Conspiracies: The Facts * the Theories * the Evidence (29 page)

believed that they
were
acting alone, but were unwittingly played by distant forces, generating enough evidence to allow them to

take the whole blame, in the same way that the Gunpowder Plot

conspirators may have been set up in 1605 (
see
chapter 2).

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Engineered Confusion?

Whatever or whoever was piloting the planes, conspiracy believ-

ers point to the consistent failure of the authorities to track the rogue flights as another contentious area. For the first time in

hijacking history, someone in each plane managed to switch off

the transponders (automatic beacon signals), which we are told

made the flights untraceable. Yet NORAD (North American

Aerospace Defense Command) and other agencies entrusted

with the vital task of protecting US airspace often boast of their ability to track any flying object, however smal , using radar and other equipment. So why were transponders necessary to find

the planes? In its defence, NORAD uses the bizarre ‘coincidence’

that a number of high-level security exercises were taking place

that day (Operation Vigilant Guardian, among others) – ones

that posited precisely the same scenario of hijacked planes hitting important buildings. The fact that this did actual y occur the very same day undoubtedly caused enormous confusion (‘Is this real

world, or exercise?’ says one hapless air traffic controller when informed of the hijackings, heard in released recordings). Such an unlikely coincidence has left many convinced that the exercises

were an intentional part of the plot, the planners knowing how

useful such operations would be in sowing uncertainty and offer-

ing good excuses for inaction. Even under the hypothesis that

al-Qaeda was directly responsible for the attacks, their operatives should have been unaware of these arrangements, given their top

secret status – unless they were tipped off by insiders.

Until 9/11, planes even suspected of being hijacked were

routinely intercepted within minutes of abnormal behaviour or

radio silence, but on this day no fighters were scrambled until far too late, and then inexplicably flew at speeds too slow to make any difference. The main defence for the relative inaction is that no one had time to find and intercept the planes before the damage

could be done, but glaring inconsistencies in the testimony of

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high-level staff strongly indicate that this was not the case. The official y published air traffic control transcripts, for instance, have been verifiably re-edited in recent years, seemingly to obscure

who knew what and when, while Vice-President Dick Cheney,

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers

– key decision-makers in such crises – all say they were either not present or informed enough in time to act decisively. This is notably contradicted by testimony from White House Security Chief

Richard Clarke and Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta,

amongst other staff, who have firmly stated that their colleagues were present at least 30 minutes before they claim – an important chronological difference in such a tight sequence of developments.

Mineta even reports being present during an episode that

morning which suggests that Cheney was deliberately allowing a

rogue plane to approach the Pentagon. When an operative seemed

to questioned the wisdom of this, asking whether the (unspecified)

‘orders’ still stood, Cheney snapped at him: ‘Of course the orders still stand – have you heard anything to the contrary?’ The

Pentagon was struck soon after. Defenders of the official version say this is open to misinterpretation, but those who believe that Cheney was a main player in the 9/11 conspiracy hold this episode to be an important piece of evidence, implicating him in a ‘stand down’ scenario. The omission of this conversation from the final

9/11 Commission report suggests that the authorities may also

have recognized its damning connotations.

As for who was real y flying the planes at these moments, there

are many unsolved issues surrounding the hijackers, with some of

those named having issued statements to claim they are still alive today. Aside from the almost too obvious evidence supposedly

left in cars (copies of the Koran, incriminating documents, plans, etc.), one of the criteria used to identify the terrorists was the miraculous survival of some of their passports, which somehow

survived huge firebal s to flutter down to the ground almost

intact, when everything else was pulverized to dust. Indeed, it is 179

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the nature of the destruction following the hijacks that has been the greatest point of focus in the conspiracy world.

The Pentagon

Before looking at the mysteries surrounding the destruction of the
three
towers which fell at the WTC, which general y receive the most scrutiny, it should be noted that one of the first anomalies to be identified by truthseekers was the markedly limited damage at the Pentagon. We are told that a 228-passenger Boeing 757 ploughed

into one side of the US military’s headquarters, yet the visible hole in the early images of the impact site (before the roof col apsed) appears to be little more than 20 feet in diameter, with some cursory damage either side. With a total wingspan of around 125 feet, and a tail 44 feet high, how had a craft of that size entered such a smal space without causing wider devastation? The photos show no

debris around the entry point, and workmen’s cable spools, present when the plane came in, stand seemingly unaffected. Windows on

the floor just above the hole are unbroken. The questions arising from this remarkably clean strike from such a large object loaded with fuel have never been satisfactorily answered.

The authorities contend that the plane entered the building at

such a speed (around 500mph) that most of the debris ended up

inside the structure and was therefore not readily visible, adding that the wings either folded back as they struck, or somehow vaporized with the force. Putting aside the problematic physics of vaporizing wings, the fact is that several witnesses inside the Pentagon have remarked at how little of the plane seemed to have survived – few seats, bodies or suitcases were immediately apparent. The rare shots of debris that do purport to be from Flight 77 display objects such as engine foils which are too small to be from a large jet liner; some have identified them instead as being from an A3 Sky Warrior,

an obscure US fighter plane. This and the oddly penetrative clean 180

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strike qualities of some of the restrained damage (as compared with the huge explosions seen at the twin towers) lead some to wonder

what real y did hit the Pentagon on 9/11.

A number of eyewitnesses on the day described seeing a much

slighter projectile enter the building; a missile or a small plane rather than a 757. A large plane
would
appear to have come down low over the building just before the explosion, perhaps leading

people to assume this was responsible, but many believe it was a

decoy for the real perpetrator, which may have flown in beneath it.

It might be assumed that CCTV would clear up any confusion, but

the very few frames ever released from what must be a multiplicity of available images fail to show anything other than a vague blur that leaves the questions hanging.

If it was Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, even more puzzles arise.

How, for instance, did the hijacker Hani Hanjour manage to execute what has been described by pilots as one of the greatest feats in aviation history, when his own flight trainers claim he could barely handle a tiny Cessna? If the official claim is correct, the Boeing 757

dropped several thousand feet in less than two minutes without

stalling or breaking up in mid-air, performed a perfect last-minute tight turn, skimmed roadside light poles without being diverted

sideways, and handily struck the one part of the Pentagon that was under renovation at the time and comparatively unstaffed. This

can be seen as oddly serendipitous when heading straight into

the natural bul seye of the structure would appear to have been so much easier and potential y more destructive.

A Theory for Flight 93

A question thrown up by the conspiracy view is that if it were

not Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon on 9/11, then what happened

to that plane and its passengers? There have been a number of

ideas proposed to account for this. There are a number of plane-

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switching theories in circulation (some of which incorporate

more extravagant claims that what looked like planes were, in

fact, projected holograms) which posit the notion that the actual hijacked flights – if they ever were real y hijacked and didn’t

just quietly divert somewhere – may have secretly landed and

disembarked, their occupants perhaps never knowing what was

real y going on. Some say the abnormal y low passenger numbers

on all the flights (
see
p. 174) enabled their collective occupants to be packed onto Flight 93, which was then sent off to be discreetly shot down over Pennsylvania. There are certainly many reports of

aerial explosions just before the plane came down, and the miles-

wide debris field and anomalous sooty smudge we are told was

Flight 93’s main impact site (with almost no plane parts found)

suggest that much of it may well have been destroyed in the air.

The US military deny shooting down Flight 93, even as a

protective measure, and adhere to the heroic tale of the passengers storming the cockpit and bringing the plane down before it could

reach its target (‘Let’s rol ’), but, as we have seen, the cell phone cal s that are supposed to have given us much of this version of

events may not be whol y reliable.

The World Trade Center

Of all the memories seared into people’s minds, the images of

the World Trade Center’s famous twin towers exploding with

aeroplane impacts or crumbling down into dust are without doubt

the most powerful of 9/11. The psychological shock generated by

these global y televised nightmares is held by most conspiracy

theorists to have been one of the key tools in the conditioning of the human race to submit to the mandate of the New World Order.

Yet the same images are also held to contain some of the most

important pieces of evidence to show that 9/11 was deliberately –

and literal y – engineered.

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The bottom line of the official post-mortem on the WTC is that

crucial fireproofing is said to have been removed from the steel

girders by the impacts of the aeroplanes, allowing the heat of the subsequent infernos to weaken the structures to the point of eventual col apse, falling floor by floor within seconds. On immediate

inspection, this would seem to be a reasonable hypothesis from

what we see in the footage. However, an unusual y large number

of professional architects, engineers and physicists, far outside the usual conspiracy boundaries, have challenged this verdict.

This is not the place for a prolonged scientific analysis (many

other sources provide the evidence in detail), but the main

assertion of the truth movement is that the fire and damage

could not by themselves have been enough to bring the buildings

down so quickly or so total y. Until 9/11, no steel-framed modern building had ever col apsed due to fire, yet on this one day it

occurred an incredible three times.

The photos and videos of Flights 11 and 175 hitting their respec-

tive towers in orange bal s of flame show clearly that much of the aviation fuel, held to be one of the biggest contributors to the

‘infernos’, in fact ignited into the air on impact, burning out very quickly to leave a thick black smouldering suggestive of relatively low temperature fires. Steel is general y accepted to lose its strength at a heat of around 2,800°F, but even the official reports suggest that the highest temperatures which could have been reached in

the towers could not have exceeded 1,800°F. The removal of the

fireproofing is usual y cited as the problem here, but this is only a theory, with no available evidence to prove it beyond a few

inconclusive tests which crudely involved firing bullets at metal plates on plywood boxes. Even allowing for the fireproofing arguments, critics believe that the towers should never have come down in the way we see, at virtual y freefall speed without unevenness or hesitation, if a process of natural col apse was at work.

How else, then, might the WTC have come down? Most

challengers assert that explosives of some kind must have been

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used, pre-planted in the buildings in the weeks before 9/11 to

ensure that the towers fell with maximum spectacle. If so, this

would suggest the activity of agents with greater access to the

buildings than Middle Eastern terrorists would have been able

to achieve. It goes without saying that defenders of the official version robustly attack this stance, but the evidence is hard to