911- Other Fires

Mandarin Oriental Hotel Fire

Skyscraper-Turned-Torch Remains Standing

Mandarin Hotel fire in early stages, showing sparks from fireworks Fire moving down the tower's sides Fire after further development The building after the fire Top of the building's facade after the fire, showing fire-induced distortions of parts

On February 9, 2009, in the middle of the Lunar New Year, the distinctive 40-story Mandarin Oriental hotel in Beijing's Television Cultural Centre (TVCC) erupted in sparks and flames that consumed the building from top to bottom in an intense fire lasing for several hours. Blamed on a ground-based fireworks display gone afoul or illegal fireworks operations inside of the building, the fire started around the tower's top and proceded downward around the tower's sides while fireworks continued to burst dramatically above the blaze. ¹  

The spectacular torching of the Mandarin tower further underscores the anomalous nature of the official explanation of the total collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 -- an explanation that primarily blames fires for causing the "global collapse" of those structures. It is yet another example of a severe fire that failed to induce even the partial collapse of a skyscraper. Although less similar to the WTC towers than other skyscrapers ravaged by fires, the Mandarin tower is notable for the magnitude of the fire it withstood -- a fire that dwarfed the fires that preceded the "collapses" of each of the the WTC skyscrapers.

Coming exactly 2711 days after 9/11/2001, the burning of the Hotel Mandarin Oriental, which was unoccupied pending its completion, killed one firefighter.

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References

1. China state broadcaster apologizes for hotel fire, AP, 

The Windsor Building Fire

Huge Fire in Steel-Reinforced Concrete Building Causes Partial Collapse

The Windsor Building after the fire was extinguished

On the night of February 12, 2005, a fire started in the Windsor building in Madrid, Spain, a 32-story tower framed in steel-reinforced concrete. At its peak, the fire, which burned for almost a day, completely engulfed the upper ten stories of the building. More than 100 firefighters battled to prevent the uncontrollable blaze from spreading to other buildings. ¹  

During the night the building shedded larged pieces, which crashed to the ground. ²  

The fire apparently caused the collapse of the top floor spans surrounding the still-standing core structure of the ten uppermost floors. As in the case of the other large skyscraper fire since 9/11/01, fears of total building collapse in the case of the Windsor fire were widely reported. ³   Those fears would again prove unfounded.

Because the Windsor fire produced a partial collapse, some have argued that it validates the official account of the collapses of WTC Buildings 1, 2, and 7. Because the same fire was so massive and did not produce total collapse, others have cited it as evidence disproving that account.

Steel Versus Steel-Reinforced Concrete

In fact, comparisons between the Windsor tower and the WTC Towers are limited because of the very different structures of these buildings. The Twin Towers and Building 7 were both 100% steel-framed, with large wide-flange columns and box columns, some measuring over four feet wideand fabricated of steel up to five inches thick. Severe fires in other skyscrapers which, like the WTC Towers, were 100% steel-framed, have not produced even partial collapses.

In contrast to the WTC Towers, the Windsor building was framed primarily in steel-reinforced concrete, with columns of concrete reinforced by thin sections of rebar. ⁴   The concrete pillars in the Windsor building are clearly visible in the photographs showing the intact core exposed by the collapsed facade. The very light construction of the perimeter, described below, makes it clear that the core was the main load-bearing component of the building.

Compare these photographs of the Windsor building fire to photographs of the Twin Towers' fires and Building 7's fires

Before examining the partial collapse of the Windsor building more closely, we note that steel-framed and steel-reinforced-concrete-framed structures behave very differently in fires.

• Steel is a good conductor and concrete is a poor conductor of heat. Thus in a fire, a steel frame will conduct heat away from the hotspots into the larger structure. As long as the fire does not consume the larger structure, this heat conductivity will keep the temperatures of the frame well below the fire temperatures. The same is not true of steel-reinforced-concrete structures, since concrete is not a good thermal conductor, and the thermal conductivity of the rebar inside the concrete is limited by its small mass and the embedding matrix of concrete.
• Fires can cause spalling of concrete, but not of steel. This is because concrete has a small percentage of latent moisture, which is converted to steam by heat. Thus, a large fire can gradually erode a concrete structure to the point of collapse, whereas a fire can only threaten a steel-framed structure if it elevates steel temperatures to such an extent that it causes failures.

Windsor Building Partial Collapse

The observation that the Windsor Building is the only skyscraper to have suffered even a partial collapse as a result of fire suggests that the use of steel-reinforced-concrete framing was responsible. A closer look at the incident shows reality to be more complex. The portion of the building that collapsed consisted of the outer portions of floor slabs and perimeter walls throughout the upper third of the building (the 21st through 32nd floors). The outer walls consisted of steel box columns arranged on 1.8 meter centers and connected by narrow spandrel plates. The columns had square cross-sections 120mm on a side, and were fabricated of C-sections 7mm thick welded together. (these had a fraction of the dimensions, and were spaced about twice as far apart as the perimeter columns of the Twin Towers.) The perimeter columns lacked fireproofing throughout the upper third of the Windsor building. ⁵  

The Windsor Building fire engulfed the upper third of the building, but also spread downward as low as the fourth floor. A report by two fire safety experts in Japan highlighted three causes for the very wide extent of the fire:

• The lack of a sprinkler system
• Incorrect installation of spandrels
• The lack of fire prevention regulations in Spain

⁶  

The Windsor Building fire demonstrates that a huge building-consuming fire, after burning for many hours, can produce the collapse of parts of the building with weak steel supports lacking fire protection. It also shows that the collapse events that do occur are gradual and partial.

Estimated time frame of collapses

Time	Collapse Situation
1:29	East face of the 21st floor collapsed
1:37	South middle section of several floors above the 21st floor gradually collapsed
1:50	Parts of floor slab with curtain walls collapsed
2:02	Parts of floor slab with curtain walls collapsed
2:11	Parts of floor slab with curtain walls collapsed
2:13	Floors above about 25th floor collapsed Large collapse of middle section at about 20th floor
2:17	Parts of floor slab with curtain walls collapsed
2:47	Southwest corner of 1 ~ 2 floors below about 20th floor collapsed
2:51	Southeast corner of about 18th ~ 20th floors collapsed
3:35	South middle section of about 17th ~ 20th floors collapsed Fire broke through the Upper Technical Floor
3:48	Fire flame spurted out below the Upper Technical Floor
4:17	Debris on the Upper Technical Floor fell down

⁷  

These partial collapse events, spread over several hours, contrast with the implosion of WTC Building 7 in 7 seconds, and the total explosive collapses of each of the Twin Towers in under 17 seconds.

9-11 Anomalies

Anomalies of the September 11th Attack, Its Run-Up, and Response

Accepting the official story of the 9/11/01 attack requires one to accept a long series of anomalies -- extremely improbable events, amazing coincidences, and contradictions. This page lists many such anomalies. The Top Anomalies page focuses on the more salient ones. The anomalies described on this page are organized into the following topics:

• Run-up to the attack
• Hijacking scenario
• (Lack of) military response
• World Trade Center destruction
• Pentagon attack
• Death toll
• Coincidences in service of incompetence
• Government response
• Means, motive, and precedent

Run-Up to the Attack

Numerous incidents preceding the attack indicate many people had advance knowledge of the attack.

• Put Options
  Stock trades bet on the fall in share values for the two airlines whose planes were used in the attack.
  • Put options purchases on United Airlines and American Airlines stock rose to four and 25 times normal levels in the days preceding the attack. ^1   2  
• Avoidance of the Airlines, the WTC, and the Pentagon
  Government officials and executives avoided the targets of the attack.
  • Pentagon officials canceled travel plans on September 10th. ³  
  • San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown received a warning not to fly on September 10th. ⁴  
  • Scotland Yard prohibited Salman Rushdie from flying on September 11th. ⁵  
  • Two employees of Odigo, the instant messaging service, received e-mail warnings of the attack two hours before the first assault on the WTC. ⁶  
  • Business executives, some of whom worked in the WTC, were in Nebraska to attend a meeting at Offutt Air Force Base hosted by billionaire Warren Buffett on the morning of September 11th. The same base would be visited later that day by George W. Bush. ⁷  
  • Attorney General Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines in the summer of 2001. ⁸  

Hijacking Scenario

The attack scenario was irrational on the part of the alleged hijackers, and its execution is incomprehensible in light of their behavior. There is little or no credible evidence that Arab hijackers were involved in the September 11th attack, except in the takeover of Flight 93.

• Attack Plan
  By flying from remote airports and going far out of their way, the attack planners exposed their plan to almost certain ruin, had the air defense system operated normally.
  • The originating airport for Flights 11 and 175 was Boston Logan instead of any of several airports near New York City. This created about 40 minutes of exposure to interception for each flight.
  • Flight 77 flew to the Midwest before turning around to return to Washington D.C.. It was airborne an hour and 23 minutes before allegedly attacking the Pentagon. That would provide ample opportunity for interception even if the air defense system were mostly disabled.
  • Flight 93 flew to the Midwest before turning around to fly toward Washington D.C. Had it reached the capital, it would have been airborne for more than an hour and a half. The odds of escaping interception with that plan would be infinitesimal under standard operating procedures.
• Behavior of Villains
  The behavior of the alleged hijackers preceding the attack is inconsistent with skill and discipline needed to have a hope of pulling off such an attack.
  • Mohammed Atta allegedly barely caught Flight 11, a key flight in the event that he was supposedly planning for years.
  • The alleged hijackers partied at topless bars and drank alcohol, despite being portrayed as fundamentalist Muslims, for whom such behavior would be surprising, to say the least. ⁹  
• Evidence Void
  There is no hard evidence that any of the alleged hijackers were on any of the doomed flights, and substantial evidence that some weren't involved.
  • No video of any of the 19 hijackers at any of the three originating airports of the four flights has been made public, except for a video allegedly showing hijackers of Flight 77.
  • At least six of the alleged hijackers have turned up alive since the attack.
  • None of the four flight crews radioed Air Traffic Control about hijackings in progress.
  • None of the four flight crews punched in the four-digit hijacking code. ¹⁰  
  • No public evidence indicates that the remains of any of the hijackers was identified at any of the crash sites.
  • None of the contents of any of the black boxes have been made public.
  • The only 4-1/2 minutes of the phone call from Flight 11 Attendant Betty Ong made public describes a stabbing but does not provide any details indicating that Arab hijackers were on board.
• Phenomenal Success
  The success with which hijackers allegedly took over four jets with knives and then piloted the jets to small targets is simply miraculous.
  • None of the four flight crews were able to stop the alleged hijackers, in spite of several of the pilots being Vietnam veterans.
  • None of the alleged hijackers were good pilots, yet the three buildings were hit with phenomenal precision.

(Lack of) Military Response

Despite normal intercept times of between 10 and 20 minutes for errant domestic flights, the airliners commandeered on 9/11/01 roamed the skies for over an hour without interference.

• Failures to Report
  According to NORAD's timeline the FAA reported errant airliners after inexplicable delays.
  • The FAA took 18 minutes to report Flight 11's loss of communication and deviation from its flight plan.
  • The FAA took 39 minutes to report Flight 77's deviation from its flight plan.
• Failures to Scramble
  Interceptors were only scrambled from distant bases after long delays.
  • Despite the fact that Flights 11 and 175 were headed for New York City, no interceptors were scrambled from nearby La Guardia, or from Langley, Virginia.
  • Despite NORAD's having received formal notification of the first hijacking at 8:38, no interceptors were scrambled from Andrews to protect the nearby Pentagon until after it was hit at 9:37.
• Failures to Intercept
  Once in the air, interceptors flew at only small fractions of their top speeds, assuring they would fail to intercept the airliners.
  • The two F-15s scrambled from Otis AFB to chase Flight 11 flew at an average of 447 mph, about 23.8% of their top speed of 1875 mph.
  • The two F-16s scrambled from Langley to protect the capital flew at an average of 410.5 mph, about 27.4% of their top speed of 1500 mph.
• Failures to Redeploy
  Nearby fighters on routine patrol duty were not redeployed to intercept the airliners, nor were fighters that belatedly reached Manhattan sent to defend the capital.
  • Two F-15s flying off the coast of Long Island were not redeployed to Manhattan until after the second Tower was hit.
  • The two F-15s scrambled from Otis AFB to protect Manhattan could have reached the capital in 9.6 minutes once they arrived over New York City. That was still 34 minutes before the Pentagon was hit.

World Trade Center Destruction

On 9/11/01 three skyscrapers were totally destroyed, with structural collapse primarily due to fires given as the explanation. Fires and bombings have never before or since caused steel-frame buildings to collapse.

• Building 7 Building 7 imploded late on 9/11/01. It was not hit by an aircraft.
  • Building 7 experienced total collapse, allegedly because of fires, when no steel-frame building before or since has ever collapsed, totally or even partially, due to fires. Building 7 was an over-engineered 47-story steel-frame skyscraper, standing over 350 feet from the nearest of the Twin Towers. Public evidence documents only small fires in it on September 11th.
  • Building 7 collapsed in a nearly perfectly vertical fall, producing only minor damage in the Verizon and Post Office buildings only 60 feet on either side of it.
  • Building 7 collapsed into a remarkably small rubble pile of mostly pulverized remains, when no steel building falling for any reason has ever pulverized itself.
  • Building 7 contained a 15-million-dollar emergency command center, but instead of using it for its ostensible purpose, then-Mayor Giuliani evacuated his team to a makeshift command center as soon as the September 11th attack started. ^11   12  
  • The emergency command center was destroyed along with the rest of the building, even though it was constructed as a bomb-hardened shelter.
  • The remains of Building 7 were rapidly removed and the steel recycled, evidently without any on-site and only extremely limited off-site examination. The rapid disposal operation proceeded despite the fact that no one was believed buried in the rubble, and the tidy rubble pile was not blocking adjacent roads.
• Twin Towers
  The Twin Towers exploded into dust and shattered steel, a behavior inconsistent with the known behavior of steel structures outside of explosive demolition.
  • The South Tower was struck 17 minutes after the North Tower, and in a less damaging manner, and it had less severe fires, yet it collapsed 29 minutes before the North Tower.
  • The South Tower's core structure was largely undamaged by the off-centered jet impact, unlike the North Tower, yet it collapsed sooner.
  • The South Tower had much less severe fires than the North Tower, and yet collapsed sooner.
  • Smoke from the fires in the South Tower became progressively darker up to the time of its collapse.
  • A stream of glowing molten material flowed from the South Tower minutes before its collapse.
  • Firefighters reached the crash zone of the South Tower and described controllable fires.
  • Both Towers started to disintegrate at regions above and below the crash zones in the first seconds of their falls.
  • Both Towers fell straight down, through themselves, following the path of maximum resistance, a behavior never before observed in spontaneous collapses of any type of vertical structure.
  • The collapses of both Towers exhibited features never otherwise seen except in controlled demolitions: sudden onset accompanied by thunderous bangs, visible explosions ringing their perimeters, energetic ejections of dust at regular intervals, and copious production of dust.
  • Both Towers exploded outward and were shredded and pulverized -- a pattern of destruction much more destructive than normal controlled demolitions, yet this result was supposedly produced without the added energy of explosives.
  • So thorough and consistent was the destruction of the Twin Towers, that no remains of the distinctive web trusses are clearly recognizable in hundreds of photographs of the rubble in various stages of excavation.
  • Intense heat persisted in the rubble completely unlike anything produced by known structure collapses and/or fires.
  • Settled dust from the Twin Towers was shown to contain residues of aluminothermic reactions, and active thermitic pyrotechnics.

Pentagon Attack

The Pentagon attack defies expectations that this prime terrorist target would have been defended, and that a terrorist would have hit the front side in a simple maneuver, rather than the back side in an extreme precision aerobatic maneuver.

• Wide-Open Target
  The Pentagon -- the heart of the military establishment of the world's greatest super-power -- was hit after ample warning without being protected by any defensive action.
  • The 9:37 strike was well over an hour after the first signs of a hijacking and 34 minutes after the South Tower strike confirmed that an attack was underway.
  • The Pentagon is within 11 miles of Andrews Air Force Base, which apparently had two combat-ready fighter wings on 9/11/01.
  • The attack plane was monitored on radar as it approached the capital.
• Unlikely Super-pilot
  Alleged Flight 77 pilot Hani Hanjour was not up to the task.
  • The spiral dive approach to the Pentagon was such an extreme maneuver that experienced air traffic controllers thought it was military jet. ¹³   The tree-top final approach skimmed objects in the yard and crashed the plane into the first floor of the building. Experienced pilots have wondered if any human pilot could have executed the maneuver.
  • Hani Hanjour was considered incompetent by his flight school instructors, and was denied rental of a single-engine plane. ¹⁴  
• Evidence Vacuum
  Authorities systematically confiscated or destroyed the evidence.
  • Video recordings from adjacent businesses were seized by the FBI shortly after the attack and have never been seen since.
  • Only two video segments have been released by the Pentagon from all the security cameras that monitor its periphery. Neither clearly shows the attack aircraft.
  • Investigators were not allowed access to the crash site until well into October.
• More Than Just a Crash
  Was the crash engineered?
  • Eyewitnesses reported the smell of cordite.
  • Several eyewitnesses reported that the jetliner exploded before reaching the facade of the Pentagon.
  • Portions of the facade where the wing ends and tail of a 757 would have collided show little gouging. Were these parts shredded by explosives before they reached the facade?

Death Toll

The death toll of the attack, though horrific, was much lower than it would have been if not for numerous aspects of target selection and timing.

• Flights
  All four flights were unusually empty.
  • Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93 were only at 51%, 31%, 20%, and 16% occupancy, respectively.
• World Trade Center
  The Towers were attacked before most people had arrived, and were hit high enough to allow most people to escape.
  • When Flight 11 hit the North Tower at 8:46 AM, the World Trade Center buildings were at less than half the occupancy of a typical mid-day.
  • The first Tower to be attacked was hit just 15 stories below the top, and trapped people mostly between the 95th and 110th floors.
  • The second Tower to be attacked was hit only 30 stories below the top, and the plane missed the core, allowing people to evacuate from above the impact zone. The 17 minutes that elapsed since the first hit allowed many people to escape the second Tower while the elevators were still working.
• Pentagon
  125 people were killed in a building with 20,000 people.
  • The portion of the Pentagon that was attacked, the West Block, was in the process of being renovated, and so was at low occupancy.
  • No high-level Pentagon officials were killed in the attack.

Coincidences in Service of Incompetence

Many decisions and events in the days and months preceding the attack helped to make the incompetence theory more plausible.

• War Games
  Several war game exercises were being conducted on 9/11/01.
  • Operation Northern Vigilance redeployed northeast sector air defense resources to northern Canada and Alaska. ¹⁵  
  • Operations Vigilant Warrior and Vigilant Guardian, which simulated hijackings and involved live radar "injects," may have confused military and civilian personnel monitoring aircraft. ¹⁶  
  • The National Reconnaissance Office, which monitors satellites and airborne objects, was evacuated while the attack unfolded because it was conducting a plane-into-tower crash drill. ¹⁷  
  • The Tripod II biowarfare exercise, scheduled for 9/12/01, resulted in the deployment of FEMA to Manhattan before the attack. ¹⁸  
• Rules Changes
  Procedural changes would limit the ability of pilots and military commanders to respond to hijackings.
  • Military orders stripped commanders in the field of autonomy in responding to hijackings.
  • The FAA banned firearm possession by commercial pilots two months before the attack.
• Out to Lunch
  Top officials were not available until after the attack was over.
  • President George W. Bush remained at the publicized location of Booker Elementary School until about a half-hour after the news of the attack went on TV worldwide, first reading My Pet Goat to second-graders, and then holding a press conference.
  • Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff allegedly remained in a meeting with Senator Max Cleland until nearly the time the Pentagon was hit.
  • Brigadier General Montague Winfield had Navy Captain Charles J. Leidig, Jr. -- a rookie -- assume his watch as Deputy Director for Operations for the National Military Command Center (NMCC) at 8:30 am on 9/11/01, and relieved him after the attack was over. ¹⁹  

Government Response

Despite the worst failure in history of the military to protect American civilians, and the worst alleged engineering failures in history, there were no consequences for the responsible authorities, and no honest investigations.

• Air Defense Failures
  No one was held to account for the numerous unprecedented failures in air defense.
  • General Richard Myers, Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 11th, was confirmed as Chairman on September 13th in spite of being unable to provide any meaningful answers to questions regarding the air defense failures.
  • General Richard Eberhart, commander of NORAD on September 11th, was promoted to head the newly created NORTHCOM. ²⁰  
  • NORAD's press release contradicted early statements by high-ranking officials that no interceptors had been scrambled on 9/11/01.
  • NORAD's vague timeline raises far more questions than it answers, yet officials have never been required to give a full account.
  • The 9/11 Commission advanced a new timeline which contradicts NORAD's earlier timeline and the testimony of military officials to the commission itself.
• Building Collapse Inquiry
  The total collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7 were the three largest engineering failures in history (based on the official story). How were they investigated?
  • FEMA was given the sole authority to investigate the collapses even though it is not an investigative agency.
  • The investigative team assembled by FEMA consisted of unpaid volunteers.
  • The investigators were not allowed access to Ground Zero.
  • The investigators were not provided with the blueprints of the buildings.
  • FEMA's report states the causes of the collapse "remain unknown at this time". (By the time the report was released the steel had been entirely disposed of.) The fact that Building 7 (supposedly) failed in a way that contradicts 100 years of engineering experience makes it the largest and least understood structural failure in history.
  • The 9/11 Commission Report failed to even mention the existence of Building 7.
  • The 9/11 Commission Report denied the existence of the Twin Towers' core structures.
  • NIST's report on the collapse of the Twin Towers purports to provide a "probable collapse sequence" for each Tower but truncates its timelines before the collapses even begin.
  • NIST avoided even mentioning the earlier findings of sulfidated and evaporated steel, then described then by the New York Times "the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation".
  • NIST's Final Report on the collapse of Building 7 abandones the earlier official claims of severe structural damage and diesel-fueled fires, and blames the swift straight-down collapse on a house-of-cards chain reaction triggered by a single beam breaking loose of its connections due to thermal expansion -- a completely novel failure mechanism with no supporting evidence.
  • NIST proffered disingenuous arguments for failing to test for explosive residues, which it continued to repeat even after responding directly to public comments and correspondence pointing out the fallacies of those arguments.

Means, Motive, and Precedent

The preceding list is far from complete. It does not include consideration of facts pertaining to the means, motive, and precedent for the crime. The official account's blaming one organization, while ignoring others with much more to gain and possessing tools and access better suited to the commission of the crime is arguably a vast anomaly. This subject is addressed by 911Review.com:

• Means
• Motive
• Precedent

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NOTE: For more complete sources, visit the pages linked to.

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References

1. Profiting From Disaster?, CBSNews.com, 9/19/01
2. Prices, Probabilities and Predictions, OR/MS Today, 
3. Bush: We're at War, Newsweek, 9/24/01
4. Willie Brown got low-key early warning about air travel, SFGate.com, 9/12/01
5. , London Times, 9/27/01
6. Odigo says workers were warned of attack, HAARETZ.com, 
7. Franklin unit rebuilds after 9/11 tragedy, San Francisco Business Times, 2/1/02
8. Ashcroft Flying High, CBS News, 7/26/01
9. Manager: Men spewed anti-American sentiments, AP, 9/14/01
10. The Day the FAA Stopped the World, time.com, 9/14/01
11. Giuliani Improvises After Command Center Gets Hit, Washington Technology, 10/08/01
12. Terrorism and Anti-Terrorism, Gotham Gazette, 9/12/01
13. 'Get These Planes on the Ground', ABCNews.com, 11/24/01
14. A Trainee Noted for Incompetence, New York Times, 5/4/02, page 10
15. The scene at NORAD on Sept. 11: Playing Russian war games ... and then someone shouted to look at the monitor, Toronto Star, 12/9/01
16. Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, 2004
17. Agency planned exercise on Sept. 11 built around a plane crashing into a building, AP, 8/21/02
18. Tripod II and FEMA: Lack of NORAD Response on 9/11 Explained, FromTheWilderness.com, 2004
19. Statement of Capt Charles J. Leidig, Jr., 9-11commission.gov, 6/17/04
20. Eberhart To Head NORTHCOM, afa.org, 8/02 [cached] 
*******

Top Anomalies

Selected Anomalies in the Official Account of 9/11/01

Many researchers have compiled lists of problems with the official account of the 9/11 attack. One example is the 9/11 Anomalies page on this website. The summary assembles some of the more glaring anomalies, making no attempt to be comprehensive.

• Indications of Foreknowledge
  • Pre-attack put option surges anticipated post-attack stock declines:
    • Put/call ratios on American Airlines and United Airlines stock increased five-fold and twenty-fold.
  • High officials avoided the attack targets:
    • John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial.
    • Salman Rushdie, Willie Brown, and Pentagon officials were warned not to fly on the eve of the attack.
    • On 9/11/01 Warren Buffett, an investor in unmanned aerial vehicle maker MITRE, hosted a breakfast meeting of WTC CEOs at Offutt AFB, where President Bush later landed that day.
  • The World Trade Center and Pentagon were anticipated terrorist targets:
    • War game scenarios targeted the WTC and Pentagon.
    • The use of jetliners as weapons was anticipated.
• Military's Non-Response
  • The official story posits a long series of improbable failures:
    • The official timelines blame the FAA for inexplicably long delays in notifying the military, after originally claiming to have been notified sooner but without specific locations.
    • Jets were not scrambled from nearest bases.
    • Jets in the air were not vectored to intercept jetliners.
    • According to NORAD and 9/11 Commission timelines, military jets flew at small fractions of their top speeds.
  • Claims that hijacked jetliners couldn't be tracked contrasts with ability of the FAA to land over 4000 aircraft at different destinations in two hours.
  • At least four simultaneous war game exercises were being conducted on 9/11/01:
    • The NRO exercise involved a plane-crash-into-building scenario.
    • Operations Vigilant Warrior and Vigilant Guardian used scenarios involving hijacked passenger planes.
  • After presiding over the worst air defense failure in US history, the commander of NORAD, head of the Joint Chiefs, and Secretary of Defense were awarded with promotions and budget increases.
• Pentagon Attack Anomalies
  • The Pentagon was left undefended until after being hit at 9:38:
    • The Pentagon should be the best-defended building in the world.
    • The Pentagon was hit more than 80 minutes into the attack.
    • It is 10 miles from Andrews Air Force Base.
    • Cheney watched the attack plane approach from 50 miles out.
  • The attack targeted Wedge 1 of Pentagon's west wing:
    • Wedge 1 was sparsely occupied, nearing completion of renovation.
    • Wedge 1 was the only one that had blast-hardened walls.
    • The top brass was in the opposite side of the Pentagon.
  • The alleged suicide pilots lacked the requisite piloting skills:
    • The attack maneuver required extreme piloting skill.
    • None of the alleged hijackers had flown jets.
    • Hani Hanjour, alleged pilot of Flight 77, was a notoriously bad pilot.
• Total Collapse of WTC Building 7
  • Is the only case of total collapse of large steel-framed high-rise building blamed on fire.
  • The collapse had all of the features of a controlled demolition implosion:
    • It fell straight down with precise radial symmetry.
    • Its rapid fall was within 10 percent of gravitational free-fall speed.
    • It collapsed into a tidy rubble pile mostly within the block that the building occupied.
• Total Destruction of the Twin Towers
  • Symmetry and thoroughness of destruction rules out natural processes.
  • Dozens of firefighters described explosions and likened the falls of the Towers to controlled demolitions.
  • Destruction exhibited main features of controlled demolitions:
    • The destruction was total, leaving no parts of the Towers intact.
    • The falls began precipitously after loud explosions were heard.
    • Energetic jets of gas and dust emerged from the facade.
  • Destruction was more thorough than conventional demolitions:
    • The explosions of Towers were up to 800 feet in diameter.
    • The rubble was shards of metal and dust.
    • More than 1000 bodies were "vaporized".
    • Extreme temperatures persisted in the rubble for three months.
  • Dust contains residues of explosives:
    • Abundant minute iron-rich spheroids match the structure and chemical composition of thermite by-products.
    • Chips consistently found in samples are a nano-engineered thermitic material the the physical structure, chemical composition, and thermal behavior of a high-tech pyrotechnic with high explosive power.
• Suppression and Destruction of Evidence
  • The World Trade Center steel was systematically destroyed:
    • Controlled Demolition Inc's plan for recycling steel was submitted 11 days after the attack, and approved.
    • Most of the steel was shipped to Asia for recycling.
    • Investigators were barred from the crime scene, and saw little of the steel.
  • Scores of videos from around Pentagon were confiscated and never released.
  • The NTSB was not allowed to investigate crashes.
• Overt Omissions in Official Reports
  • The 9/11 Commission made hundreds of glaring omissions:
    • The Report makes no mention of Building 7.
    • It called the structural cores of Twin Towers "hollow steel shaft[s]."
    • It did not mention the privatization of the World Trade Center six weeks before the attack.
  • NIST avoided the core issue of the 'collapses':
    • It did not consider events beyond when the Towers were "poised for collapse."
    • It did not demonstrate that computer models predicted "collapse initiation."
  • NIST disingenuously evaded calls to test for explosive residues.

911-Unthinkable Collapses

Unthinkable Collapses

Too Shocking for Rational Analysis

The North Tower explodes at 10:28 AM

In fifteen seconds the huge permanent steel structure of the South Tower disintegrated from top to bottom into an exploding cloud of rubble and dust. Twenty-nine minutes later the North Tower underwent the same process. Do buildings really fall through themselves like that, turning to dust in seconds? Is that really supposed to happen to a steel structure because of impacts and fires near the top? Perhaps not too many people were asking such questions because none of the series of events leading up to that were supposed to happen. We witnessed an increasingly improbable series of events, from a hijacking with knives, to a jet hitting a World Trade Center Tower, to multiple hijackings, to a second jet hitting the other Tower, to yet more hijackings, and a plane hitting the heart of the nation's military establishment. Each event in this series was more improbable than the last. So by the time we got to the collapsing skyscrapers part, we were conditioned to expect the unbelievable.

A rational look at the Twin Tower collapses reveals that the official story contradicts the laws of physics and the most basic knowledge of the behavior of steel structures, and matter itself.

• The Towers were designed to survive jet impacts of the type that happened on September 11th.
• The fires were not very severe in the South Tower and were diminishing. Even severe fires would not have initiated a collapse.
• Skyscapers have never collapsed due to fires or any other cause other than controlled demolition.
• The Towers underwent explosive disintegrations that didn't look anything like the way such buildings would fall.
• The destruction of the Towers displayed several unique features of controlled demolition.
• There are relatively simple proofs that the buildings did not fall of their own weight.

*************************

Towers' Design Parameters

Twin Towers' Designers Anticipated Jet Impacts Like September 11th's

Structural engineers who designed the Twin Towers carried out studies in the mid-1960s to determine how the buildings would fare if hit by large jetliners. In all cases the studies concluded that the Towers would survive the impacts and fires caused by the jetliners.

Evidence of these studies includes interviews with and papers and press releases issued by engineers who designed and oversaw construction of the World Trade Center.

1960s-era Jetliners Compared to Boeing 767s

Contrary to widely promoted misconceptions, the Boeing 767-200s used on 9/11/01 were only slightly larger than 707s and DC 8s, the types of jetliners whose impacts the World Trade Center's designers anticipated.

The above graphic from Chapter 1 of FEMA's Report shows the sizes of a 707 and a 767 relative to the footprint of a WTC tower. ¹   Flight 11 and Flight 175 were Boeing 767-200s. Although a 767-200 has a slightly wider body than a 707, the two models are very similar in overall size, weight and fuel capacity.

property	Boeing 707-320	Boeing 767-200
fuel capacity	23,000 gallons	23,980 gallons
max takeoff weight	328,060 lbs	395,000 lbs
empty weight	137,562 lbs	179,080 lbs
wingspan	145.75 ft	156.08 ft
wing area	3010 ft^2	3050 ft^2
length	152.92 ft	159.17 ft
cruise speed	607 mph	530 mph

Given the differences in cruise speeds, a 707 in normal flight would actually have more kinetic energy than a 767, despite the slightly smaller size. Note the similar fuel capacities of both aircraft. The 767s used on September 11th were estimated to be carrying about 10,000 gallons of fuel each at the time of impact, only about 40% of the capacity of a 707.

Statements by Engineers

Engineers who participated in the design of the World Trade Center have stated, since the attack, that the Towers were designed to withstand jetliner collisions. For example, Leslie Robertson, who is featured on many documentaries about the attack, said he "designed it for a (Boeing) 707 to hit it." 2   Statements and documents predating the attack indicate that engineers considered the effects of not only of jetliner impacts, but also of ensuing fires.

John Skilling

John Skilling was the head structural engineer for the World Trade Center. In a 1993 interview, Skilling stated that the Towers were designed to withstand the impact and fires resulting from the collision of a large jetliner such as Boeing 707 or Douglas DC-8.

Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed, ... The building structure would still be there. 3  

A white paper released on February 3, 1964 states that the Towers could have withstood impacts of jetliners travelling 600 mph -- a speed greater than the impact speed of either jetliner used on 9/11/01.

The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707—DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact. ⁴  

The Richard Roth Telegram

On Feburary 13, 1965, real estate baron Lawrence Wien called reporters to his office to charge that the design of the Twin Towers was structurally unsound. Many suspected that his allegation was motivated by a desire to derail the planned World Trade Center skyscrapers to protect the value of his extensive holdings, which included the Empire State Building. In response to the charge, Richard Roth, partner at Emery Roth & Sons, the architectural firm that was designing the Twin Towers, fired back with a three-page telegram containing the following details. ⁵  

THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS CARRIED OUT BY THE FIRM OF WORTHINGTON, SKILLING, HELLE & JACKSON IS THE MOST COMPLETE AND DETAILED OF ANY EVER MADE FOR ANY BUILDING STRUCTURE. THE PRELIMINARY CALCULATIONS ALONE COVER 1,200 PAGES AND INVOLVE OVER 100 DETAILED DRAWINGS.
...
4. BECAUSE OF ITS CONFIGURATION, WHICH IS ESSENTIALLY THAT OF A STEEL BEAM 209' DEEP, THE TOWERS ARE ACTUALLY FAR LESS DARING STRUCTURALLY THAN A CONVENTIONAL BUILDING SUCH AS THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING WHERE THE SPINE OR BRACED AREA OF THE BUILDING IS FAR SMALLER IN RELATION TO ITS HEIGHT.
...
5. THE BUILDING AS DESIGNED IS SIXTEEN TIMES STIFFER THAN A CONVENTIONAL STRUCTURE. THE DESIGN CONCEPT IS SO SOUND THAT THE STRUCTURAL ENGINEER HAS BEEN ABLE TO BE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE IN HIS DESIGN WITHOUT ADVERSELY AFFECTING THE ECONOMICS OF THE STRUCTURE. ...

At the time the Twin Towers were built, the design approach of moving the support columns to the perimeter and the core, thereby creating large expanses of unobstructed floor space, was relatively new, and unique for a skyscraper. However, that approach is commonplace in contemporary skyscrapers.

Frank Demartini's Statement

Frank A. Demartini, on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center, spoke of the resilience of the towers in an interview recorded on January 25, 2001.

The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door -- this intense grid -- and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.

Demartini, who had an office on the 88th floor of the North Tower, has been missing since the 9/11/01 attack, having remained in the North Tower to assist in the evacuation. 6  Demartini had first worked at World Trade Center when Leslie E. Robertson Associates hired him to assess damage from the truck bombing in 1993.

Like All Skyscrapers, the Twin Towers Were Over-Engineered

One aspect of engineering that is not widely understood is that structures are over-engineered as a matter of standard practice. 7   Steel structures like bridges and buildings are typically designed to withstand five times anticipated static loads and 3 times anticipated dynamic loads. The anticipated loads are the largest ones expected during the life of the structure, like the worst hurricane or earthquake occurring while the floors are packed with standing-room-only crowds. Given that September 11th was not a windy day, and that there were not throngs of people in the upper floors, the critical load ratio was probably well over 10, meaning that more than nine-tenths of the columns at the same level would have to fail before the weight of the top could have overcome the support capacity of the remaining columns.

There is evidence that the Twin Towers were designed with an even greater measure of reserve strength than typical large buildings. According to the 1964 white paper cited above, a Tower would still be able to withstand a 100-mile-per-hour wind after all the perimeter columns on one face and some of the columns on each adjacent face had been cut. ⁸   Also, John Skilling is cited by the Engineering News Record for the claim that "live loads on these [perimeter] columns can be increased more than 2000% before failure occurs." ⁹  

---

References

1. Chapter 1: Introduction, WTC Building Performance Study, 
2. Towers collapse shocks engineers, MedServ, 9/11/01 [cached]
3. Twin Towers Engineered To Withstand Jet Collision, The Seattle Times, 2/27/93 [cached]
4. City in the Sky, Times Books, Henry Hold and Company, LLC, 2003, page 131
5. City in the Sky, Times Books ..., , page 134-136
6. Painful Losses Mount In the Construction 'Family', construction.com, 10/1/01 [cached]
7. Factor of safety, StateMaster.com, [cached]
8. City in the Sky, Times Books ..., , page 133
9. How Columns Will Be Designed for 110-Story Buildings, ENR, 4/2/1964 
***********************

The Fires

The Twin Towers' Fires and Their Possible Effects

The South Tower's fires burned hot enough at produce visible flames and light smoke (photograph) until the jet fuel burned off less than ten minutes after the crash. Thereafter the fires dwindled and the smoke darkened. When it collapsd 56 minutes after the crash, the invisible fires were emitting only a thin veil of black smoke.

Much was made of the severity of the fires in the Twin Towers, since fires were invoked to explain failures they had never before caused. Some reportscompared the heat produced by the fires to that of nuclear power plants. In fact the fires were not as severe as many other highrise fires, none of which caused the buildings to collapse. Furthermore, the fires became less severe over time, at least in the South Tower, whose smoke became thin and nearly black by the time its total destruction.

Fire-induced column failure collapse theories, such as Prof. Bazant's, assume scenarios in which fires consume entire floors and burn for extended periods at temperatures of over 800° C. There are several problems with such scenarios.

• 800°C is near the maximum flame temperature of hydrocarbons burning in air without pre-heating or pressurization of the air (estimates of which range from 900°C to 1250°C ¹   ). Those temperatures are usually reached only with premixed (blue) flames, such as in gas stoves and blowtorches. Diffuse flames, such as in building fires, tend to be cooler. Although enclosures can elevate fire temperatures considerably by containing the fires' heat, tests that have recorded gas temperatures of over 800°C have involved ventilation and fuel supply characteristics arguably not present in the Twin Towers.
• Widespread fires reaching 700°C would have caused extensive window breakage over time. Although there are breaches in the perimeter wall glazing of parts of the Towers that appear to have ocurred after the plane crashes, such as in a fire zone on the 104th and 105th floor of the North Tower, descriptions of windows popping or falling on victims are not readily apparent in the eyewitness reports from that day. This contrasts with the prominence of reports of fire-induced window-popping in other highrise fires.
• Widespread fires reaching 700°C and would have made the steel glow red-hot. Visual records of the events, while showing fire damage to the aluminum cladding covering the perimeter columns, do not appear to show glowing steel. ²  
• Fires would have to be very extensive to raise the temperatures of columns to near the fire temperatures, given the thermal sinks of the steel structures. Columns of the perimeter walls were thermally coupled to eachother by broad spandrel plates at each floor, and the core columns were part of a lattice of beams and columns which would have wicked heat from a hotspot in three dimensions. In order to soften columns, fires would have to exceed the capacity of the many tons of steel in and around the crash zones to draw away the heat -- a difficult feat in the 56 and 102 minutes that the fires burned.
• Fires apparently did not involve entire floors of either Tower at any one time. The South Tower shows no evidence of fires on its northwest side at any time. The North Tower at times shows fires spanning most of a face, but the fires are not even emergant, in contrast to the One Meridian Plaza or First Interstate Bank fires.
• Heating the external columns would be especially difficult because the columns were situated outside the interior volume, with only one of the four sides adjacent to the building's interior.
• Heating of core columns would be especially difficult given the apparently poor ventilation of the core regions, being further from any air supply.
• As fires consumed fuel supplies and became less severe, affected columns would have cooled and regained strength lost due to elevated temperatures.

Even if such hot and widespread fires existed, they would still be unlikely to cause failures of the columns in either of the Towers.

The incompatibility of the fire-triggered column-failure scenario with the observed characteristics of the fires created the need for the truss theory.

---

References

1. Temperatures in flames and fires, DoctorFire.com, [cached]
2. Metal Temperature by Color, processassociates.com, [cached] 
*******************

The Fires' Severity

How Intense and Extensive Were the Twin Towers' Fires?

The plane crashes resulted in significant fires in both Towers, at least for the first few minutes after the crashes. The fires in the North Tower were considerably more extensive than than those in the South Tower. As time progressed the fires in at least the South Tower appeared to diminish greatly in severity. This was probably due to most of the jet fuel being exhausted within a few minutes of the impacts. Since kerosene (jet fuel) has a low boiling point and a low flash point, most of it would have evaporated and caught fire quickly.

The Fires at Their Most Severe

How severe were the fires at their greatest extents?

• Fires in the North Tower covered extensive regions, at least near the perimeter walls, of about three floors. Fires in the South Tower also extended over about three floors, but were more localized to one side of the building.
• The fires were not hot enough to produce significant window breakage in either Tower. Window breakage is a common occurrence in large office fires, particularly when temperatures exceed 600° C.
• The flames mostly remained within the buildings. Significant emergence of flames from the buildings, another common feature of large office fires, was only observed in a limited region of the North Tower.
• The fires did not spread significantly beyond the impact region. With the exception of a region of fire about 10 floors above the crash zone in the North Tower, the fires remained around the impact zones.
• The fires did not cause parts of the building to glow. At temperatures above 700° C, steel glows red hot, a feature that is visible in daylight.

The Fires' Progression Over Time

Most photographs of the South Tower show relatively dark smoke, and in much less quantity than from the North Tower. See photographs.

Given that the vast majority of the volatile jet fuel was consumed inside five minutes of each crash, the fires subsequently dwindled, limited to the fuels of conventional office fires. The fires in both Towers diminished steadily until the South Tower's collapse. Seconds before, the remaining pockets of fire were visible only to the firefighters and victims in the crash zone. A thin veil of black smoke enveloped the Tower's top. In the wake of the South Tower's fall new areas of fire appeared in the North Tower.

This summary is supported by simple observations of the extent and brightness of the flames and the color and quantity of smoke, using the available photographic and video evidence.

• Visible flames diminished greatly over time. Significant emergence of flames from the building is only seen in a region of the North Tower 10 stories above the impact zone.
  • South Tower: Virtually no flames were visible at the time of its collapse.
  • North Tower: Flames were visible in several areas at the time of its collapse. A region of flames on the 105th floor is seen after the South Tower collapse.
• The smoke darkened over time. While the fires in both Towers emitted light gray smoke during the first few minutes following the impacts, the color of the smoke became darker.
  • South Tower: Smoke from the fires was black by the time it collapsed. At that time it was only a small fraction of the volume of the smoke from the North Tower.
  • North Tower: Smoke from the fires had become much darker by the time the South Tower was struck, 17 minutes after the fires were ignited. The smoke was nearly black when the South Tower collapsed. Thereafter the smoke appears to have lightened and emerged from the building at an accelerated rate.

After the fall of the South Tower, the North Tower continued to produce prodigious quantities of smoke, and showed regions of active fires. Seephotographs.

Dark smoke implies the presence of soot, which is composed of uncombusted hydrocarbons. Soot is produced when a fire is oxygen-starved, or has just been extinguished. Soot also has a high thermal capacity and may act to rob a fire of heat by carrying it away.

Evidence of fires within the buildings' cores is scant. NIST found only two core column specimens in a condition allowing paint-analysis inferences about temperatures reached, and those temperatures were below 250°C. It can be assumed that most of the fires were near the perimeters of the Towers where broken windows around the crash zone allowed them a supply of air. The cores were an average distance of about 70 feet from the nearest walls, and had much less flammable material than the surrounding offices. The impact gash in the North Tower provided a line of sight to the core. Available photographs and videos show the gash as consistently dark, showing no signs of fire in the building's core.

Eyewitness Reports

Dozens of people were observed to jump from floors of the North Tower above the impact zone. They may have jumped to escape painful deaths from inhalation of toxic smoke, or to escape unbearable heat. Note, however, that temperatures unbearable to a human, such as 100° C, are insignificant to the survivability of structural materials.

At least 18 survivors evacuated from above the crash zone of the South Tower through a stairwell that passed through the crash zone, and many more would have were it not for confusion in the evacuation process. None of the survivors reported great heat around the crash zone. An audiotape of firefighter communications revealed that firefighters had reached the 78th floor sky lobby of the South Tower and were enacting a plan to evacuate people and put out the "two pockets of fire" they found, just before the Tower was destroyed.

*****************************

The Fires' Impact

How the Towers' Fires Affected the Structural Steel

As an exercise let's set aside all of the evidence about the actual severity of the Twin Towers' fires, and imagine that the fires were incredibly intense and widespread. Let's imagine that the jets were full tankers and spilled 80,000 gallons of fuel into each tower. Let's imagine that there was a strong wind giving the fires plenty of air. Let's imagine that the the fires engulfed over 10 floors in each tower, saturating the capacity of the steel buildings to draw away the heat. Let's imagine the fires burned intensely for hours, completely gutting several stories of each tower. Would that cause them to collapse? Not according to people who have studied steel structures subjected to such stresses. The following passage is from Appendix A of FEMA's World Trade Center Building Performance Study.

In the mid-1990s British Steel and the Building Research Establishment performed a series of six experiments at Cardington to investigate the behavior of steel frame buildings. These experiments were conducted in a simulated, eight-story building. Secondary steel beams were not protected. Despite the temperature of the steel beams reaching 800-900° C (1,500-1,700° F) in three of the tests (well above the traditionally assumed critical temperature of 600° C (1,100° F), no collapse was observed in any of the six experiments).

This graph represents strength as a function of temperature, which is expressed in degrees Celsius (C).

At temperatures above 800° C structural steel loses 90 percent of its strength. ¹   Yet even when steel structures are heated to those temperatures, they never disintegrate into piles of rubble, as did the Twin Towers and Building 7. Why couldn't such dramatic reductions in the strength of the steel precipitate such total collapse events?

• High-rise buildings are over-engineered to have strength many times greater than would needed to survive the most extreme conditions anticipated. It may take well over a ten-fold reduction in strength to cause a structural failure.
• If a steel structure does experience a collapse due to extreme temperatures, the collapse tends to remain localized to the area that experienced the high temperatures.
• The kind of low-carbon steel used in buildings and automobiles bends rather than shatters. If part of a structure is compromised by extreme temperatures, it may bend in that region, conceivably causing a large part of the structure to sag or even topple. However, there is no example of a steel structure crumbling into many pieces because of any combination of structural damage and heating, outside of the alleged cases of the Twin Towers and Building 7.

²  

---

References

1. Effect of temperature profile, corusconstruction.com, [cached]
2. Fire Resistance of Steel Framed Car Parks, corusconstruction.com, [cached] 

*****************************

911-Where Are the Whistleblowers?

Where Are the Whistleblowers?

If the 9/11/01 attack was an Inside Job, then Why Aren't There More Whistleblowers?

Thie idea that official perpetration of or complicity in the 9/11 crime implies a conspiracy that would be impossible to maintain is possibly the single biggest barrier to the serious consideration of such official guilt. Given the massive scale and coordinated nature of the assault, people naturally tend to think that it would involve large numbers of people consciously participating in pre-meditated murder, if it was an inside job. Wouldn't someone have talked and spilled the beans? (Interestingly the assumption that the attack's scale and coordination imply an unwieldy operation with too many participants is almost never applied to the official theory that it was the work of Islamic terrorists.)

A full and convincing answer to this question involves several aspects, such as a consideration of the personnel requirements and a number of observations in the Conspiracy FAQ. The most complete examination of this question that we are aware of is the essay by 9-11 Research Associate Editor Gregg Roberts, Where Are the 9-11 Whistleblowers?. Roberts' essay first builds a case for official complicity in 9/11 and then examines the key aspects of the whistleblowers question, including:

• The likely number of "insider" conspirators in a position to blow the whistle and their relevant personal characteristics
• How the government and media have treated whistleblowers who have revealed weaknesses in the handling of national security threats, without claiming any inside knowledge of how 9/11 was carried out (or even challenging the official story)
• The motivations and concerns of whistleblowers
• Attitudes and other filtering mechanisms evident in the major media

Roberts concludes that the probability of an insider coming forward and being offered widespread media coverage is quite low because of their small numbers, risk/opportunity balance considerations, and media filtering mechanisms.

*******

Introduction

In many personal discussions I have had about 9/11, I am often interrupted long before I can describe much of the evidence that it was an inside job, with the objection that such a large conspiracy could not have been covered up. "Hundreds, if not thousands, of people would have to have been involved. Someone would have talked," as this objection has it, or in common parlance, "someone would have blown the whistle." This objection has also been confidently raised on various Internet discussion forums, and in some instances where anyone in the corporate or Left media has bothered to dignify the issue with a response.

Gregg Roberts is a freelance technical writer and business analyst with a bachelor's degree in psychology, master's-level study in social work, and earlier education in the "hard" sciences. His history of peace and justice activism goes back 20 years, including work against US funding for Salvadoran death squads and the contra war in Nicaragua. He has been investigating the September 11 attacks since December 2003 and has provided extensive editorial assistance to the 9-11 Research website family. He is currently working with webmaster Jim Hoffman on a book based on the site.

The essay I'm offering below provides a self-contained, easily printed review of the evidence for official complicity in 9/11:

• The immediate identification of Osama bin Laden as the "mastermind" and the almost immediate identification of all 19 alleged hijackers
• Scant public evidence supporting the official account
• Lack of follow-up on advance warnings -- or outright derailment of investigations -- by law enforcement and national security officials, and numerous trip cancellations and stock transactions indicating foreknowledge
• Official statements that lack fundamental credibility, such as that a suicide attack by airliner had never been considered and that wargames conducted on 9/11 facilitated the response to the real-world emergency
• The alleged hijackers' lack of piloting skills
• The failure of all four flight crews to send a simple four-digit hijacking code
• The failure of all four flight crews to prevent unprecedented cockpit takeovers, despite their being staggered over 90 minutes
• The failure in all four cases (if we are to believe the official story) to get a jet fighter alongside the hijacked airliners
• The unprecedented, unexplained collapses of three steel-framed skyscrapers, allegedly due to fire, while exhibiting all the typical features of controlled demolition, or features that argue for it even more strongly

After the review, I discuss issues that bear on the likelihood of a 9/11 whistleblower coming forward, and of his or her case being widely covered in the mainstream media, including:

• The likely number of "insider" conspirators in a position to blow the whistle and their relevant personal characteristics
• How the government and media have treated whistleblowers who have revealed weaknesses in the handling of national security threats, without claiming any inside knowledge of how 9/11 was carried out (or even challenging the official story)
• The motivations and concerns of whistleblowers
• Attitudes and other filtering mechanisms evident in the major media

I conclude that the probability of an insider coming forward and widespread coverage being afforded such a person are quite low because of the explosive nature of the issue, the risk/opportunity balance to would-be whistleblowers, and the filtering mechanisms that operate in both the corporate and Left media.

Contents

About the Author A Respectful Request Acknowledgments Introduction The Prima Facie Case for an Inside Job      "Ignored Warnings"      They Were So Dumb, They Outsmarted Us      Media and Official Treatment of the Issues      Left Gatekeepers So Why No Whistleblowers?      Conspiracies Happen All the Time      Upstanding Members of Society      Physics Trumps Armchair Psychology      Who Is in Actually a Position to Blow the 9/11 Whistle?      If You Say It, They Will Come            Media Self-Censorship, and Ridicule of 9/11 Skeptics      The Mother of All Whistleblowers Weighs In      What Motivates Whistleblowers?      Historical Precedent: (Temporarily) Successful, Massive Cover-Ups      What Response from Authorities Could 9/11 Whistleblowers Expect?            The Case of Sibel Edmonds            The Case of Coleen Rowley            The Case of Kevin Ryan      "Trust Us, We'll Protect You"      Surely, Reforms Are on the Way Conclusion Afterword: What Can We Do?      "First, Do No Harm"      Join with Others