BRATTLEBORO — At the Nuremberg Trials, Reich Marshal Hermann Göering testified, “Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”
I prefer to read the newspapers and rarely watch TV. But on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was visiting family in Mount Savage, Md., watching the news of the World Trade Center attacks. Within a half hour of each other, both towers were reduced to rubble. By the end of the day, Tower 7 collapsed in the exact same manner.
Sitting before the TV, something kept nagging me.
I had lived in New York City for a number of years and knew those towers well, how close together the buildings really were. That you could hardly drop a shoebox between them is an overstatement, but apropos.
It was the way and speed they came down that bothered me. I kept thinking, “Why didn't they tumble over? Why such a neat collapse?”
It looked like a well-planned and well-executed demolition job to me. It was too coincidental that three massive skyscrapers would all collapse into an astonishingly similar neat pile of rubble. Even then, the possibility of that truth bothered me.
If only half of what I write here is true, the implications are unsettling beyond repair.
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The Federal Emergency Management Agency's executive summary of the World Trade Center attacks states that jet fuel spread between floors, igniting building materials, generating heat so hot that it melted thousands of steel trusses, causing them to give way at the same time by warping and sagging, causing the bolts to fail and the building to fold like an accordion, collapsing one floor upon another.
The central premise of the report is that intense heat had melted steel, glass, and concrete. Yet steel, glass, and concrete cannot burn. Steel melts at above 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit.
The small, scattered fires in the towers contained orange flames consistent with a fire of 1,800 degrees in a controlled burn. The billowing smoke from the World Trade Center indicated an oxygen-starved - and, therefore, a cool - fire.
Yet, we are told the towers collapsed from flames and heat not hot enough to melt steel.
While the official story is that uneven fires deformed some of the steel, causing some floors to collapse, it does not explain what happened to the 47 four-inch-thick steel core columns and 236 exterior steel columns. If the floors buckled and fell, they would pull away from the core, and the main core would still stand. Instead, the core disappeared in the collapse. Moreover, each 110-story building collapsed to rubble in 10 seconds.
The towers were built to withstand multiple jet impacts and 140-mile-per-hour winds. No other building in the world has totally collapsed due to fire. Other steel-frame skyscrapers have sustained infernos for up to 20 hours without collapsing.
There were reports of explosive devices in the building and a powerful explosion in the basement seconds before the plane struck 95 stories above. NYC firefighters are taped as describing the collapse as consistent with a “detonated demolition.” Small explosions were reported on the floors below and after the impact, along with other pre-collapse subbasement, ground level and interior multiple explosions.
A 10-second collapse meant that the upper floors encountered no resistance from the floors beneath them in a straight-down demolition wave, a demolition moving faster than gravity itself. The only way to explain the popping of thousands of joints simultaneously on just one floor and the speed that the building came down is this: explosives placed on the floors at primary joints.
Usually in multi-floor collapses, you'll see pancake piles of floors in the rubble. There were none at Ground Zero. If the buildings were wired for explosives, what happened to the Trade Center towers would fit the profile.
Demolition experts use detonation timing and delays to control where the debris lands; they use the vibration and noise levels to break up a building and put it into its basement. Shape charges slice through steel H-beams at an angle to control the way they fall.
Since the fires were not hot enough to melt steel, the molten metal in the basement debris is evidence of high-temperature explosives such as thermite, which reaches 4,500 degrees and melts iron when detonated. (The jet-grade kerosene was consumed by the fireballs on impact.)
The unforgettable cauliflower shape of the debris clouds that morning is a telltale sign of pyroclastic flows generated by massive explosions typical of volcanoes and controlled demolitions. The explosive force of the collapses was so great that the three-foot-thick slurry walls (“the bathtub”) which retained the Hudson River seven levels below ground had shifted by 18 inches.
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Moreover, the litany of contraindications of official findings and the possibility of corporate-government collusion by the world's oil barony is astonishing and eerie.
President Bush received a daily briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” while on vacation in August 2001. At the time, Securacom - now Stratesec - was the company that provided the newly installed WTC security system before just 2000. Marvin P. Bush, the president's younger brother and Wirt D. Walker III (a cousin of the president) were a principal director and CEO, respectively, for Securacom.
The weekend prior to Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, Securacom performed an unprecedented “power-down” in the towers. Security systems were off and an administrator for Fiduciary Trust reported men “in overalls carrying huge toolboxes and reels of cables walking around the building that weekend.” One reason given for disabling the security was new installations for the Internet. Five days prior to 9/11, the security alert system was inoperable and bomb-sniffing dogs were removed.
The towers, perpetual money-losers for the Port Authority, were worth more if demolished than standing. How convenient it must have seen to the owners who held a recently made insurance policy knowing that they would make an enormous windfall from the collapse of one or both of the towers?
It's no wonder that despite the evidence, the official story for the cause of the collapse was melting beams. In either case, the WTC owners reaped a bonanza when those towers took a rapid, orderly fall into their footprints.
Real estate mogul Larry Silverstein, with international political connections, reworked his insurance policy in the summer of 2001 to include acts of terrorism and the stipulation he had the right of rebuild if the towers were destroyed. He went to court to make the insurance company pay double indemnity, claiming the collapse of both Towers 1 and 2 on 9/11 counted as two acts of terrorism, not one. He was awarded more than $7 billion.
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The wreckage of the towers consisted of two kinds: some large beams and mostly pulverized debris.
From the collapse of two giant office buildings, no desks, chairs, telephones, or computers were found. The largest piece of human remains recovered was part of a foot; most remains were described as “bone fragments.” One official stated “Over 1,100 bodies were left unaccounted for.”
Oddly, Buildings 6 and 7 were evacuated shortly after Tower 1 was struck, yet the people who left Tower 1 were told it was safe to go back inside the building.
Buildings 3, 4, 5, and 6 sustained extensive damage in the morning collapses, yet held up. Later in the day, Building 7 neatly accordion-collapsed exactly as Buildings 1 and 2 had. Housed in this tower were offices for the IRS, CIA, DOD, SEC, Secret Service, the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, international brokerage firms, banks, and insurance companies.
Lost in the collapse of Building 7: records of government and corporate fraud, including Enron files. Was this tower a corporate-government command center for possible combined forces involved with the collapses? And did they pull down Tower 7 to cover their tracks?
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I really thought the World Trade Center was a demolition job from day one, a theory that later over the years has gained steam on the Web with too many primary sources and accounts to list here.
The best source for the readers, however, is their own resourcefulness for rational scrutiny, fact checking, and asking questions. Many sources approach this content with a might-have-happened view. I feel the same.
Nevertheless, when we eliminate the impossible, the evidence for the World Trade Center tragedy as a demolition job is overwhelming, yet it is treated solely as a conspiracy theory. While there are no doubts that 9/11 was part of a plot, the question of responsibility has never been resolved.
It isn't a conspiracy that we should concentrate on. “Conspiracy theories” are media code words for the hypotheses of kooks.
Rather, we should focus on the high probability of 9/11 being a corporate-military operation, a theory that cannot be overlooked. We should not eliminate the possibility of corporate collusion; therefore, we cannot eliminate corporate complicity. Corporations are known to have their own armies of operatives to do their bidding. The provinces of explosives lie with both the corporate and military estates - less so with civilians.
Is it so impossible to believe that Americans were brought to the bidding of the leaders that late summer morning?
“When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” Arthur Conan Doyle wrote.
In that spirit, the 9/11 attacks deserve a decent and honorable investigation. As Sherlock Holmes would say, “Our ignorance is as remarkable as our knowledge.”