9/11: Busting the Myths
Adam Harvey in New York
Five years after September 11, more than one-third of Americans believe the US Government was complicit in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
This extraordinary reaction to one of the most widely witnessed, reported and investigated incidents of modern times has been fed by what adherents like to call the "9/11 Truth Movement".
Type "9/11 conspiracy" into Google and you'll be hit with almost 1 million links to sites such as 911truth.org and letsroll911.org that claim the "official" version of what happened that day is a sham.
A popular "theory" is that the US Government orchestrated the attacks so it could make Americans hate Arabs and allow the military to bomb Muslim nations such as Iraq.
Many of the theorists claim to have uncovered hard evidence that "proves" the Twin Towers were hit by military jets and brought down by controlled demolition, a mysterious white jet shot down United Flight 93, and the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile.
Long ignored by mainstream media [gee, I wonder why that is??? Not because they're illigitimate as this writer seems to so gullibly infer.], the theorists are now having their moment in the spotlight, with two recent opinion polls saying that millions of Americans do not believe al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks of September 11.
An Ohio University poll found that 36 per cent of Americans believe the US Government was either an active participant or had advance warning of the attacks.
The theories have even become part of international politics, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hinting that the Bush Administration was involved in 9/11.
Some theories are based on claims that are easy to make but difficult to disprove: "Jews were warned to stay away from the World Trade Centre that day" or "FEMA (disaster relief) workers were sent to New York City the night before the attacks".
Others ignore the vast array of evidence that point to a terrorist attack [what evidence?] and focus on a handful of facts that don't seem to add up: Why was the hole in the Pentagon so much smaller than a passenger jet? How could barely qualified pilots execute such a complex series of manoeuvres on planes they had never flown before? And why was so little aircraft wreckage found?
Theorists who raise these questions try to appear legitimate with a selective use of science, like the temperatures at which steel melts and reproducing seismic charts to show evidence of a bomb detonation in Manhattan that morning. [And yet I fail to see the scientific evidence from the official version proponents. From what I've read, it is they who try so desperately to legitimise their claims by using highly selective science.]
A book called 911: The Big Lie that claims the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, not a plane, has sold 200,000 copies and been translated in 20 languages. Documentaries such as In Plane Site and Loose Change have become sensations on college campuses across the US with their claims that virtually nothing about September 11 is what it seems.
Loose Change began its life as a film about a fictional government conspiracy, but director Dylan Avery says his research led him to realise that there really was a conspiracy and he decided to scrap the film and make a documentary instead.
Those behind the theories aren't just self-interested film-makers and raving bloggers. There are physics professors, pilots, engineers, scientists, supposed eyewitnesses and a handful of celebrities. [Well, the fact that properly qualified experts such as physicists have questioned the official story speaks volumes, but clearly this poor excuse for a newspaper/journalist doesn't see it this way.]
The most famous adherent is actor Charlie Sheen, who told a radio interviewer in March: "It seems to me like 19 amateurs with boxcutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75 per cent of their targets raises a lot of questions."
Perhaps the most relevant question is why so many people like Sheen have clutched on to the paper-thin claims of films like Loose Change, while dismissing the mountain of evidence cited in the 9/11 Commission report and other official investigations. [What, the "mountain" of evidence which comes from the very people whose interest it is to suppress the true events, namely the U.S. Government??? Of course official investigations are 100% trustworthy by virtue of the fact that they're official! What is this "journalist" guy on?]
Slow to react, government officials and politicians are finally waking up to the danger of uncontested conspiracy theories.
"They ignore the methods of science, the protocols of investigation and the dictates of logic," said US Senator John McCain. [Another obviously very trustworthy source.] "The 9/11 conspiracy movement exploits the public's anger and sadness, shakes Americans' faith in their Government at a time when that faith is already near an all time low." [Which is to say: don't bother seriously looking at the events of 9/11 independently, because it offends too many people. The prevention of offending people is far more important than that pesky thing called "truth"!]
Legitimate media organisations like the New York Times and Popular Science magazine are finally taking the theorists to task. ["Legitimate"? How so? By the fact that they are big, mainstream and censor things from the public? Legitimacy should be judged on how truthful something is. The above sources have already proven to be untruthful, and hence illegitimate, worthless sources of information.]
An exhaustive investigation by Popular Science stripped back each conspiracy to its core set of facts then used science and logic to reveal the truth behind the myth. A new book, Debunking 9/11 Myths, details the magazine's findings. ["Exhaustive" doesn't mean long, as this writer seems to think -- it means thorough and accurate. Which the aforementioned "investigation" was not.]
Popular Science found that each conspiracy theory was supported by little more than shoddy research, misinterpretations of evidence, and leaps of logic that would embarrass a primary school student. The myths soon collapse under the weight of their own hot air.
[Apart from the fact that the following choice "myths" are either inaccurate to start with or are answered by their "truth" reply in an abysmally false, misleading or inadequate manner, note how certain "myths", such as the implosion of the 7 WTC, are omitted. They simply couldn't come up with an adequate "truth" to explain away how a huge building could collapse exactly in the manner of the 1&2 WTC buildings, despite nothing hitting it.]
MYTH
Hijackers were not skilled enough to fly four airliners through the complicated series of manoeuvres needed to hit their targets.
TRUTH
All four pilots had logged at least 250 hours' flying time and were commercially licensed pilots. They had trained extensively on commercial jet flight simulators and didn't have to perform the most complicated parts of any flight: taking off, flying in bad weather and landing. The New York pilots could see their targets from 100km away and the Pentagon huacker used autopilot to fly almost all the way to his destination, then disengaged it when he was a few minutes from his target.
MYTH
The towers were struck by military cargo planes or fuel tankers. Windows are not visible in photographs or footage of the planes before they struck the towers and a witness, cameraman Marc Birnbach said on September 11: "It definitely didn't look like a commercial plane. I didn't see any windows on the sides."
TRUTH
Birnbach told Popular Science he was 3km away and didn't see the plane hit the tower. The plane was tilted away from him, meaning the windows on the right side were pointed towards the sky. Part of a United Airlines fuselage, complete with portholes, was found on the roof of 5 World Trade Centre.
MYTH
The twin towers were in fact professionally demolished. An aircraft impact is not sufficient to knock down a skyscraper, and dust "squibs" indicating controlled demolition are visible just before the towers collapsed.
TRUTH
The aircraft severed a large portion of the external steel web that gave the towers much of their strength. Other metal supporting columns were weakened by the ferocious heat generated by burning jet fuel. The "squibs" were pressurised air being squeezed out of the building as the floors above it compacted. Explosives experts say that a successful demolition would require hundreds of tonnes of explosives packed around each weight-bearing column in the building. Installing the charges would have taken 75 men at least three months. [Well what's the problem with this? This could well have happened, and yet for some reason it's not seen as credible based on the fact it had to be done months in advance.]
MYTH
The Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile. Security tape of the attack shows a white blur, not a plane, the entry hole in the building was only 5m wide and no plane wreckage was found.
TRUTH
The plane flew over morning commuters and hundreds of witnesses saw it hit the Pentagon. Security cameras film at a very slow frame rate -- far too slow to show an object moving at 240m per second. Photographs taken after the attack and before the facade collapsed show a hole 30m wide, not 5m. A Boeing 757 is 40m from wingtip to wingtip, but parts of both wings were sheared off when they struck a generator and external vent near the Pentagon. Most of the plane was shredded on impact but the landing gear punched through three of the building's rings, and was recognisable in photographs.
MYTH
United Flight 93 was shot down by a jet that had been repainted white to disguise military markings. Debris from the plane was found kilometres from the impact zone, proving that it had exploded in midair.
TRUTH
The white plane seen by witnesses is no secret -- it was a corporate jet rerouted by flight controllers to the last known radar location of United 93. It circled the smoking impact zone as the pilot radioed in what he had found. The farthest piece of debris from the impact zone was just a few hundred metres away.
