Saturday, June 3, 2017
Robert Foley: Contradictions and Coincidences: What Happened on 9/11?
Robert Foley
[Editor's note: It was a great pleasure to receive this blog from Robert Foley, especially since it's dated just the day before I did an interview with Brian Ruhe, "9/11: Who was Responsible and Why?", which I publish here. I welcome comparisons and comments that address differences between us, where it seems to me that, by and large, we are on the same page. Very interesting stuff!]
An Australian man spotted this and posted it on YouTube:
Finally, there is this from a group of pictures released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They are photographs taken during 9/11 by a detective in a helicopter. This is from photo number 39.
This is all speculative, of course, but there are many anomalies. Like that unidentified flying object from the NIST photos. Like the collapse of Building 7. And, of course, there is the collapse of the towers. There is evidence of high-explosive material found in the dust of the towers. Independent analysts are sure it is a high-tech explosive called nano-thermite, but government representatives disagree. Only an independent inquiry will settle the matter.
I took a closer look at an image from the other camera.
[Editor's note: It was a great pleasure to receive this blog from Robert Foley, especially since it's dated just the day before I did an interview with Brian Ruhe, "9/11: Who was Responsible and Why?", which I publish here. I welcome comparisons and comments that address differences between us, where it seems to me that, by and large, we are on the same page. Very interesting stuff!]
What Happened on 9/11?
I have never been much of a conspiracy buff. Even though my
Irish-Catholic parents worshiped JFK, I took little interest in the
assassination conspiracy theories. So when some people started calling
9/11 an inside job, I dismissed it as the idea of the chronically
suspicious, the tinfoil-hat types who were sure the moon landings were
faked. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as the 9/11 Truth
movement until I ran across a book in the library by a Toronto
journalist who was skeptical of the conspiracy story and at pains to
debunk it. That made me curious, and I watched some YouTube videos and
did some reading online. Then I read articles and watched videos by
apparent experts who reassured the reader or viewer that the conspiracy
was just a misinterpretation of the data, the result of false rumors, or
the product of overactive — not to say paranoid — imaginations. And
that seemed to settle it for me.
Then, one day last year, I got something on my Facebook page about an
ex-CIA pilot who had published three books attempting to show evidence
of a conspiracy and was coming out with a fourth when he mysteriously
killed his two children, himself, and even the family dog. The police
concluded that he had been distraught over his impending divorce, but
friends said he was happy and excited about his new book. Neighbors
heard no shots and for several days afterward, they saw a black SUV with
strange antennas on the roof. That induced me to go back and take a
second look. This time I couldn’t get past two things: the pristine lawn
at the Pentagon after the plane had allegedly hit the first floor, and
the crater in Shanksville, Pennsylvania where United 93 had allegedly
crashed. It just didn’t look like the site of a plane crash and I
couldn’t picture a field, no matter how soft the ground, swallowing an
entire airliner. The more I looked, the stranger things became.
There are, for instance, videos of the plane hitting the South Tower of
the World Trade Center in which it seems to simply disappear into the
building. It seems to defy the laws of physics. Then there are
eyewitness accounts in all three places that conflict with the official
stories. It was all very confusing, and I’m in no way sure that I have
solved it in a little under a year of going through research that many
others have compiled and put online. But I have my own theories of how
it was done and the reader can judge for himself or herself how
plausible it all is.
But before I launch into that, I want to address the first and biggest
objection that always arises when someone mentions the possibility of
9/11 being an inside job. That is the question, who in government would
do such a thing? Governments have been known to provoke wars that they
thought were in their interest. If country A wished to go to war with
country B, it could dress one of its ships in the colors of country B
and fire upon one of its own ships, thus creating a justification for
war. Is that what 9/11 was? And who would justify the murder of
approximately three thousand people and for what reason?
I can’t answer that with any certainty because I don’t know. Suspicion,
however, seems to center around the Project for a New American Century
(PNAC). That is a think tank made up primarily by neoconservatives who
are foreign policy hawks. Their position is that America has become an
imperial power whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not. America
rules the waves as Britain did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
up until World War II and the rise of American military power. They
believe that this power can’t be un-built and any attempt to do so would
be destructive and disruptive to world order. So the best thing America
can do is to use its power for good, to maintain order and try to force
change in places that are resistant to democracy and free markets,
which are thought to be essential to freedom. Still, it is a great leap
to go from knowing that a group of neocons thought that Saddam Hussein
and his regime had to go, and imagining that a cabal planned and
executed 9/11. That is why I was skeptical until just last year. So I’m
going to go briefly step-by-step over the three attacks. First I’ll give
the official story, then the anomalies, and finally I will present
things that I or others have found and how those things can be arranged
into a plausible alternative scenario.
The World Trade Center
The Official Story
The official story is that, on the morning of September 11, 2001, planes
out of Boston — American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight
175 — were hijacked by Arab men armed with box-cutters. Flight 11 took
off at 7:59 AM and Flight 175 took off fifteen minutes later at 8:14.
Flight 11 had 92 people on board; Flight 175 had 65. Both were Boeing
767s. At 8:46, the hijackers crashed Flight 11 into the 93rd to the 99th
floors of the North Tower, Tower One. At 9:03, Flight 175 crashed into
ten floors of the South Tower, floors 75-85. At 9:59, the South Tower
collapsed. Twenty-nine minutes later, at 10:28, the North Tower
collapsed. The official story — or stories, because the original was
slightly altered later — is that fires caused a softening of the steel
to the point that the connections gave way, creating a pancaking effect
and pulverizing everything on the way down.
The most glaring problem with that story is that, while there have been
skyscraper fires that have gutted the whole buildings, none has ever
collapsed. The towers were built to be exceptionally strong, strong
enough to endure the impact of a Boeing 707, the largest airliner at
that time. Engineers, architects, scientists, and experts of all stripes
have come forward to say that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to
soften, let alone melt, steel. Firefighters are on record as saying they
saw molten steel in the basements. Satellite images show hot spots in
the locations of the towers and fires continued to burn underground for
weeks after September 11.
Another problem is the collapse of WTC Building 7. That was a 42-story
building across the street from Buildings 5 and 6 and the main World
Trade Center complex. It suffered no obvious structural damage during
the collapse of the towers, but fires were ignited inside the building.
Late in the afternoon of September 11, at 5:20, it collapsed, falling
straight down. Again, the collapse of a steel-frame building from
relatively small fires is mysterious. There is also the fact, suspicious
to many, that it appears to collapse exactly like buildings that are
brought down by controlled demolition. If it were, it would have taken
weeks or months in advance, according to experts, to prepare a building
that size for demolition. It is not something that can be done in an
afternoon. The official story is that the fires were responsible for
bringing it down and no explosives were used.
As mentioned, the video of the alleged United 175 hitting the South
Tower is very strange. Supposedly, it was traveling at such speed that
it simply sliced through the steel of the building leaving no trace of
it outside or on the street below. Professional pilots question whether a
plane at a thousand feet could go as fast as it is claimed Flight 175
was going. They also question whether a novice pilot could hit that
target at that speed. In addition, there appears to be no resistance on
the part of Tower 2. Even if the plane were going upwards of 500 mph,
even if it punched a hole in the side of the tower, one would expect to
see pieces of the plane blown backwards and falling after impact. A
karate master can break a board or a concrete block with his fist, but
there is a reaction in the form of pain felt in his hand. The building
had to have offered some resistance and sent energy backward in
resistance to the force of the plane.
There is also a good deal of confusion about engines, one of which was
found on the street, north of the WTC. Experts who have looked at the
picture, however, say it doesn’t appear to belong to a Boeing 767. In
addition, there is a good deal of confusion by eyewitnesses over what
they saw. Someone who saw what strike the North Tower said it looked
like a small jet. People who saw what struck the South Tower say it was a
dark gray, military-looking plane. Some say it had no windows. Some see
some kind of protuberance on the underside of the plane in photos and
videos — a so-called “pod”. They believe this is part of a military
aircraft or something used to penetrate the steel walls. Many believe
the plane was empty and flown by remote-control, something that has been
possible for several decades. So after reading and watching videos and
looking at many photographs and not being able to make more progress, I
decided to use a photo editor and look at the pictures and video stills
from New York. I first looked at a still from a video of United 175
heading for the South Tower:
I was curious about the way the tail pipe curved downward. Unlike on a typical airliner:
On an airliner, that is the exhaust for the auxiliary engine, the engine
that powers the plane when the main engines aren’t turning. I used the
photo app in Windows 10 with its various filters and got this:
Viewed through a filter, the plane appeared transparent and there appeared to be internal structures. I enlarged it:
In this video, the plane appears shadowy and gray. I tried the same
thing with stills from videos that showed an image of a plane clearly
marked as a United Airlines plane and they were opaque. I looked at a
still taken from the other side:
This also seemed to be transparent. A closer look:
It has what appears to be a spiral tube in front connected to a tank of
some kind. The bright spot on the front is the other engine. There are,
as far as I can see, only three possibilities here. This may be a
photographic artifact. The images of the plane’s right side, however,
are too detailed to be an artifact. The other possibility is that they
are faked. I can assure the reader that at the time, I had never used a
photo editing program and had no idea how to do it. Even now, when I’ve
had a little more experience with photo editing, I’m not sure I could do
something like this successfully. That doesn’t preclude the possibility
that someone else faked them. The only thing I can say about that is
that I think that if I or anyone else were going to embed an image
within the image of the plane, I would have simply grabbed a picture of a
cruise missile off the Internet and stuck it in there. Who would come
up with such an outlandish-looking object if it didn’t have a practical
purpose?
The third alternative I initially rejected as too far out there to be
true. Some have suggested that no plane hit the South Tower at all. They
believe that, either there was nothing in the air and the holes in the
building were blown open by internal explosives, or else, an idea I
considered too far-fetched, they were laser projections, projected in
mid-air and visible to both the naked eye and cameras. it sounded like
the product of the fevered imaginations of the Internet conspiracy
crowd, but there is a Washington Post story from 1999 that says in the
mid-nineties, a general was idly musing That it would be good if they
could project an image of Allah in the sky telling the people of Iraq to
rise up against Saddam. The Pentagon being the Pentagon, somebody
started researching it. It turned out to feasible but would require
building a mirror a square mile in area and floating in space —
prohibitively costly even for the U.S. military.
But just because a giant image of Allah was unfeasible doesn’t mean they
gave up on the idea. There is a YouTube video posted in recent years
which purports to be of an Alaskan Airlines commuter plane. The person
shooting the video says he can even hear the sound of the engines. The
problem is, the propellers aren’t turning. If that video is genuine, and
that is a laser projection of realistic-looking Alaska Airlines plane,
it seems that in 2001, it may have been possible to project a gray,
shadowy image of a plane in the air. If that was a laser image, I began
to wonder what those objects were that look far more solid than the
plane itself. The thing visible on the right side of the “plane” seems
to clearly be a bomb with tail-fins. On the left side, the spiral tube
struck me as resembling a laser tube:
The laser resonator tube is where photons bounce back and forth until
they acquire enough energy to break through the partially-mirrored
surface in front. In 2001, the military had a laser weapon capable of
cutting through the steel of artillery shells and missiles:
Some time after, I found this picture
It is supposed to have been found at the site of the World Trade Center.
If that isn’t part of an airplane, it looks a lot like a laser
resonator tube. Going on the assumption that a laser was part of that
flying craft in the picture, I started looking into military lasers. The
high-energy laser used by the military is a gas laser, also used in
industry. It creates energy by mixing gases together. That being the
case, I wondered if what appears to be a tail pipe on that object could
be used for exhausting gas from the laser. I took some stills from a
video:
It could be that smoke from the auxiliary engine or something else is
being ejected. It’s hard to explain, however, that explosion beginning
on the center of the east-facing wall. It would seem if that wall were
going to explode outward, it would start nearer to the side where the
plane was entering the building. So this doesn’t prove that there was a
gas laser used to cut through the steel walls. The technology, however,
existed at the time, so it remains a possibility. I then wondered if
something similar could be seen in the film of the plane hitting the
North Tower.
The images are blurry, but in frame 7, the shadow of the plane has
straight edges. In frame 8, it seems to be obscured. In frame 9,
something that looks like a plume of black smoke appears to be rising.
In frames 10 and 11, it forms a black ball, and in frame 12, it
dissipates. Some have said that it is a shadow, but in frames 10 and 11,
if it is a shadow, it seems to be detached from whatever is casting it.
Bear in mind, all the photos I’ve used have been taken off the
Internet. They are of uncertain provenance, they have been uploaded and
downloaded many times, and blowing up pictures can create strange
effects. Therefore none of this necessarily constitutes proof that would
convict someone. I enlarged a still from this film taken by the French
Naudier brothers who were doing a documentary on New York firefighters.
It is the only film of the impact with the North Tower.
It doesn’t appear to have side engines, but it does seem to have a large
exhaust portal in back. There looks to be a smaller exhaust portal
below, perhaps for the laser exhaust. The D-shaped hole somewhat
resembles that of the Global Hawk surveillance drone which has a
wingspan comparable to a Boeing 737.
If that is an exhaust port in the North Tower plane, it indicates a
centrally-located engine. Someone spotted this in the hole in the North
Tower:
It’s hard to understand how a plane with two engines, one on each wing,
ended up depositing one engine in the center of the hole. These images
appear to be too detailed to be merely imaginary. This from the South
Tower. They may be subliminal images added in real time or Photo-shopped
into the still picture later. Again, anyone could have faked the
pictures, but if 9/11 was a plot, it was a psy-op, a psychological
operation intended to induce a population to do something, like the big
image of Allah in the sky over Iraq. These would be intended to provoke
fear and anxiety in viewers. Subliminal images register subconsciously
and so bypass the conscious mind, provoking emotions that the conscious
mind can’t account for and ascribes to the action on the television.
These are some more that I believe to have been inserted for the benefit of people searching the Internet. The only Viewpoint.com I
could find was a firm selling architectural and engineering software,
including a graphics program, perhaps used to create the images.
Some more from a still from a South Tower impact video.
There are videos on YouTube where you can view these. At normal speed,
they go by faster than the eye can see. They’re just blurs. At
super-slow motion, they appear to be flying at the normal speed for
birds. That is, when everything else is moving in slow motion, these
“birds” appear to be moving at normal speed. Someone estimated they must
be moving at supersonic speed — a bit fast for your ordinary New York
pigeon. Apparently, the military has developed drone birds for
surveillance that are so realistic, they even flap their wings. There
appear to be whole flocks of them around the World Trade Center on 9/11.
An Australian man spotted this and posted it on YouTube:
It appears in at least one other video of the South Tower impact. It
flies past the towers just a moment after the explosion in the South
Tower.
The white spot is debris from the tower. The Australian man believes it
is a bunker-buster bomb headed for Building 6. Compare the silhouette
with that of the Paveway II bunker-buster. The tail fins unfold in
flight.
The bottom picture is the interior of WTC Building 6. Although it was
supposed to have been destroyed by falling debris from the towers, there
are no large pieces from the towers to be seen . Compare to this:
This is a German U-Boat pen destroyed by a British bunker-buster bomb in
World War II. Notice the similarity in the way everything is hanging
down. The upper picture appears to show that something exploded from
within. In the interior, there were no furnishings to be seen, no
wallboard, and no doors left — odd if it were only destroyed by falling
debris.
Light-colored smoke could be seen rising from the area of Building 6 at
the time of the South Tower’s collapse. Plumes of light smoke and dust
were rising from underground many yards from the South Tower. If it came
from Building 6, the light color may be due to the fact that it is
composed mostly of wallboard.
Finally, there is this from a group of pictures released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They are photographs taken during 9/11 by a detective in a helicopter. This is from photo number 39.
In the original photo, the object is tiny and could be easily
overlooked. Nevertheless, someone spotted it, enlarged it, and posted it
online. Whatever it is, it resembles the object seen within the South
Tower plane. It’s heading south after both towers have come down. I
speculate it is heading to Building 4. The white square may be a target
for a laser and it may have been cloaked by a laser projection earlier,
but in the smoke from the buildings, it would be neither possible nor
necessary to continue to cloak it.
The dark, rounded object in front could be a kind of battering ram. In
the South Tower this may be the object that emerged from the opposite
wall.
Some people say that is a landing gear. Some say it is the nose of the
plane, proving that it was no ordinary plane. It looks like a bullet. It
also seems to be detached. It seems to bear a resemblance to the object
at the front of the craft in photo 39. If it was much smaller than the
nose of a plane, it could explain why there isn’t much of a hole where
that object emerges. It may have broken through where the arrows are
pointing and the steel beams are broken and bent.
Lastly, there is building five:
It appears comparatively less damaged than Building 6, but there is a
large round hole in the roof. Could that have been made by an incendiary
bomb?
So let’s put together an alternative narrative for what happened in New
York on September 11. Whether the planes even took off from Boston is
yet another contested question. Either way, what hit the North Tower was
a modified Global Hawk. Simultaneously, explosives went off in parts of
the upper stories and some material was ignited that burned through the
steel creating the parts of the hole supposedly made by the wings. It
may have had explosives on board which detonated, ensuring there was
nothing identifiable left, besides the engine. Then the strange flying
vehicle, cloaked by laser projection, hit the South Tower. For what it’s
worth, there is a video taken from across the East River and somewhat
north of the WTC. There is alarm at the smoke billowing from the North
Tower. Suddenly, a young woman screams, “What the (expletive) is that?”
She screams it twice. Now, New Yorkers are quite familiar with
airplanes. Why did she not say something like, “Look there’s another
plane”? Why does she sound genuinely baffled by what she’s seeing. Is it
because the projection didn’t appear at that angle and they saw what
hit the South Tower, the vehicle without its cloaking?
In any event, almost simultaneous with the impact in the South Tower, a
bunker-buster was launched from the air and struck Building 6. It had a
delayed fuse which was set to explode at the time the South Tower was
demolished, thereby hiding the explosion in Building 6. At some point,
an incendiary might have hit Building 5, setting it on fire. When the
North Tower was brought down, the second flying vehicle, similar to the
one that hit the South Tower was sent to destroy Building 4. At 5:20PM,
pre-planted explosives brought down Building 7, completing the
destruction of the World Trade Center, and causing very little damage to
surrounding buildings.
The implication is, of course, that explosives were planted in the towers well in advance, as well.
The implication is, of course, that explosives were planted in the towers well in advance, as well.
It would have been a daunting task for a cell of twenty Arab terrorists
to gain access to the towers, and, posing as workmen, plant enough
explosives in two towers and a 42-story building. Plus, it would take
expertise possessed by few people in the world. Viewed from that
perspective, it is implausible that the explosives would have been
planted by the alleged hijackers. There is a lot of circumstantial
evidence that others gained access to the towers, sometimes at night
after the cleaning crews had left, and sometimes, perhaps during the
day, on empty floors. There are also “squibs”, so-called — puffs of dust
and smoke — emerging down the building ahead of the collapse. If they
were the result of air-pressure, they were powerful enough to blow
sections of the tower walls, each weighing tons, as far as five-hundred
yards, and with enough force to cause them to stick into the sides of
buildings.
This is all speculative, of course, but there are many anomalies. Like that unidentified flying object from the NIST photos. Like the collapse of Building 7. And, of course, there is the collapse of the towers. There is evidence of high-explosive material found in the dust of the towers. Independent analysts are sure it is a high-tech explosive called nano-thermite, but government representatives disagree. Only an independent inquiry will settle the matter.
The Pentagon
The Official Story
The Official Story
At 8:20AM, American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, took off from
Dulles Airport, west of Washington, D.C., and headed for Los Angeles.
There were supposed to be 64 people on board, although according to the
manifest published on CNN’s website, there were only 52. It was nineteen
minutes late taking off. At almost 8:51 AM, Flight 77 radioed its last
communication. It was 285 miles west of the Pentagon. At 8:56, the
transponder stopped transmitting. It begins a 180 degree turn over
southern Ohio and heads back in the direction of Washington. At 9:05,
West Virginia air traffic control spots an unidentified blip with no
transponder signal. At 9:33, Washington flight control sees a
fast-moving blip inbound. Minutes after the FAA grounded all takeoffs
nationwide, a C-130 cargo plane was dispatched from Andrews Air Force
Base to Minnesota. Air controllers at Ronald Reagan National Airport in
Washington ask the pilots to see if they can locate Flight 77. They
report seeing it, and, by their own account, turned around and followed
until it was too far away to see where it had gone down. Then they
proceeded on their original course. That was at 9:36. One minute later,
the plane hits the western side of the Pentagon.
There are numerous problems that arise here. One glaring one is that the
alleged pilot of the hijacked Flight 77, Hani Hanjour, is supposed to
have been a terrible pilot, according to the flight instructor at the
school in Florida where they were supposedly learning to fly.
Nevertheless, he did what professional pilots call a very difficult
maneuver, turning 270 degrees while descending, then avoiding highway
signs, crashing the plane into the first floor of the Pentagon, all
without harming the lawn. There are questions about why that part of the
building was chosen by the terrorists to crash the plane. Not only were
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the top brass on the other side
of the building, the side that was hit was recently refurbished and
almost empty. For a group of super-terrorists who launched the biggest
and most complex terrorist attack in history, they seemed to make some
critical mistakes. Not only was that section of the Pentagon nearly
empty, but part of the refurbishing included reinforcing the walls and
windows to guard against truck bombs and other forms of attack.
There is also the fact that the airspace over the Pentagon is protected. Commercial airliners aren’t allowed to fly over, and military aircraft have special transponders identifying them as friendly. Pentagon defenses should have been engaged, but apparently they weren’t. There is a good deal of confusion, some say deliberately sown, about military exercises being carried out that day. Adding to the confusion for military air traffic control, there were a good many false blips on radar, supposedly associated with the exercises.
There is also the fact that the airspace over the Pentagon is protected. Commercial airliners aren’t allowed to fly over, and military aircraft have special transponders identifying them as friendly. Pentagon defenses should have been engaged, but apparently they weren’t. There is a good deal of confusion, some say deliberately sown, about military exercises being carried out that day. Adding to the confusion for military air traffic control, there were a good many false blips on radar, supposedly associated with the exercises.
There is also confusion on the part of eyewitnesses. Some said it was an
airliner like a 757. Others said it looked more like a 737. In
addition, there was a Citgo gas station across the highway from the west
wall of the Pentagon. The official story says Flight 77 approached
along a flight path that took it south of that gas station. But several
credible eyewitnesses, including two Pentagon police officers, claim
they saw an airliner flying low past the north side of the station. The
owner and his son also claimed to have seen or heard it flying to the
north of the station. Someone who was a pilot described the plane as
being no bigger than a Gulfstream 300 private jet. Another said it
looked like a humpback whale! How to make sense of all these conflicting
accounts? Then there are the pictures released by the Pentagon in 2002.
They were taken by two security cameras a good distance away. They also
took a picture only once every second, so there is a good deal of
missing information. The footage was released in 2006. They’ve added
fuel to the debate rather than settled it.
The picture on the right is my attempt to enhance a frame of the film.
The front A of the American Airlines logo can be seen clearly while the
rest can’t, indicating the vehicle is angled away, approaching the
Pentagon at obliquely from the south as the official story says.
There is a smoke trail there that some believe is coming from an engine
on that aircraft who’s tail is visible. However, it pretty clearly has
come straight across the image from the right, while the aircraft is
coming at an angle.
I took a closer look at an image from the other camera.
In this frame, the smoke trail appears, but there is no aircraft to make
it. I tried a number of things in a photo editor. Finally, I inverted
the colors and got this:
There is a dark shadow in front of the smoke trail in the original
picture. In the inverted colors it seems to be a solid object.
This is cropped, enlarged, and filtered through a sepia filter. Some more views:
It seems to be solid and stand out from the background. I maintain that
the pointed object in front is a depleted uranium dart, which is what
one would want to break through the Kevlar-reinforced wall of the
Pentagon. There is circumstantial evidence that depleted uranium might
have been used. A scientist was using a Geiger counter outdoors and
downwind from the Pentagon and saw a momentary spike in the reading a
little while after the crash. Also, when repair work was being done on
the Pentagon, crushed gravel and sand was put down, ostensibly to
protect the lawn, but it would have the benefit of keeping down
radiation. It may not be a coincidence, also, that when the surface for
the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial — located by the wall that was struck — was
chosen, they chose stabilized gravel. As for the aircraft that is
approaching from the south, it is hard to believe that an entire 757
would be entirely hidden by the box in the foreground, even if it were
at an angle. The thing that stood out for me was the person who said the
aircraft he saw looked like a humpback whale. That’s an odd description
for an airliner but a good one for a Global Hawk drone.
Modified and painted to look like an American Airlines jet, it might
fool most people. With its wingspan comparable to a 737 and moving at a
high rate of speed, people would be hard-pressed to say what else it
could be. The pilot who said it was no larger than a private jet was
also an EMT. He rushed over to see if he could help victims, but, of
course, there were none to be seen. What he did see were thin shards of
aluminum and small bits of a black, fibrous material. The Global Hawk is
made of light aluminum and its wings are made of a Kevlar-carbon
composite. The wreckage was small and light enough to be picked up by
hand. Who these men are and why they’re removing evidence from a crime
scene is unknown to me.
So we have credible eyewitnesses that saw an airliner flying toward the
Pentagon on a route different than the one in the official report. We
have conflicting descriptions of what flew toward the building via the
official route. We have a smoke trail heading toward the wall that
doesn’t appear to belong to the aircraft in the Pentagon closed-circuit
video images. And we have eyewitness evidence of wreckage that could
match that of a Global Hawk. So I speculate that it could have gone like
this. A Global Hawk drone was modified and painted in the American
Airlines colors. (The military says it lost two in Afghanistan. Counting
the one that may have hit the North Tower in New York, that might
account for the missing drones.)
A Tomahawk cruise missile was equipped with a depleted-uranium dart on
the front. And an empty 757 or 767 was in the air, either piloted or
unmanned. That was the plane eyewitnesses at the Citgo station saw fly
past, north of the station. The Global Hawk followed the official route.
And a cruise missile was probably launched by air from somewhere. A
number of witnesses say they saw a C-130 cargo plane flying close behind
the jet. One person who was a reporter for USA Today said he thought it
was an electronic warfare plane. The Pentagon said it was the C-130
that had been sent from Andrews Air Base, but the pilots of that plane
said they didn’t get close enough to Washington to see where the plane
hit.
The EC-130 has distinctive antennae on its tail. If someone were
familiar with aircraft, he couldn’t mistake it. It has various roles,
but one is jamming electronic communication. Was it jamming Pentagon
electronics to defeat its defenses and allow the airliner to penetrate
Pentagon airspace? Could it have also launched a cruise missile?
The airliner, the drone, and the missile arrived almost simultaneously,
with the missile arriving first, just a little ahead of the others. The
explosion obliterated the Global Hawk, which might have had on=board
explosives of its own. This pushed the blast in the direction from which
the Global Hawk was flying, explaining why most of the damage inside
the Pentagon, follows the flight path, but a significant amount is
spread straight through in the direction the missile hit. At the same
time, the airliner pulled up and flew over the roof of the Pentagon. A
worker going to his car saw an airliner fly over the roof and the
parking lot. However, someone checked it on Google Earth and could see
no airliner over the Pentagon for that day and time. Yet we have
recently learned that both the CIA and NSA developed hacking tools to
gain access to various devices and media. Could they have hacked Google
Earth and wiped the image of the plane out?
This explains better the conflicting witness accounts, the damage
pattern within the building, and the lack of damage without. It explains
the strange wreckage outside the Pentagon and the lack of identifiable
wreckage inside. And it explains how an apparently inexperienced and
inept pilot was able to do what professional pilots can only do on a
flight simulator after many tries. Because he didn’t do it at all.
As for the damage pattern in the facade of the Pentagon, there is some
question about whether that damage pattern was visible immediately after
the “crash”. For some time after, a fire engine was fighting a fire
from a suspiciously long distance away:
The water effectively concealed the view of the lower part of the wall.
Low-grade explosives might have been used during that time to blow out
the walls in a pattern resembling that of damage done by airplane wings.
At some point, well after the crash, a loud explosion was heard which
may have been a pre-placed explosive that brought the roof down,
concealing any tell-tale evidence that might be seen from outside.
So this is an alternate scenario for the Pentagon. Again, there is
little solid evidence. Just circumstantial evidence that the official
story is full of problems, much like New York. The last crash was in
Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a rural area with far few witnesses than New
York and Washington. Nevertheless, it may be the Shanksville crash that
has the most convincing evidence of a plot. And an interesting link
between the Pentagon and Shanksville is, curiously enough, the C-130
that was sent from Andrews Air Force Base to Minnesota.
Shanksville
The Official Story
The Official Story
United Airlines Flight 93 was ready for take off at 8:01 that morning.
It was bound for San Francisco. There were forty-four people on board,
although the CNN count is thirty-three. There would be a forty-one
minute delay. At 9:00, Flight 93 was over Pennsylvania. United Airlines
sent out a system-wide warning of a cockpit invasion in United 93.
Flight 93 responded, “Confirmed.” At 9:28, there is the sound of
scuffling in the cockpit. At 9:35, it turns to the southeast over
Cleveland, presumably headed for Washington. At 9:40, the plane’s
transponder stops. At 9:58 passengers, who have apparently been alerted
about the events in New York, attempt to storm the cockpit. At 10:00, a
man flying a private plane near Shanksville reports seeing a plane with
United Airlines colors about three miles distant. He says the wings
rocked back and forth for a few minutes. He thought afterward the
hijackers were trying to throw the attacking passengers off balance. At
10:03, the cockpit voice recorder stops and Flight 93 crashes into the
field in Shanksville.
As with the other two attacks, there is a good deal of confusion
surrounding eyewitness accounts. And, as with the Pentagon, the field in
Shanksville doesn’t look like the typical crash site. There is no large
wreckage. The engines, which are basically indestructible, are nowhere
to be seen. The authorities said that the soft ground absorbed most of
the plane while the rest was blown to small bits.
There are numerous eyewitnesses who were on the ground and saw an
airliner flying at fairly low altitude. Some saw a small jet like a
private jet. One described it as a scout plane. At least one person saw a
small aircraft that didn’t look big enough to hold people. And one
woman saw a white, cylindrical object fly over her van while she was
driving north in the direction of the crash site. She said it didn’t
have wings but, rather, something like the spoiler on a race car on the
back and that it was no longer than her van. It went under power lines
and over the trees, banking right to the northeast and headed in the
direction of the field where the plane allegedly crashed.
People have shown her pictures of numerous aircraft of all descriptions,
but they have yet to find anything that matches what she saw. She says
she also saw a triangular plane that she thought was a fighter at a high
altitude and flying rapidly away. And, along with all those aircraft,
the C-130 that took off from Andrews was seen seventeen miles from
Shanksville. The route from Washington to Minnesota took it close enough
to Shanksville for the pilots to see the smoke from the crash. So there
was a lot of air traffic that morning for a small spot in rural
Pennsylvania.
People also say they heard two or three thumps like distant explosions.
Part of one engine was found in a nearby pond, a good distance from the
crash site. Debris, such as personal papers and letters bound for
California, was found in the local area, but also at Indian Lake, two
miles to the southeast, and New Baltimore, eight miles southeast.
Some people at Indian Lake say the heard or saw an airliner go over, flying low and trailing debris. The mayor of Indian lake says he heard a low, fast-flying plane go over. He and others report that lights flickered and cell phones and satellite TV were interrupted prior to the explosion.
Some people at Indian Lake say the heard or saw an airliner go over, flying low and trailing debris. The mayor of Indian lake says he heard a low, fast-flying plane go over. He and others report that lights flickered and cell phones and satellite TV were interrupted prior to the explosion.
People in the vicinity say the saw an airliner, but it was on a flight
path and an altitude that conflicts with the official story. In
addition, seismic stations in the Shanksville area recorded a signal
indicating some sort of explosion at 10:06 rather than 10:03 but no
signal for the earlier time. The plane hit, according to the official
story, at a forty-degree angle. But witnesses say the angle was much
steeper, perhaps as much as eighty degrees or more. The crater and wing
marks as well as the official flight data indicate the plane was headed
from the northwest to the southeast. Yet blast damage is in the
direction of the southwest.
No blood was found, nor was any jet fuel found. There was no need for an
EPA cleanup, though the plane was carrying thousands of pounds of fuel.
The woman who saw the flying craft above her van was interviewed by the
FBI. They said it was a 757. She said it was no airliner. They said she
really didn’t know airplanes. She became indignant at the insinuation
that she wouldn’t recognize an airliner flying fifty feet above her van.
They then became more polite and said that a private corporate jet had
been asked to descend to view the crash site. She asked, “Before the
crash?” At which point they abruptly stood up and said they had to be
going. No one has ever come forward to say they were on a corporate jet
in the Shanksville area that day.
So there are conflicts with the official story. I think a plausible
alternate scenario would go like this. Flight 93 was delayed in Newark
for forty minutes. During that time, mail and luggage was taken off.
Personal papers and the mail were put on another 757. It took off right
after Flight 93 and followed close behind so as not to be seen by radar.
Near Cleveland, United 93 continued on. The other 757 turned and headed
southeast. At some point, it was joined by a small corporate-type jet.
It was piloted by two of the purported hijackers. There is some evidence
that a few at least got real flight training at various military bases
around the country. When air traffic control tried to contact Flight 93,
the pilots of the small jet answered in a distinct Arab accent. They
faked an attack by passengers for the benefit of the cockpit voice
recorder.
Meanwhile, a fighter jet had launched a drone armed with a self-destruct
mechanism. Target drones used for artillery practice have explosive,
remotely-controlled self-destruct systems to destroy the drone if it
should go astray. The drone passed over the woman’s mini-van, banked to
the northeast, circled around and embedded itself in the ground without
exploding. Having come from the northeast, it was pointing toward the
southwest. Witnesses say they saw their lights flicker and cell phones
and satellite TV were interrupted. Apparently, when a plane launches a
missile, it “lights up” the area with radar. It causes lights to flicker
and an interruption in electronic devices. This may be the explanation
for that.
North of Shanksville, the 757 departed from the official route and began
descending. The small jet continued on the official route. The 757
descended to a low altitude, perhaps two hundred feet, flying over hills
and heading east to rejoin the official flight path. The small jet
meanwhile had rocked its wings back and forth, then descended at a
forty-degree angle toward the field. Thirty seconds before the “crash”,
they turned on the transponder, which was set to identify it as Flight
93, to make sure air traffic control knew it was hijacked plane. Near
the ground, they shut off the flight data recorder, the cockpit voice
recorder, and the transponder, and flew off. The time was 10:03. They
stayed in the area waiting for the 757. The 757 had added about twelve
miles and three minutes to its route. It rocked its wings back and
forth, as well, for the benefit of eyewitnesses.
Near the field, a pre-planted explosive blew off the fan and part of one
engine, which landed in or near the pond. It then banked hard to the
right as seen by several eyewitnesses, and went into a steep dive. As it
neared the ground, a second charge blew a hole in the fuselage and the
letters and papers began streaming out. The only sizable piece of a
plane found, besides the engine part, was a piece of fuselage. It pulled
out of its dive and, when it was a safe distance away, the drone was
exploded, creating the crater in the field. At this point a woman who
heard the explosion and was an amateur photographer ran out and got a
picture of the smoke cloud rising from the field.
The 757 continued on to Indian Lake, where it was seen strewing debris,
and on to New Baltimore, where more debris was found. The small jet took
a couple of turns around to see that everything looked good, and flew
off in the direction from which it had come. It was seen flying low
enough to blow leaves off the trees by a woman who had also seen the 757
flying low over her house toward the field. And what of the other small
aircraft, the one that looked to small to hold people? I believe that
was an MQ1 Predator drone, used to oversee the whole operation. The
ground control station for the Predator is contained in a box, somewhat
like that for a tractor-trailer
The ground control system can be transported in a number of ways,
including in the cargo hold of a C-130. So this is perhaps why the C-130
was dispatched with such urgency from Andrews Air Base. Calculating the
distance to Shanksville and the cruising speed of a C-130, the plane
would have been arriving at exactly the time the 757 was in the area.
The pilot and co-pilot said they hadn’t been informed about the New York
attack. It’s possible they were unaware of the nature of their cargo.
The 757, meanwhile, was flying southeast. A line drawn from Shanksville
to New Baltimore and extended, ends at Washington. However, there is a
recording of NORAD controllers giving the latitude and longitude of
Flight 93’s last known position. The coordinates put it over a small
town in West Virginia called Paw Paw, across the Potomac from Maryland.
At that time it was 8200 feet, high enough to not attract attention and
low enough that oxygen and temperature wouldn’t be a problem for a plane
with a hole in it. Paw Paw, however, is considerably south of that line
drawn from Shanksville to Washington. If it turned at New Baltimore, a
line drawn from there to Paw Paw extends to Quantico, Virginia with its
air base. A little farther, and farther south, is Langley Air Base near
Hampton, VA. That happens to be the home of the 363rd Intelligence,
Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Wing. And, at that time, one of the
planes assigned to that wing at the time was the C-21A, the military
version of the Learjet 35.
Painted white and unmarked, it might have been the jet seen flying low around Shanksville.
The photo of the smoke cloud has been subject to some scrutiny. Whether that looks like the smoke from an airliner crash is one question. One eyewitness said even at the time that it didn’t look like enough smoke for an airliner. Another problem is that it doesn’t seem to line up with the crater in the field. It appears to be too far south, leading some to accuse the woman of faking the photo for profit.
The photo of the smoke cloud has been subject to some scrutiny. Whether that looks like the smoke from an airliner crash is one question. One eyewitness said even at the time that it didn’t look like enough smoke for an airliner. Another problem is that it doesn’t seem to line up with the crater in the field. It appears to be too far south, leading some to accuse the woman of faking the photo for profit.
There may be a good explanation, however. If the drone was in the ground
at an angle facing southwest, when it exploded most of the blast would
have gone in that direction and the cloud would have risen southwest of
the crater. Seen from the east, and obscured by trees, the cloud would
appear to be rising in the wrong place.
The burned trees point like an arrow to the southwest, though the plane was supposed to have impacted going southeast.
I said the Pennsylvania operation was more convincing because it didn’t
require any exotic technology beyond the Predator drone and whatever it
was that landed in the field and exploded. The entire thing is a work of
mind-boggling complexity. That makes it hard for people to believe it
could have been brought off. Yet it’s also hard to believe that a small
numbers of hijackers, armed only with box-cutters, overpowered pilots on
four airplanes and held the passengers at bay. It’s hard to believe
that hijackers who were indifferent flight students at best, could have
hit the towers at the speed they were estimated to be going. It is hard
to believe the hijacker pilot of Flight 77 brought off that difficult
maneuver at the Pentagon. It’s also peculiar that, looking at the
satellite photo, the hijackers in Pennsylvania seemed to have chosen the
one place in the area to crash the plane that wouldn’t involve the loss
of life or damage to valuable property. For ruthless terrorists, they
seem to have been at pains to minimize casualties. They attacked the
World Trade Center in the early morning when there were fewer people in
the buildings than there would have been later in the day. They picked
the one section of the Pentagon that was largely empty. It’s hard to
credit the fact that terrorists clever enough to plan the attacks and
bring them off, could have been so inept in certain areas of planning. A
simple question would have been, “What do we do if passengers attack
and try to retake the plane or crash it before we reach our target?” Yet
there doesn’t seem to have been any contingency plan.
Beyond the complexity of the operation is the enormity of the act. Whatever the motive, killing approximately three thousand of your fellow countrymen seems beyond the pale. We might expect fanatical jihadis to conclude that the end justifies the means, but we don’t expect people in our government to think that way. That is the biggest stumbling block for most people. Even if they could, they wouldn’t. However, I liken it to the fighter pilots who are scrambled to intercept a hijacked plane. If they can’t make contact by radio or visually, they have the authority to decide to shoot the plane down. The principle is that it is the lesser of two evils. Killing two hundred people who are almost certainly going to die in a crash, is better than letting two thousand, plus the passengers die when the hijackers crash the plane into a city. If you were in a position of power and what kept you up at night was the specter of Saddam Hussein getting a weapon, and the vision of a mushroom cloud rising over New York or some other city, then something that provoked a war that removed Saddam might begin to look like the lesser of two evils.
Beyond the complexity of the operation is the enormity of the act. Whatever the motive, killing approximately three thousand of your fellow countrymen seems beyond the pale. We might expect fanatical jihadis to conclude that the end justifies the means, but we don’t expect people in our government to think that way. That is the biggest stumbling block for most people. Even if they could, they wouldn’t. However, I liken it to the fighter pilots who are scrambled to intercept a hijacked plane. If they can’t make contact by radio or visually, they have the authority to decide to shoot the plane down. The principle is that it is the lesser of two evils. Killing two hundred people who are almost certainly going to die in a crash, is better than letting two thousand, plus the passengers die when the hijackers crash the plane into a city. If you were in a position of power and what kept you up at night was the specter of Saddam Hussein getting a weapon, and the vision of a mushroom cloud rising over New York or some other city, then something that provoked a war that removed Saddam might begin to look like the lesser of two evils.
And it’s hard to argue with the idea that Saddam would have been capable
of it. With his oil money, he might have acquired a weapon or weapons,
despite the best efforts of the UN inspectors. Who could say for sure
that he might not have wanted to go down in history as a hero to the
Arabs by striking a blow against the oppressive West and the State of
Israel? He had a demonstrated willingness to use weapons of mass
destruction, using gas in the Iran-Iraq War and against the Kurdish
people in the north of Iraq. So it was never clear that Saddam,
especially as he got older and felt he had nothing to lose, would not
launch a surprise attack, killing an untold number of people. It is even
possible that he might have teamed with al Qaeda, much as they despised
each other. Al Qaeda has ships and might have transported a weapon to
New York where it could have been transferred to a truck and detonated
in midtown Manhattan.
Still, it’s probably not wise to tell your government, “Go ahead and
suspend our rights and liberties. Arrest anyone you think to be an enemy
of the state, including those who don’t agree with you and are critical
of you publicly. Keep people under constant surveillance. Listen in on
their calls and read their correspondences. Anything, as long as you
keep us safe.” It would probably make one safe to fortify one’s house
and never leave, but most people don’t want to live that way. We take
risks when we get up in the morning. We take risks when we get in our
car. We ask government to keep risks to a reasonable level. But to ask
government to eliminate risk entirely is to ask for a police state.
Prior to 9/11, Americans were probably too complacent about the
possibility of terrorism. In spite of the bombing of the battleship
Cole, and the African embassy bombings, we were still fairly unconcerned
about terrorism on our shores. Our airport security was lax compared to
other countries. For the most part, the majority of us thought of
terrorism as something that happens elsewhere. Some people thought we
would need something really big on American soil to wake us up and be
willing to do what it took to fight terrorism. The September 11 attacks
were that event. Did they come out of the blue, planned for months by al
Qaeda terrorists living in Afghanistan? Or was the plan far more
complex and technologically sophisticated than Osama bin Laden and his
cohort could have ever brought off, and planned closer to home?
Many may not be persuaded by the disparities between the official story
and certain facts. They may believe there are other explanations for the
discrepancies. They may refuse to believe that members of the United
States government would launch an operation this size and with as many
casualties as there were, no matter what the motive. Perhaps. Perhaps
there are good explanations for the contradictions with the official
story. Perhaps the whole 9/11 Truth movement has been on a wild goose
chase. Still, the facts remain. Steel frame buildings don’t collapse
from fire. The Twin Towers were built to withstand the impact of a 707.
Flakes of a high-tech explosive have been found in the dust of the World
Trade Center. Why were cars near the Trade Center flipped on their
sides and on their roofs? Why were so many cars burned, even a block
away?
There seem to be strange flying objects in the air in New York that day.
The same goes for the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. What is the
explanation for all these flying craft? Why do credible eyewitnesses say
they saw an airliner heading toward the Pentagon on a different route
than the official story says? Why was a C-130 sent from Andrews Air
Force Base, minutes after the FAA had grounded air traffic, to Minnesota
on a route that took it right by Shanksville at the exact time of the
alleged crash of Flight 93?
To get answers, one has to ask questions. So long as we are willing to
not question the official story of 9/11, we will continue to be without
real answers.
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About Me
- Jim Fetzer
- McKnight Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of Minnesota Duluth; Founder, Scholars for 9/11 Truth; Editor, Assassination Science; Co-Editor, Assassination Research
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