I.  How Could Hijacked Airliners Have Struck the WTC and the Pentagon?

If the standard operating procedure of the FAA and the US military had been carried out on the morning of 9/11, AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175 would have been intercepted before they reached Manhattan, and Flight 77 would have been intercepted long before it could have reached the Pentagon. (Such interceptions are routine, being carried out about 100 times a year.) As to why these interceptions did not occur, the public has never been given a plausible explanation. Indeed, we have received three mutually inconsistent stories.

In the first few days, military officials said that no fighter jets were sent up by NORAD until after the strike on the Pentagon at 9:38, even though signs that Flight 11 had been hijacked were observed at 8:15. That would mean that although interceptions usually occur within 15 minutes, in this case over 80 minutes had elapsed before any fighters were even airborne. This story suggested that a “stand-down” order had been issued.

Within a few days, a second story was put out, according to which NORAD had sent up fighters but, because FAA notification had unaccountably come very late, the fighters did not arrive soon enough to prevent the attacks. Critics showed, however, that even if the FAA’s notifications had come as late as NORAD claimed, there would have been time for interceptions to occur. This second story did not, therefore, remove the suspicion that a stand-down order had been given.

The 9/11 Commission Report gives a third account, according to which, contrary to NORAD’s timeline of September 18, 2001, the FAA did not notify NORAD about Flights 175 and 77 until after they had struck their targets. This third story, besides contradicting the second story and also considerable evidence that the FAA had notified the military in a timely manner, contains many inherent implausibilities. It does not, accordingly, remove grounds for suspicion that a stand-down order had been issued—a suspicion for which there is ear-witness testimony.

II. Why Did the Twin Towers and Building 7 of the WTC Collapse?

The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney has also failed to provide a credible explanation of the total collapses of the World Trade Center buildings. According to the official explanation, the Twin Towers collapsed because of the impact of the airplanes and the heat from the ensuing fires. But this explanation faces several formidable problems.
First, Building 7 also collapsed, and in about the same way. This similarity implies that all three buildings collapsed because of the same causes. But building 7 was not hit by a plane, so its collapse must be explained by fire alone. That would lead to the conclusion that all three buildings collapsed from fire alone.

Second, however, the fires in these three buildings were not very big, very hot, or very long-lasting, compared with fires in some steel-frame high-rises that did not induce collapses. In 1991, for example, a fire in Philadelphia burned for 18 hours, and in 2004, a fire in Caracas burned for 17 hours. But neither of these fires resulted in even a partial collapse, let alone a total collapse. By contrast, the World Trade Center’s north and south towers burned only 102 and 56 minutes, respectively, before they collapsed. Building 7, moreover, had fires on only a few floors, according to some witnesses and all the photographic evidence.

Third, total collapses of steel-frame high-rise buildings have never, either before or after 9/11, been brought about by fire alone, or fire combined with structural damage from airplanes. All such collapses have been caused by explosives in the procedure known as “controlled demolition.”

Fourth, the collapses of these three WTC buildings all manifested many standard features of controlled demolition, such as: sudden onset (whereas steel, if weakened by fire, would gradually begin to sag); straight-down collapse (as opposed to falling over); collapse at virtually free-fall speed (indicating that the lower floors were offering little if any resistance); total collapse (indicating that the massive steel columns in the core of each building had been sliced into many pieces—which is what explosives do in controlled demolitions); the production of molten steel; and the occurrence of multiple explosions, as reported by dozens of people—including journalists, police officers, WTC employees, emergency medical workers, and firefighters. The official theory cannot explain one, let alone all, of these features—at least, as physicist Steven Jones has pointed out, without violating several basic laws of physics. But the theory of controlled demolition easily explains them all.

Fifth, although the question of whether explosives were used could have been answered by examining the buildings’ steel columns, virtually all of the steel was immediately sold to scrap dealers, trucked away, and sent to Asia to be melted down. Moreover, although it is usually a federal crime to remove anything from a crime scene, in this case the removal was overseen by government officials.
Sixth, al-Qaeda terrorists could not have obtained access to the buildings for the enormous number of hours it would have taken to plant the explosives. But the question of how agents of the Bush-Cheney administration could have gotten such access can be answered by pointing out that Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III—the president’s brother and cousin, respectively—were principals of the company in charge of security for the WTC. It is also doubtful that al-Qaeda terrorists would have had the courtesy to ensure that the buildings would come straight down, rather than falling over onto other buildings.

III. Could the Official Account of the Pentagon Possibly Be True?

According to the official account, the Pentagon was struck by AA Flight 77, under the control of al-Qaeda hijacker Hani Hanjour. This account is challenged by many facts.

First, Flight 77 allegedly, after making a U-turn in the mid-west, flew back to Washington undetected for 40 minutes, even though it was then known that hijacked airliners were being used as weapons and even though the US military has the best radar systems in the world, one of which, it brags, “does not miss anything occurring in North American airspace.”

Second, the aircraft, in order to hit the west wing, reportedly executed a 270-degree downward spiral, which according to some experts would have been impossible for a Boeing 757. Hanjour, moreover, was known as “a terrible pilot,” who could not even fly a small airplane.

Third, how could a pilot as poor as Hanjour have found his way back to Washington without guidance from the ground?

Fourth, the Pentagon is surely the best defended building on the planet. It is not only within the P-56-A restricted air space that extends 17 miles in all directions from the Washington Monument, but also within P-56-B, the three-mile ultra-restricted zone above the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. It is only a few miles from Andrews Air Force Base, which, assigned to protect these restricted zones, has at least three squadrons with fighter jets on alert at all times. (The claim by The 9/11 Commission Report that no fighters were on alert the morning of 9/11 is wholly implausible.) Also, the Pentagon is surely protected by batteries of surface-to-air missiles, which are programmed to destroy any aircraft without a US military transponder entering the Pentagon’s airspace. (So even if Flight 77 had entered the Pentagon’s airspace, it could have escaped being shot down only if officials in the Pentagon had deactivated its anti-aircraft defenses.)

Fifth, terrorists brilliant enough to get through the US military’s defense system would not have struck the west wing, for many reasons: It had been reinforced, so the damage was less severe than a strike anywhere else would have been; it was still being renovated, so relatively few people were there; the secretary of defense and all the top brass, whom terrorists would presumably have wanted to kill, were in the east wing; and hitting the west wing required a difficult maneuver, whereas crashing into the roof would have been easier and deadlier.

Sixth, there is considerable evidence that the aircraft that struck the Pentagon was not even a Boeing 757. For one thing, unlike the strikes on the Twin Towers, the strike on the Pentagon did not create a detectable seismic signal. Also, the kind of damage and debris that would have been produced by the impact of a Boeing 757 was not produced by the strike on the Pentagon, according to both photographs and eyewitnesses. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was then an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel employed at the Pentagon, writes of “a strange lack of visible debris on the Pentagon lawn, where I stood only moments after the impact. . . . I saw . . . no airplane metal or cargo debris.” Photographs show that the façade of the west wing remained standing for 30 minutes after the strike and that, during this time, the hole in this façade was only about 16 to 18 feet in diameter. A Boeing 757 has a wingspan of about 125 feet, and a steel engine is mounted on each wing. And yet there was, as Former Air Force Colonel George Nelson has pointed out, no visible damage on either side of this hole. Former pilot Ralph Omholt, discussing both debris and damage on the basis of the photographic evidence, writes: “there is no doubt that a plane did not hit the Pentagon. There is no hole big enough to swallow a 757. . . . There is no viable evidence of burning jet fuel. . . . The pre-collapse Pentagon section showed no ‘forward-moving’ damage. . . . There was no tail, no wings; no damage consistent with a B-757 ‘crash.’”

Additional evidence that no large airliner hit the west wing is provided by the fact that the fourth-floor office of Isabelle Slifer, which was directly above the strike zone (between the first and second floors), was not damaged by the initial impact.

There is considerable evidence, moreover, that the aircraft that struck the Pentagon was instead a US military missile. This evidence consists partly of testimony. Lon Rains, editor of Space News, said: “I was convinced it was a missile. It came in so fast it sounded nothing like an airplane.” The upper management official at LAX, quoted earlier as saying that he overheard members of LAX Security receiving word of a stand-down order, says that they later received word that “the Pentagon had been hit by a rocket.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in an apparent slip of the tongue, referred in an interview to “the missile [used] to damage this building.”

The missile hypothesis is also supported by physical evidence. Dr. Janette Sherman of Alexandria reports that shortly after the strike her Geiger counter showed the radiation level, about 12 miles downwind from the Pentagon, to be 8-10 times higher than normal. Two days later, Bill Bellinger, the EPA radiation expert for the region, said that the rubble at the crash site was radioactive, adding that he believed the source to be depleted uranium. These findings are what one would expect, says Dr. Leuren Moret—formerly a scientist at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory—if the Pentagon had been struck by a military missile with a depleted uranium warhead.

On the basis of all this evidence, retired Army Major Doug Rokke has said: “When you look at the whole thing, especially the crash site void of airplane parts [and] the size of the hole left in the building . . . , it looks like the work of a missile.”

A seventh reason to be dubious about the official story is that evidence was destroyed. Shortly after the strike, government agents picked up debris from the Pentagon in front of the impact site, put it in a large container, and carried it off. Shortly thereafter the entire lawn was covered with dirt and gravel, with the result that any remaining forensic evidence was covered up. FBI agents also immediately confiscated the videos from security cameras on two nearby buildings. Although the Department of Justice, responding to a request under the Freedom of Information Act, has acknowledged the FBI’s possession of at least one of these videos, the DoJ has refused to release it.
These seven problems, besides challenging the official account, collectively indicate that the strike on the Pentagon was orchestrated by forces within our own government—an act that would clearly constitute treason.

IV. Why Did the President and His Secret Service Agents Remain at the School?

President George W. Bush reportedly believed, upon hearing that a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers, that it was an accident. It was not terribly strange, therefore, that he decided to go ahead with the photo-op at the school in Sarasota. Word of the second strike, however, should have indicated to him and his Secret Service agents—assuming the truth of official story, according to which these strikes were unexpected—that the country was undergoing an unprecedented terrorist attack. And yet the Secret Service allowed him to remain at the school for another half hour.

This behavior was very strange. The president’s location had been highly publicized. If the attacks were indeed unexpected, the Secret Service would have had no idea how many planes had been hijacked, and they would have had to assume that the president himself might be one of the targets: What could be more satisfying to foreign terrorists attacking high-value targets in the United States than to kill the president? For all the Secret Service would have known, a hijacked airliner might have been bearing down on the school at that very minute, ready to crash into it, killing the president and everyone else there—including the Secret Service agents themselves. It is, in any case, standard procedure for the Secret Service to rush the president to a safe location whenever there is any sign that he may be in danger. And yet these agents, besides allowing the president to remain in the classroom another 10 minutes, permitted him to speak on television, thereby announcing to the world that he was still at the school.

Would not this behavior be explainable only if Bush and the head of the Secret Service detail knew that the planned attacks did not include an attack on the president? And how could this have been known for certain unless the attacks were being carried out by people within our own government? The 9/11 Commission, far from asking these questions, was content to report that “[t]he Secret Service told us they . . . did not think it imperative for [the president] to run out the door.” A serious inquiry into this matter, therefore, remains to be made.

V. Why Did the 9/11 Commission Lie about Vice President Cheney?

One sign of the complicity of Vice President Cheney is the fact that the 9/11 Commission evidently felt a need to lie about the time of two of his activities: his entry into the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) under the White House and his giving the order to shoot down any unauthorized airplanes.

It had been widely reported that Cheney had gone down to the PEOC shortly after the second strike on the WTC, hence about 9:15. The most compelling witness was Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, who testified to the 9/11 Commission that when he arrived at the PEOC at 9:20, Cheney was already there and fully in charge. The 9/11 Commission Report, however, claimed that Cheney did not enter the PEOC until “shortly before 10:00, perhaps at 9:58.” Mineta’s testimony, given in an open hearing, was simply omitted from the Commission’s final report. Why would the Commission go to such lengths to conceal the true time of Cheney’s entry into the PEOC?

One possible reason would involve the content of Mineta’s testimony. He said:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President . . . said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”

Mineta said that this conversation—evidently meaning the final exchange—occurred at about 9:25 or 9:26.

This testimony creates a problem for the official story. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s spokesman, in explaining why the Pentagon was not evacuated before it was struck, claimed that “[t]he Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way.” The 9/11 Commission claimed that there was no warning about an unidentified aircraft heading towards Washington until 9:36 and hence only “one or two minutes” before the Pentagon was struck at 9:38. Mineta’s account, however, says that Cheney knew about an approaching aircraft more than 10 minutes earlier. There would have been over 12 minutes for the Pentagon to be evacuated.

Mineta’s account also seems to suggest that Cheney had issued stand-down orders. Mineta himself did not make this allegation, saying instead that he assumed that “the orders” were to have the plane shot down. But besides the fact that that interpretation does not fit what actually happened–the aircraft was not shot down—it would make the story unintelligible: The question whether the orders still stood would not make sense unless they were orders to do something unexpected—not to shoot the aircraft down. By omitting Mineta’s testimony and stating that Cheney did not enter the PEOC until almost 10:00, the 9/11 Commission implied that Cheney could not have given a stand-down order to allow an aircraft to strike the Pentagon.

The lie about Cheney’s entry into the PEOC was also important to the controversy over whether the US military shot down Flight 93. The 9/11 Commission, simply ignoring a vast amount of evidence that the military did so, supported the official claim that it did not. The Commission provided this support by claiming that Cheney, having not arrived at the PEOC until almost 10:00, did not issue the shoot-down order until after 10:10—which would have been seven or more minutes after Flight 93 had crashed (at 10:03). But in addition to the evidence that Cheney had been in the PEOC since about 9:15, we also have evidence—including statements from Richard Clarke and Colonel Robert Marr, the head of NORAD’s northeast sector (NEADS)—that Cheney’s shoot-down order was issued well before 10:00.

The 9/11 Commission’s obvious lies about Cheney’s activities give reason to suspect that it, under the leadership of Philip Zelikow, was trying to conceal Cheney’s responsibility for the Pentagon strike and the downing of Flight 93.

VI. Did Members of the Bush-Cheney Administration Have Reasons to Desire the Attacks of 9/11?

Besides having the means and opportunity to orchestrate the events of 9/11 and their subsequent cover-up, high officials in the Bush-Cheney administration would also have had motives.

Afghanistan: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, had said that establishing military bases in Central Asia would be crucial for maintaining “American primacy,” partly because of the huge oil reserves around the Caspian Sea. But American democracy, he added, “is inimical to imperial mobilization.” Brzezinski, explaining that the public had “supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,” suggested that Americans today would support the needed military operations in Central Asia only “in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”

Support for these operations was generated by 9/11 plus the claim by the Bush-Cheney administration that the attacks had been planned in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden—-a claim for which it refused to provide any proof.

A more specific motivation was provided by the “pipeline war.” The Bush-Cheney administration supported–as had the Clinton-Gore administration until 1999–UNOCAL’s plan to build an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban, being unable to provide sufficient security, had become regarded as an obstacle. In a meeting in Berlin in July 2001, representatives of the Bush-Cheney administration, trying to get the Taliban to share power with other factions, reportedly gave them an ultimatum: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.” When the Taliban refused, the Americans reportedly said that “military action against Afghanistan would go ahead . . . before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”

Given the fact that the attacks on New York and Washington occurred on September 11, the U.S. military had time to get logistically ready to begin the attack on Afghanistan on October 7.

Iraq: Some key members of the Bush-Cheney administration—including Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney himself—had in the late 1990s been active members of an organization, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), that advocated attacking Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, establish a strong military presence, and control the oil. PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, released late in 2000, reiterated the idea of a permanent military presence in the Gulf region, saying that the “unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification” but “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Immediately upon taking office, the Bush administration—two former members have revealed— was intent on attacking Iraq. Then in 2003, after its war in Afghanistan, the administration used 9/11 as a pretext for attacking Iraq, partly by suggesting that Saddam was involved in the attacks, partly by playing on the American people’s sense, created by 9/11, of being vulnerable to a major attack from abroad.

Increased Military Spending: A second possible motive was provided by PNAC’s more general goal of further increasing America’s military superiority to be able to achieve global domination. This goal had already been asserted in the draft of the “Defense Planning Guidance” written in 1992 by Wolfowitz and Libby under the guidance of Cheney, who was completing his tenure as secretary of defense. (In an essay that was entered into the Congressional Record, this draft was portrayed as an early version of Cheney’s “Plan . . . to rule the world.”)

In 2000, Wolfowitz and Libby were listed as participants in the project to produce PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, in which this goal showed up again. This document also contained an idea perhaps derived from Brzezinski’s book: After saying that the desired Pax Americana “must have a secure foundation on unquestioned U.S. military preeminence” and that such preeminence will require a technological transformation of the US military, it adds that this process of transformation will “likely be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event–like a new Pearl Harbor.”

When 9/11 came, it was immediately treated as “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century,” as President Bush reportedly called it that very night. It was also characterized as, in Bush’s words, “a great opportunity,” with Rumsfeld adding that 9/11 created “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.” This idea then showed up in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued by the Bush administration in September 2002, which brazenly said: “The events of September 11, 2001 opened vast, new opportunities.”

A central dimension of the desired technological transformation of the military is the weaponization of space, euphemistically called “Missile Defense.” In January of 2001, the Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space Management and Organization, which was chaired by Rumsfeld, published its report. Speaking of the need for massive funding for the U.S. Space Command, the Rumsfeld Commission asked whether such funding would occur only after a “Space Pearl Harbor.”

On the evening of 9/11, Rumsfeld held a press conference. In attendance was Senator Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who was asked this question: “Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don’t have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending. . . ? Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and much more later, with few questions asked.

VII. Summation: The 9/11 Attacks as Acts of Treason

The facts recited above constitute prima facie evidence that the named individuals—U.S. President George W. Bush, U.S. Vice President Richard B. Cheney, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld—and other John and Jane Does are independently and jointly guilty of Treason against these United States under Article III(3) of the U.S. Constitution, because:

I. The attacks of 9/11, as portrayed in the official account, could not have succeeded if standard operating procedures between the FAA and NORAD had been followed. The Pentagon, under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, has provided three mutually inconsistent accounts of NORAD’s response, which means that at least two of them are false. Moreover, the third account, articulated by the 9/11 Commission, is contradicted by a wide range of facts, including evidence that the FAA had notified NORAD in a timely fashion. There must have been stand-down orders, and these could have come only from the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House.

II. Overwhelming evidence exists that the collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7 were instances of controlled demolition. But al-Qaeda operatives could not have obtained the needed access to the buildings to plant the explosives and would not have ensured that the buildings come straight down. The controlled demolition, therefore, had to be the work of insiders. That President Bush was one of those insiders is suggested by the fact that his brother and cousin were principals in the company in charge of WTC security. Complicity at the highest levels of the federal government is also indicated by the removal of evidence (the collapsed steel), which is normally a federal offense. Finally, if the airplane strikes could have occurred only with the consent of the president and the secretary of defense (as suggested in the previous point), the coordination of these strikes with the demolition of the buildings implies their involvement in the latter as well.

III. Overwhelming evidence also exists for the conclusion that the attack on the Pentagon was an inside job. That the official story could not be true is evident from many facts: Hani Hanjour’s incompetence; the choice of the west wing as the target; the impossibility of a commercial airliner’s coming back to Washington undetected and hitting the Pentagon unless permitted; and the lack of physical evidence consistent with an attack by a Boeing 757. That the strike was an inside job is implied by the falsity of the official story, the evidence that the strike was made by a military aircraft, the removal of evidence, and the government’s refusal to release videos of the strike. This operation could hardly have been planned without the involvement of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

IV. Complicity at the highest levels of the federal government is also indicated by President Bush’s remaining at the school after it was evident—given the truth of the official account—that the United States was experiencing a surprise attack. This behavior makes sense only if Bush and his lead Secret Service agent knew that there would be no attack on the school.

V. The complicity of Vice President Cheney in the attack on the Pentagon and the downing of Flight 93 is implied by the testimony of Secretary Mineta in conjunction with the false claims of the 9/11 Commission, under the guidance of administration insider Philip Zelikow, as to when Cheney went to the PEOC and when he issued the shoot-down authorization.

VI. The conclusion from the evidence that members of the Bush administration orchestrated the attacks of 9/11 is reinforced by the fact that they had some huge projects—prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and obtaining funding to accelerate the technological transformation of the military—that would likely be possible only in the event of “a new Pearl Harbor.”

On the basis of this and other evidence, the conclusion that the Bush-Cheney administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks has been reached by many Americans, including intellectuals and former military officers. It is time for an independent official investigation into this evidence.

CAVEAT LECTOR: This memorandum is based upon the best public research resources presently available. It is presented not as a full treatment of the subject but as merely a brief summary pointing to the existence of sufficient prima facie evidence to warrant the appointment of an independent prosecutor.
ATTACHMENTS

My Observation of LAX Security Events on 9/11
By an Upper Management LAX Official

I was employed in upper management at LAX involved with security in the APO (Air Port Operations—where the planes are, not the passengers). I will not otherwise identify myself in this statement, since I, for both personal and professional reasons, need to remain anonymous. But I will give as much detail as possible about security-related events in the APO that I overheard on September 11, 2001, and will also suggest ways in which my account could be corroborated.

“Security” in the APO involves the CHP, LAWA PD, LAPD, and the FBI, herein referred to as “Security” (but the CHP was not in proximity to me during the period my account covers).

My Account

As on other days, there was “chatter” on LAX Security walkie-talkies, so what Security was saying could easily be heard. On some of the walkie-talkies I could overhear both sides of the conversations, on others only one. I do not know who was at the other end of the walkie-talkies, but I can only assume that it was LAX dispatch or command.

While there, I observed and heard the following:

At first, LAX Security was very upset because at that time it seemed to Security that none of the Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) tracking the hijacked airliners had notified NORAD as required. Security was well aware that LAX was a target and Emergency SOP were already in progress in that there was discussion of evacuating the airport.

More chatter revealed that the ATCs had notified NORAD, but that NORAD had not responded because it had been “ordered to stand down.” This report made Security even more upset, so they tried to find out who had issued that order. A short time later the word came down that the order had come “from the highest level of the White House.” This seemed inappropriate, so Security made attempts for more details and clarification, which was not resolved in my presence.

3 planes were grounded and swapped out in Atlanta, Georgia, simply because they did not pass the routine pre-flight inspection checklist. Those planes were found to be fully loaded with automatic weapons. LAX Security surmised that could only have been accomplished by Maintenance, the Caterers, but, in their view, most likely by “House Keeping.”

LAX Security believed that the terrorists did not board the planes through the passenger terminals, but rather by similar means, i.e. via House Keeping. Other airports were mentioned, but I was unable to get it all down. Therefore, I don’t have an accurate accounting for the status and location of the other planes.

Another piece of information that I overheard was that the Pentagon had been hit by a rocket.

There was also a radio station identifying itself as LAX Radio, from which the following was heard:

There were 11 planes and 11 targets. But at the time only 10 of the targets were mentioned: the WTC; the Pentagon; the White House; the Capitol; Camp David; the Sears Tower; the Space Needle; the Trans America Bldg.; LAX; and Air Force One–“if it could be found.”

Two fighter jets had been scrambled and had successfully shot down a hijacked airliner over Pennsylvania. The point of deployment of the fighter jets was also mentioned, but I can’t remember the name of the military base.

Points of origin mentioned included Newark, Atlanta, and other locations, but it was confusing to me in that I couldn’t determine if they were with respect to hijacked planes or fighter jets being scrambled. Unfortunately the names of these airports were not all familiar to me or it would have been easier for me to account for them.

As I was leaving there was an order to evacuate the airport.

In 2001 and 2002 I tried to notify the media of the events at LAX, but they made it clear they were not interested.

Possible Corroboration

I can think of four ways in which my account of what I heard could be corroborated:

1st     LAWA PD, LAPD, and FBI records will reveal the names of the security officers on duty in the APO during the time of the attacks.

2nd    I believe the head of LAX Security in the APO at that time was Captain Gray. He should be able to confirm the fact that my account reflects what happened that morning.

3rd    The audio recordings of radio transmissions at LAX would reveal the comments of all the Security officers and LAX dispatch/command.

4th    The audio recording of the LAX Radio broadcast would reveal what was broadcast on 911.

Note: Items 3 and 4 would reveal if I have inadvertently confused information attained from LAX Security with information received from LAX Radio. (For example, I believe I heard the comment about a rocket hitting the Pentagon during the walkie-talkie conversations, but it is possible that I heard it later on the radio.

FOOTNOTES

See David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Books, 2005), 7-12, 282-85.

2 Ibid. For a summary statement of the omissions and distortions discussed in that book, see Griffin, “The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-Page Lie,” 9/11 Visibility Project, May 22, 2005  (http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2005-05-22-571pglie.php).

3 The FAA reported in a news release on August 9, 2002, that it had scrambled fighters 67 times between September 2000 and June 2001, and the Calgary Herald reported on October 13, 2001, that NORAD had scrambled fighters 129 times in 2000. A few days after 9/11, Major Mike Snyder, a NORAD spokesperson, told the Boston Globe that “[NORAD’s] fighters routinely intercept aircraft” (Glen Johnson, “Otis Fighter Jets Scrambled Too Late to Halt the Attacks,” Boston Globe, Sept. 15, 2001 [http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=print]).

4 Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 139-48.

5 Ibid., 155-226. A briefer version of the problems is provided in Griffin, “Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93: The 9/11 Commission’s Incredible Tales,” 911Truth.org, Dec. 5, 2005 (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20051205150219651).

6 An upper management official at LAX has reported that he overheard members of LAX Security (including officers from the FBI and LAPD) using their walkie-talkies shortly after the attacks. In some cases, he could hear both sides of the conversation. At first, the LAX officials were told that the FAA’s Air Traffic Controllers had not notified NORAD about the hijackings. Later, however, they were told that NORAD had been notified but did not respond because it had been “ordered to stand down.” When LAX security officials asked who had issued that order, they were told that it had come “from the highest level of the White House” (“My Observation of LAX Security Events on 9/11,” by an Upper Management LAX Official [attached]; although this official wants to remain anonymous, he would willingly take a polygraph test).

7 “High-Rise Office Building Fire One Meridian Plaza Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” FEMA (http://usfa.fema.gov/fire-service/techreports/tr049.shtm); “Fire Practically Destroys Venezuela’s Tallest Building” (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/venezuela_fire.html).

8 Chief Thomas McCarthy of the FDNY said that while the firefighters “were waiting for 7 World Trade to come down,” there was “fire on three separate floors”  (Oral History of Thomas McCarthy, 10-11). Emergency medical technician Decosta Wright said: “I think the fourth floor was on fire. . . . [W]e were like, are you guys going to put that fire out?” (Oral History of Decosta Wright, 11). These quotations are from the 9/11 oral histories recorded by the New York Fire Department at the end of 2001 but released to the public (after a court battle) only in August 2005, at which time they were made available on a New York Times website (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_full_01.html).

9 A photograph taken by Terry Schmidt can be seen on page 63 of Eric Hufschmid’s Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (Goleta, Calif.: Endpoint Software, 2002) or on Schmidt’s website (http://www.nycwireless.net/Images/wtc2/). According to Schmidt, this photo was taken between 3:09 and 3:16 PM, hence only a little over 2 hours before Building 7 collapsed. It shows that on the north side of the building, fires were visible only on floors 7 and 12. Therefore, if there were more fires on the south side, as some witnesses have claimed, they were not big enough to be seen from the north side.

10 Whereas several witnesses have testified to the existence of molten steel, a few have reported that the ends of some of the steel beams were molten—which would be the case if explosives had been used to slice them. For example, Joe O’Toole, a Bronx firefighter who worked for many months on the clean-up efforts, said with regard to a beam that he saw lifted from deep below the surface: “It was dripping from the molten steel” (Jennifer Lin, “Recovery Worker Reflects on Months Spent at Ground Zero,” Knight Ridder, May 29, 2002 [http://www.messenger-inquirer.com/news/attacks/4522011.htm]). Another witness—a vice president of his company—reported that “sometimes when a worker would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam would be dripping molten steel” (Trudy Walsh, “Handheld APP Eased Recovery Tasks,” Government Computer News, 21/27a, Sept 11, 2002 [http://www.gcn.com/21_27a/news/19930-1.html]).

11 See David Ray Griffin, “Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories,” 911Truth.org, January 18, 2006  (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060118104223192). Fire captain Dennis Tardio, for example, said: “I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom” (Dennis Smith, Report from Ground Zero: The Story of the Rescue Efforts at the World Trade Center [New York: Penguin, 2002], 18. Another firefighter said: “It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions” (Oral History of Richard Banaciski, 3-4 [see note 8, above]).

12 Stephen E. Jones, “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” In David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink, 2006); also available at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html. For videos of the WTC collapses, see “9/11/01 WTC Videos” (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/videos/index.html).

13Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 31-32.

14 For discussions of these six points, see the essay by physicist Stephen E. Jones, mentioned above, and David Ray Griffin, “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True,” in Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, March, 2006; also available at 911Review.com, December 9, 2005 [http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html]).

15 “PAVE PAWS, Watching North America’s Skies, 24 Hours a Day” (www.pavepaws.org).

16 Russ Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after serving in Vietnam as a fighter pilot, says that it would have been impossible for Flight 77 to have “descended 7,000 feet in two minutes, all the while performing a steep 270 degree banked turn before crashing into the Pentagon’s first floor wall without touching the lawn.” It would, he adds, have been “totally impossible for an amateur who couldn’t even fly a Cessna to maneuver the jetliner in such a highly professional manner” (Greg Szymanski, “Former Vietnam Combat and Commercial Pilot Firm Believer 9/11 Was Inside Government Job,” Lewis News, Sunday, January 8, 2006 [http://www.lewisnews.com/article.asp?ID=106623]). Hanjour’s incompetence was reported by the New York Times, May 4, 2002, and CBS News, May 10, 2002. The 9/11 Commission Report in one place calls Hanjour “the operation’s most experienced pilot” (530n147). But it elsewhere acknowledges that he was known to be a “terrible pilot” (225-26, 242).

17 Besides the fact that this is what we would expect, this is evidently what Pentagon officials tell their employees. April Gallop, who was working in the Pentagon on 9/11, has reportedly said that during her classified tour when she was first assigned to the Pentagon, she was told that it was the best-defended building in the world (John Judge, “Pentagon and P-56 Preparations and Defenses and the Stand-Down on 9/11,” Ratville Times, Jan. 11, 2006 [www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/P56A.html]).

18 See Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 159-64.

19 Thierry Meyssan, who has referred to these anti-missile batteries (Pentagate [London: Carnot, 2002], 112, 116), has said with regard to his source of information: “The presence of these anti-missile batteries was testified to me by French officers to whom they were shown during an official visit to the Pentagon. This was later confirmed to me by a Saudi officer.”
John Judge, co-founder of 9-11 Citizens Watch, has reported that one day his father—John Joseph Judge, a WWII Army Air Corps veteran who worked at the Pentagon until his death in 1965—showed him the location of an air-to-surface missile.
Judge also reports that in 1998, he was given a tour of the Pentagon by Colonel Robinson, the long-time director of security. While they were outside talking about threats from terrorists, Robinson pointed to the roof and said, “we have cameras and radar up there to make sure they don’t try to run a plane into the building.” Since cameras and radars by themselves would not stop anything, Judge concluded, Robinson’s statement implicitly referred to anti-aircraft missiles (John Judge, “Pentagon and P-56 Preparations and Defenses and the Stand-Down on 9/11,“ Ratville Times, Jan. 11, 2006 [www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/P56A.html]; Judge, incidentally, intends with these accounts to argue that there must have been a stand-down order, not to support the idea that a missile hit the Pentagon).
The Pentagon, to be sure, has denied that it had any anti-aircraft batteries at that time, saying that they had been considered “too costly and too dangerous to surrounding residential areas” (Paul Sperry, “Why the Pentagon Was So Vulnerable,” WorldNetDaily, Sept. 11, 2001 [http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24426]). But can anyone believe that Pentagon officials would have let such considerations prevent them from protecting themselves?

20 Won-Young Kim and Gerald R. Baum, “Seismic Observations during September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attack” (http://www.mgs.md.gov/esic/publications/download/911pentagon.pdf).

21 Karen Kwiatkowski, “Assessing the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory,” in Griffin and Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out. For a more technical discussion of the debris, see “The Missing Wings” (http://www.physics911.net/missingwings.htm), in which A. K. Dewdney and G. W. Longspaugh argue that the absence of wing debris alone is sufficient to disprove the claim that a huge airliner hit the Pentagon. With regard to debris inside the building, both Ed Plaugher, the county fire chief, and Lee Evey, the head of the renovation project, reported seeing no big pieces from an airplane (DoD News Briefings, September 12 and 15, 2001).

22 For photographic evidence and discussions thereof, see Eric Hufschmid, Painful Questions, Chap. 9, and Dave McGowan, “September 11, 2001 Revisited: The Series: Act II,” Center for an Informed America (www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr68.html).

23 Nelson spoke on The Power Hour, April 27, 2005 (http://www.thepowerhour.com/press_release/press12.htm).

24 Ralph Omholt, “9-11 and the Impossible: Part One of an Online Journal of 9-11” (http://www.physics911.net/omholt.htm).

25 Nikki Lowe, “Pentagon Survivor Donates $500 in Lieu of a Retirement Party: Isabelle Slifer Shares Her Story,” Pentagon Memorial Fund Site (http://www.pentagonmemorial.net/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5773). By contrast, when the airliners crashed into the Twin Towers, several floors of each building were immediately damaged.

26 “Eyewitness: The Pentagon,” Space.com, June 30, 2005 (http://www.space.com/news/rains_september11-1.html). Also relevant is testimony that it appeared to be a small military airplane, because some such planes and some missiles look very much alike. Danielle O’Brien, one of the air traffic controllers at Dulles, said on the basis of the radar data: “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane” (ABC News, Oct. 24, 2001). Another witness, seeing the aircraft from a 14th floor apartment in Pentagon City, said that it “seemed to be able to hold eight or twelve persons” and “made a shrill noise like a fighter plane” (“Extensive Casualties in Wake of Pentagon Attack,” Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2001). There were, to be sure, many people who reported seeing an airliner, perhaps even one with American Airlines markings, headed towards or even hit the Pentagon. For an assessment of the credibility of these testimonies, which shows that they should not be given more weight than the physical evidence and the contrary testimony, see Dave McGowan, “September 11, 2001 Revisited: Act II: Addendum 2” (http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr68e.html).

27 Upper Management LAX Official, “My Observation of LAX Security Events on 9/11.” Below.

28 “News Transcript: Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Parade Magazine,” US Department of Defense, Oct. 12, 2001 (www.defenselink.mil/news/nov2001/t11182001_t1012pm.html).

29 Greg Szymanski, “Radiation Expert Claims High-Radiation Readings Near Pentagon after 9/11 Indicate Depleted Uranium Used; High-Ranking Army Officer Claims Missile Used at Pentagon, Not Commercial Airliner,”,” Arctic Beacon, Aug. 18, 2005 [http://www.arcticbeacon.com/18-Aug-2005.html], and W. Leon Smith and Nathan Diebenow, “DU: A Scientific Perspective: An Interview With Leuren Moret, Geoscientist,” Lone Star Iconoclast, Crawford, Texas, Nov. 20, 2005 [http://lonestaricon.com/2005/News/2005/11-20/19news03.htm]).

30 Szymanski, op. cit.

31 Karen Kwiatkowski, who was working at the Pentagon that morning, reports that “any physical remains of the aircraft that hit the Pentagon were quickly carted away to some unknown location, so we have no physical evidence that the aircraft really was Flight 77 or even a Boeing 757” (“Assessing the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory”). Photographic evidence of this removal can be seen on Eric Hufschmid’s video, “Painful Deceptions” (available at www.EricHufschmid.Net).

32 A photograph showing this literal cover-up can be seen in Ralph Omholt, “9-11 and the Impossible: Part One of an Online Journal of 9-11” (http://www.physics911.net/omholt.htm).

33 On the confiscation of the film from the Citgo gas station and a nearby hotel, respectively, see Bill McKelway “Three Months On, Tension Lingers Near the Pentagon,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dec. 11, 2001 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/1211_wirepentagon.html), and Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, “Inside the Ring,” Washington Times, Sept. 21, 2001.

34 Scott Bingham, who has tried to get videos of the Pentagon strike released under the Freedom of Information Act, has his lawsuit and the revealing response posted on his website, Welcome to Flight 77.info (http://www.flight77.info). A summary of this response is provided in “Government Responds to Flight 77 FOAI Request,” 911Truth.org, Aug. 2005 (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050824131004151). Further evidence of a cover-up is provided by investigative journalist Wayne Madsen, who reports that he learned from both a senior Pentagon official and a U.S. Army employee that a strict anti-leak policy was enacted after 9/11, which forbad all employees to discuss the Pentagon strike and the FBI’s confiscation of the security video tapes (Wayne Madsen Report, Jan. 15, 2006 [http://www.waynemadsenreport.com]).

35 The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 39.

36 See Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 241-44.

37 The 9/11 Commission Report, 40.

38 “Statement of Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, May 23, 2003” (available at www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2003/commissiontestimony052303.htm).

39 Ibid.

40 “Air Attack on Pentagon Indicates Weaknesses,” Newsday, Sept. 23, 2001.

41 The 9/11 Commission Report, 34.

42  During the Senate Armed Services Committee’s interview with General Richard Myers (who was nominated to become chair of the Joint Chiefs) on September 13, 2001, the chair, Senator Carl Levin, said that “there have been statements that the aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down.” Myers replied that “the armed forces did not shoot down any aircraft” (“Senate Armed Services Committee Holds Hearing on Nomination of General Richard Myers to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington, D.C., September 13, 2001” [available at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20040814220906511]).

43 See Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 238-39. Additional evidence that Flight 93 was shot down came from an apparent slip by Secretary Rumsfeld during his visit to Iraq on Christmas Eve, 2004, when he referred to “the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon” (“Surprise Trip for Donald Rumsfeld,” CNN, Dec. 24, 2004 [http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0412/24/nfcnn.01.html]). Evidence of a more explicit nature came from Paul Cellucci, Washington’s envoy to Canada in February of 2005. Seeking to convince Canada to support the missile defense shield, he told his audience in Toronto that a Canadian general was in charge of NORAD on 9/11 when it, under orders from President Bush, scrambled military jets to shoot down a hijacked aircraft headed for Washington (Colin Perkel and Beth Gorham, “Missile Rejection Perplexes U.S.,” Canadian Press, Feb. 23, 2005 [available at http://www.curevents.com/vb/showpost.php?p=51773&postcount=1]).

44 Clarke reports that he received the authorization from Cheney shortly after 9:45, when the evacuation of the White House began (Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror [New York: Free Press, 2004], 7-8). According to James Bamford and an ABC News program called “9/11” (Sept. 11, 2002), Colonel Marr, after receiving Cheney’s shoot-down order, “sent out word to air traffic controllers to instruct fighter pilots to destroy the United jetliner,” saying: “United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington, D.C.” (Bamford, A Pretext for War [New York: Doubleday, 2004], 65-66). “These testimonies contradict the 9/11 Commission’s claim that the military did not even know about the hijacking of Flight 93 until it had crashed.”

45 For additional evidence, see Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 237-40.

46 Why exactly the military denied shooting down Flight 93, rather than taking credit for preventing a second attack on Washington, is unclear. But the very fact that the military and the White House have steadfastly denied shooting down Flight 93 suggests that this was a criminal act, which as such needed to be covered up.

47 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 24-25, 35-36, 212.

48 Secretary of State Powell promised a White Paper presenting this proof, but it was never produced. Also, although the Taliban said that it would hand bin Laden over if the United States presented evidence of his involvement in 9/11, Bush replied that there would be no negotiations or even discussion (“White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You,’” CNN.com, Sept. 21, 2001). Four weeks after the attacks began, a Taliban spokesman said: “We will negotiate. But . . . [w]e are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama’s involvement, but they have refused. Why?” (Kathy Gannon, AP, “Taliban Willing To Talk, But Wants U.S. Respect” [http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/focus/terrorism/archives/1001/w01taliban.html]).

49 See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), Chs. 12 and 13, entitled “Romancing the Taliban: The Battle for Pipelines.”

50Julio Godoy, “U.S. Taliban Policy Influenced by Oil,” Inter Press Service, Nov. 16, 2001.

51 This according to Niaz Naik, the highly respected Pakistani representative at the meeting, as reported in George Arney, “U.S. ‘Planned Attack on Taleban,’” BBC News, Sept. 18, 2001. According to a story in the Guardian, “Threat of U.S. Strikes Passed to Taliban Weeks Before NY Attack” (Sept. 22, 2001), one of the American representatives confirmed that this discussion of military action did occur.

52 See Paul D. Wolfowitz and Zalmay M. Khalilzad, “Saddam Must Go,” Weekly Standard, Dec. 1997; PNAC, “Letter to President Clinton on Iraq,” Jan. 26, 1998  (www.newamericancentury.org); and PNAC, “Letter to Gingrich and Lott,” May 29, 1998 (www.newamericancentury.org). The signers of the latter two letters included Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.

53 The Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org), 14.

54 Paul O’Neill, who was secretary of the treasury and hence a member of the National Security Council, has stated this in Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), and in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on January 11, 2004. The main topic within days of the inauguration, O’Neill says, was going after Saddam, with the question being not “Why Saddam?” or “Why Now?” but merely “finding a way to do it.” Susskind, whose book also draws on interviews with other officials, says that in its first weeks the Bush administration was discussing the occupation of Iraq and the question of how to divide up its oil (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml). Richard Clarke, who had been the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, has confirmed O’Neill’s charge, saying: “The administration of the second George Bush did begin with Iraq on its agenda” (Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror [New York: Free Press, 2004], 264).

55 David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” Harper’s, October, 2002 (entered into the Congressional Record on October 10, 2002). One long section of the 1992 draft, Armstrong points out, began by acknowledging “definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense.”

56 Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 50-51.

57 According to the Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2002.

58 Quoted in Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 32.

59 “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times,” Oct. 12, 2001.

60 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Sept. 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html).

61 Report of the Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space Management and Organization (www.defenselink.mil/cgi-bin/dlprint.cgi).

62 “Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon Attack, 6:42 PM, Sept. 11, 2001” (available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/dod_brief02.htm). The transcript, incidentally, has the question coming from Secretary Rumsfeld. But the flow of the discussion suggests that it came from a reporter. In either case, the 9/11 attacks were interpreted to mean that greater defense spending was needed, “especially for missile defense.”

63 See at least most of the contributors to Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006 [March]); David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2006 [fall]); and Kevin Barrett, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Sandra Lubarsky, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2006 [fall]). These intellectuals include John B. Cobb, Jr., one of America’s eminent Protestant theologians; Rosemary Ruether, one of America’s leading Catholic theologians; Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University; and Morgan Reynolds, the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor during part of the first term of George W. Bush.

64 Retired USAF Colonel George Nelson, for example, has written of the “nightmarish probability . . . that so many Americans appear to be involved in the most heinous conspiracy in our country’s history” (“911: Aircraft Parts as a Clue to Their Identity: The Precautionary Principle,” Rense.com, April 23, 2005 [http://www.rense.com/general64/prec.htm ])