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9/11 Revealed?

World Trade Center, September 11, 2001. (AP)

9/11 Revealed, published in August 2005, is the latest book putting forth bizarre conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.  Its two British authors, Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan, give credence to a hodgepodge of sinister, unfounded allegations.

The book claims a drone Boeing 757, or a smaller plane painted in American Airlines colors, hit the Pentagon, but ignores the fact that forensic specialists identified the crew and passengers of American Airlines flight 77 from remains found in the Pentagon, proving irrefutably that the flight hit the Pentagon.

The book claims the World Trade Center (WTC) twin towers collapsed because they were pre-rigged with explosives but ignores an extraordinarily thorough, three-year investigation by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).  NIST concluded the towers collapsed because the impact of the plane crashes severed and damaged support columns and dislodged fireproofing insulation from the steel floor trusses and support columns, which allowed the fires to weaken them to the point where they bowed, buckled, and failed.  It recently stated, in the WTC Towers Report (p. 12) on its Web site, that it found “no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition… .” 

The book suggests that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 building, which also collapsed on September 11, was intentionally demolished, citing a comment by the property owner that he had decided to “pull it.”  The property owner was referring to pulling a contingent of firefighters out of the building in order to save lives because it appeared unstable.

The book repeats long-standing rumors of insider trading based on alleged advance warnings of the attack.  It ignores the conclusion in The 9/11 Commission Report that all trades that initially appeared suspicious were found to have innocuous causes, after an exhaustive investigation.

The book takes the bizarre position that the September 11 attacks were not real terrorist attacks and were somehow designed to “limit casualties.”  Apparently, the largest terrorist event in history was not large enough to convince the books’ authors that it was real.

The Attack on the Pentagon

Allegation:  9/11 Revealed suggests that American Airlines flight 77 was not hijacked and flown into the Pentagon but that, instead, “a drone Boeing 757 is used or a smaller, more manageable plane painted in American Airlines colors.”

Facts:  This theory ignores the fact that the passenger and crew remains from American Airlines flight 77 were recovered at the Pentagon crash site.  A team of more than 100 forensic specialists and others identified 184 of the 189 people who died in the Pentagon attack (125 from the Pentagon and 64 onboard American Airlines flight 77).  All but one of the passengers onboard American Airlines flight 77 was positively identified as a match with DNA samples provided by the families of the crash victims, as reported in the Washington Post on November 21, 2001.  This provides irrefutable proof that American Airlines flight 77, not a drone or other aircraft, crashed into the Pentagon on September 11. 

The Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers

Allegation:  9/11 Revealed suggests that the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers occurred because not the terrorists flew airliners filled with jet fuel into them, but because the towers were “pre-rigged with explosives.” 

Facts:  The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted an extremely thorough, three-year investigation into what caused the WTC twin towers to collapse, as explained on NIST’s WTC Web site.  Some 200 staff reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than one thousand people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they collapsed.  Its conclusion is that the twin towers collapsed because the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns and dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, which meant that the subsequent fire, which reached 1000 degrees Celsius, weakened the floors and columns to the point where they bowed and buckled, causing the towers to collapse.

NIST’s Draft Summary Report stated (pp. 171-172):

The two aircraft hit the towers at high speed and did considerable damage to principal structural components: core columns, perimeter columns, and floors.  However, the towers withstood the impacts and would have remained standing were it not for the dislodged insulation and the subsequent multifloor fires.  …

In WTC 1, the fires weakened the core columns and caused the floors on the south side of the building to sag.  The floors pulled the heated south perimeter columns inward, reducing their capacity to support the building above.  Their neighboring columns quickly became overloaded as the south wall buckled.  The top section of the building titled to the south and began its descent.  …

In WTC 2, the core was damaged severely at the southeast corner ….  The steady burning fires on the east side of the building caused the floors there to sag.  The floors pulled the heated east perimeter columns inward, reducing their capacity to support the building above.  Their neighboring columns quickly became overloaded as the east wall buckled.  The top section of the building tilted to the east and to the south and began its descent.  …

The WTC towers would likely not have collapsed under the combined effects of aircraft impact and the extensive, multifloor fires if the thermal insulation had not been widely dislodged or had been only minimally dislodged by aircraft impact.

In September 2005, NIST issued a clarification in its WTC Towers Report, stating:

NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001.  NIST also did not find any evidence that missiles were fired at or hit the towers.  Instead, photos and videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward, until the dust clouds obscured the view.

Allegation: Other conspiracy theorists have claimed that the fact that the towers collapsed at near a "free fall" rate indicates that explosives were needed to cause this rapid a rate of collapse.

Facts: This allegation ignores the fact that the enormous weight of the top portions of the towers completely overwhelmed the carrying capacity of the floors beneath them, which is what caused the towers to collapse at very close to a "free fall" rate. NIST's Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers states:

The structure below the level of collapse initiation offered minimal resistance to the falling building mass .... The potential energy released by the downward movement of the large building mass far exceeded the capacity of the intact structure below to absorb that ....

Since the stories below the level of collapse initiation provided little resistance to the tremendous energy released by the falling building mass, the building section above came down essentially in free fall .... As the stories below sequentially failed, the falling mass increased, further increasing the demand on the floors below, which were unable to arrest the moving mass.

The falling mass of the building compressed the air ahead of it, much like the action of a piston, forcing material, such as smoke and debris, out the windows ....

The Collapse of World Trade Center 7

Allegation:  9/11 Revealed suggests that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 building, which collapsed at 5:20 pm on September 11, was intentionally demolished.  The primary piece of evidence for this is a comment that Mr. Larry Silverstein, who owned the World Trade Center complex, made on the September 2002 television documentary American Rebuilds.  Mr. Silverstein said:

I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire.  I said, you know, “We've had such terrible loss of life that the smartest thing to do is just pull it.”  And they made that decision to pull it and we watched the [World Trade Center 7] building collapse.

9/11 Revealed and other conspiracy theorists put forward the notion that Mr. Silverstein’s suggestion to “pull it” is slang for intentionally demolishing the WTC 7 building.

Facts:  On September 9, 2005, Mr. Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, issued the following statement on this issue:

Seven World Trade Center collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001, after burning for seven hours. There were no casualties, thanks to the heroism of the Fire Department and the work of Silverstein Properties employees who evacuated tenants from the building.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducted a thorough investigation of the collapse of all the World Trade Center buildings.  The FEMA report concluded that the collapse of Seven World Trade Center was a direct result of fires triggered by debris from the collapse of WTC Tower 1.

In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center.  The Commander told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the building working to contain the fires.  Mr. Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building.

Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his firefighters out of the building and at 5:20 p.m. the building collapsed.  No lives were lost at Seven World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

As noted above, when Mr. Silverstein was recounting these events for a television documentary he stated, “I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life.  Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it.”  Mr. McQuillan has stated that by “it,” Mr. Silverstein meant the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has stated unequivocally, “NIST has seen so evidence that the collapse of WTC 7 was caused by bombs, missiles, or controlled demolition,” in its Collapse of WTC 7 report (p. 6).  NIST’s working hypothesis for the collapse of WTC 7 is that it was caused by the collapse of a critical column due to “fire and/or debris induced structural damage.”  There was substantial damage to WTC 7 when the nearby WTC 1 tower collapsed and fires began shortly afterwards.  Also, WTC 7 was a very unusual building because it was built over an existing Con-Edison power generation substation, which contained two large 6,000 gallon fuel tanks for the emergency generation of power.  The fuel from these tanks could have contributed to the intense heat that apparently weakened the supporting columns in WTC 7.

Insider Trading

Allegation:  9/11 Revealed repeats long-standing rumors of “insider trading [based] on advance warnings of the attack.”

Facts:  The 9/11 Commission examined this issue in detail, stating, in The 9/11 Commission Report (p. 499):

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks.  Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation.  For example, the volume of put options – investments that pay off only when a stock drops in price – surged in the parent companies of United Airlines [UAL] on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 – highly suspicious trading on its face.  Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11.  A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10.  Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades.  These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation.  The SEC [Security and Exchange Commission] and the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments.  These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous.

Absurd, Sinister Interpretations

9/11 Revealed often places the most absurd, sinister interpretations upon unremarkable occurrences in its effort to construct complex conspiracy theories.  For example, it states:

According to the Kean Commission [9/11 Commission] Report (p. 168), in March 2000, [Mohammed Atta] “emailed 31 different U.S. flight schools on behalf of a small group of men from various Arab countries studying in Germany who, while lacking prior training, were interested in learning to fly in the United States.”  Why would a terrorist openly approach flying schools in the USA this way?

The obvious answer, of course, is that Mohammed Atta was not afraid to openly approach flying schools in the United States because he presumably did not identify himself to them as a terrorist who wished to learn how to fly planes in order that he could crash one into the World Trade Center.  This rather simple explanation seemed to have not occurred to the authors of 9/11 Revealed.

Similarly, 9/11 Revealed gives credence (p. 177) to nonsensical statements such as the one made by “Internet activist” Brian Quig: “[when Flight 77] bypassed a straight-in shot at the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, only to hit an insignificant spot in the back of the Pentagon, I said to myself then, it is not a real terrorist attack.”

The authors of 9/11 Revealed apparently do not believe that the largest terrorist attack in history was large enough to demonstrate that it was real.  Instead, in their minds, the fact that the terrorists did not fly even larger Boeing 747 jumbo jets into the World Trade Center towers, or attack an hour or two later, when more people would have been at work, or hit the offices of the Secretary of Defense or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, means that the events of 9/11 were not real terrorist attacks, but were engineered in order to minimize the number of deaths.  9/11 Revealed states bizarrely, “the attacks … seem almost designed to limit casualties.”  One wonders how many more thousands of people would have had to die to convince the authors of 9/11 Revealed that the attacks were real.

In sum, 9/11 Revealed is a collection of unfounded conspiracy theories that bear no relationship to the tragic realities of September 11.