So who were these people? According to Daniel Hopsicker, a former PBS producer and NBC investigative reporter, US military sources confirm that the alleged hijackers had trained in US military installations in the 1990s, and even had connections to the CIA and DEA. Dozens of eyewitnesses told local American newspapers that they recognized some of these individuals from their FBI photos -- they had displayed patently non-Islamic behaviour in the form of drinking alcohol, snorting cocaine, and frolicking with women at lap-dancing clubs and illicit parties, incommensurate with that of normal practising Muslims, let alone Islamist al-Qaeda fanatics about to conduct the most spectacular martyrdom operation in history.
So again: Who were these people who, simultaneously, seemingly associated with the senior echelons of al-Qaeda, trained with the US military, were recruited by the CIA, and indulged in all sorts of illicit delights forbidden by Islamic norms? It's a question that the 9/11 Commission never asked.
And How Did They Do It? "Er, Ahem, No Comment..."
But Hanjour's flight into the Pentagon, as is well-known, was described by pilots as one of the most sophisticated flying operations they had ever seen. "For a guy to just jump into the cockpit and fly like an ace is impossible -- there is not one chance in a thousand," said former US Air Force and commercial pilot Russ Wittenberg.
Indeed, with four hijacked aircraft flying around the most restricted airspace in the US for about one and a half hours, why did the FAA and NORAD fail to respond immediately? As Lt. Col. (ret.) Robert Bowman, director of the Star Wars programmes under Presidents Ford and Carter, has said, standard operating procedures were systematically violated. Many military and intelligence experts across continents -- such as Stan Goff, US Army Special Forces Master-Sergeant (ret.); Andreas von Bulow, former State-Secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Defence (1976-1980) and Minister for Research and Technology (1980-1982); Gen. Anatoli Kornukov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Force; among others -- remain perplexed on this point, and dissatisfied with the 9/11 Commission Report's inadequate explanations of this monumental failure, the damning implications of which were flagged up by John Pilger in the New Statesman.
There are related issues here of public safety. For instance, technologies were in place to remotely direct the hijacked aircraft to avoid the terrible scenario unfolding. "Most modern aircraft have some form of autopilot that could be re-programmed to ignore commands from a hijacker and instead take direction from the ground," Jeff Gosling of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, told the New Scientist one day after 9/11. Why were these technologies not used to save the aircraft? Why did the 9/11 Commission not bother to ask the same question?
The WTC Collapse Anomaly
Even the official account of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings is being increasingly disputed by some American scientists. In a peer-reviewed contribution to the new book 9/11 and the American Empire (Olive Branch, New York), Steve Jones, professor of physics at Brigham Young University (BYU), points out the widely reported discoveries of molten metal in the basements of the two WTC towers, which were hit by planes, as well as in the third building, WTC 7 -- a building which symmetrically collapsed despite not being hit by a plane. In all cases, the official account blames intense fires, made hotter due to jet (or in WTC 7's case diesel) fuel.
But all scientific investigations by NIST, FEMA and independent experts establish that the fires burned well below 2800˚ Fahrenheit, the melting point of steel. In other words, it is agreed by all that the fires never burned hot enough to melt the steel columns. Whether or not the steel was hot enough to buckle, the official account fails to explain the deposits of molten metal found after the collapses. If not the fires, what could have caused the steel to melt? Jones argues that the findings constitute "direct evidence for the use of high-temperature explosives, such as thermite, which produces molten iron as an end product." Perhaps there are other explanations, perhaps not. But the data itself represents a problem for the official account.
Shocking and absurd conspiraloonery? Not really. That's the easy way out. The scientific validity of Jones' line of inquiry has been supported by several other experts, such as Judy Wood, professor of Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University; and Charles N. Pegelow, a 30-year veteran structural engineer. Indeed, long before this emerging scientific dissent -- only 3 months after 9/11 -- the inadequacy of the official account had been flagged up by fire protection engineering experts. Editor Bill Manning wrote in Fire Engineering that:
"Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the 'official Investigation' blessed by FEMA... 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... Respected members of the fire protection engineering community are beginning to raise red flags, and a resonating [result] has emerged: The structural damage from the planes and the explosive ignition of jet fuel in themselves were not enough to bring down the towers...."
Professor Jones didn't write his paper to support a prior ideological-conspiratorial agenda -- he wrote it to point out that to date, conventional scientific explanations of the WTC collapses remain flawed and inadequate. The molten deposits found at Ground Zero, and the failure of the official narrative to account for them, represent an anomaly that should be investigated impartially, not dismissed for reasons of political convenience -- or arbitrary standards of the boundaries of sanity.
Five years on, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we still don't know what really happened on 9/11. And this dismal, pathetic state of affairs should not continue. The 9/11 families, and with them the wider public, have an elementary right to full answers to these basic questions. And I'm not about to offer you, the reader, an alternative all-explanatory theory, or a nice ready-made answer on a plate. I don't have one. I just offer you the raw data to start a healthy process of cognitive dissonance, with which you can do as you please.
But I will say that there is one thing we do know: that much of the official narrative is untenable, in surprising and disturbing ways. As our leaders continue to push the Middle East toward the brink of nuclear war, while crushing civil liberties and criminalizing dissent at home, the case for a truly independent public inquiry into the phenomenon of terror could not be clearer.
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