouble.” I assured him that the picture was real and that there were many more similar pictures and videos of the towers and Building 7.
Given that the general public and mainstream press believe a 9/11 conspiracy is kooky, beam weapons and anti-gravity is just that much more bizarre. I’m not a scientist and I can’t claim any special inside knowledge. The reader who is interested enough will have to do his or her own research to decide whether any of this is plausible. For me, hard as it was to believe these things existed, they were the only things that explained the evidence.
After releasing this booklet, I was taken to task by a British researcher, Andrew Johnson, for omitting the name of Dr. Judy Wood. Dr. Wood is a materials scientist who has written a very large and detailed book called Where Did the Towers Go? I agree it was an omission, given that I used a number of things as evidence of a directed-energy weapon that she first called attention to. Her videos can be found on YouTube where she summarizes her findings. She has also been associated with John Hutchison, an independent Canadian researcher who produced many of the effects seen on 9/11 in his home lab, such as levitation, the bending of metal bars without heat, and the fusing of dissimilar materials, such as metal and wood. Many uninformed commenters insist the videos are fake, but the US government was interested enough to offer him a job, which he turned down.
From here we have to turn from the question of how it was done to why it was done.
Beyond the apparent difficulty of trying to fake an event like 9/11, what makes people incredulous about the claim that it was an inside job, is the claim that members of the government and some close to the top levels of government would kill nearly 3000 of their fellow citizens. There is no motivation that most people can think of that could possibly justify that. It is difficult to understand and explain.
One thing that helps is to remember the historical context. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, most people looked forward to being able to spend less on defense and put more budget money into needed domestic projects. One group that thought differently were the members of a think tank called the Project for a New American Century. In their view, the time was not for withdrawing but for expanding American power to fill the gap left by the Soviet Union and discourage rising rivals like China. In their minds, the fall of the U.S.S.R. represented not only the end of the Cold War but the end of the ideological struggles that had driven history. It was, as the title of one influential book put it, “the end of history”. America had not only the opportunity but the duty to safeguard democracy and free markets, which had triumphed by being the only things left standing, for the sake of a future of peace and prosperity for all of humanity. Could a future as bright as that not justify the loss of life, terrible as it was?
Besides that, wasn’t Saddam Hussein a menace. As students of history, the members of PNAC saw the run up to World War II being played out again in the world’s response to Saddam. In their eyes, the world was once again turning a blind eye to a dangerous tyrant. It was appeasement all over again. Eventually, people would cease to pay attention to Iraq and that would be Saddam’s opportunity to acquire a weapon or weapons of mass destruction, which he might use, or, more likely, might use to blackmail the world, threaten his neighbors, and control mideast oil. This was unacceptable.
According to John Perkins (?)-- who bills himself as an economic hitman, someone who goes around trying to bribe foreign leaders on behalf of the United States or other countries -- the US tried to bribe Saddam to play ball with them, but he wouldn’t be bribed. Then they sent in “the jackals” to try and assassinate him, but his security was too good. Finally, they let it be known to Saddam through the American ambassador to Iraq, that if he were to take Kuwait, the US and the rest of the world would not react. Saddam took the bait and immediately, George H.W. Bush was declaring war.
When the Iraqis were pushed out of Kuwait, some in the Bush administration -- notably Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld -- advocated going all the way to Baghdad to remove Saddam and his regime. But the allies were against it, as were influential members of Bush’s cabinet like Brent Scowcroft and then-head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. Bush backed down and the warhawks went back to the drawing board.
We can begin, perhaps, with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. One odd fact about that event is that the person who rented the van used in the bombing reported it stolen. It is possible the bombers stole a van to bomb the WTC, but why? Perhaps more germaine, though, is that the investigation of the damage was overseen by a company called TriData Corporation. TriData was a subsidiary of a company called SPC International, which in turn was a subsidiary of System Planning Corporation. The CEO of SPC International from 1987 to 2001 was a man named Dov Zakheim.
Though he looks like he could be the head of a large insurance company, his is apparently a name to conjure with in the world of intelligence. He was a member of the Project for a New American Century and co-author of the paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”. Later, he would become comptroller of the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld in the George W. Bush administration. He would be tasked with tracking down the $2.3 trillion that the Pentagon had misplaced. Whether he made the decision to place the group put together to find the money in the section that would be struck on 9/11 is unknown. So, whether or not he was the actual master-mind, Zakheim was well placed and knowledgeable about the sorts of technologies that would have been useful in an operation like 9/11.
Among the things produced by the System Planning Corporation is the Flight Termination System, a system that can be installed in target drones to remotely destroy them if needed. As lead investigators assessing damage to the WTC in 1993, TriData had access to the tower blueprints, which were kept under lock and key. If copies of those plans got to Zakheim and then to the plotters, it would have simplified the process of wiring the towers for demolition, since much of the time spent is in studying the plans of a building to decide precisely where to put charges in order to bring the building down in its own footprint.
So a large operation may have been in the works from early on, soon after the end of the first Gulf War. The Project for a New American Century was founded in the mid-nineties by a group known as the neo-conservatives. They have a history that stretches back two generations to the fifties. They were leftists who were bitterly opposed to Stalin and what he had done with the revolution in the Soviet Union. Through the sixties and seventies, they migrated from the left to the center-right to support Ronald Reagan and his anti-Soviet stance.
The Project for a New American Century was founded by younger members of the neo-conservative group. They saw themselves as living in a unique historical moment, one which made it imperative for the United States to take advantage of for the sake of the future of the human race. To that end, the US had to step up its military spending, place bases in areas that it hadn’t yet been able to, and, in general, lock down the planet to safeguard it from hostile ideologies, ideologies hostile to democracy and free-market capitalism, which had won the day and shown themselves to be the only workable ideologies for people the world over.
To that end, the US would have to maintain dominance over land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace in order to ensure that no rival countries with rival philosophies could think to challenge the US. This was a kind of manifest destiny writ large. It appealed to the neo-cons and their sense that they had special insight into where history was going, and it would appeal to those Americans who had a sense that America had a special, divinely-appointed destiny.
Though the speeches given by George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 and the runup to war were probably written by neocons, they were given a heartfelt tone by a president with an evangelical faith of his own. It was the perfect coalition of intellectuals without any particular religious beliefs and evangelicals who were unconcerned with complex ideas but who were certain God had chosen America to liberate the world.
To fully understand the thinking of the neocons, it is necessary to go a little deeper into the world of academic thought. In fact, one must go back to Germany between the wars, to the tumultuous Weimar period after the First World War when Communists were fighting with fascists in the streets, the economy was suffering hyperinflation, and the liberal, democratic government was helpless to do anything about it.
A number of academics, among them the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss, watched appalled as Germany seemingly pulled itself apart before their eyes. Seeking to understand just what had gone so wrong, they looked to the history of political philosophy. Schmitt, for his part, made the distinction between democracy, which went back to ancient Athens, and liberalism, which was a more recent idea. Liberalism, it seemed to him was far too individualistic and placed too much emphasis on the individual and his freedom, at the expense of social solidarity. The Athenians, he thought, were democratic, but they would not have understood liberalism.
Strauss agreed. Liberalism, he thought, led to rapacious greed on the one hand and decadent libertinism on the other. No society, he thought, could withstand the strains that those things put upon it.
When the Nazis came to power, Heidegger and Schmitt joined the Party. Strauss, being Jewish and thinking the Nazis were a “vulgarization” of the ideas he held, left Germany, eventually arriving in America and gaining a teaching position at the University of Chicago. There he continued to develop his ideas. In particular, he turned to the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato had been a disciple of Socrates and felt he had seen democracy in action when Athens executed Socrates for leading the youth of Athens astray.
Plato believed that men like Socrates were extremely rare and valuable. His allegory of the cave described society as a cave in which people were chained, watching shadows on the wall of the cave and being mostly content. Once in a great while, someone would break the chains, escape the cave, and move out into the sunlight where he could see things as they really were. Such men, Plato thought, should be the true rulers of the state.
Strauss, who had seen the masses in Germany turn to Hitler and the Nazis as their deliverers, was inclined to agree that the masses couldn’t be trusted to make wise decisions. What to do, then? Strauss thought a group of wise men, like Plato’s wise statesmen who saw things as they were, should be the ultimate rulers of the state. Well-born individuals with adequate educations could administer things, but the really important questions would be decided by the wise men.
Crucially, it seemed to Plato that the mass of people could not always be reasoned with. In order to get them to go in the ways the wise men believed they should, they might have to have their passions aroused. The wise men might have to tell them “noble lies” in order to get them to voluntarily do what they wouldn’t do otherwise. In this way, the good of the state would be maintained, and the well-being of the people would be preserved in spite of themselves.
So Strauss spent several decades teaching at the University of Chicago, gaining adherents. One of his students was Alan Bloom, who had a best-seller in the eighties with The Closing of the American Mind. One of his students was Paul Wolfiwitz, who would become Under-Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. It’s safe to say that Strauss had an influence on all the members of the Project for a New American Century and made it more likely that they would come to see themselves as the truly-wise individuals who would have to guide the masses toward their destiny, even if they resisted it.
From this, it's fairly clear why the PNAC group could justify something as enormous as 9/11. Strauss had thought that the people needed an external enemy, to see themselves as “us” as opposed to “them”. He thought they needed a kind of civic religion and a reason to rally ‘round the flag. When American flags began sprouting on houses all over America after 9/11, the PNAC group likely thought most of their work was done. The neo-cons could add a sense of mission which resonated well with the American self-image, and the rest was easy.
So beyond petroleum -- which is to the modern military what oats were to the cavalry -- and the safeguarding of Israel, both of which were important, the PNAC group had much larger ideas in mind. They had a precedent, too.
With the outbreak of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt was desperate to get the United States into the war. Yet, the American people, accustomed to being protected by two large oceans, were not inclined to involve themselves yet again in “foreign wars”. Presumably, fireside chats were gaining no traction.
It is now generally acknowledged by historians that the military at that time had already cracked the Japanese code. Roosevelt had been provoking the Japanese by violating neutrality, selling goods to Britain and refusing to sell to Japan. When Japan finally decided to attack the United States, Roosevelt and the military knew the day and the hour. Roosevelt moved the newer ships in Pearl Harbor out to sea, leaving the older ones in harbor. Many died, whom we memorialize to this day. It obviously galvanized the American people, and the rest is history. Was Roosevelt justified in his act?
What would have been the consequence if he hadn’t chosen that course? What if Britain had fallen and the United States, for all intents and purposes stood alone? Remember that there was no vast military. The first recruits had to train with wooden models of guns. How would history have been different? Would it have been like The Man in the High Castle, the novel by Philip K. Dick which imagines the fascists winning the war and the Nazis and the Japanese dividing the United States, with only a narrow neutral zone between them? Would we want to play history out again to see?
Regardless of whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or not, he had the oil weapon and he could cause economic havoc whenever he wanted by unilaterally cutting production. He was obviously a menace, but was that enough to justify 9/11?
Terrorism is real enough, and sooner or later, some large event might have occurred, possibly on American soil. The possibility that it could involve chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons is the kind of thing that keeps policy-makers up at night. These things couldn’t be dismissed, but were ordinary Americans thinking about them? Would they have tolerated the inconveniences at airports that they tolerate now if no event had occurred?
Researching 9/11, it’s easy to feel duped and resentful, as well as shocked and outraged. On calmer reflection, one can imagine the rationale for carrying it out. Whether that makes it moral or not, I don’t know. A lot depends on how immanent the threat was. In retrospect, the possibility of a fascist victory in Europe and East Asia was very immanent. While terrorists hadn’t carried out anything near the scale of 9/11, and haven’t since, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons would seem to change the calculations of what’s immanent. Could the American people have been convinced of the danger by speeches from the President? If the general public learns that the “attacks” were a psychological operation, will they return to their indifference?
On the other hand, it’s a lot like asking how much power to give the police to keep us safe. At what point does the balance tip so that the danger of becoming a police state is greater than the threat of crime? As an ancient Roman once asked, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes -- Who will guard us from the guardians?
Then there is the question of the possibility of a benign empire. It seems to me improbable that the United States, of all history’s imperial powers, would remain pure in its intentions toward the rest of the world. This is especially true because the neocons, as intellectuals, seem to have neglected a pre-existing, predatory class of rich who looked upon the creation of an American empire as the perfect opportunity to pillage and loot worldwide. There is an indication that those rich were kept apprised of the plan. On 9/11, George Bush was in a classroom in Sarasota, Florida reading with the children. Andrew Card, his Chief-of-Staff, came over and whispered something in his ear. Everyone has assumed that he was informing the President of the attacks, but that may not have been the case. Bush turned back to the book, but now it was upside down. Perhaps he was distracted? Maybe. But a 9/11 researcher says that is a maritime signal for “I’m in trouble”.
When the Bush entourage finally left the school, they took off at as steep a climb as possible, leaving behind their two-fighter escort. Rather than going right back to Washington, they went to Barksdale Air Base in Louisiana. Two hours later, they went to Offut Air Base in Nebraska, home of the Strategic Air Command. There was a lack of communication and they weren’t sure to land, given that Air Force One was an obvious target. On top of that, the military was conducting its annual “Global Guardian” war game with live nuclear weapons. There is a rumor that, while in the air, the Bush team received a radio message from someone who knew the nuclear launch codes and was threatening to take the war game live. Bush is supposed to have reasserted control at SAC headquarters, but was put on notice that he would have to toe the line for some shadowy forces -- perhaps the “deep state”. So, in the opinion of some, the plot itself was hijacked.
That, in any case, is the story. It is not hard to believe that vested interests of all kinds work together. War is an extremely profitable enterprise and there are many in the top echelons of wealth and power who think nothing of the suffering caused, so long as it makes money.
I should say a few more words about why people are so quick to dismiss conspiracy theories. In the case of 9/11, of course, it is hard to believe one’s own government would carry out something of such enormity. That would be true in any country. Other governments might do that kind of thing, but not ours. Few people keep up with military technology and thus they have no idea how it could be done. Nor can they imagine any possible motive for their government doing something heinous which they had thought could only be carried out by fanatical jihadists.
There is also a naive assumption that the military and intelligence agencies are kept well in hand by Congress. It is more the other way around. I was shocked to learn that presidents, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even heads of the CIA had been denied intelligence because their clearance wasn’t high enough. Elected officials and appointees come and go, but the permanent military and intelligence bureaucracy is there for life. It can happen that a general’s aide has a higher security clearance than the general.
So oversight is difficult if not impossible. As Senator Inouye, quoted in the introduction, said, “The intelligence agencies treat us like mushrooms; they keep us in the dark and feed us manure.”
This means that other people are deciding what elected officials can see and can’t see. Knowledge is power and the power to keep knowledge secret gives the secret keepers great leverage. In addition, the entire structure is so compartmentalized that no one has all the information. As an intelligence insider put it, “Only one being in the universe knows all of it, and that’s God.” Thus, the opportunities and temptations for segments of the military and intelligence to go rogue are very great.
For this reason, the Founders didn’t even want a standing army. Historically, they were aware of what mischief an idle army could cause. They would no doubt be appalled to see the sprawling military-intelligence-industrial complex operating with no real oversight.
But these things are generally lost on the public and the pundits. Rogue operations are impossible, they think, despite the fact that they get exposed on a regular basis. As a rule, the pundits are people who have lived fairly sheltered lives, going from leafy suburbs, to leafy college towns, and back to leafy suburbs. They travel in circles where everyone is much like themselves, and their view of the world is thus restricted. They find it as hard as the general public to imagine things that go on behind the scenes in the name of national security.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the national media is owned by no more than seven conglomerates. The men that run them enjoy their lives in their clubs, rubbing elbows with other rich and powerful people. A word to them from one of those powerful people is enough, generally, to get a story squelched. Consider ABC News and the Jeffrey Epstein case.
At the same time, the military and intelligence agencies decided decades ago to become more aggressive in controlling the narrative. Project Mockingbird (alternatively, Operation Mockingbird) was -- and no doubt still is -- a program to get people into the media who would write stories favorable to intelligence and the military, and suppress those that weren’t. The CIA says they no longer run the program, but many assume that just means reporters are paid indirectly.
Then there is the problem of groupthink. A study was done in which test subjects along with plants, were invited to answer simple questions such as which line on the paper is longer. The plants invariably picked the wrong answers and the test subjects, sooner or later, went along. No one likes to feel like an oddball or outsider, not to mention potentially mentally ill and paranoid. The pressure of authorities and experts supporting the official story, whether they believe it or not, tends to settle things for everyone else. In the media, questioning that narrative can cost one one’s job. And we know the pressures on social media and the tech companies to curb anything remotely resembling a “conspiracy theory”.
Then too, sorting through evidence, arguments and counter-arguments, hearsay, eyewitness testimony, and so on, is time consuming. The media try to keep up with the news cycle and don’t assign reporters to get to the bottom of the 9/11 conspiracy. To the degree that they pay attention at all, they attribute it to “outsiders”, frustrated people who seek easy answers for things and suspect the government is behind most bad things in the world. In addition, anyone with the time to research these theories is assumed to have too much time on his hands and is probably also the type that believes Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings.
At best, people who suspect official narratives are considered harmless eccentrics and, at worst, dangerous cranks who may take it into their heads to arm themselves and take a stand against the enemy, whomever that might be.
While I might have too much time on my hands, and am, by now, familiar with most of the conspiracy theories out there, I don’t believe them all. I, for one, am still convinced the Earth is a sphere, for instance. Nevertheless, the sorts of things I now entertain as possibly or probably true are things I wouldn’t have considered plausible a few years ago. Does that mean I’ve gone off the rails or that I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew?
This has been a crowd-sourced investigation, probably the biggest of all time, with thousands of people contributing large things and small. I had an advantage in coming along late since so much had been accumulated by then. I have tried to avoid descending into technical and arcane arguments since neither I nor most readers can decide much by reading the disagreements by two apparently-equally qualified experts. Instead, I relied mostly on eyewitnesses, for whose testimony I again thank the Citizen Investigation Team.
This is either a long paper or a short book. I’ve tried to keep it brief. The pictures and eye-witness accounts speak for themselves, in any case. It is my hope that the reader will come away persuaded or, if not persuaded, will at least have a few doubts raised in his or her mind. The way to gain wisdom, it is said, is to clear your mind of what you think you know. Small doubts about the official theory can be the beginning of big questions.