62 online
 
Most Popular Choices
Share on Facebook 9 Printer Friendly Page More Sharing
Exclusive to OpEd News:
OpEdNews Op Eds   

TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11

By       (Page 1 of 1 pages)   3 comments
Message Robert Halfhill

 
          TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11  
          By Robert Halfhill

   I guess those of us who see many unexplained discrepancies with
the official government account of 9/11 owe a debt of thanks to
Katherine Kersten.  Although I am sure it was not her intention, by
launching another attack on Keith Ellison, she inadvertently brought
9/11 back into public discussion, and provided another opportunity to
break through the media blackout on views that dissent from the
official conspiracy theory that an Islamic terrorist organization,
headquartered in Afghanistan, sent 19 men with box cutters to
infiltrate the United states to hijack four plane and wreak appalling
destruction by crashing them into buildings.
   The first question about the official story is that since the
World Trade Center had already been attacked by terrorists once
before in 1993 and it remained the one place where a successful
terrorist act would make the greatest impression, why was there no
attempt to guard the WTC or prepare defenses?  I remember thinking in
1993 that the terrorists had to only be successful once while we had
to be successful every time.
   Second, the U.S. government received at least eleven warnings from
foreign intelligence services about Al Qaida's plan for a big attack
on the United States before they struck the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon.  Again, why were no counter measures prepared?
   Third, the Minneapolis FBI tried to obtain approval from the FISA
Court to look at Zacarias Moussaoui's computer after he was arrested
for being in the country illegally.  But as Minneapolis FBI agent
Coleen Rowley testified to a Senate hearing, the National FBI Office
even rewrote the Minneapolis Office's request to FISA so it failed to
be approved.
   Fourth, the Phoenix FBI Office had noticed the large number of
Middle Eastern men enrolling for flight training.  Someone from the
Phoenix Office pointed out to the National Office that a plane could
be used as a weapon.
   Fifth, there is the mind boggling incompetence of both the
civilian air traffic control system and the military North American
Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).  The civilian air traffic control
system's radar can detect a plane going off course immediately, as
soon as it deviates from its flight plan.  Boston Air Traffic Control
detected American Airlines Flight 11 going off course as soon as it
deviated from its flight plan at 8:14 A.M. on September 11, 2001. 
But it did not notify several other air traffic control centers until
8:25 A.M., eleven minutes later.  And it did not notify NORAD until
8:40 A.M.  The two F-15 Eagles that were eventually scrambled from
Otis
Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which was 153
miles northwest of the World Trade Center and which had a top speed
of over 1875 miles per hour, could have reached the WTC in seven
minutes with more than enough time to intercept AA 11 if the F-15's
had been in the air soon after 8:14 A.M or even 8:25 A.M.  However,
the F-15's were not in the air until 8:52 A.M., six minutes after AA
11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 A.M.  If
NORAD had been informed and had the F-15's in the air soon after AA
11 was detected going off course at 8:14 A.M., there would have been
far more than enough time to intercept it.
   At 8:41:32 A.M., there was a suspicious radio transmission from
United Airlines Flight 175 which sounded something like "everyone
stay in your seats."  Boston Air Traffic Control informed NORAD that
UA 175 had been hijacked at 8:43 and there would have been more
than enough
time for the two F-15"s, which were air borne by 8:52 A.M. to
intercept UA 175 before it hit the South Tower at 9:02:54 A.M.  That
is there would have been more than enough time if the two F-15's had
not been flying at only 23.9% of their top speed!
   At 8:55 A.M., Barbara Olson called her husband, Solicitor General
Theodore Olson from American Airlines Flight 77 to tell him that the
plane had been hijacked.  Since Theodore Olson was a high government
official, we may assume that he informed the government shortly
afterwards.  AA 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37 A.M.  At their top speed,
the two F-15's could have intercepted AA 77 twenty-four minutes
before it hit the Pentagon.
  At 9:55 A.M., United Airlines Flight 93 went of course near
Cleveland and began a 135 degree turn over Ohio and Northern
Kentucky.  It crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:06:05 A.M.
   If the police officer pursuing fleeing criminals drove her or his
squad car at on 23.9 percent of the car's top speed, the most
probable conclusion would be that the officer intended to let the
criminals escape.  Human stupidity can account for a lot and even
mount to civil or even criminal negligence.  But when there is a
series of one incredible, mind boggling stupidity after another,
there has to be a malign intent to bring about the opposite of what
officials are supposedly trying to achieve, in this case to ensure
that the hijackers succeed.  But there's more!
   Six, why did the government officials ship most of the steel from
the World Trade Center out of the country, even though it is a felony
to remove evidence from a crime scene.  In the October 6, 2005 issue
of
NEW CIVIL ENGINEER, Dave Parker writes in "WTC Investigators Resist
Call For Collapse Visualization" that nearly all the WTC steel was
shipped out to Asia and melted down for recycling.
   Seven, Why did the Bush Administration fight against having public
hearings on 9/11 for nearly 18 months although public hearings on
Pearl Harbor were held within weeks after the event?  9/11 hearings
were not held until the relatives of those killed at the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon exerted enough lobbying pressure to force the
hearings to be held, and even then, only one-tenth of their questions
were answered.
   And eight, why did the government not even allow the visitors to
the site of the World Trade Center to even take photographs of the
ruins and why did the government confiscate photos and videos of the
attack on the Pentagon?   Could both seven and eight be part of an
attempt to hide evidence of government complicity?
   In his editorial, "Selling out the Investigation," in the January,
2002 FIRE ENGINEERING, William Manning wrote that "Fire Engineering
has good reason to believe that the 'official investigation' blessed
by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) ... is a half baked
farce that may already have been
commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it
mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure."  Manning also criticized
the investigation in another editorial, "The Twisted Brush of 9/11
Politics" in the September, 2004 FIRE ENGINEERING.
   Robert Berhinig, P.E. states in "Protecting the Foundation of Fire-
Safety," in the July/August, 2002 IAEI (International Association of
Electrical Inspectors, the definitive magazine for electrical
inspectors) that "the FEMA report states further that until the
attack on the WTC, no protected steel framed buildings had been known
to collapse as a result of a fire."  Yet on 9/11, after steel framed
buildings had been around for over a hundred years, since the late
1800's, three protected steel framed buildings, WTC 1, 2, and 7, had
collapsed, supposedly because of fire.
   There are many other suspicious anomalies about 9/11.  Only a few
are, nine, all three World Trade Center buildings collapsed at nearly
free fall speed, i.e. almost as fast as it would take an object
dropped from one of the WTC building's roof to reach the ground.  The
resistance of the massive steel columns and concrete would have
slowed the fall considerably if it had been a matter of the floors
pancaking and falling on the floors below.  And ten, fire would have
unlikely to have been equally intense at every point in the buildings
so that they fell onto the surface area they stood on, i.e. on to
their footprint.  Eleventh, although fire had never caused the
girders in protected steel framed buildings to become ductile or
loose sufficient strength to result in a building collapse, pools of
molten steel remained at the bottom of the wreckage for 100 days. 
And twelve, although an ordinary building collapse would produce
chunks of broken concrete, the steel, concrete and asbestos in the
three World Trade Center buildings was mostly converted to a fine
dust which flowed out from the WTC through the streets of Manhattan
in the manner of the pyroclastic
flows produced from volcanoes.  And Thirteen, although the buildings
were not even observed to move at all when the planes crashed into
them, nearby geological observatories detected seismic tremblors as
if there had been massive explosions at ground level when the
buildings collapsed.  And while WTC 7 had not even been struck by a
plane, all the phenomena previously mentioned accompanied its
collapse also.  And fourteen, while the Environmental Protection
Agency said that the air around the World Trade Center was safe to
breath after 9/11, we now know that our government lied yet again
because of all the deaths from asbestosis and other respiratory
diseases among both the humans and dogs who were involved in the WTC
cleanup.  And fifteen, while it is standard procedure for the secret
service to hustle the President away from the scene immediately
whenever there is a hint of danger, George Bush remained in the
Florida elementary school reading "The Pet Goat" for nearly a half an
hour, even though there was supposedly no assurance that there would
not be an attempt to crash a plane into the school.
   And although the Bush Administration attempted to ship all the
steel from the World Trade Center to China and Korea, some of the
steel girders were saved by 9/11 investigators.  And the massive
amounts of metal in the dust which surged out from the WTC collapse
provided additional metal for investigators to study.  Brigham Young
University Professor of Physics, Steven E. Jones obtained some of the
metal containing dust after he had published his first paper  about
9/11 online in November, 2005.  Janette Mackinlay had returned to her
apartment on the fourth floor of 113 Cedar Street, which was about
100 meters, or 328 feet, away from the South Tower, about a week
after her apartment had been flooded with dust to clean up.  She had
saved some of the dust in a plastic bag and mailed some of it to
Jones after he published his first paper online.  Later, he traveled
to MacKinlay's new residence in California and obtained a second
sample of WTC dust in the presence of other scientists.
   In his subsequent online paper, "Revisiting 9/11, 2001 -- Applying
the Scientific Method," Professor Jones reported that the dust
contained clear traces of thermate.  Thermate is an explosive used to
melt and cut steel in controlled building demolitions.  It is a well
mixed powder of iron, aluminum and sulfur. The sulfur lowers the
melting point of iron, or steel, and cuts right through it. 
Sometimes other metallic powders are mixed in to fine tune the
characteristics of the explosives.  Doctor Jones found all of these
substances in the dust.
   David Heller, who has degrees in physics and engineering, makes
many of the same points Dr. Jones made in Heller's article, "TAKING A
CLOSE LOOK; HARD SCIENCE AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER,"
in the June 18, 2007 GARLIC AND GRASS.  After he states that the
collapse of all three World Trade Center buildings was a controlled
demolition brought about by pre-planted thermate explosives, he
states that it would
seem impossible for Al Qaida to preplant the explosives, especially
since WTC 7 housed the offices of the FBI, CIA, and OEM(Office of
Emergency Management).  But he says
that recently he learned that President George Bush's brother, Marvin
Bush, is a part owner of the company that provides security for not
only the the
World Trade Center buildings but also both United and American
Airlines, the two airlines whose planes were hijacked on 9/11.  He
also pointed out that the owner of the World Trade Center, Larry
Silverstein, had received a $3.55 billion insurance settlement after
9/11 and was suing for an additional $3.55 billion on the grounds
that the airplane crashes into the Twin Towers constituted two
separate incidents.
   However, regardless of Silverstein's motives, it is unlikely that
he could have played a major role in planting the explosives in the
building containing the offices of the FBI, CIA and OEM.  Only the
United States government could have carried that off and Silverstein,
at most, could have played no more than a subsidiary role.
   The final step in a criminal investigation is asking who had the
motive to do the crime.  Whose poll numbers shot up into the
stratosphere after 9/11 and who gained the popular support to enable
the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, abolish habaeus corpus and, at
least, the de jure power to lock anyone up for life without a trial
or even telling them why they were being imprisoned?   Only the neo
cons and the Bush Administration, although Bush may be only a front
man and Dick Cheney the real power behind the throne.  It was the neo
con Project for a New American Century who proposed that the U.S.
seize the lands where the world's dwindling supply of oil is located
and who were quoted in NEWSWEEK as saying that the American people
may need a new Pearl Harbor to wake them up.
   But if enough people realize in time just how bad our government
is, we can counter them before it is too late.
   Robert Halfhill   Loring Park
     

Rate It | View Ratings

Robert Halfhill Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

DOB -- September 20, 1940. Became active in civil rights and peace movements in 1962. Active in socialist and antiwar movements -- 1963-69. Active in Gay Liberation from 1969 to present.
Go To Commenting
The views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Writers Guidelines

 
Contact AuthorContact Author Contact EditorContact Editor Author PageView Authors' Articles
Support OpEdNews

OpEdNews depends upon can't survive without your help.

If you value this article and the work of OpEdNews, please either Donate or Purchase a premium membership.

STAY IN THE KNOW
If you've enjoyed this, sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter to get lots of great progressive content.
Daily Weekly     OpEd News Newsletter
Name
Email
   (Opens new browser window)
 

Most Popular Articles by this Author:     (View All Most Popular Articles by this Author)

Christianity's Persecution of Gays: Historical Bigotry

TOO MANY SUSPICIOUS ANOMALIES ABOUT 9/11

DOES ANYONE STILL BELIEVE THAT LESSER EVIL VOTING FOR DEMOCRATS IS A VIABLE STRATEGY?

To View Comments or Join the Conversation:

Tell A Friend