I. Victims

Glenn Greenwald recently posted a short piece about "The Human Toll of the U.S. Drone Campaign." Greenwald noted that the population of the United States is kept in the dark about the civilian victims of the drone campaign by a government that "refuses to disclose anything about these attacks and media outlets [which] virtually never report on [its] victims." What the U.S. public does get from both of these sources is a picture of the Middle East "as a cauldron of sub-human demons."

Greenwald’s article references a BBC program about a Pakistani "jirga" or gathering of tribal leaders. The leaders were from the Warziristan region of the country but the gathering took place in the capital of Islamabad. Warziristan has been the site of many drone attacks and the leaders brought with them some of the maimed survivors so they could be seen and their stories told. The picture that came through is that there are now rapidly growing numbers of innocent victims of these attacks: children, teenagers, adults and the elderly–essentially anyone in the neighborhood of an intended target. The number of those actually targeted who have been killed is impossible to know because the government will claim such kills even if the only verifiable victims are "half-blinded, double-amputee teenagers."

II. Visibility

Greenwald correctly observes that "it is easy to cheer for a leader when the victims of his on-going violence remain invisible." However, the question remains, how is this invisible status maintained in a country with a "free press"? Here are some relevant points that might shed light on this issue:

1. The "news business" in America is infinitely more interested in profit than it is in journalistic excellence. Much of that profit comes from advertisers who have no wish to underwrite what might appear to be unpatriotic investigations into unwarranted wars and foreign interventions. This makes the business oriented boards and stockholders of media outlets very conservative and also encourages a "make no waves" cooperative attitude toward the government and its preferred storylines.

2. Most citizens do not care about all this. In the U.S., and elsewhere, the majority are apolitical. They focus on the local and other people are "real" relative to their geographic and relational distance. As you move further away from the average person’s focal center, victims of accident or injustice become more abstract.

3. Being apolitical does not mean that the average citizen cannot be scared out of his or her wits. Deliver the same media message over and over again, consistently and with the right amount of emotion and you can create a nationwide consensus based on nothing but a sales pitch. Among other things you can sell the population an enemy (Viet Nam, Iraq, Iran or any state you chose) to the point where almost an entire nation will support invasion and slaughter. This is what I call a "thought collective." And, as our own recent history reveals, you can create this sort of group-think repeatedly over a relatively short period of time.

III. Distorted Vision

Greenwald’s piece is an indicator that, when it comes to the Middle East, the United States has long been steeped in a thought collective that distorts the vision of both the common folk and the elites alike. The 9/11 attacks raised this national mind set to the point of near hysteria. In the immediate aftermath of that disaster anyone who suggested that U.S. foreign policy might have helped motivate the terrorists (an obvious fact for anyone who had read the speeches of Osama bin Laden) was likely to be labeled unpatriotic, maybe even a traitor, lose their job, maybe even their friends, and refused admittance into the arena of national mourning. When in early October 2001 Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal gave the city of New York a check for $10 million to help with recovery efforts, Mayor Giuliani rejected the offer out of hand. It seems the Prince had suggested that now was a good time for the U.S. to rethink its Middle East foreign policy.

Only in the last year or so have their been signs of small cracks in the thought collective. Growing numbers of ordinary citizens, to the extent that they think about these things at all, want the U.S. out of the Middle East. They are even starting to question the $3 billion a year that goes to Israel. And, it may be that Islamophobia has peaked as a popular topic of national concern. More and more, this bit of paranoia is being identified with fringe factions of the conservative right.

Unfortunately, these cracks are visible only outside the beltway. Inside the beltway, that is in Washington DC, nothing has really changed. The thought collective is, if anything, stronger than ever. This is because the formulation of policy is strongly influenced by special interests whose power over the politicians and the political parties is financially decisive. It will stay that way until millions of Americans decide change in our foreign policy is important enough to be a voting issue.

Because the thought collective within the government has not changed, foreign policies and actions have not changed. Violent intervention is still the mainstay of policy as can be seen in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan (with perhaps Iran in the wings). Greenwald notes at the end of his piece that while Americans "hear almost nothing" about the victims of U.S. aggression, "the people in that part of the world hear a lot about it and that explains much about the vast discrepancy between the two regions."

IV. The Verdict

And what might that continuing discrepancy mean for the future of the United States? Well, it means the U.S. will almost certainly lose the war in Afghanistan, just as it lost the war in Iraq. You see, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, there are just too many people who really hold a fearsome dislike for the U.S., its government and its soldiers, to make likely successful conquest and pacification. A more general victory in the war of terror is equally unlikely. Here the applicable logic is rather simple. There were a set of conditions that led up to the 9/11 attacks and the attacks themselves created a precedent. America’s contribution to those conditions (our policies and our behavior) have held constant. Whatever damage we have caused al-Qaida can, and probably will, be repaired and other equally dangerous groups are likely to spring up in the foreseeable future.

So what then is the answer to the question that serves as the title of this short essay? The honest answer is that if there continues to be no change in U.S. policies and behavior in the Middle East, it is more likely than not that another attack of the magnitude of 9/11 will occur within the next ten years. The time line is guesswork, but the rest of the answer is not.

* Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

(By Paul J. Balles * | Sabbah Report: www.sabbah.biz)

This past week the internet and mainstream media have both been chock-a-block with 9/11. But they haven't been in the same world. The contrasting stories have been absolutely amazing.

The mainstream media has covered the ceremonies honouring the dead and the courageous. Both deserve the honours--the dead as innocent victims and the courageous for sacrificing their lives and health in rescue efforts.

TV and print media have both gone into expansive detail about the victims and the heroism of first responders--police, fire fighters and paramedics.

The stories cover moving, appropriate memorials to the dead and injured.

But then there's the other world, which exists outside of the mainstream--the 9/11 truth seekers.

Truth seekers range from extreme conspiracy theorists, who believe that the Bush administration engineered the attacks to consolidate power, roll back civil liberties and help oil mogul friends.

More moderate factions simply insist that top government officials know more about the attacks than they have acknowledged, and then used the attacks as a pretext for invading Iraq.

A large percentage of activists proffer--often in great detail--what they call inconsistencies in government explanations of the attacks, which many consider a governmental cover-up.

The most amazing thing about these two worlds is that one of them doesn't even acknowledge that the other even exists.

Major newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and major networks like MSNBC, ABC, CBS and CNN have knowledgeable reporters, researchers and anchors working for them.

They can't possibly be so completely detached from the internet world and unaware of the truth seekers. They act as if they don't know the questions that have been raised or the findings that have been reported in the online world.

Mainstream media voices continue to talk about 9/11 as if thousands of intelligent researchers didn't even exist!

These people might as well have duct tape over their mouths! What silenced the media people who use remarkable resources to dig up facts, evaluate them and make sound judgments about other issues?

It's impossible to believe that mainstream commentators and their staffs have willingly buried their heads in the sand obliterating any honest investigation of the questions raised about 9/11.

How can they pretend to be honest anchors and programme hosts and not stay awake at night with guilt over what they have shoved under the carpet?

David Ray Griffin, Professor Emeritus, author of 11 books on 9/11 wrote, "All the proffered evidence that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11, when subjected to critical scrutiny, appears to have been fabricated." Have our brilliant news anchors been oblivious to this?

Apparently the wealthy networks and publications haven't used their vast resources to investigate the findings of more than 3000 professionals and experts who have questioned the official story.

The findings that follow come from The Wisdom Fund.

More than 220 Senior Military, Intelligence, Law Enforcement and Government Officials, including two generals, have questioned the 9/11 Commission's report.

Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, PhD, Former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development said "Scholars and professionals . . . have established beyond any reasonable doubt that the official account of 9/11 is false and that the official 'investigations' have really been cover-up operations."

The following have all found serious flaws in the Commission's findings.

1500 plus architects and engineers; more than 250 pilots and aviation professionals; 400 plus professors, dedicated to research and teaching the truth; more than 300 survivors and family members; 200 plus artists, entertainers and media professionals.

A video released last week entitled AE 9/11Truth Experts Speak Out provides the clearest analysis of the 9/11 attacks from professional architects and engineers. It is, without doubt, the best and most comprehensive film yet produced challenging the official version of the WTC attacks. It's also the appropriate antidote to the disinformation that continues to be pervasive in the US media.

Video link: http://youtu.be/YW6mJOqRDI4

The world of the mainstream media need not entertain flawed or questionable conspiracy theories. However, with their articulate anchors, investigative reporters and large staffs of producers and researchers, they have no excuse for wallowing in ignorance.

The major news organizations and networks need to get in tune with the cogent minds of scientists and credentialed professionals who have found legitimate flaws in the public accounts of 9/11.

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. He's a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the Gulf Daily News. Dr. Balles is also Editorial Consultant for Red House Marketing and a regular contributor to Bahrain This Month.

By James M. Wall * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

9/11: by Marty Lederhandler for the Associated Press

President George Bush's War on Terror began ten years ago, September 11, 2001.

Murderous crime scenes in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, became spiritual staging grounds for an international war against what Time's Tony Karon describes as "a tiny network of transnational extremists, founded on the remnants of the Arab volunteers who'd fought in the U.S.-backed Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union."

It did not need to come to this.

The attacks on the US could have been a time to reinvent ourselves as a united people, bound together in our common grief. But politicians, supported by a national media that was far more concerned with drama of what happened than why it happened, began to shape a different future, a worldwide attack on Islam.

Our crime scenes of death became shrines of memory designed not to mourn the dead, but to serve as spiritual support bases for the Bush War on Terror. The deaths of more than 3000 victims were exploited to create an evolving narrative of permanent international warfare.

Frank Rich wrote in New York magazine August 27, 2011:

The hallowed burial grounds of 9/11 were supposed to bequeath us a stronger nation, not a busted one. We were supposed to be left with a finer legacy than Gitmo and the Patriot Act. When we woke up on September 12, we imagined a whole host of civic virtues that might rise from the smoldering ruins.

Rich reminds us that Bush, a "still-green president" had a "near-perfect approval rating for weeks". The nation was ready to build "a selfless wartime patriotism built on the awesome example of those regular Americans who ran to the rescue on that terrifying day of mass death, at the price of their own health and sometimes their lives".

Instead we got "another hijacking-of 9/11 by those who exploited it for motives large and petty, both ideological and crassly ­commercial".

The most lethal of these hijackings was the Bush administration's repurposing of 9/11 for a war against a country that had not attacked us. So devilishly clever was the selling of the Saddam-for-Osama bait-and-switch that almost half the country would come to believe that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University, wrote in a posting, The Price of 9/11: "President George W. Bush's response to the attacks compromised America's basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security".

Three years ago, when Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist, and a colleague, examined the costs of the Bush wars, their conservative tally was $3-5 trillion. Since then, he writes, the costs have mounted.

With almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans' medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900 billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

One glaring reason why the Bush-Cheney war machine could shape public opinion with such impunity in 2001 is that the main stream media had abandoned its journalistic responsibility to talk truth to power.

Looking back over my own 2001 files from those immediate post 911 months, I found a remarkable exception to that total media capitulation, a Newsweek essay published on November 18, 2001. The essay was written by David Gates under the headline, "The Voices Of Dissent". The Daily Beast, Newsweek's current online presence, has the essay on its site, here. Gates writes:

Since September 11, political dissent has seemed a decadent luxury, rather than a democratic necessity. The new united-we-stand orthodoxy holds that we're all engaged in a war of unquestionable good against inexplicable evil–that, in fact, the attempt to understand the enemy's perception of us is disloyal–and that bombing Afghanistan, approved by 90 percent of Americans, is both morally and practically justified.

These assumptions are worth questioning, if only for prudential reasons. But our official opposition party has signed on; so have most of the world's leaders. And again, [few contemporary] writers get with the program.

Gates found, with some searching I imagine, John le Carre and Alan Gurganus, both of whom had written "to critique the war and the United States' arrogance"

The most audible voices Gates identified, however, were those of Susan Sontag and Barbara Kingsolver, and the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy.

Sontag, the essayist and author of the National Book Award-winning In America: A Novel, drew a bizarrely fierce reaction for a 473-word New Yorker piece. She called the president "robotic" and added that the attacks were motivated by "specific American alliances and actions". Gates does not specify those allies and their actions, but ten years later it is possible to surmise she may have been alluding to Israel.

Gates writes further that since September 11, Kingsolver "has been pouring out editorials and essays".

Her dissent, like Roy's, is both moral and practical. "If our goal is to reduce the number of people in the world who would like to kill us," she says, "this is not the way to go about it." She resents having her patriotism impugned. "I'm speaking out because I'm a patriot," she says.

"Because I love my country and I want it to do the right thing." And she also resents being told–as she has been lately–that she should stick to writing novels. "It's a nasty slap down that's been used against those of us, particularly Arundhati Roy, who have spoken out," Kingsolver says.

"As if the fact of our being novelists disqualified us for any other sort of speech. I can't make any sense of that. Words are my tools. Words are what I have to offer."

In that same 2001 file folder I found a column I wrote for the Christian Century's December 12, 2001, issue. It is available on the Century web site. Click here for the full column.

I quoted from the David Gates Newsweek essay, and added these observations on how Bush's War on Terror looked to me, and to many more Americans who were not being heard, in 2001.

Meanwhile, the president's repeated insistence that the war against terror will last a long time indicates that he is listening to those who want him to extend the war to all nations that "harbor" what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has seen too many movies, likes to call the "bad guys."

Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, White House officials Condolezza Rice, Karl Rowe and Karen Hughes, and chairman of the president's Defense Policy Board, Richard Pearle, are urging Bush not to stop with Afghanistan.

New Yorker writer Peter J. Boyer reports that Newt Gingrich, a member the President's Defense Policy Board, is urging the president to "confront Iraq even while the engagement in Afghanistan continues, and go after terrorist operations in Somalia and Sudan as well."

I called my December 12, 2001 column, A Moral Squint: Bombs and Chaos. The column began:

After a particularly heavy U.S. bombardment of the city of Kunduz, al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters initially refused to surrender. Northern Alliance factions argued over how to arrange the surrender of Kunduz, provoking one U.S. official to describe the situation in and around the city as "chaotic."

His word reminds me of an exchange in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey demands that Thomas More support a papal dispensation so that King Henry VIII can legally divorce his queen, who has failed to produce a male heir.

When More refuses to intercede with the pope, the cardinal says, "You are a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see facts flat on without that horrible, constant moral squint. With a little common sense you could have made a statesman."

To which More replies: "I think that when statesmen forsake their own private consciences for the sake of their public duties they lead the country by a short route to chaos."

Our nation needs the wisdom of writers these days who possess a "moral squint" and don't hesitate to write and speak about it.

* James M. Wall is currently a Contributing Editor of The Christian Century magazine, based in Chicago, Illinois. From 1972 through 1999, he was editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine. Jim launched personal blog April 24, 2008.

By Paul J. Balles * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Assassinations, kidnappings, torture – the actions of uncivilized pirates, barbaric criminals and rogue governments.

The entire litany of vicious crimes against humanity, fitting for horrid, inhuman terrorist groups or Third World mongrels, now belongs to America.

Every day another violation of human dignity is exposed in the medium of the internet and ignored by most mainstream media.

The leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, exemplifies the brutish attitude of leading Americans. Said Romney:

American strength is the only guarantee of liberty,
American strength turned the Cuban missiles around,
American strength caused the collapse of the Soviet Union,
American strength yanked Saddam out of his spider hole.

... On 31 August, Ian Cobain and Ben Quinn, writing in the Guardian, revealed that US firms profited from torture flights.

In a rendition programme, America hired private firms who "flew terrorism suspects to locations around the world, where they were often tortured," the article reports.

Nadeem Sarwar writing for Monsters and Critics, Islamabad, records how "Beatings, deprivation of food and sleep, and cultural shocks were part of the daily routine for Ghairat Bahir during six years spent in US detention centres in Afghanistan."

Truthout editor William Rivers Pitt refers to "the rancid reality of a free and un-convicted Dick Cheney appearing in the public eye once again" following the publication of Cheney's memoir.

Says Pitt: "If there were any justice to be found in this deranged country, Dick Cheney would have penned his pestiferous, self-serving little memoir by the light of a bare bulb inside the cell of a federal prison.”

According to Pitt, Cheney's "actions directly caused deaths and injuries that number in the hundreds of thousands. The deaths he is responsible for are ongoing to this day..."

In several appearances on televised interviews, Cheney consistently attempted to defend his actions while in office, including the use of torture in interrogations.

In these interviews, Cheney proudly admitted that he authorized torture, secret prisons, and illegal wiretapping. All are crimes under US and international laws.

Observes Robert Kaiser in the Washington Post, the memoir attempts "to make clear how right Cheney always was, and how wrongheaded were his critics and bureaucratic rivals.

More than once Cheney tells us he would do again exactly what he did the first time, “in a heartbeat”. He acknowledges no serious regrets about anything.

Under any universally acceptable code of justice, narcissists who serve nothing but themselves, deserve to be arrested and prosecuted for their crimes. Failure to do so makes the public complicit in their crimes.

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. He's a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the Gulf Daily News. Dr. Balles is also Editorial Consultant for Red House Marketing and a regular contributor to Bahrain This Month.

By Stephen Lendman* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Winston Churchill rightly explained that "(a) lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Today, of course, it circulates everywhere instantly.

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany's Reich Minister of Propaganda, once said:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

He added that "truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Corporate media manipulators love a big story they can hype, distort, and falsify to attract large audiences supportively for the worst imperial crimes.

In fact, the bigger the event, the worse the reporting, sacrificing truth for managed news and opinions everyone should understand and avoid.

Distinguished scholars like David Ray Griffin exposed the 9/11 lie in his exhaustive research and writings. In numerous books, articles, and lectures, he provided convincing evidence about an inside job, not an attack carried out by "crazed Arabs."

In an April 5, 2006 lecture titled, "9/11: The Myth and the Reality," he concluded saying:

"It would seem, for many reasons, that the official story of 9/11, which has served as a religious Myth in the intervening years (and still does), is a myth in the pejorative sense of a story that does not correspond to reality."

It was Griffin's polite way of calling it a Big Lie, the biggest of our time.

On September 11, 2008, his Global Research article headlined, "September 11, 2001: 21 Reasons to Question the Official Story about 9/11," including:

(1) Although the Big Lie holds Osama bin Laden accountable, the FBI admitted it "has no hard evidence connecting" him to the attack (NPHR 206-11).

(2) Although the 9/11 myth claims "devout Muslims (were) ready to die as martyrs to earn a heavenly reward, Mohamed Atta (their alleged leader) and the other alleged hijackers regularly drank heavily, went to strip clubs, and paid for sex (NPHR 153-55)."

(3) Claimed cell phone calls from above 30,000 feet to relatives were falsified as technology at the time made completely them impossible. Later, the FBI changed its story, saying only two were made "from United 93 after it descended to 5,000 feet (NPHR 111-17)."

(4) Then "US Solicitor General Tel Olson's claim that his wife, Barbara Olson, phoned him twice from AA 77," saying hijackers controlled the plane, "was also contradicted by this FBI report," saying one call she attempted was "unconnected" and lasted "0 seconds (NPRH 60-62)."

(5) The FBI lied, saying Atta's left behind luggage included "decisive evidence that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks....(NPHR 155-62)."

(6) Evidence of alleged Al Qaeda videos, "passports discovered at the crash sites, and a headband discovered at the crash site of United 93 (showed) clear signs of having been fabricated (NPHR 170-73)."

(7) Evidence shows hijackers WERE NOT on the planes. Moreover, if they broke "into cockpits, the pilots would have 'squawked' the universal highjack code," a simple two second act. However, none aboard the four flights did it (NPHR 175-79).

(8) Standard operating procedures to intercept "planes showing signs of an in-flight emergency within about 10 minutes" weren't followed. Instead, a "stand-down order prevented (them) from being carried out (NPHR 1-10, 81-84)."

(9) Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said Dick Cheney, inside the White House bunker, "apparently confirmed a stand-down order at about 9:25AM," prior to an alleged plane striking the Pentagon. "Another man has reported hearing a member of LAX Security learn that a stand-down order (came) from the 'highest level' of the White House (NPHR 94-96)."

(10) The 9/11 Whitewash Commission ignored Mineta's report, deleted it from the official record, "and claimed that Cheney did not enter the (bunker) until almost 10:00...." They lied (NPHR 91-94).

In fact, Philip Zelikow, head of the 9/11 Commission, was a member of the Bush White House.

(11) The 9/11 Commission even contradicted what Cheney told Tim Russett on "Meet the Press" on September 16 (NPHR 93).

(12) Hani Hanjour, the so-called terrible pilot unable to fly a single-engine aircraft, "could not possibly have executed the amazing (AA 77) trajectory....to hit Wedge 1 of the Pentagon" that even experienced airline pilots would have had trouble negotiating, and never would have tried, fearing they'd crash and burn (NPHR 78-80).

(13) Wedge 1 was the most implausible spot to be struck. It was furthest from offices of Rumsfeld and Pentagon top brass, presumably the targeted high-value officials.

It was also "the only part of the Pentagon that had been reinforced." Its reconstruction wasn't finished, so few people were there. And it presented the most difficult flight path to execute (NPHR 76-78).

(14) Pentagon officials lied, saying they had no warning of an approaching aircraft. In fact, "a military E-4B - the Air Force's most advanced communications, command, and control airplane - was flying over the White House at the time." Astonishingly, the Pentagon "denied it belonged to them (NPHR 96-98)."

Moreover, the Pentagon is the most guarded structure in the world, complete with advanced radar and surface-to-air missiles, able to intercept and destroy any approaching threat.

(15) Without explanation, the Secret Service let George Bush remain at a Sarasota, FL school for 30 minutes after learning the second tower was struck, ignoring standard procedures to secure his safety as presumably high-value officials were targeted.

Only advance knowledge assured them of no danger at a time media reports circulated about America being under attack.

On 9/11's first anniversary, a new White House story emerged, falsely claiming Bush left the school immediately. "The lie was told in major newspapers and on MSNBC and ABC television (NHHR 129-31)."

(16) Their rigid steel columns made it impossible for the towers to crumble, let alone "at virtually free-fall speed - unless (they) had been sliced by means of explosives." In other words, claims about impacting planes and resulting fires being responsible are "scientifically impossible (NPHR 12-25)."

(17) Other features of the towers' destruction "can be explained only in terms of powerful explosives." They include "horizontal ejections of steel beams, the melting of steel, and the sulfidation and thinning of steel." Moreover, "fires could not have come within 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit of the temperature needed to melt steel (NPHR 30-36)."

(18) New York Fire Department "oral histories shortly after 9/11" provided testimonies of "having witnessed explosions in the Twin Towers. Others toppling WTC 7 as well as the towers were also reported by city officials, WTC employees, and journalists (NPHR 27-30, 45-48, 51)."

(19) On 9/11, Mayor Rudy Giuliani told" told ABC News anchor Peter Jennings that he was informed that the towers would collapse, despite no basis to think so. In fact, the so-called information came from his own Office of Emergency Management that either falsified it or had advance knowledge of the plot (NPH 40).

(20) "NIST, which produced the official reports on the Twin Towers and (recently) WTC 7, has been fully hijacked from the scientific to the political realm...." In fact, its "scientists" are "hired guns (NPHR 11, 238-51)."

(21) Growing numbers of "physicists, chemists, architects, engineers, pilots, former military officers, and former intelligence officers" reject the official 9/11 myth as a bald-faced lie (NPHR xi).

The Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST - formerly the National Bureau of Standards, NBS) is a measurement standards laboratory, expected to produce scientifically verifiable, not falsified, analysis.

In other writing, Griffin exposed its 9/11 coverup role, saying it suggested that "fire-induced collapses of large steel-frame buildings (like the twin towers) are normal events," when they knew it's impossible.

NIST was also tasked to provide "the definitive explanation" of WTC 7's collapse. Again, coverup was its unstated mandate.

It "committed two kinds of scientific fraud: Ignoring relevant evidence (showing explosives were used) and falsifying evidence."

For example, it suppressed evidence revealed in a peer-reviewed University of Copenhagen report, showing "WTC dust contained unreacted nanothermite. Unlike ordinary thermite, which is an incendiary, nanothermite is a high explosive."

Short of verifiable insider confessions, its presence is as close as it gets to smoking gun proof of controlled demolitions, destroying the twin towers and WTC 7, not fires or other causes.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth

James Fetzer founded Scholars for 9/11 Truth, a non-partisan association of faculty, students, and scholars, dedicated to exposing official lies, removing the shroud of deceit, and revealing truths behind 9/11.

Access his site here.

A section on it headlines "Why Doubt 9/11," providing 20 examples to debunk the official lie. They include:

(1) The Twin Towers were built to sustain impacts similar to large planes striking them.

(2) Most jet fuel burned "in the first fifteen seconds or so. Below the 96th floor in the North Tower and the 80th in the South, those buildings were stone cold steel, unaffected by" fires above.

(3) Steel melts at 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, "about 1,000 degrees higher than the maximum" burning jet fuel produces.

(4) "Underwriters Laboratory certified the" building steel to be able to handle temperatures up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit "for three or four hours without any significant effects."

The ignited 500 degree fires were more suitable for roasting marshmallows than melting steel.

(5) Had steel melted or weakened the buildings, "the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior," far short of collapsing that was impossible.

(6) Even when the top 30 floors of the South Tower "pivoted and began to fall to the side when the floors beneath gave way, it wasn't enough "to exert downward pressure on the lower 80 floors."

Moreover, the top 16 floors of the North Tower, "as one unit of downward force," was offset by "199 units of upward force....counteract(ing) it."

(7) Last man out of the North Tower William Rodriguez "reported massive explosions in the sub-basements that (caused) extensive destruction...."

(8) He said "the explosion occurred prior to reverberations from upper floors, a claim...substantiated by a Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross" study, titled "Seismic Proof: 9/11 Was an Inside Job," showing the "explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds before the presumptive airplane impacts."

(9) "Heavy-steel-construction buildings like" the towers are virtually immune from "pancake collapse," unless rigged explosives cause it.

(10) Both towers collapsing from fires or on their own any other way at free-fall speed is impossible.

(11) Mechanical Engineering Professor Judy Wood compared the phenomenon of the towers collapsing to "two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down."

(12) WTC-7 was a "classic controlled demolition at 5.20PM...."

(13) The twin towers were "destroyed by different modes of demolition."

(14) "The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44-feet high...."

Moreover, the debris found had "no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail," and no engines.

In other words, no plane struck the Pentagon. A likely cruise missile was used, a weapon unavailable to alleged terrorists anywhere, let alone the ability to launch one.

(15) Pentagon videotapes show no Boeing 757 striking the building.

(16) The "official trajectory - flying at high speed barely above ground level - (was) physically impossible..." It was aerodynamically inconceivable to negotiate even for experienced airline pilots. None, of course, would have tried.

(17) Flight recorder data given to Pilots for 9/11 truth by the NTSB "corresponds to a plane with a different approach and altitude...." If followed by a Boeing 757, it would have overflown the Pentagon, not hit it.

(18) If Flight 93 crashed as reported, efforts would have been made to find survivors post-haste. Instead, coverup to suppress the truth followed, suggesting an incident other than reported.

(19) The alleged hijackers had minimal competence to fly single-engine aircraft, let alone be able to handle commercial jets. Moreover, their "names are not on any original, authenticated passenger manifest."

In fact, several "turned up alive and well and living in the Middle East." Washington never even produced their tickets as evidence because they weren't aboard the planes and had nothing to do with the incidents.

(20) George Bush later acknowledged that Saddam Hussein "had nothing to do with 9/11. The Senate Intelligence Committee" said he had no connection to Al Qaeda. Moreover, the FBI admitted having no evidence linking bin Laden to 9/11.

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

AE911Truth is a "non-partisan association of architects, engineers and affiliates dedicated to exposing the falsehoods and to revealing truths about" the Big 9/11 lie, substituting myth for reality.

Its growing membership "is devoted to:

(1) Dispelling misinformation with scientific facts and forensic evidence

(2) Educating and motivating thousands of architects and engineers and the public at large

(3) Procuring a truly independent 9/11 investigation with subpoena power

(4) Achieving 9/11 Truth mainstream coverage

Access AE911Truth's here.

Growing numbers worldwide now dispute the official myth, including Muslims for 9/11 Truth, anyone can connect with through its site.

More than any others worldwide, Muslims unfairly paid the greatest price - vilified, persecuted and attacked for their faith, ethnicity, locations in resource rich countries, and domestically for political advantage.

The 9/11 lie bears main responsibility for launching a decade of war, persecution and other forms of abuse. Stopping it ahead is job one. Revealing the truth and holding those responsible is how.

In his new book titled, "9/11 - Ten Years Later," David Ray Griffin said the following:

"Getting the 9/11 lie exposed is essential. One obvious reason is simple justice," not only for 9/11 family members never told the truth or compensated in whatever way possible.

"There also needs to be justice in the sense of punishment for those who engineered this crime," including top government and military officials. They perhaps consider themselves patriots. They're, in fact, "guilty of murder and treason."

Revealing 9/11 truth is also vital "for the sake of preventing further crimes against democracy."

"Many lines of evidence show that 9/11 was an inside job." It's virtually indisputable. As a result, it needs to outed so everyone knows to give "never again" real meaning.

A Final Comment

9/11 was the transformative event of our time, for ill, not good. It sparked multiple wars producing more of them, as well as repressive domestic crackdowns.

It also launched a Global War on Terror (GWOT), another on truth, human and civil rights, social justice, rule of law principles, and democratic values wherever America and its NATO partners show up.

September 11, 2011, will mark the 10th anniversary of a day those old enough won't ever forget. Nor should they forgive political Washington for using it to wage war on humanity.

All wars are for wealth and power, never for liberation or other social justice reasons.

Debunking the official 9/11 lie is a vital first step to freeing America of a malignancy that's destroying it and free people everywhere in its grip.

Mark October 6 on your calendar. Stand with most Americans for "human needs, not corporate greed."

"Stop the Machine! Create a New World!" Head to the nation's capital where "hundreds of thousands are expected" to "occupy Freedom Plaza indefinitely until their demands have been met," including:

(1) Taxing the rich and corporations.

(2) Ending imperial wars, bringing US forces home, and cutting military spending.

(3) Protecting America's social safety net, especially Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as public and private pensions.

(4) Ending corporate and other forms of welfare for the rich at the expense of most others.

(5) Transitioning to a clean energy economy, as well as reversing environmental degradation.

(6) Protecting worker rights, including collective bargaining, decent wages and benefits, and initiatives to create jobs.

(7) Getting money out of politics, and

(8) Supporting social justice for everyone, not just too-big-to-fail banker crooks, other corporate favorites and America's aristocracy.

Transforming America starts with putting our bodies on the line for change, and not quitting no matter the odds.

There's no other way because the alternative is too grim to accept what only grassroots activism can achieve.

* Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon.

By Stephen Lendman* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously ruled for Fox News, saying no rule or law prohibits distorting or falsifying news.

Just as Wall Street, war profiteers, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and other corporate favorites steal with impunity, it's OK for America's media to lie.

The ruling pertained to a 1996 Jane Akre/Steve Wilson Fox affiliate WTVT, Tampa reports on bovine growth hormone (BGH) dangers, Monsanto's hazardous to human health genetically engineered milk additive.

At first, the station loved them. Later, however, Fox executives and their attorneys ordered its reporters to admit falsifying evidence and produce bogus reports on BGH safety.

They refused, threatened to inform the FCC, were fired, and sued. A district court jury decided on their behalf, awarding Acre alone $425,000 in damages.

Fox appealed and won, the Appellate Court saying Acre wasn't protected under Florida's whistleblower statute, loosely interpreting it to mean employers must violate an adopted "law, rule, or regulation."

In other words, Fox simply followed "policy" entitling its stations to lie - whether on product safety or falsifying facts about anything, including 9/11 truth.

In 2005, Project Censored chose this story among its top 25 most important, titled "The Media Can Legally Lie," and lie they've done about 9/11 from that day to the present.

Those old enough to remember won't forget, including how media distortions turned it into perhaps the most hyped ever spectacle, especially on television.

For days, images of planes hitting the twin towers and their collapse were aired repeatedly.

A personal note. I was in a doctor's waiting room with others watching events on television. When the South Tower collapsed, everyone audibly gasped, unaware as I was how or why, let alone what lay next.

When the North Tower collapsed 30 minutes later, unsettling thoughts crystallized enough to make me sense much more was involved than met the eye or what news reports claimed.

It was almost anti-climactic when WTC 7 collapsed at 5:21PM. Notably, BBC's Jane Standley reported the event at 4:54PM New York time, 27 minutes in advance.

Later she claimed she didn't "remember minute-by-minute what she saw," or perhaps (like BBC's management) doesn't want to explain how she could report an event before it happened without advance knowledge.

Earlier in the afternoon, I smelled a rat and wrote my brother, saying: "They're drinking champagne in the White House tonight," precise words I'll never forgot. Yet they failed to imagine the horror-filled decade to come.

Back then, the whole world watched the horrific spectacle, including planes hitting the towers, both bursting into flames, desperate people jumping out of windows to avoid incineration, and then collapse at near free-fall speed, later proved (but unreported) by controlled demolitions.

A 2002 HBO film titled, "In Memoriam" called 9/11 "the most documented event in history," stopping short of revealing what really happened or why.

It provided a collage of images produced by news crews, filmmakers, amateur videographers and photographers, some of them risking their lives by so doing.

For three or more days, US television covered the event and its aftermath nonstop commercial free. In the process, they hyped war hysteria belligerently.

On October 7, 26 days later, it began against a nation having nothing to do with the attack. However, falsified reports held Osama bin Laden responsible. Later, the FBI admitted no evidence linked him to the incident.

Nonetheless, Washington demanded Taliban authorities extradite him. They, in turn, rightly wanted proof of his culpability.

None, of course, was provided to let the Bush administration go to war on false pretenses. March 2003 against Iraq followed.

Both wars rage today, besides Obama's naked aggression, notably against Libya - another nonbelligerent country America and its NATO allies systematically destroyed, butchering tens of thousands of Libyans on the pretext of protecting them.

America's post-9/11 decade is best called its visible fall from grace, waging permanent wars on humanity for wealth and power, never for falsified hyped reasons everyone needs to understand and condemn.

But don't expect America's media to explain. They're, in fact, complicit by regurgitating official lies, vilifying Islam, and resonating war fever discourse for intervention, featuring one-sided reports and commentaries.

Absent was critical debate. Vital questions weren't asked. Militarism instead was promoted as the solution to "global terrorism."

For days, political and military officials and spokespersons shared air time with so-called national security state experts and various crackpots, ranging from right-wing to hard-right to the lunatic fringe.

The common theme argued was that America was at war with Islam, Samuel Huntington's racist "clash of civilizations" notion, "good v. evil," "freedom (and our) way of life" against "forces of darkness."

Bush administration officials used cowboy metaphors, including wanting bin Laden "dead or alive," calling its campaign a "crusade" until criticism forced its change to "Operation Enduring Freedom," and vowing to "smoke out and pursue" barbaric evil doers.

Their underlying theme was fear because it sells, even when cause for it doesn't exist.

At the same time, Bush's "war on terrorism" didn't mention democracy, instead emphasizing his fighting for "freedom" mantra, no matter the human toll or illegitimacy of the Big (9/11) Lie, permitting America's war on the world to follow.

Inaugurated on January 20, 2001, his nationally televised address to Congress declared war on terrorism, describing a conflict between "those governed by fear (who) want to destroy our wealth and freedoms" and others wanting to defend it.

Thereafter, the major media hyped fear, promoted revenge, and defended falsified notions that Washington wages wars for freedom and democratic values by ridding nations of dangerous tyrants, especially ones threatening Americans.

In other words, wars of aggression are liberating ones. Civil and human rights are suppressed for our own good, and patriotism means going along with lawless governments, committing crimes of war and against humanity against one country after another.

Bin Laden and Al Qaeda replaced "the evil empire." Terrorism became the new mantra. Manichean good v. evil notions were hyped. Fear and hate overwhelmed sanity and defending right over wrong, as well as holding venal politicians accountable for acting lawlessly with impunity.

An earlier article explained that when America goes to war, managed news follows, spreading rumors, half-truths, misinformation, and willful deception about targeted nations, regimes, leaders, and other enemies, whether despots of democrats.

John Pilger said "Journalism is the first casualty" of war. "Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship (and willful misreporting) that goes unrecognized in the United States, Britain and other democracies; censorship by omission (makes all) the difference between life and death for people in (targeted) countries...."

It suppresses debate, substitutes fiction for facts, filters out truth, and cheerleads in lockstep with government policy, right or wrong.

As a result, it supports America's right to be judge, jury and executioner, as well as get victor's spoils because that's why all wars are fought, never for falsified reasons, regurgitated on air and in print ad nauseam.

Because America's business is war, supported by its major media, war profiteering is a growth industry, and as famed comedian Jimmy Durante used to say:

"Everybody wants ta get inta da act," and they do.

In addition, not telling the truth and holding venal politicians accountable for taking America to war on false pretenses lets them do it again with impunity.

At best, damage control tactics follow, including Bush officials relying on 9/11 Commission liars to let them off the hook by sanitizing policy and concealing facts.

David Ray Griffin brilliantly exposed them in his book titled, "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions." He explained that Bush officials "deliberately" failed to prevent the attacks or, in fact, were "actively involved in (their) planning and execution...."

His introduction calls his book important because of the significant consequences of 9/11, taking America to war on false pretenses, and its major media lying about it supportively.

His reasons for wanting to examine the 9/11 Commission's report included:

• to determine if Bush's "war on terrorism" response to 9/11 was appropriate;
• to learn if the Commission's account was "definitive;" and
• "whether the success of the attacks would have been less likely if the recommended structural changes had already been in place."

A fourth reason was the "possibility of a cover-up," and indeed that's precisely what happened. Instead of "provid(ing) the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11," damage control suppressed them.

The Commission, of course, was hardly "nonpartisan," "impartial," or "thorough," especially with Philip Zelikow as executive director, a Republican Bush administration member at the time, appointed to assure whitewash, not full disclosure.

In his exhaustive account, Griffin brilliantly, "painstaking(ly) and devasting(ly) demoli(shed)" the Commissions findings, according to Peter Dale Scott.

Though Griffin didn't address America's media, he nonetheless exposed its complicit role. They regurgitated Commission lies as truth, the way they always represent powerful interests at the expense of good journalism, commentaries and full disclosure.

To this day, 9/11 mythology remains official dogma on air and in print. As a result, most Americans remain unaware of the biggest lie of our time and its horrific consequences, touching their lives directly.

A Final Comment

Sunday marks the 10th 9/11 anniversary. This writer plans two more articles about the big lie and its aftermath to be published on or about the date.

On September 10 and 11, the Progressive Radio News Hour will feature more discussion on it, especially its horrific consequences.

Expect America's media also to react. The Washington Post already features "Full coverage: Remembering 9/11," with features headlined:

"After 9/11, security guard on high alert," against what wasn't explained.

"Brought together by catastrophe," focusing on marriage vows exchanged, not 9/11 truth.

"Twin misses his other half," killed in the attack on the Pentagon, instead of explaining the toll on millions of dead Afghans, Iraqis, and their families, their countries destroyed by US lawlessness.

"Trying to find the new normal," about a wife coping in the aftermath of her military husband's death, again ignoring a global catastrophe because of America's post-9/11 wars.

On September 4, New York Times writers Jeremy Peters and Brian Stelter headlined, "Media Strive to Cover 9/11 Without Seeming to Exploit a Tragedy," saying:

Coverage of its 10th anniversary will walk "a fine line between commemoration and exploitation. Mindful of this, television networks and magazines and others planning special coverage....are approaching it differently," some commercial free.

Unfortunately, freedom from truth already is featured. Neither writer explained, instead saying news outlets will vary in their approach with special print and on air specials.

As on previous anniversaries, they'll cover everything except what Americans most need to know - the truth.

* Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon.

By Philip A. Farruggio * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Seven Days in May - original film poster

What really happened on that day, now nearly 10 years ago? So many books and theories have been brought forth, yet our mainstream media, controlled by ...you guessed it, seems to discount most if not all of those theories. The purpose of this column is not to go down that road. Google 9/11 Truth or David Ray Griffin and check out the myriad of resource material available. The bottom line is that the Military Industrial Complex and the Cabal of nameless individuals made lots of money and extended our American empire because of that day. The coup that occurred on November 22, 1963 helped pave the way for it. There is a fine book, JFK and the Unspeakable, which came out last year. Read it! Oliver Stone, who was vilified after he made his JFK film, was hitting home with some powerful truths. The critics who trashed it simply took the few times that Stone used artistic license to mislead the public away from the historical facts. Those facts were that we did have a Coup d'e tat in 1963, and that we have never, as a nation, been able to counteract it.

On September 11, 2011, we will see and hear a slew of remembrances for the fallen. I say rightly so that we Americans remember the civilians killed in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and in those planes. I would hope (and pray) that we Americans also reflect upon our need to finally have closure on what really may have gone down that day. The 9/11 Commission was partly a 'whitewash 'and completely a cop-out! The effect of that dastardly day was first the Patriot Act, whereupon the Bill of Rights was trashed. Then we had our Congress, more concerned about the upcoming elections than our Constitution, who overwhelmingly gave up its own exclusive right to declare war. Finally, we had an empire, really on its last legs, which needed to show force and Shock and Awe innocent people to death. There will be no ceremonies on September 11^th for those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, or the 4000+ young Americans killed in that hornet's nest... Our hornet's nest!

All of a sudden American foreign policy trumpets the need to 'Bring democracy to the world.' And now, they change the faces and the political ornaments, these masters behind the Military Industrial Complex curtains. Back at home, we have a 2 Party con job that will not allow for any real ideas of needed change, whether they are economic or political. Sadly, as our nation falls deeper into a depression ( financially and emotionally ) few seem to challenge the Military Industrial Complex that even Cold War warrior President Eisenhower chose to warn us about... much too late! No, the hypocrites who wear those Republican, Democrat and Tea Party buttons on their election cycle lapels only care about serving the empire. Who is this empire? Who makes bundles of money from phony wars, illegal invasions and occupations? Who earns profits from those fantastic up and down swings of the S& P? Yet, they still pull the strings and watch the obedient lemmings march to the edge of the cliff of reason. Swim anyone?

* Philip A. Farruggio is son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen. He is a small businessman, activist leader and free lance columnist. Philip is an advocate for the 25% Solution to cut military spending to save our state and city budget shortfalls. Since the 2000 elections, he has written over 250 columns, many posted on various sites worldwide. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net.

By Anthony Lawson* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

This video concentrates on the two major 9/11 issues: The Unidentified Planes and The Controlled Demolitions. Nothing else. It does not mention the NORAD stand--down; the don't-fly and don't-go-to-work warnings or the Dancing Israelis or any of the other anomalies and suspicious happenings. The alleged amateur suicide pilots are not mentioned, either, for obvious reasons, and I do not know what happened to the allegedly hijacked planes or their alleged passengers and crews.

It is my contention that the 9/11 Truth Movement has got to concentrate on the most blatant and provable lies in the official story, and stop trying to be an amateur Police Precinct or a citizen's District Attorney's Office. The Movement must bring pressure to bear in the authorities for a new enquiry, so that the police, the FBI, the NTSB and all of the other law enforcement and investigative agencies can do what should have been done 10 years ago: Find out who was responsible for the crime of the attacks on 9/11 and bring them to justice.

Video link: http://youtu.be/wF-Rp4W_ABE

While I was thinking about a video for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, an English artist named David Borrington got in touch, and asked if I would write and record some voice commentaries to be included in a set of prints that he was making for the same occasion. When I saw his strangely haunting artwork, I decided to incorporate David's images into my video. So, my sincere thanks go to David Borrington, whose website is www.davidborrington.com

I would also like to recommend that anyone who is interested in the research done on the Murray Street engine take a look at Christopher King's excellent web page.

Music: Adagietto - 4th Movement from Gustav Mahler's Symphony No.5

* Anthony Lawson (known professionally as Tony Lawson) is a retired international-prize-winning commercials director, cameraman, ad agency creative director and voice over. He used to be known for shooting humorous commercials, but doesn’t find much to laugh about, with the way the world is going, these days.

They are part of the national fabric that holds our country together. They contribute to America in many ways, and deserve the same respect as any of us. My Fellow American pledge to spread this message, and affirm the country's principles of liberty and justice for all.

Take the pledge: http://myfellowamerican.us/pledge

Video link: http://youtu.be/cjm0uk2JO58

By Paul J. Balles * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The biggest political mistake I've ever made was to vote for Barack Obama. I should have known that a really great campaign speaker and organizer would probably make an inept president.

All of Obama's emphatic talk about change sounded appealing; even though Washington has proven so often that it's incapable of changing. There are just too many self-interests needing trade-offs with other self-interests, none of which has public needs in mind.

The fact that Obama opposed the Iraq War carried a lot of weight with those who don't believe America should mind everybody else's business.

Many had enough of Bush-Cheney war-mongering for the neo-cons (aka American Zionists who desperately wanted America to take out Iraq before Saddam Hussein could wage the mother of all WMDs against Israel).

So the Zioncons made up stories, pretended that fiction was fact and lied about non-existent WMDs.

Some argue they even went so far as to arrange for the slaughter of 3000 plus people on 9/11 with Israel's help.

Let's say Mossad, Israel's intelligence deceivers, speaking perfect Arabic and pretending to be Arabs, infiltrated an Al Qaeda cell and hatched a plan to highjack four planes; and that would show everyone how clever Al Qaeda was.

Of course the hijackers knew nothing about any plan to fly into buildings like kamikaze pilots on a suicide mission.

Once they got into the air and managed to get control of the planes, there would be nothing else the hijackers had to do. Thank you very much; everything would now be on remote control, with planes being flown like drones and directed by the Pentagon.

All the Israeli-firsters needed to do now was trigger the already placed thermal devices in the Trade Centre buildings just before the time the flying drones were guided into the top of the twin towers.

Another plane was droned into a largely unoccupied wing of the Pentagon, and the last--not allowed to fly into the White House--was shot down over Pennsylvania.

The whole story is perfect enough to allow Bush to continue reading to school children in Florida and for Cheney to pretend fear of terror while hiding in a bunker under the White House.

Of course the dots had to be connected between hijackers and Al Qaeda who at first knew nothing about the operation, and later -Bin Laden hearing they were blamed for 9/11- ignorantly accepted credit.

Is there any better rationale for assassinating Bin Laden, once he was allowed to be found, than to keep him from eventually testifying that he had nothing to do with 9/11?

Once Bin Laden claimed credit for bombing America, the Taliban refused to turn him over to US authorities without evidence that Bin Laden was indeed guilty.

That provided enough reason for America to gather a coalition of 9/11 sympathizers to agree to invade Afghanistan. Does anyone seriously believe it took 10 years to find Bin Laden? Certainly Obama must know better!

Before locating and capturing the Al Qaeda mastermind, it was necessary to go to war with Iraq. In order to do that, Iraq had to be associated with the reign of terror connecting the triumvirate of evil: Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

North Korea was simply thrown into Bush's Axis of Evil to send a message to China while pretending that the US wasn't focusing only on Middle Eastern threats to Israel.

Now here's Barack Obama, foster child of Bush-Cheney, trying to prove to the Zioncons (who have already jumped ship) that he's as much a warrior for Israel as his predecessors were.

Shame on me for ignoring the lessons of history: a great campaigner can make an inept leader!

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. He's a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the Gulf Daily News. Dr. Balles is also Editorial Consultant for Red House Marketing and a regular contributor to Bahrain This Month.

By Ray McGovern* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

With few exceptions, like some salacious rumor about the Kennedy family, the mainstream U.S. news media has shown little interest in stories that throw light on history - even recent, very relevant history. So it comes as no surprise that, when a former White House counter-terrorism czar accuses an ex-CIA director of sitting on information that could have prevented a 9/11 attack, the story gets neither ink nor air.

Bulletin for those of you who get your information only from the New York Times, the Washington Post and other outlets of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM): Former White House director for counterterrorism Richard Clarke has accused former CIA Director George Tenet of denying him and others access to intelligence that could have thwarted the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11.

Deliberately withholding critical intelligence from those who need it, and can act on it, is - at the least - gross dereliction of duty. The more so if keeping the White House promptly and fully informed is at the top of your job jar, as it was for Director of Central Intelligence Tenet. And yet that is precisely the charge Clarke has leveled at the former DCI.

In an interview aired on Aug. 11 on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado, Clarke charges that Tenet and two other senior CIA officials, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, deliberately withheld information about two of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 - al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The two had entered the United States more than a year before the 9/11 attacks.

Clarke adds that the CIA then covered it all up by keeping relevant information away from Congress and the 9/11 Commission.

Lying by senior officials is bad enough, and there is now plenty of evidence that former CIA Director George Tenet and his closest agency associates are serial offenders. Think for a minute about the falsehoods spread regarding Iraq's non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" stockpiles.

But withholding intelligence on two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been particularly unconscionable - the epitome of malfeasance, not just misfeasance. That's why Richard Clarke's conclusion that he should have received information from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, "unless somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution" amounts, in my view, to a criminal charge, given the eventual role of the two in the hijacking on 9/11 of AA-77, the plane that struck the Pentagon.

Tenet has denied that the information on the two hijackers was "intentionally withheld" from Clarke, and he has enlisted the other two former CIA operatives, Cofer Black (more recently a senior official of Blackwater) and Richard Blee (an even more shadowy figure), to concur in saying, Not us; we didn't withhold.

Whom to believe? To me, it's a no-brainer. One would have to have been born yesterday to regard the "George is right" testimony from Black and Blee as corroborative.

Tenet's Dubious Credibility

Tenet is the same fellow who provided the "slam dunk" on the existence of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, as well as the "artist renderings" of equally non-existent mobile laboratories for developing biological warfare agents, based on unconfirmed information from the impostor code-named (appropriately) "Curveball."

It was Tenet who, under orders from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, ordered up and disseminated a fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq, the purpose of which was to deceive our elected representatives out of their constitutional prerogative to authorize war. No small lies.

After a five-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Chairman Jay Rockefeller described the intelligence adduced under Tenet to "justify" attacking Iraq as "uncorroborated, contradicted, and non-existent." Good enough to win Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom, though. The corruption of intelligence worked just fine for the purposes of Bush and Cheney, thank you very much.

It is a actually a matter of record that Tenet lies a lot - on occasion, displaying what I would call chutzpah on steroids. Recall, for example, Tenet in April 2007 snarling at Scott Pelley on "60 Minutes" - five times, in five consecutive sentences - "We do not torture people."

Even Under Oath

Tenet has lied about 9/11, too. The joint statement from Tenet, Black and Blee – orchestrated by former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow – concludes: "We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn't know. We stand by that testimony."

Almost made me laugh ... almost.

In his sworn testimony to the 9/11 Commission on April 14, 2004, Tenet said he had not spoken to Bush - even on the telephone - during the entire month of August 2001.

But Tenet did fly down to see the President in Crawford - not once, but twice during August 2001, and briefed Bush again in Washington on the 31st.

After the TV cameras at the 9/11 Commission hearing were shut off, Bill Harlow phoned the commission staff to say, Oops, sorry, Tenet misspoke. Even then, Harlow admitted only to Tenet's Aug. 17 visit to Crawford (and to the briefing on the 31st).

How do we know Tenet was again in Crawford, on Aug. 24? From a White House press release quoting President Bush to that effect - information somehow completely missed by our vigilant Fawning Corporate Media.

Funny, too, how Tenet could have forgotten his first visit to Crawford on Aug. 17. In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet waxes eloquent about the "president graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and me trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna." But the visit was not limited to small talk.

In his book Tenet writes: "A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events." The Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief contained the article "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US." According to Ron Suskind's The One-Percent Doctrine, the president reacted by telling the CIA briefer, "All right, you've covered your ass now."

If, as Tenet says in his memoir, it was the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB that prompted his visit on Aug. 17, what might have brought him back on Aug. 24? I believe the answer can be found in court documents released at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the fledgling pilot in Minnesota interested in learning to steer a plane but indifferent as to how to land it.

Those documents show that on Aug. 23, 2001, Tenet was given an alarming briefing focusing on Moussaoui, titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." Tenet was told that Moussaoui was training to fly a 747 and, among other suspicion-arousing data, had paid for the training in cash.

It is an open question - if a key one - whether Tenet told Bush about the two hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, while keeping that key information from the person who most needed it - White House counter-terrorist czar Richard Clarke. Clarke finds the only plausible explanation in his surmise that Tenet was personally responsible. Clarke says:

"For me to this day, it is inexplicable, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn't tell me, that the director of the counterterrorism center didn't tell me, that the other 48 people inside CIA that knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over 12 months."

Enter Harlow

But Tenet's aide-de-camp Bill Harlow has branded Clarke's statements "absurd and patently false." And the statement Harlow shepherded for Tenet, Black and Blee adds "reckless and profoundly wrong ... baseless ... belied by the record ... unworthy of serious consideration."

And Harlow never lies? Right. I'm reminded of Harlow's reaction to Newsweek's publication on Feb. 24, 2003, of the intelligence information provided by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel when he defected to Jordan in 1995. Kamel brought with him a treasure trove of documents and unique knowledge of Iraq's putative "weapons of mass destruction."

Most significantly, he told his U.S. debriefers there were no WMD in Iraq. He knew. He had been in charge of Iraq's chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs for almost a decade, and he ordered what weapons existed destroyed before the U.N. inspectors could discover them after the war in 1991. In his words:

"I ordered the destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed."

He told the U.S. much more, and the information that could be checked out was confirmed. But Kamel's information didn't fit with the Bush administration's propaganda regarding its certainty that Iraq did have WMD stockpiles and was defying United Nations demands that the WMD be destroyed.

Those pushing the Iraq War juggernaut in early 2003 almost had a conniption when Newsweek acquired a transcript of Kamel's debriefing and published this potentially explosive story barely three weeks before the invasion.

Newsweek noted gingerly that this information "raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist." It was, in fact, the kind of impeccably sourced documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts and lawyers lust.

But this was not at all what Bush, Cheney, and - by sycophantic extension - Tenet wanted Newsweek readers, or the rest of us, to learn less than a month before the U.S./U.K. attack on Iraq ostensibly to find and destroy those non-existent weapons.

Bill Harlow to the rescue: he told the FCM in no uncertain terms that the Newsweek story was, "incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue." And the media cheerleaders for war breathed a sigh of relief, saying, Gosh, thanks for telling us, and then dropped the story like a hot potato.

By all indications, Harlow is still able to work his fraudulent magic on the FCM, which have virtually ignored this major Clarke v. Tenet story since it broke six days ago.

If Harlow says it's not true ... and hurls still more pejorative epithets and adjectives, in a crude attempt to discredit the very serious charge Clarke has made ... well, I guess we'll have to leave it there, as the FCM is so fond of saying.

No matter Clarke's well-deserved reputation for honesty and professionalism - and Tenet's for the opposite. And so it goes.

* Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. As a CIA analyst, he served under seven presidents and nine CIA directors; he is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

By David Ray Griffin* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The Mysterious Collapse of WTC 7: Why NIST's Final 9/11 Report is Unscientific and False¹

At 5:21 in the afternoon of 9/11, almost seven hours after the Twin Towers had come down, Building 7 of the World Trade Center also came down. The collapse of this building was from the beginning considered a mystery.

The same should have been true, to be sure, of the collapse of the Twin Towers. But they had been hit by planes, which had ignited big fires in them, and many people assumed this combination of causes to be sufficient to explain why they came down.

But WTC 7 had not been hit by a plane, so it was apparently the first steel-framed high-rise building in the known universe to have collapsed because of fire alone. New York Times writer James Glanz quoted a structural engineer as saying: "[W]ithin the structural engineering community, [WTC 7] is considered to be much more important to understand [than the Twin Towers]," because engineers had no answer to the question, "why did 7 come down?"²

From a purely scientific perspective, of course, there would have been an obvious answer. Scientists, presupposing the regularity of nature, operate on the principle that like effects generally imply like causes. Scientists are, therefore, loath to posit unprecedented causes for common phenomena. By 9/11, the collapse of steel-framed high-rises had become a rather common phenomenon, which most Americans had seen on television. And in every one of these cases, the building had been brought down by explosives in the process known as controlled demolition. From a scientific perspective, therefore, the obvious assumption would have been that WTC 7 came down because explosives had been used to remove its steel supports.

However, the public discussion of the destruction of the World Trade Center did not occur in a scientific context, but in a highly charged political context. America had just been attacked, it was almost universally believed, by foreign terrorists who had flown hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, and in response the Bush administration had launched a "war on terror." The idea that even one of the buildings had been brought down by explosives would have implied that the attacks had not been a surprise, so this idea could not be entertained by many minds in private, let alone in public.

This meant that people had to believe, or at least pretend to believe, that Building 7 had been brought down by fire, even though, as Glanz wrote: "[E]xperts said no building like it, a modern, steel-reinforced high-rise, had ever collapsed because of an uncontrolled fire."³ And so, this building's collapse had to be considered a mystery – insofar as it was considered at all.

But this was not much. Although WTC 7 was a 47-story building, which in most places would have been the tallest building in the city, if not the state, it was dwarfed by the 110-story Twin Towers. It was also dwarfed by them in the ensuing media coverage. And so, Glanz wrote, the collapse of Building 7 was "a mystery that . . . would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world," if the Twin Towers had not also come down.⁴ As it was, however, the mystery of Building 7's collapse was seldom discussed.

For those few people who were paying attention, the mysteriousness of this collapse was not lessened by the first official report about it, which was issued by FEMA in 2002. This report put forward what it called its "best hypothesis" as to why the building collapsed, but then added that this hypothesis had "only a low probability of occurrence."⁵

This FEMA report, in fact, increased the mystery, thanks to an appendix written by three professors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This appendix reported that a piece of steel from WTC 7 had melted so severely that it had gaping holes in it, making it look like a piece of Swiss cheese.⁶ James Glanz, pointing out that the fires in the building could not have been hot enough to melt steel, referred to this discovery as "the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation."⁷

The task of providing the definitive explanation of the collapse of WTC 7 was given to NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Although NIST had been expected to issue its report on this building along with its report on the Twin Towers, which came out in 2005, it did not. NIST then continued to delay this report until August of 2008, at which time it issued a Draft for Public Comment.

1. NIST's Denial of Evidence for Explosives

At a press briefing, Shyam Sunder, NIST's lead investigator, declared that "the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery." Also, announcing that NIST "did not find any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down,"⁸ he said: "[S]cience is really behind what we have said."⁹ In the remainder of this lecture, I will show that both of those statements were false.

NIST and Scientific Fraud

With regard to the question of science: Far from being supported by good science, NIST's report repeatedly makes its case by resorting to scientific fraud.

Before going into details, let me point out that, if NIST did engage in fraudulent science, this would not be particularly surprising. NIST is an agency of the US Department of Commerce. During the years it was writing its World Trade Center reports, therefore, it was an agency of the Bush-Cheney administration. In 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists put out a document charging this administration with "distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends." By the end of the Bush administration, this document had been signed by over 15,000 scientists, including 52 Nobel Laureates and 63 recipients of the National Medal of Science.¹⁰

Moreover, a scientist who formerly worked for NIST has reported that it has been "fully hijacked from the scientific into the political realm," with the result that scientists working for NIST "lost [their] scientific independence, and became little more than 'hired guns.'"¹¹ Referring in particular to NIST's work on the World Trade Center, he said everything had to be approved by the Department of Commerce, the National Security Agency, and the Office of Management and Budget-"an arm of the Executive Office of the President," which "had a policy person specifically delegated to provide oversight on [NIST's] work."¹²

One of the general principles of scientific work is that its conclusions must not be dictated by nonscientific concerns – in other words, by any concern other than that of discovering the truth. This former NIST employee's statement gives us reason to suspect that NIST, while preparing its report on WTC 7, would have been functioning as a political, not a scientific, agency. The amount of fraud in this report suggests that this was indeed the case.

According to the National Science Foundation, the major types of scientific fraud are fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. There is no sign that NIST is guilty of plagiarism, but it is certainly guilty of fabrication, which can be defined as "making up results," and falsification, which means either "changing or omitting data."¹³

The omission of evidence by NIST is so massive, in fact, that I treat it as a distinct type of scientific fraud. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said in his 1925 book, Science and the Modern World: "It is easy enough to find a [self-consistent] theory . . . , provided that you are content to disregard half your evidence." The "moral temper required for the pursuit of truth," he added, includes "[a]n unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account."¹⁴

NIST, however, seemed to manifest an unflinching determination to disregard half of the relevant evidence.

Physical Evidence of Explosives

Some of the evidence ignored by NIST is physical evidence that explosives were used to bring down WTC 7.

Swiss-Cheese Steel: I will begin with the piece of steel from WTC 7 that had been melted so severely that it looked like Swiss cheese. Explaining why it called this "the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation," James Glanz wrote: "The steel apparently melted away, but no fire in any of the buildings was believed to be hot enough to melt steel outright."¹⁵ Glanz's statement was, in fact, quite an understatement. The full truth is that the fires in the building could not have brought the steel anywhere close to the temperature – about 1,482°C (2,700°F) – needed for it to melt.¹⁶

The professors who reported this piece of steel in the appendix to the FEMA report said: "A detailed study into the mechanisms [that caused] this phenomenon is needed."¹⁷ Arden Bement, who was the director of NIST when it took on the WTC project, said that NIST's report would address "all major recommendations contained in the [FEMA] report."¹⁸

But when NIST issued its report on WTC 7, it did not mention this piece of steel with the Swiss-cheese appearance. Indeed, NIST even claimed that not a single piece of steel from WTC 7 had been recovered.¹⁹

This piece of steel, moreover, was only a small portion of the evidence, ignored by NIST, that steel had melted.

Particles of Metal in the Dust: The Deutsche Bank building, which was right next to the Twin Towers, was heavily contaminated by dust produced by their destruction. But Deutsche Bank's insurance company refused to pay for the clean-up, claiming that this dust had not resulted from the destruction of the WTC. So Deutsche Bank hired the RJ Lee Group to do a study, which showed that the dust in the Deutsche Bank was WTC dust, which had a unique signature. Part of this signature was "Spherical iron . . . particles."²⁰ This meant, the RJ Lee Group said, that iron had "melted during the WTC Event, producing spherical metallic particles."²¹ The study even showed that, whereas iron particles constitute only 0.04 percent of normal building dust, they constituted almost 6 percent of WTC Dust – meaning almost 150 times as much as normal.²²

The RJ Lee study also found that temperatures had been reached "at which lead would have undergone vaporization"²³ – meaning 1,749°C (3,180°F).²⁴

Another study was carried out by the US Geological Survey, the purpose of which was to aid the "identification of WTC dust components." Besides also finding iron particles, the scientists involved in this study found that molybdenum had been melted. This finding was especially significant, because this metal does not melt until it reaches 2,623°C (4,753°F).²⁵

NIST, however, did not mention either of these studies, even though the latter one was carried out by another US government agency.

NIST could not mention these studies because it was committed to the theory that the WTC buildings were brought down by fire, while these studies clearly showed that something other than fire was going on in those buildings.

Nanothermite Residue: What was that? A report by several scientists, including chemist Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen, showed that the WTC dust contained unreacted nanothermite, which – unlike ordinary thermite, which is an incendiary – is a high explosive. This report by Harrit and his colleagues, who included Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan, did not appear until 2009,²⁶ several months after the publication of NIST's final report in November 2008.

But NIST, as a matter of routine, should have tested the WTC dust for residue of explosives, such as nanothermite. The Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations put out by the National Fire Protection Association says that a search for evidence for explosives should be undertaken whenever there has been "high-order damage." Leaving no doubt about the meaning of this term, the Guide says:

High-order damage is characterized by shattering of the structure, producing small, pulverized debris. Walls, roofs, and structural members are splintered or shattered, with the building completely demolished.²⁷

That description applied to the destruction of the Twin Towers and WTC 7. The next sentence – "Debris is thrown great distances, possibly hundreds of feet" – applied to the destruction of the Twin Towers, a fact that NIST had to admit in order to explain how fires were started in WTC 7.²⁸ So NIST should have looked for signs of explosives, such as nanothermite.

But when asked whether it had, NIST said No. A reporter asked Michael Newman, a NIST spokesman, about this failure, saying: "[W]hat about that letter where NIST said it didn't look for evidence of explosives?" Newman replied: "Right, because there was no evidence of that." "But," asked the reporter "how can you know there's no evidence if you don't look for it first?" Newman replied: "If you're looking for something that isn't there, you're wasting your time . . . and the taxpayers' money."²⁹ (You couldn't make this stuff up.)

When Shyam Sunder, who headed up NIST's investigation of the WTC buildings, gave his press conference in August of 2008 – at which he announced that "the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery" – he began by saying:

Before I tell you what we found, I'd like to tell you what we did not find. We did not find any evidence that explosives were used to bring the building down.³⁰

By making this point first, Sunder indicated that this was NIST's most important conclusion – just as it had been NIST's most important conclusion about the Twin Towers. However, although Sunder claimed that this conclusion was based on good science, a conclusion has no scientific validity if it can be reached only by ignoring half the evidence.

Molten Metal: In addition to the ignored evidence already pointed out, NIST also, in its investigation of the WTC, ignored reports that the rubble contained lots of molten metal – which most people described as molten steel. For example, firefighter Philip Ruvolo, speaking of the Twin Towers, said: "You'd get down below and you'd see molten steel, molten steel, running down the channel rails, like you're in a foundry, like lava."³¹

Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction, which was involved in the clean-up operation, said that he saw pools of "literally molten steel."³²

However, when John Gross, one of the main authors of NIST's reports, was asked about the molten steel, he said to the questioner: I challenge your "basic premise that there was a pool of molten steel," adding: "I know of absolutely no . . . eyewitness who has said so."³³

However, in addition to Ruvolo and Tully, the eyewitnesses who said so included:

• Leslie Robertson, a member of the engineering firm that designed the Twin Towers.³⁴
• Dr. Ronald Burger of the National Center for Environmental Health.³⁵
• Dr. Alison Geyh of The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who headed up a scientific team that went to the site shortly after 9/11 at the request of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.³⁶
• Finally, the fact that "molten steel was also found at WTC 7" was added by Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc., which was involved in the clean-up.³⁷

And yet John Gross suggested that no credible witnesses had reported molten steel. That appears to have been a gross lie.

Testimonial Evidence for Explosives

Besides ignoring physical evidence that explosives had been used, NIST also ignored testimonial evidence.

NIST's Twin Towers Report: In its 2005 report on the Twin Towers, NIST ignored dozens of testimonies provided by reporters, police officers, and WTC employees, along with 118 testimonies provided by members of the Fire Department of New York.³⁸ NIST even explicitly denied the existence of these reports, saying that there "was no evidence (collected by . . . the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions" that would have suggested that explosives were going off.³⁹

However, when a group of scholars including scientists and a lawyer called NIST on this false statement, NIST refined its meaning, saying:

NIST reviewed all of the interviews conducted by the FDNY of firefighters (500 interviews). . . . Taken as a whole, the interviews did not support the contention that explosives played a role in the collapse of the WTC Towers.⁴⁰

So, although NIST had said in its report that there was no testimonial evidence for explosives, it now seemed to be saying that, because only 118 out of 500 reported explosions, the testimonies, "taken as a whole," do not support the idea that explosions were going off, so that NIST had been justified in claiming that there was no testimonial evidence to support the idea that explosives had been used.

Imagine an investigation of a murder on the streets of San Francisco. Of the 100 people who were at the scene at the time, 25 of them reported seeing Pete Smith shoot the victim. But the police release Pete Smith, saying that, taken as a whole, the testimonies did not point to his guilt. That would be NIST-style forensic science.

Reports from People Outside WTC 7: NIST continued this approach in its WTC 7 report. There had been several credible reports of explosions. A reporter for the New York Daily News, said:

[T]here was a rumble. The building's top row of windows popped out. Then all the windows on the thirty-ninth floor popped out. Then the thirty-eighth floor. Pop! Pop! Pop! was all you heard until the building sunk into a rising cloud of gray.⁴¹

NYPD officer Craig Bartmer said:

I was real close to Building 7 when it fell down. . . . [A]ll of a sudden. . . I looked up, and . . . [t]he thing started pealing in on itself. . . . I started running . . . and the whole time you're hearing "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom."⁴²

Reports from Hess and Jennings from Inside WTC 7: Besides ignoring these and other reports of explosions made by people outside Building 7, NIST distorted the testimony of two highly credible men who were inside: Michael Hess, who was New York City's corporation counsel, and Barry Jennings, the deputy director of the Emergency Services Department of the New York City Housing Authority.

Immediately after the North Tower was struck that morning, both men followed the instruction that, whenever there was an emergency, they were to meet Major Giuliani at his Emergency Management Center on the 23^rd floor of Building 7. The North Tower was struck at 8:46, so they would have arrived at about 9:00. They found, however, that everyone had left. Calling to find out what they should do, Jennings was told to get out of the building immediately. So, finding that the elevator would not work (the electricity had evidently been knocked out at 9:03 by the airplane strike on the South Tower), they started running down the stairs. But when they got to the 6^th floor, there was a huge explosion, which blew the landing out from under them and blocked their path. They went back up to the 8^th floor, broke a window, and signaled for help.

Firemen came to rescue them, Jennings said, but then ran away. Coming back after a while, the firemen again started to rescue them, but then ran away again. They had to run away the first time, Jennings explained, because of the collapse of the South Tower, which occurred at 9:59, and the second time because of the North Tower collapse, which occurred at 10:28. On that basis, Jennings told Dylan Avery in an interview in 2007, he knew that, when that big explosion occurred, "both buildings were still standing." Finally, when the firemen returned after the second tower collapsed, Hess and Jennings were rescued.

This must have been sometime between 11:00 and 11:30, because at 11:57, Hess gave an on-the-street interview several blocks away. Jennings also gave an on-the-street interview. Both men reported that they had been trapped for some time – Hess specified "about an hour and a half."

This story obviously was very threatening to NIST. It was going to claim that, when Building 7 came down at 5:21 that afternoon, it did so solely because of fires. There were no explosives to help things along.

But here were two city officials reporting that a big explosion had gone off pretty early in the morning, evidently before 9:30. In his interview for Dylan Avery, moreover, Jennings said that the big explosion that trapped them was simply the first of many. He also said that when the firefighter took them down to the lobby, he saw that it had been totally destroyed – it was, he said, "total ruins, total ruins." Jennings also that, when he and the firefighter were walking through this lobby, they were "stepping over people."⁴³

Jennings's testimony contradicted the official story, according to which there were no explosions in WTC 7 and no one was killed in this building. What would NIST do?

NIST's Treatment of the Hess-Jennings Testimony: NIST simply ignored Jennings' report about the lobby and, with regard to the time that Hess and Jennings got trapped, followed the line that had taken by Rudy Giuliani in a 2002 book, according to which the event that Hess and Jennings took to be an explosion within WTC 7 was simply the impact of debris from the collapse of the North Tower.

But that collapse did not occur until 10:28, whereas the event described by Hess and Jennings had occurred at least an hour earlier.

Also, Jennings said that the South Tower as well as the North Tower was still standing when the event he called an explosion occurred, and that is surely what he told NIST when it interviewed him (as well as Hess) in the Spring of 2004.

Another problem was that Hess had said that they had been trapped for "about an hour and a half." If the event that trapped them did not happen until almost 10:30, as NIST claims, then they would not have been rescued before noon. And sure enough, in an Interim Report on WTC 7 put out by NIST in 2004, it claimed that Hess and Jennings had been rescued "[a]t 12:10 to 12:15 PM." But that is clearly false, given the fact that Hess was being interviewed several blocks away before noon.⁴⁴

NIST would, of course, deny that it had distorted Jennings' testimony. But when we sent a Freedom of Information Act request to NIST to obtain a copy of the Hess and Jennings interviews, NIST declined on the basis of a provision allowing for exemption from FOIA disclosure if the information is "not directly related to the building failure."⁴⁵ NIST thereby suggested that a report of a massive explosion within the building would be irrelevant to determining the cause of its failure. Using such an obviously phony reason seemed to be NIST's way of saying: There's no way we're going to release those interviews.

The BBC Helps Out: In any case, NIST's attempt to neutralize the testimony of Barry Jennings was aided by the BBC, which interviewed Jennings and then, obviously, changed the timeline, so that the narrator, with her reassuring voice, could say:

"At 10:28, the North Tower collapses. . . . This time, Tower 7 takes a direct hit from the collapsing building. . . . Early evidence of explosives were just debris from a falling skyscraper."⁴⁶

Mike Rudin, who produced this BBC program, recently telephoned me to discuss the possibility of interviewing me about my little book, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?⁴⁷ I told him that I had a book coming out shortly about WTC 7 and that, after seeing it, he probably would not want to interview me. When he asked why, I said because I pointed out that he had obviously distorted the timeline of Jennings's account. When he denied this, I said, OK, show me the uncut, unedited interview. If this interview had showed that Rudin had not distorted the timeline, I would have told the world. Rudin, however, declined to allow me to see the unedited interview.⁴⁸

This BBC program had appeared in July of 2008. The first version of NIST's final report – its Draft for Public Comment – was to be released at a press briefing on August 21, at which time Sunder would announce that the mystery of the collapse of WTC 7 had been solved.

The Death of Barry Jennings: Two days prior to that, Barry Jennings died – and died very mysteriously. No one has been willing to provide any information as to how or why this 53-year-old man had died. Dylan Avery, trying to find out something, hired a private investigator – reputed to be one of the best in the state of New York – to find out what she could. He used his credit card to pay her a considerable fee. Within 24 hours, however, Avery received a message from her, saying:

Due to some of the information I have uncovered, I have determined that this is a job for the police. I have refunded your credit card. Please do not contact me again about this individual.

This is not the response one would expect, Avery observed, if she had merely found that Jennings had passed away "innocently in a hospital."⁴⁹ The dedication page on my book says: "To the memory of Barry Jennings, whose truth-telling may have cost him his life."

Be that as it may, his death was very convenient for NIST, which now did not need to fear that Jennings might hold his own press conference to say that NIST had lied about his testimony.

The BBC Helps Out Again: The death of Jennings was also convenient for the BBC, which could now put out a second version of its program on WTC 7, this time including Michael Hess.

In the first version, the BBC had pretended that Jennings had been in the building all by himself. Even though Jennings would say, "We did this, and then We did that," the BBC spoke only of Jennings, never mentioning the fact that Hess was with him.

But in the new version, which was aired at the end of October 2008, Hess was the star. While admitting that, back on 9/11, he had "assumed that there had been an explosion in the basement," he said: "I know now this was caused by the northern half of Number 1 [the North Tower] falling on the southern half of our building," exactly what Giuliani had said in his book. It is no surprise that Hess supported Giuliani's account, given the fact that since 2002 Hess has been Giuliani's business partner.

In spite of the fact that Hess could in no way be considered an impartial witness, Mike Rudin portrayed him as such. On his BBC blog, Rudin said that some "self-styled truthers" had charged that the BBC, in presenting Barry Jennings' testimony, had "misrepresented the chronology." But, Rudin said triumphantly, Michael Hess, "In his first interview since 9/11 . . . confirms our timeline."

But Hess's account could be said to "confirm" the BBC timeline only if it were a credible account. In my book, however, I show that it is riddled with problems, so that anyone can easily see that he was lying.⁵⁰

2. NIST's Own Theory of WTC 7's Collapse

Thus far, I have spoken about the first half of my book, which deals with NIST's negative claim, namely, that it had found no evidence that explosives were used to bring down WTC 7. NIST could make this argument, I have pointed out, only by committing two kinds of scientific fraud: Ignoring relevant evidence and falsifying evidence – in this case, the testimony of Barry Jennings.

The second half of my book deals with NIST's own theory as to how fire brought the building down. To develop such a theory, NIST had to falsify and fabricate data on a possibly unprecedented scale. And yet, after all of that, it had to violate one of the basic principles of science: Thou shalt not affirm miracles.

You perhaps know the cartoon about this. A physics professor has filled several boards with mathematical equations, at the bottom of which we read: "Then a miracle happens." In science, you cannot appeal to miracles, whether explicitly, or only implicitly – by implying that some basic principle of physics has been violated. And yet that is what NIST does.

Fabrication of Evidence

But before describing its miracle story, I will point out three especially obvious examples of scientific fraud committed by NIST before it resorted to this desperate expedient. These examples all involve fabrication.

No Girder Shear Studs: NIST's explanation as to how fire caused Building 7 to collapse starts with thermal expansion, meaning that the fire heated up the steel, thereby causing it to expand.

A steel beam on the 13^th floor, NIST claims, caused a steel girder attached to Column 79 to break loose. Having lost its support, Column 79 failed, and this failure started a chain reaction, in which all 82 of the building's steel columns failed.⁵¹

Without getting into the question of whether this is even remotely plausible, let us just focus on the question: Why did that girder fail?

It failed, NIST said, because it was not connected to the floor slab with sheer studs. NIST wrote:

In WTC 7, no studs were installed on the girders.

Floor beams . . . had shear studs, but the girders that supported the floor beams did not have shear studs.

This point was crucial to NIST's answer to a commonly asked question: Why did fire cause WTC 7 to collapse, when fire had never before brought down steel-framed high-rise buildings, some of which had had much bigger and longer-lasting fires? NIST's answer was: differences in design.

One of those crucial differences, NIST stated repeatedly, was "the absence of [girder] shear studs that would have provided lateral restraint."

But this was a fabrication on NIST's part. How can we know this? All we need to do is to look at NIST's Interim Report on WTC 7, which it had published back in 2004, before it had developed its theory of girder failure.

This report stated that girders as well as the beams had been attached to the floor by means of shear studs.⁵²

We have here as clear a case of fabrication as one will see, with NIST simply making up a fact in order to meet the needs of its new theory.

The Raging Fire on Floor 12 at 5:00 PM: NIST also contradicted its "interim report" in telling a lie about the fire in the building. NIST claims that there were very big, very hot fires covering much of the north face of the 12^th floor at 5:00 PM. This claim is essential to NIST's explanation as to why the building collapsed 21 minutes later. However, if you look back at NIST's interim report, published before it had developed its theory, you will find this statement:

Around 4:45 PM, a photograph showed fires on Floors 7, 8, 9, and 11 near the middle of the north face; Floor 12 was burned out by this time.

Other photographs even show that the 12^th floor fire had virtually burned out by 4:00. And yet NIST now claims that fires were still going strong at 5:00 PM.⁵³ We have here another clear case of fabrication.

Shear Stud Failure: A third case of fabrication involves shear studs again – this time the shear studs that connected to the steel beams to the floor slab.

NIST claims that, due to the failure of that crucial girder discussed earlier, the floor beams were able to expand without constraint. But each of these beams was connected to the floor slab by 28 high-strength shear studs. These studs should have provided plenty of restraint.

They would have, except for the fact, NIST tells us, that they all broke.

Why did they break? Because of what NIST calls "differential thermal expansion," which is simply a technical way of saying that, in response to the heat from the fires, the steel beams expanded more than the floor slabs did.

But why would that have been the case? Steel and concrete have virtually the same "coefficient of thermal expansion," meaning that they expand virtually the same amount in response to heat. If that were not the case, reinforced concrete – that is, concrete reinforced with steel – would break up when the weather got very hot or very cold. NIST itself points out that "steel and concrete have similar coefficients of thermal expansion."

So why does NIST claim that the shear studs broke because of differential thermal expansion?

To understand this point, you need to understand that NIST's theory is an almost totally computer-based theory. NIST fed various variables into a computer program, which then supposedly told it how WTC 7 would have reacted to its fires. So, what did NIST feed into its computer that caused it to say that the steel would have expanded so much more than the concrete slab that all of the shear studs would have broken? The answer is given in this bland statement:

No thermal expansion or material degradation was considered for the concrete slab, as the slab was not heated in this analysis.

When I first read this statement, I had to rub my eyes. Surely, I thought, I have mis-read the statement, because a few pages earlier, NIST had said: "differential thermal expansion occurred between the steel floor beams and concrete slab when the composite floor was subjected to fire." The "composite floor," by definition, is the steel beams made composite with the floor slab by means of the shear studs. So NIST had clearly said, in stating that the composite floor had been subjected to fire, that both the steel beams and the concrete slab had been heated.

But then in the eye-rubbing passage, NIST said: When doing its computer simulation, it told the computer that only the steel beams had been heated; the concrete floor slab was not.⁵⁴

So of course the steel beams would have expanded, while the floor slabs stayed stationary, thereby causing the sheer studs to break, after which the steel beams could expand like crazy and bump into Column 79, which then causes the whole building to come down.

A comic book version of the official story of 9/11 has been published.⁵⁵ This was an exercise in redundancy, because the official reports already are the comic book version of what happened on 9/11. In any case, I come now to NIST's miracle.

NIST's Miracle

Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement had almost from the first been pointing out that WTC 7 came down at the same rate as a free-falling object, at least virtually so.

NIST'S Denial of Free Fall: In NIST's Draft for Public Comment, it denied this, saying that the time for the upper 18 floors to collapse "was approximately 40 percent longer than the computed free fall time and was consistent with physical principles."

Implicit in this statement is that any assertion that the building did come down in free fall would not be consistent with physical principles – that is, the principles of physics.

Explaining why not, Shyam Sunder said at a technical briefing:

[A] free fall time would be [the fall time of] an object that has no structural components below it. . . . [T]he . . . time that it took . . . for those 17 floors to disappear [was roughly 40 percent [longer than free fall]. And that is not at all unusual, because there was structural resistance that was provided in this particular case. And you had a sequence of structural failures that had to take place. Everything was not instantaneous.

Chandler's Challenge: However, high-school physics teacher David Chandler challenged Sunder's denial at this briefing, pointing that Sunder's 40 percent claim contradicts "a publicly visible, easily measurable quantity."

The following week, Chandler placed a video on the Internet showing that, by measuring this publicly visible quantity, anyone knowing elementary physics could see that "for about two and a half seconds. . . , the acceleration of the building is indistinguishable from freefall."

Finally, Chandler wrote a comment to NIST, saying: "Acknowledgment of and accounting for an extended period of free fall in the collapse of WTC 7 must be a priority if the NIST is to be taken seriously."

NIST Admits Free Fall: Amazingly, NIST did acknowledge free fall in its final report. It tried to disguise it, but the admission is there on page 607. Dividing the building's descent into three stages, it describes the second phase as "a freefall descent over approximately eight stories at gravitational acceleration for approximately 2.25 s[econds]. "Gravitational acceleration" is a synonym for free fall acceleration.

So, after presenting 606 pages of descriptions, testimonies, photographs, graphs, analyses, explanations, and mathematical formulae, NIST on page 607 says, in effect: "Then a miracle happens."

Why this would be a miracle was explained by Chandler, who said: "Free fall can only be achieved if there is zero resistance to the motion."

The implication of Chandler's remark is that, by the principles of physics, the upper portion of Building 7 could have come down in free fall only if something had removed all the steel and concrete in the lower part of the building, which would have otherwise provided resistance, and only explosives of some sort could have removed them.

If they had not been removed and the upper floors had come down in free fall anyway, even for only a second or two, a miracle would have happened.

That was what Sunder himself had explained the previous August, saying that a free-falling object would be one "that has no structural components below it" to offer resistance. Having stated in August that free fall could not have happened, NIST also stated that it did not happen, saying: "WTC 7 did not enter free fall."

But then in November, while still defending the same theory, which rules out explosives and thereby rules out free fall, NIST admitted that, as an empirical fact, free fall happened. For a period of 2 and a fourth seconds, NIST admitted, the descent of WTC 7 was characterized by "gravitational acceleration (free fall)."

Knowing that it had thereby affirmed a miracle, meaning a violation of a law of physics, NIST no longer claimed that its analysis was consistent with the physical principles. In its Draft put out in August, NIST had repeatedly said that its analysis of the collapse was "consistent with physical principles." One encountered this phrase time and time again. In its final report, however, this phrase is no more to be found.

NIST thereby admitted, for those with eyes to see, that its report on WTC 7, by admitting free fall while continuing to deny that explosives were used, is not consistent with the principles of physics.⁵⁶

And yet the mainstream press will not report this admission. So the press continues to support the notion that anyone who questions the official reports on 9/11 is unfit for public service.⁵⁷

Conclusion

The 9/11 Truth Movement has long considered the collapse of Building 7 to be the Achilles' heel of the official story about 9/11 – the part of this story that, by being most vulnerable, could be used to bring down the whole body of lies.

My latest book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False, shows that the official account of this building is indeed extremely vulnerable to critique – so vulnerable that, to see the falsity of this account, you need only to read NIST's attempt to defend it, noting the obvious lies in NIST's report and its violations of basic principles of physics.

I hope that my book will indeed help bring down that body of lies that some of us call the Bush-Cheney conspiracy theory, according to which al-Qaeda hijackers, by flying planes into two buildings of the World Trade Center, brought down three of them – an obviously false conspiracy theory that is still being used, among other things, to kill women, children, and other innocent people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Notes

¹ This essay is a slightly revised version of a lecture presented at the 9/11 Film Festival at Grand Lake Theater, Oakland, California, September 10, 2009. It is based on David Ray Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False (Northampton, Mass., Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2010). This essay was originally posted in Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15201).

² James Glanz, "Engineers Suspect Diesel Fuel in Collapse of 7 World Trade Center," New York Times, November 29, 2001 (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/29/nyregion/29TOWE.html).

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ See FEMA, World Trade Center Building Performance Study (http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch5.pdf), Ch. 5, Sect. 6.2, "Probable Collapse Sequence."

⁶ Jonathan Barnett, Ronald R. Biederman, and Richard D. Sisson, Jr., "Limited Metallurgical Examination," FEMA, World Trade Center Building Performance Study, May 2002, Appendix C (http://wtc.nist.gov/media/AppendixC-fema403_apc.pdf).

⁷ James Glanz and Eric Lipton, "A Search for Clues in Towers' Collapse," New York Times, February 2, 2002 (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E0DE153DF931A35751C0A9649C8B63).

⁸ Shyam Sunder, "Opening Statement," NIST Press Briefing, August 21, 2008 (http://wtc.nist.gov/media/opening_remarks_082108.html).

⁹ Quoted in "Report: Fire, Not Bombs, Leveled WTC 7 Building," USA Today, August 21, 2008 (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-08-21-wtc-nist_N.htm).

¹⁰ Union of Concerned Scientists, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Federal Policymaking" (www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/scientists-sign-on-statement.html).

¹¹ "NIST Whistleblower," October 1, 2007 (http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2007/10/former-nist-employee-blows-whistle.html).

¹² Ibid.

¹³ "What is Research Misconduct?" National Science Foundation, Office of Inspector General, New Research Misconduct Policies (http://www.nsf.gov/oig/session.pdf). Although this document is undated, internal evidence suggests that it was written in 2001.

¹⁴ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New York: Free Press, 1967), 187.

¹⁵ Glanz and Lipton, "A Search for Clues in Towers' Collapse."

¹⁶ The melting point of iron is 1,538°C (2,800°F). Steel, as an alloy, comes in different grades, with a range of melting points, depending on the percent of carbon (which lowers the melting point), from 1,371°C (2,500°F) to 1,482°C (2,700° F); see "Melting Points of Metals" (http://www.uniweld.com/catalog/alloys/alloys_melting.htm).

¹⁷ Barnett, Biederman, and Sisson, "Limited Metallurgical Examination," C-13.

¹⁸ Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., Testimony before the House Science Committee Hearing on "The Investigation of the World Trade Center Collapse," May 1, 2002 (http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/wtc/official/nist/bement.htm). In the quoted statement, the name "FEMA" replaces "BPAT," which is the abbreviation for "Building Performance Assessment Team," the name of the ASCE team that prepared this report for FEMA.

¹⁹ "Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC 7 Investigation," updated December 18, 2008 (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/wtc_qa_082108.html).

²⁰ RJ Lee Group, "WTC Dust Signature," Expert Report, May 2004 (http://www.nyenvirolaw.org/WTC/130%20Liberty%20Street/Mike%20Davis%20LMDC%20130%20Liberty%20Documents/Signature%20of%20WTC%20dust/WTCDustSignature_ExpertReport.051304.1646.mp.pdf), 11.

²¹ RJ Lee Group, "WTC Dust Signature Study: Composition and Morphology," December 2003 (http://www.nyenvirolaw.org/WTC/130%20Liberty%20Street/Mike%20Davis%20LMDC%20130%20Liberty%20Documents/Signature%20of%20WTC%20dust/WTC%20Dust%20Signature.Composition%20and%20Morphology.Final.pdf), 17. On the differences between the 2003 and 2004 studies, see my discussion in The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False (Northampton, Mass., Olive Branch (Interlink Books], 2009), 40-41.

²² RJ Lee Group, "WTC Dust Signature Study" (2003), 24.

²³ Ibid., 21.

²⁴ WebElements: The Periodic Table on the Web (http://www.webelements.com/lead/physics.html).

²⁵ WebElements: The Periodic Table on the Web (http://www.webelements.com/molybdenum/physics.html). Although the scientists involved with this USGS study discovered the molybdenum, they did not mention it in their report. Knowledge of their discovery was obtained only by means of a FOIA request. See The Mysterious Collapse, 44-45.

²⁶ Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, and Bradley R. Larsen, "Active Thermitic Material Observed in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe," The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009/2: 7-31 (http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm).

²⁷ National Fire Protection Association, 921 Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations, 1998 Edition (http://www.interfire.org/res_file/92112m.asp), Section 18.3.2.

²⁸ See The Mysterious Collapse, 142-44.

²⁹ Jennifer Abel, "Theories of 9/11," Hartford Advocate, January 29, 2008 (http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=5546).

³⁰ Sunder, "Opening Statement."

³¹ Ruvolo is quoted in the DVD "Collateral Damages" (http://www.allhandsfire.com/page/AHF/PROD/ISIS-COLL). For just this segment plus discussion, see Steve Watson, "Firefighter Describes 'Molten Metal' at Ground Zero, Like a 'Foundry,'" Inforwars.net, November 17, 2006 (http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/firefighter_describes_molten_metal_ground_zero_like_foundry.htm).

³² Quoted in Christopher Bollyn, "Professor Says 'Cutter Charges' Brought Down WTC Buildings," American Free Press.net, May 1 & 8, 2006 (http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cutter_charges_brought_down_wt.html).

³³ "NIST Engineer, John Gross, Denies the Existance [sic] of Molten Steel" (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7180303712325092501&hl=en).

³⁴ James Williams, "WTC a Structural Success," SEAU News: The Newsletter of the Structural Engineers Association of Utah, October 2001 (http://www.seau.org/SEAUNews-2001-10.pdf).

³⁵ Quoted in Francesca Lyman, "Messages in the Dust: What Are the Lessons of the Environmental Health Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11?" National Environmental Health Association, September 2003 (http://www.neha.org/9-11%20report/index-The.html).

³⁶ "Mobilizing Public Health: Turning Terror's Tide with Science," Magazine of Johns Hopkins Public Health, Late Fall 2001 (http://www.jhsph.edu/Publications/Special/Welch.htm).

³⁷ Quoted in Bollyn, "Professor Says 'Cutter Charges' Brought Down WTC Buildings."

³⁸ For the FDNY testimonies, see Graeme MacQueen, "118 Witnesses: The Firefighters' Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers," Journal of 9/11 Studies, Vol. 2/August 2006 (http://www.journalof911studies.com/articles/Article_5_118Witnesses_WorldTradeCenter.pdf): 49-123. For a brief discussion of these and other testimonies, see The Mysterious Collapse, 75-82.

³⁹ NIST, "Answers to Frequently Asked Questions," 2006 (http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm), Q. 2. For discussion, see The Mysterious Collapse, 77.

⁴⁰ NIST, "Letter of Response to Request," September 27, 2007, published in Journal of 9/11 Studies, Vol. 17/November 2007 (http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2007/NISTresponseToRequestForCorrectionGourleyEtal2.pdf).

⁴¹ This statement (by Peter Demarco) is quoted in Chris Bull and Sam Erman, eds., At Ground Zero: Young Reporters Who Were There Tell Their Stories (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002), 97.

⁴² Bartmer's statement is quoted in Paul Joseph Watson, "NYPD Officer Heard Building 7 Bombs," Prison Planet, February 10, 2007 (http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007/100207heardbombs.htm).

⁴³ For documentation of these points about the testimonies of Hess and Jennings, see The Mysterious Collapse, 84-92.

⁴⁴ For discussion and documentation of NIST's treatment of the testimonies of Hess and Jennings, see The Mysterious Collapse, 92-94.

⁴⁵ Letter of August 12, 2009, from Catherine S. Fletcher, Freedom of Information Act Officer, NIST, to a FOIA request of August 8, 2009, from Ms. Susan Peabody, for "[t]he complete texts of NIST's 2004 interviews of Michael Hess and Barry Jennings, which are cited in NIST NCSTAR 1-8. . . , 109, n.380, as 'WTC 7 Interviews 2041604 and 1041704.'"

⁴⁶ For discussion and documentation of the BBC's treatment of Hess and Jennings in the first version of its program, see The Mysterious Collapse, 95-99.

⁴⁷ David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2009).

⁴⁸ Telephone conversation, September 1, 2001.

⁴⁹ See The Mysterious Collapse, 98-99.

⁵⁰ For documentation and discussion of the second version of the BBC's show, including the problems in Hess's testimony, see The Mysterious Collapse, 99-104.

⁵¹ See The Mysterious Collapse, 150-55.

⁵² For documentation and discussion of NIST's claim about the lack of girder shear studs, see The Mysterious Collapse, 212-15.

⁵³ See The Mysterious Collapse, 187-88.

⁵⁴ For discussion and documentation of this point about failed shear studs, see The Mysterious Collapse, 217-21. As I point out in the book, the contradictions between NIST's final report and its 2004 interim report, involving the 4:45 fire and both claims about shear studs, were discovered by Chris Sarns.

⁵⁵ Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

⁵⁶ For documentation and discussion of this point about free fall, see The Mysterious Collapse, 231-41.

⁵⁷ I am referring to the fact that Van Jones, who had been an Obama administration advisor on "green jobs," felt compelled to resign due to the uproar evoked by the revelation that he had signed a petition questioning the official account of 9/11. The view that this act made him unworthy was perhaps articulated most clearly by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. After dismissing as irrelevant the other reasons that had been given for demanding Jones's resignation, Krauthammer wrote: "He's gone for one reason and one reason only. You can't sign a petition demanding . . . investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed Sept. 11, 2001 – i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil – and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House. Unlike the other stuff . . . , this is no trivial matter. It's beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It's dangerous. . . . You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier – a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice" (Charles Krauthammer
, "The Van Jones Matter," Washington Post, September 11, 2009 [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/09/10/AR2009091003408.html]).

* David Ray Griffin (born 1939) is an American retired professor of philosophy of religion and theology.

By Rob Lonaker | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Dear Israel,

My son Jeff, a U.S. Army soldier, is sworn to defend Israel against all its enemies. At least that's how his commanding officers and the guys in his squad figure it, because America and Israel have exactly the same interests. Our countries are like one. Perfect allies!

Plus, like his mother and me, his whole platoon is Christian and proud of it. He has his Bible study every day, so he knows how important Israel and the Jewish people are to God. His platoon wants to fulfill God's plan, so they fight hard for you, Israel. They all love you. And to prove it, they're dying for you.

Lately something's been bothering Jeff, though. It seems a lot of Americans have found convincing evidence of explosives used to bring down the towers on 9/11. And it's direct evidence, as the lawyers say: video, eyewitness, and chemical evidence.

Problem is, no one in the media or government will look at the evidence, even though most of it has come to light only since 2009. That's weird, because 9/11 was a pretty important event. Jeff is constantly reminded by his captain that 9/11 is the main reason his squad is in Afghanistan, fighting and dying for you, Israel.

Here's the strange part: Not one prominent Jewish person is asking for an investigation of this evidence.

We all know how much influence the Jews and Israel have over our politicians and the media. Don't get me wrong – I mean, it's great! The Israel Lobby makes sure every congressman and senator is being sensitive to even the smallest issue that affects Israel. You guys do a good job pressuring every last member of Congress to vote to fund each holocaust memorial service – and it seems likes there's another one, somewhere, every couple weeks!

Best of all, you always make sure no one criticizes Israel. We all know that's hate speech by definition! And your mechanisms for punishing politicians who slip up, by defunding their campaigns and trashing them in the press, or throwing them in jail like Jim Traficant, is nothing short of genius. Your organizational skills are amazing.

So Jeff can't understand why Jewish leaders don't want anyone to investigate the explosives found in the dust around Manhattan on 9/11.

Why are you silent, Israel?

Shouldn't great Jewish men, like 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow, former Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, and NIST 9/11 Investigation Leader John Gross, want to look at this evidence? Why aren't they clamoring to find the truth? These guys were in positions of trust, so we Americans assumed they would never omit important evidence, much less refuse to talk about it now that they're out of office.

Shouldn't our Jewish neoconservative leaders be excited to investigate new and important evidence of explosives? After all, they helped us launch America's righteous wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and they now urge us to plunge deeper toward national bankruptcy and troop suicide by invading Iran with nukes. Where are men like Eliot Cohen, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Abraham Shulsky, Elliott Abrams, David Schenker, Michael Ledeen, and Michael Rubin, who helped bake Iraqi WMD intelligence, when you need them? I just don't get it.

And what about the media? Come on, most mainstream media sources are heavily Jewish owned or influenced. Can't they put a little pressure on politicians and the Justice Department to get an investigation going?

We all know that al-Qaeda did 9/11, because the media, president, and congress say so. I know, no one's proved it yet, and the story is completely implausible, but – well, that's beside the point. Heck, the media told us within ten minutes of the second plane hit that Osama bin Laden did it. That just proves how smart they are: the story never needed changing, even after the 9/11 Commission "investigated" it!

So why won't Western media and governments now look into the explosives issue? I'm sure they'll find that somehow, al-Qaeda helped destroy the twin towers using the explosive agent nanothermite, which scientists later discovered in the tower dust. And someone will surely explain how al-Qaeda got access to this high-grade explosive, produced only in a few countries' classified military programs.

A few of Jeff's buddies in Afghanistan tell him there's only one logical explanation for why all the mainstream media and politicians won't look at the new explosives evidence:

You did 9/11.

Jeff thinks that no other explanation fits all the facts. But the reality of this crushes him and makes him want to despair.

But he always gets a grip on himself. He fights back tears and tries to put it out of his mind. He will stay brave.

If I may be so bold, Israel, Jeff and I would like to ask, why?

Forgive me for saying so, but I really don't think you needed to go that far. Jeff would still have fought and died for you, as I'm sure President Bush would have ordered him to, even without 9/11. I'll bet the fake WMD evidence the neocons ginned up would have been enough to garner public support for the wars you wanted. I guess what I'm saying is, our soldiers could have been mobilized into your service, Israel, with just a little false flag prevarication. You didn't need to go all the way and kill 3,000 of us. Jeff even has a friend whose mom died in the towers. Again pardon me for being brash enough to say this: that wasn't cool.

But hey, I'm sorry. Jeff and I will get over it. I talked it over with his mother, and I think maybe one day, she'll get past it, too. She's pretty emotional, though, so it may take a while.

Jeff's whole squad still supports you, Israel! They're Christians, after all, and they must remain faithful to God's Anointed People. If you had to kill some of us Americans to show us the way, then I suppose that God's ways, which are your ways, are perhaps just beyond our lowly human understanding.

Who knows? Maybe losing 3,000 innocent citizens was a small price for us to pay in your bigger scheme of things.

May God give Jeff the faith to keep fighting for you, Israel, and to be willing to lose life and limb for you, even though he may not comprehend everything. Like God smote Job to test his faith, I think that's what Israel must be doing to America. And like Abraham, I'm willing to sacrifice my son if you say it's God's will.

Jeff will go forward for you, no matter the cost you impose. Isn't that what blind faith is all about?

Sincerely,

Rob Lonaker

Source: Veterans Today

By Anthony Lawson *, Sabbah Report: http://sabbah.biz/

Recently, political pressure has been brought to bear against a trades unionist KEVIN BRACKEN, for attempting to express his views about the events of 9/11, on Australia's publicly funded broadcaster, the ABC. This video redresses the balance, and makes it clear that Australia’s prime minister is either ignorant, beyond belief, or she is putting the interests of nuclear, Apartheid Israel ahead of Australia's. (My Catbird Seat)

Friends of Israel - Enemies Inside the Gates:

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UntixeRiEK8

* Anthony Lawson (known professionally as Tony Lawson) is a retired international-prize-winning commercials director, cameraman, ad agency creative director and voice over. He used to be known for shooting humorous commercials, but doesn’t find much to laugh about, with the way the world is going, these days.

By Maidhc Ó Cathail * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Philip Zelikow

In an interview on the Fox Business Network, a retired U.S. intelligence officer accused the official in charge of the 9/11 Commission of a cover-up of intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Appearing on the political talk show Freedom Watch, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and the author of Operation Dark Heart, a much-hyped new book on the war in Afghanistan, spoke about his mid-October 2003 encounter with Dr. Philip Zelikow, then executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States.

During a fact-finding mission to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Zelikow's team was briefed by Shaffer on Able Danger, a DIA data mining project that had allegedly identified Mohammed Atta as a threat to the U.S. a year before 9/11.

Parenthetically, the "Mohammed Atta" identified by Able Danger may have been an imposter operating under a stolen identity, as occurred in the assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai. In an interview with a German newspaper, reported by the Guardian, Mohammed Atta's father claimed that his son had nothing to do with the attacks and was still alive a year after 9/11.

Whichever Mohammed Atta was referred to by Shaffer in Bagram, Zelikow reportedly "fell silent with shock at the news."

According to Shaffer, Zelikow came to him at the end of the meeting, gave him his card, and said: "What you said today is critically important, very important. Please come see me when you return to Washington D.C."

On his return to Washington in January 2004, Shaffer immediately contacted Zelikow's office and was told to "stand by." After a week passed, Shaffer called again, and this time was told by Zelikow's staff: "We don't need you to come in. We have all the information on Able Danger we need. Thank you anyway."

None of the information provided by Shaffer appeared in the 9/11 Commission's 585-page report, however.

In September 2005, more than a year after the publication of the 9/11 report, Shaffer said he met with one of the 9/11 commissioners in Philadelphia. Over lunch, he told the commissioner what he had told Zelikow in Afghanistan. The commissioner said that "he had never heard any of this," adding that, "had he heard of it, it would have been something that was very much of interest to he [sic] and the commission."

"So there's a lot of things that never made it in that 9/11 report?" asked Judge Andrew Napolitano, the host of Freedom Watch.

"Things were either by negligence left out, or, and I believe, by purpose left out," Shaffer replied.

Another guest on the show, Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, spoke of a similarly frustrating experience with the 9/11 Commission staff director.

Describing the 9/11 Commission Report as "a whitewash, and a lie from top to bottom," Scheuer said he provided Zelikow with over 400 pages of official government documents detailing intelligence failures before 9/11.

"I never heard one word back from Zelikow," he said.

"They all seemed very interested in what you had to say," the former CIA officer added, referring to meetings he had with Zelikow and his staff, "but at the end of the day, it didn't make it into the report."

This is not the first time that questions have been raised about Zelikow's handling of the 9/11 Commission.

In his 2009 book, The Commission, Philip Shenon, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, wrote about "how tightly Zelikow was able to control the flow of information on the commission," and that "everything" was "run through" him.

While Zelikow's tight control of the commission excluded disturbing evidence from national security experts like Shaffer and Scheuer, a dubious scholar like Laurie Mylroie was afforded ample opportunity to promote the most spurious justification for the Iraq war. Mylroie, whose major booster in government was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, argued that Iraq had been involved in every major terrorist attack against the United States since the early 1990s, including 9/11. During commission hearings on al-Qaeda, Zelikow, writes Shenon, "made sure that she had a prominent place at the witness table."

And why wouldn't he? After all, Zelikow had an important role in, as Shenon puts it, "developing the scholarly underpinnings for the Iraq war." It was Zelikow who had authored a thirty-one-page "preemptive war" doctrine which George W. Bush announced to the world in 2002 as "The National Security Strategy of the United States."

"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?" Zelikow asked an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. In a rare moment of candour, Zelikow proceeded to explain that the real reason for preemptive war against Iraq was "the threat against Israel."

Judge Napolitano asked Lt. Col. Shaffer if the commissioner in Philadelphia had said whether anyone on the 9/11 Commission "had an agenda, or was covering up for somebody, or was protecting somebody." The commissioner's reply was, according to Shaffer: "Everybody on the commission was covering for someone."

Given the fatal career implications of broaching such a taboo subject, not to mention Rupert Murdoch's well-known devotion to the State of Israel, it's hardly surprising that the Fox presenter didn't probe too deeply into who Philip Zelikow might have been covering for.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbak9KOINgo

* Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan.