Much of America 's foreign policy since 9/11 has been based on the

assumption that it was attacked by Muslims on that day. This

assumption was used, most prominently, to justify the wars in

Afghanistan and Iraq . It is now widely agreed that the use of 9/11 as

a basis for attacking Iraq was illegitimate: none of the hijackers

were Iraqis, there was no working relation between Saddam Hussein and

Osama bin Laden, and Iraq was not behind the anthrax attacks.



But it is still widely believed that the US attack on Afghanistan was

justified. For example, the New York Times, while referring to the US

attack on Iraq as a "war of choice," calls the battle in Afghanistan

a "war of necessity." Time magazine has dubbed it "the right war."

And Barack Obama says that one reason to wind down our involvement in

Iraq is to have the troops and resources to "go after the people in

Afghanistan who actually attacked us on 9/11."



The assumption that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11 also lies

behind the widespread perception of Islam as an inherently violent

religion and therefore of Muslims as guilty until proven innocent.

This perception surely contributed to attempts to portray Obama as a

Muslim, which was lampooned by a controversial cartoon on the July

21, 2008, cover of The New Yorker.



As could be illustrated by reference to many other post-9/11

developments, including as spying, torture, extraordinary rendition,

military tribunals, America's new doctrine of preemptive war, and its

enormous increase in military spending, the assumption that the World

Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by Muslim hijackers has

had enormous negative consequences for both international and

domestic issues.1



Is it conceivable that this assumption might be false? Insofar as

Americans and Canadians would say "No," they would express their

belief that this assumption is not merely an "assumption" but is

instead based on strong evidence. When actually examined, however,

the proffered evidence turns out to be remarkably weak. I will

illustrate this point by means of 16 questions.



1. Were Mohamed Atta and the Other Hijackers Devout Muslims?



The picture of the hijackers conveyed by the 9/11 Commission is that

they were devout Muslims. Mohamed Atta, considered the ringleader,

was said to have become very religious, even "fanatically so."2 Being

devout Muslims, they could be portrayed as ready to meet their Maker--

-as a "cadre of trained operatives willing to die."3



But this portrayal is contradicted by various newspaper stories. The

San Francisco Chronicle reported that Atta and other hijackers had

made "at least six trips" to Las Vegas , where they had "engaged in

some decidedly un-Islamic sampling of prohibited pleasures." These

activities were "un-Islamic" because, as the head of the Islamic

Foundation of Nevada pointed out: "True Muslims don't drink, don't

gamble, don't go to strip clubs."4



One might, to be sure, rationalize this behavior by supposing that

these were momentary lapses and that, as 9/11 approached, these young

Muslims had repented and prepared for heaven. But in the days just

before 9/11, Atta and others were reported to be drinking heavily,

cavorting with lap dancers, and bringing call girls to their rooms.



Temple University Professor Mahmoud Ayoub said: "It is

incomprehensible that a person could drink and go to a strip bar one

night, then kill themselves the next day in the name of Islam. . . .

Something here does not add up."5



In spite of the fact that these activities were reported by

mainstream newspapers and even the Wall Street Journal editorial

page,6 the 9/11 Commission wrote as if these reports did not exist,

saying: "we have seen no credible evidence explaining why, on [some

occasions], the operatives flew to or met in Las Vegas."7 2. Do

Authorities Have Hard Evidence of Osama bin Laden's Responsibility

for 9/11?



Whatever be the truth about the devoutness of the hijackers, one

might reply, there is certainly no doubt about the fact that they

were acting under the guidance of Osama bin Laden. The attack on

Afghanistan was based on the claim that bin Laden was behind the

attacks, and the 9/11 Commission's report was written as if there

were no question about this claim.



But neither the Bush administration nor the Commission provided any

proof for it.



Two weeks after 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking to

Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," said he expected "in the near

future . . . to put out . . . a document that will describe quite

clearly the evidence that we have linking [bin Laden] to this

attack."8 But at a press conference with President Bush the next

morning, Powell reversed himself, saying that although the government

had information that left no question of bin Laden's

responsibility, "most of it is classified."9 According to Seymour

Hersh, citing officials from both the CIA and the Department of

Justice, the real reason for the reversal was a "lack of solid

information."10



That same week, Bush had demanded that the Taliban turn over bin

Laden. But the Taliban, reported CNN, "refus[ed] to hand over bin

Laden without proof or evidence that he was involved in last week's

attacks on the United States ."



The Bush administration, saying "[t]here is already an indictment of

Osama bin Laden" [for the attacks in Tanzania, Kenya, and

elsewhere]," rejected the demand for evidence with regard to 9/11.11



The task of providing such evidence was taken up by British Prime

Minister Tony Blair, who on October 4 made public a document

entitled "Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United

States." Listing "clear conclusions reached by the government," it

stated: "Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he

heads, planned and carried out the atrocities on 11 September

2001."12



Blair's report, however, began by saying: "This document does not

purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a

court of law."



This weakness was noted the next day by the BBC, which said: "There

is no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama Bin Laden to

the 11 September attacks. At best the evidence is circumstantial."13



After the US had attacked Afghanistan , a senior Taliban official

said: "We have asked for proof of Osama's involvement, but they have

refused. Why?"14



The answer to this question may be suggested by the fact that, to

this day, the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorist" webpage on bin Laden,

while listing him as wanted for bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,

and Nairobi, makes no mention of 9/11.15



When the FBI's chief of investigative publicity was asked why not, he

replied: "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's

Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting

Bin Laden to 9/11."16



It is often claimed that bin Laden's guilt is proved by a video,

reportedly found by US intelligence officers in Afghanistan in

November 2001, in which bin Laden appears to report having planned

the attacks. But critics, pointing out various problems with

this "confession video," have called it a fake.17



General Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistan 's ISI, said: "I think

there is an Osama Bin Laden look-alike."18



Actually, the man in the video is not even much of a look-alike,

being heavier and darker than bin Laden, having a broader nose,

wearing jewelry, and writing with his right hand.19 The FBI, in any

case, obviously does not consider this video hard evidence of bin

Laden's responsibility for 9/11.



What about the 9/11 Commission? I mentioned earlier that it gave the

impression of having had solid evidence of bin Laden's guilt. But

Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the Commission's co-chairs, undermined

this impression in their follow-up book subtitled "the inside story

of the 9/11 Commission."20



Whenever the Commission had cited evidence for bin Ladin's

responsibility, the note in the back of the book always referred to

CIA-provided information that had (presumably) been elicited during

interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives. By far the most important of

these operatives was [torture victim] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM),

described as the "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks.



The Commission, for example, wrote: Bin Ladin . . . finally decided

to give the green light for the 9/11 operation sometime in late 1998

or early 1999. . . . Bin Ladin also soon selected four individuals to

serve as suicide operatives. . . . Atta---whom Bin Ladin chose to

lead the group---met with Bin Ladin several times to receive

additional instructions, including a preliminary list of approved

targets: the World Trade Center , the Pentagon, and the U.S.

Capitol.21



The note for each of these statements says "interrogation of KSM."22



Kean and Hamilton, however, reported that they had no success

in "obtaining access to star witnesses in custody . . . , most

notably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed."23 Besides not being allowed to

interview these witnesses, they were not permitted to observe the

interrogations through one-way glass or even to talk to the

interrogators.24 Therefore, they complained: "We . . . had no way of

evaluating the credibility of detainee information. How could we tell

if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed . . . was telling us the

truth?"25



An NBC "deep background" report in 2008 pointed out an additional

problem: KSM and the other al-Qaeda leaders had been subjected

to "enhanced interrogation techniques," i.e., torture, and it is now

widely acknowledged that statements elicited by torture lack

credibility.



"At least four of the operatives whose interrogation figured in the

9/11 Commission Report," this NBC report pointed out, "have claimed

that they told interrogators critical information as a way to stop

being "-tortured.'"



NBC then quoted Michael Ratner, president of the Center for

Constitutional Rights, as saying: "Most people look at the 9/11

Commission Report as a trusted historical document. If their

conclusions were supported by information gained from torture, . . .

their conclusions are suspect."26



Accordingly, neither the White House, the British government, the

FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission has provided solid evidence that Osama

bin Laden was behind 9/11.



3. Was Evidence of Muslim Hijackers Provided by Phone Calls from the

Airliners? Nevertheless, many readers may respond, there can be no

doubt that the airplanes were taken over by al-Qaeda hijackers,

because their presence and actions on the planes were reported on

phone calls by passengers and flight attendants, with cell phone

calls playing an especially prominent role.



The most famous of the reported calls were from CNN commentator

Barbara Olson to her husband, US Solicitor General Ted Olson.

According to CNN, he reported that his wife had "called him twice on

a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77," saying that "all

passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to

the back of the plane by . . . hijackers [armed with] knives and

cardboard cutters."27



Although these reported calls, as summarized by Ted Olson, did not

describe the hijackers so as to suggest that they were members of al-

Qaeda, such descriptions were supplied by calls from other flights,

especially United 93, from which about a dozen cell phone calls were

reportedly received before it crashed in Pennsylvania .



According to a Washington Post story of September 13, [P]assenger

Jeremy Glick used a cell phone to tell his wife, Lyzbeth, . . . that

the Boeing 757's cockpit had been taken over by three Middle Eastern-

looking men. . . . The terrorists, wearing red headbands, had ordered

the pilots, flight attendants and passengers to the rear of the

plane.28



A story about a "cellular phone conversation" between flight

attendant Sandra Bradshaw and her husband gave this report:



She said the plane had been taken over by three men with knives. She

had gotten a close look at one of the hijackers. . . . "He had an

Islamic look," she told her husband.29



From these calls, therefore, the public was informed that the

hijackers looked Middle Eastern and even Islamic.



Still more specific information was reportedly conveyed during a 12-

minute cell phone call from flight attendant Amy Sweeney on American

Flight 11, which was to crash into the North Tower of the World Trade

Center.30 After reaching American Airlines employee Michael Woodward

and telling him that men of "Middle Eastern descent" had hijacked her

flight, she then gave him their seat numbers, from which he was able

to learn the identity of Mohamed Atta and two other hijackers.31 Amy

Sweeney's call was critical, ABC News explained, because without

it "the plane might have crashed with no one certain the man in

charge was tied to al Qaeda."32



There was, however, a big problem with these reported calls: Given

the technology available in 2001, cell phone calls from airliners at

altitudes of more than a few thousand feet, especially calls lasting

more than a few seconds, were not possible, and yet these calls, some

of which reportedly lasted a minute or more, reportedly occurred when

the planes were above 30,000 or even 40,000 feet. This problem was

explained by some credible people, including scientist A.K. Dewdney,

who for many years had written a column for Scientific American.33



Although some defenders of the official account, such as Popular

Mechanics, have disputed the contention that high-altitude calls from

airliners were impossible,34 the fact is that the FBI, after having

at first supported the claims that such calls were made, withdrew

this support a few years later.



With regard to the reported 12-minute call from Amy Sweeney to

Michael Woodward, an affidavit signed by FBI agent James Lechner and

dated September 12 (2001) stated that, according to Woodward, Sweeney

had been "using a cellular telephone."35 But when the 9/11 Commission

discussed this call in its Report, which appeared in July 2004, it

declared that Sweeney had used an onboard phone.36



Behind that change was an implausible claim made by the FBI earlier

in 2004: Although Woodward had failed to mention this when FBI agent

Lechner interviewed him on 9/11, he had repeated Sweeney's call

verbatim to a colleague in his office, who had in turn repeated it to

another colleague at American headquarters in Dallas, who had

recorded it; and this recording---which was discovered only in 2004---

indicated that Sweeney had used a passenger-seat phone, thanks to "an

AirFone card, given to her by another flight attendant."37



This claim is implausible because, if this relayed recording had

really been made on 9/11, we cannot believe that Woodward would have

failed to mention it to FBI agent Lechner later that same day. While

Lechner was taking notes, Woodward would surely have said: "You don't

need to rely on my memory. There is a recording of a word-for-word

repetition of Sweeney's statements down in Dallas ."



It is also implausible that Woodward, having repeated Sweeney's

statement that she had used "an AirFone card, given to her by another

flight attendant," would have told Lechner, as the latter's affidavit

says, that Sweeney had been "using a cellular telephone."



Lechner's affidavit shows that the FBI at first supported the claim

that Sweeney had made a 12-minute cell phone call from a high-

altitude airliner. Does not the FBI's change of story, after its

first version had been shown to be technologically impossible, create

the suspicion that the entire story was a fabrication?



This suspicion is reinforced by the FBI's change of story in relation

to United Flight 93. Although we were originally told that this

flight had been the source of about a dozen cell phone calls, some of

them when the plane was above 40,000 feet, the FBI gave a very

different report at the 2006 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-

called 20th hijacker. The FBI spokesman said: "13 of the terrified

passengers and crew members made 35 air phone calls and two cell

phone calls."38 Instead of there having been about a dozen cell phone

calls from Flight 93, the FBI declared in 2005, there were really

only two.



Why were two calls still said to have been possible? They were

reportedly made at 9:58, when the plane was reportedly down to 5,000

feet.39 Although that was still pretty high for successful cell phone

calls in 2001, these calls, unlike calls from 30,000 feet or higher,

would have been at least arguably possible.



If the truth of the FBI's new account is assumed, how can one explain

the fact that so many people had reported receiving cell phone calls?

In most cases, it seems, these people had been told by the callers

that they were using cell phones.



For example, a Newsweek story about United 93 said: "Elizabeth

Wainio, 27, was speaking to her stepmother in Maryland . Another

passenger, she explains, had loaned her a cell phone and told her to

call her family."40



In such cases, we might assume that the people receiving the calls

had simply mis-heard, or mis-remembered, what they had been told. But

this would mean positing that about a dozen people had made the same

mistake.



An even more serious difficulty is presented by the case of Deena

Burnett, who said that she had received three to five calls from her

husband, Tom Burnett. She knew he was using his cell phone, she

reported to the FBI that very day and then to the press and in a

book, because she had recognized his cell phone number on her phone's

Caller ID.41 We cannot suppose her to have been mistaken about this.

We also, surely, cannot accuse her of lying.



Therefore, if we accept the FBI's report, according to which Tom

Burnett did not make any cell phone calls from Flight 93, we can only

conclude that the calls were faked---that Deena Burnett was duped.



Although this suggestion may at first sight seem outlandish, there

are three facts that, taken together, show it to be more probable

than any of the alternatives.



First, voice morphing technology was sufficiently advanced at that

time to make faking the calls feasible. A 1999 Washington Post

article described demonstrations in which the voices of two generals,

Colin Powell and Carl Steiner, were heard saying things they had

never said.42



Second, there are devices with which you can fake someone's telephone

number, so that it will show up on the recipient's Caller ID.43



Third, the conclusion that the person who called Deena Burnett was

not her husband is suggested by various features of the calls. For

example, when Deena told the caller that "the kids" were asking to

talk to him, he said: "Tell them I'll talk to them later." This was

20 minutes after Tom had purportedly realized that the hijackers were

on a suicide mission, planning to "crash this plane into the ground,"

and 10 minutes after he and other passengers had allegedly decided

that as soon as they were "over a rural area" they must try to gain

control of the plane. Also, the hijackers had reportedly already

killed one person.44



Given all this, the real Tom Burnett would have known that he would

likely die, one way or another, in the next few minutes. Is it

believable that, rather than taking this probably last opportunity to

speak to his children, he would say that he would "talk to them

later"? Is it not more likely that "Tom" made this statement to avoid

revealing that he knew nothing about "the kids," perhaps not even

their names?



Further evidence that the calls were faked is provided by timing

problems in some of them. According to the 9/11 Commission, Flight 93

crashed at 10:03 as a result of the passenger revolt, which began at

9:57. However, according to Lyzbeth Glick's account of the

aforementioned cell phone call from her husband, Jeremy Glick, she

told him about the collapse of the South Tower , and that did not

occur until 9:59, two minutes after the alleged revolt had started.

After that, she reported, their conversation continued for several

more minutes before he told her that the passengers were taking a

vote about whether to attack. According to Lyzbeth Glick's account,

therefore, the revolt was only beginning by 10:03, when the plane

(according to the official account) was crashing.45



A timing problem also occurred in the aforementioned call from flight

attendant Amy Sweeney. While she was describing the hijackers,

according to the FBI's account of her call, they stormed and took

control of the cockpit.46 However, although the hijacking of Flight

11 "began at 8:14 or shortly thereafter," the 9/11 Commission said,

Sweeney's call did not go through until 8:25.47 Her alleged call, in

other words, described the hijacking as beginning over 11 minutes

after it, according to the official timeline, had been successfully

carried out.



Multiple lines of evidence, therefore, imply that the cell phone

calls were faked. This fact has vast implications, because it implies

that all the reported calls from the planes, including those from

onboard phones, were faked. Why? Because if the planes had really

been taken over in surprise hijackings, no one would have been ready

to make fake cell phone calls.



Moreover, the FBI, besides implying, most clearly in the case of

Deena Burnett, that the phone calls reporting the hijackings had been

faked, comes right out and says, in its report about calls from

Flight 77, that no calls from Barbara Olson occurred. It does mention

her. But besides attributing only one call to her, not two, the FBI

report refers to it as an "unconnected call," which (of course)

lasted "0 seconds."48 In 2006, in other words, the FBI, which is part

of the Department of Justice, implied that the story told by the

DOJ's former solicitor general was untrue. Although not mentioned by

the press, this was an astounding development.



This FBI report leaves only two possible explanations for Ted Olson's

story: Either he made it up or else he, like Deena Burnett and

several others, was duped. In either case, the story about Barbara

Olson's calls, with their reports of hijackers taking over Flight 77,

was based on deception.



The opening section of The 9/11 Commission Report is entitled "Inside

the Four Flights." The information contained in this section is based

almost entirely on the reported phone calls. But if the reported

calls were faked, we have no idea what happened inside these planes.

Insofar as the idea that the planes were taken over by hijackers who

looked "Middle Eastern," even "Islamic," has been based on the

reported calls, this idea is groundless.



4. Was the Presence of Hijackers Proved by a Radio Transmission "from

American 11"?



It might be objected, in reply, that this is not true, because we

know that American Flight 11, at least, was hijacked, thanks to a

radio transmission in which the voice of one of its hijackers is

heard.



According to the 9/11 Commission, the air traffic controller for this

flight heard a radio transmission at 8:25 AM in which someone---

widely assumed to be Mohamed Atta---told the passengers: "We have

some planes. Just stay quiet, and you'll be okay. We are returning to

the airport."



After quoting this transmission, the Commission wrote: "The

controller told us that he then knew it was a hijacking."49 Was this

transmission not indeed proof that Flight 11 had been hijacked?



It might provide such proof if we knew that, as the Commission

claimed, the "transmission came from American 11."50 But we do not.



According to the FAA's "Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events,"

published September 17, 2001, the transmission was "from an unknown

origin."51 Bill Peacock, the FAA's air traffic director, said: "We

didn't know where the transmission came from."52 The Commission's

claim that it came from American 11 was merely an inference. The

transmission could have come from the same room from which the calls

to Deena Burnett originated.



Therefore, the alleged radio transmission from Flight 11, like the

alleged phone calls from the planes, provides no evidence that the

planes were taken over by al-Qaeda hijackers.



5. Did Passports and a Headband Provide Evidence that al-Qaeda

Operatives Were on the Flights?



However, the government's case for al-Qaeda hijackers on also rested

in part on claims that passports and a headband belonging to al-Qaeda

operatives were found at the crash sites. But these claims are

patently absurd.



A week after the attacks, the FBI reported that a search of the

streets after the destruction of the World Trade Center had

discovered the passport of one of the Flight 11 hijackers, Satam al-

Suqami.53 But this claim did not pass the giggle test.



"[T]he idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno

unsinged," wrote one British reporter, "would [test] the credulity of

the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism."54



By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission was discussing the alleged

discovery of this passport, the story had been modified to say

that "a passer-by picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective

shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed."55



So, rather than needing to survive the collapse of the North Tower ,

the passport merely needed to escape from the plane's cabin, avoid

being destroyed or even singed by the instantaneous jet-fuel fire,

and then escape from the building so that it could fall to the

ground!



Equally absurd is the claim that the passport of Ziad Jarrah, the

alleged pilot of Flight 93, was found at this plane's crash site in

Pennsylvania.56 This passport was reportedly found on the ground even

though there was virtually nothing at the site to indicate that an

airliner had crashed there. The reason for this absence of wreckage,

we were told, was that the plane had been headed downward at 580

miles per hour and, when it hit the spongy Pennsylvania soil, buried

itself deep in the ground.



New York Times journalist Jere Longman, surely repeating what he had

been told by authorities, wrote: "The fuselage accordioned on itself

more than thirty feet into the porous, backfilled ground. It was as

if a marble had been dropped into water."57



So, we are to believe, just before the plane buried itself in the

earth, Jarrah's passport escaped from the cockpit and landed on the

ground. Did Jarrah, going 580 miles per hour, have the window open?58



Also found on the ground, according to the government's evidence

presented to the Moussaoui trial, was a red headband.59 This was

considered evidence that al-Qaeda hijackers were on Flight 93 because

they were, according to some of the phone calls, wearing red

headbands. But besides being absurd for the same reason as was the

claim about Jarrah's passport, this claim about the headband was

problematic for another reason. Former CIA agent Milt Bearden, who

helped train the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, has pointed out

that it would have been very unlikely that members of al-Qaeda would

have worn such headbands:



[The red headband] is a uniquely Shi'a Muslim adornment. It is

something that dates back to the formation of the Shi'a sect. . . .

[I]t represents the preparation of he who wears this red headband to

sacrifice his life, to murder himself for the cause. Sunnis are by

and large most of the people following Osama bin Laden [and they] do

not do this.60



We learned shortly after the invasion of Iraq that some people in the

US government did not know the difference between Shi'a and Sunni

Muslims. Did such people decide that the hijackers would be described

as wearing red headbands?



6. Did the Information in Atta's Luggage Prove the Responsibility of

al-Qaeda Operatives?



I come now to the evidence that is said to provide the strongest

proof that the planes had been hijacked by Mohamed Atta and other

members of al-Qaeda. This evidence was reportedly found in two pieces

of Atta's luggage that were discovered inside the Boston airport

after the attacks. The luggage was there, we were told, because

although Atta was already in Boston on September 10, he and another

al-Qaeda operative, Abdul al-Omari, rented a blue Nissan and drove up

to Portland , Maine , and stayed overnight. They caught a commuter

flight back to Boston early the next morning in time to get on

American Flight 11, but Atta's luggage did not make it.



This luggage, according to the FBI affidavit signed by James Lechner,

contained much incriminating material, including a handheld flight

computer, flight simulator manuals, two videotapes about Boeing

aircraft, a slide-rule flight calculator, a copy of the Koran, and

Atta's last will and testament.61 This material was widely taken as

proof that al-Qaeda and hence Osama bin Laden were behind the 9/11

attacks.



When closely examined, however, the Atta-to-Portland story loses all

credibility.



One problem is the very idea that Atta would have planned to take all

these things in baggage that was to be transferred to Flight 11. What

good would a flight computer and other flying aids do inside a

suitcase in the plane's luggage compartment? Why would he have

planned to take his will on a plane he planned to crash into the

World Trade Center ?



A second problem involves the question of why Atta's luggage did not

get transferred onto Flight 11. According to an Associated Press

story that appeared four days after 9/11, Atta's flight "arrived at

Logan . . . just in time for him to connect with American Airlines

flight 11 to Los Angeles , but too late for his luggage to be

loaded."62 The 9/11 Commission had at one time evidently planned to

endorse this claim.63



But when The 9/11 Commission Report appeared, it said: "Atta and

Omari arrived in Boston at 6:45" and then "checked in and boarded

American Airlines Flight 11," which was "scheduled to depart at

7:45."64 By thus admitting that there was almost a full hour for the

luggage to be transferred to Flight 11, the Commission was left with

no explanation as to why it was not.



Still another problem with the Atta-to-Portland story was the

question why he would have taken this trip. If the commuter flight

had been late, Atta, being the ringleader of the hijackers as well as

the intended pilot for Flight 11, would have had to call off the

whole operation, which he had reportedly been planning for two years.



The 9/11 Commission, like the FBI before it, admitted that it had no

answer to this question.65



The fourth and biggest problem with the story, however, is that it

did not appear until September 16, five days after 9/11, following

the collapse of an earlier story.



According to news reports immediately after 9/11, the incriminating

materials, rather than being found in Atta's luggage inside the

airport, were found in a white Mitsubishi, which Atta had left in the

Boston airport parking lot. Two hijackers did drive a blue Nissan to

Portland and then take the commuter flight back to Boston the next

morning, but their names were Adnan and Ameer Bukhari.66 This story

fell apart on the afternoon of September 13, when it was discovered

that the Bukharis, to whom authorities had reportedly been led by

material in the Nissan at the Portland Jetport, had not died on 9/11:

Adnan was still alive and Ameer had died the year before.67



The next day, September 14, an Associated Press story said that it

was Atta and a companion who had driven the blue Nissan to Portland,

stayed overnight, and then taken the commuter flight back to Boston.

The incriminating materials, however, were still said to have been

found in a car in the Boston airport, which was now said to have been

rented by "additional suspects."68 Finally, on September 16, a

Washington Post story, besides saying that the Nissan had been taken

to Portland by Atta and al-Omari, specified that the incriminating

material had been found in Atta's luggage inside the Boston

airport.69



Given this history of the Atta-to-Portland story, how can we avoid

the conclusion that it was a fabrication?



7. Were al-Qaeda Operatives Captured on Airport Security Videos?



Still another type of evidence for the claim that al-Qaeda operatives

were on the planes consisted of frames from videos, purportedly taken

by airport security cameras, said to show hijackers checking into

airports. Shortly after the attacks, for example, photos showing Atta

and al-Omari at an airport "were flashed round the world."70



However, although it was widely assumed that these photos were from

the airport at Boston , they were really from the airport at Portland .

No photos showing Atta or any of the other alleged hijackers at

Boston 's Logan Airport were ever produced. We at best have

photographic evidence that Atta and al-Omari were at the Portland

airport.



Moreover, in light of the fact that the story of Atta and al-Omari

going to Portland was apparently a late invention, we might expect

the photographic evidence that they were at the Portland Jetport on

the morning of September 11 to be problematic. And indeed it is. It

shows Atta and Omari without either jackets or ties on, whereas the

Portland ticket agent said that they had been wearing jackets and

ties.71



Also, a photo showing Atta and al-Omari passing through the security

checkpoint is marked both 05:45 and 05:53.72



Another airport video was distributed on the day in 2004 that The

9/11 Commission Report was published. The Associated Press, using a

frame from it as corroboration of the official story, provided this

caption:



Hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar . . . passes through the security

checkpoint at Dulles International Airport in Chantilly , Va. , Sept.

11 2001, just hours before American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into

the Pentagon in this image from a surveillance video.73



However, as Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall have pointed out, a

normal security video has time and date burned into the integral

video image by proprietary equipment according to an authenticated

pattern, along with camera identification and the location that the

camera covered. The video released in 2004 contained no such

data.74



The Associated Press notwithstanding, therefore, this video contains

no evidence that it was taken at Dulles on September 11.



Another problem with this so-called Dulles video is that, although

one of the men on it was identified by the 9/11 Commission as Hani

Hanjour,75 he "does not remotely resemble Hanjour." Whereas Hanjour

was thin and had a receding hairline (as shown by a photo taken six

days before 9/11), the man in the video had a somewhat muscular build

and a full head of hair, with no receding hairline.76



In sum: Video proof that the named hijackers checked into airports on

9/11 is nonexistent. Besides the fact that the videos purportedly

showing hijackers for Flights 11 and 77 reek of inauthenticity, there

are no videos even purportedly showing the hijackers for the other

two flights. If these 19 men had really checked into the Boston and

Dulles airports that day, there should be authentic security videos

to prove this.



8. Were the Names of the "Hijackers" on the Passenger Manifests?

What about the passenger manifests, which list all the passengers on

the flights? If the alleged hijackers purchased tickets and boarded

the flights, their names would have been on the manifests for these

flights. And we were told that they were.



According to counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, the FBI

told him at about 10:00 that morning that it recognized the names of

some al-Qaeda operatives on passenger manifests it had received from

the airlines.77 As to how the FBI itself acquired its list, Robert

Bonner, the head of Customs and Border Protection, said to the 9/11

Commission in 2004:



On the morning of 9/11, through an evaluation of data related to the

passenger manifest for the four terrorist hijacked aircraft, Customs

Office of Intelligence was able to identify the likely terrorist

hijackers. Within 45 minutes of the attacks, Customs forwarded the

passenger lists with the names of the victims and 19 probable

hijackers to the FBI and the intelligence community.78



Under questioning, Bonner added: We were able to pull from the

airlines the passenger manifest for each of the four flights. We ran

the manifest through [our lookout] system. . . . [B]y 11:00 AM, I'd

seen a sheet that essentially identified the 19 probable hijackers.

And in fact, they turned out to be, based upon further follow-up in

detailed investigation, to be the 19.79



Bonner's statement, however, is doubly problematic. In the first

place, the initial FBI list, as reported by CNN on September 13 and

14, contained only 18 names.80 Why would that be if 19 men had

already been identified on 9/11?



Second, several of the names on the FBI's first list, having quickly

become problematic, were replaced by other names. For example, the

previously discussed men named Bukhari, thought to be brothers, were

replaced on American 11's list of hijackers by brothers named Waleed

and Wail al-Shehri. Two other replacements for this flight were Satam

al-Suqami, whose passport was allegedly found at Ground Zero, and

Abdul al-Omari, who allegedly went to Portland with Atta the day

before 9/11. Also, the initial list for American 77 did not include

the name of Hani Hanjour, who would later be called the pilot of this

flight. Rather, it contained a name that, after being read aloud by a

CNN correspondent, was transcribed "Mosear Caned."81 All in all, the

final list of 19 hijackers contained six names that were not on the

original list of 18---a fact that contradicts Bonner's claim that by

11:00 AM on 9/11 his agency had identified 19 probable hijackers who,

in fact, "turned out to be. . . the 19."



These replacements to the initial list also undermine the claim that

Amy Sweeney, by giving the seat numbers of three of the hijackers to

Michael Woodward of American Airlines, allowed him to identify Atta

and two others. This second claim is impossible because the two

others were Abdul al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami,82 and they were

replacements for two men on the original list---who, like Adnan

Bukhari, turned up alive after 9/11.83 Woodward could not possibly

have identified men who were not added to the list until several days

later.84



For all these reasons, the claim that the names of the 19 alleged

hijackers were on the airlines' passenger manifests must be

considered false.



This conclusion is supported by the fact that the passenger manifests

that were released to the public included no names of any of the 19

alleged hijackers and, in fact, no Middle Eastern names whatsoever.85

These manifests, therefore, support the suspicion that there were no

al-Qaeda hijackers on the planes.



It might appear that this conclusion is contradicted by the fact that

passenger manifests with the names of the alleged hijackers have

appeared. A photocopy of a portion of an apparent passenger manifest

for American Flight 11, with the names of three of the alleged

hijackers, was published in a 2005 book by Terry McDermott, Perfect

Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers.86 McDermott reportedly said that he

received these manifests from the FBI.87 But the idea that these were

the original manifests is problematic.



For one thing, they were not included in the evidence presented by

the FBI to the Moussaoui trial in 2006.88 If even the FBI will not

cite them as evidence, why should anyone think they are genuine?

Another problem with these purported manifests, copies of which can

be viewed on the Internet,89 is that they show signs of being late

creations.



One such sign is that Ziad Jarrah's last name is spelled correctly,

whereas in the early days after 9/11, the FBI was referring to him

as "Jarrahi," as news reports from the time show.90



A second sign is that the manifest for American Flight 77 contains

Hani Hanjour's name, even though its absence from the original list

of hijackers had led the Washington Post to wonder why

Hanjour's "name was not on the American Airlines manifest for the

flight."91



A third sign is that the purported manifest for American Flight 11

contains the names of Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, Satam al-

Suqami, and Abdul al-Omari, all of whom were added some days after

9/11.



In sum, no credible evidence that al-Qaeda operatives were on the

flights is provided by the passenger manifests.



9. Did DNA Tests Identify Five Hijackers among the Victims at the

Pentagon?



Another type of evidence that the alleged hijackers were really on

the planes could have been provided by autopsies. But no such

evidence has been forthcoming. In its book defending the official

account of 9/11, to be sure, Popular Mechanics claims that, according

to a report on the victims of the Pentagon attack by the Armed Forces

Institute of Pathology: "The five hijackers were positively

identified."92 But this claim is false.



According to a summary of this pathology report by Andrew Baker,

M.D., the remains of 183 victims were subjected to DNA analysis,

which resulted in "178 positive identifications." Although Baker says

that "[s]ome remains for each of the terrorists were recovered," this

was merely an inference from the fact that there were "five unique

postmortem profiles that did not match any antemortem material

provided by victims' families."93



A Washington Post story made even clearer the fact that this

conclusion---that the unmatched remains were those of "the five

hijackers"---was merely an inference. It wrote: "The remains of the

five hijackers have been identified through a process of exclusion,

as they did not match DNA samples contributed by family members of

all 183 victims who died at the site" (emphasis added).94



All the report said, in other words, was that there were five bodies

whose DNA did not match that of any of the known Pentagon victims or

any of the regular passengers or crew members on Flight 77.



We have no way of knowing where these five bodies came from. For the

claim that they came from the attack site at the Pentagon, we have

only the word of the FBI and the military, which insisted on taking

charge of the bodies of everyone killed at the Pentagon and

transporting them to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.95



In any case, the alleged hijackers could have been positively

identified only if samples had been obtained from their relatives,

and there is no indication that this occurred. Indeed, one can wonder

why not. The FBI had lots of information about the men identified as

the hijackers. They could easily have located relatives. And these

relatives, most of whom reportedly did not believe that their own

flesh and blood had been involved in the attacks, would have surely

been willing to supply the needed DNA.



Indeed, a story about Ziad Jarrah, the alleged pilot of Flight 93,

said: "Jarrah's family has indicated they would be willing to provide

DNA samples to US researchers, . . . [but] the FBI has shown no

interest thus far."96



The lack of positive identification of the alleged hijackers is

consistent with the autopsy report, which was released to Dr. Thomas

Olmsted, who had made a FOIA request for it. Like the flight manifest

for Flight 77, he revealed, this report also contains no Arab

names.97



10. Has the Claim That Some of the "Hijackers" Are Still Alive Been

Debunked?



Another problem with the claim that the 19 hijackers were correctly

identified on 9/11, or at least a few days later, is that some of the

men on the FBI's final list reportedly turned up alive after 9/11.



Although Der Spiegel and the BBC claim to have debunked these

reports, I will show this is untrue by examining the case of one of

the alleged hijackers, Waleed al-Shehri---who, we saw earlier, was a

replacement for Adnan Bukhari, who himself had shown up alive after

9/11.



In spite of the fact that al-Shehri was a replacement, the 9/11

Commission revealed no doubts about his presence on Flight 11,

speculating that he and his brother Wail---another replacement---

stabbed two of the flight attendants.98 But the Commission certainly

should have had doubts.



On September 22, 2001, the BBC published an article by David Bamford

entitled "Hijack 'Suspect' Alive in Morocco ." It showed that the

Waleed al-Shehri identified by the FBI as one of the hijackers was

still alive.



Explaining why the problem could not be dismissed as a case of

mistaken identity, Bamford wrote: His photograph was released by the

FBI, and has been shown in newspapers and on television around the

world. That same Mr Al-Shehri has turned up in Morocco , proving

clearly that he was not a member of the suicide attack. He told Saudi

journalists in Casablanca that . . . he has now been interviewed by

the American authorities, who apologised for the misunderstanding.99



The following day, September 23, the BBC published another

story, "Hijack 'Suspects' Alive and Well."



Discussing several alleged hijackers who had shown up alive, it said

of al-Shehri in particular: "He acknowledges that he attended flight

training school at Daytona Beach . . . . But, he says, he left the

United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi

Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in

Morocco."100



In 2003, an article in Der Spiegel tried to debunk these two BBC

stories, characterizing them as "nonsense about surviving

terrorists." It claimed that the reported still-alive hijackers were

all cases of mistaken identity, involving men with "coincidentally

identical names." This claim by Der Spiegel depended on its assertion

that, at the time of the reports, the FBI had released only a list of

names: "The FBI did not release photographs until four days after the

cited reports, on September 27th."101 But that was not true. B



Bamford's BBC story of September 22, as we saw, reported that Waleed

al-Shehri's photograph had been "released by the FBI" and "shown in

newspapers and on television around the world."



In 2006, nevertheless, the BBC used the same claim to withdraw its

support for its own stories. Steve Herrmann, the editor of the BBC

News website, claimed that confusion had arisen because "these were

common Arabic and Islamic names."



Accordingly, he said, the BBC had changed its September 23 story in

one respect: "Under the FBI picture of Waleed al Shehri we have added

the words "-A man called Waleed Al Shehri...' to make it as clear as

possible that there was confusion over the identity."102



But Bamford's BBC story of September 22, which Herrmann failed to

mention, had made it "as clear as possible" that there could not have

been any confusion.



These attempts by Der Spiegel and the BBC, in which they tried to

discredit the reports that Waleed al-Shehri was still alive after

9/11, have been refuted by Jay Kolar, who shows that FBI photographs

had been published by Saudi newspapers as early as September 19.



Kolar thereby undermines the only argument against Bamford's

assertion, according to which there could have been no possibility of

mistaken identity because al-Shehri had seen his published photograph

prior to September 22, when Bamford's story appeared.103



The fact that al-Shehri, along with several other alleged

hijackers,104 was alive after 9/11 shows unambiguously that at least

some of the men on the FBI's final list were not on the planes. It

would appear that the FBI, after replacing some of its first-round

candidates because of their continued existence, decided not to

replace any more, in spite of their exhibition of the same defect.



11. Is There Positive Evidence That No Hijackers Were on the Planes?



At this point, defenders of the official story might argue: The fact

that some of the men labeled hijackers were still alive after 9/11

shows only that the FBI list contained some errors; it does not prove

that there were no al-Qaeda hijackers on board. And although the

previous points do undermine the evidence for such hijackers, absence

of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.



Evidence of absence, however, is implicit in the prior points in two

ways.



First, the lack of Arab names on the Pentagon autopsy report and on

any of the issued passenger manifests does suggest the absence of al-

Qaeda operatives.



Second, if al-Qaeda hijackers really were on the flights, why was

evidence to prove this fact fabricated?



Beyond those two points, moreover, there is a feature of the reported

events that contradicts the claim that hijackers broke into the

pilots' cabins. This feature can be introduced by reference to Conan

Doyle's short story "Silver Blaze," which is about a famous race

horse that had disappeared the night before a big race. Although the

local Scotland Yard detective believed that Silver Blaze had been

stolen by an intruder, Sherlock Holmes brought up "the curious

incident of the dog in the night-time." When the inspector pointed

out that "[t]he dog did nothing in the night-time," Holmes

replied: "That was the curious incident."105 Had there really been an

intruder, in other words, the dog would have barked. This has become

known as the case of "the dog that didn't bark."



A similar curious incident occurred on each of the four flights. In

the event of a hijacking, pilots are trained to enter the standard

hijack code (7500) into their transponders to alert controllers on

the ground. Using the transponder to send a code is

called "squawking." One of the big puzzles about 9/11 was why none of

the pilots squawked the hijack code.



CNN provided a good treatment of this issue, saying with regard to

the first flight: Flight 11 was hijacked apparently by knife-

wielding men. Airline pilots are trained to handle such situations by

keeping calm, complying with requests, and if possible, dialing in an

emergency four digit code on a device called a transponder. . . . The

action takes seconds, but it appears no such code was entered.106



The crucial issue was indicated by the phrase "if possible": Would it

have been possible for the pilots of Flight 11 to have performed this

action? A positive answer was suggested by CNN's next statement:



[I]n the cabin, a frantic flight attendant managed to use a phone to

call American Airlines Command Center in Dallas . She reported the

trouble. And according to "The Christian Science Monitor," a pilot

apparently keyed the microphone, transmitting a cockpit

conversation.107



If there was time for both of those actions to be taken, there would

have been time for one of the pilots to enter the four-digit hijack

code.



That would have been all the more true of the pilots on United Flight

93, given the (purported) tapes from this flight.



A reporter at the Moussaoui trial, where these tapes had been played,

wrote: In those tapes, the pilots shouted as hijackers broke into

the cockpit. "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!" a pilot screamed in the first

tape. In the second tape, 30 seconds later, a pilot shouted: "Mayday!

Get out of here! Get out of here!"108



According to these tapes, therefore, the pilots were still alive and

coherent 30 seconds after realizing that hijackers were breaking into

the cockpit. And yet in all that time, neither of them did the most

important thing they had been trained to do---turn the transponder to

7500.



In addition to the four pilots on Flights 11 and 93, furthermore, the

four pilots on Flights 175 and 77 failed to do this as well.



In "Silver Blaze," the absence of an intruder was shown by the dog

that didn't bark. On 9/11, the absence of hijackers was shown by the

pilots who didn't squawk.



12. Were bin Laden and al-Qaeda Capable of Orchestrating the

Attacks?



For prosecutors to prove that defendants committed a crime, they must

show that they had the ability (as well as the motive and

opportunity) to do so. But several political and military leaders

from other countries have stated that bin Laden and al-Qaeda simply

could not have carried out the attacks. General Leonid Ivashov, who

in 2001 was the chief of staff for the Russian armed forces, wrote:



Only secret services and their current chiefs---or those retired but

still having influence inside the state organizations---have the

ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such

magnitude. . . . . Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the

organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do

not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders.



Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the former foreign minister of Egypt,

wrote: Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of

this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaida as if it was

Nazi Germany or the communist party of the Soviet Union, I laugh

because I know what is there.



Similar statements have been made by Andreas von Bülow, the former

state secretary of West Germany's ministry of defense, by General

Mirza Aslam Beg, former chief of staff of Pakistan's army, and even

General Musharraf, the president of Pakistan until recently.109 This

same point was also made by veteran CIA agent Milt Bearden.



Speaking disparagingly of "the myth of Osama bin Laden" on CBS News

the day after 9/11, Bearden said: "I was there [in Afghanistan] at

the same time bin Laden was there. He was not the great warrior."



With regard to the widespread view that bin Laden was behind the

attacks, he said: "This was a tremendously sophisticated operation

against the United States---more sophisticated than anybody would

have ascribed to Osama bin Laden." Pointing out that a group capable

of such a sophisticated attack would have had a way to cover their

tracks, he added: "This group who was responsible for that, if they

didn't have an Osama bin Laden out there, they'd invent one, because

he's a terrific diversion."110



13. Could Hani Hanjour Have Flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon? The

inability of al-Qaeda to have carried out the operation can be

illustrated in terms of Hani Hanjour, the al-Qaeda operative said to

have flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon.



On September 12, before it was stated that Hanjour had been the pilot

of American 77, the final minutes of this plane's trajectory had been

described as one requiring great skill. A Washington Post story

said:



[J]ust as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White

House, the unidentified pilot executed a pivot so tight that it

reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver. . . . Aviation sources

said the plane was flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly

likely that a trained pilot was at the helm.111



But Hani Hanjour was not that. Indeed, a CBS story reported, an

Arizona flight school said that Hanjour's "flying skills were so

bad . . . they didn't think he should keep his pilot's license."



The manager stated: "I couldn't believe he had a commercial license

of any kind with the skills that he had."112



A New York Times story, entitled "A Trainee Noted for Incompetence,"

quoted one of his instructors as saying that Hanjour "could not fly

at all."113



The 9/11 Commission even admitted that in the summer of 2001, just

months before 9/11, a flight instructor in New Jersey, after going up

with Hanjour in a small plane, "declined a second request because of

what he considered Hanjour's poor piloting skills."114



The Commission failed to address the question of how Hanjour,

incapable of flying a single-engine plane, could have flown a giant

757 through the trajectory reportedly taken by Flight 77: descending

8,000 feet in three minutes and then coming in at ground level to

strike Wedge 1 of the Pentagon between the first and second floors,

without even scraping the lawn.



Several pilots have said this would have been impossible. Russ

Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after

serving as a fighter pilot in Vietnam, says it would have

been "totally impossible for an amateur who couldn't even fly a

Cessna" to fly that downward spiral and then "crash into the

Pentagon's first floor wall without touching the lawn."115



Ralph Omholt, a former 757 pilot, has bluntly said: "The idea that an

unskilled pilot could have flown this trajectory is simply too

ridiculous to consider."116



Ralph Kolstad, who was a US Navy "top gun" pilot before becoming a

commercial airline pilot for 27 years, has said: "I have 6,000 hours

of flight time in Boeing 757's and 767's and I could not have flown

it the way the flight path was described. . . . Something stinks to

high heaven!"117



The authors of the Popular Mechanics book about 9/11 offered to solve

this problem. While acknowledging that Hanjour "may not have been

highly skilled," they said that he did not need to be, because all he

had to do was, using a GPS unit, put his plane on autopilot.118



"He steered the plane manually for only the final eight minutes of

the flight," they state triumphantly119---ignoring the fact that it

was precisely during those minutes that Hanjour had allegedly

performed the impossible.



14. Would an al-Qaeda Pilot Have Executed that Maneuver?



A further question is: Even if one of the al-Qaeda operatives on that

flight could have executed that maneuver, would he have done so? This

question arises out of the fact that the plane could easily have

crashed into the roof on the side of the Pentagon that housed

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and all the top brass. The

difficult maneuver would have been required only by the decision to

strike Wedge 1 on the side.



But this was the worst possible place, given the assumed motives of

the al-Qaeda operatives: They would have wanted to kill Rumsfeld and

the top brass, but Wedge 1 was as far removed from their offices as

possible. They would have wanted to cause as much destruction as

possible, but Wedge 1---and only it---had been renovated to make it

less vulnerable to attack. Al-Qaeda operatives would have wanted to

kill as many Pentagon employees as possible, but because the

renovation was not quite complete, Wedge 1 was only sparsely

occupied. The attack also occurred on the only part of the Pentagon

that would have presented physical obstacles to an attacking

airplane. All of these facts were public knowledge. So even if an al-

Qaeda pilot had been capable of executing the maneuver to strike the

ground floor of Wedge 1, he would not have done so.



15. Could al-Qaeda Operatives Have Brought Down the World Trade

Center Buildings? Returning to the issue of competence, another

question is whether al-Qaeda operatives could have brought down the

Twin Towers and WTC 7?



With regard to the Twin Towers, the official theory is that they were

brought down by the impact of the airplanes plus the ensuing fires.

But this theory cannot explain why the towers, after exploding

outwards at the top, came straight down, because this type of

collapse would have required all 287 of each building's steel columns-

--which ran from the basement to the roof---to have failed

simultaneously; it cannot explain why the top parts of the buildings

came straight down at virtually free-fall speed, because this

required that the lower parts of the building, with all of their

steel and concrete, offered no resistance; it cannot explain why

sections of steel beams, weighing thousands of tons, were blown out

horizontally more than 500 feet; it cannot explain why some of the

steel had melted, because this melting required temperatures far

hotter than the fires in the buildings could possibly have been; and

it cannot explain why many firefighters and WTC employees reported

massive explosions in the buildings long after all the jet-fuel had

burned up. But all of these phenomena are easily explainable by the

hypothesis that the buildings were brought down by explosives in the

procedure known as controlled demolition.120



This conclusion now constitutes the consensus of independent

physicists, chemists, architects, engineers, and demolition experts

who have studied the facts.121 For example, Edward Munyak, a

mechanical and fire protection engineer who worked in the US

departments of energy and defense, says: "The concentric nearly

freefall speed exhibited by each building was identical to most

controlled demolitions. . . . Collapse [was] not caused by fire

effects."122



Dwain Deets, the former director of the research engineering division

at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, mentions the "massive

structural members being hurled horizontally" as one of the factors

leaving him with "no doubt [that] explosives were involved."123



Given the fact that WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, its vertical

collapse at virtually free-fall speed, which also was preceded by

explosions and involved the melting of steel, was still more

obviously an example of controlled demolition.124 For example, Jack

Keller, emeritus professor of engineering at Utah State University,

who has been given special recognition by Scientific American,

said: "Obviously it was the result of controlled demolition."125



Likewise, when Danny Jowenko---a controlled demolition expert in the

Netherlands who had not known that WTC 7 had collapsed on 9/11---was

asked to comment on a video of its collapse, he said: "They simply

blew up columns, and the rest caved in afterwards. . . . [I]t's been

imploded. . . . A team of experts did this."126



If the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were brought down by explosives, the

question becomes: Who would have had the ability to place the

explosives? This question involves two parts: First, who could have

obtained access to the buildings for all the hours it would have

taken to plant the explosives? The answer is: Only someone with

connections to people in charge of security for the World Trade

Center.



The second part of the question is: Who, if they had such access,

would have had the expertise to engineer the controlled demolition of

these three buildings? As Jowenko's statement indicated, the kind of

controlled demolition to which these buildings were subjected was

implosion, which makes the building come straight down. According to

ImplosionWorld.com, an implosion is "by far the trickiest type of

explosive project, and there are only a handful of blasting companies

in the world that possess enough experience . . . to perform these

true building implosions."127



Both parts of the question, therefore, rule out al-Qaeda operatives.

The destruction of the World Trade Center had to have been an inside

job.



16. Would al-Qaeda Operatives Have Imploded the Buildings?



Finally, we can also ask whether, even if al-Qaeda operatives had

possessed the ability to cause the World Trade Center buildings to

implode so as to come straight down, they would have done so? The

answer to this question becomes obvious once we reflect upon the

purpose of this kind of controlled demolition, which is to avoid

damaging near-by buildings. Had the 110-story Twin Towers fallen over

sideways, they would have caused massive destruction in lower

Manhattan, destroying dozens of other buildings and killing tens of

thousands of people. Would al-Qaeda have had the courtesy to make

sure that the buildings came straight down?



All the proffered evidence that America was attacked by Muslims on

9/11, when subjected to critical scrutiny, appears to have been

fabricated. If that is determined indeed to be the case, the

implications would be enormous. Discovering and prosecuting the true

perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks would obviously be important. The

most immediate consequence, however, should be to reverse those

attitudes and policies that have been based on the assumption that

America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11.