See other 9/11 Articles
Title: An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11
Source:
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6013
URL Source: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6013
Published: Feb 10, 2007
Author: Sue Reid
Post Date: 2007-02-10 08:45:52 by Kamala
Ping List: *9-11* Subscribe to *9-11*
Keywords: None
Views: 19082
Comments: 205
An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 Sue Reid – The Daily Mail February 10, 2007 The official story of what happened on 9/11 never fails to shock. Four American airliners are hijacked by Osama Bin Laden's terrorists in an attack on the heart of the Western world on September 11, 2001. Two are deliberately flown into New York's famous Twin Towers, which collapse. A third rams into the United States defence headquarters at the Pentagon, in Washington D.C. The last goes down in rural Pennsylvania, 150 miles north of the capital, after a tussle between the hijackers and some of the passengers onboard, whose bravery was recently portrayed in a Hollywood film, United 93. Nearly 3,000 ordinary, decent Americans die in the attacks, provoking the U.S. President George W. Bush to mount a global war on terror, which leads to the invasion of Iraq, with Britain in tow. Or that's how the official story goes. Yet today, more than five years on, this accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie made for £1,500 on a cheap laptop by three young American men. The film is so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched what is being dubbed the first internet blockbuster. The movie was shown on television to 50 million people in 12 countries on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 last autumn. More than 100,000 DVDs have been sold and another 50,000 have been given away. In Britain, 491,000 people have clicked on to Google Video to watch it on their computers. Called Loose Change, the film is a blitz of statistics, photographs pinched from the web, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony, all set to hip-hop music. And it is dramatically changing the way people think about 9/11. A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Americans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. This proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story of an Al Qaeda attack. The video claims the Bush administration was, at the very least, criminally negligent in allowing the terrorist attacks to take place. It also makes the startling claim that the U.S. government might have been directly responsible for 9/11 and is now orchestrating a cover-up. Unsurprisingly, the film's allegations have been denied, even roundly condemned, by White House sources and U.S. intelligence services. Only this week, the letters page of the Guardian newspaper was full of discourse about Loose Change, which was made by a trio of twentysomethings, including a failed film school student and a disillusioned ex-soldier. Indeed, the movie's assertions are being explored by a number of commentators in America and Britain - including the former Labour Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher - who are questioning the official account of 9/11. Mr Meacher, who last year proposed holding a screening of Loose Change at the House of Commons (he later changed his mind), has said of 9/11: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery. Some of the key facts remain unexplained on any plausible basis." These words were written in a foreword for Professor David Ray Griffin's bestselling book, The New Pearl Harbour (a pointed reference to the conspiracy theory that President Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to assault the U.S. fleet in 1941, in order to force America into World War II). Griffin, now nearing retirement, is emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California and a respected philosopher. While Loose Change is capturing the interest of internet devotees, Professor Griffin's equally contentious theories are receiving standing ovations in book clubs across the U.S. Together, the book and the movie have raised the question: could the attack be a carbon copy of Operation Northwoods, an aborted plan by President Kennedy to stage terror attacks in America and blame them on Communist Cuba as a pretext for a U.S. invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro? In other words, on a fateful September morning in 2001, did America fabricate an outrage against civilians to fool the world and provide a pretext for war on Al Qaeda and Iraq? This, and other deeply disturbing questions, are now being furiously debated on both sides of the Atlantic. Why were no military aircraft scrambled in time to head off the attacks? Was the collapse of the Twin Towers caused by a careful use of explosives? How could a rookie pilot - as one of the terrorists was - fly a Boeing 757 aircraft so precisely into the Pentagon? And who made millions of dollars by accurately betting that shares in United and American Airlines, owners of the four doomed aircraft, were going to fall on 9/11 as they duly did? An extremely high volume of bets on the price of shares dropping were placed on these two airline companies, and only these two. In the three days prior to the catastrophe, trade in their shares went up 1,200 per cent. Initially, like most people in America, Professor Griffin dismissed claims the attacks could have been an inside job. It was only a year later, when he was writing a special chapter on American imperialism and 9/11 for his latest academic tome, that the professor was sent a 'timeline' on the day's events based entirely on newspaper and television accounts. It was then that he changed his mind. And one of the most puzzling anomalies that he studied was that none of the hijacked planes was intercepted by fighter jets, even though there was plenty of time to do so and it would have been standard emergency procedure in response to a suspected terrorist attack. Indeed, it is mandatory procedure in the U.S. if there is any suspicion of an air hijack. In the nine months before 9/11, the procedure had been implemented 67 times in America. Readers of The New Pearl Harbour and viewers of Loose Change are reminded that it was 7.59am when American Airlines Flight 11 left Boston. Fifteen minutes later, at 8.14am, radio contact between the pilot and air traffic control stopped suddenly, providing the first indication that the plane might have been hijacked. Flight 11 should have been immediately intercepted by fighter pilots sent up from the nearby McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. They could have made the journey to the World Trade Centre in three minutes. But, surprisingly, F-15 fighter jets were instead ordered out of an airbase 180 miles away at Cape Cod. They appear to have flown so slowly - at 700mph, instead of their top speed of 1,850mph - that they did not arrive in time to stop the second attack, on the South Tower of the World Trade Centre. They were 11 minutes too late. And this is not the only worrying question. Incredibly, the attack on the Pentagon was not prevented either. The defence headquarters was hit by the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 at 9.38am. But fighter jets from Andrews Air Force Base, just ten miles from Washington, weren't scrambled to intercept it. Instead, jets were ordered from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, 100 miles away. By the time they arrived, Flight 77 had already hit the Pentagon. So what of the fall of the Twin Towers? The official version is that the buildings collapsed because their steel columns were melted by the heat from the fuel fires of the two crashed planes. It is a mantra that has been repeated in White House briefings, official inquiries into 9/11, leaks by the American intelligence services and almost every TV documentary on the attack in the U.S. and Britain. But, according to the allegations of Loose Change (which are endorsed by Professor Griffin), the science does not stand up. Steel does not begin to melt until it reaches around 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, but open fires of jet fuel - such as those in the Twin Towers inferno - cannot rise above 1,700 degrees. Professor Griffin and the makers of Loose Change are convinced the Twin Towers were deliberately blown up. The film shows clip after clip of the towers coming down in one fell swoop to loud and distinct booms. Were they the sound of detonators being set off? And the Pentagon attack? The hotly disputed theory of the film and Professor Griffin is that a passenger plane never hit the building at all. The terrorist pilot, Hani Hanjour, was so slow to learn the fundamentals at flight school that his tutors reported him to the authorities for his incompetence five times. How could he have guided the huge aircraft in such a complex manoeuvre into the building? And if he did, what happened to the aircraft? The Loose Change narrator says: "The official explanation is that the intense heat from the jet fuel vapourised the entire plane. Indeed, from the pictures, it seems there was no discernible trace of a fully loaded Boeing 757 at the crash scene. "But if the fire was hot enough to incinerate a jumbo jet, then how could investigators identify 184 out of 189 dead people found at the defence headquarters?" Intriguingly, the narrator adds: "The only visible damage to the outer wall of the Pentagon is a single hole no more than 16ft in diameter. But a Boeing 757 is 155ft long, 44ft high, has a 124ft wingspan and weighs almost 100 tons. "Are we supposed to believe that it disappeared into this hole without leaving any wreckage on the outside? Why is there no damage from the wings or the vertical stabiliser or the engines which would have slammed into the building? "Remember how big the engines were," the film adds persuasively. "If six tons of steel and titanium banged into the Pentagon at 530mph, they would bury themselves inside the building, leaving two very distinct imprints. And yet the only damage to the outer wall is this single hole." And what of the Boeing's 40ft high tail? "Did it obligingly duck before entering the building?" asks Professor Griffin. So if a commercial aircraft did not hit the building, what did? The wildest of all the theories in Professor Griffin's writings - echoed in Loose Change - is that the Pentagon was attacked by a military missile of some kind. Certainly, several onlookers quoted in the film claim that they saw a tiny aircraft piercing the defence HQ. Another witness says it made a shrill noise, quite unlike a giant passenger plane. So if it wasn't hijacked and flown by a terrorist into the Pentagon, what happened to Flight 77, last heard of on its way to Ohio? No one knows. But one thing is sure, asserts Professor Griffin. Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice- President, and Condoleezza Rice, at the time President Bush's national security adviser, were in the White House bunker as the drama unfolded. They, and their advisers, knew a hijacked aircraft was heading towards Washington. The obvious target was the White House, not the Pentagon. Yet Cheney and Rice were never evacuated from the White House. Did someone in high places already know that they were safe and that it was the Pentagon that was going to be the target? Of course, no account of 9/11 by the conspiracy lobby is complete without a minute-by-minute observation of President Bush's behaviour. He was hundreds of miles away in Florida, about to read a book to primary school children when the worst terrorist attack of the modern age happened. The President reportedly showed little reaction when an aide told him that the first plane had crashed into the Twin Towers. Why not? He, apparently, told the school's principal: "A commercial plane has hit the World Trade Centre, but we're going ahead with the reading thing anyway." Then President Bush, who is also the commander-in-chief of the American military, settled down to recite My Pet Goat to a group of seven-year-olds. He was interrupted a few minutes later by a whispered message in his ear from an aide that a second aircraft had hit the Twin Towers. The President's face, captured by photographers at the school, remained completely passive. He showed no sign of emotion. Now it must have been obvious a terrorist maelstrom was being unleashed on his country. But three days later, back in the American capital, he was a different man. By now he was certain that Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen were to blame. Surrounded by the Christian evangelist preacher Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi and an imam, the President delivered a sermon in America's national cathedral in Washington. The words he uttered are recounted by both Professor Griffin and the makers of Loose Change. President Bush announced: "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks waged against us by stealth, deceit and murder and rid the world of evil." The scene had been swiftly set for the West's war on terror. www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=435265&in_page_id=1811 Watch Loose Change here. Printer friendly version Email this article to a friend Last updated 10/02/2007 Homepage
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 108.
#90. To: Kamala, BeAChooser, SKYDRIFTER (#0)
"But if the fire was hot enough to incinerate a jumbo jet, then how could investigators identify 184 out of 189 dead people found at the defence headquarters?" There did seem to be a lack of bodies and debris around the Pentagon crash site. Also after many people began to question what really went on there as there was little evidence a jet with passengers slammed into the building, that letter began to circulate around the net, supposedly by an ex-military, home- schooling psychiatrist (I guess the purpose of all that information in the first paragraph was to let us know this was a very trustworthy individual) living in New Orleans, who made the claim that he had inside information that no Arab bodies were found on that plane! Right off I knew it was a red herring, to make people think indeed there were bodies when in fact there weren't any on the Pentagon grounds at all. I believe the Pentagon was hit by a missle of some kind, not by a jet full of people. If there were people on the flight, if that plane indeed took off, then the passengers were brought elsewhere and killed.
You'd expect bodies on the outside of the Pentagon if the fuselage penetrated the outer wall? And there was plenty of debris around the pentagon ... at least enough to account for the portions of the plane that wouldn't have fit in the hole noted above. You want to see a photo of some of that debris? What kind of missile would make a hole like the pictures indicate? Did it have extra long wings to knock down light poles spaced more than a 100 feet apart? Were the wings made of unobtainium so they could penetrate the blast hardened concrete wall? Was it painted to look like an American Airlines jet and shaped to confuse the many eyewitnesses who said they saw a large AA commercial jet? Just curious.
That hole looks too clean, where are the wings, it seems there would be more smoke and damage to the sides of that main impact hole. I've never seen any evidence of wings, not pictures of wing wreckage unless they miraculously melted into the building (along with the passengers) without even causing smudging to either side of that clean main impact hole. And that one photo of the piece of wreckage is the only one I've ever seen, there appears to be a lack of pictures of the Pentagon wreckage scene of the grounds, just that one you show, I've never seen any others.
Not melt, Diana ... deform and then penetrate. The mass in the plane is traveling at hundreds of miles an hour. It has a LOT of kinetic energy. When it impacts, the plane and its contents begin to compress and slow down. As that happens, the energy is transfered to the body it hits. If the impact is fast enough with enough mass, the body will deform and fail. That is what happened to the outer wall of the Pentagon. And note that large sections of the wings contained a lot of fuel giving them enough mass to penetrate the outer wall. But this didn't stop all forward movement of the plane and its contents. It continued on into the building (now carrying with it the remains of the outer wall) and did the same thing to the interior structural elements (columns, walls, floors). The destruction of these additional elements gradually slowed down and stopped the combined mass. You will note that the damage done in the interior has a cone shape. This is because the mass behind a unit of wing area is not as great at the combined mass of fuselage and contents behind a unit of nose area. The more mass, the farther the penetration. Next you add in the fire that was initiated by the fuel that the plane was carrying. Much of this fuel was also carried into the build where it initiated a conflagration which also used the contents of the building and even the structures themselves (such as the plane's aluminum) as fuel. Fire damage to concrete columns in the Pentagon indicate temperatures were at over 1700 F. http://www.pubs.asce.org/ceonline/ceonline03/0203feat.html Not a lot is going to survive that fire. Some certainly were incinerated by this fire (what would you expect) but they did find remains from many passengers. For example: ********** http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/sept01/2001-09-14-pentagon-usat.htm " Pentagon searchers encounter grisly scenes By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, Army Staff Sgt. Mark Williams witnessed a combat zone for the first time in his 11 years of service. He never imagined it would be inside the Pentagon. One of the first recovery personnel to enter the crippled headquarters building after a hijacked Boeing 757 smashed into it, the urban search-and-rescue specialist found a gruesome sight. "If anyone has ever burned a pot roast, they'll know what the victims looked like," Williams, 30, said Thursday after another 12-hour shift of searching for 190 bodies — those of 126 missing Pentagon personnel and the 64 aboard the doomed jetliner. The fireball occurred when the jetliner's full fuel tank exploded on impact and roared down corridors so fast that "90% didn't know what happened to them," he said. Many were sitting at their desks or behind partitions. One woman was found frozen in a sitting position, her arms posed as if reading a document. Several bodies were found huddled in groups near televisions. Pentagon workers were apparently watching the carnage taking place at the World Trade Center when the hellish scene on TV became reality for them, too. When Williams discovered the scorched bodies of several airline passengers, they were still strapped into their seats. The stench of charred flesh overwhelmed him. "It was the worst thing you can imagine," said Williams, whose squad from Fort Belvoir, Va., entered the building, less than four hours after the terrorist attack. "I wanted to cry from the minute I walked in. But I have soldiers under me and I had to put my feelings aside." ... snip ... ************ No. That is a winged shaped hole to the left of a more circular central impact hole. If you look above the SUV in the smoke, you will see the location of the central impact hole where the fuselage went into the building. This image has that region circled:
There are no replies to Comment # 108. End Trace Mode for Comment # 108.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestThe Loose Change narrator says: "The official explanation is that the intense heat from the jet fuel vapourised the entire plane. Indeed, from the pictures, it seems there was no discernible trace of a fully loaded Boeing 757 at the crash scene.
#97. To: Diana, Kamala, ALL (#90)
There did seem to be a lack of bodies and debris around the Pentagon crash site.
I believe the Pentagon was hit by a missle of some kind,
#101. To: BeAChooser (#97)
What kind of missile would make a hole like the pictures indicate?
#108. To: Diana, ALL (#101)
So the plane kind of melted into the building?
Did the bodies melt into the building too do you know?
In that first picture, is the main impact hole suppose the be above the white car with the "possible aircraft debris" around it, that is suppose to be the main impact hole?
Replies to Comment # 108.