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“Loose Change” (Second Edition) (www.loosechange911.com) is supposedly “a documentary that exposes the truth about what really happened on 9-11”. But how much truth does it really contain? Let’s take a closer look.
The Pentagon conducts the first of two training exercises called MASCAL, which simulates a Boeing 757 crashing into the building.
Charles Burlingame, an ex-Navy F4 pilot who worked in the Pentagon, participates in this exercise before retiring to take a job at American Airlines, where, less than a year later, his Boeing 757 allegedly crashes into the building
Unlikely. Online biographies suggest Burlingame retired from the Naval reserves in 1996, years before these exercises were carried out. He joined American Airlines in 1979, not "less than a year" before 9/11. And other sites reproducing this story online have failed to provide any support whatsoever for the claim that he was connected to the exercises. Link
Larry A. Silverstein, who already owned World Trade Center 7, signs a $3.2 billion dollar, 99-year lease on the entire World Trade Center complex, six weeks before 9-11.
Included in the lease is a $3.5 billion dollar insurance policy specifically covering acts of terrorism
Correct, however if this is supposed to imply a financial motive, then it’s worth pointing out claims that Silverstein originally tried to buy insurance for $1.5 billion, hardly the actions of a man who knew what was about to happen.
In its court papers, Swiss Re shows how Silverstein first tried to buy just $1.5 billion in property damage and business-interruption coverage. When his lenders objected, he discussed buying a $5 billion policy. Ultimately, he settled on the $3.5 billion figure, which was less than the likely cost of rebuilding.
http://www.forbes.com/2003/09/11/cx_da_0911silverstein.html
3,150 put options are placed on United Airlines’ stock.
A put option is a bet that a stock will fall. That day, the put options were more than four times its daily average
True, however what they’re not telling you is that there were much higher spikes in sales at least twice in the preceding year: this level of trade was not unprecedented.
In the same period, United Airlines had slightly more action (Aug. 8 with 1,678 puts, July 20 with 2,995, April 6 with 8,212 and March 13 with 8,072).
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/6/2/62018.shtml
They’re also not telling you that American Airlines were about to declare a major profit warning. Anyone with inside knowledge of that might expect UAL to fall as well, in which case buying puts would again be a sensible decision. Link
Bomb sniffing dogs are pulled from the World Trade Center, and security guards end two-weeks of 12 hour shifts
Not all dogs were pulled (at least one died on 9/11). The extra dogs and security rota appear to have been temporary only: they worked more than usual for a couple of weeks, then returned to regular duties, but there's no evidence security was any weaker than normal. Link
4,516 put options are placed on American Airlines, almost 11 times its daily average
It’s true, these puts were placed on Monday September 10th. Was there a legitimate reason for them? Yes, as it happens. Loose Change is failing to point out the following announcements that appeared on financial sites, the preceding Friday:
12:48pm 09/07/01 [AMR] AMR NOTES 'POOR' ECONOMIC CONDITIONS, 'FALLING' DEMAND
12:49pm 09/07/01 [AMR] AMR SAYS DEFERRING JET PURCHASES BEYOND FIRM ORDERS
12:47pm 09/07/01 [AMR] AMR'S AMERICAN RETIRING 5 MORE 727 AIRCRAFT EARLY
12:48pm 09/07/01 [AMR] AMR: AMERICAN TO RETIRE ENTIRE 727 FLEET BY END OF 2002
12:46pm 09/07/01 [AMR] AMR SEES Q3 LOSS 'CONSIDERABLY LARGER' THAN Q2'S
12:47pm 09/07/01 [AMR] AMR ANTICIPATES 'SIGNIFICANT' LOSS IN Q4
12:49pm 09/07/01 [AMR] AMR SAYS CUTTING 2001-02 CAPEX BY NEARLY $1.2 BLN
12:50pm 09/07/01 [AMR] AMERICAN AIR FEELS SQUEEZE OF FUEL PRICES, LABOR COSTS
1:07pm 09/07/01 AMR warns of wider losses - William Spain
2:44pm 09/07/01 Analyst: Airline Stocks Face At Least Another Bad Quarter
2:51pm 09/07/01 [AMR] AMR DOWN 3.4% AT $30.08 FOLLOWING Q3 WARNING
4:04pm 09/07/01 Boeing stock rating cut over commercial growth - August Cole
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/newsfinder/browse_day.asp?scid=0&siteID=mktw&strYear=2001&strMonth=9&strMonthName=September&strDay=7& strDayName=Friday&nextPage=371 41.5442824074-788605255
Given all this bad news, it’s really not surprising that an unusually high number of people assumed American Airline shares might fall further still. Link
Newsweek reports that a number of top Pentagon brass cancel their flight plans for the next morning
Actually the articles just said they cancelled "travel plans", or "a trip".
The narrator fails to mention alternative explanations, including a worldwide warning released on September 7th that had been updated to include "threats to US military personnel in Asia". Link
NORAD is in the middle of a number of military exercises.
The first, “Vigilant Guardian”, is described as “an exercise that would pose an imaginary crisis to North American Air Defense outposts nationwide”, and “an air defense exercise simulating an attack on the United States.”
Here we're offered only vague descriptions of Vigilant Guardian, presumably in order that viewers might think it referred to the events of 9/11. However, the 9/11 Commission described it as "a military exercise... which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union". More on the exercises here
Three F-16s from Washington D.C.’s National Guard at Andrews Air Force Base, 15 miles from the Pentagon, are flown 180 nautical miles away for a training mission in North Carolina.
This left 14 fighter jets to protect the entire United States
The "14 fighter jet" figure refers to the planes available to NORAD on 15 minute alert. There is no evidence whatsoever that figure was lower because of the exercises.
There's also no evidence that Andrews ever had fighters available to NORAD, other than an interpretation of the claim that their mission was "to provide combat units in the highest possible state of readiness" ( http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-2534 ). But this is just an interpretation, just has has been suggested before with the term “combat ready”. Link
Hanjour came to Freeway Airport in Bowie, MD in August, 2001, seeking to rent a small plane.
However, when Hanjour went on three test runs, he had trouble controlling and landing a Cessna 172.
Marcel Bernard, the Chief Flight Instructor at Freeway, deemed Hanjour an unfit pilot and declined to rent him a plane without further lessons
Correct, however fails to point out that Hanjour had both a private and commercial pilots licence. Also fails to mention other reports that take a contrary view:
170. FBI report, "Summary of Penttbom Investigation," Feb. 29, 2004, pp. 5257. Hanjour successfully conducted a challenging certification flight supervised by an instructor at Congressional Air Charters of Gaithersburg, Maryland, landing at a small airport with a difficult approach.The instructor thought Hanjour may have had training from a military pilot because he used a terrain recognition system for navigation. Eddie Shalev interview (Apr.9, 2004).
Page 548, 911 Commission Report
http://www.faqs.org/docs/911/911Report-548.html
More here
Danielle O'Brien, an Air Traffic Controller at Dulles International Airport, told ABC News that everybody in the control room thought that Flight 77 was a military plane
The full quote explains why:
"The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane," O'Brien said. "You don't fly a 757 in that manner. It's unsafe."
http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/hijackeWr.htm
O'Brien was simply saying the plane was being flown in a dangerous way for a passenger jet.
Second, you only have to look at the photos to realize that whatever hit the Pentagon did not bounce off of the lawn
The inclusion of this point might make you think it was important... But you'd be wrong. The ACSE Pentagon Building Performance Report, for instance, does not say that Flight 77 "bounced off the lawn". The 9/11 Commission doesn't say it. Most witnesses didn't say it. And showing that the people who did were incorrect, doesn't invalidate other parts of their testimony.
If flight 77 vaporized upon impact, it would be the first time in aviation history...
It definitely would. But who says this? Not the ACSE report, or the 9/11 Commission Report, or the FBI. It isn't part of the official story. Loose Change merely makes a big deal of it, so they can knock it down: a classic straw man.
Are we supposed to believe that it disappeared into this hole, without leaving any wreckage on the outside
Uh, no. It did leave wreckage outside. See http://www.pentagonresearch.com/debris.html for some examples. More here
And yet, the only damage to the Pentagon is this single hole, with no damage from where the engines would have hit
Water obscures the damage in the photos used here, but the ACSE report points out that it was considerably more than “this single hole” (although not wide enough to accomodate the full wingspam of the plane.
The width of the severe damage to the west facade of the Pentagon was approximately 120 ft (from column lines 8 to 20).The projected width, perpendicular to the path of the aircraft, was approximately 90 ft, which is substantially less than the 125 ft wingspan of the aircraft (figure 6.1). An examination of the area encompassed by extending the line of travel of the aircraft to the face of the building shows that there are no discrete marks on the building corresponding to the positions of the outer third of the right wing. The size and position of the actual opening in the facade of the building (from column line 8 to column line 18) indicate that no portion of the outer two-thirds of the right wing and no portion of the outer one-third of the left wing actually entered the building.
It is possible that less of the right wing than the left wing entered the building because the right wing struck the facade crossing the level of the second-floor slab. The strength of the second-floor slab in its own plane would have severed the right wing approximately at the location of the right engine. The left wing did not encounter a slab, so it penetrated more easily. In any event, the evidence suggests that the tips of both wings did not make direct contact with the facade of the building and that portions of the wings might have been separated from the fuselage before the aircraft struck the building.
http://fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/build03/PDF/b03017.pdf
(There’s plenty more relevant text there that we’ve had to snip. Go read the full document, if you haven’t already).
More at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jpdesm/pentagon/pages-en/dam-front.html
And as for the inside of the Pentagon, there's another hole, approximately six feet in diameter...
...Found on the other side of the C Ring, three rings from the impact. For that hole to have been caused by Flight 77, the Boeing would have had to smash through nine feet of steel reinforced concrete
The assumption here appears to be that the plane passed through 6 walls, each of them being 18" of "steel reinforced concrete". However, this is incorrect: the Pentagon ring walls didn't extend down to the ground floor, through which the plane passed. There's no evidence for more than one 18” reinforced wall.
More here
April Gallop was working in the Pentagon’s west side when it was hit. In Jim Marrs’ book Inside Job, April claims...
“While in the hospital, men in suits visited her more than once. They never identified themselves or what agency they worked for. They didn’t tell her what to say, just made suggestions. For example, to take the compensation money and shut up. They also kept insisting a plane hit the building. They repeated this over and over. But I was there, and I never saw a plane, or even debris from a plane. I figure this story is to brainwash people."
So Gallop believes there was no plane? Other quotes don't make that entirely clear: it certainly seems she smelled jet fuel at the Pentagon, for instance:
When Elisha cries these days the same way he did when he was trapped under the debris, it all comes back. If she drives past an airport and smells jet fuel, it all comes back.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12652-2004Sep10_3.html
And, eyewitnesses described a bright, silvery flash.
Jet fuel combustion, i.e. the planes that struck the Twin Towers, is bright yellow at best
A "silvery flash"? Let's see. One of the largest collections of Pentagon witnesses statements was collected by Eric Bart. Search through these and you find this account (our emphasis):
James S Robbins a national-security analyst & 'nationalreviewonline' contributor: "I was standing, looking out my large office window, which faces west and from six stories up has a commanding view of the Potomac and the Virginia heights." "The Pentagon is about a mile and half distant in the center of the tableau. I was looking directly at it when the aircraft struck. The sight of the 757 diving in at an unrecoverable angle is frozen in my memory, but at the time. " I did not immediately comprehend what I was witnessing. There was a silvery flash, an explosion, and a dark, mushroom shaped cloud rose over the building. I froze, gaping for a second until the sound of the detonation, a sharp pop at that distance, shook me out of it. "
Here he seems to be talking about a silver flash before the explosion, rather than saying the explosion was a silvery colour. No-one else uses the word "silver" or "silvery" to describe the explosion, either. Instead he have:
he impacted low on the Westside of the building to the right of the helo, tower and fire vehicle around corridor 5. What instantly followed was a large yellow fireball
The impact created a huge yellow and orange fireball,
"It was a huge fireball, a huge, orange fireball,"
A huge flash of orange flame and black smoke poured into the sky.
There was a burst of orange flame that shot out that I could see through the highway overpass.
Perhaps there was a “silvery flash” that these witnesses missed, but support for that idea seems slim, to say the least.
Whatever it was, it might be related to two planes in the air after the crash.
The first one was uniformly identified as a C-130.
The second plane was an unmarked white plane, flying over Washington DC..
At 9:25, Jane Garvey, the head of the FAA, initiated a national ground stop, which prevents further takeoffs and requires all planes in the air to land. The order, which hasn’t been implemented since 1903, applied to almost every kind of plane; civilian, military, or law enforcement.
Why were these two planes allowed in the air when everyone else had to land
The information about the ground stop appears to be taken from a Time article. The full paragraph reads as follows.
At 9:25, Garvey, in an historic and admirable step, and almost certainly after getting an okay from the White House, initiated a national ground stop, which forbids takeoffs and requires planes in the air to get down as soon as reasonable. The order, which has never been implemented since flying was invented in 1903, applied to virtually every single kind of machine that can takeoff — civilian, military, or law enforcement. The Herndon command center coordinated the phone call to all major FAA sites, the airline reps in the room contacted all airlines, and so-called NOTAMS —notices to airmen — were also sent out.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,174912,00.html
However, this doesn’t immediately seem to make much sense. Why would a ground stop apply to military flights? Weren’t there military flights over Manhattan around this time? The 9/11 Commission report has Langley fighters scrambling at 9:24, for instance, and no-one says they were asked to return a few minutes later.
And sure enough, when you look elsewhere it seems the Time article may not have been accurate on this particular point. Here’s part of a Norman Mineta statement:
...The FAA began to restrict air travel in the Northeast United States by a combination of actions which included “sterilizing” air space in certain regions and at various airports, and, ultimately, a nationwide “ground stop” of all aircraft for all locations regardless of destination.
Within a few minutes, American Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. At this time, as we discussed the situation with the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) Commander and his staff, we considered implementing an emergency system of coordinated air traffic management to allow maximum use for defensive activities. It was clear that we had to clear the airspace as soon as possible to stop any further attacks and ensure domestic airspace was available for emergency and defensive use. So, at approximately 9:45 AM less than one hour after I had first been notified of an airplane crash in New York, I gave the FAA the final order for all civil aircraft to land at the nearest airport as soon as possible. It was the first shutdown of civil aviation in the history of the United States.
http://testimony.ost.dot.gov/test/pasttest/03test/Mineta6.htm
Here, although he talks about “all aircraft” at first, Mineta is clearly referring to closing down civil aviation, so that the military could fly. Here’s a further clarification from the FAA’s Jane Garvey, who initiated the order:
Next, a national ground stop was issued, that is, no civil aircraft in the U.S. could take off.
After speaking with Secretary Mineta, controllers told all airborne aircraft to land at the nearest airport. Within four minutes, controllers directed 700 planes to safe landings. Another 2,800 planes returned to safe ground in 54 minutes. By 12:16 p.m., within hours of the first attack, U.S. airspace was clear of traffic.
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/garvey_002.htm
The sequence appears to have been this, then.
At 9:25, Garvey initiates the national ground stop for civil aircraft, meaning none are able to take off.
At “around 9:30” the C-130 takes off. Even if the order applied to military aircraft, it’s hardly inconceivable that the order wouldn’t have filtered through to them yet. And as it appears the order applied to civil aircraft only, the C-130 wouldn’t be affected.
At 9:45, Mineta issues a further order saying that all civil aircraft currently in the air must land as soon as possible.
There appears to be no mystery about the C-130 being in the air, then. The second plane remains unidentified, however even if it was a civil aircraft, and in the air at the time the Pentagon was hit, Mineta’s “land immediately” order had not yet taken effect. And we don’t know when it took off, either, so without more information it’s hard to see any significance to this point.
Finally, why do satellite photos taken four days before 9/11 show a white marking on the front lawn, marking almost the exact trajectory of whatever hit the Pentagon four days later
Perhaps these were traces related to the recent Pentagon renovations in this area: it would be surprising if building work, the presence of extra people and perhaps vehicles didn’t leave any trace at all.
If this explanation isn’t sufficient, then we’d love to hear what this mark really means. Given that Flight 77 approached the Pentagon at around 700 feet per second, it’s hard to imagine that marks on the grass would have been particularly helpful in allowing the plane to line up.
And is it merely coincidence that the Pentagon was hit in the only section that was recently being reinforced to withstand that very same kind of attack
The “very same kind of attack”? It was specifically reinforced to protect against attacks from hijacked planes? And the evidence to support this is... where, exactly?
...and that Donald Rumsfeld was safe in his office on the opposite end of the building?
Rumsfeld being in his office is supposed to be suspicious? Presumably if he’d been away from the Pentagon on 9/11, that would also prove some “inside job” theory, yes?
The South Tower of the WTC collapses to the ground, in approximately 10 seconds.
29 Minutes later the North Tower follows suit, collapsing in approximately 10 seconds
There’s a distinct lack of evidence to support this, which Loose Change illustrates by counting to ten over a video that doesn’t show the end of the collapse. There’s considerably more evidence supporting collapse times of 15 or more seconds. More here.
Although every single building surrounding Building 7 stood intact, WTC7 fell straight down, into a convenient little pile, in 6 seconds
This time appears to be rounded down: Professor Jones estimates it at “6.5 +- 0.2 seconds” (and when people do calculations about free-fall speeds, even fractions of a second count).
These timings ignore other issues, though. Specifically, they measure the fall of the roofline, not the length of the full collapse process. In particular, they ignore the time it takes for the penthouses to collapse, as shown in NIST Appendix L:
Why does this matter? Because it illustrates that failures in the building support system occurred before the “6 second” timing starts: first, with the collapse of the support for each penthouse, and then perhaps with falling debris inside the building causing further damage. This is an integral part of the collapse process, and ignoring it makes very little sense. Unless you simply want to produce an impressively low collapse time, of course.
On July 28th, 1945, a B-25 bomber lost in the fog crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building.
Fourteen people dead, 1 million dollars in damage. But, the building stands intact to this day
The narrator fails to point out that the 9/11 planes would have weighed 7 to 10 times as much as a B-25, are likely to have been travelling at more than twice the speed, and were carrying more than ten times as much fuel. Which all seems relevant information if you’re going to compare the two events.
This picture of the impact point illustrates the differences.
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More here.
On February 12th, 2005, the Windsor Building in Madrid, a 32 story tower framed in steel reinforced concrete, burned for almost 24 hours, completely eradicating the upper ten stories of the building.
Although the top ten floors of the building fell, the building itself did not collapse
The Windsor suffered no structural damage prior to the fire. It was an entirely different construction, too: the lower 16 floors were concrete, for instance, not “steel reinforced concrete”. And the steel on the upper floors did fail. More here
And to think...the government would have us believe that these massive structures were destroyed by 10,000 gallons of jet fuel.
There’s actually quite a lot of energy in “10,000 gallons of jet fuel”. Plus of course the narrator misrepresents the official account, where the the impact from the planes, and the amount of energy available in other combustibles within the WTC, all play a part.
Yet, this Tower collapses first, even though the North Tower was hit straight on, and had already been burning for 18 minutes longer
Here we’re not reminded that the South Tower was hit lower down, and so had more weight to support. Or that it had less fireproofing:
Specifically, One WTC, which had 1 1/2 inch fireproofing, fell in 104 minutes, while Two WTC, which had 3/4 inch fireproofing, crumbled in only 56 minutes. "The insulation used [was] too little, according to our calculations," he said.
http://www.securitymanagement.com/library/001304.html
More here
The windows in the lobby were blown out, and marble panels were blown off of the walls. This was brushed off as damage from a raging fireball that went barreling down the elevator shafts
Even witnesses used by some 9/11 sites to support the idea of underground explosives offer some support for this (our emphasis).
This article from Chief Engineer magazine presents eyewitness account of the moments after the first plane crash, and describes evidence of large explosions in the lobby, parking garage and subbasement levels of WTC-1 at the time of the crash...
...the whole building seemed to shake and there was a loud explosion. They had been told to stay where they were and “sit tight” until the Assistant Chief got back to them. By this time, however, the room they were working in began to fill with a white smoke. “We smelled kerosene,” Mike recalled, “I was thinking maybe a car fire was upstairs”, referring to the parking garage located below grade in the tower but above the deep space where they were working
http://st12.startlogic.com/~xenonpup/underground/underground_explosions.htm
Jet fuel is pure kerosene.
Firefighter Louie Cacchioli told People Weekly "I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the 24th floor to get in position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building
Cacchioli has since said he was misquoted, that he said he heard “what sounded like bombs”, but nothing more.
Further, we discovered testimony from another firefighter about this “last trip up”, where he said that “the doors closed and that's when the power went out. Which, what we found out later was when the south tower fell down”. Could Cacchioli simply have heard something of the roar from the collapse outside, felt the lift sway, and reported that as being “what sounded like bombs”?
More here
Chief Palmer had reached the fire on the 78th floor of the South Tower, and devised a plan to put it out. He describes "two isolated pockets of fire", and requests two lines (hoses) to knock it down.
If the 78th floor was a “raging inferno” like the government would have us believe, then Palmer wouldn’t have gotten as far as he did, and certainly wouldn't have been able to put it out with two fire hoses.
A straw man argument. The NIST report doesn’t say the 78th floor was a “raging inferno”, for instance: the actual phrase they use is “there was only light fire activity observed on the 78th floor”, something not contradicted by Palmer’s report at all. More here
Mark Loizeaux, the president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. told the American Free Press that in the basements of the World Trade Center, where 47 central support columns connected to the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered more than a month after 9-11.
These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts, down seven [basement] levels, three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed."
He said that molten steel was also found at WTC7
It’s not clear whether Loizeaux saw the “literally molten steel” for himself, or how it was determined to be steel. There’s also some confusion over how “molten” is used, with some people using it as “liquid”, while a commonly-used photo simply shows glowing debris. More here
Etienne Sauret was filming her documentary, WTC: The First 24 Hours, and caught both collapses on tape.
Watch carefully.
The tripod shakes 12 seconds before the North Tower begins collapsing, and something is knocked off the right hand side of the building
If this shaking is due to some explosive event within the towers, then why doesn’t the tripod shake when the full collapse begins?
Ben Fountain, a financial analyst who worked in the WTC, told People Magazine that in the weeks before 9-11, there were a number of unannounced and unusual drills where sections of both the Twin Towers and Building 7 were evacuated for security reasons
This claim references a Prisonplanet.com article, which says:
Ben Fountain, a financial analyst who worked in the World Trade Center Complex, told People Magazine that in the weeks before 9/11 there were numerous unnanounced and unusual drills where sections of both the twin towers and building 7 were evacuated for quote ‘security reasons’. This was obviously the perfect opportunity to place those explosives.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/011904wtc7.html
Unfortunately it's not what Fountain said, which you can actually find quoted more accurately elsewhere (even on 9/11 conspiracy sites):
How could they let this happen? They knew this building was a target. Over the past few weeks we'd been evacuated a number of times, which is unusual. I think they had an inkling something was going on.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/911_reichstag.html
Nothing to say these evacuations were unannounced, and nothing to say they applied to "sections of both the Twin Towers and Building 7".
Daria Coard, a guard in the North Tower, told Newsday that security detail was working 12 hour shifts for two weeks before 9-11. But on Thursday the 6th, bomb sniffing dogs were abruptly removed from the building
This appears to have been additional security, that was provided for a short time only. (There’s no evidence that there was less security after this two week period, than before). And there were still “bomb sniffing dogs” in the building: at least one died on 9/11. More here
So who authorized all this?
President Bush’s brother, Marvin, was Board of Directors at Securacom from 1993 until fiscal year 2000.
Securacom, now known as Stratesec, is an electronic security company which provided security for United Airlines, Dulles International Airport, and from the early 1990s up to the day of 9-11, the World Trade Center.
The original research on Marvin Bush and Stratesec comes from a Margie Burns article, “Security, Secrecy and a Bush Brother”. Check this out and you’ll find the United Airlines security job is said to be on a single site, Indianapolis, back in the 1990’s, so any relevance to 9/11 isn’t exactly clear.
This article has Securacom starting work at the WTC in 1996, not “the early 1990’s”. This was as a contractor, on a particular contract that ended in 1998. The article reports that “the company had an ongoing contract to handle security at the World Trade Center ‘up to the day the buildings fell down.’”, according to CEO Barry McDaniel. However SEC filings only listed the WTC as a “former client”, which suggests the contract wasn’t a big one.
Whatever the contract was for, there is no evidence that Securacom could organise “drills” or “evacuations”, add or remove bomb-sniffing dogs. And as Marvin Bush left the company in June 2000, we can be doubly sure that he didn’t authorise it. (Hint the the 3rd Edition: mention CEO Wirt Walker instead. And try to find some evidence against him other than a relationship to Bush). More here
If only we could examine the debris from the World Trade Center and figure out what happened.
Unfortunately, Mayor Giuliani began shipping the remains off to recycling yards overseas before investigators could even examine it.
Not even FEMA was allowed into Ground Zero.
Essentially, they blocked off a crime scene and destroyed all the evidence
FEMA created a Building Performance Assessment Team who were tasked with the job of investigating the WTC collapses. There were complaints that they couldn’t get access to Ground Zero until early October, but the claim that they weren’t allowed access at all is false. See the legitimate complaints here, and other details here.
Note also what BPAT head Gene Corley said on the issue:
"There has been some concern expressed by others that the work of the team has been hampered because debris was removed from the site and has subsequently been processed for recycling. This is not the case. The team has had full access to the scrap yards and to the site and has been able to obtain numerous samples. At this point there is no indication that having access to each piece of steel from the World Trade Center would make a significant difference to understanding the performance of the structures".
www.house.gov/science/hearings/full02/mar06/corley.htm
Wally Miller, a Somerset County coroner, told the Houston Chronicle:
"It looked like somebody just dropped a bunch of metal out of the sky."
In the Washington Post...“It looked like someone took a scrap truck, dug a 10-foot ditch and dumped trash into it."
And as for the passengers..."I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes, because there were no bodies there.”
In the Pittsburg Review..."I have not, to this day, seen a single drop of blood. Not a drop.”
It would seem that, on one day, for the second time in history, an entire plane, along with its passengers, disappeared upon impact
This segment is constructed to make you think that there was no trace of the passengers. However, this is achieved by selective quoting. For example, the narrator mentions the "no bodies" part of the Washington Post story, but omits the preceding paragraph which explains what he meant (no intact, or even partly intact bodies):
As coroner, responsible for returning human remains, Miller has been forced to share with the families information that is unimaginable. As he clinically recounts to them, holding back very few details, the 33 passengers, seven crew and four hijackers together weighed roughly 7,000 pounds. They were essentially cremated together upon impact. Hundreds of searchers who climbed the hemlocks and combed the woods for weeks were able to find about 1,500 mostly scorched samples of human tissue totaling less than 600 pounds, or about 8 percent of the total.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56110-2002May8
At 11:43 on September 11th, WCPO, a local TV station in Cincinatti, Ohio, reported that two planes landed at Cleveland Hopkins Airport due to a bomb threat. United Airlines identified one of the planes as Flight 93.
Delta Flight 1989, suspected of being hijacked for a while, definitely landed in Cleveland. The claim that Flight 93 did as well is based on a story that was retracted within minutes. More here
Yet, the FBI claims to have found the passport of Satam al-Suqami, which managed to fly out of his pocket, through the explosion and onto the streets of Manhattan below.
So four different black boxes, made from the most resiliant materials known to man, were destroyed.
Yet, a passport, made from a fragile material known as paper, managed to survive
Light paper objects seem more likely to be thrown clear of an explosion than metal boxes, attached to the plane. And we know this, because at least two letters from the WTC planes were recovered, and sent on to their intended recipients, and other fragile materials were recovered at each of the crash scenes. More here
Nicholas DeMasi, a firefighter who helped the recovery efforts claims in the book Behind-the-Scenes: Ground Zero, “At one point I was assigned to take Federal Agents around the site to search for the black boxes from the planes. There were a total of four black boxes. We found three."
I guess it all comes down to who you’d rather believe
Go look at some of the pictures of Ground Zero on the photo links page. Then ask yourself, what are the odds that you could drive around that site and recover three out of four boxes on the same day,
And for some reason, the last three minutes of the tape was unaccounted for. The FBI had no explanation for the discrepancy
This misrepresents the “official story” to make it sound like there’s no answer to this question, and (whether you believe the official answer or not) that simply isn’t true. It sounds like it’s based on this Philadelphia Daily News story:
THE FINAL three minutes of hijacked United Flight 93 are still a mystery more than a year after it crashed in western Pennsylvania - even to grieving relatives who sought comfort in listening to its cockpit tapes in April.
A Daily News investigation has found a roughly three-minute gap between the time the tape goes silent - according to government-prepared transcripts - and the time that top scientists have pinpointed for the crash.
Several leading seismologists agree that Flight 93 crashed last Sept. 11 at 10:06:05 a.m., give or take a couple of seconds. Family members allowed to hear the cockpit voice recorder in Princeton, N.J., last spring were told it stopped just after 10:03.
The FBI and other agencies refused repeated requests to explain the discrepancy.
http://www.propagandamatrix.com/three_minute_discrepency_in_tape.htm
And the 9/11 Commission Report explanation for the “discrepancy” appeared in a Chapter 1 footnote:
168. Ibid., pp. 2327. We also reviewed a report regarding seismic observations on September 11, 2001, whose authors conclude that the impact time of United 93 was "10:06:05±5 (EDT)." Won-Young Kim and G. R. Baum,"Seismic Observations during September 11, 2001,Terrorist Attack," spring 2002 (report to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources). But the seismic data on which they based this estimate are far too weak in signal-to-noise ratio and far too speculative in terms of signal source to be used as a means of contradicting the impact time established by the very accurate combination of FDR, CVR, ATC, radar, and impact site data sets. These data sets constrain United 93's impact time to within 1 second, are airplane- and crash-site specific, and are based on time codes automatically recorded in the ATC audiotapes for the FAA centers and correlated with each data set in a process internationally accepted within the aviation accident investigation community.
Furthermore, one of the study's principal authors now concedes that "seismic data is not definitive for the impact of UA 93." Email from Won-Young Kim to the Commission,"Re: UA Flight 93," July 7, 2004; see also Won-Young Kim,"Seismic Observations for UA Flight 93 Crash near Shanksville, Pennsylvania during September 11, 2001," July 5, 2004
http://www.faqs.org/docs/911/911Report-478.html
It’s an interesting postscript that Flight 93 was spotted on April 10th, 2003 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, by David Friedman, a United Airlines employee who records his flights.
The tail number, N591UA was spotted on United Airlines Flight 1111, a 757.
The www.bts.gov site gives the tail number for that flight as N594UA. Looks like a simple trascription error to us. More here
And according the FAA, both N591UA and N612UA, Flights 93 and 175, are still valid. But Flights 11 and 77 are listed as destroyed.
(note: On September 28th, 2005, the Tail Numbers were finally updated. Why did it take them 4 years?)
Not to mention that they were not even scheduled to fly on September 11th
We checked out other planes that had been involved in crashes, and found more that were still listed as “Valid”, years after the event. It seems that delayed updates to the FAA database are quite common. More here
Flight Attendant Betty Ong allegedly placed a call from Flight 11.
According to the 9-11 Commission, although the conversation lasted 23 minutes, only 4 and a half minutes was recorded.
Does Ms. Ong sound like a woman on a hijacked plane who just saw three people murdered?
Why is nobody in the background screaming
The 911 Commission said that “only the first 4 minutes of the phone call between Ong and the reservations center (Miner, Sadler and Gonzalez) was recorded because of the time limit on the recently installed system (footnote #29 to Chapter 1).
It also seems unlikely that Ong personally “saw three people murdered”. She mentions one person being stabbed at first, for instance, without saying she witnessed it herself, then only relays a message later that two others have also been stabbed. Given that the Staff Monograph on the Four Flights and Civil Aviation Security says that Ong was in position 3 “assigned to the right aft jumpseat at the back of the aircraft behind the coach section”, and the Commission report also puts her working in coach, she may not have seen what happened in first class.
What’s more, other information from another flight attendant, Madeline Sweeney, suggests all three victims may have survived the stabbings. And she also reveals why the passengers in coach were calm:
Sweeney calmly reported on her line that the plane had been hijacked; a man in first class had his throat slashed; two flight attendants had been stabbed - one was seriously hurt and was on oxygen while the other's wounds seemed minor; a doctor had been requested; the flight attendants were unable to contact the cockpit; and there was a bomb in the cockpit...
At 0838, Ong [said] that the plane was flying erratically again...
The aircraft was in a rapid descent.
At 0841, Sweeney told Woodward that passengers in coach were under the impression that there was a routine medical emergency in first class...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3919613.stm
Flight attendant Madeline Sweeney allegedly talked with her ground manager Michael Woodward for 25 minutes.
She describes 4 hijackers. The FBI says there were 5.
She says the hijackers were in rows 9 and 10. The FAA says there were all in row 8.
Sweeney is reported as giving the following specific seat numbers:
The names, addresses, phone numbers, and credit cards of these hijackers are quickly identified: Abdulaziz Alomari is in 9G, Mohamed Atta is in 9D, and Satam Al Suqami is in 10B.
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-106
Alomari and Atta were actually booked in 8G and 8D, so the report was one row out, but that’s not exactly a difficult mistake to make. Especially as Sweeney was also reportedly working in coach with Ong, and so may have relied on second-hand information about their location. And as there were no other passengers sitting in the row 7 to 10 D and G seats, it wasn’t hard to figure out the most likely candidates for who she was talking about. More here
Near the end, she screams, “I see buildings. Water. Oh my god!”
Madeline was a flight attendant out of Boston for 12 years. I think she would have recognized Manhattan
A straw man argument: no-one says she wouldn't have recognised Manhattan (although you can bet she’d never flown towards it at that speed and altitude before). Sweeney didn’t “scream”, either.
Woodward asked Sweeney to look out of the window and see if she could tell what was going on. "I see the water. I see the buildings. I see buildings," she told him...
Sweeney told Woodward the plane was flying very low. Then, he said, "She took a very slow, deep breath and then just said, 'Oh, my God!' Very slowly, very calmly, very quietly. It wasn't in panic."
http://english.people.com.cn/200207/19/eng20020719_99980.shtml
Kee Dewdney of Physics911.net conducted some research of his own. In an experiment called Project Achilles, he took a series of cell phones onto a Cessna 172 and flew up to 8,000 feet.
At 4,000 feet he had a .4 success rate.
At 8,000 feet he had a .1 success rate.
For 32,000 feet, cruising altitude for a commercial airliner, he calculated a .006 success rate, less than one in a hundredth of a chance
That suggests one successful call in roughly 167 attempts. So does that mean that if 17 passengers each redialled 10 times, then you’d be sure of one of them getting through? The rest could use the Airfones, seatback phones on the planes which would work at altitude.
What they’re not telling you about Dewdney’s experiment is that it was carried out over the city centre of London, Ontario, an area he describes as “richly populated with some 35 cellsites distributed over an area of about 25 square miles”. Although it sounds like this might make the experiment more fair, in fact the opposite is true.
Base stations work on a reduced power and range in populated areas, because you need more of them to handle all the potential calls, therefore they’ll be less likely to pick up calls at altitude.
Don’t believe me? Even American Airlines has put their foot in the government’s mouth.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2004-07-19-aircells_x.htm
On July 15th, 2004, passengers aboard a commercial American Airlines flight were able to send and receive calls from their cell phones as if they were on the ground, thanks to a cell station that was installed into the plane.
"It worked great, I called the office. I called my wife. I called a friend in Paris. They all heard me great, and I could hear them loud and clear."
Why would American Airlines spend thousands of dollars on this technology in 2004 when cell phones worked so well on September 11th, 2001?
The cell phone calls were fake. No question about it.
So how is it possible to fake a person’s voice?
In 1999, the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico revealed their voice morphing technology
With just a 10-minute recording of somebody’s voice, they are able, in almost real time, to clone speech.
Excellent. Now we have a way to fake someone’s voice. But keep in mind that many of those on Flight 93, in particular, were only moved to that plane at the last minute from other flights. How were the conspirators able to take 10 minute recordings of sufficient quality, without the passengers noticing something was going on, with only an hour or two of notice?
And cloning the voice is only the first problem. Who do you call? What do you say? How do you behave?
But on September 23rd, the BBC reported that Waleed Al Shehri was alive and well in Casablanca, Morroco
The person the BBC were talking about was Waleed A Al Shehri, a pilot. The person on the FBI suspects list was Waleed M Al Shehri, not a pilot, and a very different person. As was confirmed when an Al Shehri relative gave an interview to US television a year after 9/11, and while he didn’t want to accept that his brothers were involved, also believed that they were probably now dead. More here
They also tracked down Abdulaziz Alomari, who is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and lost his passport while studying in Denver
Here the narrator leaves out a crucial detail. Here’s the relevant part of the article
Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects, has also been quoted in Arab news reports.
He says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver.
Another man with exactly the same name surfaced on the pages of the English-language Arab News.
The second Abdulaziz Al Omari is a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines, the report says.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm
Yes, there are two people claiming to be the real Abdulaziz Alomari, and the only thing that proves is that there really was confusion over names. Because what is the basis Loose Change use for saying the first Al Omari is the correct one? One of these must be wrong: why not both? More here
In the same article, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that “the identity of several of the hijackers is in doubt.”
And in the first few weeks after 9/11, this was true. But then, in November 2001, Mueller said this:
The FBI has resolved questions about the identities of the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks and has discovered places outside the United States where the conspiracy was planned, FBI Director Robert Mueller said Friday.
Saudi Arabian officials and others have questioned whether some of the hijackers identified by the FBI in the weeks after the attacks used stolen identifications. Mueller said those questions have been answered.
"We at this point definitely know the 19 hijackers who were responsible," he said.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/11/02/attack/main316806.shtml
This quote isn’t seen so often, though, presumably because it better serves the conspiracies to pretend that the initial doubts still exist.
So how many hijackers turned up alive? At least 9 of them
There’s no solid proof that a single hijacker has “turned up alive”. And the fact that Saudi Arabia have accepted that all 15 of their citizens (as named by the US) were involved, amongst other things, strongly suggests they’re not. More here
And last but not least, Mohammed Atta's father claimed to receive a phone call from his son on September 12th
Odd, then, Atta’s father didn’t mention this fact in initial interviews printed around a week after 9/11. He then changed his story, introducing this phone call. And finally, in an interview praising the London 7/7 attacks, he’s reported to have said they “were the beginning of what would be a 50-year religious war, in which there would be many more fighters like his son”. More here
...not even the official autopsy for Flight 77 lists the hijackers...
...and the opening paragraph makes no mention of their absence
The document referred to here describes itself as "the final list of bodies that were identified by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, at the Pentagon crash site of Flight 77". That's all it is: there's no reason whatsoever for it to mention their absence. Just as it doesn't mention the absence of 2-year-old Dana Falkenberg, for example, the only passenger not to be identified.
So why aren't they on the list? No mystery at all. The passengers were identified through DNA. The relevant DNA samples were provided by the passengers families, but the AFIP didn't have any samples from the hijackers families at the time, therefore they couldn't be identified. There were reports of their bodies being recovered, though:
"Families of the airplanes' passengers and crews and those who died within the Pentagon provided DNA samples, typically on toothbrushes or hairbrushes, to aid with identification. The remains that didn't match any of the samples were ruled to be the terrorists, said Chris Kelly, spokesman for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which did the DNA work. The nine sets of remains matched the number of hijackers believed to be on the two planes..."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/08/17/attack/main519033.shtml
On December 14th, 2001, the government released a tape, allegedly of bin Laden confessing to the attacks of 9/11, which they claimed to find in a house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
Except there's a number of things wrong with this tape.
One, the tape itself is of very poor quality.
And two, the man in the video looks and acts nothing like bin Laden
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