The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (55 page)

So far as the false-flag case goes, theorists find quite a lot of evidence that the Government put its rampant political desires into practice.

First there’s the sheer amount of incriminating evidence the plotters left around. Oddly, amidst 1.6 million tons of debris, investigators found the intact passport of Mohammed Atta, the man alleged to be the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks. So fortuitous was this find, conspiracy researchers suggest, that it must have been a plant. In fact, a number of other laminated passports were found in the debris. Atta also left flight-simulation manuals behind in a car, and apparently a will. However, he cannot have minded their discovery since he was intent on suicide. In fact, he may have wished them to be discovered to let the world know his martyrdom.

Second, what befell the towers of the World Trade Center bears examination. To most observers what happened to the WTC towers on 9/11 is straightforward: two planes hit the towers, then the towers fell down. This “reality” was soon challenged by conspiracy theorists, together with a covey of scientific experts.

Before 9/11 no steel-framed skyscraper had collapsed because of fire, yet WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 collapsed like pancakes. Particularly unusual was the death of WTC 7, which was not hit by an aircraft. Additionally, according to at least one demolition expert, the billows of dust coming out of the towers were more indicative of explosion than fire. Steel wreckage recovered from the site shows that it became molten; fire is not usually able to effect this change in steel. But a bomb is.

The “controlled demolition hypothesis” is a central plank of 9/11 conspiracy theory, featuring heavily in David Ray Griffin’s
The New Pearl Harbor
(2005), and most cogently argued by Steven Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University. Jones asserts that without demolition charges a “gravity-driven collapse” of the sort that happened to the WTC buildings would defy the laws of physics.

By the laws of the “controlled demolition hypothesis” the WTC was rigged with explosive devices, probably containing thermite. The strange comment by Larry Silverstein, owner of WTC 7, on a PBS documentary that he told the fire department to “pull it” makes sense in this scenario: “pull it” is demolition industry slang for setting off demolition charges. (Silverstein’s spokesman said later that Silverstein meant “pull it” as in “pull outta there”.) The bottom-to-top style collapse of WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 is said to be typical of controlled demolitions. Fuelling conspiracy theory is the fact that building 7 housed offices of the CIA and the FBI, plus New York City’s emergency command bunker.

In counterpoint to the controlled demolition hypothesis is the finding of the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report into 9/11. According to this report the fireproofing on the Twin Towers’ steel infrastructures was blown off by the impact of the planes, thus opening them to fire damage. Fires weakened the trusses supporting the floors, which made the floors sag. Sagging floors pulled on the exterior steel columns, making them bow inwards. Buckled columns could not support the building. Thus the buildings collapsed. NIST’s findings are supported by a whole range of independent researchers.

What the controlled-demolition hypothesis fails to take into account is the aviation fuel carried by the planes. Skyscrapers were never made to withstand the effects of having thousands of gallons of ignited aviation fuel swilling around inside them.

Demolition experts have also weighed in on NIST’s side. To place enough lethal charges around three skyscrapers would require weeks of work and tons of explosive. Security at the WTC was among the tightest in the US, following a terrorist attack there in 1993. Wouldn’t
somebody
have noticed men carrying in bags of explosives for days on end or heard the drilling work needed to secure the devices to the steel frames?

Over to Washington DC. Like the WTC, the Pentagon was hit by a hijacked plane … well, no, the 9/11 “Truthers” say. Whereas in NY the dramatic extent of the damage done by the hijacked planes arouses suspicion, in Washington it is the
limited
extent of the damage done that incurs disbelief. In 2002, French writer Thierry Meyssan published
9/11: The Big Lie
, which noted that the hole in the outer wall of the west wing was too small to have been caused by an incoming Boeing 747 and that the interior of the Pentagon was suspiciously undamaged.

Specifically, the holes punched in the interior walls of the Pentagon were 16 feet in diameter, too small to be made by a 757. According to Meyssan, the hole was caused by a cruise missile. (A more realistic weapon, some commentators feel, than the
HAARP
-like energy beam nominated by Assistant Professor Judy Woods as the doomslayer-of-the-day on 9/11.) Why did the Pentagon fire a missile at itself? Conspiracist Jesse Ventura, sometime wrestler and Minnesota governor, posited on his TV show that the Pentagon was trying to bury bad news. Literally. The Defense Department had lost $2.3 trillion. As it happens, the portion of the building destroyed by “Flight 77” was the precise office that housed the computers recording the DoD’s accounting irregularity.

Something else about the Pentagon attack raises the Truthers’ doubts. There were about eighty-five security cameras trained on the Pentagon, but all the Pentagon would show (after five years of petitioning by Truthers) was five frames of CCTV footage which showed an indefinable blur and an explosion.

To release just five frames prompted an obvious question: what might the other frames reveal? The Pentagon “bomb” conspiracy theory grew wings, especially when it was discovered that the section of the Pentagon which the plane crashed into was nearly empty at the time.

All this is taken by the 9/11 Truth Campaign as definite evidence that 9/11 was stage-managed or known about.

The clincher for the Truthers is the footage of George W. Bush’s infamous response when his reading of a story to a Florida kindergarten was interrupted by an aide to tell him of the attacks. Bush continued reading. He could only have carried on being so calm, the theory goes, if he knew about the attacks in advance.

The fact is that the Pentagon was designed to withstand an air attack. The limestone layers shattered with the impact of the Boeing but the reinforced steel internal cage remained intact, hence the apparent lack of internal damage. Bush’s response can be explained in a multitude of ways: he wanted to give the appearance of calm, he was shocked into immobility, he was too unintelligent to grasp what had occurred. Of all the claims of the Truthers, the Pentagon “missile” is the most ludicrous. Hundreds of drivers stuck in the morning rush hour traffic saw a plane hit the side of the military administration building.

What about Flight 93? Flight 93 was the fourth airliner hijacked by terrorists that morning. Unlike the others, it failed to find its target, instead plummeting into a Pennsylvania field. It is commonly considered that Flight 93 came down because its passengers heroically fought back against the hijackers and, in the melee, the plane went out of control or perhaps a terrorist aboard pulled the pin on a bomb.

In 9/11 conspiracy theory, Flight 93 was shot down on the orders of the White House before it could reach its target – which was the White House. Welcome to the world of Alice in the Looking Glass, because conspiracists complain that it is suspicious that “Flight 77” plane/cruise missile was
not
shot down as it crossed US airspace.

Admittedly, on Flight 93 alone of the events of 9/11 the evidence is unclear. By 8.52 the White House had ordered fighters into the air to seek out any hijacked airliners. Around 10.00 a.m. CBS TV reported that F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93. Several witnesses to the Flight 93 crash report seeing a white plane nearby. The wide spread of debris from the plane, it is alleged, points to a mid-air crash. In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld seemed to say that Flight 93 had been shot down, though the White House later maintained he’d made a slip of the tongue.

Whatever, shooting down a hijacked plane – if it did happen – to stop its potential use as dive-bomber is not in the same moral league as a false-flag operation. Or a terrorist attack.

The weight of evidence is that al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda alone, carried out the 9/11 attacks. Elements of the assault were planned and directed by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the donkey work was done by a self-supporting al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, led by Mohammed Atta. After receiving training in Afghanistan, the cell moved to the US by summer 2000; in Florida Atta opened an account at the SunTrust bank into which $109,000 was transferred from Dubai, seemingly to finance the upcoming operation. In the following year, al-Qaeda sent a number of Saudi volunteers to join Atta. On the morning of 9/11 a total of nineteen terrorists hijacked four aircraft from East Coast airports …

The rest is history, not conspiracy theory.

Oh, and the smallness of the hole in the interior wall of the Pentagon? Sixteen feet is the width of a 757 fuselage. The wings had been ripped off by the outside walls, where the plane had smashed in a 90-feet wide section.

The true problem with the 9/11 “Truth” campaign is that it is barking up the wrong tree. Bush did not deliberately plan 9/11 or allow it to happen, but it is pertinent to ask whether, when he was shown the CIA daily briefing paper headed “bin Laden determined to strike in US”, he failed to push for an adequate investigation because the bin Ladens were family friends and oil industry partners. (The Bushes and the bin Ladens go way back, to the 1970s, when George H. W. Bush’s Arbusto company received a $1 million investment from Salem bin Laden, Osama’s older brother.) The Bush White House consistently refused to release a copy of the briefing, even to the Congressional 9/11 inquiry.

As for the CIA, as far back as 1995, they were informed by the Phillipines police that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was planning to use planes as flying bombs. The French and Russian secret services warned of the attack, and the Egyptians passed on the crucial detail that twenty Al-Qaeda members had slipped into the US for flight training.

Despite this epic dereliction of duty not a single CIA official has been disciplined.

Further Reading

David Ray Griffin,
The New Pearl Harbor
, 2005

Jim Marrs,
Inside Job: Unmasking the Conspiracies of 9/11
, 2005

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks,
The 9/11 Commission Report
, 2004

Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan,
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden
, 2011

Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura: Pentagon
, 17/12/2010

www.Loosechange911.com

www.911truth.org

NORTH AMERICAN UNION

The notion that there are powerful forces seeking the integration of Canada, the USA and Mexico into a political union on the model of the European Union is one of the most subtly persuasive of conspiracy theories.

The main elements of the North American Union (NAU) conspiracy feature:

“Follow the money” is as good a rule in conspiriology as it is in journalism or police work. A clique of industrialists – who would benefit from a barrier-free market – are said to be behind the NAU. These industrialists have promoted their continental dream through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Security and Prosperity Partnership, the North American SuperCorridor Coalition, the Independent Task Force on North America (a joint post-9/11 venture by the CFR, the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives) which are all designed to bring about the North American Union.

There demonstrably
are
industrialists, academics and lobbyists seeking closer economic and political ties between the three nations of North America. The Council on Foreign Relations has produced a report entitled “Building a North American Community”, while the amero received fulsome support in 1999 from Canadian economist Herbert Grubel, senior fellow of the Fraser Institute think tank, in
The Case for the Amero
, and in 2001 from Robert Pastor, vice-chairman of the Independent Task Force on North America, in
Toward a North American Community
. Making no bones about it, Pastor stated: “In the long term, the amero is in the best interests of all three countries.”

Doubtless, some of the lobbying and organizing for the NAU is done behind doors. Less obvious, is whether there is one cabal of string-pullers behind the NAU, rather than a loose, amorphous movement of like-minded people. Or whether the NAU project seriously proposes a political union. According to www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com: