Guardian psyop: “Who really blew up the twin towers?”

2006-09-08

Richard Moore

    "To plant bombs in three buildings with enough bomb
     materials and wiring? It's too huge a project and would
     require far too many people to keep it a secret afterwards,"
     says Christopher Pyle, professor of constitutional law at Mt
     Holyoke College. "After every major crisis, like the
     assassinations of JFK or Martin Luther King, we've had
     conspiracy theorists who come up with plausible scenarios
     for gullible people. It's a waste of time."

This article, which pretends to be 'opening up the dialog' on 911, is 
carefully crafted so that gullible people can see some of the 
anomalies surrounding 911, and still come away doubting the truth.

rkm

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Original source URL:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1864524,00.html

Who really blew up the twin towers?

As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 nears, Christina Asquith finds 
academics querying the official version of events

Tuesday September 5, 2006
The Guardian

Shards of glass and dust from the World Trade Centre towers sit on 
Professor Steven Jones's desk at Brigham Young University in Utah. 
Evidence, he says, of the biggest cover-up in history - one too evil 
for most to believe, but one he has staked his academic career on 
exposing.

The attacks of September 11, Jones asserts, were an "inside job", 
puppeteered by the neoconservatives in the White House to justify the 
occupation of oil-rich Arab countries, inflate military spending and 
expand Israel.

"We don't believe that 19 hijackers and a few others in a cave in 
Afghanistan pulled this off acting alone," says Jones. "We challenge 
this official conspiracy theory and, by God, we're going to get to 
the bottom of this."

While this sinister spin strikes most American academics as absurd, 
Jones, a physics professor, is not alone. He is a member of 9/11 
Scholars for Truth, a recently formed group of around 75 US 
professors determined to prove 9/11 was a hoax. In essays and 
journals, they are using their association with prominent 
universities to give a scholarly stamp to conspiracy theories long 
believed in parts of Europe and the Arab world, and gaining ground 
among Americans due to frustration with the Iraq war and opposition 
to President Bush's heavily hyped "war on terror".

Their iconoclastic positions have drawn wrath from rightwing radio 
shows and caused upheaval on campuses, triggering letters to 
newspapers, phone calls from parents and TV cameras in lecture halls.

In the Midwest, 61 legislators signed a petition calling for the 
dismissal of a University of Wisconsin assistant professor, Kevin 
Barrett, after he joined the 9/11 Scholars for Truth. Citing academic 
freedom, the university provost defended Barrett, albeit reluctantly.

A Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll taken during the summer 
indicates that Americans are increasingly suspicious of the 
government's explanation of the events of 9/11: 36% said it was "very 
likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either 
participated in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the 
Pentagon, or took no action to stop them, "because they wanted the 
United States to go to war in the Middle East".

For most of the world, the story of 9/11 begins at 8.45am on 
September 11 2001, when American Airlines flight 11 smashed into the 
North tower of the World Trade Centre. But, tumble down the rabbit 
hole with Jones, and the plotline begins a year earlier, in September 
2000. A neoconservative group called Project for a New American 
Century, which included the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and 
the vice-president, Dick Cheney, brought out a report arguing for a 
global expansion of American military and economic supremacy, and for 
the US to transform itself into a "one-world superpower". The report 
warned that "the process of transformation, even if it brings 
revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some 
catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor".

Excuse for aggression

The group, in concert with about 20 others, orchestrated the attacks 
of 9/11 as an excuse for pre-emptive global aggression against 
Afghanistan, then Iraq and soon Iran, the academics say. And they 
insist that they have amassed a wealth of scientific data to prove it.

It is impossible, says Jones, for the towers to have collapsed from 
the collision of two aeroplanes, as jet fuel doesn't burn at 
temperatures hot enough to melt steel beams. The horizontal puffs of 
smoke - squibs - emitted during the collapse of the towers are 
indicative of controlled implosions on lower floors. The scholars 
have collected eyewitness accounts of flashes and loud explosions 
immediately before the fall.

The twin towers must, they say, have been brought down by explosives 
- hence the container of dust on Jones's desk, sent to him 
unsolicited by a woman living in lower Manhattan. He is using X-ray 
fluorescents to test it for explosive materials.

What's more, the nearby World Trade Centre 7 also collapsed later 
that afternoon. The building had not been hit by a plane, only 
damaged by fire. WTC 7 housed a clandestine CIA station, which the 
scholars believe was the command centre for the planning of 9/11.

"The planes were just a distraction," says Professor James Fetzer, 
65, a recently retired philosopher of science at the University of 
Minnesota. "The evidence is so overwhelming, but most Americans don't 
have time to take a look at this."

But Jonathan Barnett, professor of fire protection engineering at the 
Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, calls such claims 
"bad science". Barnett was a member of the World Trade Centre 
Building Performance Study, one of the government groups that 
investigated the towers' collapse.

Reluctantly, he has familiarised himself with the scholars' claims - 
many of them have emailed him. Yes, it is unusual for a steel 
structure to collapse from fire, Barnett agrees. However, his group 
and others argue that the planes' impact weakened the structures and 
stripped off the fireproofing materials. That caused the top floors 
of both towers to collapse on to the floors below. "A big chunk of 
building falling down made the next floor fall down, and then they 
all came down like a deck of cards," Barnett says.

The collapse of WTC 7 was also unusual, he admits. However, 
firefighters do not usually let a fire rage unabated for seven hours 
as they did on the morning of September 11, because they had 
prioritised the rescue of victims. "The fact that you don't have 
evidence to support your theory doesn't mean that the other theory is 
true," Barnett says. "They just made it up out of the blue."

Since the attacks, the US government has issued three reports into 
the events of the day, all of which involved hundreds of professors, 
scientists and government officials. The 9/11 Commission, a 
bipartisan group, issued a 500-page, moment-by-moment investigation 
into the hijackers' movements, concluding that they were connected to 
Osama bin Laden. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, 
a government agency, filed 10,000 pages of reports examining the 
towers' collapse. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency weighed 
in, examining the response to the attacks.

"To plant bombs in three buildings with enough bomb materials and 
wiring? It's too huge a project and would require far too many people 
to keep it a secret afterwards," says Christopher Pyle, professor of 
constitutional law at Mt Holyoke College. "After every major crisis, 
like the assassinations of JFK or Martin Luther King, we've had 
conspiracy theorists who come up with plausible scenarios for 
gullible people. It's a waste of time."

But Barrett says the experts have been fooled by an "act of 
psychological conversion" not unlike the tactics CIA interrogators 
use on their victims. "People will disregard evidence if it causes 
their faith to be shattered," he says. "I think we were all shocked. 
And then, when the voice of authority told us what happened, we just 
believed it."

Misleading the public

History has revealed that governments have a tradition of misleading 
the public into going to war, says Barrett, and the next generation 
of Americans will realise the truth. "Europe and Canada are way ahead 
of us on this."

The 9/11 scholars go to great lengths to portray themselves as 
rational thinkers, who have been slowly won over by a careful, 
academic analysis of the facts of the day.

However, a study of the full extent of their claims is a journey into 
the increasingly absurd: Flight 93 did not crash in Pennsylvania but 
landed safely in Cleveland; desperate phone calls received by 
relatives on the ground from passengers were actually 
computer-generated voices from a laboratory in California. The 
Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77, but by a 
smaller, remote-controlled A-3 Sky Warrior, which shot a missile into 
the building before crashing into it.

Many of the 9/11 scholars have a history of defending conspiracy 
theories, including that the CIA plotted both the Lockerbie bombing 
and the plane crash of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, and that 
"global secret societies" control the world.

Professor Robert Goldberg, of the University of Utah, wrote a book on 
conspiracy theories, Enemies Within: the Culture of Conspiracy in 
Modern America. He recounts a history of religious and political 
leaders using conspiracy theories for personal and political gain. 
The common enemy is usually Jews, big government or corporations. The 
public laps it up, either because these theories are more exciting 
than the truth, or out of emotional need.

"What the conspiracy theorists do is present their case with facts 
and figures: they have dates, meeting places and always name names," 
he says. "The case is always presented in a prosecutorial way, or the 
way an adventure writer presents a novel. It's a breathless account. 
They are willing to say hearsay is a fact, and rumour is true, and 
accidents are never what they seem.

"One of the stories is that a missile hit the Pentagon, and all the 
data is there. But what is missing is: what actually happened to the 
plane and the people on it? Conspiracy theorists avoid discussion of 
those facts that don't fit."

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the public's willingness to believe 
conspiracy theories parallels their dissatisfaction with the Bush 
administration. In recent years, the American public has felt misled 
over false claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in 
Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

Many fear infringements on their civil liberties now the National 
Security Agency has gained access to phone billing records from 
telecommunications companies, the Bush administration has engaged in 
wiretapping without court warrants and there are thousands of cases 
of indefinite detentions of American and foreign citizens without 
trial. Those who criticise the Bush administration's "war on terror" 
are accused of being unpatriotic.

By taking their criticisms to such extremes, though, the scholars 
risk caricaturing the opposition. None the less, they are pushing on, 
and imploring Congress to reopen the investigation.

"We're academics and we're rational, and we really believe Congress 
or someone should investigate this," says David Gabbard, an East 
Carolina education professor and 9/11 scholar. "But there are a lot 
of crazies out there who purport that UFOs were involved. We don't 
want to be lumped in with those folks."
-- 

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