By Craig McKee
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was part of the majority. I believed that Osama bin Laden had led a group of Islamic fundamentalists to crash planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
There were many things that made me accept this, but mostly it was because I believed what I saw on TV. Sure I was cynical about the media then, but to believe that they got it so wrong would be to believe they were complicit in the cover-up.
I believed that the attacks – while reprehensible – were a logical result of America’s imperialist policies around the world. It was the typical “liberal” reaction, which unfortunately still dominates how the left sees 9/11. We were all so sure that Uncle Sam was screwing everyone that the idea that someone would want revenge seemed reasonable – even inevitable.
This made me and people who agreed with me valuable dupes for the real criminals. We helped establish our view as the “left” end of the spectrum of 9/11 opinion. The “right” believed Bush’s claim that the “evil-doers” had attacked America because they hated our way of life.
Despite being fooled about 9/11, there were some things that made me immediately suspicious that morning. The main one was the incredible failure of the U.S. military to intercept any of the planes. I just couldn’t buy this. And I couldn’t figure out why no one in the media saw this as a red flag.
But even with that doubt, I didn’t seriously doubt the official story. I may have believed there were inexplicable examples of incompetence, but I didn’t put it all together. For one thing, I was still being influenced primarily by the mainstream media, which were all fully behind the bin Laden story.
In a way, it’s surprising to me I could be so naive. I’d spent much of my youth reading every book I could find about the Kennedy assassination, the Bay of Pigs, and about U.S. imperialism in Central America and elsewhere. I believed the CIA was a criminal organization, as I do now. If anyone should have seen through the “official government conspiracy theory” about 9/11, it should have been someone like me.
But the lie was so massive I couldn’t see it.
As I came to realize later, there were individual elements of the official story that were positively essential for maintaining the fake terrorist scenario. With the absence of any real journalism from the mainstream press, these factors kept my doubts from growing and kept me from seeing the big picture:
- The cell phone calls: If passengers had called relatives and told them hijackings were happening, then how could it not be true? I now believe that these calls were faked. The technology exists to do it. The technology to make cell phone calls from airliners flying at 30,000+ feet at 500 miles per hour did not exist in 2001. The media failed to examine this seriously.
- The Bin Laden confession tapes: Didn’t most of us take it for granted that bin Laden had taken responsibility? It turns out that there’s only one video tape that has him doing so, and a close look at bin Laden’s face in that video reveals that it’s not him! Check this out for yourself. Again, the media ignored this.
- The lack of questioning by the political left: The fact that there was a version of the story that I could be comfortable with – that the attacks were revenge for U.S. misdeeds – was enough to satisfy me. And the support for this view from people I admired, like Noam Chomsky, cemented the deal.
- Evidence allegedly found in Mohamed Atta’s trunk: This was absolutely critical to the official story. It included a letter saying he planned to martyr himself, a Saudi passport, an international driver’s license, instructional videos teaching how to fly a Boeing airliner, and an Islamic prayer book. I never thought to question how all this incriminating evidence was so easily found. Why didn’t it make it on to the plane? Classic staged evidence. And when it came out that the hijackers had been using prostitutes and drinking heavily before Sept. 11, the whole “fundamentalist” angle crumbled.
- The Pentagon was hit in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses: Obviously it was Flight 77, right? To fake this was inconceivable to me. Now the idea that an airliner hit that building is inconceivable. Media ignored the overwhelming evidence that evidence was staged and explosives were placed in the building.
- It would have been too difficult to rig the towers for demolition: How, exactly, do you place explosives throughout a 110-storey office tower with no one noticing? That just seemed crazy. Now it’s the only thing that makes any sense. With no help from the media, I was unaware of the dozens of witnesses who reported massive explosions in the basements of the World Trade Center. And I was not aware that security for the buildings was being handled by a firm very closely linked to the Bush family.
- I had never heard of Building 7: When a friend told me in 2007 that a third skyscraper had collapsed in New York on 9/11, I almost didn’t believe him. This revelation, more than any other, shattered my assumptions about 9/11. The facts so obviously pointed to controlled demolition that I began to doubt everything else.
- Reports of government incompetence: Any media inquiry into how the attacks could have happened focused on whether the system broke down and whether the military failed to react properly. It never looked at government complicity. Neither did I.
- The government would never go that far: Most people believe this still. They can’t conceive of their own government showing such disregard for human life. Especially the lives of American citizens. But if they were to look at past examples of “false-flag” operations, they might change their minds. Just looking at the plans for Operation Northwoods, a 9/11-style fraud to create a pretext to invade Cuba, would open a lot of people’s minds.
- It was too big to keep secret: All it would take would be one person to spill the beans, right? This one is SO wrong. People talk all the time; if the media isn’t reporting it, how does the public find out? Howard Hunt confessed to helping kill Kennedy but this was virtually ignored by the media. David Schippers, a Washington insider who prosecuted Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial, says he was told about the entire 9/11 plot in advance by FBI agents. How much attention did this get?
Selling the official story doesn’t require that it be airtight because most people aren’t looking that closely. And with the media parroting the official line, it takes real effort for the average person to learn the truth.
Most of us won’t make the effort. Or we don’t want to know.
Your chronology and how you reacted to these events almost perfectly parallels mine, all the way down to the friend in 2007 who told you about bldg.7. Building what? I thought I was an informed citizen like yourself having studied and read much material that should have given me the tools to question this much earlier. Oh, the hubris of thinking you can’t be fooled. Thanks, good post.
I appreciate it. 9/11 was really a psychological attack that depended on all of us thinking it was too big to be a lie. But as Hitler was quoted as saying, “It is easier to convince people of a big lie than it is a small one.” Before 2007 I’m not sure I would have understood what this meant.
good post, sir…i wonder why the mainstream media does not cover potentially the biggest crime of the century??? i’m simply outraged by this and the 2 faced government.
Great question. The media have just repeated the official story without doing their own investigating. Imagine if they’d done that in the early ’70s. Without investigations of Watergate, Richard Nixon would have finished his second term. It seems that these corporate media entities are more concerned with defending the corporate elite in the U.S. than they are with telling the population the truth. That’s why we have to find it ourselves.
Great article.
If you truly believe that thousands of live eyewitnesses to the human remains and wreckage from AA 77 inside the Pentagon were duped, or part of the conspiracy you’ve concocted out of thin air, then reason has completely left you, Craig. Your “10 ways” are riddled with inaccuracies and illogic, but exculpating the al Qaeda terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks is absurd, as well as being an affront to the nearly 3000 victims of this suicide operation, which occurred shortly after 2 suicide attacks on US embassies in Africa, and a suicide attack on the USS Cole, both during a different administration, and both conclusively linked to the same group.
Oddly enough, the bin Ladens, Azzams, and al-Zawahiris, with their very close family ties to the two top al Qaeda leaders, and their enormous wealth, prestige, and influence in Saudi Arabia and Egypt respectively, have never defended their relatives from the allegations that they were behind 9/11, and the Saudi government has admitted that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. With all of their access to the world’s media, are Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s relatives just letting the 9/11 “truth movement” do it for them?
For your next “research” project, you might consider working Bradley Manning and Julian Assange into the yarn. Wikileaks has yet to release even one document that supports any of your assertions.
Albury,
I’m afraid it is your comments that are riddled with inaccuracies. Thousands of people saw the human remains at the Pentagon? Really? Why didn’t the world see the wreckage you’re talking about? And I hope you don’t mean only the landing gear and engine that have been photographed. Surely there are wings somewhere? Has even one part been conclusively linked to Flight 77? You “debunkers” love to rely on hyperbole. Concocted out of thin air. That’s not even worth responding to. If bin Laden has been conclusively linked to the Cole incident, why isn’t he wanted for that crime? Why isn’t he wanted for 9/11? No hard evidence, that’s why. As to why the bin Laden family hasn’t come to Osama’s defense, this is a real red herring and has nothing to do with evidence. And WikiLeaks? Is anything that doesn’t come from Assange not to be considered? This guy doesn’t represent my views. He has released lots of documents; that doesn’t mean he has a clue about 9/11.
How come it took you guys 6 years to learn of WTC 7. I saw it fall on TV after it was badly damaged from the towers falling and the fire afterwards. As far as the pentagon, my friend was outside and across the street from the pentagon when the jet flew overhead. She watched it Einstein and their was footage on TV of the silver fuselage with the A/A red white and blue stripes. How old were you when it happened, 10?
I too went from an enraged partiot for a few years, to wondering about facts about our war efforts since 1990. Why are we there? WMD’s, nope, Oil, yep and also the military industrial complex needing to sell its weapons. Then I found out about all the real evidence, the nano-thermite, the explosions, the eye-witnesses, the dancing Israelis filming the first tower attack, Larry Silverstein’s insurance fraud, what actual structural engineers said about the “pancake” theory, the Pentagon losing $2 trillion on Sept 10, 2001, FBI confiscating all video evidence around the Pentagon and refusal to release them, on and on. Our government lies to us. They always have. There are so many false flag attacks in our history that prove it. JFK, RFK, MLK all point to our government doing what it wants. But we have to pay for it all. 911 is the most important issue today, above all others. It’s the basis for all of our problems. We must investigate it fully now.
I couldn’t have said it better. We’re being manipulated into thinking that wars and Draconian security measures are for our own good. But they’re not. They just continue the shift of control to those who already have power.
What insurance fraud, “tired”? If you’re among the 9/11 “researchers” who’ve misrepresented his 2002 PBS statement, which said that the FDNY (not Silverstein)made the decision not to try to fight the fires, please feel free to address the following:
-Why would Larry Silverstein have publicly admitted even to knowing that there were planted explosives in WTC 7 in the first place?
-What was Silverstein Properties’ and the FDNY’s motive for blowing up a perfectly good, 14 year-old building, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in cash flow from it for nine years and counting, spending ~$700 million, or most of the $861 million insurance settlement, on obligatory replacement of it, and paying ~$500 million back to lenders?
(note: it was built in 1986-1987, at least 15 years after asbestos was written out of all building codes, and it had no asbestos in its SFRM or elsewhere.)
-Why would any insurance company have paid him a dime instead of the $4.68 billion total he received if he publicly admitted to foreknowledge of or complicity in the alleged secret demolition of his property, but especially those based in Copenhagen, Zurich (2 of them), and London?
-How did he or the FDNY know that flaming debris from a taller collapsing hi-rise across the street would hit WTC 7, start multi-story fires in it, and break the water main to it, disabling the sprinklers and providing a cover story for the demolition?
-If the alleged explosives were pre-planted, which would have taken weeks or even months in a vacant building and been completely impossible to do secretly in an occupied one, and Barry Jennings heard some of them go off around 10 AM, why was there any discussion at all in mid-afternoon about whether or not to demolish WTC 7 with the other apparently fireproof explosives a few stories higher?
-Do controlled demolitions take seven or eight hours to collapse a building?
-Do they leave no severed columns with copper residue on the ends, or any other evidence in the debris?
-Do they leave ~12 stories on one corner standing?
-Is the FDNY in the controlled demolition business? What other buildings, on fire or not, have they demolished before or since 9/11?
-Please link me to a C/D contractor’s web site, and show me the use of “pull” or “pull it” to refer to building demolition using explosives, not one in which cables are used to pull an already damaged building over, as was done with WTC 6.
-How does a “terrible loss of life” in the WTC towers affect a later decision to demolish a nearby building with no one in it?
-How many of the FDNY who were inside WTC 7, and presumably at risk from these alleged explosives, are now in the 9/11 “truth movement”?
-There was a pre-existing ConEd substation at the Vesey Street WTC 7 site in 1986, and the building was designed to straddle it, requiring some of the extremely long (~50′) girder and beam spans inside that contributed to the 9/11 collapse. It was powered up and in full use on 9/11/01, and the demolition of a 200,000 ton, 47-story building directly on top of it probably didn’t do it much good. Do you know whether ConEd’s insurers just absorbed the loss of tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure damage and restoration and then subrogated Industrial Risk Insurers, since Larry Silverstein’s firm was still the responsible party?
Btw, did you know that Silverstein owed more on the lease for the towers than he paid out of pocket, and that his lenders forced him to up the face values on his policies, since he didn’t want to pay the increased money in premiums?
Mr. Albury wrote:
Slip of the tongue. Accidents happen. Mr. Silverstein is no silver screen expert actor.
Mr. Albury wrote:
Separate Silverstein from FDNY, because with the latter you are imposing blame erroneously (on purpose).
Silverstein’s motivation was to destroy records of the SEC, particularly for several ongoing cases against well-heeled Bush supporters. Silverstein may have also benefited from the Gold heist from the vaults under the complex. In addition, the rules on trades were relaxed in the days following 9/11 allowing trillions of ill-got dollars to be cleaned slicker than any other money laundering scheme on the planet, whereby he might have gotten some of the piece of the action.
Mr. Albury wrote:
In case you missed what was happening to Goldman-Sachs and all, the insurance companies are in the same class of elite as the bankers and stock brokers. Although the insurance companies might have initially cringed at the prospect of paying out to this Silverstein scammer, they knew that they were too big too fail and that they could manipulate things for a big payout to themselves down the road. They were manipulating the real estate market, insuring the fraudulent bundling of mortgages, and driving up housing prices with their churn.
Do some research into the Black Eagle Fund and the Marcos Fund. These were moneys stolen in WWII by the Germans and Japanese, respectively. When found by the US, instead of repatriating them with their righful owners as dictated by international law, they served as covert funds to a whole host of black projects, like what G.H.W.Bush did to the Russian stock market. The bonds on the gold used as backing on these 1991 transactions were coming due on 9/11.
Not only was this money cleaned in the aftermath of 9/11, but it made trillions available to new loans that the banks felt compelled to lend out to anybody and everybody regardless of their ability to pay. It led directly to the housing market bubble and real estate mortgage collapse that we observed.
Mr. Albury wrote:
You are spreading disinformation here and erroneously blaming the FDNY. Pumper boats were at the docks; plenty of water was available to tackle the WTC-7 fires. Pressure from above ordered the FDNY out.
Point of fact. The WTC-7 had explosions and fires BEFORE either tower fell. I’ve seen videos of the fires from about 9:33. They trapped Jennings and Hess. Jennings testified to stepping over bodies in the lobby (or close by) as the FDNY was leading him out.
I speculate that some of these were fizzled milli-nukes. Couldn’t have the FDNY discovering not only the fizzling nuclear material, but also the crews planting new ones.
Mr. Albury wrote:
The whole WTC-7 was secure. Look at the tenant list. They are all about secrets and secrecy. They look suspicious no matter what.
The amount of time required to wire the WTC-7 with conventional explosives (or nano-thermite) is unimportant. They had access and they had time. However, I speculate that milli-nukes were used, which would speed up the implementation time, at least as far as taking out any inner core.
Mr. Albury wrote:
Irrelevant. I think it would take 7-8 hours to get the back-up redundant milli-nukes to the site and into a damaged building that was on fire on several floors.
Mr. Albury wrote:
Milli-nukes would leave no severed columns. Milli-nukes combined with nano-thermite would leave other anomalous things in the debris. Don’t know what your point is.
Mr. Albury wrote:
What you talkin’ bout, Willis?
Mr. Albury wrote:
Stop blaming the FDNY. The CIA & FBI, among others, were tenants of WTC-7 and could have easily wired themselves.
Mr. Albury wrote:
Instead of us going off to do busy work in doing research that you are too lazy to do and will then ignore, why don’t you go out and do it. Post the links when you are done.
Mr. Albury wrote:
This was the lame excuse for why the FDNY was told to evacuate WTC-7 and not fight the fires (with water from the pumper boats).
Mr. Albury wrote:
It is all about knowing what side your bread is buttered on. Why haven’t more college physics professors spoken up about the implausibility of the WTC destruction from gravity alone? Because they get most of their funding from govt sources.
Why haven’t many in the FDNY spoken up? Guess what? They did. Their testimony was suppressed from public viewing for many years. They were pressured into not talking about 9/11. They are firefighters, not whistleblowers. They saw which way the hurricane winds of 9/11 patriotism was blowing. If the nuclear truth of 9/11 were revealed, we’d be doing more nuking besides DU munitions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and end up spoiling the very prizes the neo-cons hoped to acquire for the American Empire.
Mr. Albury wrote:
Sounds like an excellent research project for you, Mr. Albury. Chop, chop. Hop to it. I’ll be interested in your findings.
You’ve just added the SEC, CBOE, most of the workers in WTC 7, and at least 12 insurance companies to the plot, senor, and haven’t provided a shred of evidence that the airlines’ put options, whose volume was slightly elevated for other reasons, would have offset a month’s cash flow from one floor of any WTC hi-rise lost on 9/11, let alone a decade or so of all of them, plus the ~$9 billion estimated rebuilding cost of the towers and the ~$700 million to replace WTC 7.
You’re also ignoring the fact that the FDNY called Silverstein, so they were very much a part of the picture, and even had firefighters inside WTC 7 until the order was given to evacuate and get away from it for the following reasons (many more “conspirators” at these links):
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/eyewitnessaccountsofwtc7fires
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/accountsofwtc7damage
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/eyewitnessaccountsofthewithdrawalfromwtc
Since these firefighters were presumably at risk from your imaginary, evidence-free explosives, and 343 of them were killed on 9/11, many because of the collapses, why isn’t there an FDNY9/11truth.com, or equivalent? Here’s the link to the petition at “Firefighters” for 9/11 “Truth”:
http://firefightersfor911truth.org/?page_id=469
Using a “ctrl-f” search, please feel free to count up the total number who even claim to be FDNY. Don’t they care what killed so many of their close friends and colleagues, or aren’t they as knowledgeable as your “truth movement”?
You asked me for a link showing that demolition contractors don’t use the term “pull” or “pull it” to refer to explosive demolition of a building, Senor. It would be more appropriate for you to find one who does, as I requested, since you’re asking me to prove a negative, but here’s a demolition expert who finds the claim ridiculous:
“We have never, ever heard the term ‘pull it’ being used to refer to the explosive demolition of a building, and neither has any blast team we’ve spoken with.” -Brent Blanchard of Protec
http://www.implosionworld.com/Article-WTC%20STUDY%208-06%20w%20clarif%20as%20of%209-8-06%20.pdf
There are plenty of controlled demolition contractors with web sites on the Internet, so please feel free to link me to even one whose site uses that term in that manner.
Silverstein isn’t and wasn’t a demolition expert.
The term “pull” is from the era that he grew up in when buildings were destroyed using wrecking balls and cables to “pull” parts of a building down. The term “pull” may have become archaic in the modern era but it was certainly part of demolition jargon in Silverstein’s formative days.
And I would note that although it would not be used today for ‘controlled explosive demolition’, experts still use cable pull-downs for some portions of their work and do call that what it is, “pulling”.
The argument is a red herring, Silverstein meant “pull it” as taking the building down, this is clear from the structure of his sentence. Those who deny the obvious make fools of themselves.
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AA 77 was tracked by ATC to the Pentagon, ~136 people reported seeing a plane hit the Pentagon, some of whom even identified the model and airline, thousands of people saw the wreckage, including FBI, FEMA, NTSB, and AMERICAN AIRLINES inspectors, American Airlines has paid undisclosed millions of dollars to victims not covered by the 9/11 VCF (just being good sports?), 58 of the 59 victims aboard were identified through forensics, along with some of the hijackers, using DNA samples from relatives or acquaintances, or from places where they were known to have lived prior to the attacks.
Does the FBI generally gather up all of the evidence at a crime scene and take it on a world tour, Craig? Do explosives secretly planted inside buildings produce 200′ high fireballs of burning jet fuel and knock over a staggered line of 5 light poles outside and hundreds of feet away? Do they produce a ~300′, relatively narrow and diminishing path of destruction inside that only goes in one direction, or would they have scattered large amounts of the facade and other building debris outside and upward? Any thoughts on what explosive charges powerful enough to do all of that damage to a heavily-reinforced concrete and steel building would have sounded like? Do RDX and other high explosives smell like kerosene?
There are numerous agencies whose personnel were live eyewitnesses to the crash site at this link:
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/911pentagonflight77evidencesummary
and more irrefutable evidence here:
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/pentagonattackpage2
There’s contact information there for almost every one of those agencies, so why not just randomly ask some of the first responders, etc. what they found inside the Pentagon?
AA 77 was traveling ~530 mph, which is ~777 fps, and surveillance cameras generally take ~1 frame in that time period. The Citco camera wasn’t pointed in the right direction to capture the plane, but probably has some great footage of people pumping gas. If you’re basing your claim on the lack of video evidence, both the CVR and FDR from AA 77 were recovered inside the Pentagon, meaning that your imaginary perps must have planted them in your version of events, so how difficult would it then have been to stick a 757 into a surveillance video just to fool the “truth movement”? You’ve claimed elsewhere that the crash elevation was “too high,” apparently not understanding that digital recorders have a few second time delay, but are your villains so dumb that they couldn’t figure out how to put it the right data?
Bin Laden and al Qaeda were already on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for the 1998 embassy bombings, and adding the Cole suicide bombing to the list would have required a full disclosure of substantial amounts of evidence, as would adding the 9/11 suicide attacks to it. What would our intelligence services have gained by revealing their sources in Yemen and elsewhere around the world?
My questioning why only the 9/11 “truth movement” is defending OBL and Zawahiri is perfectly legitimate. You’d deny the charges if you were being hunted by the most powerful military in the world, and so would those close to you, and the bin Ladens, Azzams, and Zawahiris are three of the wealthiest and most influential families in the M.E. Aside from an alleged denial as they were fleeing Afghanistan in 2001, while under heavy air attack by the US, they don’t seem to realize that they weren’t responsible for the “planes operation” they planned.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Assange to leak something supportive of your 9/11 “inside job” assertions. Oddly enough, the files cover a wide range of government activities, but they just plumb skipped that one. Given the number of participants in your “conspiracy,” that’s pretty remarkable, but just another “red herring” to you, I’m sure.
You make so many assumptions.
The FBI saw the evidence so it must be real!
Jet fuel exploded, so a plane must have crashed!
You actually want me to believe there is no video of the supposed crash? Not credible. This is the most secure building in the world. You want me to believe the wings “folded in” like Mike Walters says? Please.
And Julian Assange is no friend of the 9/11 Truth movement. People like David Ray Griffin have done some wonderful research, and they don’t need a “leak” from WikiLeaks to do it. Frankly, the number of people who are now saying that we have to depend on JA to break the story is very revealing. You seriously mean to say that Assange not leaking about it shows it didn’t happen? I can’t take that seriously.
I gave you contact info for thousands of civilians and other non-FBI witnesses who also saw the evidence, and asked you some questions about your imaginary planted explosives, including whether they leave ~200′ high fireballs, similar to the ones at the WTC, so please don’t misrepresent what I said. I also explained to you why no surveillance videos caught the image of AA 77, and pointed out that if your alleged villains could have planted plane parts, including AA 77’s FDR and CVR, faked DNA and other forensic evidence, voice morphed phones calls to close relatives, convinced the airlines to go along with all of it, and accomplished all of the other amazing feats you’ve attributed to them, they could also have released a doctored-up surveillance video to satisfy the most astute 9/11 “researcher,” especially considering how long they had to do it
Griffin’s a chronic liar, who’s been caught making up stuff repeatedly while doing his “wonderful research,” and this is simply one example:
http://www.jod911.com/There_Are_No_Missile_Defenses_at_the_Pentagon.pdf
Be sure not to fly into or out of Reagan National Airport if you believe his bunk about missile batteries “ringing” the Pentagon and programmed to shoot down commercial aircraft not transmitting a friendly IFF signal. It’s <1 mile from the Pentagon, and has a runway pointed directly at the NE corner. There were some AA missiles installed after 9/11, but they aren't just sitting there waiting to blow up airliners automatically. He also cooked up the goofy yarn about Marvin Bush, who left his board of directors position with Securacom ~15 months before 9/11. Board members don't run day-to-day operations in corporations, and Securacom didn't run security at the WTC; the PAPD did. They simply furnished and installed electronic surveillance equipment under contract to the PA, and had been doing it since shortly after the 1993 bombing. There were no secret, fireproof explosives planted in any WTC building to be coordinated with al Qaeda's 9/11 "planes operation," or there would have been hundreds of explosively-severed columns found in the debris, and he had no more connection to the WTC than Kevin Bacon did, but I'm sure Griffin could find some links there too.
I never said "that Assange not leaking about it shows it didn’t happen," so you're misrepresenting my comments once again. The fact that he doesn't have any leaked files corroborating your "inside job" and other unsupported claims is just another nail in the 9/11 "truth movement" coffin, not that you weren't completely debunked years ago.
Btw, are you sure you're in the 9/11 "truth movement"? My posts are usually removed by this point and I'm banned for life.
Are you really saying that the only incendiary that can create the fireball we saw is jet fuel? The U.S. government has no other options?
Sorry, I haven’t had time to read the “thousands” of testimonials that you’re referring to. But your explanation for why we don’t see any video is absurd. If a plane hit, there’s video. Show it to us. They don’t do this because skeptics would think it was fake? That’s a ridiculous reason not to release evidence.
Your comment that Griffin is a chronic liar hardly warrants a response. Give me a few examples of where he has demonstrably lied. And I don’t mean instances where you just disagree with him.
Assange again? Look, I don’t care what he releases, it has no bearing on the validity of the Truth movement’s case. It’s not a nail in any coffin.
As for being banned, I don’t ban anyone unless they are abusive in some way. I hasn’t happened yet.
That’s at least the third time you’ve completely distorted something I posted here, Craig. I never said that “They don’t do this because skeptics would think it was fake”; I said that if they did all of the other evil deeds you’ve attributed to them (with no evidence whatsoever), they easily could have presented faked surveillance tape with a 757 inserted. I also didn’t say that jet fuel was the only incendiary, but there are few that stink like kerosene, and no explosives that I know of produce either the appearance or the smell witnesssed at the Pentagon on and after 9/11.
I gave you two glaring examples of pure fraud from Griffin, and his WTC free-fall, or near free-fall collapse times are another. The South Tower collapsed in ~15 seconds, and the North Tower took ~22 seconds. How tough is it to get a bunch of collapse videos and time them? Watch and learn:
http://www.youtube.com/user/RKOwens4#p/u/39/qLShZOvxVe4
If you’d like to see how blatantly dishonest your other “truth movement” icons are, read and enjoy:
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/theyoughtaknowbetter%3Acritiquesoftheinept
Hmm, aren’t I the sneaky one? I keep trying to distort and you keep bringing us back to hard facts. Well done!
Aside from what they “could” have done with the video, the fact still remains that they have video and they won’t release it. Am I wrong? I think I characterized what you said quite accurately, unless you’re just trying to play semantic games. But to be fair, let’s simplify things. Why haven’t they released video of the impact?
As for smell, how about the smell of cordite inside the Pentagon? Admittedly there aren’t “thousands” of people who say they smelled this. As for the time the collapses took, how did you manage to be the only person to find out that all the other times were so wrong? I have no idea how you’re measuring this. And although you’re wrong, it really doesn’t matter that much. Even 22 seconds is nowhere near long enough for a pancake collapse to occur – if such a collapse is even possible. The fact still remains that something was done to remove the resistance below the point of impact. And how about the many witnesses to explosions in the basements before collapse? And Barry Jennings talking about massive explosions in WTC 7 before the towers came down?
Dear Mr. Albury,
I unfortunately do not subscribe to comments being posted on all of Mr. McKee’s articles, so I missed many from you.
Mr. Albury wrote in one posting.
What do you get when you average Bill Gates’ net worth with that of, say, 20 homeless men? Answer: Twenty-one billionaires, but 20 of them have nothing to show for it.
Imagine that you ordered McDonald’s take-out in town A at noon and then were pulled over at 1 p.m. by a traffic cop 60 miles away at town B for speeding. In trying to talk yourself out of the ticket, you produce the receipt with the time stamp and say: “See, 60 miles in 1 hour means I was only going 60 m.p.h., which is at the speed limit.” Instead of one ticket, the officer proceeds to write up two. Why? He explains that that 60 mile stretch had a 10 mile construction zone where the speed limit was 30 m.p.h. Therefore, by your own admission, you sped through the construction zone where fines are double. And if you didn’t, then it would take you 20 minutes to go through that 10 miles, leaving 40 minutes to travel the remaining 50 miles, putting your speed before and after the construction zone at 75 m.p.h.
Mr. Albury, when you give total collapse times for the towers in a lame effort to prove Griffin and free-fall a fraud, you are doing little more than proving (a) you have little understanding of math and physics, (b) you are purposely playing math games to distract people in tune with some disinformation agenda, or {c) both.
In the case of both towers and WTC-7, the demolition can be broken up into stages of varying acceleration depending on the resistance or lack thereof acting on it. All buildings had stages that were indistiguishable from free-fall, meaning that — quite unbelievable to anyone understanding physics and construction — no structure or content were present to slow the collapse.
To get a better understanding of this, I suggest you go to A&E for 9/11 Truth and study the videos of high school physics teacher Mr. Chandler.
By the way, Mr. Chandler did some interesting physics calculations on the collapse of just the upper 20 floors or so of WTC-1. Although the acceleration in this stage was 2/3 that of gravitational acceleration (g), the acceleration did increase. More importantly, in order to achieve this increasing acceleration (albeit only to 2/3g), it implies that the resistive force of the tower below this point was 2/3 less than what it would have been without any collapse going on. How could the structure transition from 100% structural support suddently to 33% structural support? Energy was added to compromise the structure.
Mr. Albury wrote:
Here’s another analogy. How many people live in Green Bay, Wisconsin or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or the states where these cities are located? Answer: A samll fraction of the number of people who were rooting for those teams and watching them on the telly on Super Bowl Sunday. So how could all these people just abandon their home teams and become some rabid fans of those who played? Answer: It is called “knowing which was the wind was blowing”, “reading the writing on the wall”, and “going with a winner”.
Did the Super Bowl advertizers really care who was playing in the game or who would win? Their purpose was to make money.
When the second Bush Administration entered (stole) the White House, installed many hold-overs from G.H.W. Bush (including the VP, Sec. of Defense, etc.), and outlined their neo-con agenda in the PNAC manifestos, the writing was on the wall. After 9/11, football/patriotic fanaticism took over and clearly specified what “going with a winner” meant… And major hints were provided regarding how people in the know could capitalize on these developments and profit handsomely.
Mr. Albury wrote:
I never mentioned the put options. Now that you bring it up, that is a clear indication of foreknowledge.
Mr. Albury wrote:
You are skewing things. Assuming that the FDNY was out of the loop, I’d wager that none in the FDNY from their years of experience in fighting fires expected either tower to fail in a monumental fashion, to be pulverized. Shouldn’t have happened, period. Therefore, as soon as the first one was demolished, it dawned on the FDNY that they didn’t know what additional demolition mechanisms were at play. All bets were off regarding what could be expected. It would not take many planted seeds from high level officials or others to FDNY leadership to get firefighter evacuation.
Mr. Albury wrote:
It is called “knowing what side your bread is buttered on.” Firefighters were ordered not to talk to the press about 9/11. Their testimonies to which you link were suppressed for many years. They could see how this event was being used to wage war and how evidence was being destroyed & suppressed. They were simple fire men who were dependent on their jobs. The writing was on the wall and the anthrax was in the mail. If they wanted to stay employed, they’d shut up.
I work for law enforcement, which is the main reason I use an alias when making these comments. Yes, “knowing which side your bread is buttered on” is valid. That hasn’t kept me silent, but, then again, I do use an alias. And I do speak openly about the subject to the people at work, just not to law enforcement at large. And I am not the only one.
BTW, I have been reading this while wanting to add something I saw on a forum. One of my brothers-in-law is a civil engineer who said it looked like a controlled demolition, but he didn’t see how they could have prepared it, since it would normally take 2 or 3 months for such a building. But I saw an anonymous post by someone who said he was paid 6 figures to replace all of the fire extinguishers mounted on the columns with fake ones containing shaped charges. This was done apparently in connection with the white vans parked every night for two weeks around the buildings after the cleaning crew left. The use of shaped charges and remote control would answer my brother-in-law’s objection, since it then would not require drilling into the columns or running any cables. Also, I have recently seen a post from a contractor who described secret research into explosives related to but beyond the the normal capabilities of nano-thermite. That could also have been a factor.
Mr. McKee; You might as well save your breath. I think it’s obvious this Albury dude is either on the federal payroll to spew this illogical anti-911 truth BS or he is living in his Mom’s basement blogging 24/7 because he dropped out of community college and has nothing else better to do.
I crave and love historical, documented facts and quotes. I recently discoverd Rys2sense.com and have learned a great deal from this degreed history major. I’m a Vietnam Vet that wasted 2 of my best years fighting because of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, risking my life, for what? The military industrial complex and its greed. Like the Who sang decades ago, “We won’t get fooled again”.
Yes, it’s unfortunate when people make the evidence fit their conclusion rather than the other way around. I don’t mind differences of opinion when I think the other person is being sincere, but…
I’m glad that you made it through your Vietnam experience when so many didn’t. I wasn’t there, but it makes me angry to think about how many lives were ruined or endangered based on lies and distortions. You know, when one of my friends dismisses my interest in 9/11 on the basis that it’s old news, I’m always tempted to ask them how they’d feel if they had a brother or sister in Afghanistan or Iraq. What if they lost someone on 9/11? How old would the news be then? Thanks for your comment.
The 9/11 “truth movement” has fooled you, tired one, and you’ve chosen to resort to personal attacks and the old “government shill” canard instead of addressing anything I’ve posted here, which is a familiar tactic. On most “truth” sites, I’d also have been banned by now, and all of my comments would have disappeared.
I’m a Vietnam vet too (1st Cav, An Khe, 1968), and don’t see any comparison between some fudging of an incident report in an encounter that didn’t kill any US personnel or cost much, and the murdering of nearly 3000 civilians in the US, along with billions in property damage on 9/11. Vietnam was a big mistake, as was Bush’s 2003 Iraq invasion, but there’s no evidence that 9/11 was carried out by anyone other than al Qaeda, or that inside help was needed or given in the hijacking and crashing of 4 airliners. It was pretty simple to hijack one prior to 9/11, and too late once we realized what their intentions were.
Are you a big contributor to Gage, Rodriguez, Chandler, and the other shameless frauds and profiteers of your “movement”?
No, you’re not “the sneaky one,” Craig, but I did point out to you that your paraphrasing of some of my comments very substantively changed what I said, whether you choose to call that very valid observation “playing semantic games” or not.
Switchgear explosions in a ConEd substation below WTC 7, after planes shorted out secondaries across the street, might have been heard by only a couple of people inside, but for cutter charges or any explosives powerful enough to have severed columns in the building, we wouldn’t have needed Barry Jennings to report them to us. Please see my other comment here regarding Jennings’ account vs. the “truth movement’s” mangling of the Larry Silverstein “pull it” statement. If you believe that he and the FDNY were just deciding in mid-afternoon WHETHER to use those imaginary explosives, why were some of them already being detonated before the North Tower collapsed? Generally speaking, demolition explosives don’t go off 7 or 8 hours before a building collapses either, and are usually heard within seconds of collapse initiation.
The Pentagon video you’re looking for simply doesn’t exist, because surveillance cameras aren’t fast enough to record an object going ~775 fps, as I’ve already explained. Instead of glomming onto a contrived anomaly and weaving a conspiracy yarn out of it, you could easily establish with absolute certainty what hit the Pentagon just by contacting some of the many civilian first responders and others at the link I provided above. I’ve looked, and nearly every organization listed at that link has a web site and contact information. More than 130 people nearby actually saw the airliner fly in from the SW and crash there, and there are no reports from the NE side of the Pentagon of a low-flying, high-speed 757 going away from the building, nor are there any reports from the SW side of a missile, or of any other flying object your “researchers” can dream up. A Minnesota ANG C-130 that had recently left Andrews AFB for home was seen by some of the people in the area, but had been asked by ATC to follow AA 77, as the crew related later:
http://www.minnesotanationalguard.org/press_room/e-zine/articles/index.php?item=75
It was obviously not in position to crash into the Pentagon, and the crew seems to have survived the flight. There is also very little else in the world that smells like diesel-range organic jet fuel, and the huge quantities of it required to produce a 200′ high fireball would hardly have escaped everyone’s attention prior to the attack.
If you “have no idea how” I’m measuring the collapse times, I took actual collapse footage and timed it from top to bottom, as did the man who produced this video I’ve already linked to on here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/RKOwens4#p/u/39/qLShZOvxVe4
He also used other methods he clearly explained and illustrated. Free-fall time from 1368′ is ~9.25 seconds, so there was obviously considerable resistance in both tower collapses, and dynamic loading of ~60,000 or 125,000 tons onto the intact lower floors from a story or more far exceeded their design capabilities.
Collapse times aren’t evidence of a controlled demolition in the first place, but it just isn’t that much of a challenge to time the towers’. [WTC 7 was more difficult, since there weren’t any videos showing the lower floors, but that hasn’t stopped Gage, Ryan, Steven Jones, and others from declaring that the facade took either 6.5 or 6.6 seconds to fall, depending on which liar you choose to believe. It appears to have taken ~9 seconds, but timing it to the nearest 1/10 of a second is impossible from videos. Naturally, these “researchers” won’t explain how they got their collapse times, because they can’t.]
There weren’t “many witnesses” to the loud sounds in the North Tower basement; there was 9/11 opportunist and profiteer William Rodriguez, who also sued the US government, claiming that a high-powered microwave weapon brought down UA 93, among other absurdities. If he heard bombs in the basement before the North Tower collapsed, why didn’t people outside, or even a floor or two higher report hearing them also? How does anyone even see the 96th floor from a sub-level of the basement? Why didn’t the building collapse immediately starting at the bottom, instead of starting at least 1:42:00 later and nearly 100 floors higher? What did the explosions do, since there were no explosively-severed columns found in the debris? Some of the column steel at that level was 7″ thick, and explosives sufficient to sever it would have killed him and everyone else near them. They certainly wouldn’t have blown out a few elevator doors and badly burned some people, but burning debris and a wave of flaming jet fuel falling from nearly 1/4 mile would.
You also caught a tough break with the WTC tower design itself. 236 of the 283 columns in each one were mostly outside of the buildings, and clad in 1/10″ aluminum brake metal outside, and covered with directly-applied lightweight gypsum plaster on the inside surfaces. There was simply no place to hide explosives, and since they were in plain sight to tens of thousands of live eyewitnesses and millions who’ve seen the videos, it would also have been impossible to detonate them without the bright flashes and deafening bangs being noticed. I’d say that your motive-free bombs-in-the-WTC on 9/11 “theory” is DOA.
Mr. Albury wrote:
And what do you get? A near meaningless number in terms of describing what happened to the buildings.
I prefer using the Zen stop-watch. Instead of the glass is half empty or the glass is half full, the Zen outlook is that the glass is already broken. So, when you apply the Zen stop-watch, it starts when the first piece of material is placed on top of another in the construction of the building. It ends when the last particle of the building has fallen out of the air and landed back on earth where it started. Total elapsed collapse time is decades.
Mr. Albury wrote:
You are absolutely correct. Total collapse times aren’t evidence of controlled demolition.
What is evidence would be distinct stages in their collapse, whether using your stop watch or the Zen stop watch.
In the case of WTC-7, it had a stage of 100+ ft where its collapse was indistinguishable from free-fall, which can only be possibly if energy is applied to moved structure and content out of the way of the falling mass so that it offers no resistance.
In the case of the towers, they have stages of free-fall. They also have stages where the upper stories suddenly loose 2/3 their standing-strength such that the rapidly deteriorating-into-dust mass could move at 2/3 the rate of gravitational acceleration [g] (meaning that it was speeding up and accelerating, just not as fast as g.)
Mr. Albury wrote:
If you’d study the construction pictures, you’d see that the sections of the outer box structures had access holes where they placed the bolts to connect it with lower and upper pieces. Not only would it be a perfect place to put nano-thermite steel bolt cutters, but it would also be easy to hide and ideal for “chunking” the outer structure into pieces suitable for carting away. Being on the inside of the buildings, they would not have been as visible; there’s no rule that says there’d have to be a bang. The access hole can be resealed on the inside.
It should be noted that the number of floors that could physically host a real tenant may have been significantly less than 110. After the 30th or so floor and except for the sky lobbies, restaurant, and select premiere floors, the towers may have been mostly a grand, hollow, ruse to fool us and the world: a 40 year hoax as our stunning example of capitalism on display to the world. Meaningful and significant on so many levels.
I still can’t get an answer as to why any agreement with anything CIT says is met with attacks. I’m thoughtful but I’m being made a fool of? That’s pretty arrogant. People who don’t agree with you are fools?
I’ll try to respond briefly to your points (under a big work deadline so I don’t have the time for a longer response):
1. The north path doesn’t preclude the plane hitting the building. It precludes the plane knocking the poles over.
2. Wreckage: I know there’s no PROOF that this was planted, but it hardly accounts for a whole plane, does it? And the willingness of anti-CIT people to accept the Pentagon “evidence” stll puzzles me. If 9/11 was a deception, why is all the evidence at the Pentagon to be taken at face value? Has even one piece of the plane been positively connected to Flight 77? Serial numbers and such? And far be it for me to doubt Sgt. Williams, but I do. We’re supposed to accept that the whole plane was inside the buildiing without seeing 95% of it?
3. I still don’t get it. Why do you defend the official story on the Pentagon?
4. This point is so absurd that it barely merits a response. The world has doubts about whether the Pentagon was hit by Flight 77 – and you’re telling me they’d avoid confirming this because of “military secrecy.” Give me a break. If true, that would make them incredibly irresponsible.
5. Oh my God. This wing folding thing is complete crap. i refer you to the essay by A.K. Dewdney and Jerry Longspaugh on physics911.net. And you well know that the hole wasn’t 90 feet when the alleged impact occurred. The wall collapsed about half an hour after. This is deliberately misleading.
6. You accuse Ranke and Marquis of personal attacks but then you call them cowardly. Pot calling the kettle black?
My bottom line: I believe everything should be investigated thorough and independently. You may feel CIT doesn’t include all the evidence. But you won’t accept ANY of theirs.
And Chandler/Cole is a very weak piece. They list things that “haven’t had a lot of attention,” but what they list are the main issues that have had tons of attention. They should spend more time on the Pentagon before writing their dismissal of CIT.
Were the 5 light poles secretly bombed with precise timing, Senor? Did American Airlines just pay out millions of dollars to victims not covered by the 9/11 VCF because they’re good sports? I’ve already posted a long list of eyewitnesses you could contact if you have the slightest doubt about what crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, so why haven’t you? Were all of the civilian first responders in on the plot too? They’re certainly not in your “truth movement.”
” Did American Airlines just pay out millions of dollars to victims not covered by the 9/11 VCF because they’re good sports”
I understand that Albury Smith is no longer here, but this should be addressed never the less.
No, American Airlines are certainly not merely “good sports”, but were an airlines that was plunged to the edge of bankruptsy by the ‘short puts’ on their stock, involving the economic end of this attack. No, not good sports–forced to play ball or else.
Not that this or any other rational answer would have any effect on our raging agent of cognitive dissonance.
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It was very interesting to read this article. I certainly understand how it got you at first.
A psychological operation like this bears on the emotions, not ones critical thinking abilities.
9/11 was above all a media event, for trauma induced programming; fear and loathing…shock and awe {as they say}.
Do you remember reading about how many people had to recieve psychological help with anger and depression caused by this event?
I have several close friends who, like Craig were well versed in investigating government wrong doing, many beginning such by looking into the JFK hit. That {JFK} plus trying to figure out the Nazi phenomenum in Europe were my first hard labors into historical study.
Of those close friends, one of my best, was a female friend who had partnered with me for years in search and analysis. She is very smart, intuitive and full of insight. However 9/11 got her, and took her down for the count.
She actually wrote me an email about two weeks after the event that said; “I give up, I am going to love Big Brother.”
Wow…I could hardly believe it. Can hardly believe it to this day. But we can no longer talk to each other. She is no a confirmed anti-Islamic pro war nutcase.
So I take this very personal–she meant a lot to me, and she was turned into a zombie by Ming the Merciless.
I was suspicious when I watched the video loop of the second plane striking the tower ad infinitum behind the talking head announcer early on TV–being on the west coast myself.
This is a technique called “psychic driving”–developed by Ewing Cameron in the 1950s, although his work involved mainly audio.
But when I saw the video of the first tower erupt on the first shots of it on TV–I knew then and there it was impossible. There is no way there was any correlation of the airplane strikes and that.
Probably talking to myself here, as this is an older post…
At any rate, it is simple common sense that a building cannot fall through itself. I hate to be so blunt about it with those who were taken in by this for so long. But they were programmed by repetitive mantras, “the building collapsed into its own footprint” for weeks, while in a state of trauma and stress, plus the natural hypnotic state of TV viewing.
~W. Whitten
Note how the criminal trolls fear the search for truth.
they know exactly who and what they are protecting
Albury must be really stupid if he thinks this is evidence of a building collapsing.
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/collapses.html
http://www.show-the-house.com/id107.html
The sun rises in the east on this planet does it not?
Not according to the liars and shills like Albury Smith, who would have you believe the sun actually comes up in the NORTH!
So, why do you feel the need to lie so much Albury?