thesyntaxera
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Official account challenged
Before the sun had set on the evening of September 11, competing theories were being developed to explain what had occurred. For each version of events reported by the mainstream media (the “Common Account”) that transpired that Tuesday, there has arisen an alternate view. Some of these theories have more adherents than others.
While those who accept the 9/11 Commission Report have often dismissed alternative hypotheses as conspiracy theories, there are individuals, groups and organizations who say that the most common account of the events can also be referred to as a conspiracy theory. Professor of philosophy of religion and theology David Ray Griffin has written, "…we can say that we accept all those conspiracy theories that we believe to be true, while we reject all those that we believe to be false."
As with almost all major historical events, there exists a wide variety of theories about those occurring on 9/11. Alternative theories to the Common Account surrounding this subject are generally placed in one or more of the following classifications:
Individuals within the U.S. government are covering up key details of the attacks and stonewalling an honest, exhaustive investigation into the events.
Individuals within the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the attacks and consciously failed to prevent them. This group can be referred to as LIHOP ("Let It Happen On Purpose").
Individuals within the U.S. government orchestrated the attacks themselves. This group can be referred to as MIHOP ("Make It Happen On Purpose").
Individuals within the government of Israel or Iraq were behind the attacks.
One of the ideas most commonly accepted by persons who doubt the dominant view is the notion that some segment of the United States Government allegedly knew of the impending attacks and failed to act on that knowledge. In the aftermath of the disaster, the intelligence world was looked upon to explain what went wrong within its own community. The following reports are drawn upon to support these alternate theories:
Shortly after the attacks, David Schippers, the chief prosecutor for the impeachment of Bill Clinton stated he was contacted by three FBI agents who mentioned uncovering a possible terrorist attack planned for September. According to the story, as the agents informed their superiors, they were briefed not to pursue the issue and threatened with prosecution. After 9/11 David Schippers declared, "Five weeks before the September 11 tragedy, I did my best to get a hold of Attorney General John Ashcroft with my concerns." It is unclear exactly what warnings he is thought to have received from the FBI, but Mr. Shippers has said he received information warning of a terrorist attack planned for lower Manhattan using a nuclear device.
Author William Norman Grigg furthers the Shippers story in his article "Did We Know What Was Coming?" published in The New American. According to the article, three FBI agents interviewed confirmed, "the information provided to Schippers was widely known within the FBI before September 11."
CBS News reported that Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines in July of 2001 because of a "threat assessment" by the FBI. The Attorney General did fly at least two more times commercially after the assessment was given.
Two of the 9/11 hijackers from Flight 77 had lived with an FBI asset months prior to September 11th. According to CBS News, "The CIA sent out an alert Aug. 23, 2001, naming the two as possible terrorists — but the FBI didn't know the names of the two houseguests, who had moved out months earlier." The Administration also could not agree to allow the FBI to serve a Committee subpoena and deposition notice on the informant. Instead, written interrogatories from the Joint Inquiry were, at the suggestion of the FBI, provided to the informant.
A high volume of put options were purchased in the days before 9/11 for both American and United Airlines, among others[1]. The number of put options purchased was more than six times higher than normal[2]. Put options were purchased for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied 22 stories in the World Trade Center. Merrill Lynch & Co., with headquarters near the Twin Towers, saw a 1200% increase in put options bought in the four days preceding 9/11. CNN reported that "Between August 10 and September 10, the NYSE says short sales of UAL Corp. increased 40 percent, American parent AMR Corp increased 20 percent, and aircraft manufacturer Boeing Corp. increased 37 percent. Short-sellers with advance knowledge of the attack could have made millions."[3] Stock tracker Phil Erlanger stated,"'It's not the type of thing you'd normally do, unless you were sure the stock price was going to go down . . .There was nothing going on to warrant that kind of speculation. The footprint is there. You've just got to find which shoe fits it."[4] Munich Re, the world's biggest reinsurance company, was also examined. A reported $2.5 million in profits made trading options went unclaimed after 9/11. Insider trading is said to have also occurred in several other countries immediately before the attacks of Sept. 11.[5] Furthermore, investigators from the U.S. Secret Service contacted a number of bond traders regarding large purchases of five-year Treasury notes before the attacks (Five-year Treasury notes are considered one of the best investments in the event of a world crisis)[6]. and Germany's central bank governor, Ernst Welteke, says there were signs of suspicious movements in oil and gold prices before the attack.[7],[8] The Airline industry had been on unstable ground during 2001, and there were a number of put option spikes throughout the year. Although no evidence has yet been provided for anything sinister in these transactions, US intelligence agencies are known to monitor markets for signs of imminent, untoward events. Former Security and Exchange Commission enforcement chief William McLucas told Bloomberg News that regulators would "certainly be able to track down every trade," however, no arrests have ever occurred.
On September 10 Amr "Anthony" Elgindy, an Egyptian-born financial analyst, tried to liquidate his children's $300,000 trust account. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken Breen has stated that this could have indicated foreknowledge of the attacks.[9] (the referenced article does not indicate that Elgindy had any ties to the US government)
Rep Curt Weldon has asserted that over a year before the 9/11 attacks, a classified US intelligence unit known as "Able Danger" identified Mohammed Atta and three other future 9/11 hijackers as likely members of an Al Qaeda cell operating in the US. The team recommended that the information be shared with the FBI but the military's Special Operations Command rejected the recommendation. (New York Times, Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00, 8/9/2005)
Pentagon officials said they have found three more individuals who recall an intelligence chart identifying Mohamed Atta as a terrorist one year prior to the attacks. (MSNBC, More remember Atta ID’d as terrorist pre-9/11, 9/1/2005)
Four days before the attack Florida Governor Jeb Bush signed an executive order that some have interpreted as allowing Bush to declare martial law and others have said was a routine training order.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told talk show host Larry King that at eight o'clock of the morning of the attack he was meeting with some congressmen and told them " that sometime in the next two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve months there would be an event that would occur in the world that would be sufficiently shocking that it would remind people again how important it is to have a strong healthy defense department."
Collapse of the World Trade Center
Many aspects of the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings have been well documented, though other aspects, such as the destruction of WTC building 7, have received less scrutiny. Those who reject the dominant version of events support their claim with both a presentation of evidence that many are not aware of, as well as interpretation of the more commonly known evidence.
Much of the discussion about Towers One and Two centers around the idea that planted explosives brought down the structure. This idea would fall into the MIHOP category listed above. Many researchers questioning the official account of 9/11 have highlighted the following:
Claims regarding the actual collapse
Lower Manhattan as seen from New Jersey, shortly after the attacks and subsequent collapse of the World Trade Center towersIt has been observed the Twin Towers fell straight down, at close to free-fall speed. This is a similar characteristic of a controlled demolition. As far as the speed, a consensus has yet to be reached as to the exact duration of the fall. The most widely used number is at 10 seconds. Objects breaking away from the collapsing towers are photographed falling faster than the actual building, indicating the structure was not in a true free fall but very close to it as in the case of typical prepared demolitions.
The dust cloud and its make up are considered un-characteristic of a gravity-driven collapse. These arguments also cite reports from fire-fighters and others on the scene that nearly all the concrete was pulverized. Aside from explosives, the energy from the fall would be the only source of energy to cause the concrete to be pulverized. It is unclear as to how much gravitational energy was stored in the buildings or its ability to cause such pulverization, as very few studies have been done in order to obtain a conclusive answer for any theory regarding the dust cloud. At least one detailed analysis [10] of selected dust samples (to determine the exposure of nearby residents and workers to toxic contaminants) was conducted, but the samples were all collected from just three sheltered locations, and rain on September 15th washed away dust in exposed locations. A USGS study showed the elemental composition of a number of dust samples collected from outdoor and indoor locations [11]. However, no study has addressed the issue of whether the dust showed evidence of explosive residues.
Many witnesses retold the event with the use of words such as "bomb" or "explosion" to describe what they heard during the attack up to the subsequent collapse. Many witnesses describe multiple sounds heard before the collapses bearing curious and unique features. One observer recalls, "It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions," as well as this impression, "It seemed like it took forever, but there were about ten explosions."
It is often pointed out that no steel building before or since the 9-11 attack has collapsed as the result of fire. The following examples are generally cited in regards to this claim: the Caracas Tower (2004), One Meridian Plaza (1991), First Interstate Bank (1988) and 1 New York Plaza (1970), as illustrated here. The recent fire of the Madrid Windsor Tower, a 32 story building burned for nearly 24 hours in February of 2005, resulted in a partial but not total collapse (steel portions involved in the fire had collapsed.[12]). However, the Windsor Tower, unlike all the buildings mentioned above, was framed in steel-reinforced concrete rather than steel alone, and thus, is not a close comparison to the WTC towers. While the above examples differed slightly from the Twin Towers in design and materials, all steel framed high rise buildings must follow common standards of building code specifications for resisting fire [13] and other events which could result in structural failures.
Some opponents of this analysis cite the 10,000 page National Institute of Standards and Technology report, which presented evidence on how and why they believe buildings collapsed. The report noted that "NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001." [14]. Though this report said there was no such evidence, physicist Steven E. Jones and others have pointed out that it did not address or try to refute any of the specific analysis arguing for the demolition hypothesis.
Claims in reference to the aftermath or debris field
A section of fuselage rests in the ruins of the World Trade Center.The rubble of the Twin Towers smoldered for weeks after the collapse [16]. Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y, observed "literally molten steel" at the WTC. Physicist Steven E. Jones has pointed out that the molten metal cannot be known to be steel without a metallurgical analysis being done. He has also noted that molten iron is a byproduct of a thermite reaction, which could have been used in the demolition of the towers[17]. Molten metal was also mentioned by Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc(citation needed). The extreme temperatures in the rubble pile are unprecedented in the history of documented building fires or structural failures. The melting point of un-fireproofed steel is around 2750 °F (1510 °C) while the highest speculation regarding temperatures inside the twin towers circled 2000 °F (1093 °C). According to Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction, "Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100 °F (593 °C)," however, these temperatures could not have been reached in the towers themselves (if thermite or other explosives were not used) since air-aspirated open hydrocarbon fires typically cannot exceed 820 °C. Asif Usmani of Edinburgh University concluded that the interconnecting beams of the towers could have expanded by around 9cm at 932 °F (500 °C), causing the floors above to buckle. The molten steel observation has not been elaborated on or picked up by most news groups. The observation of molten metal at Ground Zero was emphasized publicly by Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer responsible for the design of the World Trade Center Towers, in a second hand account by James Williams who reported, "As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running." Sarah Atlas, of New Jersey's Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue, one of the first on the scene said, "Fires burned and molten steel flowed in the pile of ruins…" (Penn Arts and Sciences, Summer 2002). Similarly, Dr. Allison Geyh, a public health investigator from Johns Hopkins, recalled in the late fall 2001 issue of Magazine of Johns Hopkins Public Health, "In some pockets now being uncovered they are finding molten steel." While NASA's satellite images of Ground Zero show large hot spots well after 9/11, they do not provide an exact measure of temperatures within the rubble pile [18] since this type of remote sensing captures only the temperatures on the surface of a debris pile.
Most of the columns came down in sections about 30 ft. long. The last bits of debris were finally removed in May 2002. The speed of the removal process has raised eyebrows suggesting not enough forensic study was done. Critics of this assertion cite a statement by Dr W. Gene Corley, head of the Building Performance Assessment Team on the site, where he said "The team has had full access to the scrap yards and to the site and has been able to obtain numerous samples."[19] NIST has numerous sections of steel from both Towers as well as WTC 7. Large sections of steel destined for recycling were sent to areas in SE Asia. See images of the debris sorting for more information.
The government has yet to produce the Cockpit voice recorder (CVR) or Flight recorder (FDR) from the WTC attack. While it is still publicly unknown if any of the black boxes were recovered intact from the wreckage, a recent report has stated that a source has revealed that the black boxes from the planes in the WTC attack "were in fact recovered and were analyzed by the NTSB." The Chicago Tribune reported that experts believed the recorders would not be found simply because of the massive scope of the damage and debris. Now that the boxes may have been found, the validity of the opinions of experts, as reported by the Tribune, is in question. The contents of the black boxes could provide important clues about the skills of those flying the planes, their apparent strategy, ability to locate their targets, flying speed, etc.
On September 16th, 2001, several news agencies reported authorities finding "the passport of a suspected hijacker" which they described to be that of Satam al Suqami.
As the Chicago Tribune reported, many tons of the debris was stolen as "scrap" by the mafia, but recovered from New Jersey, supposedly intact.
Individual viewpoints on the collapse
With the exception of the last entry, the following individuals have expressed concern or doubts on the Common Account regarding the fate of the Twin Towers:
In a research report, entitled "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?", professor of physics at Brigham Young University, Steven E. Jones, writes "The 'explosive demolition' hypothesis better satisfies tests of repeatability and parsimony and therefore is not 'junk science.' It ought to be seriously, scientifically investigated and debated."
In a letter to Frank Gayle of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Kevin Ryan of Underwriters Laboratories, wrote "This story just does not add up. If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans. Alternatively, the contention that this steel did fail at temperatures around 250 °C suggests that the majority of deaths on 9/11 were due to a safety-related failure." Underwriters Laboratories is the company that certified the steel components used in the construction of the World Trade Center towers.
Van Romero, Vice President for Research and Economic Development at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, a major authority on the effects of explosions on buildings, has said, "My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse." Romero has since retracted and revised his belief stating, "Certainly the fire is what caused the building to fail." ("Explosives Planted in Towers, New Mexico Tech Expert Says", Albuquerque Journal, September, 2001). Some have wondered about the grant of $56 million which came to New Mexico Tech in the years following his retraction, as well as the apparent notable ability of Van Romero's to acquire federal funding[20].
A June 13, 2005 article in the Washington Times, reported that former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term, Morgan Reynolds, said the Common Account about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Some have doubted this individual's credibility because he also questioned the involvement of commercial jets, stating that "North Tower's hole wasn't big enough for a Boeing 767." [21]
Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, expressed his doubt about the Common Account in the following statement: "I know many qualified engineers and scientists have said the WTC collapsed from explosives. In fact, if you look at the manner in which it fell, you have to give their conclusions credibility."
In The New Pearl Harbor, Professor David Ray Griffin argues that the fact that WTC 2 collapsed first, when it appeared most of the jet fuel was ignited on impact outside the tower makes the collapse questionable. Additionally, he argues the impact of the second aircraft was not as precise as the first, suggesting less fuel would have burned in the central support area.
Before his death in February, 1986, Minoru Yamasaki, architect and designer of the WTC, stated, "We designed the towers to take multiple 707 jet strikes."
In support of the Common Account of the collapse, Dr. Thomas Eagar, professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has stated that the building "would have had to have tipped at least 100 feet to one side in order to move its center of gravity from the center of the building out beyond its base." In other words, according to him, the structure had no choice but to fall straight down, following the path of most resistance.
Firefighters in the Twin Towers reported seeing or hearing explosions
I could copy and paste the whole thing, but I think you might find this version easier to read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Conspiracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Researchers_questioning_the_official_account_of_9/11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_World_Trade_Center
these links pretty much cover the skeptic case, as well as the official story, not to mention the Ct claims.
Read closely, and then lets talk....provide some refutations, or counter claims, or whatever you feel inclined to write....personal attacks, bad spelling, or whatever...
And if your gut response is to point out how unreliable wiki is, just know that it is just as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm
