Irish Sunday Tribune Article on 9-11

[Andrew Johnson]

Thanks to Maureen for sending this (and Morgan!!):
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So, which one of these men was responsible for September 11th?

Pictured in sequence – Bush, Cheney, Bin Laden & Sharon.

'Four years on, the official conclusion about the 9/11 attacks – that a US-hating terrorist in a faraway cave co-ordinated 19 men armed with box-cutters – is being dismantled by the growing number of theories that claim involvement and foreknowledge at the highest levels'.

Lisa Hand, New York, Sunday Tribune, Sun Sept 4th 2005.

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IT’S Thursday 1 September and the weather in New York is perfect – limpid blue skies dotted with planes climbing from Newark and JFK, and with low lying birds free-wheeling on summer breezes.

The hot blanket of humidity has finally broken, and downtown Manhattan is packed with tourists and locals soaking up the benign sunshine. September, they say, is the finest month to be in New York City.

And today is just such a perfect morning, just like a September morning four years ago, when two planes brought the Twin Towers crashing to the ground, and a hard rain of bodies, ash and endless sheets of paper fell from that same clear sky.

Jimmy Deane (“with an ‘e’, not like the actor,” he points out) wasn’t living in New York then; he moved to the city from Illinois in 2003. He works for one of the financial companies in New York, and every morning before entering his building, he sits on a bench at St. Paul’s Chapel, lights a cigarette and looks out over Ground Zero.

“It was a terrible thing” he says. “But what is almost as terrible is the way that the government continues to lie and cover-up what really happened that day.”

The towers may be gone, but their destruction continues to cast a long shadow. For Jimmy isn’t alone in harbouring suspicions about the events surrounding 9/11.

A survey, conducted by respected polling company Zogby International in August 2004, revealed that half (49.3%) of New York residents and 41% o0f the city’s citizens overall believe that some of America’s leaders @knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around 11 September 2001, and that they consciously failed to act.”

While some chose to regard this as gross incompetence on the part of the Bush administration, growing numbers are convinced that the events of that say are part of a sinister conspiracy whose shadowy tentacles stretch from the heart of the White House, right around the globe.

Most of the alternative viewpoints to the official story involve the four hijacked planes; the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers; how much the Bush administration knew in advance; and what other governments were involved in the attacks (Israel, Pakistan to name but two).

While conspiracy theories have flourished since hitting their stride in the 1960’s (UFOs, Apollo 11, the deaths of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King and Marilyn Monroe), it was the deaths of just under 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington which has spawned an industry of alternative views as to what really happened on 9/11.

The theorists behind these speculations are largely either ignored or dismissed by the mainstream media, and have sought the comfort of like-minded paranoiacs on the internet – Google the words ‘conspiracy’ and ‘September 11th’ and the search engine returns over 3.8 million hits.

Even Ireland has its own active branch of 9/11 non-believers; the Irish 9/11 Truth Movement. Run by Kerry based teacher Morgan Stack, the organisation recently hit the news for its over-enthusiastic bombardment of TD’s and RTE hacks with voluminous statements and a copy of a DVD which it claims proves that there is a high-level cover-up surrounding the planes in place.

“Nothing more important is happening in the world right now,” says Stack. “The attacks led directly to the Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

Stack became a non-believer after he researched claims that the explosion at the Pentagon was not caused by American airlines Flight 77, but by a missile – a popular theory in the Conspiracy Top Ten.

“I spent two months practically crying at my laptop, as I downloaded so much truth about the attacks. I can now prove that the official story is a load of nonsense,” he says.

However, Stack is convinced that it is only a matter of time before the non-believers are taken seriously. “The big difference between September 11 and other cover-ups, such as the deaths of the two Kennedy brothers, is that the public is no longer dependent on the RTE’s, BBCs and CNNs for information, or propaganda,” he says. “The new media – blogs, internet – are the key to our salvation.”

However, being a true-blue conspiracy theorist, Morgan stack is also convinced that the military-industrial complex is after the World Wide web. “The next terror attack may very well be the release of a computer worm or virus that will crash the web – then the governments can take control of the mainframe servers to ‘protect’ us from further attacks,” he reckons.

But sometimes the attacks come from more conventional quarters. Last March, US magazine Popular Mechanics ran an extensive cover feature debunking the myths which had sprung up around 9/11 – prompted, according to its editorial, by the fact that ‘healthy scepticism has curdled into paranoia.’

This prompted an online furore, with conspiracy theorists smelling rats at every turn – one website www.prisionplanet.com, pointed out that the senior researcher on the magazine feature was Benjamin Chertoff, “none other than the cousin of Michael Chertoff, the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.”

So what are the theories surrounding the events of 9/11 which are at the centre of the fuss? Among the most chewed-over are the following:

The Twin Towers Planes

THEORIES abound about the real identities of the two jets which crashed into the North and South Towers – American Airlines Flight 11 at 8.45am and United Airlines Flight 175 at 9.03am. It is claimed that they weren’t commercial planes, but were remotely controlled military jets, or guided missiles. Some sites have evidence of explosions or ‘flashes’ before the planes hit the towers. Some sites show fuzzy photographs as ‘proof’ that Flight 175 had a ‘pod’ or missile case attached to the base of the..

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.. fuselage, which contained a missile. The ‘pod’ theory has been dismissed by experts who state it is simply the outer casing of the 767’s landing gear.

The Pentagon Plane

THIS is the subject of some of the most fevered theorising. At 9.43am, American airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon’s exterior wall. However, the impact crater seemed suspiciously small to some people, who believe that no plane ever crashed into the building, but that the damage was the work of a truck-bomb detonation or a satellite-guided missile. This is based on (erroneous) reports that the plane only punched a hole 16 feet wide in the wall. (See the cheerily named site Hunt the Boeing! At www.asile.org/citoyens/index-pentagone.htm for a fun-filled take on this tragedy). The latter theory is peddled by French author Thierry Meyssan in his book The Big Lie, which concludes that the attack on the Pentagon was part of an elaborate military coup.

The Pennsylvania Plane

The question of whether Flight 93 crashed of its own volition, or was shot down by US fighters, is one of the more contentious controversies, and probably the one with the most widespread support. Some of the claims are on shaky ground, such as the sighting of a ‘white plane’ in the vicinity just before the flight crashed. (This is either a variation of the ubiquitous ‘white van’ which invariably turns up in crime reports, or it was a small private Falcon jet owned by a local clothing company which confirmed it went to investigate the crash site at the request of the FAA.)

But there is more persuasive evidence – the scattered distribution of the debris, and the possible involvement of vice-president Dick Cheney, who stomped into North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) bunker 30 minutes before the plane went down – that this crash was a cover-up.

Where was NORAD?

This is one of the murkier conspiracies, involving claims that NORAD ordered its fighter jets to stand down rather than to scramble and intercept the four hijacked planes. This was done on the orders of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who allowed the attacks to happen, in order to green-light the Neo-cons plans to invade Iraq. They permitted the missile attack on the Pentagon – Flight 77 was flown to a secret location where its crew and passengers now live.

The Jews Did it:

According to this theory, the 9/11 attacks were not the work of 19 terrorists, but of Israeli’s intelligence agency, Mossad. This is why, according to some of the more eye-popping sites, 4,000 Israelis never showed up for work in the Twin Towers on the morning of 11 September. (This piece of gibberish was robustly dismissed by ex-White House counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clark. In his book, Against all Enemies, he states that the story was false. “With almost every terrorist incident or similar event, an urban legend develops that challenges the official story.” Oh yes – and there were no cabs (many of which are driven by Muslims) to be had in the city that morning, either.

The Collapse of the Twin Towers

This theory posits that there was no possible explanation for the cataclysmic collapse of the Twin Towers, unless it involved explosives. Among the claims made by conspiracy theorists are that the two towers and the smaller WTC7 building were wired with explosives in advance and felled in a series of controlled explosions. Evidence includes the fact that the structural integrity of the buildings could not have failed without extra help. Also, that burning jet fuel couldn’t have raised the temperature sufficiently to melt steel. One book, Painful Questions: And Analysis of the September 11 attack, claimed that the concrete clouds puffing out from the floors of the collapsing towers could only have been caused by explosives. The arguments are even more forceful in relation to the shorter 47-storey WTC7 building, which collapsed seven hours after its taller brethren. For the full low-down on these theories go to www.wtc7.net.

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The various debates over what really unfolded on 11 September have attracted all sorts of commentators, including respected polemic-ist Gore Vidal. In his 2002 book, Blood for Oil: The Cheney-Bush Junta, Vidal weaves a blanket of conspiracy which takes in 9/11, the confused response of the US army and intelligence agencies, Osama bin Laden and the Bush family'’ connections with the House of Saud.

One of the leading figures among the non-believers is West coast-based theology professor and author David Ray Griffin. In 2004, he wrote The New Pearl Harbour and recently published a rebuttal of the 9/11 Commission’s findings, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.

“I had expected the report to be a whitewash, but I was still shocked at the audacity of some of the lies it told,” he told the Sunday Tribune.

“Among my favourite lies were those about the collapse of WTC7, and of the shooting down by the military of Flight 93. These both can be disproved by hard evidence and open testimony” he says.

Griffin stresses that it is time that the mainstream media started taking a look at their points of view. “There are a lot of people worried that America is moving towards a full-scale fascist regime; we are living in a new reality; where a group of people have rotten control of every branch of the government – Justice, the FBI, CIA, the White House and increasingly, the Supreme Court,” he said.

Such initial conspiracy theories have spread like ripples. And the fuel to keep the conspiratorial flames burning is still pouring out; al Queda has now been linked to the London bombings, and confusion reigns over recent reports by intelligence operatives that the Pentagon knew all about terrorist Mohammed Atta before 9/11.

It is a subject on which everyone has an opinion. One is former NYPD Sargent Jerry Kane, who was in Brooklyn when the second plane struck. He raced into the city, and arrived just in time to see the first tower collapse right in front of him. He took refuge in the small St. Peter’s Chapel on Fulton Street, and cannot remember where he was when the second tower fell.

But he does know where he spent the next month: at Ground Zero, co-ordinating operations for police commissioner Bernard Kerick, and the month after that working at the morgue, and the following month at the buildings’ graveyard on Staten Island.

So what does he think? “I reckon that people react differently to trauma and grief, and it’s easier for some to believe in a massive conspiracy, then that a guy in a far-away co-ordinated 19 men to do this armed with box-cutters,” he said.

“Its not easy to believe that the Pentagon – and the US – could be so vulnerable,” Kane added. “We weren’t prepared for this sort of attack; if Russian bombers had come screaming into New York, we would have shot them down and looked like superheroes. But I don’t take the conspiracy theories personally. If people get a little kooky, it’s just their way of coping.”

The Irish 9/11 Truth Movement is holding a conference, ‘Exploring Conflicting Interpretations of 9/11’ on Saturday 12th November in UCC. For more information contact info@911truth.ie.

[Andrew Johnson]

His/her e-mail address is: nhegarty@tribune.ie
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Dear Sir/Madam,

I am just writing to thank you for your article on some of the questions about what really happened on Sept 11th. The publication of your article was an important step in the events related to this matter.
I am in the UK (Derbyshire) and have been trying to make people aware of some of the issues mentioned in your article - this is generally an up-hill job.

Your article covered some of the important topics quite well, and for this I applaud you and the person who wrote article. However, I felt the tone of the article was somewhat inappropriate as, in places, it sounded rather scornful. One of the main problems with the article was the language used. Like many main-stream reports about 9-11 Truth (which is what it is), there was a failure to make a proper distinction between "theory" and "evidence". It isn't "a theory" that the WTC was destroyed with explosives, for example, that is a fact - a fact established through scientific observation of their collapse. Despite what we have been told by official bodies, the towers did *not* undergo a pancake collapse - the physics and chemistry do not support this "theory". For a simple explanation of the physics of what happened, please see the proof that I wrote some time ago:

http://www.checktheevidence.com/911/TwinTowersandGravity.htm

You can send this to anyone who may have the knowledge to refute it. The amount of dust involved also proves, unequivocally, that some type of explosives were used to destroy the towers. So therefore, it is hugely important to distinguish between "fact" and "theory". Obviously we cannot say or prove, at this stage, who planted these explosives. Saying "we cannot prove *who* did it" should *not* lead us to say "well, it simply wasn't done, then".

Once you have accepted that the Towers were demolished with explosives (I accepted this fact only about 12 months ago), I think you reach a turning point. You then have to ask yourself "Who knowingly pressed a button and blew up 2 buildings occupied with unsuspecting, innocent civilians, in peacetime". You then realise that not only did someone press 1 button, they then waited several 10's of minutes and pushed another one. So who pushed those buttons anyway? Isn't this what we have to understand about the mindset of the people we are dealing with?

I think it is now time for everyone to recognise this issue for what it is - the most important one of all in global politics and economics. As those who do all the research will tell you, it affects everything else - "Make Poverty History", Democracy, Economics, Politics, Science, Religion - everything.

However, like the close of your article indicated, it is easier for people to be in denial and suggest that all of what I have talked about above is "but a simple conspiracy theory to solve lots of problems".

Thanks very much for reading.

Yours,
Andrew Johnson
Derbyshire, UK

[Jim]

One thing that really grabs my attention is the molten pools of steel found at the base of the towers. It is impossible for steel to have melted to a temperature ~3000F with jet fuel in a poor combustable environment (as demonstrated by the black, billowing smoke) without the aid of some sort of "assitance" i.e. explosives. Building 7 was pulled and so were 1 & 2. Demolition requires explosives, explosives provide the energy to pulverise the building materials and content to the degree that they were and to melt steel. Explosives are also required to demolish a 50 ton press at the C level (sub-basement level) - http://st12.startlogic.com/~xenonpup/underground/underground_explosion s.htm. The Pancake Theory is ridiculous given the structural integrity of the building, when put into the context of other more serious skyskaper fire scenarios and given that both towers were designed to withstand such impacts: http://hawaii.indymedia.org/print.php?id=3257. Then there are all the anomalous events that were reported before and during both collapses i.e. explosions, squibs multiple floors below the collapsing region and positive evidence from fire-fighters that the fires were containable and not serious enough to threaten the integrity of the building(s).

[John. M]

Well done Andrew.

Your letter was just what is needed.

John. M