9/11 Event (Part I)

Part 1: Anomalies About the Crashes

According to the official story, on September 11, 2001, unexpectedly to the US government, coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic group al-Qaeda killed 2,996 people, injured over 6,000 others, and caused at least $10 billion in damage. Four passenger airliners were hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists armed with box cutters. Two of the planes were crashed into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. A third plane was crashed into the Pentagon. The fourth plane was initially flown toward Washington, D.C., but crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers thwarted the hijackers. The organizing genius behind the attacks was promptly identified as Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, who directed the attacks from caves in Afghanistan with the help of his laptop. However, is this what really happened? There is evidence that the real story could be much more convoluted and sinister.

Marcus Schultze

Published May 27, 2021

The beginning of the 21^st century are most certainly strongly influenced by the 9/11 events that took place on the US soil. It shaped global geopolitics for years to come and filled the “vacuum”, which had been left after the end of the so-called Cold War. A new antagonism was created – the War on Terror.

A hardly imagined scenario did unfold in front of our eyes on September 11, 2001 – the most powerful military power in the world was allegedly caught by surprise by attacks carried out by young radical suicide Muslims, which were successfully able to target the very heart of the United States – the financial centre in Manhattan and the military centre in Pentagon. The US intelligence agencies with a 40-billion annual budget were not able to prevent such a row of attacks, the powerful trillion-dollar US air defence system was not able to intercept suicide planes that were off-course and in the air at least 1 hour and 45 minutes before they did hit their highly visible targets.

In the following an effort is made to examine the main claims of the official theory of the 9/11 events. The aim is to weed wheat from chaff and give enough material for serious seekers to analyze whether the official conspiracy theory of 19 hijackers give adequate answers to many questions associated with those events back in September 2001.

Official timeline of events

The world affairs in the beginning of the 21st century are most certainly strongly influenced by the 9/11 events that took place on the US soil. It shaped global geopolitics for years to come and filled the “vacuum”, which had been left after the end of the so-called Cold War. A new antagonism was created – the War on Terror.

A hardly imagined scenario did unfold in front of our eyes on September 11, 2001 – the most powerful military power in the world was allegedly caught by surprise by attacks carried out by young radical suicide Muslims, which were successfully able to target the very heart of the United States – the financial centre in Manhattan and the military centre in Pentagon. The US intelligence agencies with a 40-billion annual budget were not able to prevent such a row of attacks, the powerful trillion-dollar US air defence system was not able to intercept suicide planes that were off-course and in the air at least 1 hour and 45 minutes before they did hit their highly visible targets.

In the following an effort is made to examine the main claims of the official theory of the 9/11 events. The main aim is to weed wheat from chaff and give enough material for serious seekers to analyze whether the official conspiracy theory of 19 hijackers give adequate answers to many questions associated with those events back in September 2001.

The 9/11 Commission and its official theory

The failure of the 9/11 Commission (November 2002 - August 2004) and its official report to address and reasonably explain the most important questions has been a subject to straightforward criticism by a large number of researchers and experts during the last decades. Based on the build-up and actions of the Commission, it has been suggested that the aim of the Commission was not to find out the truth, but to cement the official theory, which was channelled through mass media and government authorities from right after the 9/11 events. Especially considering the fact that establishing of the Commission was not a prompt reaction from the US Government, but was only a result of a citizen initiative and purposeful pressure from different interest groups and concerned public. The Commission was established more than 14 months after the 9/11 events, only in November 2002. President G. Bush named notorious Henry Kissinger as the chairman of the Commission, who resigned after several weeks as he refused to disclose his private business clients and be transparent on his interest of conflicts. After that former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean took over as a new chairman.

Initially, chairman Kean promised an aggressive investigation, praised the broad mandate of the Commission and didn’t think to have any problem looking under every rock.² But reality turned out to be different. Kean and vice-chairman Lee Hamilton later assert in their book, “Without Precedent” (2006), that they were “set up to fail” and were starved of funds to do a proper investigation. They also stated that they were denied access to the truth and misled by senior officials in the Pentagon and the federal aviation authority; and that this obstruction and deception led them to contemplate slapping officials with criminal charges. The commissioners admit their report was incomplete and flawed, and that many questions about the terror attacks remain unanswered.³ Nevertheless, the 9/11 Commission was swiftly closed down already on August 21, 2004.

The real power was in the hands of the executive director of the Commission – Philip Zelikow⁴. He was a close associate of Paul Wolfovitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense) and Richard Perle (Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee), the most prominent members of the the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an influential neoconservative think tank, which will be addressed later in our analysis. Zelikow was in charge of the whole staff, who carried out the majority of the work. He chose which witnesses were to be listened to and he organized the writing of the final report. The Commission acted on the basis of unanimous decisions, meaning that if even one of the commissioners disagreed with a damning fact, claim or statement of the draft report, then it was excluded from the report. This resulted in a “rounded” report, which is closely following the official line taken by the US government.

Researcher Paul Thompson, the author of the comprehensive book “The Terror Timeline”⁵, has said that it is not possible to trust the official report at all⁶. The Commissioners (the ten members of the Commission) had clear ties with different interest groups. At least six of the ten commissioners had ties to the airline industry and every commissioner had at least one potential conflict of interest⁷:

Republican commissioners:

1. Chairman Thomas Kean’s sits on different corporate boards, but most notably on the Board of Director and Executive Committee positions at Amerada Hess, an oil company with extensive investments in Central Asia and a partner with the Saudi oil company Delta Oil. Delta Oil has been one of the main financial partners in a controversial oil pipeline designed to go through Afghanistan.

2. Fred Fielding also works for a law firm lobbying for Spirit Airlines and United Airlines.

3. Slade Gorton has close ties to Boeing, which built all the planes destroyed on 9/11, and his law firm represents several major airlines, including Delta Airlines.

4. John Lehman, former secretary of the Navy, has large investments in Ball Corp., which has many US military contracts.

5. James Thompson, former Illinois governor, is the head of a law firm that lobbies for American Airlines, and he has previously represented United Airlines.

Democratic commissioners:

6. Richard Ben-Veniste represents Boeing and United Airlines. His law firm also represents Deutsche Bank, which have many connections to 9/11. Ben-Veniste has been has been referred to in print as a “Mob lawyer,” and was a long-time lawyer for Barry Seal, one of the most famous drug dealers in US history who also is alleged to have had CIA connections.

7. Max Cleland, former US senator, has received $300,000 from the airline industry.

8. James Gorelick is a director of United Technologies, one of the Pentagon’s biggest defense contractors and a supplier of engines to airline manufacturers.

9. Vice-chairman Lee Hamilton sits on many advisory boards, including those to the CIA, the president’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, and the US Army.

10. Tim Roemer represents Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

There are a great number of anomalies and contradictions, which are not dealt with by the official theory of the events. Several researchers have made their efforts to point them out and tried to find explanations.⁸ In the following we will focus on the primary and secondary anomalies to unveil different aspects of those events. After that also possible motives and beneficiaries will be analyzed to highlight the broader context of the organised attacks.

Primary anomalies: the crashes and material evidence

In our civilization, the interpretation of objective evidence can be twisted in quite many possible ways and speculation rules loud even in natural sciences. Still, primary evidence should consist of mostly material evidence that is harder to be disputed than e.g. the claims made by witnesses. Instead we can observe a number of primary anomalies, which illustrate the 9/11 case.

There are three main lines of the 9/11 official theory that trigger the search for material proof:

• Firstly, the WTC North and South Towers and two other spots were hit by hijacked passenger planes.
• Secondly, the WTC North and South Towers collapsed due to fires caused by the hits and WTC 7 due to fires.
• Thirdly, the towers (WTC 1, 2 and 7) fell to the ground in a collapse-induced manner and formed a massive debris, which was gathered together and allegedly transported to other countries (to China and India).

So, the first question – Were the WTC towers, Pentagon and Shankesville ground hit by hijacked passenger planes?

There are several aspects or characteristics, which do not match the official theory of the claim that hijacked passenger planes (flights 11 and 175) crashed the WTC North and South towers. It is true that lack of evidence does not disprove a theory – but contradictory evidence does. It seems that in the following instances of both can be pointed out.

World Trade Center crashes (Flights 11 and 175)

• Missing black boxes of WTC planes

  Officially no black boxes of the planes have been discovered or released,though the black boxes should survive severe impact and fire. It is extremely rare that the recorders get sufficiently damaged to make them unreadable. The storage medium of each recorder is located in a protective capsule, which must be able to withstand an impact of 3,400gs (3,400 times the force of gravity). Additionally, each must also survive flames at 2,000°F (1090°C) for up to 30 minutes, and submersion in 20,000 feet (6100 metres) of saltwater for 30 days. Typically, to increase their chances of survival, the recorders are located in the tail section of the aircraft, which usually sustains the least impact in a crash. National Transporation Safety Board spokesperson Ted Lopatkiewicz has said that he couldn’t recall a domestic case before 9/11/01 in which the recorders were not recovered.⁹

• No forensic identification of the aircrafts and very little debris

  There was incredibly little debris of the planes in all four sites. Very little debris exists from two alleged 767 high-speed crashes into WTC skyscrapers within 17 minutes of each other, a stunning lack of evidence to support the official 767 theory. The crashed aircrafts have not been forensically identified. In fact the parts that go into the plane engines are serial numbered and recorded in a database, which also maintains what engines the parts belonged to, what planes the engines were installed in and also how long the parts were used. This is done because of a life cycle, which the parts have. This kind of identification has not been carried through and forensic analysis has been simply lacking.

For instance, FBI has claimed that a part of the plane engine that hit the South Tower (flight 175 or Boeing 767) was found first at Murray street in Manhattan. Remarkably, this piece of evidence was then dumped (sic!) and piled at Staten Island, where it lied for ca 10 years. Independent research has found out that this piece of engine cannot belong to a Boeing 767, but belongs to Boeing 747 instead. This was discovered according to taken photographs and comparing the particular engine parts (HPT Cooling Duct of Boeing 767 vs Boeing 747).¹⁰

• The speed of the planes hitting the WTC towers

  The speed of the planes controlled by the Muslim hijackers just before the crashes was remarkable. Based on and calculated from video evidence, e.g. the second plane (flight 175) flew with ca 583 mph (ca 950 km/h, 264 m/s or 513 knots) when hitting the tower. This plane was allegedly hijacked by Arab youngsters between 20-24 years of age. Several experts have considered it an impossible feat for those unexperienced pilots, taken into account the density of air and the stated and calculated speed of such airplanes. It is regarded as physically impossible or at least incredibly hard to control an aircraft of that size and of such speed on such low altitude. The experts, who have expressed their view on that, are: aeronautical engineer Ben Eadie, Dr Willem A.J. Anemaat, aeronautical engineer Gordon Wilson etc. CIA ex-pilot John Lear have expressed his serious doubts on the possibility of those passenger jets by Arab pilots to hit the WTC Towers.¹¹

• The planes were “swallowed” by the steel WTC towers

  All of the video evidence of the crashes show that the planes were wholly “swallowed” by the solid steel and concrete buildings – not even the most vulnerable parts (wings, wing tips, tail etc) were knocked off the plane on the impact. The same happened in Pentagon (very little debris discovered) and also in Shankesville, where the ground “swallowed” the plane, so that no significant parts of the plane nor debris was discovered near the crash site. The contradictory physics of such effects are discussed in a paper by material scientist Rick Rajter (MIT) and Dr Morgan Reynolds.¹² They have concluded that all steel beam and belt sections that were hit and did not fragment must have rejected plane pieces and bounced them outside each tower. WTC crash videos show the South Tower silently “absorbing” a plane and completely enshrouding it. Also, no deceleration occurs in these videos. Those Arab pilots parked each aircraft as if flying into an upper level airplane hangar without “braking.” A noiseless collision without deceleration is according to those researchers physically impossible and the chances of two Boeing 767s vanishing completely inside two towers are slim and none.

• The bright flashes before the impact of the WTC planes

  A bright flash just before the planes (both first and second) did hit the WTC Towers was first mentioned in Dave von Kleist’s film In Plane Sight¹³ (2004) and afterwards by others, for instance Christian Hampton’s 2018 documentary 9/11 Alchemy: Facing Reality¹⁴, where it is referred to as “luminance without heat”. It is shown in multiple video shots that the flash occurs in both cases before the plane hits the tower, not after the plane (at least some part of the nose) had penetrated the building. It has been shown in several angles, which rules out the possibility of a reflection etc. At the same time, researcher Mark Ferran has provided an explanation related to aluminium reaction to such bright flashes.¹⁵

• Missing wing of the WTC second plane

  In several different witness videos it is clearly visible that one of the wings of the second plane (flight 175) is missing before colliding with the WTC Tower. Researcher Mark Conlon has shown in his analyses that it was not an effect produced by video compression nor background nor the sky.¹⁶

• Contradictory statements of the witnesses of WTC crashes

  So-called ground witnesses and/or first-responders had remarkably different perception of the impact of the planes with WTC Towers. On studying the accounts of the plane impacts, a confused picture appears. A number of them were talking about a “small plane”, some describe a military plane, a small number about “a missile attack” and some about “bigger plane or a passenger jet”. The last category included a number of journalists and the affiliates of TV stations happening to be on the spot. Media had from the beginning a mostly unified approach that passenger planes did hit the WTC Towers.¹⁷

There are many video recordings of the second impact on the WTC South Tower, though just one brief recording of impact on the WTC North Tower. There are those, who have claimed that most of the videos have been manipulated on the planes impact to WTC Towers and that those recordings (also from many amateur video cameras) might be forgeries. Such claims have been produced e.g. by Alexander Baker¹⁸ and Simon Hütten (alias Simon Shack¹⁹). These video-fakery claims are refuted by several researchers, e.g. by Mark Conlon²⁰ and professional cameraman Anthony Lawson.²¹

Pentagon crash (Flight 77)

The official theory maintains that American Airlines flight 77 (Boeing 757) was crashed by hijackers into the western side of Pentagon on September 11, 2001. What particularly distinguishes the Pentagon crash from the WTC crash is the near-absence of video or photographic evidence of the crash. The only released video footage of the crash are the 2006 clips from Pentagon security cameras north of the crash site²². One of the most secured institutions of the whole world – the Pentagon – has claimed that it has supplied all of the footage it has on the attack. Though there should be many security cameras pointing on and out of Pentagon in our modern technological and militarized age. In the official document²³ the following appears: “Many security cameras at the Pentagon that could have captured the building being hit were switched off or had been taken down due to construction work that was taking place and therefore do not film the attack”. Moreover, immediately after the crash the FBI confiscated all other videos from private businesses (hotel, gas station etc) that were possibly pointed at and recording the surroundings of the crash site.

There are several similarities between the crash sites of WTC Towers and the Pentagon, e.g. very little debris of the aircrafts and no forensic identification of the aircraft and their parts involved. It can be said that also in the Pentagon the aircraft was like sucked into the building and mostly “vaporized”. This and the strangely small size of the hole visible on some of the photographs and peculiar damages to the building have created more questions over the official theory and puzzled many researchers. The peculiar damages of the building comprise of e.g. the photographs showing that a much larger area of the roof was strangely damaged, third and fourth floor of the building having very little damage though the tail of such passenger jet (Boeing 757) is at least 15 metres (or 50 feet) high.

However, researcher Wayne H. Coste has created a thorough presentation on his research and evidence of the Pentagon crash, and concluded amongst others that a large plane most likely crashed into the Pentagon, as the verified route of the plane and the connected physical evidence on the ground, together with witness reports, is consistent with the damage caused by the crash to the Pentagon’s western side, especially to the ground floor of the building.²⁴ David Chandler has conducted a technical analysis of the 5 frames “leaked out” in 2002 of the crash, using special methods and has concluded that it is possible to recognize a plane image from those frames.²⁵ At the same time, the evidence is not convincing to indicate that the crashed plane was American Airlines flight 77, as have been pointed out by several researchers²⁶ and organisations, e.g. Pilots for 9/11 Truth.²⁷

There are many witnesses stating that a plane did hit Pentagon and that they saw it with their own eyes. The overview of such statements has been compiled by several researchers on different sites.²⁸ Yet, a number of these eyewitnesses expressed shock and disbelief at how a big jetliner had seemingly vanished in the wake of the crash. Several eyewitnesses reported that the jetliner exploded before reaching the facade of the Pentagon.²⁹ One witness from the Pentagon, executive administrative assistant April Gallop, who was inside the building at ground floor at the time of the event and claimed that she did not witness a passenger plane to actually hit the building.³⁰

Still, several other controversial issues are connected with the Pentagon crash that have not been given reasonable answers by the official theory. For instance, the Pentagon impact happened:

• 83 minutes after first passenger jet (flight 11) went off course
• 58 minutes after the North Tower impact and
• 40 minutes after the South Tower impact.

Flight 77 disappeared from radar screens at 8:56, that is 41 minutes before it hit the Pentagon. Yet, nothing was done by the US military and defence systems to hinder an off-course passenger jet to fly into and around the most well-protected airspace in the US. Andrews Air Force Base is situated less than 20 km from Pentagon.

Also, an unexperienced alleged pilot of that hijacked passenger jet – Hani Hanjour – performed complicated manoeuvrers with the passenger jet and chose a difficult ground level (in the range of less than 10 metres off the ground) approach to the Pentagon, instead of choosing a much simpler course to crash into the building. Moreover, surprisingly the hijackers chose to perform a difficult and abnormal 320-degree descending spiral just before hitting the Pentagon in order to hit the western side of the building that was situated just in the opposite side of the offices of the Pentagon’s high command. That side of the Pentagon was incidentally just undergoing a renovation and had the least number of people in it.

Shankesville crash (Flight 93)

The official theory maintains that flight 93 crashed in high speed at 10:03 near Shankesville, Pennsylvania, which was a result of inner struggle in the cockpit between the hijackers and passengers and this hijacked plane did not reach its target aimed by the perpetrators. The anomalies related to flight 93 are similar to those with other crash sites.

There was very little debris in the alleged crash site of the flight 93. The crash site was quickly sealed off by the authorities and no access was possible to other researchers. The crash site consists mainly of a crater of dubious size in the ground. It seems like the ground had “swallowed” the plane and left no other significant clues to suggest that it happened as the official theory has described the events.

Moreover, although there was very little debris in the crash site, the alleged debris from the plane was found from different locations and was scattered across thirteen kilometres (eight miles). No reasonable explanation has been given for this, except stating that may be “the wind” scattered the debris once on the ground.³¹

Some researchers like Jim Hoffman have suggested that flight 93 was most likely shot down by a missile, as the debris was widely scattered, there were testimonies from numerous ear- and eyewitnesses and that NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) and the 9/11 Commission changed the timeline to hide the plane’s true fate.³²

Yet, researcher Mark Conlon comes to a different conclusion. He has analyzed the publicly available wheels-off time data from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) database and telemetry data, which indicate that at 10:03 am (the official time of the crash³³) flight 93 was still in the air and for some time so. He further suggests according to the collected data that it was quite possible that the plane identifying itself as flight 93 did not crash at the site in Shankesville, but likely landed at 10:28 am at the Reagan National Airport in Washington.³⁴

(Continues as 9/11 Events Part 2)